[tar sands] canada sits on barely usable oil

This article was referred to me by Two Wolves: Tar Sands: Part 2 by Chris Nelder, originally written for Energy and Capital and it's severely abridged to fit it into a blog front page.

It touches on problems faced by Canada and ultimately the U.S. in using Alberta tar as one of the sources of fuel for internal combustion engines.

Water

- plants typically use two to four barrels of water to extract a barrel of oil - currently enough to sustain a city of two million every year.

- water ends up toxic, some of it reused, vast amounts pumped into enormous settlement ponds as toxic waste.

Energy

- needs over 1,000 cubic feet of natural gas - to produce one barrel of bitumen.

- consume about 4% of Canada's natural gas supply.

- quadrupling production would consume 16% of the supply

- estimates over the next ten years exceed the projections for available amounts of natural gas

- proven reserves of natural gas will be gone in about eight years

- after gas, the next obvious choice is nuclear energy - costs and water usage still a problem.

- total Energy Return On Investment around 5% to 10% but with oil over $60 it still makes economic sense

- other processes like "toe heel air injection," are being looked at.

Labor

- perennial shortage of skilled labor

- workers want a bigger piece of the action.

Environment

- primeval boreal forest the size of Florida is being blighted

- toxic sludge in huge tailings ponds

- industry pays next to nothing

- every barrel of oil uses enough natural gas to heat a family's home for four days.

Therefore there is the scenario of us sitting in our cars burning up the environment with the only limit in our minds vague ideas of environmental difficulties and the limiting cost of increasingly pricy fuel and this being supplied at all costs through a very inefficient and damaging process.

As my Min pointed out, the Arabs have only to drop the price below 50 dollars and still make a profit and the whole tar sands wastage then becomes pointless. This is how the middle-east has the west over a barrel.

Bob Ebersole [oilmanbob] says:

Its time to do the heretofore unthinkable, and demand that no more internal combustion engines be sold new in North America, and go full tilt into Alan Drake's Electrification of Rail program.

That's the rationale coverage of the issue.

Another point of view has it that far from being indifferent to the blighting of the landscape, making it unfit for human habitation and destroying all eco-systems, the driving force for this energy madness is quite happy to see this state of affairs and will do all it can to continue it.

Verse 6:12 here states it clearly.

Just an alternative point of view, that's all. But still these are words. I myself have sold my gas guzzler which I admit simply transfers the problem to someone else.

[science] religion and evolution

Angelic?

Wolfie believes science is not a religion:

There are many within science who attempt to elevate the scientific method to the position of religion which in itself is a dishonest practice. Science is nothing more than an intellectual tool and can only offer support to philosophical enquiry but there are many who believe, in their nihilist delusion that it can supplant philosophy.

The power of belief can be astounding, but one should be discerning in whatever you believe and belief can and will define your personal reality. Its up to you whether you create a heaven or a hell.

Gracchi agrees:

Scientific method is simply the idea that if you have a hypothesis about the world you then test it in an experiment, nothing more nothing less. Therefore that cannot prove or disprove anything you say about a supernatural event or person because obviously that isn't testable.

Commenters here generally see science and religion as mutually exclusive and I imagine they'd also see the latter as untestable. Christians might be upset with me for this analogy but it seems to me that Christianity is quite testable, in the way that LSD is testable - you're not going to know, until you're actually on it, if it works or not.

In other words, the proof comes to those who've signed on but will never come to those who haven't. Therefore all argument between Christians and non-Christians is pointless.

So where does that leave evolution? Where indeed, with so many turning against it now? Is it testable or is it merely theory [good theory though, quite logical] about the origin of the earth?

Simian?

[body image] how important is it

I don't want to start getting all feminist here but this one had me thinking:

I am a healthy, active and happy 26-year-old woman, surrounded by other seemingly healthy and happy women. We should be in the prime of our young lives: embarking on careers, travelling, falling in love, thinking about the future, fearful of buying a house, partying too hard, working too hard — but loving it all. And yet this year two 26-year-old women in my extended circle have died before their time. Too young. Too unnecessary.

In a nutshell - body image, eating disorder, unlucky, dead. These were the extremes but there's a lot happening in between. Why do girls do it? Why do they concern themselves with an unrealistic ideal dictated to them by the media, fashion and peer pressure? Why are they doing it younger and younger? Why is the unreasonableness seemingly getting worse and worse, as with alcoholics?

If the girls over here can be an indicator - it's one third for the boys, one third for the appreciation of other women and one third for their own self-confidence. For myself, it's basically because I'm with girls who care so much about appearance that it can affect relations and for my own pride that I watch how I look.

The test is when I'm with the guys but even here I think I'd still dress smartly, if not sartorially or fashionably. But die of an eating disorder? Well, someone is going to have to explain this one to me. It doesn't compute.

[readers] as soon as rl allows

Again the constant problem of answering your comments, particularly on the debunking of science post, the comments raising some interesting issues which are crying out to be addressed.

Then there is getting to your sites with the help of the reader. It's uppermost in my mind, I assure you but you would also see, by the low number of posts from me currently, that RL is intruding something awful.

