By Elaine Meinel Supkis
A student at Vanderbuilt University accidently discovered a novel way to light surfaces. Using nano-quantum dots, he found that exciting them with a small LED light caused them to light up brightly.
Michael Bowers, a graduate student at Vanderbilt University, was just trying to make really small quantum dots, which are crystals generally only a few nanometers big. That's less than 1/1000th the width of a human hair.They experimented with using these nano-dots with polyurethan and this caused an entire surface to light up. There are many applications one could think of for this, lighting hallways, for example, by painting the floor or ceiling or both with these and then "turning them on" by electrifying them.Quantum dots contain anywhere from 100 to 1,000 electrons. They're easily excited bundles of energy, and the smaller they are, the more excited they get. Each dot in Bower's particular batch was exceptionally small, containing only 33 or 34 pairs of atoms.
When you shine a light on quantum dots or apply electricity to them, they react by producing their own light, normally a bright, vibrant color. But when Bowers shined a laser on his batch of dots, something unexpected happened.
"I was surprised when a white glow covered the table," Bowers said. "The quantum dots were supposed to emit blue light, but instead they were giving off a beautiful white glow."
Then Bowers and another student got the idea to stir the dots into polyurethane and coat a blue LED light bulb with the mix. The lumpy bulb wasn't pretty, but it produced white light similar to a regular light bulb.
Indirect light is useful for defining large spaces. I use strings of christmas white lights to light up various areas of the house that needs to be seen but not brightly lit. I run them along the treads of my spiral staircases so the steps are very defined. I don't bother to turn on hall or staircase lights because the smaller lightbulbs outlining the steps or hallways are better because they don't cast shadows all over the place. After all, I don't read books in the stairs!
Already, since my days in the tent complex when we had only one solar panel, I used only the most efficient of bulbs. I have no old fashion lightbulbs. This new potential technology sounds great. I can't wait to paint the entire basement ceilings with this! Wow. Fun.
Companies Post Multibillion Dollar Profits Thanks To Hurricanes
By Elaine Meinel Supkis
Thanks to the hurricanes and oil company-sponsored wars, the price of fuels has shot up to the stratosphere and the oil giants posted record-breaking profits. This isn't top headline news in the media. Congress slashes aid to the poor.
Big Rise in Profit Puts Oil Giants on DefensiveNot exactly a gripping headline. "Big rise" is an understatement here. How about "Gigantic Windfall"?
A sudden interruption in oil supplies sent prices and profits skyrocketing, prompting Exxon's chief executive to call a news conference right after his company announced that it had chalked up record earnings.ExxonMobil spends lots of money advertising in the NYT. So when these robber barons say this money isn't due to the violent winds befalling the Gulf then the Times has to nod yes."I am not embarrassed," he said. "This is no windfall."
Exxon Mobil, the world's largest oil company, said yesterday that its third-quarter net income jumped 75 percent, to $9.92 billion. Its profit in the first nine months of this year - $25.42 billion - already equals its full-year earnings for 2004. This year's sales, which topped $100 billion in the last quarter, are expected to exceed those of Wal-Mart.The Roosevelt family saved the robber barons by preventing them from going all the way, just most of the way. Right now, our rulers are going all the way so we are seeing dead Americans all over the place and will see many more before this train wreck is done. They frankly want this, killing off "excess" population is one of their dreams going way back to the 19th Century. To unlock the mineral, vegetable and animal wealth of America, the vast native population was nearly exterminated. Think they won't do this for gain today? Eh?Another oil giant, Royal Dutch Shell, reported a 68 percent jump in profits yesterday, to $9.03 billion. Chevron is expected to post a profit of more than $4 billion today.
This year is shaping up as an exceptionally lucrative one for the oil industry, thanks to strong global demand, tight supplies and high prices for oil and natural gas. While the idea that the Bush administration was considering imposing a windfall profits tax was knocked down yesterday by officials, longstanding resentments against Big Oil are resurfacing and could end up imposing some additional burdens on the industry.
The vast profits will be used to buy more political power so they can get Congress to cut heating aid, food stamps, housing for the poor, medicine for the disabled, etc, while granting tax cuts and benefits to the world's richest corporations. The ridiculous "Energy Bill" crafted by crafty Cheney was a total give away for the energy giants.
Further, America doesn't need more refineries, we need to control the urge to consume vast quantities of fuel. As a person who uses a car that gets great milage, I resent all those one passenger behemoths hogging the roads and eating up natural resources. CAFE standards left out these classes of vehicles and we knew for years that this was a total disaster and now we are all paying for it.
