The People's Cube at The Washington Times

With the announcement of the indefinite suspension of nuclear refueling of the aircraft carrier USS Lincoln, the White House has signaled a new shift in naval technology - away from costly and potentially hazardous fossil fuels, towards non-toxic and environmentally stable wind power.

Not letting Republican obstructionism of the budget process go to waste, President Obama's national defense team is putting together a plan to retrofit US warship with 'tried-and-true' sails, taking advantage of free, naturally occurring wind rather than diesel and nuclear fuels that put crews at constant risk of causing an ecological disaster.

Used by many advanced cultures for thousands of years, sails were the environmentally sound propulsion system for naval vessels until the 20th century.

Many experts agree that their return might just usher in a new era of 'green military technology' - if it can overcome opposition from the generals and the fossil fuels lobby, whose alleged "concerns" about military readiness only serve to ensure more profits for the military-industrial complex.

"Of all the things that can slow down our response times to situations far away, sails are the least of our problem," said defense expert Tammy Sdayus of the Progressive Disarmament Institute, a non-partisan think tank for military analysts.

"The amount of time the Pentagon and White House need to evaluate options and make decisions usually takes far longer than the time for a carrier group to move from the Pacific to the Atlantic. Sails will actually help the military pace the White House's decision-making process, rather than racing out to the scene and then having to wait several months for orders," she said.

Refitting an aircraft carrier with sails may require some re-engineering, since modern ships are designed for engine propulsion rather than wind power.

Department of the Navy officials are looking at ways not only to retrofit masts onto ship structures, but also to lighten ships in general to increase sail performance.

"A lot of extra weight will have to be removed to match the wooden ship standards," said Sdayus, pointing out that early US carriers did have wooden flight decks. "The Navy will have to scrap those big steel vessels in favor of wooden hulls and superstructures.

Ultimately, it would make total sense to go back to an all-wood fleet and avoid the problem of retrofitting so many ships altogether."

This is not necessarily good news for the environmentalist movement. Some activists are concerned about over-harvesting of oak and other hardwoods traditionally used in ship building.

"We will need assurances from the President that those ships are made of at least 50% recycled and reclaimed wood," said Willow Crier , a media liaison with Revolting Green, a forestry watchdog group based in Oregon. "We are confident that the President places the tree census way above such an uncool, violence-based activity like war. This generation of Americans need trees more than they need standing armies and navies."

"Conflict resolution without war is better for the environment," Crier added, hoping that the slowdown of naval reaction times may facilitate peace-making processes.

Experts agree that the President's willingness to cut defense spending signals a new era in conflict resolution, where the show of military strength will no longer be a viable option.

"As a result of the President's diplomatic efforts, forces of peace and progress are finally taking over the Middle East and other parts of the world," Sdayus said. "I don't think any more military adventures will be necessary for years to come."

While some military analysts have proposed that the U.S. start looking at its drone program to see if unmanned aerial surveillance and strike vehicles can be converted to gliders, not unlike the U2 spy plane, this may not yet be negotiable.

"The drone program allows the President to control the strikes directly from the White House in real time, giving him the much needed emotional relief after a stressful day in the office," Sdayus noted. "I don't foresee him abandoning it in the near future."

This story is the reverse version of The Fighting Temeraire by the English artist Turner.

A white, magnificent, three-mast battleship is being towed away, to be broken up for scrap, by an ugly, dirty tugboat with a smelly, polluting smokestack. Turner created a visual representation of an ultimately nostalgic concept - a universal human condition. As such, it appears in the most recent James Bond movie Skyfall, when Bond and Q sit in the National Gallery in front of this painting, which serves to illustrate the point that aging warriors like Bond were becoming obsolete and meeting the fate of the great sailing tall ships.

