07.06.10
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, Extremism, Ted Nugent at 10:55 am by George Smith
Ted, recently, on Hannity:
You, Sean Hannity, and Fox News represent, by word and deed, the pulse of the most productive and conscientious members of this American dream across the board. And I bring you a salute and a thank you.
Which is to validate previous observations on the blog. Ted must suck up to Fox and the Tea Party because that is now the only way to a potential audience for him. His word-of-mouth draw in the world of rock music is far from what it used to be.
Speaking of which, Ted’s 76 cent Internet album, Happy Defiance Day Everyday — the one that compiles the hits from all his records that didn’t sell, collected many favorable reviews on Amazon.
However, there were a couple flies in the ointment, a few one-stars, the most scabrous of which was:
So we celebrate independence day by promoting a racist, misogynist, draft dodging dead beat dad? He represents everything about America that sucks. Good guitar player though.
But the most thorough perspective, in terms of reviewing the actual set, was given in this three star:
First, the guitar playing is top notch. The main reason I have always liked Ted Nugent. Second, the vocals are bad. They make Uncle Ted sound like Grandpa Ted. Time to hire a vocalist. Third, next time try using a lot less “F” bombs. Fourth, delete “Girl Scout Cookies” altogether. It just seems weird and not right to hear someone of Mr. Nugent’s age to be singing about this subject matter. Finally, I think the main problem is that I have grown-up over the years and Uncle Ted hasn’t. I can no longer relate to him. With all that sexual bravado, does the aged Mr. Nugent acutually think the girls are interested in anything he has in his pants other than his wallet?
One listener echoes the sentiment:
I do agree that Girl Scout Cookies is a poor choice of songs to include. The sexual innuendos about eating girls scout cookies is a bit unsettling, especially for a guy like me with a teenage daughter.
Profanity and flirting with taboos did not grace Ted’s records in the Seventies. They were no-nos.
But tax not so bad a voice to slander music any more than absolutely necessary per set. So, such being the case, one must furnish some kind of filler.
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06.30.10
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, Phlogiston, Why the World Doesn't Need US at 5:47 pm by George Smith
Good news, lads! Good news! We can make hydrogen cars for the super rich.
More in from our culture of sucking up, plus wishful thinking added for just the right seasoning.
“Imagine a world where all it took to power a car was sunshine and tap water,” wrote Susan Carpenter of the Los Angeles Times a week or so ago.
But first you have to know the history of the journalist.
Carpenter was infamous for being a Times swell. Her old gig was writing for a discontinued automotive section, reviewing high end superbikes, riding with Peter Fonda, writing about breaking the speed limit and getting her picture into the newspaper.
And I used to bag on her regularly.
Here she’s lampooned for touting a $3,000 electric bicycle, the iZip, made for miscellaneous upper class nuisances, gadget freaks and conspicuous consumers.
And here, she’s dealt with in her leather gear, after pumping her high-end superbike tour of the Old Silk Route in China:
[The] Silk Route highway is empty for Carpenter and her tourmates because most of the locals are too busy scrabbling out a subsistence living to afford driving on it.
And gas is cheaper in China than southern California! Imagine that!
The main hazards on the Silk Route highway, we are informed, are “packs of animals and stacks of rocks. In rural areas, you never knew when you would round a corner and need to slow for yaks or goats.”
“[There’s] never a line at the pump because so few people drive in the remote and impoverished outskirts of Xinjiang province.”
So she’s just right to tell readers — “Welcome to the future” — and that a hydrogen generating station the size of a refrigerator is just around the corner, for her wealthy and highly regarded pals, maybe.
Was she perhaps thrilled by Brad Paisley’s latest record, too?
Carpenter’s article centers around the Honda Clarity and it never deals with the details of cracking water for automotive use. All on house current without causing fainting from billing shock.
The latter is dealt with by simply saying it can all be had with solar-power panels and an accompanying electrolysis system.