But this is no reason to not tax the windfall profits of the oil giants! This loot has to be recaptured by the people via taxes. This is what happens when windfalls happen! We could stop running up huge deficits if we tax this profit at 50%. Or better, 80%!
There is no reason oil companies should siphon off all this public wealth and pocket it or be tempted to use it to buy political power. This is unacceptable in a democracy. But then, these same powers own the media, own the transmission of information, they are secure in the knowledge that they can deflect blame to others. Like Saddam, for example.
Time to attack Iran, right?
Abiotic Oil Is Idiotic as Intelligent Design
By Elaine Meinel Supkis
Like the Easter Bunny or Santy Claus, bizarre wishful thinking keeps on trucking. The most recent example of this is the whole "Abiotic Oil" idiocy.
In a dynamic debate regarding the origins of oil, best-selling author of "Black Gold Stranglehold: The Myth of Scarcity and the Politics of Oil," Craig Smith, told CNBC's "Squawk Box" yesterday: "We can get all the oil we need for dozens, if not hundreds of years to come."One can pretend fossil fuels are really magical ooze that just happens to appear and unlike any other form of wet stuff, it burns! Magma burns when volcanoes erupt so the wishful thinking of these people is, why not have oil come the same way? Just bubbling out of the earth, just ignore the carbon chains that is what makes oil burn. These same clowns are the people who ignore 99% of all scientific data about how all us living things are interrelated and evolved over immense time frames. Nope, according to these chidlish minds, we magically appeared suddenly 6,000 years ago and all living things were capriciously created out of nothingness by a busybody god that had fits of irritation.Debating peak oil vs. deep oil perspectives, Smith went head-to-head with Matthew Simmons, author of "Twilight in the Desert" on the cable news outlet's program. Smith, CEO of Swiss America Trading Company, contends that oil is not a fossil fuel. Rather, he believes it is being producing deep within the earth and is brought to attainable depths by centrifugal forces of the earth's rotation. In contrast, Simmons argues that oil is a finite resource and that Saudi Arabian oil supplies are dwindling, putting the world in a possible economic and political crisis.
One can see why people fall for such schemes. Being a responsible resident on planet earth means interacting with nature in a sensible way, not devouring all planetary resources like some giant out of control squid! These fantasies are dangerous for they signal to these people that it is OK to behave irresponsibly. And we are seeing already the beginnings of the Great Die Off, namely, many species including our remaining nearest relatives, the Great Apes, are on the ropes and many just might not make it and become extinct.
"Black Gold Stranglehold" advances the argument that technology and education are needed to increase production and exploration efforts.The real oil that really exists will last for dozens of years if we don't keep abusing it by wasting it, a very unlikely prospect. If we keep sucking it up in greater and greater amounts, no, this won't go on for hundreds of years. Nor dozens, for that matter."The problem is," according to Smith, "if you believe that we are getting oil from decaying dinosaurs and debris from the forests then obviously there's only a finite supply. We don't embrace that. We believe that the earth is creating oil as we speak and that with technological advances and the ability to put human resources together with natural resources, and the wonderful capital markets we have here in America, we can get all the oil we need for dozens, if not hundreds of years to come."
Earth no longer creates the vast amount of undigested organic matter which it made millions of years ago. There are several reasons for this. One is, a younger earth was a much warmer earth and the atmosphere was quite different from today's. There was no grass, for example. Grass evolved after the dinosaurs died off, for the most part. The mammalian era is all about eating or exploiting grass and the biggest feature of this era is the great plains and savannahs which are long stretches of grass that gets eaten! It doesn't form vast mats of organic matter to be crushed by rocks and turned into oil. It is eaten very efficiently by horses and cows and other grazers. Goats and sheep graze to the roots, the larger mammals eat the longer shoots, humans kill forests like mad in order to extend this grass culture for the basis of many diets we eat is from the grass family: sugar, corn, wheat, barely, rice and oats, for example. Even in the jungles,the multilayered community of living things strips all fallen organic matter down to near zero as swiftly as possible. There are areas of peat which are artifacts of glacial melt, namely, when permafrost melts, the locked layers of organic matter heat up and even catch fire. But the peat areas are small in relation to desertifcation, for example. Certainly, it can produce only tiny amounts of oil over millions of years. Certainly nothing to crow about.