Painted in 1838, this picture was also a sign of the times. The old legendary world of hero-kings and noblemen who ruled over their compliant and grateful subjects had now been almost completely replaced by the more efficient capitalism as a result of the industrial revolution. Just as the great white sails were giving way to the soot-spitting smokestacks, the magnificent, carefree aristocracy was giving way to the ugly, dirty, smelly, loud, uncultured, uneducated rubes of the bourgeois class, who selfishly and conspicuously celebrated their individual success and financial independence from their former masters.

As the hallmark of the old noble class, the beautiful art of swordsmanship, was made obsolete by "the "great equalizer" - Samuel Colt's revolver - so, too, went romantic heroism and bravery, replaced by boorish concerns of profits, mechanization, and balance sheets, all crude hallmarks of the ignoble new way of life.

Of this very annoying new breed of self-reliant humans, Americans were the worst.

Pregnant with this sort of nostalgia and revulsion of modernity, the Western elites eventually gave birth to Progressivism. Despite its stated goals of universal justice, the main driving force of Progressivism is the subliminal longing for the fairy-tale medieval utopia of noble, enlightened overlords guiding, defending and caring for the lowly peasants and city folk. The flip side of this seemingly benevolent idealism is the irrational, vicious desire to punish the "undeservedly" wealthy rubes, take away their dignity, and force them back into the impoverished, compliant, disarmed, and invisible collective under the caring guidance of the "enlightened ones," who could once again feel good about themselves and their place in the world.

Any pretext will do - Marxism, Fabian Socialism, Fascism, or Anarcho-Syndicalism - as long as it helps to halt human progress towards individual self-reliance and reinstate the "purity" of the idealized lost kingdom.

Today the "progressives" seem to be getting their wish. They have now almost completely reclaimed the civilized world and, full of disdain for such loutish concerns as profitability and balanced budgets, they are now busying themselves "purifying" it of the base self-interest, individualism, and success, recreating the zeitgeist of the olden days, complete with the magical thinking, rigid social stratification, regulated behavior, lack of upward mobility, refined opulence of the elites, and desperate lowly masses throwing themselves at the feet of a larger-than-life hero-king.

It is as though Turner's majestic but inefficient sail ship is being rebuilt, while the more efficient tugboat is being destroyed for no other purpose than to exact a righteous revenge - or, if you will, to perform a quasi-religious sacrificial ritual of evicting the demons of reason which threaten the tranquility of their illusionary progdom.

Indeed, the age in which we live may well be defined as "the revenge of The Fighting Temeraire."

Don't forget the energy-saving, wind-powered, low-visibility Stealth Fighter version of the now-obsolete F-22 Raptor.

I'm not laughing, Comrades....

In the continuing greening of the US Navy, here we see high velocity catapults, which, over the next five years, will replace all pyrotechnic-based weapons on American warships peaceships. While primarily to be used on ships such as destroyers and cruisers, aircraft carriers like the one pictured above (back behind the sails) will also be temporarily fitted with catapults while their jet fighter planes are being retrofitted with sails.

>Prog temporarily submerged<

One can't help but wonder how far the cost of those F-16s and Abrams tanks being given to the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt would have gone in refueling an aircraft carrier...

>Prog back on the surface, catapults armed with organic rocks!<

In the People's Republic of Michigan, we have been providing harbor for the Navy's most modern vessels since 2001. Well, since 1776 really, but they'd been away a long time before recently.

This might be a little tangential, but you know how, when decommissioned (which of course all of it should be), it can often be used for having families drive to their reedukation appointments:

KOOK wrote:
Don't forget the energy-saving, wind-powered, low-visibility Stealth Fighter version of the now-obsolete F-22 Raptor.

Yes Comrade! "Obsolete" is the new "stealth"! No one can see it coming!

I am reminded of Comrade Krasnodar's report on Obama's Wind-Powered Stealth Submarine

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The Israelis have been way ahead of us... those babies can move!

PROG/OFF

President Reagan used to say that a Nimitz class carrier does not pay for itself sitting tied to the pier. Two years of Syria, Libya, Benghazi, Egypt, Algeria...all of it because the rank amateur in the White House has no clue how to use a carrier battle group. One of the fist things he did was withdraw the carriers from the Med.

