harikari.com

In certain parts of rural Colorado, this is what happens if you light a match next to your running tap water.

The documentary film by Josh Fox titled Gasland explains how flammable tap water came to be.  The film airs on HBO tonight, and the network’s synopsis of the movie includes:

Fox reveals alarming facts about America’s natural gas industry.  In 2005, Congress passed the Energy Policy Act, championed by then-Vice President Dick Cheney, which exempted fracking [hydraulic fracturing] from numerous long-held environmental regulations such as the Safe Drinking Water Act.  Natural gas companies have installed hundreds of thousands of rigs in 34 states, drilling into huge shale fields, tight sands or coal bed seams containing gas deposits trapped in the rock.  Each well requires the use of fracking fluids – chemical cocktails consisting of 596 chemicals, including carcinogens and neurotoxins, as well as one to seven million gallons of water, which are infused with the chemicals.  Considering there are approximately 450,000 wells in the U.S., Fox estimates that 40 trillion gallons of chemically infused water have been created by the drilling, much of it seeping or injected into the ground across the country.

And we thought the BP gulf spill was bad.  It is, but pumping trillions of gallons of toxic chemicals into the land that seeps into our nation’s waters supply could be just as bad or worse.

Regulations?  We don’t need no stinking government regulations.  The huge corporations in the trillion-dollar extraction industries have nothing but our best interests in mind when they drill wells 5,000 feet below the surface of the ocean and pump trillions of gallons of flammable carcinogens into the earth that seep into our groundwater supplies.  There’s nothing to worry about here…  No need for government watchdogs to get involved!  I mean really, what could possibly go wrong if companies that exist solely to create profits go fracking around the country in search of natural gas?

A couple days ago it was Bob Marley day.  Well now it’s James Dean Day.

Here’s some dialogue from Giant.

Leslie Benedict:  Money isn’t all, you know?
Jett Rink:  Not when you’ve got it.

And later on…

Jett Rink:  My well came in, Bick.

Bick Benedict:  Fine.  That’s wonderful, Jett.

Jett:  Everybody thought I had a duster.  You all thought Spindletop and
Burkburnett was all the oil there was.

I’m here to tell you it ain’t, boy. It’s here.

There ain’t a dang thing you gonna do about it.

My well came in big, so big… And there’s more down there,
bigger wells.

I’m rich, Bick!  I’m a rich one.  I’m a rich boy.

I’m gonna have more money than you ever thought you could have.  You and the rest of you stinking sons of Benedicts.

James Dean, b. February 8, 1931

I would summarize, but so much would be lost.

Just check it out:

VALLEJO, California (AP) — A cell phone apparently ignited in a man’s pocket and started a fire that burned his hotel room and caused severe burns over half his body, fire department officials said.

Luis Picaso, 59, was in stable condition Monday with second- and third-degree burns to his upper body, back, right arm and right leg, Vallejo Fire Department assistant chief Kurt Henke said.

Firefighters arrived at the residential hotel Saturday night to find Picaso lying on the bathroom floor after a malfunctioning cell phone in his pants pocket set fire to his nylon and polyester clothes, Henke said.

The flames spread to a plastic chair, setting off a sprinkler that held the fire in check, he said.

Authorities declined to name the phone’s manufacturer and model.

The fire and water caused $75,000 (euro57,955) damage to the room and a business on the ground floor, Henke said.

In case you lost count, that was 4 petroleum based products combining to nearly kill this man.  Wow, I have heard that petroleum was flamable, but had no idea how dangerous it was when used to manufacture clothing, a plastic chair and a cell phone…

While I do in fact understand the flamable nature of petroleum, I think only one of two scenarios is plausible.  The first involves a crack pipe that is suspiciously absent from the new story.  The second scenario is that he was secretly testing Apple’s new iPhone (note that authorities “declined to name the phone’s manufacturer and model).
What do you think???

The Tesla Roadster:

• 100% electric
• 0-60 in 4 seconds
• 135 mpg equivalent
• 250 miles per charge
• about 1 cent per mile

Check out the Tesla Roadster website and get your order in for a 2008 model.

Martin Eberhard, the Tesla’s inventor, explains to Slate why the Tesla Roadster is different from previous electric cars:

Eberhard says traditional carmakers have failed with electrics for two reasons. First, they market them as “penalty boxes” for environmental do-gooders and gas-mileage-obsessed penny-pinchers. Second, they just don’t understand batteries. The Tesla’s giant lithium-ion battery pack gives it the power to hit 60 in four seconds, to run 250 miles without a recharge, and to charge rapidly at its home charging base (a one-hour charge will take you 80 miles; it takes a 3.5-hour charge to go 250 miles). You can even plug into a wall socket at a roadside stop in a pinch. That makes the Roadster a viable commuter car and weekend day-tripper. The company claims energy costs as low as a penny per mile.

