BMEWS
 
Sarah Palin is the other whom Yoda spoke about.

calendar   Wednesday - September 21, 2011

today’s funnies

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Posted by Drew458   United States  on 09/21/2011 at 01:38 PM   
Filed Under: • Humor •  
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hidden in plain sight

Red perfection.

Like some of the lesser known rules in chess, the Pratchett Rules of Art (used to rationalize your interest while gazing at Three Large Pink Women and One Piece of Gauze apply to pics of naked ladies as well:
1. If there are cherubs in the picture, it’s art
2. If there are Greek urns or amphorae in the picture, it’s art. Gods and religious symbols also make the cut.
3. Same thing goes for settings in an “Arcadian Garden” setting; add a bit of statuary and it’s art.

You don’t need to be one of the gray robed Auditors to no figure out the last one:
4. If you can’t see the details, it’s art.

Either way, I’ll put things under the fold for you cubicle bound surfers.

See More Below The Fold

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Posted by Drew458   United States  on 09/21/2011 at 12:23 PM   
Filed Under: • Miscellaneous •  
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take the fifth, then drink it

Solyndra execs will decline to testify at hearing

What more needs to be said? Follow this link to the tiny news story. Falling on their swords to protect their emperor? Seems like. Guilty, guilty, guilty.


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Posted by Drew458   United States  on 09/21/2011 at 12:01 PM   
Filed Under: • Corruption and GreedObama, The One •  
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calendar   Tuesday - September 20, 2011

Frack You

‘Fracking’ protesters say drilling jobs not worth environmental risks

How would they know even what a job is?



Our way or the highway; the left being intransigent again. Oh no, don’t get the gas that’s MILES down, because it will destroy the water table that’s only a couple hundred FEET down, plus it will set off earthquakes and we’llllll alllll diiiiiiiiiiiiiiieee!!!!!!!!!!!!1111!!!

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Hey, at least now we know who Jeff Dunham modeled Walter on!
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Charlotte Bevins’ long blond hair blows in the wind as she stands amid protesters, her eyes red and puffy from crying. Just four months ago, Bevins’ brother, Charles, lost his life in a drilling accident in central New York. He was 23, a father of two small children.

Gazing at the ground, Bevins tightens her grip on the handles of the baby stroller that cradles her young niece while hundreds of protesters lining the nearby streets wave signs and yell around her.

No fracking way. No fracking way. No fracking way, the crowd chants.

Bevins recently made the trek from West Virginia to Philadelphia, with her mother and her late brother’s son and daughter, to join up with other protesters calling for a moratorium on hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking.”

The “Shale Outrage” rally took place outside a gas industry conference at the city’s convention center this month.

Inside, industry lobbyists and gas company executives were touting the natural gas boom in northeastern Pennsylvania and networking with officials, including Tom Ridge, the former Pennsylvania governor and former U.S. homeland security secretary.

Outside, the angry mob continues to chant and wave signs before marching to Gov. Tom Corbett’s office near City Hall.

Ban fracking now. Ban fracking now. Ban fracking now, the crowd chants.

These 21st century neo-hippies are so lame. Couldn’t they have a proper die-in or something to make their point? It’s funny to read the article and the comments - “we shouldn’t be doing this, we should be investing in alternate energy!” Um, hey dipshit - this IS alternate energy!

Underneath the river basin is the mighty Marcellus Shale, one of the largest natural gas deposits in the nation, found in parts of Kentucky, Maryland, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Virginia and West Virginia.

Fracking opponents received a boost last month when the U.S. Geological Survey estimated that the Marcellus Shale contains about 84 trillion cubic feet of undiscovered, technically recoverable natural gas.

That estimate is far lower than the 410 trillion cubic feet of natural gas published by the U.S. Energy Information Administration in July.

The discrepancy has reportedly triggered an investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission into whether shale gas companies are overstating their gas reserves.

Hey SEC - who made the report, industry or the government? Government!! Could it be that their green sissies downplayed the numbers on purpose? Or could it be that they moved the goalposts significantly on what “recoverable” really means? Maybe you should figure that out first, and STFU in the meantime.


