Surviving: A Compulsion to Prepare for the Worst

"People are waking up to the fact that they cannot always rely on outside sources for their personal safety and survival," Tom Martin, CEO of the American Preppers Network, tells Asylum.

"A 'sh** hit the fan' scenario happens to just about everyone sometime in their life," he says. "Preparing and having a 'prepper' mindset will lessen the impact of whatever disaster it may be that you might experience in your life."

...there is a posse of self-sufficient men and women out there who make it their goal to be prepared when disaster strikes. They call themselves "preppers."

From natural catastrophes to economic meltdowns to nuclear blowouts, the preppers' collective goal is quite simple: to carry on as usual, even when catastrophe strikes.

Over recent years, a huge community of preppers has developed. Perform a simple Google search and you'll turn up plenty of prepper-related stuff, including the Web television portalPrepper TV, survival blogs, podcasts (such as DoctorPrepper and PrepperPodcast), andforums that cover everything from a woman's perspective to recycling to how to handle dead bodies.

There's even a rash of YouTube videos offering tutorials on such topics as how to construct your own nuclear bomb shelter, what firearms you should own, and how to earthquake-proof your stored food.
_Asylum

h/t SurvivalBlog

The idea is to have the tools, supplies, and skills to make it to the other side of whatever crisis is likely to pop up.  If you last longer than everyone else in your part of town, and you are running out of supplies, it will be okay to scavenge a bit in your local neighborhood.  But be careful of other scavengers who may be of the "shoot first and ask questions later" variety.

Ironically, while it is largely leftists who frequent the dieoff.org sites and who pine for the killing off of 90% of the human population of the planet, it is more likely to be the more independent and apolitical persons who will be in the best position to see the far side of catastrophe.  Most leftists -- typically incompetent pseudo-intellectuals -- will not have what it takes to make it.

750,000 Concrete Mushroom Bunkers from Commie Paranoia Days

Concrete Mushrooms Preview - Albania's 750,000 inherited bunkers. from Concrete Mushrooms on Vimeo.
Back in the commie paranoia days of Albania's Enver Hoxha, the fear of invasion from imperialist capitalist outsiders was topmost in the mind of leadership. To better defend Albania from the hordes of capitalists who were massing at the gates, Hoxha built hundreds of thousands of concrete mushroom bunkers. Many years later, now, and the invasion never came. So what does the dirt-poor country of Albania do with almost a million concrete mushroom bunkers?

Some people are creating hotels and resorts from the lumps of concrete. Others turn the monstrosities into wineries or restaurants. Let your imagination run wild. The mushrooms are there. You may as well think of a use for them.

H/T and photo credit: ImpactLab

Imagine the Possibilities

H/T Recyclart Das Park

This simple sewer pipe-to-dwelling conversion suggests many possibilities. Sewer pipe is strong, water-proof, and meant to be buried underground. With the proper end-caps, sealants, insulation, and entry-ways, an underground survival shelter or bunker made of large diameter sewer pipe could be made relatively sustainable for long periods of time -- given a certain ingenuity and resourcefulness.

H/T ImpactLab

Pitcher-Style Home Water Purification System

H/T ImpactLab
The Homedics water purification utilises both filtration and light-wave germicidal action to kill 99.9999% of bacteria, 99.99% of viruses and 99.95% of microbial cysts in your drinking water (and costs $99.99 as well). It is like a Brita activated charcoal filter plus germicidal ultraviolet, so it removes more of the potentially harmful products that sometimes find their way into a drinking water supply.
Homedics website

UVC light, with wavelengths between 100 and 280 nm, is commonly referred to as “germicidal light” due to its effectiveness in destroying microorganisms. UVC light acts as a natural outdoor air purification system by deactivating the DNA of microorganisms and destroying their ability to multiply.

UVC light has been used to effectively disinfect and sanitize in water treatment plants, hospitals and laboratories, and food and drug facilities for years. In addition, this technology has been used in a number of consumer products.

Utilizing the germ-killing benefits of UVC light, HoMedics, the leader in health and wellness products, developed Restore®, a complete water purification system in an easy to use pitcher. Restore combines UV Clean technology to remove bacteria, viruses and microbial cysts with a filtration system to reduce heavy metals, chlorine (taste and odor), and some industrial and agricultural pollutants.

Restore includes an internal filtration system with an activated carbon and ion exchange resin. Once water has passed through the filter, the water is purified by the built-in UV lamp by activating a 60-second germ-killing cycle. _Homedics PDF

Police Searching for Missing, Productive, Obedient Woman

Police Still Searching For Missing Productive, Obedient Woman
Worth watching just for the Sasquatch ads.

War of the Sexes: Not Politically Correct

In the paper, Nyborg looks at many other studies to try to determine whether sex differences in IQ exist and, if so, which sex does better on which subtests and by how much. He comes to the conclusion that women do slightly better in verbal tests, men better on spatial, and in sum, men have an IQ advantage over women of between 3 and 8 points, his best number being around 7 points. Men also have a wider dispersion of IQs than women....The result, as the graph shows, is that at an IQ of 145, which could reasonably be deemed an elite level, men outnumber women by a factor of 8. _Mangans

Mangans
Dennis Mangan looks at a 5 year old study comparing gender differences in intelligence. The study was by Helmuth Nyborg at a Danish university, U. of Aarhus. Nyborg received no end of grief from pseudo-intellectuals, and was even reprimanded by his own university for daring to cross the line of political correctness. But lines of political correctness must be crossed if humans are to get at the truth -- and learn to live with the truth while doing whatever they feel is necessary to change the underlying reality.