Smith and co-author Jerome Corsi's interview last week on "Coast to Coast AM with George Noory," sent "Black Gold Stranglehold" racing up the charts to land at the No. 10 position on Amazon's non-fiction best-seller list. With enormous oil conglomerate profits making headlines, "Black Gold Stranglehold" has opened the dialogue regarding the United States and its need for independence from foreign oil producers.There seems to be a lot of people who want to believe the world is a ball of oil and we don't have to change a thing, all we need to do is wait for all that abiotic oil to erupt to the surface and surprize us. Or perhaps they imagine that all you have to do is poke holes everywhere and gushers will just shoot into the air.
The gist of this article is that the North Atlantic Oscillation which is a form of La Nina, is going to happen this winter and thus, it will be cold...which, by the way, hits home here in NY, too. Grrr. The North Sea Oil rigs are running out of oil very rapidly because the Britsh government and the oil companies decided to pump like crazy this year because of high oil prices. Now that patrimony is gone and there is no abiotic oil coming up these holes, is there? So now they are discussing how to deal with the inevitable deaths that will now occur.
Britain could be left paralysed by energy shortages, a health crisis and gridlock on the roads if the predicted Arctic winter strikes with severity.Prolonged sub-zero temperatures after nearly a decade of mild winters could result in the death of tens of thousands of people, with fears that the National Health Service faces the prospect of a full-blown winter bed shortage for the first time since Labour came to power in 1997.
An extra 8,000 deaths per degree Celsius below normal is the prediction. Quadruple this for US people. Congress, far from passing bills extending heat aid, are cutting everything as much as possible. They are in a fury of cutting programs to the poor for they didn't kill enough of them during the hurricane season, I am guessing. Funny, that.
I still wonder why, when we drilled our well for water, no oil showed up. Not that it would have been good. I need the water. But heck, according to these abiotic people, there is black gold in them thar holes.
Winter Cold Brings Financial Misery To North
By Elaine Meinel Supkis
Winter has only just begun and already many in the middle class are struggling with record high fuel bills. Congress cut fuel aid even as they cut taxes paid by the energy giants. I see a political blizzard in the future here.
The cost of natural gas heat, already high, has risen 50 percent since last year. Home heating oil prices are up 30 percent. What that means for the larger economy will be divined by economists.Those paltry benefits were set ten years ago under Clinton and record cheap energy. Few people needed it and it covered 100% of energy costs for the very poor.A hint of what it portends for the average person, though, is apparent in early indications from offices like Suffolk's.
"We have more people applying for help, and more of them are in a higher income group than we've seen before," said Mark Wolfe, executive director of the National Energy Assistance Directors Association, a group of 50 state directors in charge of administering a federal home energy assistance program that offers one-time-per-winter cash benefits of $100 to $500.
It hasn't been raised since and of course now $500 pays less than a quarter of the costs. The buying frenzy, fueled nearly entirely by cheap loans running for less than the rate of inflation, is dying because credit card companies are nearly all across the board raising rates to 20-30%. This is not cheap money, it is usurous. I suspect last weekend's shopping frenzy was the last gasp, people counting pennies to buy ridiculously cheap luxury items. Now we will all hunker downa and desperately figure out how to survive this winter.
All were applying for help through the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program, or Liheap, though no one was exactly low income. All, as it happened, would be turned away for having incomes that exceeded the strict federal limits - $41,616 for a family of four, or $28,296 for a family of two.These Federal standards are silly since living in high-cost communities means someone on these incomes is really very poor, for example, if rents or taxes on properties are high like in the Northeast.
Elected officials from cold weather states have pushed hard for substantial increases in financing for the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program, which provided about five million people with benefits last winter.Lieberman, a man whose first country of choice is Israel, recently toured Iraq and said our hideously expensive mess there is going just fine. All the Democrats are of divided loyalty, wanting money from various religious or business special interests like the military/industrial complex clowns, and so they support this ruinous war while pretending they are agast we can't muster the money to spend a measly additional $3 billion to keep Americans alive!Those efforts, however, have so far failed to bring an increase from last year's allocation, which was about $2.2 billion. Governors and lawmakers say about $5 billion would be necessary to meet the needs of the six million eligible people expected to apply for aid this year.
A parallel drive to impose a windfall-profits tax on energy companies, which have reported record profits, has also stalled.
The GOP is totally toxic. They make no bones about who they really serve: the Pope in Italy, the Japanese government, and big big business. So they love this ruinous war. I would suggest we levy a 100% profit tax on money above the profit levels of two years ago on the big oil companies! Then we can easily afford to heat Americans this winter.