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Posted by Drew458   United States  on 09/20/2011 at 03:31 PM   
Filed Under: • Democrats-Liberals-Moonbat Leftists •  
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Model Math-o-Magic



Does image + image = image



Just wondering. Not biologically of course, though the faces of the last two look quite similar to me. CBullit has more info on this subject, plus puppies.


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Posted by Drew458   United States  on 09/20/2011 at 03:19 PM   
Filed Under: • Eye-Candy •  
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Rouge Mardi

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Part-time redhead, full-time actress, singer, model, and famous French newlywed Josephine de la Baume - Ronson.


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Posted by Drew458   United States  on 09/20/2011 at 10:48 AM   
Filed Under: • Eye-CandyFRANCE •  
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calendar   Monday - September 19, 2011

Today’s Chess Problem 9/19/11

My last chess problem post got a little interesting in the comments:

Chris, a little post on how the nomenclature works would benefit everyone. It’s shorthand notation, and very terse ... I find it a bit irritating because I don’t fully understand it, and I also am not happy “leaving out the final moves as an academic exercise” even when they are blatantly obvious. I’m not much of a player so that seems wrong to me somehow.

Valid points. Here’s a Wikipedia entry on algebraic chess notation.

I even found that entry a bit ‘terse’. Here’s another article, which you can download as a pdf file.

And I will make an effort to ‘play out the final moves’… even if they are, to me, obvious. I’m just used to that. Most problem books quit after a move or two because they assume if you are reading them, you’re able to find the ‘obvious’ final moves. I guess the best way to illustrate that would be to post some of MY best games. I can at least explain how I was thinking, and why my opponent resigned/accepted the draw, or why I resigned/accepted the draw.

An example is today’s problem. Yes, queen takes knight wins the game, but it isn’t ‘all over’ when that occurs. Black rook at d7 then takes white queen at c7, white rook at d1 takes black rook at d8 for another check, black rook at c7 moves to c8 to block, and then white rook at c1 takes black rook at c8 for the mate. If it goes any other way (queen takes knight, rook takes queen, then white rook at c1 takes black rook at c7) then black can not only escape but win!

Let me address that while showing the solution to the last problem.

1. Qxc7+ Rxc7
Now, if

queen takes knight, rook takes queen, then white rook at c1 takes black rook at c7

well, guess this is one of those ‘obvious’ moves. If:

1. Qxc7+ Rxc7
2. Rxc7?? Rxd1+ and Black is winning.
3. Bf1 (only move) Kxc7
Black is up Q and R vs. B. And it’s all forced.

Now, ‘obviously’, White didn’t even look at such a losing move when sacrificing the Queen on c7.

Back to the solution to the last problem.

1. Qx7+ Rxc7
2. Rxd8+ Rc8 (forced!)
3. R (either White R) xc8 mate

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Today’s Problem:

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1. ?

That’s chess notation for White to move. If it was Black to move it would be 1. … ?

So this one is White to move and win. Black’s back rank is weak.


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Posted by Christopher   United States  on 09/19/2011 at 07:18 PM   
Filed Under: • CHESS •  
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1000 Oak Trees Later

Drew once again finds himself snared by the infinity of the internet. Looking around for UK stories to post, yesterday I ran across a ran across a link to the great explosion of the River Fleet in London. While that in itself was quite interesting - the Fleet (as in Fleet Street, which is right on top of it) was a short river that carried barge traffic a short distance to the mills back in Roman times, when the city was Londinium; it later became an area where the butchers and tanners worked and their waste quickly polluted the river, centuries went by and the stench became so awful that the river was covered over and then the city grew right over it, but it continued to be used as a sewer (Via Cloaca for all you Pratchett fans) and at some point in the 19th century the fumes really built up, somebody dropped a match by accident, and BOOM! The river is still there, underground, wrapped in a massive network of brick tunnels, and you can tour it if you are very brave: it’s still a tidal river, so twice a day the tunnels fill right up to the top. Don’t dawdle or you’ll drown! - I found a great bunch of photos on it at Planet Oddity and another photo essay somewhere else, but when I looked things up at Google I found myself over at a wonderful blog called The Web History of England.

Unloved, smelly, and in the way, the Fleet started to be covered over.  In 1733, the part from Fleet Bridge to Holborn Bridge was covered over, and in 1739, the stretch from Holborn to Ludgate Circus was covered over, and the Fleet Market and the Mansion House built over it.

