I'd say by the description

... that these were deffinately Arizona drivers. As for the rest of it, why don't you tell me what you think?

For years, I have said that the single most patriotic thing that Americans can do is to try to reduce their use of oil and natural gas. This point was reinforced today as my wife and I drove across Arizona to visit relatives: I was driving our 40MPG car at the speed limit while watching HUGE vehicles with one driver, no passengers speed by often 20 MPH over the speed limit. These selfish assholes do not care about the long term health and vitality of our country.

This article on Chinese plans to topple the US economically seems a little over the top and exaggerated to me, but is still an interesting read and serves as a good start to a dialog that I would like to see occur more in the US: how can we insure long term that we will enjoy a reasonable quality of life? The simple answer is to conserve and save something for our kids and grandkids. A longer answer would deal with saving money to wheather the economic storm that will start when the world switches from using dollars to using Euros to buy oil, and the general downward settling of our economy when the rest of the world decides to stop loaning us money to pay for our excesses. It is not often talked about, but in the US we depend on foreign banks to fund our massive debts and we are at constant risk that for any of several possible reasons the rest of the world decides to "pull the plug" on us, in spite of our powerful military.

[Mark Watson's opinions on Java, AI, semantic web, and politics]