Experts have long disagreed about the existence of a sex difference in overall intelligence. Some (e.g. Lynn, 1994, 1997, 1999; Lynn, Irwing, & Cammock, 2002) find that males outscore females by about 3.8 IQ points, but most find no sex difference (e.g. Brody, 1992; Halpern & LaMay, 2000; Jensen, 1998).

This disagreement is confusing for theoretical reasons. First, males dominate all higher ranks of education, research, occupation, and political power structures that call for capacity to deal with complexity, which is just another way of defining general  intelligence g. Second, males have, on average, larger brains than females, and brain size correlates positively with intelligence. Yet, the empirical evidence for a male g advantage is equivocal.

The present study addresses these paradoxes by testing four hypotheses: (1) Ambiguous definitions and methods explain the current disagreement among the experts, (2) The proper analytic approach will identify a male lead in general intelligence g, (3) The larger male brain
partly explains the average male g lead, and, (4) Classical Distribution Theory illustrates how a small male mean SD g score advantage and a wider male SD dispersion score translate into an exponentially increased male–female ratio at the high end of the g distribution. This unequal ratio of high g males to females explains in part why males (always, according to Goldberg, 1977) dominate the intellectually most demanding top occupational and political strata.

...The study made it understandable how an exponentially growing male/female ratio at the high end of the g distribution—with the exact numerical ratio being a function of the size of the average sex difference in mean g and of the dispersion of g—provides part of an explanation of the male dominance in high society.

The present results derive from a more careful sampling of the two independent sub-samples than any before, but the small Ns call for caution in interpretation, even if it is harder to obtain a statistically significant difference in a small than in a large sample.

The general conclusion: Proper methodology identifies a male advantage in g that increases exponentially at higher levels, relates to brain size, and explains, at least in part, the universal male dominance in society. _PDF_Nyborg_PDF

Later research using fMRI and other brain scanning methods have looked at specific differences in connections between brain centers (white matter) and differences in specific brain centers themselves (grey matter), finding much greater significance in those subtle differences than in gross brain size and weight differentials.

That is to be expected, since it is the actual performance of the brains, rather than the size of the hat, that is at issue.

Males dominate the top levels of most professions for many reasons. A significant part of the reason is hormonal -- testosterone providing a certain assertiveness that often lends toward hard work and achievement. At the upper levels of cognitive performance, males are undeniably dominant. Part of that difference is also likely due to testosterone's effects on the developing brain -- primarily in adolescence, but also in early life.

Modern political correctness is counter-productive and self defeating for society as a whole, since it leads to wholesale waste of many of the finest male brains on the planet -- and for too many other reasons to mention here.

In the final reckoning, there will be no final reckoning. But there will certainly be repercussions that Susan Faludi never dreamed of. ;-)

48% of African American Women have Genital Herpes

More from LA Times

CDC MMWR reporting findings

It is shocking to think that half the African American women one may see walking down the street are infected with HSV 2, genital herpes. HSV 2 infection makes one more susceptible to HIV infection. And these days, STDs do not necessarily travel alone. Syphilis, gonorrhea, and other STDs are much more common among American blacks as well.

Given the 70% illegitimacy rate of childbirth among African Americans, it is clear that family and monogamy are not highly prized. Other symptoms of social pathology such as high poverty rates, high crime rates, high rates of drug and alcohol abuse, and high rates of domestic violence, combine with behavioural diseases such as STDs to add to the misery index of the community.

It is not an American phenomenon, since one sees the same things in Haiti, Jamaica, South Africa, and almost everywhere that persons of African descent live in appreciable numbers and proportions.

More attention needs to be given to these social pathologies which tend to concentrate among persons of African heritage -- that is if we wish to do something to lessen the morbidity, mortality, and misery.

1001 Uses for Vinegar, and Other Cheap Everyday Things

In a prolonged recession, it sometimes becomes necessary to learn to do more with less. That's why it is good to know several uses for common, cheap, household items such as vinegar, bleach, rubbing alcohol, baking soda, and vaseline.

Here are 1001 uses for white distilled vinegar. Some of them might get you out of embarrassing situations, or help you get over an ailment when no doctor can be found.

12 extraordinary uses for bleach. Mostly having to do with sanitation, of course. Here's an extra: 5 drops of liquid bleach in 1/2 gallon water can keep stored water potable long term.

13 ways to use rubbing alcohol.

75 extraordinary uses for baking soda -- not all of them for cooking! It can even help clean your stuck drains!

60 uses for table salt. A mixture of salt and baking soda in your Neti Pot can help tremendously in cold and allergy seasons.

30 uses for Vaseline petroleum jelly. The one about getting bubble gum out of your child's hair was a new one for me.

Becoming an expert in the use of cheap, common household products could make you the hero of the hour -- more than once. I won't tell you that such knowledge will save your life someday, but in some circumstances it might.

They call it being resourceful, or being broadly competent, or just being prepared. The best time to learn these simple things is childhood, of course. But who had parent willing to teach them these things? Not many.

Try being your own parent now.

3 Meals from Anarchy

Things can fall apart for many reasons, and at astoundingly rapid speeds. Whether you are 3 meals from anarchy or 9, the distance between you and deadly threat is alarmingly small. Natural disaster, epidemic disease, power failure, terror attack, or outright warfare -- potential triggers are more numerous than you can imagine.

You won't be able to leave the city by freeway -- they will all be jammed by wrecked, abandoned, and burning vehicles. Better have several alternate routes and fallback plans. Is your bugout kit packed and ready? Does your bugout vehicle have a full tank of fuel and is it well maintained? Do you have a bugout destination?

I recommend the links and the postings at PreparednessPro.com. A good site for daily browsing is SurvivalBlog. Unfortunately, membership in the Society for Creative Apocalyptology is currently closed, but several online forums of a similar nature are available.

