perfidy

Thanks to the unwinking eye of James at Hell in a Handbasket, I have learned what my nom de net really means:

• Bloodthirsty? I'm a conservative. Check.
• Unholy? I don't know. I'm at least abholy. Check.
• Cheerleader-Kidnapping? Don't tell my wife. Check.
• Explorer-Torturing? Check. Hate the nosy bastards.
• Horror? Sure.
• Enchanted Arcane Dungeon? Well I don't know about all that magical stuff, but my office is cramped and smelly. Check.

[wik] But then I got to thinking. What do some common acronyms really mean?

• CIA Cheerleader-Injuring Abomination
• IRS Injuring Ravager of Spite
• NSA Nightmare Spurred by Anger
• NOAA Nefarious Orphan-Abducting Abomination

Fun for the whole family. 

[wik] The Ministry of Future Perfidy attempted to find the image that was lost to bit rot, but you don't want to see what we found.

Homeland Security Honcho Chertoff has said that he wants to kick out all the wetbacks. Well, he didn't say it that way, that was me paraphrasing. He did say this:

Our goal at DHS (Homeland Security) is to completely eliminate the 'catch and release' enforcement problem, and return every single illegal entrant, no exceptions. It should be possible to achieve significant and measurable progress to this end in less than a year.

Today, a non-Mexican illegal immigrant caught trying to enter the United States across the southwest border has an 80 percent chance of being released immediately because we lack the holding facilities. Through a comprehensive approach, we are moving to end this 'catch and release' style of border enforcement by reengineering our detention and removal process.

Well all right. I have no problem with legal immigration. Within limits, I would actually support raising the number of people legally allowed in this country. I am for lowering requirements for entry from anglophone nations along the lines of Jim Bennet's sojourner concept. But there should be no tolerance of illegal immigration.

I posted a while back on Jerry Pournelle's idea for running a scheme to rid ourselves of illegal immigrants. But that's just one way to do it. Another way to relieve the pressure that led to the catch and release policy is to lower the numbers of people in prison, and use that money. Seeing as over half a million people are in jail for pot possession, that gives us more than a little wiggle room, even if some of those reeferheads actually deserve to be in prison. Decamillions of illegals is just a mockery of the rule of law and good public policy.

Last Saturday in fashionable Old Town Alexandria we had ourselves a blogmeet. I've gotten together with bloggers previously – notably the Cannons games with Rocket Jones but this was the first I guess you could say, official, blogmeet for yours truly. I have noticed – and the participants Saturday amply confirmed this – that bloggers as a whole seem to be awfully nice people. This is a happy conclusion to come to, because if I had discovered that bloggers were rotten, foul and murderous people that would reflect rather poorly on me.

Conversation was scintillating, humorous and chock full of interesting little tidbits of information. Four Widmer Hefeweisens may have colored my perceptions, but it looked like everyone was having a damn good time. In honor of their willingness to be seen in public with someone who goes by the nom de net of "Buckethead," I will now link each and every one of them:

• John of Texas Best Grok, who writes posts about obscure Cold War Era strategic bombers.
• Rob the Llama Butcher makes up amusing conversations between other bloggers
• Mike the Maximum Leader drove hundreds of hours through snow, sleet and Virginia drivers to make the meet. He tells an interesting story of the death of the world's greatest political theorist
• I'd be glad to have a beer with Princess Cat anytime; but I'd have more difficulty explaining to Mrs. Buckethead why I was spending time with a, you know, woman than why I was drinking beers with a graduate student. I mean, that's what graduate students do.
• Matt the blogless wonder doesn't get a bloglink because he's blogless. He fit in remarkably well for someone who doesn't share our particular social problem.
• Dawn isn't anyone to mess with. She's got an appointment. [oh no she di’in’t -ed.]
• I wonder whether this Lysander is modeling himself after this Lysander, or this Lysander.
• Rocket Jones, who knows there's two sides to everything, and especially Pringles.

Thanks to Rocket Jones, for inviting me, and to John for being so important that people are compelled to gather around him, and to all the others for showing up despite knowing that I was going to be there.

And, for those who expressed interest, here is a brand new t-shirt.

