God Bless Spain!  Like you, I’ve been proud to have Spain on our side and feel the blow like every Spanish, DF(you deserve the status of being your own country), and American citizen would, right in the gut.  Fine then, we haven’t gotten all of the scum yet, but when we (together) get our hands on them...it won’t be pretty!  Please pass my condolences and solidarity on to your friend Juan Pablo for me.  Hoist a few tonight, and tomorrow we can look forward to the beginning of ‘their’ end!

A price was paid today by the citizens of a country who respect freedom and will not be forced to kneel and cower before the lowest of cowards. The death of free people is always tragic because they loved life enough to stand and strive rather than whimper and submit.

It is important to remember this when in a couple of days or weeks the Left begins to suggest that it is the victims fault for not understanding the terrorists pain, for not trying to meet them half way, for driving them to these acts. We have seen it here in the States and you will witness it there in Europe. It is more disgusting than the attacks themselves.

Do not allow them to go unchallenged. Do not allow them to turn the deaths of honest people into a tool of those who murdered them. Hold onto your cold fury and insist that justice is done and no quarter is given.

Thank you Spain for supporting the freedom of my country, and more importantly the freedom of your own.

Plenty of reasons why certain countries decided to stay out of the coalition against terror, but this is a big part of the big reason:  fear.  They didn’t want their people targeted.

Little do they know that they are targets anyway, and the favorite targets of terrorists:  people who don’t fight back.  The Mighty DF has already indexed a wealth of reports of Islamic crime in France and elsewhere.  The leaders of the timid shrug, and cluck their tongues at Spain and say, “this is what happens, I told you so,” and laugh nervously when the bully turns and hits them instead.  “Why can’t you follow our example and be polite little stationary targets?”

Nuts to that.  Spain is right to fight; better that their soldiers risk death to save their people, than to sit idly like a lobster in a pot while it slowly rolls to a boil.  Maybe it doesn’t mean that much, but the US will not forget who has stood with them in this fight, and they will stand by Spain in the same way.  God Bless and comfort the bereaved and the dead.  Now let’s stomp some terrorists.

Pardon je pour écrire seulement en anglais.  Mon Français est très pauvre.

DissidentFrogman wrote:

>That 4 points demonstration of yours seems rather simplistic,

>but I imagine that was the poet speaking here, not the engineer.

One does not always have either the time or the space to fully support every point one might like to make.  I apologize for anything which might have been lost in the abridgement.

>Saudi Arabia is not the only oil supplier.

A point well-understood by others.  For some years the Saudis have been the world’s swing producer, but this situation does not have to be permanent.  Some have already posted on the idea that sufficient oversupply of oil will allow the world to say to the Saudis, “We don’t need you”.  When excess world capacity equals Saudi pumping rate, that day will have arrived.

The point I would like everyone to understand is that this day arrives sooner with every barrel of demand reduced, and later with every barrel of demand increased.  It is a simple 1/1 ratio.

>Pakinstan comes to mind as far as militant Islam is concerned

Follow that one step further.  What is one of the most powerful promoters of militant Islam in Pakistan?  It is the system of madrassas which have almost replaced the secular schools.  Who pays for the madrassas and indoctrinates the teachers?  The Wahhabists; specifically, the Saudis.

>I don’t believe that switching our V8 powered wonders for humble bicycles to save on our oil purchases will help us in any way.

There I believe you are wrong.  A V8 engine is almost wholly dependent on petroleum.  But what are most V8 engines used for?  Very few of them labor at nearly full power for long periods.  Most V8 engines, and even most 6 and 4 cylinder engines, spend most of their time loafing at a small fraction of their peak power.  Many spend a lot of their operating time at idle.  This idling is very inefficient.

Batteries are actually a better source of power for short bursts, and electric motors are efficient, light and powerful.  If you would like to see an example of what is possible near the limits of today’s technology (and R&D prices!) seehttp://www.acpropulsion.com.

I’ve read that the average efficiency of American gasoline-fuelled vehicles (conversion of fuel to work) is 17%.  Multiple measurements on different types of vehicles give numbers which agree with this to a surprising degree.