You have a much better chance of surviving a short, medium, and long-term catastrophe if you are a member of a cooperating group of survival-oriented individuals and families with complementary skills.

First published at Al Fin

Bugout Tanker: Naked Girl Sold Separately

When you think about the ideal bugout vehicle, it is not likely that you think of a modified tanker trailer. And yet, consider the advantages: easily transportable, rugged construction, weather-proof, potentially floatable, and even capable of burying underground with proper anti-corrosion precautions and ventilation equipment. It would also make a fine sauna on warm summer days.

I am required to tell you that the naked girl seen in the sketch does not come with the converted tanker. You will have to make other arrangements when furnishing your bugout apartment. The long, cold winter nights should be more happily endured with a well furnished survival apartment.

The bugout vehicle above is not nearly so convenient as the tanker apartment on top. For one thing, you must push the vehicle yourself. And as you can see, there is no naked girl inside, nor is there very much room for one should you take the trouble to obtain her. Nevertheless, even a small hand-pushed bugout vehicle is better than no shelter at all. This one comes with a mini-kitchen and make-shift washroom, at least.

Impact Lab, via Design Boom

A Potpourri of Ways to Escape a Doomed City

If you watched the "After Armageddon" videos in the previous post, you should have some awareness of how difficult it might be to get out of town at the exact same time as several million other would-be escapees. The HovPod featured in the video below was the recipient of the Al Fin 2009 Small Vehicle Survival Award.

The HovPod is a great all-terrain escape vehicle, but you can see from the topmost video that adding flight -- even low level ground effect flight -- to your escape vehicle's capabilities may make the difference between reaching the high ground and being stuck in a bad place.

The Terrafugia Transition is featured in the video below. It is a roadable aircraft capable of flying above the gridlocked freeways below. Finding a good landing spot may be problematic under some conditions, but a wise escape artist plans ahead.

The ICON A5 amphibious trailerable plane may be your best bet if you live near a lake, river, bay, or protected harbour. With the A5 you can take off from water and land on solid surface, or vice versa. Check it out below:

A personal helicopter may be your best bet if you live in the middle of a large city, and do not have access to a waterway or runway for your private airplane. The Helicycle demonstrated in the video below, is one example of a personal helicopter. Consider adding flotation for more versatility.

At War in the Forest: Ballad of the Bark Beetle

Bark beetles have killed nearly 80 million ponderosa, piñon and lodgepole pines in Arizona and New Mexico and tens of millions more across the West over the past decade. Years of punishing drought left the trees unable to protect themselves against the attacks, which carve ugly scars into forests, weaken the surrounding ecosystem and heighten wildfire danger.

Forest managers can apply insecticide to individual trees or small stands, but forestwide treatments are impractical and would be wildly expensive and potentially risky to other plants and wildlife.

Enter Reagan McGuire, a research assistant who wondered what would happen if the beetles were blasted with noise, creating an acoustic stress that might change their behavior. He sold Hofstetter on the idea, and the experiment was hatched at NAU's School of Forestry lab.

They collected tree trunks infested with bark beetles and sandwiched slices of the trees between clear plastic plates, creating what looked like the old ant farms once sold in the back pages of magazines.

Working in the lab, McGuire piped in the music through tiny speakers, the sort you might find in a singing greeting card. He watched the reaction of the beetles using a microscope. The rock music didn't seem to annoy the bugs, nor did Rush [Limbaugh] in reverse.

McGuire and Hofstetter decided to try something different. They recorded the sounds of the beetles and played them back, manipulating them to test the response.

Suddenly, every little thing they did seemed to provoke the beetles.

"We could use a particular aggression call that would make the beetles move away from the sound as if they were avoiding another beetle," Hofstetter said.

When they made the beetle sounds louder and stronger than a typical male mating call, he said, the female beetle rejected the male and moved toward the electronic sound.


Even more surprising was what the beetles did to each other. The researchers manipulated the sounds and, at a certain point, the male stopped mating and tore the female apart, McGuire said.

"This is not normal behavior in the natural world," he said. _AzCentral

Al Fin botanists and entomologists respond to McGuire: No shite Shirlock! If it were normal behaviour in the natural world, there would be no bark beetles at all by now. It is your job to make it common behaviour in the pine forest. Otherwise, give back all those grants!

Biomass companies had better grab up as many dead pines as they can, while they last. If the bark beetles are driven to distraction by the manipulation of their own sounds, pine forests may have a few years to recover -- until the next deadly pest comes along.

First published at Al Fin, The Next Level

Skipper BO Steers Course Onto the Rocks, Blames Others

Worst unemployment picture since WWII

Obama Doesn't Know What He's Doing

Long-term unemployment skyrockets

Middle class collapsing

Dependency on government a growing addiction for Americans

This is the Obama - Pelosi age, the age of the oxymoron "social justice." Destroying the country to save it is the path that radical revolutionaries often take -- from Mugabe to Castro to Chavez to Kim to Pol Pot to Stalin to Hitler and so on.

Captain Obama at the wheel, the USS America headed onto the rocks, and in the ballroom Pelosi is gathered with Greenpeace, the trial lawyers, labour union bosses, the IPCC, Al Gore and the carbon traders, and a host of lobbyists, singing "Happy Days are Here Again!"

Pay no attention to those deep grinding noises coming from below. Those are just some noises left over from the previous administration. Captain BO has increased speed to full ahead, so we will soon be out of the rough spots.

Stun Gun Cannon Will Keep Neighbors at Bay

If you are the type of person who doesn't like intrusive neighbors, you may be interested in the new sonic cannon device from Israel. If you are tired of neighbors using your landscaped lawn and gardens as a shortcut -- or as a place for their dog Rover to relieve himself -- consider the stun cannon, and a few other non-lethal devices that may serve to keep outsiders on the proper side of the line.