Plans are already underway for a sedan to compete with BMW 5-series cars.  I can hardly wait to see what the big car companies decide to bring to the game.

Mr. War President speaks ad nauseum about the War on Terror being waged in Iraq and how we are there to fight the “terrorists” so we don’t have to fight them at home. But who are we fighting and why? Are they all terrorists? Sean Gonsalvez has some answers in his Tuesday column:

Most experts agree the insurgency is made up of mostly Iraqi Sunni Muslims and Baath Party loyalists.

The International Institute for Strategic Studies recently estimated there are about 1,000 foreign Islamic jihadists fighting in Iraq (out of an estimated 40,000 insurgents and up to 200,000 native supporters).

Gonsalvez goes on to report why the insurgents are fighting

Council on Foreign Relations staff writer Lionel Beehner reports: ”Nationalism is… what motivates many of Iraq’s insurgents, many experts say. These include Iraqis who, after Saddam Hussein’s regime fell, were fired from their military or other government jobs but do not favor a return to Saddam Hussein’s secular form of Arab socialism.”

Most insurgents, Beehner writes, are Sunnis who fear a Shiite-led government, support a strong state run by Sunnis, and want U.S. forces out of Iraq.

No matter how many times Bush says it’s a War on Terror, it’s not. We are fighting a minority group of Iraqi nationalists that don’t want us there because they don’t like the government that is emerging as a result of our overthrow of Saddam. We are staying in the fight not for the altruistic reason espoused by the Administration-to spread Democracy. The draft of the Iraqi Constitution looks a lot like that of a Theocratic Islamic state, not a Democratic state. We continue to fight because Iraq has oil that we’d like to secure for ourselves. Bush admitted it yesterday when he said: “If Zarqawi and bin Laden gain control of Iraq, they would create a new training ground for future terrorist attacks; they’d seize oil fields to fund their ambitions; they could recruit more terrorists by claiming an historic victory over the United States and our coalition.” Okay so he said we have to keep it away from them. Read between the lines-That oil is ours!

President Bush signed the Energy Bill today that was passed by Congress last week. Notably absent from the bill was the opening of ANWR to oil drilling. Had that provision been included in the bill, it would never have made it to the president. Why? Well as this AP article points out:

A coalition of Democrats and moderate Republicans in the Senate has repeatedly used the threat of a filibuster to thwart attempts to open the refuge to energy development.

“If we had put [Arctic drilling] in the bill, we wouldn’t be here,” said Sen. Pete Domenici, R-N.M., celebrating passage of the energy bill that Bush plans to sign in a ceremony in Albuquerque, NM. The bill never could have mustered the 60 votes needed to overcome a certain Senate filibuster over ANWR, he said.

The Republicans don’t like that damn filibuster when they are in charge, so they’ve come up with their own version of Bush’s “Neener Neener Neener! You can’t catch me!” game, only I think they call theirs “Nanny Nanny Boo Boo!” Domenici says he’ll start taunting in September:

… he will include a provision authorizing ANWR drilling as part of the budget process. Unlike other legislation, budget bills are not subject to filibuster, so only 51 votes would be needed in the Senate for the ANWR provision to clear Congress and be signed into law.

This we get from the party that cries foul when the Democrats, whose 45 senators represent slightly over 50% of the population, used the filibuster once and while to thwart the appointments of Bush’s radical judges.

Don’t you just love the way the Bush Team plays? It’s all just a game to them and they can’t stand compromise. To them, that’s like losing. They have to win at any cost and will, but “we the people” will lose.

… The Bush administration has no plans to bring the troops home from this misguided war, which has taken a fearful toll in lives and injuries while at the same time weakening the military, damaging the international reputation of the United States, serving as a world-class recruiting tool for terrorist groups and blowing a hole the size of Baghdad in Washington’s budget.

A wiser leader would begin to cut some of these losses. But the whole point of this war, it seems, was to establish a long-term military presence in Iraq to ensure American domination of the Middle East and its precious oil reserves, which have been described, the author Daniel Yergin tells us, as “the greatest single prize in all history.”

No… I didn’t write that, but I THOUGHT it. That’s an excerpt from the most recent edition of Bob Herbert’s fine work. Read it all here.

Let’s not lose sight of what this war is all about: American Power and Control. No matter what they say, it’s not about pre-emptive strikes against madmen with WMDs, it’s not about “regime change,” and it’s not about “spreading democracy.” It’s about securing a supply of oil to keep our sinking economy afloat.