There is this guy named Ralph Nader…lots of folks call him a cook or weirdo. I can understand why with all that talk of alternative energy sources over the last THIRTY YEARS… I don’t think there has been near enough discussion of this fact. They (muslims) want us out of the Holy land. Pour all of this war money into the final stages of fuel cell development and build more, bigger and safer nuke power plants. Start drilling in Alaska and leave them to kill each other. Why not?
Folks are so quick to speak on such important issues as whether or not Bill Mahr will loose his show or who called who a rag head or camel jockey or if we should go and kill the families of terrorist…no one yet from Washington to this forum has the guts to address the real problem. Oil dependency will not solve itself…;…wake up out there.
All good points portajon but I think it’s foolish to think that energy independance, while an extremely good thing, would make the terrorism problem go away. America will not abandon Israel or ignore the rest of the world.
FWIW fuel cell technology is all well and good but Hydrogen is not an energy source, merely a form of energy. The only naturally occuring form of hydrogen is in hydrocarbon fuels which doesn’t address the oil dependancy problem. Pure hydrogen must be made from water using as much energy in elecetricity as will be available in the hydrogen fuel. That electricity has to some from somewhere.
Since it takes so much electricity to get the hydrogen are you trying to say give up? If it seems too hard just give up? You show none of the pioneering spirit that has made our country and people great problem solvers and yes largely independent. So what do you propose? A long term plan of oil dependency secured by rank politics and constant threat of war?..And by the way give me one GOOD reason, besides Geographical, why the Greatest nation on earth should continue to be a puppet for Israel.
I certainly don’t think we shoulld give up on alternate energy but just wanted to point out that hydrogen and fuel cells in themselves do nothing to reduce our dependance on foreign oil.
As for the other issue I dont’ think we should be a puppet for Israel but I do not think we are that now.
>>I don’t think there has been near enough discussion of this fact.
I suspect it has something to do with Mulit-National Oil Companies.
Again I ask why not. I will try to simplify. Do you think tax dollars are better spent on a multi billion dollar Mid east military action every few years or do you think that money would be better spent in development of a long term plan to improve our ability to meet our energy needs? Surely you do see the direct relationship of our ties with the oil bearing nations and our terrorist problems. I have never implied to turn our backs on the world. We are treading on the religious beliefs of these people. They are begging us to turn our backs and leave…oil keeps us there.
If oil was keeping us there, surely we wouldn’t be supporting Israel. We support Israel for a number of reasons, and developing alternative fuel sources wouldn’t change that.
I am not being a smart ass here. Will someone please supply just a couple non geographical, hard reasons of why we support Israel?
This is going to sound like a flippant answer but it is real enough.
One of the reasons the US supports Israel is a very strong and very well funded jewish special interest group in the United States.
For a more palatable reason the US tends to support governments that jibe closely to our own national outlook and policies and system of government. While the US has certainly supported all manner of creeps and governments in the past as the need arose we have a much easier time stomaching Israel than we do King Hussein of Jordan or Saddam Hussein in Iraq or a bevy of Iranian clerics. Israel is much closer to the western way of thinking than any Arab country I can think of.
Finally, once you have committed yourself to a friend you just don’t back away easily or at a whim when it isn’t convenient for you. If you do you won’t find yourself left with many reliable friends when you need them most. This is as true in world politics as it is in personal relationships. I’d have to polish up on my history to tell you why we got into bed with the Israelis in the first place but once we did so it became very hard to walkaway.
Maybe because of what happened the last time some insane bastards tried to wipe out an entire people? We did fight a World War, and all.
I can venture a guess about why we keep furnishing money and arms to Israel so they can continue to kill arabs…
Just try and get elected to national office in the USA with a platform of disengagement from Israel and its bloody policies. Won’t happen. Too many powerful, American Jews who would be too pissed at you.
So, we maintain a morally questionable position simply because we fear the Jewish-American lobby’s backlash.
True, Israel’s policies do jibe well with ours. Especially the policy of killing people from a different ethnic group who are living on land that you covet.
I would like to think that if native americans were still around in any numbers our good friends the Israelis would send money and weapons to help us kill them and drive them from their land. (After all, we help them get rid of their nasty little Arab infestation, so it’s only fair).
