Its just a start, but the Bakken is 24 Billion Barrels and counting.
Harold Hamm, the Oklahoma-based founder and CEO of Continental Resources, the 14th-largest oil company in America, is a man who thinks big. He came to Washington last month to spread a needed message of economic optimism: With the right set of national energy policies, the United States could be “completely energy independent by the end of the decade. We can be the Saudi Arabia of oil and natural gas in the 21st century.”
Inspiration
24 month old deaf child having a conversation:
Lucky She Wasn’t In Canada
Based on all the cases of Canadians being charged after protecting themselves, is it incorrect to assume that this young woman would have been charged north of the U.S. border?
Take Me, Obama
I Can’t Seem To Find A “Before” Picture
Reader Tips
In tonight’s Tips music, from 1929, an unknown British dance band’s unidentified vocalist asks Is Everybody Happy Now?
The comments are open, as always, for your Reader Tips.
Guess What $34K/year Makes You?
Something I would have never guessed.
What Would We Do Without Headline Writers?
National Post, Jan.3rd…
h/t John W.
So You Think You Can Diplomacy?
…builds on Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton’s vision of “smart power” diplomacy. It embraces the full use of diplomatic tools, in this case dance, to engage people and create opportunities for greater understanding.
· Rennie Harris Puremovement, a hip-hop dance company based in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, will tour in Egypt, Israel, and the Palestinian Territories from March 9 – April 6;
· Seán Curran Company, a contemporary dance company based in New York, New York, will tour in Kazakhstan, the Kyrgyz Republic, and Turkmenistan from April 5 – May 3;
· Jazz Tap Ensemble, based in Los Angeles, California, will tour in Mozambique, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Zimbabwe from April 9 – May 7 …
The Tolerant Left
[I]t tells you something about the culture in which we live that in some quarters those who routinely champion abortion, even partial-birth abortion, are viewed as enlightened and morally sophisticated while those grieving the loss of their son, whom they took home for a night before burying, are mercilessly mocked.
We Don’t Need No Stinking French Fry Grease
Now is the time at SDA that they were warned!
AJC.com;
The failed Range Fuels wood-to-ethanol factory in southeastern Georgia that sucked up $65 million in federal and state tax dollars was sold Tuesday for pennies on the dollar to another bio-fuel maker with equally grand plans to transform the alternative energy world.
From the archives of Steven Den Beste;
One of the biggest advantages of coal and oil is that they are high-energy, but also extremely concentrated. A relatively small capital investment in a single area can harvest a great deal of useful end-product. A big open-pit coal mine can justify hundreds of millions of dollars spent on big shovels and huge dump trucks, because the shovel can dig more than a ton of coal on each bite, and each dump truck can carry several tons of coal out of the mine. The coal can be carried by rail point-to-point from the mine to a big power plant to be burned, or to a nearby harbor where it will be loaded on barges or ocean-going bulk carriers. All of this can be done big because huge amounts of coal come from one place, and go to a small number of destinations. Since petroleum is liquid, it is even easier to transport via pipelines or ships.
Coal would be a lot less valuable if it was found as a layer one centimeter thick spread over an area the size of the states of Iowa and Nebraska; the collection process would defeat the purpose. How difficult would it be to gather it all? How much equipment would be needed? Would it make sense economically to buy it all, given that each piece of equipment could only collect a relatively small amount of coal? Unfortunately, it wouldn’t.
But that’s exactly what the situation is when you’re talking about any kind of biomass as a source of fuel; it grows on the ground, and though you may get a lot of it, it’s spread over an immense area and you can’t do anything until you pick it all up first and collect it.
Of course, if one is only interested in harvesting tax dollars…
Ethical Oil Vs Blood Banana
SDA gets results! Chiquita won’t join bunch boycotting Alberta oilsands products
Not Waiting For The Asteroid
The claim that the military made up the tale of her battlefield heroics is seriously misstated. And more than faintly ironic, given that it was the Washington Post that reported Lynch had “gone down firing,” that she had fought ferociously in the ambush of her unit, the 507th Maintenance Company, in southern Iraq in MaPostrch 2003.
It was the Post — citing otherwise anonymous “U.S. officials” — that claimed Lynch had “shot several enemy soldiers” in the ambush.
It was the Post that said Lynch “continued firing at the Iraqis even after she sustained multiple gunshot wounds and watched several other soldiers in her unit die around her” in the fighting.
It was the Post that placed the electrifying heroic-warrior tale about Lynch on its front page of April 3, 2003, beneath a headline that read:
“‘She was fighting to the death.’”