I love Civilization. Not just the thousands of years old collection of history, myth, bloodshed, and achievement that surrounds us every day. I mean, everyone should love that. I mean to say that I love Civilization the game, created by Sid Meiers back in the mists of the early computer age. The game that has, through three epochs, sucked months out of my life. And it's now on the verge of yet another life-draining assault with the release of the fourth edition Tuesday next.

As a rule, I do not eagerly await games. The only game in the last five years that I awaited at all was Ghost Recon II. (Which, for the record, bitterly disappointed me by removing everything I thought was cool in the first game and leaving all the schlock.) But today I feel a longing. A physical need to develop deep aches in the center of my back for not moving in hours. A desire to lose myself in a frenzy of virtual creation. A pressure to construct huge armies and smite the French. I feel a yearning to do all this; a yearning to explore with OCD thoroughness all the manifold changes built into the new game. New religions! New Leaders! New Wonders! How do they all fit? What hidden levers can I exploit to win?

And I'll do it no matter how much it pisses off Mrs. Buckethead.

Civ IV is tugging at my soul from its hidden lair in a non-descript suburban warehouse. That itch will grow stronger, more painful, more difficult to ignore over the coming days. Until next Tuesday. Should I even bother going to work? I won't get anything done that day. I'll just be sitting mournfully at my desk, calling my wife every few minutes asking if the package has arrived yet. Maybe I should just stay home and sit out on the porch until it arrives. That way I can be sure that the game won't languish unplayed for hours while I rush home from work. If I go to work, I know that that will be the day they schedule track maintenance for the yellow line. I won't be able to get home, and I'll start gnawing on my fellow commuters from the unbearable frustration.

Yes, maybe I should stay home.

I've put up a small timer in the sidebar to your right. Just so you can share - even if only a little bit – my pain. They say a watched pot never boils. But maybe if enough people watch, it will anyway.

I could call it "Late Summer Lentil Vegetable Medley made with heirloom tomatoes, native leeks, Sugar Snack carrots, and Red Russian Kale" but at the end of the day it's the same goddamn lentils with greens and barley I eat for lunch five days a week anyway.

Good though.

There's been a lot of talk lately about "peak oil" – the idea that we have passed the mid-point in our insatiable quest to rape the Earth of her oil. Having extracted the easy half of the world's oil reserves, getting at the rest will be ever more difficult and expensive. The price of oil will inexorably rise, leading to the collapse of western civilization and forcing the starving and emaciated survivors to survive on a diet of boiled SUV seat leather. Or something.

The above scenario, endorsed with virtual unanimity by all of the professional petroleum geologists employed by the large oil companies, is based on the uncontroversial theory that oil is biogenic; that is, that oil and coal and natural gas are created by a process of heating and cooking of biological material (dead dinosaurs and focuses from previous geological epochs) in the upper layers of the Earth's crust. Given that there is only so much dead T. Rex to go around, there is an inherent and relatively small amount of these fossil fuels to be had.

However, there is another theory. There are some (largely Ukrainians and British astrophysicists) who believe that petroleum is the result of abiogenic processes. Which is to say that oil does not come from T. Rex and the clever velociraptors, but rather from non-biological processes acting on hydrocarbons that were present in the Earth (in stupendous quantities) from the time of the Earth's formation.

The oil company petrochemical experts say bunk to this, and point to the fact that there are biological materials found in oil and coal. That is, in fact, why we call them "fossil fuels." How do you explain that, Mr. Smarty-pants?

Well one of the Smarty-pants on the abiogenic side of the debate is the now deceased Thomas Gold. Gold, originally from Austria, spent most of his lengthy scientific career in Britain, where he worked with Fred Hoyle as one of the proponents of the Steady State theory of cosmology. Now thought to be wrong, no one ever believed that it was stupid – and the contest between the two theories greatly enhanced our understanding of the cosmos. But Gold was right about an uncanny number of things. When the first pulsars were detected, Gold was the first to realize that they must be rapidly rotating neutron stars. Neutron stars had first been theorized in the thirties, but no one had ever detected one. Gold was laughed at, and then proved right.