At one time when there was a crisis in the world, the first thing the President asked was "Where is the nearest carrier?". Not any more.

Uncle Sam wants the Navy Green.

In case you were wondering about my lost post above, I just rewrote it from the memory and replaced the previous text with it.

https://thepeoplescube.com/peoples-blog ... tml#155605

A Head Turner...


Thank Comrade Square for a glorious post including Turner.

Pathetic just Pathetic:

The People's Navy ™ has been light years ahead of the pathetic efforts of the U.S Navy in the going green technology for future ship propulsion. The PNS Spotted Owl was the first ever carrier exclusively fueled by algae oil production by utilizing a bio-mass beet field growing on the flight deck. Sure there were some snivelers that complained that a carrier should actually use the flight deck to land planes, but those voices were soon stifled using the People's justice.

As many may know already the beet field was disguised as a three round hole golf course so that the carrier can appear as an innocent vessel when infiltrating hostile Capitalist ports.

Also about that vicious and vile rumor about the Inner party:

Rest assured the Golf course disguise is truly only for show and that Inner Party members are not using this vessel or the luxurious club house facilities to get a few rounds of golf in and for any other sort of Capitalistic type debauchery. Everything we do in the Inner party is always, "for the Children ™ ".

Anyer Marx wrote:And so our brave submariners may circumnavigate this pieceful globe, the solar sub for doldrum travel....Obama's Wind-Powered Stealth Submarine

Comrade, you must have missed The Peoples Navy ™ communique 772.533.875.352.871.543.632.654.914.535.896.342.865.958.8 Chapter 408 - Paragraph 768 Line 6364 dated in the Year of our Obama 01.21.08 where Government Motors was duly commissioned a 5 yr. plan to design & manufacture our new line of green stealth submarines.
I hear they are equipped with flamethrowers.

Every time we watch Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World and get to that scene where there's absolutely no wind and the ship's just sitting out there in the middle of nowhere in a glassy dead calm, I can never help saying the same thing: "And THIS is what the Left wants to take us back to because it's better for the planet!"

Commissarka Pinkie wrote:Every time we watch Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World and get to that scene where there's absolutely no wind and the ship's just sitting out there in the middle of nowhere in a glassy dead calm, I can never help saying the same thing: "And THIS is what the Left wants to take us back to because it's better for the planet!"

Our Dear Leader has taken the occasional lack of wind into account with a jobs program for those who doubt the wisdom of his Green Navy ...

And to think that Bush advocated developing this carbon-belching monstrosity instead of
" El Presidente's " idea of the pedal - powered attack ornithopter !

Photograph of new green stealth attack dirigible just released by Pentagon:

Who would not want to row right behind Charlton Heston? Imagine spending hours looking as his muscular, perspiring back? What a Proletarian Dream!

The Trojan Duck Landing Craft carries a company of Marines and has almost no carbon footprint as the enemy must tow it into their own harbor.

Chairman Meow wrote:Our Dear Leader has taken the occasional lack of wind into account with a jobs program for those who doubt the wisdom of his Green Navy ...

battleship.jpg

I must point out that, while we refer to this labor opportunity as "jobs" (and include the so "employed" in our jobs statistics), these are actually positions held by reich wing teabaggers who have been sent to the gulag.

Row, row, row our boat, reich wing extremists!!

R.O.C.K. in the USSA wrote:Row, row, row our boat, reich wing extremists!!

People's Power, in the end, always comes down to pure muscle power of forced labor.

Don't say we didn't warn you. You heard us call for "People's Power" many times, you chanted "People's Power," you voted for "People's Power," and you helped us destroy the opposition to "People's Power." Now get back to oars and row!

ROCK wrote:In the continuing greening of the US Navy, here we see high velocity catapults, which, over the next five years, will replace all pyrotechnic-based weapons on Americanwarshipspeaceships. While primarily to be used on ships such as destroyers and cruisers, aircraft carriers like the one pictured above (back behind the sails) will also be temporarily fitted with catapults while their jet fighter planes are being retrofitted with sails.