It was the Post — alone — that placed the story into the public domain.
And none of it was true.
Math is Hard
Yesterday Charles Adler had an interesting segment about technology in the classroom.
As sometimes happens in such discussions, I think the bigger point was missed entirely by the pundits. Here’s the crux of the e-mail I sent to Adler afterwards:
Interesting segment on your show today. If I may, I’d like to broaden the discussion somewhat. The underlying problem is that finding competent teachers in any of the “non-soft” subjects is exceptionally difficult. Whether it be Computer Science or Math or Physics or Chemistry, I have strong reasons to suspect that the competency of most high school teachers in Canada in these areas would range somewhere between “Fair” to “Poor”. When it comes to basic computer skills, I wonder if most teachers would even be qualified for the most rudimentary office job that involved word processing and spreadsheets? I suspect they would not.
Let we forget, computers have had a significant presence in our society since at least 1981 when the first IBM PC was introduced. That’s 30 years ago. The fact that any teacher of any age is now expecting formal training in the basic use of a computer is mind boggling.
I graduated high school at one of the best schools in Vancouver in 1982. We were blessed to have an excellent Physics teacher, some pretty good Math teachers, and a fairly good Computer Science teacher. Fast forward to today … what I’ve been told by my many high school teacher friends is that the competency levels in these areas has dropped significantly. Oh sure, there are undoubtedly some exceptions and the kids learning from those particular teachers are lucky. But what about the majority of kids who are being “taught” by people who really aren’t passionate about their assigned subject area?
Stop for a moment to think about how many kids steer away from going into the hard sciences or engineering because of uninspiring high school teachers. Unless there’s a role model in the form of a parent or an uncle or some adult friend of the parents, it’s unlikely that most Canadian kids will go into the fields where our country most needs them. Ooops, am I even allowed to make that last statement, that Canada needs more people in hard sciences than in soft subjects?! Or is the master plan for this century to generate oodles of wealth in our nation from sociologists and womens studies majors?!?
Just the other day a longtime friend of mine, unsatisfied with the teachers at his son’s school, asked where his son could get some mentoring in the area of Computer Science. Where he’s going to get it from is from me. As an accomplished software developer I’m going to devote some time to teach my “nephew” in this area that he has an interest in. He clearly is not going any help or inspiration from the trained “professionals” at his school.
For the record, I don’t dislike teachers. But I much prefer competence over treating every single person in the teaching profession as a hero.
Update: Useful education links for students & parents alike:
– Khan Academy
– MIT Open Courseware
– Berkeley
h/t Kyla, Ron in Kelowna, Fridge Logic
O, Sweet Saint Of San Andreas
Y2Kyoto: This Is Awkward
After I showed the original press release contained not one mention of “global warming” or “climate change”, one of our readers decided to ask the researcher about this statement attributed to to Jessica Morgan in that Business Insider story…
They Took All The Rights, Put ‘Em In A Social Infrastructure
What is “social infrastructure”? Just a big, fat pipeline through which tax dollars hurtle into the abyss.
Reader Tips
Have you ever been in the midst of a thoroughly pleasant social night out only to run into, say, a belligerent Obama supporter who harangues you with a scattershot salvo of “everybody knows” fake statistics and pseudo-facts the minutiae of which, given your convivial mood, you have neither the interest nor the motivation to counter point-by-point?
Up your opponent’s ante with Bob, your one-stop solution to unwanted political harassment. Simply invite him over to your table, buy him a drink, and voilà, your would-be interlocutors will be kept well and truly occupied All. Night. Long..
To get an approximate idea of the sort of services offered in Bob’s Platinum Plus package, which includes two of Bob’s friends, simply load all three videos and play them at once. Sweeet!
The comments are open, as always, for your Reader Tips.
The Depravity of the Left on Display
Victims: “the judge has decided to punish Sam Gualtieri again for the crime of being non-aboriginal”
As Publius puts it:
…
There is certainly racism in modern Canada, it is mostly directed at those of European descent. It is a racism that has been devised and implemented overwhelmingly by people of European descent. White people hampering other white people to help non-whites. Think of it as a collectivism where one collective abnegates itself in favour of another collective. Altruistic collectivism in its purest form.
I use the word “help” in a relative way. At some level the self-hating white folks do think they are helping various minorities. Altruism, however, is not their primary motivation. As is often the case altruism is the justification for an irrational psychological need. In this case it is a desire to feel morally superior…