Gold oversaw the construction of the world's largest radio telescope at Arecibo. When radio sources were first seen through Arecibo, astronomers thought at first that they were merely unusual stars. From the 1950's, Gold insisted that they were galaxies. Again after a long dispute, he was proven right. Starting in the seventies, Gold began looking at the problem of petroleum. He published a controversial paper in 1993 on the The Origin of Methane (and Oil) in the Crust of the Earth. His efforts culminated in the 1999 publication of the book, The Deep Hot Biosphere.

Gold maintains that there is another biosphere, one of bacteria living deep in the earth and feeding on heat and oil found in the depths. The total mass of biological material under the earth would be many, many times greater than of all the life on the surface or the oceans. And as the oil, natural gas and other petroleum seeps up from below through fissures along the fault lines of the Earth's crust, it is fed upon by these bacteria – which are where some of the biological markers found in oil come from. As it gets closer to the surface, it collects in reservoirs. Sedimentary rock form particularly good ones, because of the porous structure of the rock. And that is where the fossils come from. But oil has not only been found in sedimentary rock. And human skulls have been found in coal deposits in Pennsylvania. Gold's theory has coal formation a result of petroleum saturating fossil biological material and "freezing." The age of the substrate is irrelevant – the oil comes from below.

There are several key arguments for the abiogenic theory for the origin of petroleum:

The basics:

• The constituent precursors of petroleum (mainly methane) are commonplace in the solar system and it is likely that they were part of the Earth's makeup from the start, and that appropriate conditions (heat and pressure) exist for hydrocarbons to be formed deep within the Earth. Carbonaceous chondrite meteorites have been found to contain kerogen-like carbon and hydrocarbons, similar to the precursors for the oil we drill. Heated under pressure, this material would release hydrocarbon fluids in addition to creating solid carbon deposits. Further, at least ten bodies in our solar system are known to contain at least traces of hydrocarbons. Kerogen-like material has been detected in interstellar clouds and in dust particles around stars.

  Dr. Gold, from this excellent article:

  Astronomers have been able to find that hydrocarbons, as oil, gas and coal are called, occur on many other planetary bodies. They are a common substance in the universe. You find it in the kind of gas clouds that made systems like our solar system. You find large quantities of hydrocarbons in them. Is it reasonable to think that our little Earth, one of the planets, contains oil and gas for reasons that are all its own and that these other bodies have it because it was built into them when they were born? That question makes a lot of sense. After all, they didn’t have dinosaurs and ferns on Jupiter to produce oil and gas?

• Also, it is now accepted that the formation of the Earth was a "cold" process – a process of accretion that didn't heat up until radioactive materials began to sink to the center under the heat and pressure from the cold surface. This process would not have resulted in outgassing of hydrocarbons and methane from the surface as it would have if the surface had been all molten rock. (That surface likely would have done away with all the water, too.)
• The Second Law of Thermodynamics prohibits spontaneous generation of hydrocarbons heavier than methane at low pressures. Thermodynamic calculations and experimental studies confirm that n-alkanes (common petroleum components) do not spontaneously evolve from methane at pressures typically found in sedimentary basins. There simply isn't enough crushing and squeezing energy at these relatively low depths. The materials we find in petroleum would require far greater pressures – those found below 200 km.
• Hydrocarbon deposits have been found in places that are said to be poorly explained by biogenic theory. In the White Tiger field in Vietnam and many wells in Russia, oil and natural gas are being produced from reservoirs in granite basement rock, below all sedimentary rock. In the Vietnamese case, this rock is believed to have no oil-producing sediments under it, so the biogenic theory requires the oil to have migrated laterally dozens of kilometers along faults from source rock. Experiments in Sweden, deep drilling over five kilometers into shield rock has also revealed oil, and microbes. These microbes live on the hydrocarbons.
• Petroleum deposits are often found close to deep structures in the earth – subduction zones, plate boundaries, and the like. They also are found over meteorite impact structures. In short, the places where faults can reach to the Earth's mantle, and release the primordial crude. Oil is often found in sedimentary basins because sedimentary basins fill and cover – cap – depressions over the deep structures. Sedimentary rocks make good reservoirs that allow hydrocarbons to pool, but prevent them from migrating further upward. (Petroleum also occurs in crystalline basement strata, but most petroleum companies prefer to drill sedimentary basins, either because they are looking for large reservoirs or because they hold with the idea that petroleum would only be formed there from organic debris.)
• Some oil fields are being refilled from deep sources, although this does not rule out a deep biogenic source rock. One instance is Eugene Island in the Gulf of Mexico which "began producing about 15,000 barrels of oil per day in the early 1970s. By 1989, the flow had dwindled to 4,000 barrels per day. Then, suddenly, production zoomed to 13,000 barrels. In addition, estimated reserves rocketed from 60 to 400 million barrels." The age of the oil recovered now is reportedly greatly different from that of only ten years ago.
  

