Politics vs. Reality.

[DK]

Off-topic: Nice car. 👍

Sorry about the comment regarding German cars, I always imagined there would be some bitterness in America to the Germans due to the World Wars. I'm glad at least two other people in the world share my attitude to SUVs. I'll say this again, if you want an SUV, please don't just use it for driving to and from the local supermarket, or to deform your dog beyond recognition at a canine beauty salon. The kind of people who drive SUVs here in Ireland are complete and utter tools, known as D4s. These are the people who made their money in banking, and for that the rest of Ireland will despise them. I'll repeat what I said earlier - if you actually do something that requires you to drive an SUV, e.g. farming, then drive one, as long as you have a fuel-efficient second car for when you're not off-roading, but instead driving to the supermarket. If you live in the city, and there aren't any steep inclines in the area, don't drive one as you're unlikely to be in a situation that you will use it for. You will be better off getting an MPV, or as they're known in America, minivans. I don't care if your Porsche Cayenne-driving friends laugh because you're driving a - let's just say - VW Touran. If you don't have a huge family, and instead have the average 2.4 kids, a 5 door hatchback will do fine. My mum drives a Nissan Tino, that has 5 seats, and it's just right for us (you don't expect to do the school run in a Nissan Skyline 25GT-t sedan, do you?) because it sips fuel when you drive it gently at 10-30% throttle. I just hate making these lectures, all these rants, because quite frankly there are some things that make me mad as hell and not able to take it any more.

 

[Biggles]

Must explain why a 2006 study by the Center for Market Research surprisingly found soccer moms wanted a bigger SUV.

What?

2006 had to be the peak of the SUV craze, just before oil prices started going through the roof & before the recession hit. By that time the North American public had been successfully brain-washed to see the SUV as the vehicle to be seen driving. It turned out to be a very questionably strategy for the not-so-"Big Three". However, the taxpayer (future generations) was there to help bail them out in the US & Canada 👍

It makes me believe that the polarization has always been there and that it is the 24 hour news cycle that makes it obvious.

You're probably right, but Limbaugh et al. seem to be stoking the fire.

I do think it is a bit silly to accuse Limbaugh of some sort of current divide when I remember my babysitter listening to him. He has been one of the most popular shows in America for decades and if there is a massive polarization in recent times then there must be another influence that has played into it.

It may seem to you that Limbaugh has been around forever, but I'm old enough to remember pre-Limbaugh times (fondly).

So, what were your thoughts when prominent Democrats and democratic supporters attempted to create their own public commentators via Air America Radio?

Seems to me that Air America doesn't have anything like the profile that the Limbaughs, O'Reillys, & Becks enjoy. I've listened to Air America, on occasion, while traveling in the States. I can't say it makes for particularly riveting listening - which I think says something about the "policy-wonk" nature of most liberal discourse. I imagine a libertarian network wouldn't go over too big either ...

Just saw Canada talking. Don't : you're sandy oil in the north is not green either you pollute a lot of water to get the oil out of the sand, and the water after is surly not healty, so don't trow with rocks if you sitting in a glashouse

You must have missed this:

Of course, we in Canada have got our own environmental mess in the making:

http://thetyee.ca/Views/2007/09/20/TarSands/

 

[Ibonibo]

No i didn't see...


A lot of Suv talking, and greener cars,...

What makes me mad about this subject is that now we (society) have the chance to change this problem about petrolium dependance.
But instead of pushing hydrogen evolution, we go for electric cars which will create alot of other problems. Where does the power come from when the whole earth is riding with electric cars??
That can not come from eco friendly sources to power billions of cars.
What will happen to the batteries after they are not usable anymore?
Hydrogen is the most common element in the universe, therefore when we get a powerful procede to make H, companies like BP, Shell, RWE, or other electric companies do not make enough dough.
And no, making hydrogen is not impossible, Sweden produces H for 20 years.
The hindenburg was fulled with H because it was cheaper than helium.
Top gear, Captain Slow has a masterpiece presentation of this. Honda Clarity in California.

this decision for electric cars is like the very wise decision of the Eu with eco light bulbs (a lot of quicksilver which is very toxic to the enviromment) instead of pushing Led technologies which are easily recycable and even less power hungry.

Politics and industries do what they want.

eco friendly houses, like the passiv houses here in Europe have lot of longterme negeative aspects (i work in a construction company) and are built with questionnable materials to isolate. Again the recycling question.


These exemples can continue for pages, where industries and politics direct us to the not ideal evolution because of monatary concerns

 

[Dotini]

There is no universal decision for electric cars. Hydrogen technology is in its infancy. Natural gas powered vehicles make much sense as do various kinds of biofuels. It may be back to the future for industrial hemp. The fact is that liquid fuels are the safest and most convenient, but we cannot go forward just burning away 70% of our precious liquid petroleum oil production on transportation. In the end, it is needed most for lubricants and by the chemistry and pharmaceutical industries. We will grope for decades like we always do in trying to solve these sustainability and large scale economic problems.

The good news is that petroleum oil is very likely abiotic in origin, and existing reservoirs will replenish over long enough time periods. Further good news is found in places like Brazil, where the problems are addressed on a regional basis rather than a global one. I'm in favor of greater localization over gobalization. Over time, this tension will reveal itself in the choices made in vehicles and fuels.

Respectfully,
Dotini

 

[DK]

I don't like electric cars. I don't want to swap out an RB26DETT in favour of a few thousand Duracell batteries.

 

[FoolKiller]

Sorry about the comment regarding German cars, I always imagined there would be some bitterness in America to the Germans due to the World Wars.

I know some people that think like that about German and/or Japanese cars. But they are usually older than 80 and have lost their license due to medical reasons. You are talking about something that happened two generations before me, and I am 30.

What?

2006 had to be the peak of the SUV craze, just before oil prices started going through the roof & before the recession hit. By that time the North American public had been successfully brain-washed to see the SUV as the vehicle to be seen driving. It turned out to be a very questionably strategy for the not-so-"Big Three". However, the taxpayer (future generations) was there to help bail them out in the US & Canada 👍

The point is that even at the SUV peak the marketing departments weren't targeting the soccer mom demographic, but they were still buying it. In all fads there is a combined mix of consumer demand and producer design/marketing. Car companies can't blindly market any old thing to us and expect us to want to buy The Homer just because they tell us to.

I think the perfect example of how consumer demand controls marketing is in the difference in perception I have seen toward Honda. Granted this is primarily based on Top Gear and the occasional comment on here, as I don't see a lot of other British media. In England it seems that Honda is primarily a car for older people. In the US a Honda is a great starter car for a teenager that is both affordable and cool. Did Honda create those different perceptions via marketing or did the consumers?

You cannot blame a bad fad 100% on the marketing. Consumers are conscious, sentient creatures with free will that make their own decisions.

You're probably right, but Limbaugh et al. seem to be stoking the fire.

It may seem to you that Limbaugh has been around forever, but I'm old enough to remember pre-Limbaugh times (fondly).

They stoke the fire because it brings in ratings. He isn't the highest rated radio show in the US (since Howard Stern moved to satellite) because he is some amateur.

If you remember pre-Limbaugh times then you should be able to recognize that his popularity grew up years ago, not just now when there is a new perceived trend of divisiveness in politics.

Seems to me that Air America doesn't have anything like the profile that the Limbaughs, O'Reillys, & Becks enjoy.

Likely because they went bankrupt and shut down in January.

I've listened to Air America, on occasion, while traveling in the States. I can't say it makes for particularly riveting listening - which I think says something about the "policy-wonk" nature of most liberal discourse. I imagine a libertarian network wouldn't go over too big either ...

Most critics of Air America stated their main problem as being one of talent. People like Al Franken and Janeane Garofalo were brought on to compete with the entertainment value of people like Limbaugh and Beck. The problem is that they are script readers and stand-up comics, not live ad-lib commentators with an entertaining take on serious issues. Trust me, they can be divisive and stir up some ire, they just couldn't do it in a fun way. They brought in all raw talent and failed to find any veteran radio talent that could handle the format. When they did have some good talent that proved popular they lost them to TV. Rachel Maddow went to MSNBC, and instead of her doing a radio and TV show, like Beck, O'Reilly, and Hannity, and once upon a time Limbaugh, she just rebroadcast the audio feed from her TV show.

Trust me, Air America's issues were large and had little to do with the Policy Wonk nature, considering they started out with comedians. It would have worked better if they had been able to get the radio shows for people like Chris Matthews and Keith Olberman.

 

[Famine]

I don't like electric cars. I don't want to swap out an RB26DETT in favour of a few thousand Duracell batteries.

No, but if you swap out your crappy commuter wagon for a four-wheeled dynamo, there'll be loads of gas and spare money to run your RB26DETT at the weekends.

 

[Ibonibo]

@Dotini:
You mentioned the hemp. Well it is exactly the same .
Hemp was forbidden by an american (who owned a paper factory) in the early 1900 (1921?) to preserve his business, by making a propaganda against cannabis. The evil mexican workers brought this plague to his country....
family guy makes fun of this as putterschmid owns also a paperfactory.

A new technologies will never succed if it goes backwards. and that is the case of electric cars. Drive 1.5 hours full trottle and wait 5 hours. How the heck do you want to go to holidays or if you travel a lot for work??
That is a step back.
But the industries is a genius in pushing stupid technologies.
They will exchange batteries.
The only purpose for electric cars are FOR ME buses and innercity public transports, because they always drive and park on the same spot. So with induction these can be plugged in when parked and slow driving.

Like i said what will happen when the batteries a in end of life?? recycling. Sure the futur generation can handle that.

If the technology of hydrogene making was as pushed as other technologies by the industries and politics, we would have mass hydrogene in 5 years.

Go look at Sweden. 20 years in making H (and their process is green btw)

And look at the e-cars now. Because of the massive batteries, they need to save weight on the bodyshell (plastic, not carbonfibre because it is not payable for a normal human beeing)
Those cars are coffins on wheels.

And when one of those car crashes you will have all the battery juice all over.
Nice.

And biofuels transport the problem elsewhere.

To give biofuel to all cars (billions) you woud not have any place to get agriculture for food supply.
The same goes for biogas,... and every other alternative that will imply us to withdraw ressources from an other needed place.

hydrogene is the futur. And when you listen to researchers in that domain that is not si-fi. Si-fi is H3 (isotope) which is found on the moon.

hydrogene is aquired to electolyse (in school we made that experiment in 3rd garde). A damm is ideal for producing Hydrogene, as exemple.


As for the Suv, i saw a very intersing report on dmax, foolkiller might know, and the spoof from the simpson with camionero is so true.
For 30 years they werre trwoing out suv, the first commerical was the jeep. And for 30 years they were killing people because they handeled like they look (over 1000 officially declarded from consequences of the suv). And now toyota some 30 deads and it's the evil.
I don't understand neither how a high seat position is safe, but for female this is a main buy reason.

Well enough said...


Opinions are beautiful because everybody has a different one.

 

[Biggles]

Likely because they went bankrupt and shut down in January.

I wasn't aware of that ... which just goes to show.

The times I listened to it they seemed to be attempting to do a left-wing version of Limbaugh's bluster & bombast - it just didn't ring true.

Jon Stewart is in a class of his own - he manages to be both political & funny. Where would he be without Fox though?

 

[FoolKiller]

I wasn't aware of that ... which just goes to show.

The times I listened to it they seemed to be attempting to do a left-wing version of Limbaugh's bluster & bombast - it just didn't ring true.

Because they didn't have on-air talent, they had scripted talent. It requires a good talent to be able to ad-lib an entertaining approach to politics for three hours a day including live call-ins that cannot be prepared in advance.

Jon Stewart is in a class of his own - he manages to be both political & funny.

And scripted with a large staff of talented writers who have gone on to write comedic books and work on other comedy programs. Before doing the Daily Show and acting Stewart was a good improv comedian as well.



Back to the oil leak though. I think I finally found that nuanced, complex approach to policy that Obama has.
http://blogs.abcnews.com/politicalpunch/2010/06/president-obama-wants-to-kick-some-ass.html

"I was down there a month ago, before most of these talking heads were even paying attention to the Gulf," the president told Matt Lauer in a clip released this evening. "A month ago I was meeting with fishermen down there, standing in the rain talking about what a potential crisis this could be. And I don't sit around just talking to experts because this is a college seminar, we talk to these folks because they potentially have the best answers, so I know whose ass to kick."

Ass kicking, no more nuanced and complex approach to policy than that.

I guess rhetoric like, "So our job is to keep the boot on the neck of BP," was too polite?

 

[Dotini]

http://www.infowars.com/evidence-points-to-bp-oil-spill-false-flag/

- Sales of shares and stocks in days and weeks beforehand

- Halliburton (see link), took acquisition of cleanup company days before explosion

- BP report cites undocumented tampering with well sealing equipment

- Government uses disaster to push for Carbon Tax, Nationalization talk

Troubling evidence surrounding the Deepwater Horizon explosion on April 20th suggests that the incident could have been manufactured.

On April 12th, just over one week before the Deepwater Horizon rig exploded, Halliburton, the world’s second largest oilfield services corporation, surprised some by acquiring Boots & Coots, a relatively small but vastly experienced oil well control companies.

The company deals with fires and blowouts on oil rigs and oil wells. It was responsible for putting out roughly one third of the more than 700 oil well fires set in Kuwait by retreating Iraqi soldiers during the Gulf War.

The deal itself is still under scrutiny with Boots and Coots facing an ongoing investigation into “possible breaches of fiduciary duty and other violations of state law”

Where this information gets really interesting is with the fact that Halliburton is named in the majority of some two dozen lawsuits filed since the explosion by Gulf Coast people and businesses who claim that the company is to blame for the disaster.

Halliburton was forced to admit in testimony at a congressional hearing last month that it carried out a cementing operation 20 hours before the Gulf of Mexico rig went up in flames. The lawsuits claim that four Halliburton workers stationed on the rig improperly capped the well.

As the New York Times noted on May 26th, “BP officials chose, partly for financial reasons, to use a type of casing for the well that the company knew was the riskier of two options,”

Workers from the rig and company officials have said that hours before the explosion, gases were leaking through the cement, which had been set in place by the oil services contractor, Halliburton. Investigators have said these leaks were the likely cause of the explosion.”

According to a 2007 study by Minerals Management Service, cementing was a factor in 18 of 39 rig blowouts in the gulf between 1992 and 2006.

Another intriguing connection Boots and Coots has to the Deepwater Horizon explosion comes via Pat Campbell, the man BP has employed to cap the well beneath the ruined rig. Campbell worked for Boots and Coots as general manager for many years.

BP has admitted to buying Yahoo and Google keywords in an attempt to control publicly available information in the wake of the catastrophe. It seems that the company is taking all the flack for the spill while the Halliburton link is being roundly ignored.

BP’s prepared testimony briefing, which has since leaked online, also intriguingly notes that the Hydraulic Control System on equipment designed to automatically seal the well in an emergency was modified without their knowledge sometime before the explosion.

“the extent of these modifications is unknown at this time” states the report on page 37.

Possible prior knowledge of the explosion is also evident via huge dumping of stocks and shares in the weeks and days prior to the incident.

Goldman Sachs dumped 44% of its shares in BP Oil during the first quarter – shares that subsequently lost 36 percent of their value, equating to $96 million.

Other asset management firms also sold huge blocks of BP stock in the first quarter. Though the amounts pale in comparison to Goldman’s holdings, Wachovia, owned by Wells Fargo, sold 98% of its shares in BP and Swiss bank UBS sold 97% of its BP shares.

Furthermore, as reported by the London Telegraph on June 5th, Tony Hayward, the chief executive of BP, sold £1.4 million of his shares in the fuel giant weeks before the spill.

In the days before the Deepwater explosion, Obama had announced a new effort to explore for and lease new drilling locations in the deep Gulf and in Alaska. In the wake of the disaster, these plans have been cancelled and BP is taking a PR bashing.

All of which has been capitalized on by the Obama administration to reinvigorate talk of a carbon tax and has created the opportunity to reintroduce the idea of nationalizing oil, which the Democratic leadership has long sought.

The full story of what is happening in the Gulf of Mexico is yet to emerge, there are rumours of more spills and an ongoing coverup. The site represents a $2.2 trillion source of wealth and power, a motive along with a plethora of suspicious activity that needs to be investigated further.

 

[Duke]

Please, I beg of you, don't start with Conspiracy "Theories" on this.

 

[Biggles]

Well, it's obvious that Dick (Darth Vader) Cheney's behind it all...

 

[Dotini]

Please, I beg of you, don't start with Conspiracy "Theories" on this.

I'd thought of it all more as "business as usual" rather than conspiracy theory. If you like, I will delete it; it doesn't matter to me.

Yours in wholesome entertainment,
Dotini

 

[Duke]

No, you don't need to delete it, but I guess I'm still not up to the task after marathon-debunking all the stupid 9/11 theories.

 

[Dotini]

I'm still not up to the task after marathon-debunking all the stupid 9/11 theories.

After debunking all the stupid 9/11 theories, were there any left over in your gray basket?

Respectfully,
Dotini

 

[DK]

Please, I beg of you, don't start with Conspiracy "Theories" on this.

*Googles "Deepwater Horizon Explosion Conspiracy Theories"*

 

[Dotini]

http://video.godlikeproductions.com/video/Simmons_Says_Nuclear_Device_Only_Option_to_Stop_Oil_Flow

Matthew Simmons is a recognized guru in the petroleum oil industry. Here he comments on what he thinks is a worst case disaster in the Gulf of Mexico.

Edit: I was just watching CNN and saw Wolf Blitzer several times express concern over the structural integrity of the well bore casing when he was interviewing a scientist on the subject of successfully completing a relief well. He knows something is up with it.

Edit II: The failed blowout preventer is falling over and the casing down the hole has failed. A complete bleedout of the reservoir is likely. That's maybe 2.5 billion barrels of oil. Sober petroleum engineers and geologists are now speaking in muted voices about the possibility of a collapse of the ocean floor under the wellhead. Possibly in the mix are eplosions and tsunamis. This is not a conspiracy theory. It is a real worst case possibility. But it's also possible bottom kill will work.
http://www.theoildrum.com/node/6593/648967