Scratch a pro-Palestinian and 4 times out of ten you’ll uncover an anti-Semite.
Typical uninformed claptrap. If you want to be an anti-semite at least try to be an informed one.
The problems between Israel and the Palestinians are deep and very complex. I’m not absolving Israel and trying to say they are somehow perfect but there is no way to boil their issues down to, “Me Israel! Me take land me want! Palestinian go away!”
Portajon has opened a similar thread (here asking where Israel came from and C K Dexter Haven does an excellent job of summing up some of how this has all worked. Given the nature of a message board it is perforce brief but it is a good quick-pass at the situation and I encourage you to read it.
For more on the subject I suggest you visit your local library and check out any of dozens of books on this issue.
Again I ask Why Not? No one seems to have a problem with funding alternative energy programs, drilling Alaska or making war on the Arabs. The entire sticking point of my theory of getting out of the mid east is Israel. How many lives of Americans and Arabs and Jews is it worth to continue to defend a spit of sand that hastory has proven will always be disputed. I am not anti-semitic or what ever the word is for those that hate Jews. I am not anti Timoreese either but we a re not defending their land nor should we be, just as it is with tons of tiny tiny nations around the world.
I really don’t see how support for Israel has anything to do with our lessening our dependance on middle-Eastern oil. The U.S. has played a constant game of pitting middle-eastern nations against each other in order to keep the prices low (remember the Iraq and Iran war). In doing so we can lessen the power of OPEC. Israel’s a red-herring, the problem is supply, demand, and NIMBY.
Drilling in Alaska won’t make up for the shortfall in dropping mid-east petroleum and neither will further drilling in the Gulf of Mexico. There are two other reasons why drilling excessively there is being resisted.
Strategic concerns: When the oil dries up in the mid-east we can start drilling here. Figure it as our un-tapped reserve.
Political concerns: This is the big one, and it’s called NIMBY (Not In My Backyard). People don’t want environmental damage on their property. This can apply to the national parks which the public perceives of as theirs as well as to the offshore oilrigs that spoil the ocean view of coastal residents.
As for nuclear power as an alternate form of energy, it has some severe problems. First off is the public’s perception of the technology’s safety. We may have made technological strides, but no one is going to forget three-mile island and Chernobyl. Additionally, we still haven’t a clue as to what to do with the waste. This is even a larger NIMBY concern than where to build the plants in the first place. Fission will not become a viable solution in the U.S. anytime soon.
So, with our current technology we are stuck with fossil fuels. We prefer to get them from fields in the North Sea, the Mid-East, and the ones we have already tapped here. Better to drill in somebody elses yard (a desert), than in ours (a temperate rain forest)
We can lessen the impact by subsidizing solar and wind power generation, but those technologies only seem to work on an extremely local level (such as solar panels on a roof to offset the electrical bill of a structure) and are woefully inadequate when used as generators for utilities.
This will continue until something really new comes along. Anybody have the latest news on the tocamak fusion reactor?
-Beeblebrox
Several billion trillion tons of superhot exploding hydrogen nuclei rose slowly above the horizon and managed to look small, cold and slightly damp.
You register in Sept 2001, and start off by bashing our support for Israel under the pretense that you care about alternate fuels. As much as I agree that alternate fuel sources are of utmost importance, I just don’t think that you truly care. Maybe a pit thread would be more appropriate.
Let me get this straight… is the original poster suggesting that Ralph Nader endorses nuclear power and oil drilling in Alaska? Umm… does he have any idea what the “Green” in “Green Party” means?
There are only two possibilities: that, after mentioning Ralph Nader, port completely FORGOT about Nader. The other possibility is that he’s even more ignorant than I thought.
I vote for option 2. How about you guys?
I thought the juxtaposition of Ralph Nader and Alaskan oil drilling was a bit odd, too, and I suspected something even darker than mere ignorance when the subject of Israel popped out of nowhere. I am willing to give portojon the benefit of the doubt, however, if he can come back and either discuss alternative energy or give reasons why ceasing trade with OPEC will prevent terrorism. I’m not sure he can do either.
Oh, and portajon, Osama Bin Laden was sheltered by the Taliban, the rulers of Afghanistan. Afghanistan doesn’t have any oil.