  "The Middle East has more than doubled its reserves in the past 20 years, despite half a century of intense exploitation and relatively few new discoveries. It would take a pretty big pile of dead dinosaurs and prehistoric plants to account for the estimated 660 billion barrels of oil in the region, notes Norman Hyne, a professor at the University of Tulsa in Oklahoma." Off the-wall theories often turn out to be right," he says."

  Gold said, in a Wired interview,

  It becomes accessible by recharging, and the recharging process I think I completely understand. There's a stepwise approximation of the pore pressure to the rock pressure - that will always be the case if the stuff is coming up from below. You will not just fill up one reservoir at the top in the shallow levels. It will always be underlaid by another reservoir, and that in turn by another, and so on for a long way down.

Circumstantial evidence:

• Tiny diamondoids occur in oils and condensates. They have similar structure to regular diamonds, and would probably have the same origin - earth's mantle.
• Helium gas has close association with petroleum. Although some He is primordial, much He gas is from radioactive decay of uranium. Helium gas is associated with light oils, sometimes accompanied by nitrogen that allow petroleum to reach shallow levels in crust. No conceivable biological process would result in helium, a noble gas which plays no part whatsoever in organic chemistry.
• Nickel (Ni),vanadium (V),lead (Pb),arsenic (As),cadmium (Cd),mercury (Hg) and others metals frequently occur in oils. Some heavy crude oils, such as Venezuelan heavy crude have up to 45% in vanadium pentoxide in their ash, high enough that it is a commercial souce for vanadium. These metals are common in earth´s mantle.
• Russian geologist Nikolai Alexandrovitch Kudryavtsev first enunciated the modern abiotic theory of petroleum. He studied the Athabasca Tar Sands in Alberta, Canada and concluded that no "source rocks" could possibly have formed the enormous volume of hydrocarbons. (Source rocks being sedimentary deposits with requisite quantities of dead dinosaurs.) Therefore, abiotic deep petroleum is the only plausible explanation.

J.F. Kenney of Gas Resources Corp. in Houston said there is no real debate about petroleum origination.

There has not been any 'debate' about the origin of hydrocarbons for over a century," he stated. "Competent physicists, chemists, chemical engineers and men knowledgeable of thermodynamics have known that natural petroleum does not evolve from biological material since the last quarter of the 19th century.

Gold Said:

We have two conflicting pieces of evidence. Petroleum contains helium, which the plants cannot have concentrated," he said. "Petroleum also contains purely biological molecules, which petroleum-fed biology deep in the ground could concentrate.

This (upward migration from great depth) is the only explanation I've ever heard of to account for the amount of helium brought up with petroleum.

Gold believes that the amount of oil is hundreds of times greater than the estimates produced by the oil industry's scientists. The Russians are already acting on the theory, and now have many wells producing oil where no western petrochemical engineer would believe it should be. If abiogenic oil exists in the quantities imagined by Gold and the Ukrainians, much of our energy worries are grossly exaggerated. And given the scarcity-driven price of oil, criminally exaggerated.