But we're winning the battle.

[playing g-d] the mindset of those in power [2]

Hamilton - played g-d at Gallipoli

If you've read the last article, "playing g-d: the mindset of those in power", you possibly still think so what? Even if these people are as dastardly as all that, what's wrong with that? They keep it to themselves and all's well. We don't see them - they don't see us.

Wrong. We see it very much.

Result from the Mindset

Nixon and Kissinger, from the released phone transcripts:

Nixon: There are other methods of getting intelligence. You understand what I mean?

Kissinger: Yes, I do.

Kissinger gives directives to Haig:

He wants a massive bombing campaign in Cambodia. It's an order, it's to be done. Anything that flies on anything that moves.

Kissinger's professed concern with the biosphere:

On page 149: Then there is the entire range of New Age issues: proliferation, environmental, cultural and scholarly exchange, among many others.

Rummie enjoys a round of golf while generals protest and the slaughter continues in Iraq

The Method

Senator Overman: It was charged that Trotsky got $10,000 here.

Col. Hurban: I do not remember how much it was, but I know it was a question between him and Miliukov.

Senator Overman: Miliukov proved it, did he?

Col. Hurban: Yes, sir.

Senator Overman: Do you know where he got it from?

Col. Hurban: I remember it was $10,000; but it is no matter. I will speak about their propaganda. The German Government knew Russia better than anybody, and they knew that with the help of those people they could destroy the Russian army.

[The committee then adjourned for the day and the next day the matter was not mentioned nor ever again.]

On board the S.S. Kristianiafjord, the passenger list has been described by Lincoln Steffens, the American communist:

"The passenger list was long and mysterious. Trotsky was in the steerage with a group of revolutionaries; there was a Japanese revolutionist in my cabin. There were a lot of Dutch hurrying home from Java, the only innocent people aboard. The rest were war messengers, two from Wall Street to Germany...."

Sutherland - a man with no country, not unlike me

Lincoln Steffens was on board en route to Russia at the specific invitation of Charles Richard Crane, a backer and a former chairman of the Democratic Party's finance committee. Charles Crane, vice president of the Crane Company, had organized the Westinghouse Company in Russia, was a member of the Root mission to Russia, and had made no fewer than twenty-three visits to Russia between 1890 and 1930.

Richard Crane, his son, was confidential assistant to then Secretary of State Robert Lansing. According to the former ambassador to Germany William Dodd, Crane "did much to bring on the Kerensky revolution which gave way to Communism."

The Stockholm legation cabled the State Department on June 13, 1917, just after Trotsky crossed the Finnish-Russian border:

"Legation confidentially informed Russian, English and French passport offices at Russian frontier, Tornea, considerably worried by passage of suspicious persons bearing American passports."

Somewhat tardily, in mid-August 1917 the Russian embassy in Washington requested the State Department (and State agreed) to "prevent the entry into Russia of criminals and anarchists... numbers of whom have already gone to Russia."

This is the tried and trusted method. Financing someone and setting him in motion, then drawing in the machinery of state to prevent him after it's too late.

Read on - the corruption of power

The spiritual comfort the U.N. offers at its HQ

[playing g-d] the mindset of those in power

This long, rambling post is basically a few fragments from a vast whole thrown together to touch on different aspects of the mindset of "the power" and why I am so opposed to them.

It's not intended as proof but more as a few pointers, which I owed a few people, on the mindset of a particular class of person who gets him/herself into power.

The Fed itself has been done to death, including Greenspan, so he's not covered below.

Atmospheric experimentation

A long article prepared by Rosalie Bertell, Ph.D., GNSH - these are just two fragments:

Project Argus (1958)

# Between August and September 1958, the US Navy exploded three fission type nuclear bombs 480 km above the South Atlantic Ocean, in the part of the lower Van Allen Belt closest to the earth's surface. In addition, two hydrogen bombs were detonated 160 km over Johnston Island in the Pacific. The military called this "the biggest scientific experiment ever undertaken."

It was designed by the US Department of Defense and the US Atomic Energy Commission, under the code name Project Argus.

# The US Military planned to create a "telecommunications shield" in the ionosphere, reported in 13-20 August 1961, Keesings Historisch Archief (K.H.A.). This shield would be created "in the ionosphere at 3,000 km height, by bringing into orbit 350,000 million copper needles, each 2-4 cm long [total weight 16 kg], forming a belt 10 km thick and 40 km wide, the needles spaced about 100 m apart."

This was designed to replace the ionosphere "because telecommunications are impaired by magnetic storms and solar flares."

SPS Military Implications (1978)

Early review of the Solar Powered Satellite Project began in around 1978, and I was on the review panel. Although this was proposed as an energy program, it had significant military implications.

One of the most significant, first pointed out by Michael J. Ozeroff, was the possibility of developing a satellite-borne beam weapon for anti-ballistic missile (ABM) use. The satellites were to be in geosynchronous orbits, each providing an excellent vantage point from which an entire hemisphere can be surveyed continuously.

More - old boys network