I have heard Iran plans to convert a number of obsolete USSA carriers from polluting jet aircraft launchers to more energy efficient shoe launch systems in the near future. Plans attached...

Dear Comrade Director! This is precisely why the Party seeks to 'empower' the People, so that they can do more heavy lifting, and carrying, and shoveling!

Red Square wrote:

R.O.C.K. in the USSA wrote:Row, row, row our boat, reich wing extremists!!

People's Power, in the end, always comes down to pure muscle power of forced labor.

Don't say we didn't warn you. You heard us call for "People's Power" many times, you chanted "People's Power," you voted for "People's Power," and you helped us destroy the opposition to "People's Power." Now get back to oars and row!

Comrades!

The Peoples Navy ™ has been at the forefront of green Naval technology for years using Socialist principles and ideals incorporated into all phases from design prototype, engineering and actual development. The U.S Navy is still using antiquated 18th century capitalist theory as evident by its sorry attempts to go green with 18th century sail power and cannot even begin to compete with what the Peoples Navy has already accomplished with modern socialist ideals.

Our totally green Carrier PNS Kumbaya not only was funded by billions of dollars borrowed from future generations by stimulus money in another outstanding example of Keynesian economic theory at work, it also uses wind in a way that puts the U.S Navy to shame.

How long before the wheel is reinvented by Dear Leader?

Funny you should mention that....


DOT experiments with the new ObamaTread 2016 look quite promising.

Sorry I asked!

Ivan Betinov wrote:Funny you should mention that....


DOT experiments with the new ObamaTread 2016 look quite promising.

This, comrades, is why we MUST "invest" in additional research!

Subvet wrote:How long before the wheel is reinvented by Dear Leader?

You haven't been following the news. See the bottom right corner.

[img]/images/NewsPaper_Things_Not_Happened_2012.png[/img]

I cheered! Onward to Glory for our Warriors of NextTuesday ™

I wept, as this parody looks like it is becoming reality.

Not to worry, Komrade Skwerl - once our entire military drops sufficiently for China to take over they'll build the Navy back up!

Dear Leader says that sequestration will lead to wearing of second-hand green Cuban-like military uniforms for all White House staff and other carp they just make up.

https://www.caintv.com/jay-carney-ebarrasses-himself Such clothes will make the up-coming double secret Gay Bash at Easter a real drag.

The Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda will hear of this! Dr. Goebbels will not be pleased...

They are also planning to relocate the United States Fleet Forces Command to a single location, to save billions in electricity, heating, personnel, and land leases:

Comrades, this is an insidious, reactionary idea to use wind power to propel our People's Navy ships! Has anyone even reflected on how much the winds are going to be exploited, blowing themselves into exhaustion 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, for no wages at all! This is sheer slavery of the highest criminality! How decadent can we get?

To add injury to insult, the winds in the industrial age have been forced to humiliatingly aid and abet the Kapitalist enemy by blowing imperialist navies across the seven seas to invade, colonize and exploit the hapless natives of the 2nd and 3rd worlds! And now we want to abuse them too?

Moreover, some winds, particularly the westerly winds, may have become utterly subverted by now through prolonged association with bourgeois yachts, paragliders and sailboats, and can no longer be trusted! They are, indeed, a potential counter-revolutionary threat to our glorious USSA's future!

Clearly Comrades, the only theoretically correct method of propulsion for our glorious Navy is the collective use of our liberated workers' steely muscles and powerful hands steadfastly gripping stout wooden oars to hurl our ships through the water. This is the bright (and environmentally friendly) future I can now envision for our fleets! Let this be your vision too, Comrades:

Mac is right! What happens when we use up all the wind? Ever think about that, comrades?

Tsk...tsk...The wind is our friend comrades. Place all wind turbines in downtown DC. It will never stop blowing in Washington.