U.S. Has Royalty Plan to Give Windfall to Oil Companies - New York Times

from NY Times:

By EDMUND L. ANDREWS
Published: February 14, 2006

WASHINGTON, Feb. 13 — The federal government is on the verge of one of the biggest giveaways of oil and gas in American history, worth an estimated $7 billion over five years.

Royalty-Free Oil and Gas

New projections, buried in the Interior Department's just-published budget plan, anticipate that the government will let companies pump about $65 billion worth of oil and natural gas from federal territory over the next five years without paying any royalties to the government.

Based on the administration figures, the government will give up more than $7 billion in payments between now and 2011. The companies are expected to get the largess, known as royalty relief, even though the administration assumes that oil prices will remain above $50 a barrel throughout that period.

Administration officials say that the benefits are dictated by laws and regulations that date back to 1996, when energy prices were relatively low and Congress wanted to encourage more exploration and drilling in the high-cost, high-risk deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico.

'We need to remember the primary reason that incentives are given,' said Johnnie M. Burton, director of the federal Minerals Management Service. 'It's not to make more money, necessarily. It's to make more oil, more gas, because production of fuel for our nation is essential to our economy and essential to our people.' (more)

Yeah, 'cause everyone knows how terribly close the Oilies are to folding.

FuddGate

from The Heretik:

What a deference a day makes, twenty four little hours


DEFERENCE IS THE ORDER of the day, but who ordered that?

White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan, peppered with questions about the incident at his Monday morning press “gaggle,” explained that the White House had deferred to the Vice President’s office in the matter, and the latter deferred to the ranch owner.

[more…]

Snorggle......Sputter.....TeeHee.....

Cheney shoots fellow hunter

from CNN.com :

Vice President Dick Cheney accidentally shot and injured a man during a weekend quail hunting trip in Texas, his spokeswoman said Sunday.

Harry Whittington, 78, was 'alert and doing fine' after Cheney sprayed him with shotgun pellets on Saturday while the two were hunting at the Armstrong Ranch in south Texas, said property owner Katharine Armstrong.

Armstrong said Whittington was mostly injured on his right side, with the pellets hitting his cheek, neck and chest, and was taken to the hospital by ambulance.

Whittington was in stable condition Sunday, said Yvonne Wheeler, spokeswoman for the Christus Spohn Health System.

Must be practicing for the survivalist refuge in the Bitterroots.

Poem of the Day

The Physical Becomes the Personal by Loyal F Ramsey

All appearance to the contrary,
I am but one score and twelve,
My body ravaged
By years of dissolution,
Consternation,
And unceasing masturbation.

Take special care to heed not my tales of the sixties,
A decade surely over long before my mind's birth.
There is no possibility
That I could know whereof I speak,
My young and supple mind
Trapped as it is
In this body of some aged monster.
The spirit living here
Calmly demanding the things of youth,
The body, punished for its continual indulgence,
Sadly moldering on.

Obviously, this dissonance will not be resolved in my favor.

So, young beauty,
Do not shy away from this hideous spectacle,
Age has captured the shell,
But the heart remains pristine.

The White Noise of Scandal

from the Rude Pundit:

What's it gonna take for the general public to be shocked anymore? 'Cause, really, and, c'mon, this week's news alone ought to be enough to make the head of even the most casual observer of the nascent Washington scandals explode into a shower of skull and viscera, raining down on the ignorant. The White House knew the levee hadn't held and that New Orleans was being drowned a day earlier than previously admitted? Scooter Libby was told by Dick Cheney and other "superiors" to break the law and leak classified information? Tom DeLay is put on the House subcommittee that oversees the Justice Department, while said department is investigating DeLay's buddy, Jack Abramoff? (more)

Climate 'warmest for millennium'

from BBC:

In the late 20th Century, the northern hemisphere experienced its most widespread warmth for 1,200 years, according to the journal Science.

The findings support evidence pointing to unprecedented recent warming of the climate linked to greenhouse emissions.

University of East Anglia researchers measured changes in fossil shells, tree rings, ice cores and other past temperature records or "proxies".

They also looked at people's diaries from the last 750 years.

Timothy Osborn and Keith Briffa of UEA analysed instrument measurements of temperature from 1856 onwards to establish the geographic extent of recent warming.

Then they compared this data with evidence dating back as far as AD 800.