Like Chavez in Venezuala is offering us. From NPR:
So, record profits for oil companies, on record high oil prices. The Senate defeated a proposed windfall tax on those profits -- a bill that President Bush had threatened to veto such a bill. Time for Mr. Bush's nemesis -- Venezuela's President Hugo Chavez -- to get into the act. Chavez has renewed his offer to send discounted heating oil to America's poor. Venezuela's CITGO Petroleum says it will distribute the cheap oil next week, through community groups in Boston and the Bronx.Can we switch Presidents? We get Chavez and they get Bush? Well, that would be terribly cruel.
How about we ship Bush to Iraq? He can run that place. I remember the right wingers here in America celebrating the attack on oil rich Iraq. "Oil will be cheap," they crowed.
"Never ever, when there is a war, is oil cheap," I cautioned. Well!
America tried to overthrow populist Chavez and replace him with oil toadies owned by our oil companies. This failed spectacularily and we are still reaping the crop from that mess. This is why Bush was viewed as a comedy character in South America. His trade initiatives were thrown back into his face.
Well, we need to rethink our energy systems and our way of living. I live in a solid house with an elegant passive solar energy system that requires little heat thanks to pushing air around from warm parts of the house to the colder parts. Most homes have been built with no regard to the sun, the rain or any elements. We build huge towers that need to gobble up tons of energy to maintain habitability. We ignore nature and think we can burn our way to happiness.
Our gas guzzling has brought this crisis upon our own heads. Now our auto industry is dying, our weather system is raging, note the high winds and violent storms, this month, a record number of tornadoes, heck, just this most recent storm which is about to hit me, the winds are howling already, has killed people with tornadoes and raging fires that run ahead of it, very violent, the isobars at 988 yet again like the previous three tornado laced storms! This is hurricane levels! There is no ocean push so the damage isn't as great as hurricanes, but only barely. Many travelers are trapped by blizzards in the Midwest and it is still only November. I fear this will be a violent winter just like we had a violent summer.
The sun was very active this summer and fall and we are still dealing with the energy it spat at us back then. This is what greenhousing does: it contains solar energy and winds it down via violent storms!
Very Cold, Now Snow Coming, Price of Energy Jumps
By Elaine Meinel Supkis
In Iraq, in China, lowly peasants, people of the land, lowly workers, people without power directly engage in battles with people who want to steal their pitiful belongings, steal their land, steal their resources, steal their culture. This hamfisted violence is causing more and more retaliatory fighting which is threatening the power and control of the planet by the world's biggest empires. And lurking in the background is more potential uprisings, anger about the Hubbert Oil Peak effects.
Despite President Bush's optimism on Iraq's reconstruction, the country appears set to pump less crude in 2005 than last year's disappointing showing and far less than under Saddam Hussein.Great. Because of the stupid war, Iraq pumps less oil but this it OK because the lack of oil means prices can go through the roof so the ever important profit magins of the oil giants is doing just fantastic! The money is literally pouring into their laps! Hoozah!The only bright spot for Iraq's oil sector, hampered by unrelenting insurgent attacks on its infrastructure, is that near-record oil prices have softened the blow by boosting export earnings.
"The general integrity of Iraqi oil infrastructure appears to us to be heading backwards rather than forwards," London-based Barclay's Capital said in a report issued Thursday.
Of course, world oil prices shot up this week because a big nasty blizzard is coming to my house. Hoozah again. I watched the jet stream make a deep detour over California and said, "By Friday, we will be dumped." And sure enough, this southern route storm is going to mess things up just great here. More reason for all those oil buddies of Bush to have a very merry xmas/holiday. They can close their mega churches because Jesus loves them and not us Northeasterners.
Published on Tuesday, November 22, 2005 by the New York Daily NewsI am hoping Santa Cheney will leave me coal for xmas. I will be very naughty and nasty. Braaack. F-you, Cheney, now where is that coal?
Oil For Bronx Poor is a Foreign Gift
Santa Claus, make way for Santa Chavez
by Juan GonzalezPoor residents and nonprofit groups in the South Bronx are about to receive a huge Christmas gift from Venezuela's firebrand President Hugo Chavez: Eight-million gallons of heating oil at bargain-basement prices.
Two months ago, in an interview with the Daily News during his visit to the United Nations, Chavez first made the startling offer of cheap fuel for this winter from his oil-rich country to a handful of poor communities in the United States.At the time, critics of the radical populist Chavez, the Bush administration's biggest nemesis in South America, scoffed at his proposal. But the Venezuelan leader is about to deliver.