Using a patented process involving Pulse Detonation Technology (PDT), the system feeds the gas-air mixture into one or more so-called impulse chambers or cannon barrels, where the burning fuel detonates and intensifies in force as it travels through the chamber, exiting in a rapid-fire succession of high-velocity shock bursts.

A small battery-powered control system - about twice the size of a pack of cigarettes - measures fuel pressure, temperature and flow rates while monitoring the continuous intake of the air-gas mixture.

According to company data, the system generates 60 to 100 bursts per minute, each traveling at about 2,000 meters per second and lasting up to 300 milliseconds.

The resulting shocks create a double deterrent to rioters and potential intruders, developers here say, by the extreme air pressure and sonic boom effect generated once the mixture propagates and expands through the air. One standard 12-kilogram LPG gas canister (retail cost: about $25) can produce up to 5,000 shock bursts. _DefenseNews

This powerful stun cannon can now take its place alongside the infrasonic disruptor, the microwave skin burn, and a large variety of lasers, electric-stun, and impact-stun weapons meant to discourage unwelcome guests.

We are talking about riot control, repelling pirates, and perhaps border control. As the ability to stun-at-a-distance gets better and less permanently damaging, remotely operated non-lethal antipersonnel emplacements will likely be installed along difficult stretches of border.

For Israelis, the issue is clear. Good fences make good neighbors. For the rest of us, the ability to control the dangerous and unruly mob has never been more necessary.

Wake Up Little Stupid Head!

You are being played like a chump in many ways. Here are just 2:

foreign outsourcing of component manufacturing has led to consistent overstatement of U.S. GDP and productivity. The connection goes a long way to explain why we keep losing jobs even as GDP is apparently expanding.

As our economy becomes less competitive due to higher taxes, burdensome and uncertain regulations, and capital flight, more manufacturing and services will be outsourced to foreign firms. However, the flaw in GDP calculation allows the output of those foreign workers to be included in our domestic tally. Since we count the output but not the worker responsible for it, government statisticians attribute the gains to rising labor productivity. To them, it looks like companies are producing more goods with fewer workers.

The reality is that we are producing less with fewer workers. The added “productivity” comes from higher unemployment and larger trade deficits. This is a toxic formula that will have lethal economic consequences. _PeterSchiff

And # 2, look at the taxes!

I keep reading about surveys that show that retail sales are up. But as noted above, no one pays extra sales taxes, or decides they need to pay more income taxes. The surest way to measure retail sales is sales taxes. Want to know how incomes are doing? Look at income tax receipts. Let's look at sales taxes first.

First off, I can find no single source of recent sales tax information. It is all one-off, but it is consistent. Sales taxes in my home state of Texas are down 12.8% year-over-year, and we're in the fifth straight month of decreases of 11% or more. Projections are for sales taxes to continue to decline into 2010.

There is a very revealing study by the Pew Center on state taxes, called "Beyond California". Everyone knows how badly off California is. The Pew Center looks at how the rest of the states are doing, and focuses on 10 states that also have severe problems. Sales tax receipts are down 14% in Arizona, and state income taxes are down 32%.

On average, revenues are down almost 12%. Oregon has seen their revenues collapse a stunning 19%. New York is down 17%, with a deficit of 32%. Illinois has a projected deficit of 47% of its budget, second only to California with 49%. You can see how your state fares here.

The Liscio Report notes that all states had negative year-over-year sales tax collections in October, and the weighted average decrease was 10.2%, down from a negative 7.2% in September. _SeekingAlpha

One more thing: do you really believe those unemployment numbers they try to feed you?

As I noted last week, the number of unemployed actually soared by 558,000, to 15.7 million, as measured by the household survey, not the 190,000 you read about in the mainstream media. Unemployment is sadly continuing to rise by significant amounts.

In August, I did an interview with CNBC from Leen's Fishing Lodge in Maine. The unemployment numbers had just come out. I did a back-of-the-napkin estimate that we would need about 15 million new jobs over the next five years just to get back to where we were when the recession started. _SA

President Obama thinks he can speak the country out of the recession with his teleprompter and 1960s era speechwriters.

He thinks that by paying off his supporters in the big unions, big Wall Street firms, big trial lawyer partnerships, and big overseas illegal campaign contributor scams, that somehow everything will magically get better.

How, Mr. Obama? By taxing small and medium business into oblivion? By destroying the coal industry, hamstringing the oil industry, and paralyzing the nuclear industry? By giving the auto industry to your union chums to destroy, and regulating the energy industry out of existence? By creating a monster of a government health care bureaucracy that drives the economy into the mud even more quickly than all previous entitlements put together?

Hey little stupid head! Wake up and decide if you are going to put up with this green rookie incompetent clown president you stumbled into electing. Because despite what you may have been told, the world really did need a prosperous, strong US -- for a lot of reasons.

Another Century of Crude Oil?

The following is excerpted from the October 2009 Scientific American article by Leonardo Maugeri, "Another Century of Oil?"

On fourteen dry, flat square miles of California’s Central Valley, more than 8,000 horsehead pumps—as old-fashioned oilmen call them—slowly rise and fall as they suck oil from underground. Glittering pipelines crossing the whole area suggest that the place is not merely a relic of the past. But even to an expert’s eyes, Kern River Oil Field betrays no hint of the technological miracles that have enabled it to survive decades of dire predictions.