The analysis confirmed periods of significant warmth in the Northern Hemisphere from AD 890 - 1170 (the so-called "Medieval Warm Period") and for much colder periods from 1580 - 1850 (the "Little Ice Age").

Natural records

The UEA team showed that the present warm period is the most widespread temperature anomaly of any kind since the ninth century.

"The last 100 years is more striking than either [the Medieval Warm Period or Little Ice Age]. It is a period of widespread warmth affecting nearly all the records that we analysed from the same time," co-author Timothy Osborn told the BBC.

Osborn and Briffa used 14 sets of temperature records from different locations across the Northern Hemisphere.

The records included long life evergreen trees growing in Scandinavia, Siberia and the Rockies which had been cored to reveal the patterns of wide and narrow tree rings over time. Wider rings related to warmer temperatures.

The chemical composition of ice from cores drilled in the Greenland ice sheets revealed which years were warmer than others.

Dear diary

The researchers used proxy data developed from the diaries of people living in the Netherlands and Belgium during the past 750 years that revealed, for example, the years when the canals froze.

"These records extend over many centuries and even thousands of years. We simply counted how many of those records indicated that, in any one year, temperatures were warmer than average for the region they came from," said Dr Osborn.

Professor John Waterhouse, director of the Environmental Sciences Research Centre Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge commented: "Although we're getting increasingly accurate measurements of present-day temperature, we've got nothing like that from the past to compare those with.

"There's much uncertainty in past reconstructions. You've got to look at the reconstructed data in the past in light of the likely errors that those data have."

But he added: "As we get more and more evidence in, it is looking as if the current period is the warmest for over 1,000 years."

In November, Science published a paper showing atmospheric levels of the greenhouse gases carbon dioxide and methane are higher now than at any time in the past 650,000 years.

We're Baaaack!

Well at least Kolchak and I have returned from our involuntary exile from this hallowed realm, this blessed discourse, this progressive haven, this blogosphere. havana gila is off on an extended roadtrip along the competitive poetry slam circuit. We wish her well.

I can only comment that preparing the paperwork for grant proposials rivals my conception of what being in purgatory must be like. Endless, meaningless triviality presaging terrible final decisions. With lots of tedious terror-filled waiting in between. Well, as Ficus Panderatta once remarked on the long forgotten Quark, "Now we wait for the bee!"

Kolchak met his deadline, finishing a chapter for a scholarly/pop-culture book on the TV show Lost. His latest publication, a chapter in Farscape Forever! Sex, Drugs, And Killer Muppets, a book on the late, lamented TV series, is freshly out on the stands. Go thou and purchase said tome at once.

Poem of the Day

Unentitled by Loyal F Ramsey

Enigmatic Smile
Sent to torture me,
Frightening my poor feeble self
Into scurring round in tight circles of restless failure.
Thin cigarettes held in cruel lips,
Tearing the flesh,
Rending the small catastrophe of my life
Into shreds without a word.

If only I had imagined a different self,
I cry.
If only the truth of me held some
Substance,
But with a single glance she has found me out.

Soon I will be crying with the other dogs
At the pile of death and memory,
Tearing apart all pretense of remembrance,
Howling that only the immediate has any validity,

Discarding a past that was the only safety
To which my soul could aspire.

Poem of the Day

On Dating at 53 by Loyal F Ramsey

One day, through no apparent decision
And very little real desire,
You find yourself
Standing at the fifty yard line
On the field in an empty and darkening stadium.
You look about and shout,
Your voice barely reaching the first row of seats.
High up in the stands,
Dimly visible in the dull twilight
Sit a few people,
Some in twos and threes,
But most are as isolated as you.
Some of them wave
In response to your tentative gestures,
But many are seemingly unable
To view the field or notice your situation.

Every once in a while,
Another figure stumbles onto the turf,
Dazed and confused,
Usually appearing at a spot quite distant,
But occasionaly passing mere yards away.
Then, a quick furtive conversation can occur
As they rush for the exit,
Leaving you to contemplate the scoreboard in silence.

Congratulations, Jerome!

Simply Super!
Pittsburgh 21, Seattle 10

Poem of the Day

October, 1962 by Loyal F Ramsey

We
Can let air
Into the basement from the closed up house
My Father said,
Seated on the old floral couch
In the living room of the darkened farmhouse
During the fall of my twelth year.

I think that the radioactive dust
Will settle out
As the air filters in through the cracks
In the window sills,
He continued.