"The first shipments of low-cost fuel from CITGO will begin arriving in mydistrict by late next week," U.S. Rep. Jose Serrano (D-South Bronx) said yesterday.
Of course, the energy crisis as we drive up and up the Hubbert Oil Peak, grows greater and greater. In China on a daily basis, the poor men who plunge into those black death-traps die hideous deaths, 100 at a time, even today, more died, they drown, they suffocate, they burn in explosions. Meanwhile, in Iraq, many die too, in explosions and suffocation, torture. As the energy bubble people who desire endless energy murder and stomp on helpless people, we want more, we need more! And the bodies pile up.
The Chairman of the Majlis Energy Commission, Kamal Daneshyar said here, on Friday, that preparatory measures have been taken to sell oil in euros instead of dollar, adding that such a measure is quite positive and should be taken as soon as possible.The Europeans don't want their currency tied to oil any more than the Japanese want the yen tied to the yuan as it rises. Everyone uses currency to play games, not to sustain fair trade! Of all people, America needs everyone to remove the dollars we print and store them either overseas, in bonds that won't be sold ever on the open market or in gold which is shooting up in price as we shovel our inflation overseas.
Speaking to the Persian service of Iranian Students News Agency (ISNA), he went on to say that Iran should at the first phase sell its oil in both Dollar and Euro, and then gradually move toward Euro as the mere source.
As for the probable consequences of such a decision, Daneshyar said that when such a measure is taken, the United States would soon realize that it is not the one who can always inflict economic damages on the Islamic Republic and that Iran can also get even with it.
The price of BTUs continues relentlessly climbing. All BTU forms go up and up. Firewood, coal, pellets, electricity, you name it. The price of killing peasants is going through the roof. The Pentagon made noises today that staying the course will cost us another $100 billion this year. Already, Congress must vote for another $50 billion for this damn war. They cut $50 billion from American welfare/education/health programs and to celebrate this, gave themselves a pay raise which the press barely mentioned and of course this: From the NYT:
The House of Representatives today passed the last and biggest piece of a total of $95 billion in tax cuts, a move that reflects both the ambition of House Republicans leaders and their willingness to let the budget deficit widen in years to come.We are going bankrupt. I see no sanity anywhere in Congress or our other rulers who seem bent on destroying us just as they recklessly cause the deaths of thousands of peasants all over the earth. Speaking of which, unlike the American peasantry who are all in a fog about gays kissing and what to call that pagan wonder, the Tannenbaum, are fighting back in true hand to hand combat. From the Washington Post:The bill passed by a vote of 234 to 197. It extends a long list of tax cuts at a cost of $56 billion over five years. The biggest provision would extend President Bush's 2001 tax cut for stock dividends and capital gains for two years at a cost of $20 billion.
Paramilitary police and anti-riot units here have opened fire with pistols and automatic rifles for the past two nights on rioting farmers and fishermen who have attacked them with gasoline bombs and explosive charges, according to residents of this small coastal village.Peasant unrest, as I keep pointing out, is a healthy sign. Unlike here, when the government seizes property or pollutes or in general, runs riot, people bellyache but they bow to the superior power and quietly retreat. The good people of New Orleans, scattered hither and yon, have driven out FEMA from the destroyed remains of their neighborhoods but this doesn't do a bit of good as FEMA frankly is looking to leave, anyway, and blame them. The rest of America shrugs their shoulders. Tough luck.The sustained volleys of gunfire, unprecedented in a wave of peasant uprisings over the past two years in China, have killed between 10 and 20 villagers and injured more, residents said. The count was uncertain, they said, because a number of villagers have disappeared and it is not known for sure whether they were killed, wounded or driven into hiding.
The tough response by black-clad riot troops and People's Armed Police in camouflage fatigues deviated sharply from previous government tactics against the spreading unrest in Chinese villages and industrial suburbs.
Pure capitalism is raising hell in the Chinese countryside as well as underground. Classically, when these forces team up with the teeming workers in the cities, we get revolutions. Every time. Trust me on this. This is a sign of energetic populations. Meanwhile, Ford and GM announced they are closing many American factories. Merk was made the same announcement today. All over, all I see are announcements of workers with good jobs being kicked to the curb. Yet the media and the lunatics in DC all scream the economy is doing just great, all we have to do is cut more taxes and go shopping more!
Insane. No one can buy a revolution. They just happen. Like a mine explosion. Boom.
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