When Kern River Oil Field was discovered in 1899, analysts thought that only 10 percent of its unusually viscous crude could be recovered. In 1942, after more than four decades of modest production, the field was estimated to still hold 54 million barrels of recoverable oil, a fraction of the 278 million barrels already recovered. “In the next 44 years, it produced not 54 [million barrels] but 736 million barrels, and it had another 970 million barrels remaining,” energy guru Morris Adelman noted in 1995. But even this estimate proved wrong. In November 2007 U.S. oil giant Chevron, by then the field’s operator, announced that cumulative production had reached two billion barrels. Today Kern River still puts out nearly 80,000 barrels per day, and the state of California estimates its remaining reserves to be about 627 million barrels.

Chevron began to markedly increase production in the 1960s by injecting steam into the ground, a novel technology at the time. Later, a new breed of exploration and drilling tools—along with steady steam injection—turned the field into a kind of oil cornucopia.

Kern River is not an isolated case. According to common wisdom, a field’s production should follow a bell-shaped trajectory known as the Hubbert curve (after the late Shell Oil geologist M. King Hubbert) and peak when half of the known oil has been extracted. Instead most of the world’s oil fields have revived over time. In a way, technology is the real cornucopia.

Many analysts now prophesy that global oil production will peak in the next few years and then decline, following the Hubbert curve. But I believe that those projections will prove wrong, just as similar “peak oil” predictions [see “The End of Cheap Oil,” by Colin J. Campbell and Jean H. Laherrère; Scientific American, March 1998] have been mistaken in the past. New exploration methods have revealed more of the earth’s secrets. And leaps in extraction technology have led to tapping oil in once inaccessible areas and in places where drilling used to be uneconomic. Advanced exploration and extraction methods can keep oil production growing for decades to come and could allow oil supplies to last at least another century.

Although oil and other fossil fuels pose risks for the climate and the environment, for now alternative energy sources cannot compete with their versatility, cost, and ease of transport and storage. As research into alternatives goes on, we will need to be sure that we use the oil we have responsibly.

All That You Can’t Leave Behind
At a time when the world increasingly fears an approaching peak and subsequent decline in oil production, it may be surprising to learn that most of the planet’s known resources are left unexploited in the ground and that even more still wait to be discovered.

On the face of it, oil should last only a few more decades. In 2008, just before the economic meltdown slashed consumption, the world burned about 30 billion barrels of oil a year. Assuming that in the near future consumption resumed at 2008 levels and then stayed constant, our planet’s proven reserves of oil—currently estimated at between 1.1 trillion and 1.3 trillion barrels—would have about 40 years to go.

But proven reserves are only estimates and not fixed numbers. They are defined as the amount of known oil that can be recovered economically with current technology, so the definition changes as technology develops and as the price of crude varies. In particular, if supply tightens or demand increases, resale prices go up, and oil that was once too expensive to extract becomes part of the proven reserves. That is why most oil fields have produced much more than the initial estimates of their reserves assumed and even more than the initial estimates of their total content. Today only 35 percent of the oil in the average oil field is recovered, meaning that about two thirds of the oil in known fields remains underground. That resource is rarely mentioned in the debate on the future of oil.

Even a mature oil country such as the U.S., whose oil production has been declining since the 1970s (if not as fast as the Hubbert curve predicted), still holds huge volumes of unexploited oil under its surface. Although the country’s proven oil reserves are now only 29 billion barrels, the National Petroleum Council (NPC) estimates that 1,124 billion barrels are still left underground, of which 374 billion barrels would be recoverable with current technology.

On a global scale, the U.S. Geological Survey estimates the earth’s remaining conventional oil (petroleum) deposits to be around seven trillion to eight trillion barrels. But with today’s technology, know-how and prices, only part of that oil can be recovered economically and is thus classified as a proven reserve.

And there is more.

Only one third of the sedimentary basins of our planet—the geologic formations that may contain oil—has been thoroughly explored with modern technologies. Moreover, the USGS data do not include unconventional oils, such as ultraheavy oils, tar sands, oil shales and bituminous schist, which together are at least as abundant as conventional oil.

Thus, a country or a company may increase its reserves of black gold even without tapping new areas and frontiers, if it is capable of recovering more oil from known fields. Still, doing so is not always easy.

A Rocky Start
Contrary to common belief, oil is not held in great underground lakes or caves. If you could “see” an oil reservoir, you would notice only a rocky structure seeming to have no room for oil. But beyond the reach of the human eye, a world of often invisible pores and microfractures entraps minuscule droplets of oil, together with water and natural gas.

Nature created these formations over millions of years. It started when huge deposits of vegetation and dead microorganisms piled up at the bottom of ancient seas, decomposed and became buried under successive layers of rock. High temperatures and pressures then slowly transformed the organic sediments into today’s oil and gas. These fossil fuels soak the porous underground rock almost like water soaks pumice.

When such a reservoir is drilled, it behaves a bit like an uncorked bottle of champagne. The oil is freed from its ancient rocky prison, and the reservoir’s internal pressure pushes it to the surface (along with stones, mud and other debris). The process goes on until the pressure peters out, usually after several years. This initial, or primary, stage of recovery can usually yield between 10 and 15 percent of the oil in place. From then on, recovery must be assisted.

About one third of the oil left in a reservoir after the initial “champagne” release is called immobile oil—drops trapped by strong capillary forces within isolated pores in the rock. No technique exists yet to extract this part of the oil. The remaining two thirds, though mobile, will not necessarily flow into the wells on its own. In fact, usually about half of the mobile oil stays stuck inside the reservoir because of geologic barriers or low permeability, which happens when the pores are too narrow. The situation is even worse when the oil is not a light liquid but a heavy, viscous, molasseslike substance.

To help some of the remaining oil seep through the pores in the rock and come out of the wells, operators usually inject natural gas and water into the reservoir, in what is called secondary recovery. Injecting gas restores the lost pressure and forces oil that is sufficiently fluid to seep through the rock’s pores. Meanwhile, because oil is lighter than water, injection of water raises the oil toward the well, just like pouring water in a glass filled with olive oil would send the oil upward.