My science fiction addled mind,
Full of Gregory Peck, mutants, and the Blessed St Lebowitz
Screamed NO! NO!
While my voice remained
Respectfully quiet,
Seemingly aware much more than he
Of the danger presented
By this odd intersection
Of Kennedy, Cuba, and Khrushchev
With our quiet
Lives.

When We Went To See the End Of the World (Again)

from Kolchak:

I honestly wasn't planning to do a follow-up to my post about American Cold War propaganda. Just before the end of last year, though, four short films from that period were added to Comcast’s on-demand library. So I decided to take the hint.

Like many people, I had seen snippets of Duck and Cover in the 1982 documentary Atomic Cafe But this was the first time I was able to see it in its entirety. At this point, I’m glad I didn't see Duck and Cover while I was growing up. Maybe kids were tougher back in 1951-- when this was originally released--but I think it would scare a lot of modern children.

(I was in elementary school during the late 1950s and the early ‘60s but I do not remember doing any drills to prepare for an atomic attack. My Dad brought home plans to build a fallout shelter, but construction never got beyond that point. I do remember hearing the grown-ups talk about the Cuban Missile Crisis, but their attitude boiled down to “We’re gonna get those Russkies,” which is frightening only in retrospect.)

Duck and Cover starts innocently enough, with animated character Burt theTurtle demonstrating how to duck and cover. (After the last several months, seeing Civil Defense represented by a turtle seems almost prophetic. Or maybe just pathetic.) And the warnings from the narrator are relatively low key at first. If an atomic bomb goes off without warning, he says, it could “knock you down hard or throw you against a tree or wall.”

Later, though, he says that the bomb “could come at any time, no matter whereyou may be.” Then the narrator says, “The bomb might explode when there are no grown-ups near.” By the time he tells us that “Tony knows the bomb can explode any time of the year, day or night, and he is ready for it,” all I could think was: And Tony hasn't been out of his house since 1963.

The other shorts were aimed more at adults and try to make the point that the recommendations they were making would be effective. The narrator in Survival Under Atomic Attack (also made in 1951) claims that “If the people of Nagasaki and Hiroshima knew what we know about civil defense, thousands of lives would have been saved.”

But here’s the bad news: atomic war isn't going get you any time off from your job. “Our cities are prime targets for atomic attack,” the narrator states, “but mass evacuation would be disastrous. An enemy would like nothing better than to have us leave our cities empty and unproductive. If an emergency should come, our factories will be battle stations. Production must go on, if we are to win.”

Survival Under Atomic Attack was also the title of the booklet I wrote about last time, incidentally, but I'm not sure whether there are any other connections.

As the title suggests, You Can Beat the A-Bomb, also promotes the idea that preparing for the bomb to drop will make a difference. To help support that point, the film tries to show how common radiation is. There's a scene where a Kindly Old Janitor, in a lab of some sort, provokes a reaction from a Geiger counter. A Kindly Young Scientist explains that the device is reacting to the radium on the face of his wrist watch.

“What do you know about that?” Kindly Old Janitor says with an amused chuckle. “I've been carrying radiation around with me and I didn't even know it.”

You Can Beat the A-Bomb stands out from the other shorts because it uses actors to deliver some of the information, not just a narrator. Some of the film follows a family as it responds to an enemy attack. The family consists of Dad, his wife, Elsie; their son, Joe, and their teenage daughter, Meg, and they are definitely products of their time. Dad wears a business suit throughout the movie, except for one scene, when he exchanges his jacket for a pair of coveralls. He keeps his tie on when he switches to the coveralls, and it is always tied in a perfect Windsor knot. Meg does her best to look like Annette Funicello, with a tight sweater and a nosecone bra.

Dad remains confident and in charge throughout the attack. He tells the others, “I'll give the signal when its okay to get up,” and announces that the radiation, “went straight up into the air. The terrific heat makes it do that.

“Nothing to do now but wait for orders from the authorities and relax,” he concludes.
Interestingly, both Survival Under Atomic Attack and You Can Beat the A-Bomb refer to airplane spotters warning the public of any attack. How enemy bombers would reach us is not clear. And You Can Beat... was produced in cooperation with the curiously-named Council On Atomic Implications.