One of the only figures delivered (there are two pertaining to power generation, neither particularly enlightening or convincing) is that the new “hydrogen fueling system” is “25 percent more efficient than the electrolysis system Honda devised in 2001 and it no longer requires a mechanical compressor or storage tanks.”
While it sounds too good to be true, Carpenter swallows it without comment.
If you were interested in chemistry as a kid you may have cracked water with wall current and a transformer. If you did, it was an unexciting experiment, slow and not much of a hydrogen generator, although you could collect some gas in a test tube, enough to make a pop when lit.
The energy required to decompose the covalent bonds holding water together is not trivial. This is well-explained, in chemical and physical terms, here.
In life, that it’s not trivial is good. If water fell apart easily, life just wouldn’t be possible. It just wouldn’t do to have to worry about unexpectedly and explosively popping from hydrogen build-up.
Carpenter’s article for the Times does not explain any of this. And it is
one of the central problems facing any attempt to bring on a hydrogen-based energy rich economy, one in which the hydrogen is generated from water — with the power not furnished by fossil fuel.
Use wall power generated by fossil fuels to generate hydrogen from water doesn’t automagically do away with the problem of greenhouse gases. It just lengthens the vehicle’s tail pipe away from the house and roads where it operates.
Generating it from solar — well, let’s say no one has even come remotely close to adequately explaining how the entire country, not just sunny soCal, could get enough power from the sun to satisfy current American driving habits on a daily basis.
Like in the middle of winter in eastern Pennsylvania.
And no editor at the LA Times required Carpenter to even take a stab at it.
Instead, most of her article’s testimony is turned over, of all people, to Jon Landau. A member of the mansion set who presumably called in some favor to get his Honda Clarity lease and fueling station permissions.
Landau was the film producer of Titanic and Avatar, so he’d be the guy to go to for an explanation of how the hydrogen economy and automobiles might work.
“There’s no trip I can’t make and get back here [to the fueling station], Landau tells Carpenter.
“Now he drives it more often than his Mercedes S550,” writes Carpenter brightly.
The Mercedes S550 is a $91,000 car, about twenty thousand cheaper than Elon Musk’s electric car for the rich. The cost of the Honda Clarity is ridiculous — $1 million. And this explains the expensive cocked-up leasing program for test vehicles and attached fueling station described by Carpenter, a program which furnished Landau with his auto.
If only we could all have such gigs and opportunities. Welcome to the future. Where the class war’s been waged and you’ve all lost.
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Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, Phlogiston, Why the World Doesn't Need US at 2:57 pm by George Smith
One thing Paul Fussell didn’t envision when he wrote BAD in 1991: The universal adoption of mindless sucking up to wealth and celebrity as a regular trait of American character.
Good examples abound in daily newspapers. Entire sections seem to often still be turned over to lickspittle praise of business tycoons or whoever has the predicted number one movie for this week.
But Tesla’s Elon Musk surely rates a mention today for the omnipresence in recent weeks of comparisons to comic book character Tony Stark.
Originally based on the producer of Iron Man 2’s claim that his version of the Marvel Comics character was modelled on Musk. And the latter’s subsequent Stan Lee-esque cameo in the movie.
Here’s a parrot’s collection, repeated ad nauseam, in current ISOO-approved national practice for sucking up:
The [Tesla] IPO is also the first for the eccentric and charismatic Musk, who is the inspiration for Robert Downey Jr’s Tony Stark character in “Iron Man” and also — ABC News
The funny thing about Elon Musk is that he does sort of remind you of Tony Stark. Minus the Iron Man suit … — the New York Times
Musk helped inspire the film version of Tony Stark, the billionaire in the “Iron Man??? movies, director Jon Favreau wrote in Time magazine in April — Businessweek
The script is good for a Hollywood movie, compete with a messy divorce; while Musk himself is the blueprint for the Robert Downey’s character Tony Stark in … — Times LIVE
If Elon Musk and his credentials, his lifestyle, his love for women and sportscars reminds you of the Marvel comic book hero Iron Man’s common man avatar … — Entertainment and Showbiz
With skepticism mounting about the cost and adoption of pure electric cars over the next five years, investors will have to decide whether Tesla represents a high-risk, high-return bet on an emerging technology or a Silicon Valley version of “Government Motors” … Musk, the inspiration for Robert Downey Jr’s Tony Stark character in “Iron Man” who makes a blink-and-you-miss-it cameo in this summer’s sequel, sees it very differently. — Reuters
But Tesla has its strengths, including some high-profile backers. Chief among them is CEO Elon Musk, the 38-year-old entrepreneur who was an inspiration for the playboy business mogul of the Iron Man films, Tony Stark … Investors will decide for themselves whether it takes Iron Man to lift Tesla off the ground. — AP
Jon Favreau, director of “Iron Man,” calls Musk a modern-day “Renaissance man” … In an article for Time, Favreau said that he and actor Robert Downey Jr. modeled the main character in the movie — “genius billionaire Tony Stark” — after the Silicon Valley star … Musk told Time that his goal was to be “involved in things that are going to make a significant difference to the future of humanity. — Agence France Presse
Now I mentioned “Iron Man” because Robert Downey Jr. based the movie version of Tony Stark in “Iron Man” in part on this guy. Now if that’s not cool enough, keep listening, I’ve got more … We’ll be right back with the real life “Iron Man,” right after this. — CNN
The CNN interview was spectacular for its fawning treatment of Musk, who’s current business ventures wouldn’t really exist without the serious underwriting provided by the US government.
In any case, for CNN Musk said he wanted to be involved in “sustainable energy and … space exploration and particularly the expansion of life to multiple planets.”
This was immediately followed by:
But on that second point, sustainable energy, I think we really see a clear example here with the Gulf oil spill that, you know, the oil is bad in so many ways. Apart from being unsustainable, it also is a huge pollutant of the oceans, of the atmosphere and we need to get off it.
Scintillating.
But the real bell-ringer is “expansion of life to multiple planets,” quite an ambition from a guy who’s actual material contribution to making stuff, right now, is a premium sports car for really rich people and a proposed slightly less premium car for … the wealthy.
And a booster rocket to potentially cart supplies and baggage, and maybe more really wealthy people, to the great outhouse in the sky, the international space station. On the taxpayer’s dime, most — if not all — the time.
For CNN, Musk was emphasizing sustainable energy. And it’s a common trope of the sales pitch for his electric car manufacturing business.
But the electricity has to come from somewhere for a rechargeable car.
And if it comes from a wall plug at home, or any hook-up at an electric car charging station, the current infrastructure in the US still generates it through the burning of fossil fuels. Which means only that the electric car has a really long exhaust pipe — to where the power is being generated.
If it’s going to run solely off elemental hydrogen — which DD may get into later — it inherits a different set of problems. Namely, the relativey high energy needs for cracking water, if you’re not going to use hydrogen derived from fossil fuels.
The technical dimensions are described somewhat briefly here..
Manufacturing a $109,000 (after US government tax rewards) automobile for celebrities doesn’t go far in arguments for solving global warming or eyewash about sustainable energy.
However, this hasn’t stopped top journalists from lavishing praise upon the man who’s giving them celebrity privileges to drive it. Infamously, like Lesley Stahl.
Musk is almost perfect for America in 2010. Someone who delivers little, spends an awful lot, isn’t above ludicrously pleading poverty but — above all — is someone showy and adept at cultivating the right image in the culture of sucking up.
In Iron Man 2, Tony Stark was also a narcissist and a drunk.
In the comic book, as well as in the best parts of Favreau’s two movies, Stark defeated bad guys at no charge. And the people in the street, not just George Clooney or Lesley Stahl — got to enjoy it.
Twelve cents, later a quarter, originally — right here.
More on Musk’s IPO, skeptically, at the LA Times.
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