In the past decade or so, the distinction between primary and secondary recovery has blurred as companies have begun to apply advanced technology from the outset. One of the most important developments so far has been the horizontal well, an L-shaped structure able to deliver dramatically more oil than the traditional vertical drilling that has been used since the inception of the oil industry. The L shape enables horizontal wells to change direction and penetrate sections of a reservoir that would otherwise be unreachable. The method, first adopted commercially in the 1980s, is particularly suitable in reservoirs where oil and natural gas occupy thin, horizontal layers.

Exploration tools have also improved over the years. Advanced 3-D imaging of the underground, for instance, which is based on how seismic waves bounce off the boundaries between layers of different rock composition, now offers more detailed understanding of the structure of existing fields, which helps in choosing where to drill to optimize recovery.

Imaging technologies now enable geologists to “see” what lies underneath layers of salt that sit unevenly distributed below the seabed and are sometimes thicker than 5,000 meters. Similar to frozen waters, salt formations used to represent a formidable obstacle because they blurred the seismic waves used to reconstruct an accurate image of the underground.

Such imaging breakthroughs, combined with more advanced offshore technologies, have made new parts of the oceans accessible to oil developers. At the time when the North Sea oil fields were developed in the 1970s, it seemed as if offshore technology had reached its most daunting milestone, tapping fields that lay below 100 to 200 meters of water and 1,000 meters under the seabed. But in the past few years the industry has succeeded in striking oil at depths below 3,000 meters of water and 6,000 meters of rock and salt. There have been at least three major ultradeep offshore discoveries: Thunder Horse and Jack in the Gulf of Mexico and Tupi off the coast of Brazil.

Scraping the Barrel
As wells have gone farther and deeper than ever before, technologies have also evolved to get more oil out of the rock after the first lines of recovery have run their course. Primary and secondary recovery stages together can bring the recovery rate to between 20 and 40 percent. To go beyond that, in what experts call tertiary recovery, it is usually necessary to make the remaining oil less viscous, which can be accomplished using heat, gases, chemicals and even microbes. Steam injection, among the oldest heat-based methods, was decisive in the revival of the Kern River Oil Field back in the early 1960s. The injected steam heats the overlying formation and enables oil to move. To this day, Kern River’s steam-injection project is among the largest of its kind in the world. A variant of steam-assisted recovery has been applied to tar sand deposits in Alberta that are too deep to be surface-mined.

Another heat-based process that has been tested in the field is burning a part of the reservoir’s hydrocarbons by igniting it with a heater while pumping air into a well to feed the combustion. The fire generates heat and carbon dioxide (CO2), both of which make oil less viscous; much of the CO2 also remains underground and helps to push the oil out. At the same time, the fire itself breaks the larger and heavier molecules of oil, once again making it mobile. The airflow can be controlled to limit oil that gets burned and to prevent the release of pollution into the surrounding environment.

A more common method is the high-pressure injection of gases such as CO2 or nitrogen into the reservoir. These gases can restore or maintain a reservoir’s pressure and can also mix with oil, reducing both its viscosity and the forces that can keep the oil trapped. In the U.S., CO2 extracted from volcanoes or from waste gases from power stations has been applied to oil recovery since the 1970s. The process is in use in about 100 ongoing projects, with dedicated pipeline networks totaling more than 2,500 kilometers.

The know-how accumulated in CO2 injection has opened the way for the capture and storage of CO2 from power plants—procedures that could help slash emissions of this greenhouse gas into the atmosphere and instead keep it underground for hundreds of years. The first commercial carbon capture and storage project has been active at the Sleipner field, off the coast of Norway, since 1996, and is storing one million metric tons of CO2 a year. This amount is small, considering that human activity alone is estimated to eject into the atmosphere greenhouse gases equivalent to around 50 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide every year. But the plant’s success serves as a proof of concept.

Continue reading here

Peak oil has never been an intelligent religion, but it is growing less and less bright every day.   If peak oilers knew one tenth as much about what is going to happen with oil supplies and prices as they pretend, they would be stinking rich from crafty investing.  

Between the Peak Oil Religion and the Climate Catastrophe Religion, a huge proportion of the world's nutcases can be grouped.  Add the Fundamentalist Muslim Religion and you have largely covered the world's majour delusions and problem children.  Throw in the Obama Zombies and that just about does it.   While still delusionary, the rest of the religions are not a significant threat to the future of abundance and sustainability.

Reinventing the Wheel Again, Once More

Tires and wheels that can change configuration to suit the purpose at hand, might come in handy. Modern tires that can assume only one shape are of limited use in an all-purpose, amphibious vehicle.The wheels / tires shown above are capable of changing from conventional round tires, to a stepped snow tire shape, to a water-wheel configuration. That should prove useful, should you wish to cross the river without a bridge.The system above is known as the intelligent wheel system. Its 3 configurations can serve well on the highway, on snow - mud - or sand, and in the water.

Freedom of Movement for the Fourth of July

The Aeroyacht 110has been dubbed “the world’s most innovative super catamaran” by its designers and, while that’s a pretty big claim, it’s certainly an audacious concept. Capable of speeds of over 32 knots but able to cruise effortlessly at 20, boasting a superbly-appointed 32ft wide salon with 360º sea views and with its own fold-up amphibious plane as a tender, the Aeroyacht 110 looks to be the ne plus ultra of luxury sailing.

