Big Green Machine
--P. Nicholson, The Australian
So we sailed on to the sun,
Till we found the sea green,
And we lived beneath the waves,
In our yellow submarine
--Yellow Submarine, The Beatles
TV news and camera,
there's choppers in the sky
Marines, police, reporters
ask where, for and why
--How Bizarre, OMC
___________________
The New Hampshire is a $3 Billion top-secret attack submarine, over 375 feet long. The vessel is powered by an ultra-modern, 40,000 horsepower reactor that motors the ship at speeds up to 50 m.p.h. No other sub is as fast, expensive, quiet or deadly (ideasanddiscoveries.com).So we sailed on to the sun,
Till we found the sea green,
And we lived beneath the waves,
In our yellow submarine
--Yellow Submarine, The Beatles
TV news and camera,
there's choppers in the sky
Marines, police, reporters
ask where, for and why
--How Bizarre, OMC
___________________
Breaking through arctic ice? No problem. It has 12 vertical Cruise missile launching tubes to deter any "potential enemies", and with a lifespan of 30 years and the capacity to maintain its crew underwater for three months, the New Hampshire truly is a super sub.
Now, with the encomiums out of the way, Ranger has two comments:
- The U.S. frets over Iranian efforts to get a nuclear weapon, for what reason?
- The Chevy Volt has been recalled, and all have been bought back by General Motors due to technical problems. So, we can build machines of death and mass destruction, yet we cannot get a handle on a simple people-moving green machine for the streets of America.
But, you know, the Office of Naval Research says the killer sub is trying an initiative "to replace noisy fluorescent bunk lights with LEDs" -- yeah, at least that. So that makes you feel a little better, that if the trolling sub must unleash its deadly wrath, it will be led into battle under greener lights.
How bizarre!
Labels: bizarre, chevy volt, relativism, the new hamshire
posted by rangeragainstwar at 7:17 AM
7 Comments:
Ranger;
Three observations on your most excellent post.
1. Like the F-22 and many other "advanced weapons programs," just who is it designed to fight? We are in an arms race with ourselves.
2. Remember a few years ago when the US launched a missile from a similar super-sub to "kill an Al-Qaeda number two" That's about a cool million spent for that mission. My take is we could have put him on the payroll for much less but the profit margins would have suffered.
3. The LED's are not at all about being "green." The clue to the whole reason is the word "noisy" and that means "suseptable to detection."
blake,
how many number 2 and 3 have we killed since 2002?
it's a bunch.
run silent run deep.
jim
wooden ships
Not only do we not have affordable--truly affordable--hybrid and electric cars, we don't have a national energy policy that heavily incentivizes buying them in the first place and heavily disincentivizes buying big old SUV's that get 7 miles to the gallon. (There is some downside, but not much.) Nor do we have the kind of public transportation system that the Swedes, Japanese, or Chinese have zoomed ahead with. But oh, we sure can build killing machines. And the makers of the killing machines are themselves making a killing.
It's as if America's purse strings are controlled by my twelve-year-old son, given the kind of outsized whiz-bang (emphasis on "bang") toys that the country seems fine spending its money on. Well, its borrowed money. Arrrgh.
Jim, Aust. will most likely be "leasing" US nuke subs in the near future, along with the US crews to maintain them etc. New US bases are/will be springing up on the Aust. mainland.
Yet the Aust. gov have failed miserably in so many key areas on the domestic scene on issues that matter to the average taxpayer.
One wonders where all this is being directed, and against who.
Carl
Don't we need bigger a better toys?
wargear,
what we need is 22 million kids going to bed at night with food in their guts.jobs, health care costs reduced,affordable housing, less homeless vets.
thanks for writing.
jim
Post a Comment
<< Home