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Navy Spends $33 Million For Hybrid of the High Sea
coondoggie writes "Some might call it an enormous floating Prius, but others will call it a step in the right direction: A new hybrid electric engine for US Navy ships that promises to save up to 12,000 barrels of oil a year per ship.
The folks who brought you the Predator unmanned flying aircraft, General Atomics, this week got $32.7 million to develop a proof-of-concept Hybrid Electric Drive (HED) system for a full-scale demonstration on board the Navy's DDG 51 Class destroyers.
DDG 51 destroyers are powered by General Electric gas turbines capable of moving the ships along at over 30 knots or about 35 mph. The General Atomics system would meld into this system and let the ship use electric power for slow-speed maneuvers. The engines would provide more power as the ship needed to go faster."
-- Charles P. Pierce, from "Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free"
Pity the poor "real Americans," because they sure feel sorry for themselves. Self-pity appears to be the latest national craze. Not that we haven't got real troubles, but everywhere you look and listen these days, some big crybaby's blubbering about how people like him or her get no respect from (take your pick) "Ivy League elitists," the "scientific establishment," "so-called sophisticates," the "mainstream media" and so on.
But hey, Americans don't come any realer than me. I learned that recently from MSNBC news-chat personality Mika Brzezinski. Discussing Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin's supporters on "Morning Joe," Brzezinski allowed as how us country folks (I live in a rural county with a lot more cows than people) constitute the nation's moral backbone. "God, I hate to say it," Brzezinski allowed, "but in the cities where there are a little bit more liberal elite populations, you are not going to find what is representative of America."
Sigh. We already tried that. It brought us George W. Bush, a synthetic cowboy who dropped the "rancher" pose the minute he left the White House. Back in 2001, metropolitan pundits -- seemingly unfamiliar with the oeuvre of Hank Williams and Garth Brooks -- kept telling us about the superior moral instincts of us "red state" voters.
Brzezinski's the daughter of former Carter administration national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, and attended several fancy private schools. So I'm guessing she doesn't know a lot of drinkin' and cheatin' songs either.
The occasion of the MSNBC pundit's comments was Palin's poor-pitiful-me resignation speech, the one that sounded like an audition for the Lucille Ball part in an "I Love Lucy" revival.
"Life is too short to compromise time and resources," Palin said. "It may be tempting and more comfortable to just keep your head down, plod along and appease those who demand: 'Sit down and shut up,' but that's the worthless, easy path; that's a quitter's way out. And a problem in our country today is apathy. It would be apathetic to just hunker down and 'go with the flow.' Nah, only dead fish 'go with the flow.'"
No dead-fish quitter she, Palin quit.
Having spent much of her tenure as Alaska's governor scheming to fire her ex-brother-in-law from the state police and having her press secretary issue statements contradicting her daughter's 18-year-old former boyfriend, Palin evidently mistook national politics for one long Miss Congeniality contest.
That is, until she started picking fights with TV comics and whining that nobody before her had been so victimized by "the politics of personal destruction" -- a phrase Bill Clinton coined after Republican operatives accused him and his wife of murder.
Chances are Palin doesn't know that, as she appears to know precious little else. Even many conservatives who supported Bush almost to the end fear that the Republicans have finally touched bottom.
"In television interviews," Peggy Noonan wrote in the Wall Street Journal, "she was out of her depth in a shallow pool. She was limited in her ability to explain and defend her positions, and sometimes in knowing them. She couldn't say what she read because she didn't read anything. She was utterly unconcerned by all this and seemed in fact rather proud of it: It was evidence of her authenticity."
Palin's authentic, all right: An authentic product of what author Charles P. Pierce calls the "Three Great Premises" of America's decayed TV celebrity culture. First, "Any theory is valid if it moves units," i..e. sells advertising. Second, "Anything can be true if someone says it loudly enough." Third, "Fact is that which enough people believe. Truth is measured by how fervently they believe it."
The cultural left is sometimes as prone to dimwit populism as the right. Witness the Rev. Al Sharpton moving an audience to tears by assuring Michael Jackson's children that he wasn't "strange," but his crit
12000 barrels per year at $100 per barrel, 1,200,000. Cost to save 12000 barrels per year with hybrid drive, 8.8 million (plus 17.1 million initial cost). Can someone explain the economic benefit of this move?
never a better time for robbIE to turn off his patentdead PostBlock censorship devise, as opposed to cranking it up to include subjects that he personally disagrees with/has no concept of, &/or scares him.
there's nothing new under the fake 'atmosphere'/enlarging sun. also never a better time to consult with your creators. the lights are coming up all over now & again.
Now the US navy can bring death upon the infidels in a clean and environmentally safe way
Hmm...the US Navy is going to bomb US citizens? Remember, the US (and some of the Western world) are the infidels.
I do not support "The Man". I also do not support your irrational stupidity