Designed from scratch by Gregor Tarjan, founder of Aeroyacht International, together with naval architect Pete Melvin, of the world-renowned Morrelli & Melvin multihull architects, the Aeroyacht 110 was designed from the outside-in. Tarjan started with the concept for a “pure sailing machine” and, once its streamlined shape was established, only then worked out how many people it could and should accommodate.Source

The amphibious tender ICON A5 adds a completely new dimension of freedom to the maritime ensemble. All that is lacking is a small submarine. Perhaps the Aeroyacht people can correct that oversight by the time the super cat hits the market.

First Send Them Back to the Stone Age, Then Make Their Home Into a Parking Lot

And you can do it all without messy invasions or nuclear weapons! First send that pesky enemy back to the stone age with EMP weapons -- you don't even need to use nukes! This will create havoc with military command and control, and largely break civilian morale within a few days.Then you can destroy transportation arteries and vital infrastructures such as powerplants, fuel refineries, pipelines and military installations from a distance -- using kinetic weapons fired by electromagnetic cannon!

This one-two punch can be assembled with off-the-shelf components taking very little time and expense.

A smart world conqueror might put off invasion plans until nano-weaponry becomes more advanced. Nothing clears a space so well as nano-invaders capable of stripping a land cleaner than locust. Stealthy in, quick working, then dissolving into the landscape. Entire nations could be turned over, ready for radical makeover practically overnight!

The social democracies of Europe, North America, Japan, and Oceania have allowed humans to take a vacation from history for the past half century or more. This pax cannot possibly last much longer, particularly in the wake of the ongoing Obama devastation of the world economy.

Soon, the world populations will be thrust back into the hands of the warlords, the conquerors, the absolute destroyers of lands and peoples. Again. History coming to life, just when you thought it was obsolete.

Modern weapons research is a bit uneven. Most projects, perhaps, will not survive due to poor conceptualisation and a lack of robustness on the field of battle. But enough of the tools of "the new warfare" will succeed, to change the face of the planet a million times more than the hyped up global warming scare of Gore and Obama.

Buckle up.

Hobbit Home: The Shire Located in Wales

A pilot doing an aerial survey of Wales spotted this outpost of the Shire down below. Apparently the hobbit-builder maintains a website, and explains just how to build a hobbit home.

Some key points of the design and construction:

* Dug into hillside for low visual impact and shelter
* Stone and mud from diggings used for retaining walls, foundations etc.
* Frame of oak thinnings (spare wood) from surrounding woodland
* Reciprocal roof rafters are structurally and aesthaetically fantastic and very easy to do
* Straw bales in floor, walls and roof for super-insulation and easy building
* Plastic sheet and mud/turf roof for low impact and ease
* Lime plaster on walls is breathable and low energy to manufacture (compared to cement)
* Reclaimed (scrap) wood for floors and fittings
* Anything you could possibly want is in a rubbish pile somewhere (windows, burner, plumbing, wiring...)
* Woodburner for heating - renewable and locally plentiful
* Flue goes through big stone/plaster lump to retain and slowly release heat
* Fridge is cooled by air coming underground through foundations
* Skylight in roof lets in natural feeling light
* Solar panels for lighting, music and computing
* Water by gravity from nearby spring
* Compost toilet
* Roof water collects in pond for garden etc.
_woodlandhome_more photos here

Hobbit Homes Movie Set New Zealand
Hobbits are normally secretive, but apparently the author of the hobbit website linked above is a human : hobbit mixed-blood who married into a hobbit family. That explains his willingness to interact with the human world over the internet.

Bad Skin, Bad Brain

Scientists have learned that skin fibroblasts share many of the same peculiar cellular mechanisms as brain neurons. This suggests that the study of skin cells in persons with brain diseases such as schizophrenia, might provide almost as much information as the study of brain cells obtained from potentially dangerous brain biopsies.

Until now diseases like schizophrenia and bipolar disorder have been difficult to study biologically, since this would entail taking samples from the patient’s brain. But new research findings from Örebro University in Sweden show that it is just as good to study a certain type of skin cells, since they function in a way that is similar to a type of brain cells that are suspected of playing a major role in both disorders.

“Among other benefits, this makes it considerably easier to develop and test new drugs,” says Ravi Vumma, and the head of the research group Nikolaos Venizelos who is presenting the findings in the journal Neuroscience Letters.

One of the causes of schizophrenia and bipolar disorder (previously called manic-depressive syndrome) is assumed to be that the level of important transmitter substances in the brain is too low, which negatively impacts the transmission of signals. That, in turn, is because the cells in the blood-brain barrier are not transporting enough of the amino acids that are needed for the brain to be able to produce signal substances like dopamine, noradrenalin, and serotonin.

“Altered transport of the amino acids tyrosine and tryptophan may be one explanation for the disrupted signal transmission in patients with schizophrenia and bipolar disorder,” Ravi Vumma explains.

We have therefore mapped how the transport of the two amino acids takes place, what paths they take into the cell. Various amino acids use different transport systems, and to enhance our knowledge about schizophrenia and bipolar disorder it is necessary to identify which systems are relevant for tyrosine and tryptophan.

Moreover, we want to find out whether connective tissue cells in the skin, fibroblasts, transport amino acids in the same way as endothelial cells in the brain, as this would constitute a dramatic enhancement of our ability to study how substances pass through the blood-brain barrier. The two cell types have a similar membrane function, to close out undesirable substances and only transport substances the body needs.

“The research shows that tyrosine and tryptophan largely use the same transport system and that it functions in the same way in both skin fibroblasts and the endothelial cells of the blood-brain barrier.”

On top of this we were able to determine that the inward transport of tyrosine in fibroblasts was lower in patients with bipolar disorder compared with a healthy control group. Since previous research has shown that it was lower in individuals with schizophrenia, his discovery indicates that the two diseases involve a common alteration that is probably caused by a common genetic variation. _SD

Gasification: Coal and Biomass to Liquid Fuels

Plasma Gasification - Funny home videos are a click away
Gasification of coal and biomass to liquid fuels is one emphatic answer to the peak oil hysteria that afflicts so many otherwise intelligent humans. This video presents the gasification process in easy to understand terms.