When the Regent’s Canal was constructed in 1810 – 1815, the Fleet was buried northwards, to Camden Town, and by 1880 the whole river, apart from the few hundred yards from the source springs, was underground in pipes, conduits and the New Canal bed.

In 1846, a build up of sewage and associated gasses caused a massive explosion, and the pipes near King’s Cross blew up, sending a tidal wave of sewage through the streets, demolishing buildings, flooding houses, and ramming a boat on the Thames, near the mouth of the Fleet, into Blackfriars Bridge.

Talk about a shitstorm!

Interesting, neato, but not really much to blog about. So I took a look around tWHoE and I found myself hooked by a short post on a couple of old barns in Essex.  This is the barley barn and the wheat barn at Cressing Temple, just outside of Braintree in Essex:

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By modern standards these are not huge buildings, but in their day they had to have been enormous. The barley barn is 118 feet long by 45 feet wide, and it looks to be at least 3 stories tall. It used to be somewhat bigger. The wheat barn is a bit larger, at 130 x 39. By American standards both these barns are beyond ancient. By English standards they are still “somewhat elderly”.

How elderly?

They were built by the Knights Templar. In the early to mid Middle Ages. From about 1000 oak trees.

Holy cow.

Toldja I was hooked. And it gets better. These are the two largest fully wooden old buildings in Europe, and the oldest wooden barns on earth. Not a nail, a screw, a bit of rebar or a squirt of glue in them anywhere. And they were pretty much hewn with axes; their construction in the years 1210 - 1270 predates the re-introduction of the saw in Western Europe. The 14,000 acres of land they are on was given to the Knights, who worked them as a commercial farm; profits from their farming funded the Crusades. These barns helped bring the war to islam.

Cressing Temple was given to the Templars in 1137 by Matilda [Matilda of Boulogne], wife of King Stephen, not the rival claimant to the throne, the Empress Matilda. Two great barns were built by the Templars at Cressing. The first is now called the Barley Barn, and is thought to have been built some time around 1210 A.D. The Wheat Barn was built in about 1260 to 1270 A.D. It is built directly on top of a Bronze Age settlement.

The Barley Barn is an immense structure built from oak, and was made from an estimated 480 oak trees. Tree science, dendrochronology, has dated the felling of these trees from between 1205 and 1235. The Barn was originally larger even than it is today, but it seems to have been repaired later and made smaller at that time. It now measures about 36 metres long by 13½ metres wide. Although it’s been repaired over the years, the original structure of the Barn still holds it up today. The arcade posts and main ties are the ones built by theTemplars. The Barley Barn at Cressing is the oldest timber framed barn still in existence in the world.

The Wheat Barn is larger, 40 metres long and 12½ metres wide. It was built from 472 different oak trees, and there are identical trusses with braces meeting at a scissor above the collars.

Cressing Temple is open to the public and is host to many conferences and events throughout the year.

Cressing was the largest and most important of the Templar Knights landholdings in Essex. Such an estate would have been in the charge of a preceptor accompanied by two or three resident knights or sergeant-at-arms, together with a chaplain, a bailiff and numerous household servants. The estate would have employed agricultural labourers and craftsmen and thus functioned as a large estate farmed for profit to help the Order pay for the war effort in the Holy Land.

We know relatively little about the Templar buildings on site as only the two great barns and the stone well survive. The inventory of 1313 gives the clearest picture of the buildings. This mentions a chapel, two chambers, a hall, a pantry, a buttery, a kitchen, a larder, a bakehouse, a brewhouse, a dairy, a granary and a smithy.

The barns appear large and dominating in the landscape when viewed externally but stepping inside is an awesome experience. The open space inside is huge and the roof and wall timbers are a magnificent sight.

Hooked me again! How huge? This huge:

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The Royal Philharmonic Orchestra playing in one end of the Wheat Barn

while a crowd of 420 sit inside to watch the performance

How magnificent? There are tens of thousands of photographs all over the internet showing the wood working that supports the roofs of these two buildings. It isn’t fancy. They were just barns after all. But it’s all pretty amazing still, and to my delight ( and digital entrapment ) I learned that the two barns are an absolute treasure trove of knowledge for architects and other students of the arch and the wooden truss. Damn, hooked yet again; scissors, braces, corbels, cruck truss, king truss, queen truss, hammerbeam truss, and the one that took me the most time to learn, which was original to the barley barn but taken away during a roof rebuild some centuries later, the pass through truss.

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use of inverted king truss in the barley barn

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special visitor’s platform just so you can see the joinery up close

one of the beams is 44 long, and the rafters are tapered

All of this sent me down an endless corridor to learn all about various trusses and the challenges of post-Norman building. It was great. The older barn was built one way, but by the time a few decades had passed and the newer barn was built, the knowledge of how to build a sturdy roof has taken a nearly exponential step forward. Actually, the first barn was almost a Fail; it’s pass through truss design put too much lateral stress on the brick foundations, which started to fall over. A few quick buttresses saved the day, and it’s been standing ever since. SeeBuilder Bill’s site for a photo, and read all about the various trusses there as well.

I’m going to cut this post off here, though I’d be happy to write a ton more about trusses, walls, and ancient building methods. Instead I’ll give you a bunch of links, and leave off with a bit that will make Peiper happy if he ever reads this post: the hammerbeam truss, a design which holds up Westminster Hall and keeps the roof above Parliament’s heads, was a quantum leap forward in knowledge, and was not surpassed until the iron girder came about in the 19th century. The oldest example of a hammerbeam truss is in the Pilgrim’s Hall on Cheyney Court, a 1308 building mere feet from the Kingsgate in Winchester, and we all know that the King’s gate is underneath St. Swithun’s church, because Peiper wrote about it 2 years ago. I wonder if he knew about Pilgrim Hall? Winchester packs so darn much history into every square foot, it’s hard to tell. St. Swithun’s is just a few years younger than the Wheat Barn.

http://www.vag.org.uk/VAarticles/earlyaisledbuildings.htm (see all 3 parts)
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/66/Hammerbeam_Roof%2C_Stirling_Castle.jpg
http://www.medievalarchitecture.net/images/HampshireBuildings/CressingTemple/photos/previews/Cressing_Temple_Barns0034.jpg
http://www.medievalarchitecture.net/images/HampshireBuildings/CressingTemple/photos/previews/Cressing_Temple_Barns0019.jpg

http://www.destinations-uk.com/articles.php?link=articles&country=wales&id=374&articletitle=Cressing%20Temple,%20Essex
http://www.builderbill-diy-help.com/hammer-beam-truss.html
http://www.builderbill-diy-help.com/eltham-palace-roof.html
http://www.builderbill-diy-help.com/cruck-truss.html
http://www.brentwoodit.plus.com/cgb/otherbarns.htm



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The pass through truss at Cressing Temple. Note the tapered rafters.


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Posted by Drew458   United States  on 09/19/2011 at 02:32 PM   
Filed Under: • ArchitectureUK •  
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Teach Your Children Well

9/11 Coloring Book

an introduction to history for small children, or a lever to teach hatred and prejudice?





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We Shall Never Forget 9/11: The Kids Book of Freedom is a coloring book about the tragic events of 9/11 2001, featuring pictures of the burning World Trade Center towers and the execution of Osama bin Laden.

Although Wayne Bell, publisher of Really Big Coloring Books Inc., in Saint Louis, says the book was never meant to be controversial, and that it’s simply based on market research, on what people are looking for, the fact that it contains scenes like Osama bin Laden being shot by a Navy SEAL has sparked some controversy. Bell goes on to describe the coloring book as “a simplistic honest tool” to “educate children on events on 9/11″, but do kids who still like to color need to see scenes of mourning, burning buildings, and the execution of a Muslim man portrayed as hiding behind his veiled wife?





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The entire first printing run has sold out, but more copies are on the way. At least I hope so.. I see that a pack of 10 of them is for sale on eBay.

The original book We Shall Never Forget 9/11 - The Kids Book of Freedom, will completely sell out soon and is no longer available at wholesale pricing. We Shall Never Forget is the fastest selling book in our company history; traveling to 157 countries, YES, 157 countries, via email, download or regular mail in less than three weeks. Once these last few original copies sell out, this book will no longer be available from the Publisher, Really Big Coloring Books, Inc. Thank you to all.

To the American people and all others who may read this child’s coloring book, We Shall Never Forget is designed (8.5” x 11”, 36 pages.) to be a tool that parents can use to help teach children about the facts surrounding 9/11. This book also describes basic freedoms in America. We suggest parental guidance. As the 9/11 events are shown countless times on national media, this book will help children understand the meaning of these events. The book was created with honesty, integrity, reverence, respect and does not shy away from the truth.In this book you will see what happens to a terrorist who orders others to bomb our peace loving wonderful nation.

The September 11, 2001 attacks on America are now commonly referred to as 9/11. It was a series of coordinated attacks by a radical Islamic Muslim extremist terrorist group who call themselves Al Qaeda. They were self-proclaimed Jihadists; many American people refer to them as homicide bombers. Their leader was a Saudi national named Osama Bin Laden. He and his men used hijacked U.S. airplanes as weapons.

OTOH ...

Believing that the upcoming 10th anniversary of Sept. 11 is best memorialized in crayon, Really Big Coloring Books, Inc. is publishing a new coloring book entitled “We Shall Never Forget 9/11: The Kids’ Book of Freedom.” In offering kids the option of coloring the Twin Towers burning, mourning survivors, or the Navy SEALs shooting Osama Bin Laden, publisher Wayne Bell insists that “the doodles represent patriotism,” a “simplistic, honest tool” to “help educate children on events on 9/11.” But many Muslims describe it as, in a word, “disgusting.”

Fun With Killing Bin Laden: Coloring books are meant to inspire children’s creativity, but the new “We Shall Never Forget 9/11: The Kids’ Book of Freedom” channels that impulse in a shocking direction. Published by Really Big Coloring Book Inc. and intended as a “learning tool” to help teachers explain the terrorist attacks, the book features a page showing a SEAL firing a bullet straight at Bin Laden, who is shown (inaccurately, as it turns out) using a woman as a human shield — more or less challenging tot artists to fill in their own splatter and gore. Publisher Wayne Bell defends the page as being “mild compared to the graphic video games children play,” but since when is a coloring book judged by those standards? [Chicago Tribune]

Not really mentioned in the few reviews and news stories that covered this is that the author added a fair amount of text to the book. So it isn’t just for those kids too young to read, unless the text is there for the parents to help tell the story?

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Posted by Drew458   United States  on 09/19/2011 at 08:17 AM   
Filed Under: • HistoryRoPMAWar On Terror •  
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calendar   Sunday - September 18, 2011

nyuk nyuk nyuk

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via Fat Kid At Camp


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Posted by Drew458   United States  on 09/18/2011 at 09:29 PM   
Filed Under: • Humor •  
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calendar   Saturday - September 17, 2011

Pebble East, Pebble West, Does The EPA Know Best?

Pebble Mine Alaska: The Wealth Of Nations

EPA shenanigans driven by WA Senator could freeze mining of largest copper and gold deposit on earth

Fears that mine waste will destroy salmon watershed

A State’s Rights Issue?

AK to WA: Butt Out!?





Ok, this is a tough one.

One the one hand we’ve got an “almost” mine where investors have already spent hundreds of millions of dollars exploring the strata, and have found themselves on top of two of the largest copper, gold, molybdenum, silver, rhenium, palladium, and porphyry deposits on the planet. We’re talking billions of tons here. Billions. Of tons. 50 million ounces of gold, perhaps more. All proven. No conjecture. Mining jobs for 100 years. And I’m calling it an “almost” mine because it’s not really working yet, nearly 20 years after the deposits were first found. It’s taken that long to go through the beauracratic process. And it might suddenly get worse if Washington Senator Maria Cantor has her way.

On the other hand we have some fish. No, I don’t mean that sarcastically, like the Snail Darter that caused so much Endangered Species fuss some years ago. I mean fish, as in, a large part of the entire Alaskan salmon industry.

See, the Pebble Mine is on watershed land up behind Bristol Bay, which is where all the salmon swim through when it’s breeding time. And the rock that would be mined is called chalcopyrite - a porphyritic granodiorite mineral that is gold, copper, iron, and sulfide all bonded together. Add water and it turns into sulfuric acid, and the minerals drop out. Oh, and the area is seismically active, like most of Alaska. So we’re talking about a two mine approach, both of gargantuan size: an open pit mine that could be 2 miles across, and a deep shaft mine that could swiss-cheese the underground strata for miles in every direction. And to get billions of tons of minerals, that means hundreds of billions of tons of waste rock. Mine tailings. Acidified muck in giant, giant piles. Giant lakes full of toxic runoff behind earthen dams ... just waiting for the next earthquake. But let’s not mislead ourselves: though headwaters they may be, they are many miles back from the bay itself. Dozens of mile I think. 15 at least. Sorry, I’m new to this topic, and I’m suffering a bit of information overload. But the mine area is not right on the bay. It’s back in the hills. Still, the salmon swim some distance upriver to spawn, right?

Can a giant mine be run without destroying a fragile environment? Is the environment all that fragile anyway? And of course, there’s the Indigenous Native Angle, who have lived off of the salmon for centuries and feel some kind of spiritual bond with them. Not to mention the whole salmon fishing, canning, sport fishing, and state licensing industries that swim right along with them. What you’d call seriously vested interests. And let’s not forget that whole Alaskan Beneficiaries thing; I gather that the state wealth is shared out to the population, and everybody gets an annual check from the oil and gas industries. I don’t know if that concept applies to mining.

I told ya, it’s a tough one. And it gets worse.

First, a little tiny bit of background, because the scope of this thing is just so damn huge I have to paste some data on it:

In recent years, however, another potential source of immense wealth has emerged around Bristol Bay. At the headwaters of two drainages that flow into the bay, beneath lands owned by the state of Alaska, a company named Northern Dynasty Minerals has discovered a gargantuan mineral deposit. The granitic rocks hidden beneath an otherwise ordinary upland basin and rounded foothills contain riches beyond anything ever discovered in North America – and possibly the world.

The find is known as Pebble Mine, and, with its full extent yet to be determined, officials estimate that it contains 67 billion pounds of extractable copper, 82 million ounces of gold, and 4 billion pounds of molybdenum. At current prices [as of 2008], the mine’s metals are worth $345 billion to $500 billion.

Seeing how much copper has gone up in the past few years, I’d put those numbers at $750 billion or more today. And those numbers may have been before the Pebble East deep continuation was even found, and it may be just as large as the western part. So we could be looking at a trillion. Maybe more.
Years worth of exploratory drilling has shown that the recoverable deposits go down 1700 meters - more than a mile deep.

The salmon side is also quite large, in it’s own way:

Bristol Bay is home to some of the largest runs of salmon in the world, all five Pacific species spawn in the bay’s freshwater tributaries. Commercial fisheries include the world’s largest sockeye salmon fishery, which along with herring and other fisheries, account for nearly 75% of local jobs

Sport fishing is also an important part of the area’s industry. There are many lodges catering to sport fishermen exploiting the tremendous salmon and trout populations in the freshwater tributaries. Freshwater species include humpback whitefish (Coregonus Pidschian), Dolly Varden trout (Salvelinus Malma), and Rainbow trout (Oncorhynchus mykiss).

Not only the commercial and sport fish harvest is important: seasonal subsistence harvesting of salmon and year-round subsistence harvesting of freshwater fish is a critical part of life for rural residents of the Bristol Bay region, most of whom live downstream of the Pebble site.

If fully developed, the roads and other infrastructure for Pebble mine would cross - and perhaps impact - nearly two dozen of these spawning streams.

The place was first discovered in 1986, because the ore beds go right up to the surface and can be seen from airplanes. A few years worth of investigation were done, then folks took a decade off. Money problems I’d bet. Since about 2001 another company has come in and has been doing all sorts of exploration, planning, environmental studies, and filling out government forms. For a decade. Meanwhile, it’s been something for the folks in Alaska to fight about, in case hockey and dog sled racing get boring. In that Big Empty land of ice and cold, this one is a hot potato that never cools off.

just a few links - you can Google up hundreds more with ease:
http://e360.yale.edu/content/feature.msp?id=2062
http://www.alaskadispatch.com/article/pebble-no-mine-alaskas-ever-seen (this one describes the rocks as acidic, yet Wikipedia tells me they are alkaline. I’m no geologist)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pebble_Mine
http://www.pebbleminealaska.com/
http://dnr.alaska.gov/mlw/mining/largemine/pebble/



And now we get to the story that reader Beth wrote me about, from her work at resourceful earth news, a pro industry blog from what I can tell. Well, at least the place doesn’t seem to ooze self-righteous Greenie Sap like a Sierra Club meeting.