It is not very hard to make huge improvements when you are starting from a situation as poor as 17% efficiency.  This is known as “low-hanging fruit”, easy to pick.

I live in the USA, so I have spent more time studying US facts and figures than any others.  (Pardon my parochial interests, but when the rest of the world concerns itself with my country’s consumptive habits, why shouldn’t I also?)  It is a fact that the US consumption of motor gasoline is nearly equal to Saudi Arabia’s entire production of crude oil:  seehttp://www.eia.doe.gov/pub/oil_gas/petroleum/data_publications/petroleum_supply_annual/psa_volume1/

current/txt/table_02.txt for the most recent figures available.  It follows from this that a large movement in the USA from V8 engines to hybrid vehicles could severely reduce the worldwide market for crude oil, and move up the day that Saudi Arabia changes from essential supplier to disposable nuisance.

>To precipitate this regime change from outside - and in addition

>to the political example of democratic society that the Coalition

>is helping to build in Iraq - finding alternative sources of oil

>and *viable* energy alternatives would help a lot indeed.

This may surprise you, but I have reason to believe that these viable energy sources are right under our noses.  The problem is that few people have the educated insight to see them for what they are; most only see them the way they have always been seen.

A century or so ago the best evening light came from liquid drawn from the heads of a rapidly-shrinking population of one species of whale.  Kerosene (paraffin) replaced spermaceti for most uses a short time afterward, and it was itself supplanted by glowing filaments of carbon heated by electricity.  Carbon was replaced by tungsten (wolfram), and now the thermal spectrum of tungsten is being replaced by the glow of sodium vapor in large lamps and the emissions of phosphors under the bombardment of ultraviolet photons in smaller lamps.  Some lighting is going completely solid-state, to LEDs.

If we are going to advance, we have to open our minds to the advantages of change.  Science and technology have opened doors since our last major shift.  We must select the correct door and take ourselves into the future.

I do not just include the USA in this.  Spain has its own part to play, as does France.  Spain has just received a powerful reminder of the cost of giving money and power to murderers.  France may receive its own soon.  It is time (actually it is ten years past time) to take action, on the economic end as well as the military.

Remember that the Islamofascists cannot spread their ideology nearly so well if their home countries are hungry and broke.

>(And oh, please, let’s not forget that “alternative” means that it

>costs the same, and offers the same output....)

I have reason to believe that the cost of one of the MOST radical “alternatives” is getting very close to the current retail price of gasoline in California; better yet, developments moving into pilot production could slash the price within the next few years.  I hope to be able to dig into this later, with facts and figures.

I intend to support and explore these points elsewhere.  Feel free to write me or take a look at my blog: http://ergosphere.blogspot.com;I will attempt to answer counter-arguments as my time permits.

Thanks Frogman. Spot on.

We really need to get rid of Socialism, Political Correctness at home, otherwise we will be inviting disaster after disaster. There is no substitute for understanding reality; wishful thinking leads straight to hell.

The hard decisions will be: Is it enoug to fix immigration or do we need a mass expulsion of of Arabs and Muslims? To what extent? How will it practically be performed?

I would like to point out that Multiculturalism (or plain stupidity) is a much better candidate for “root cause” (if there is one) for terrorism than any sins of the West.

Terrorism would not be a problem here if we had not invited them.

Jeez, DF, I love your blog :) Excellent posts here as well!  Thanks to everyone!!

You’re right: it’s not about oil, it’s not about class or race.  But what will spell doom for the Sand Sheiks is the death of Wahhabism.  And that, and that alone, these bastards will fight to the last.

Wahhabism provides their support: a pliable populace, submissive and emotional, who are more than willing to commit any atrocity.  They **are** cannon fodder, no more and no less.  And why?  Because the rise of wahhabism represented the death of logic for these people.  And with the death of logic comes the inevitable: cults of personality.