Coal gasification is a cleaner way of using coal, and allows for carbon sequestration -- or preferably diverting of CO2 to algae bioreactors or controlled atmosphere greenhouses.

Biomass gasification allows for a sustained renewable form of solar energy that can provide either liquid fuels, high value chemicals, or clean baseload electricity.

A Nation of Sluts? Brazil Goes Globo

Girls learn to be women -- and women learn to be sluts -- from the media. Romance novels, films, and especially soap operas and "soap Oprahs". Brazil's population of women is being taken over by the popular soap "Globo."

How much impact do the soaps have on real life? As recounted in papers from the Inter-American Development Bank, researchers tracked Globo’s expansion across the country and compared this to data on fertility and divorce.*

The results are most striking for the total fertility rate, which dropped from 6.3 children per woman in 1960 to 2.3 in 2000, despite contraception being officially discouraged for some of that time. This was because women moved to cities and opted to have fewer babies. The papers argue that the small, happy families portrayed on television contributed to this trend. Controlling for other factors, the arrival of Globo was associated with a decline of 0.6 percentage points in the probability of a woman giving birth in a given year. That is equivalent to the drop in the birth rate associated with a woman having two extra years of schooling

The effect on divorce was smaller, but noticeable. The researchers found that between 1975, when divorce was first mooted, and 1984 about one in five of the main characters in Globo soaps were divorced or separated, a higher percentage than in the real Brazil. These break-ups were not just a result of machismo: from the mid-1960s to the mid-1980s about 30% of female lead characters in novelas were unfaithful to their partners. The researchers find that the arrival of Globo in an area was associated with a rise of 0.1-0.2 percentage points in the share of women aged 15-49 who were divorced or separated. The authors reckon that watching “empowered” women having fun in Rio made other women (a few of them anyway) more independent. _ImpactLab

One person's "empowered woman" may be another person's slut -- it depends upon a person's perspective.

I wonder if ancient Rome had soap operas, right up until the end? Would you like to know, "who were Rome's soap Oprahs?" Women take their cues from the herd, as they interpret it. The soap Oprahs of the world exert a huge impact on female behaviour, and on society at large. You may be a slave to a loosely knit web of puppet masters and puppet mistresses, pulling the strings on female behaviour everywhere except perhaps within the Muslim world. And how much longer can that bastion of male dominance hold out?

Cross-posted at Al Fin, You Sexy Thing!

Is Competence Dying Out In the Obama Age?

Within the next five years, an estimated 45 percent of engineers in U.S. electrical utilities will be eligible for retirement or will leave for other reasons, according to a 2008 survey by the Center for Energy Workforce Development. That percentage translates into some 7,000 power engineers that will be needed in the electric utility industry alone. But the problem doesn't stop there. According to the report, two to three times as many electric power engineers may be needed to fulfill the needs of the entire economy. PW

The shortage of qualified engineers for the power industry, the oil industry, the nuclear industry, the construction industry, and many other industries, threatens to stifle plans for a vibrant, sustainable future. Without the manpower to turn ideas into working industries, jobs, and economies, you may as well start mixing the final kool-aid.

This looming shortage of competence is the end result of a designed dumbing down of schools -- from K-12 through the university. The substitution in the curricula of political indoctrination in the place of competence-building procedural and declarative knowledge has created at least one lost generation so far. Under Obama, the process toward brain-wasting will only accelerate.

But competent generations eventually retire, and die off. If all you are left with is psychological neotenates, academic lobotomates, and incompetent Obama zombies, your future will be dismal. But that is precisely the direction the western world is headed.

Even if universities and colleges were teeming with engineering students, the educational institutions may not be well equipped to handle the demand. The Collaborative estimated that within the next five years, 40 percent of full-time senior engineering faculty will be eligible for retirement and that 27 percent may actually do so. A number of historically strong power engineering programs have ended or are close to doing so. _PW

The rapidly depleting supply of competent engineers is just the beginning of the problem. As young minds are being rapidly destroyed by a dysfunctional educational system and popular culture, their dimming consciousness is incapable of selecting career paths for the future.

The recent debacle on Wall Street involving faulty computer models and suicidal risk instrument derivatives suggests that the mind rot extends all the way to the Ivy League cream of the crop. And under Obama, millionaire investment bankers are being bailed out by custodians, auto mechanics, garbage collectors, and taxi cab drivers -- via forced taxation of hard-earned income. Corruption on top of incompetence! Is this the future of hope and change? It seems so.

Clueless Clown, Hapless Harlequin, Zombie King

A combination of wishful thinking and abject stupidity has landed the US (and the world) in a toxic pit of hazard. It is bad enough having an inexperienced, incompetent, and ideologically blindered clown of a president in control. Unfortunately, the US Congress is led by a group of corrupt and unscrupulous quasi-criminals the likes of which has not been seen in well over a century of government corruption in the US. To top it off, everyone that Obama appoints to the executive and to the courts appears to share in these global Obama-style inadequacies and failure to lead responsibly. This will be a very rough 4 years. Even a radical rearrangement of the House of Representatives in 2010 will not be enough to reverse the destruction of Obama's first 6 months, let alone the next two years. Decades will be required to recover from this episode of failure by American voters and media.

Abandoning a Nuclear Deterrent Out of Wishful Thinking

Obama's War On Business

Obama's Recovery Plan Can Only Fail

Obama Prefers the UN to the US

Entering an Obama Dark Age

China's Support for Jihad in Afghanistan, India, and Pakistan



H/T Reverse Spins