Fallout, the fourth and final film, was made roughly 10 years after the others, and wasn't afraid to make radiation menacing. The movie opens with a passage of theremin music, which was a vital component of science fiction movies for years. This time, the narrator says that the purpose of the film is to explain what radiation is “how to detect it and how to protect yourself against it. Yes, this means you.”

The rest of the film is devoted to fairly detailed instructions on how to build a fallout shelter. I was pleased to learn that, if you cant line your shelter with sandbags,“thick, solid layers of books, magazines or newspapers” will work nicely.

If books block radiation, this house is secure.

Go Stillers!

Gettem', Yunz Guyz!
Love Ya, Jerome!

So Long & Thanks for All the Fish

We're all taking a bit of a break here at The Blatt.

handdrummer is caught up deep in the morass of graduate school grant paperwork,

kolchak is on a short deadline with his realworld writing assignments,

and havana gila is preparing her entries for the National Poetry Slam.

See you soon.

Reason's Greetings!

Happy Newtonmas!

Sir Isaac Newton, PRS

(25 December 1642 – 31 March 1727)

English physicist, mathematician, astronomer, alchemist, and philosopher

One of the most influential scientists in history

Most importantly, Newton wrote the Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica wherein he described universal gravitation and the three laws of motion, laying the groundwork for classical mechanics. By deriving Kepler's laws of planetary motion from this system, he was the first to show that the motion of bodies on Earth and of celestial bodies are governed by the same set of natural laws. The unifying and deterministic power of his laws was integral to the scientific revolution and the advancement of heliocentrism.

Among other scientific discoveries, Newton realised that the spectrum of colours observed when white light passes through a prism is inherent in the white light and not added by the prism (as Roger Bacon had claimed in the 13th century), and notably argued that light is composed of particles. He also developed a law of cooling.

Newton, often regarded as an "unrivalled mathematical genius", shares credit with Gottfried Leibniz for the development of integral and differential calculus, which he used to formulate his physical laws. He also made contributions to other areas of mathematics, for example proving the binomial theorem. The mathematician Joseph Louis Lagrange (1736–1813), said that "Newton was the greatest genius that ever existed and the most fortunate, for we cannot find more than once a system of the world to establish.

from Wikipedia

On Earth, Peace!

Brahmanism: This is the sum of duty: Do naught unto others which would cause you pain if done to you.: Mahabharata 5:1517

Christianity: All things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them.: Matthew 7:12

Islam: No one of you is a believer until he desires for his brother what which he desires for himself. Sunnah

Buddhism: Hurt not others in ways that you yourself would find hurtful.: Udana Varga 5:18

Judaism: What is hateful to you, do not to your fellowmen. That is the entire Law; all the rest is commentary.: Talmud, Shabbat 31:a

Confucianism: Surely it is the maxim of loving-kindness: Do not unto others that you would not have them do unto you.: Analects 15:23

Taoism: Regard your neighbor’s gain as your own gain, and your neighbor’s loss as your own loss.: T’ai Shag Kan Ying P’ien

Zoroastrianism: That nature alone is good which refrains from doing unto another whatsoever is not good: for itself. : Dadistan-i-dinik 94:5

Blessed Be!

Somethings require no comment

Thanks to doghouse riley at Bats Left, Throws Right for the image.

I just had to share.

OH GREAT, another just trust us from BushCo

from BBC:

Bush spying claim causes US storm

Bush's top aides say he did not break the law

Allegations that President George Bush authorised security agents to eavesdrop on people inside the US have caused a storm of protest.

The New York Times says the National Security Agency was allowed to spy on hundreds of people without warrants.

The NSA is normally barred from eavesdropping within the US.

Republican Senator John McCain called for an explanation, while Senator Arlen Specter, Senate Judiciary Committee chairman, said he would investigate.

"There is no doubt that this is inappropriate," said Mr Specter, also a Republican, adding that Senate hearings would be held early next year as "a very, very high priority".

The allegations coincided with a setback for the Bush administration, as the Senate rejected extensions to spying provisions in the Patriot Act. (more)

Robert Sheckley 1928-2005

from WikiPedia:

Robert Sheckley (born July 16, 1928, died December 9, 2005) is an American author. He first appeared in the science fiction magazines of the 1950s with stories and novels, fantasies that are often moralistic (in the sense that they have a moral), but more often absurdist and broadly comical

During a recent visit to Ukraine for the Ukrainian Sci-Fi Computer Week, an international event for science fiction writers, Sheckley fell ill and had to be hospitalized in Kiev on April 27, 2005 [1]. His condition was very serious for one week, but he appeared to be slowly recovering. The official web site of Robert Sheckley [2] ran a fundraising campaign to help cover Sheckley's treatment and his return to the USA. However, only a large donation from a Ukrainian businessman allowed him to pay the hospital bill and return home.

