Barrel Strength

From the New Atlantis magazine, a journal of technology and society, comes this straightforward examination of the physics and chemistry of hydrogen and fuel cells.

Once the basic facts of physics are explained, one wonders what kind of political pressure is needed to sustain funding of this phlogiston science.

By contrast, the author, Robert Zubrin, observes that ethanol and methanol are approaching economic feasability. Whike there are serious concerns about converting foodland to fuel creation, the facts are such that hydrogen and its offshoot, the fuel cell, are radically unfeasible technologies.

It is all very great bosh, as they used to say.

WaPo reports (h/t the corner ) that Obama is about send an additional 30,000 troops to Afghanistan.

President-elect Barack Obama intends to sign off on Pentagon plans to send up to 30,000 more U.S. troops to Afghanistan, but the incoming administration does not anticipate that the Iraq-like “surge” of forces will significantly change the direction of a conflict that has steadily deteriorated over the past seven years.

The most obvious question is that if they do not anticipate that it “will significantly change the direction of” the conflict in Afghanistan then why do it?  The second question is, why send troops to Afghanistan when the forces of al Qaeda (AQ) are elsewhere, as Obama stated earlier in an interview with Katie Couric.

The problem is when we got distracted by Iraq. We gave al Qaeda time to reconstitute itself. And we now know, based on all the intelligence available to us that they, in fact, have set up safe havens back in Afghanistan, the hills between Afghanistan and Pakistan.

It is indeed unfortunate that the CBS’ resident air-head Katie Couric, didn’t follow up and ask where exactly is this place in “the hills between Afghanistan and Pakistan”.

The broader question of course is why send troops at all to Afghanistan?  Is it just a case of policy inertia?  Everybody agrees that AQ is not in Afghanistan because they concentrated their firepower in Iraq.  A place lot more hospitable in terms of geography and culture, along with a Sunni-Shiite schism that could be exploited.  If Obama is serious about attacking AQ, then he should be sending the troops into Pakistan, instead of relying on pinprick raids by drones.