Ted of Rocket Jones has invited yours truly to a little blog fest in lovely downtown Alexandria. It seems that John of Texas Best Grok is in town for some seedy lawyerly interactions, and suggested getting together for some bloggy goodness. Attendees will include half of the Llama Butchers, Princess Cat of Swift Kick and a Bandaid, The Maximum Leader of Naked Villainy, Ted's spawn Mookie, Dawn of Caterwauling and my own bad self. As Ted said, it sounds like the lineup at a Battle of the Bands at the Council Bluffs, Iowa County Fair. I passed on the word to our resident Canadian Ross, who lives not very far from the bar we'll be infesting - the Union Street Public House, and perhaps he will grace us with his goofy welfare state socialist self. Perhaps others will be there. Perhaps we will acquire groupies. Anything could happen.

Anything.

[wik] If you look at the DC Metro Blog Map, there's another score or more bloggers who probably live within a few miles of the bar, and that's just the ones that bothered to (or knew about) the blog map. How about that.

Or, perhaps more fittingly, "Now that your picture's in the paper being rhythmically admired, you can have anyone that you ever desired."

Protein Wisdom does some Photoshop magic on an old Elvis Costello album cover that really just sort of nails where the President's at right now and makes me feel funny down inside.
 

I realized something today; there's a reason that people in New York and LA think everyone in the middle is crazy. It's because the only time that Beaufort, Montana or Monkeybutt Township, Tennessee makes the news, it's over something really messed up. Flood, famine, fire, bizarre hunting accident, massive KKK rally, or lurid murder plot. Usually the last of those.

Case in point: the place I'm from has made the news exactly once in the past decade, when a woman drowned her kids in a bathtub and maintained that the Lord commanded her to do it. In the past twenty-five years that count bumps to twice, when a budding serial killer was nabbed and identified as a resident. Also, two members of 80s hair-metal also-rans Warrant are from the next town over, so it might just be that I am from a cursed place.

An now my wife's hometown makes its own sad debut on the national stage. The very small, quiet, and lovely river town of Ford City, Pennsylvania is now in the news because some crazy evil woman tried to murder her neighbor and cut her unborn child out of her abdomen to keep as her own. And THIS after pretending to be pregnant right along with her neighbor for eight-odd months. The DA of Armstrong County, Pennsylvania was on the news this AM, and my wife upon seeing him said... "Holy crap... I went to school with his brother!"

And of course, since this story ended up on the national news, the damn fool crazy woman (who of course lives in a double-wide trailer) had to drive her unconscious prey all the way out to Rural Valley to do the baby-extraction part, and then managed to be discovered in flagrante by a kid out tooling around on his four-wheeler. There's a town out there called Rural Valley! Go a little way down 66 and US-422 and you'll also find Oil City, Coaltown, and Distant, Pennsylvania. This area is country.

S. We've got trailers, Rural Valley, a kid on his ATV. and a sensational murder plot that is like stinkbait for the rabid wombats of the national press. That's like some hideous perfect storm of unfortunate stereotypes to make it even easier for the stringers from the AP, Reuters, and CNN to play up (quite unfairly) just how gomerish the place is. Just Ford City's luck that it didn't make the news because the toilet factory opened back up, or for the fine exploits of NFL quarterback Gus Frerotte (who's from the neigboring Kittanning, but that's academic), but because some idiot damn-fool woman thought she could fool the world into thinking that it would be mere coincidence that her neighbor has disappeared and her new baby looks a lot like her.

But all's well that ends without disaster. The victim is alive and in the hospital and the baby is fine, and the crazy lady's husband is shocked and bewildered rather than complicit or room-temperature himself. I just wish for once places like where I'm from would make the news for good reasons. Puppies. Cotton candy. Children getting together and singing in a spirit of love and harmony. Something.

Jesus.

See? This is why I never throw anything away. A late-period Beethoven manuscript from his late-and-stone-deaf period has been discovered in the bottom of a cabinet in Philadelphia. It is a reduction of his Grosse Fugue (originally a string quartet) for two pianos. Although this is a piano reduction and therefore arguably a minor work next to his towering achievements as a non-hearing person, it is still a hugely important find. Beethoven was a merciless reviser and wordy notetaker, so unlike his finished scores which are full of polish, this manuscript in his own hand contains scratch-outs, corrections, emphatic instructions, and even fingerings, thus giving us a rare and precious look into the mind of a genius at work. Check it out.