On November 20 he had surgery for a brain aneurysm, and on December 9, 2005 he died.

from Locus Online:

SF writer Robert Sheckley died today in Poughkeepsie, New York, at the age of 77. One of the field's great humorists, Sheckley was a prolific short story writer beginning in 1952 with titles including "Specialist", "Pilgrimage to Earth", "Warm", "The Prize of Peril", and "Seventh Victim", collected in volumes from Untouched by Human Hands (1954) to Is That What People Do? (1984) and a five-volume set of Collected Stories (1991). His first novel, Immortality, Inc. (1958), was followed by The Status Civilization (1960), Journey Beyond Tomorrow (1962), Mindswap (1966), and several others. Sheckley served as fiction editor for Omni magazine from January 1980 through September 1981, and was named Author Emeritus by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America in 2001. Sheckley was hospitalized earlier this year in Ukraine, then recovered sufficiently to return to the US, though he was unable to attend the World SF Convention in Glasgow where he'd been scheduled Guest of Honor.

from SFWA site:

*************************** Robert Sheckley (1928-2005) ***************************

Robert Sheckley passed away at Vassar Brothers Medical Center Poughkeepsie New York on Friday, December 9, 2005. He was 77.

He was first hospitalized while in the Ukraine in April of this year. He returned to the US in late May, and recovered in the summer. On November 20, he had surgery for a brain aneurysm at Mount Saini Hospital.

Robert Sheckley wrote scores of novels and hundreds of short stories. When Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America honored Sheckley as Author Emeritus in 2001, then President of SFWA Paul Levinson said that Sheckley's "writing helped our genre grow up by giving it an irresistible sense of humor."

Funeral information will be available later today. The arrangement is being handled by Simpson-Gaus Funeral Home of Kingston, New York.

Funeral Arrangements:

Arrangements by:

Simpson-Gaus Funeral Home
411 Albany Ave
Kingston, NY 12401
845-331-0631
http://www.simpsongaus.com/

Blog Against Racism Day.

from Rexroth's Daughter at the dharma bums, this sad and wondrous meditation on racism as the American disease. Read it and take a moment to remember those who gave their lives for freedom in this their own country. And weep for your country.

We Still Have a Dream

Chris over at Creek Running North has asked that bloggers blog against racism today. I was trying to come up with something that was current and meaningful, but kept tripping back to 1963: The year that changed my life. It wasn't the war in Vietnam that radicalized me when I was a kid in the 60s. It was the civil rights movement. There was something about the image of fellow human beings being attacked by police dogs or with fire hoses that seared the brain of this eleven year old. There were things that happened in 1963 and 1964 in this country that were so horrific, so inhumane, so abjectly cruel that it shook our country to its constitutional roots. How do I blog against racism today? I invoke the names Medgar Evers; Carol Denise McNair, Addie Mae Collins, Cynthia Wesley and Carole Robertson; and Michael Schwerner, James Chaney, and Andrew Goodman. They paid for our racism with their lives

.

Medgar Evers was assassinated 6/12/63

(more)

chris at Creek Running North adds his own essay on a life lived in a society suffering from racism in the small and in the large things of life

Racism in Pinole

Pinole is a town under siege. An island of rusticated charm in a burgeoning megalopolis, our traditional way of life is under attack. We are hard up against the deepening crime of Richmond, the most dangerous city in California according to recent rankings. A short ride on the local bus, or in a (presumably stolen) car along Interstate 80, and the barbarian hordes are at our gates, had we gates, which we do not. So we are vulnerable.

Or so some of my neighbors would have it.

Two years ago we fought a development on church land immediately behind our house. Those neighbors who, like us, were adjacent to the project, thought mainly of engineering and traffic concerns. The plan would have shunted storm runoff into our property - likely destroying our foundation – and killed the live oak that overhangs our yard. Landslides would have threatened others' houses. Our next door neighbor would have had the project's traffic driving five feet from her bedroom window. We killed the project for those reasons. (more)

from Neil Shakespeare, this visual tribute to Fredrick Douglas: