Date: 2008-06-13 02:57 Subject: Hodgepodge of Notions Security: Public Mood: thoughtful Tags: democrats republicans ethanol electric l

 On Livejournal:
How frustrating.  I get online with a few extra minutes to kill, decide to spend them posting to livejournal, and instead spend half-an-hour chasing my tail.  

Click "Post" - Response:  Now that you've posted, you can view the entry, edit the entry, add to memories, etc, etc, etc.  Wait, this can't be right.  I haven't posted anything yet.  Click "Post" - Response:  Now that you've posted, you can view the entry, edit the entry, add to memories, etc, etc, etc.  Wait, this can't be right.  I haven't posted anything yet. Click "Post" - Response:  Now that you've posted, you can view the entry, edit the entry, add to memories, etc, etc, etc.  Wait, this can't be right.  I haven't posted anything yet. Click "Post" - Response:  Now that you've posted, you can view the entry, edit the entry, add to memories, etc, etc, etc.  Wait, this can't be right.  I haven't posted anything yet. Click "Post" - Response:  Now that you've posted, you can view the entry, edit the entry, add to memories, etc, etc, etc.  Wait, this can't be right.  I haven't posted anything yet. Click "Post" - Response:  Now that you've posted, you can view the entry, edit the entry, add to memories, etc, etc, etc.  Wait, this can't be right.  I haven't posted anything yet.   Click "Post" - long pause - text editor comes up at long bloody last.

I'm on borrowed time to put a new entry in here, and past my bedtime to boot.  I really don't need to be run in circles by a text-management system that can't distinguish between a new post and a post made 2 weeks ago.

On LASFS Politics:
Out of the Vice Presidency, into the Presidency.  (Out of the frying pan, into the fire.)  Talk about blowing your saving throw....

On National Politics:
Every holder of every publicly-elected political position in the last 70 years has started his campaign the exact same way...by spending months telling every reporter he can get his hands on that he has no intention whatsoever of running for that office.  For at least 3 months, at any press junket or photo-op, whenever the question of his political aspiriations comes up, it's deny, deny, deny.  Then one day he's suddenly a candidate for the office in question.  So, basically, his whole career has begun with a lie. 

How can we have the gall to express outrage at our political leaders for constantly and continually lying to us in office, when we know and have known all along that they were lying bastards from the get-go?  We get the sort of political leadership we deserve when we continually, knowingly, cheerfully elect pathological liars to lead us.  What does that say about us as a people?

On Misleading Polls:
Talk radio hosts are all a-quiver about a new poll which asks its participants "Do you believe the world is a safer place with a Republican in the White House?"  My answer:  Depends on the republican.  Or the democrat.  Of the Presidents I have experienced:  The world was a safer place under JFK (D),  Ford (R), Reagan (R), and Bush 43 (R).  The world was significantly less safe under Johnson (R), Nixon (R), Carter (D), Bush 41 (R), and Clinton (D).  The world became a great deal safer once we no longer faced the possibility of another Clinton presidency.  I'm not sanguine about the prospects of world safety (or the survival of the Constitution, for that matter) under either Presiden McCain or President Obama.

On Fuel Economy:
$4.75 a gallon and still rising.  Will be more than $5.50 a gallon by Christmas, at this rate.  In other countries, such as Great Britain, the price works out to @ $25.00 a gallon. 

Simultaneously, the $3.00 you paid for a quart of motor oil last week is the same price you paid for a quart of motor oil last year.  And 2 years ago.  And 3.  And 6.  Motor oil, which is made from the same substance as is gasoline, has maintained price-stability for decades while the price of fuel has risen continuously.  25 years ago I paid $1.25 for a quart of motor oil at the same time I paid $0.89 for a half-gallon of gasoline ($1.78 a gallon, for those who were somehow convinced that half the price for half the merchandise was some kind of bargain).  In a quarter-century,  the price per gallon of petroleum-based fuel has risen by 400 to 500%, while the price per quart of petroleum-based motor oil has only doubled, and at a rate so slow as to have been invisible, at that.  Yet gasoline and motor oil are both made from that self-same $148-a-barrel foreign oil.  

How that can be?  It would appear that there is something more at work here than Supply-And-Demand, or oil and gas price increases would make more sense relative to each other.

On Alternative Energy:  
Corn-based ethanol causes food shortages.  Who knew?  Apparently there is some quality of ethanol made by fermenting and processing the edible portions of the corn plant that can't be had by fermenting and processing the cobs, the stalks, the silk, and the shucks.  

Now that Brazil has made a ethanol-based fuel their national standard, pundits and politicians in the USA are pushing flex-fuel vehicles here.  ("Flex-fuel" = A car that will run on ethanol as well as on gasoline.)  But Brazil doesn't do flex-fuel;  they do ethanol-fuel  (ie, cars that run on ethanol.  Period.)  Flex fuel engines have been shown to burn ethanol inefficiently and gasoline efficiently.  Since the cars work best on gas, their drivers will fill with gas, not alcohol, by preference and common sense.

Flex-fuel is not the answer.  The answer is to convert industrial engines (cargo & construction) to use biodeisel instead of petroleum-based deisel, and go electric for all domestic vehicles (ban gasoline and the cars that use it from the market entirely).  And then take the necessary next steps that were not taken during the unsuccessful test-marketing of electric cars in the recent past:

A) Make a serious effort to install charging stations that will serve everyone (ie, an outlet in every space in the parking lot of every store rather than one or two charging stations every 100 square miles), (B) Engineer the cars so they don't need some exotic interface to hook up to the charging outlets, and (C) Make a nationwide commitment to non-petroleum-based electrical power generation (nuclear, solar, hydrogen, armies of chipmunks on treadmills, whatever).

MWT