The islamic world has failed to grow since the 14th century.  It stopped in its tracks hundreds of years ago and what we’re seeing now is nothing more and nothing less than a replay of the Last Crusades.  The disconnect between the Arab world and the west was a conscious one by the Arab leaders of the time who preached an insular message to their people, encouraging cutoff.  Arab secular logic, never completely removed from the mullahs’ review, was not so much displaced as morphed into a sick, self-aggrandizing mess of fallacies.  The ultimate upshot is that the Arab world never had a reformation as the West did, and as a result their capacity for self-examination has been squelched by a pervasive culture of victimization.

Want to stop the terrorists?  Eliminate wahhabism.  How do we do that?  It’s long process.  Keep encouraging those “free-thinkers” in the Arab world who see something wrong with the conventional wisdom of their rulers.  Support those who itch for positive change, for freedom.  Give those who would force the muslims to examine their own actions in light of reality an outlet to distribute their message.  It will take a few generations—hell, look at how long it took Luther to get his message across—but the end result will be worth the effort.

For now, for us, the immediate solution is to silence those muslim “leaders” who are the proponents of the violence and the victimization.  Remove them.  Permanently.  (Dead men have trouble spending money.) And allow the reformation to begin.

>I’m always weary of people who claim that the solution for the better (and, for that

>matter, the “common good") goes through the suppression of “useless relics of the

> past”. First, it usually ends in a ghastly way, and next, this is not how progress works.

Sometimes the suppression comes as a consequence of other forces that we all agree to be for the better.  For instance:

1.) Steam-engine train locomotives are museum pieces and historical curiosities.  They are too slow, not powerful enough, require too many fuel/water stops and pollute too much to be acceptable for modern rail transport.  They were everywhere a mere 60 years ago, but today they have been completely replaced by diesel, diesel-electric or even all-electric traction.  This replacement happened despite the greater cost of diesel fuel versus coal and the cost required for electrifying rail routes.

2.) Vacuum-tube electronics have been almost entirely replaced by transistors, the exceptions being some high-end audiophile gear (curiosities) and certain categories which 50 years ago did not exist as consumer items (microwave ovens).

3.) Flat-head, side-valve automobile engines are relics, not produced for many years.  They lost too much energy as heat and did not breathe well enough to produce the power/weight desired by consumers.  An overhead-valve engine is bulkier, has more parts and costs more, but today they have the entire automotive market.

4.) Pollution regulations have eliminated the sale of new 2-stroke motorcycles (and their emissions of unburned fuel and oil) from the USA.

Some of these changes happened over a very short time, yet few people really cared all that much.  The catalytic converter caused another gas pump marked “Unleaded” to appear for a while, but now that’s all there is; the air is a lot cleaner as a consequence, and cars are still cars.  We have other changes coming, due in part to government incentives to purchase hybrid cars.  Toyota Prius buyers sit on a waiting list measured in months, and Ford just licensed Toyota’s technology.

>engineering is good. Engineering society is not.

The USA currently spends about USD 50 billion (that is 5e10 dollars in scientific notation) per year to protect the Middle East oil-trade routes alone.  Total spending on defense needs related to oil or Arab military threats was a much larger part of our defense budget, roughly half of USD 360 billion - and that was before the USD 87 billion requested for the first year of the Iraq affair.

The USA uses about 110 billion gallons of motor gasoline per year, plus about half that much “distillate fuel oil” which fuels diesels.

If the defense costs related to oil were charged directly to motor fuel, the pump price of fuel in the USA would roughly double.  Speaking as an American who knows Americans, if motor gasoline cost $3.00 to $3.50 per gallon there would not be many people wanting to buy Hemi-powered trucks for driving to work.  Had this change occurred ten years ago there would be many more people already driving cars like the Prius and there would already be many different models using such technology.  You would not need government diktat to achieve this end.  All you would have to do is charge the costs to the goods which produce those costs, and let people choose freely between the alternatives.  (I have been saying this for ten years.  Just because nobody wants to listen does not mean it is not true. ;-)

Let me reverse that argument:  we have been indulging in social engineering for many years, using subsidy of petroleum consumption with our tax and defense policies.  These subsidies have resulted in great problems, including despotic regimes which sponsor terrorism.  It is time to change these policies, remove the subsidies and force the necessary adjustments to begin.