Hi,

We need your help in stopping a critical assault on the environmental review process. We cannot overstate the importance of making people aware of this behind-the-scenes attack.

U.S. Senator Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.) recently wrote a letter to the EPA urging the agency to halt the Pebble Mine Project in Alaska. The Alaskan copper and gold mine project has been in limbo for more than three years – with $120 million spent to research how to have minimal impact on the surrounding environment near Bristol Bay. Once it has been officially proposed, the Pebble site will have to go through 67 federal, state, and local agencies for approvals and permits. If this isn’t stringent enough, I don’t know what is.

Now, Cantwell won’t even let the process work. She is changing the game altogether by moving to preempt the environmental review process the EPA put in place. The consequences couldn’t be more serious if Cantwell succeeds in her efforts. If she succeeds, *ANY Natural Resource Extraction in the United States will not be safe from the EPA and radical environmentalists.*

As Alaskan Senator Lisa Murkowski wrote, a preemptive veto of the Pebble Mine project will expand the powers of the EPA and “could have widespread and unintended consequences for any development project, including airports and other infrastructure.”

Cantwell’s actions make a mockery of the federal environmental review process and leave Americans even more dependent on foreign sources to meet our needs for natural resources and energy. More American jobs will be lost and it will be another blow to our already shaky economy.

I think the implication is that, having followed all the rules to the letter, crossed all the Ts and dotted all the Is, the mine was set to proceed, so in desperation it was time for the Gaia Squad to pull a fast one out of their bag of dirty tricks.

ANCHORAGE, Alaska — Washington Sen. Maria Cantwell said Monday she would oppose a proposed huge copper and gold mine near Alaska’s Bristol Bay if studies find it would harm salmon and thus put jobs in her own state at risk.

In a letter sent to EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson, Cantwell described Bristol Bay’s salmon population as an economic lynchpin for commercial fishermen both in Alaska and Washington. Nearly 1,000 Washington residents hold Bristol Bay commercial fishing licenses, she said.

“Thousands of my constituents have contacted me expressing their concerns regarding the potentially catastrophic and widespread long-term impacts of the proposed Pebble Mine, which would be the world’s largest man-made excavation,” Cantwell said in her letter.

Cantwell called on the Environmental Protection Agency to consider using the Clean Water Act to prohibit or restrict large-scale development around the bay if it would harm the world-class salmon-producing rivers in the region. She also expressed her support of the agency’s decision to conduct a thorough analysis of large-scale mining near the Pebble Mine project site.

Mike Heatwole, a spokesman for the Pebble Limited Partnership, told The Associated Press the senator never sought any information from the companies involved about the project or the scope of its environmental studies.

In addition to commercial fishing jobs, nearly all major seafood operations that process Bristol Bay fish are based in Washington. Cantwell’s letter said Bristol Bay commercial and recreational fisheries are worth at least $500 million annually.

The EPA announced in February that it would analyze the potential impact of the Pebble mine proposal on watersheds feeding Bristol Bay.

The Bristol Bay Native Corp. and nine federally recognized Bristol Bay Alaska native tribes have asked the EPA to use its authority under the Clean Water Act to stop the mine from being developed. The analysis is expected to be released this fall.

WASHINGTON, D.C. – U.S. Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, today released the following statement in response to a news report that Washington Democratic Sen. Maria Cantwell may seek a preemptive veto from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) of the proposed Pebble Mine:

“Attempts to prejudge development in the Bristol Bay area before a permit application has even been submitted would make a mockery out of the federal environmental review process. A preemptive veto makes no more sense than a preemptive approval.

“I am fully committed to protecting Bristol Bay and the fishing industry it supports, but a preemptive veto represents a serious violation of Alaska’s state’s rights and would undermine the science-based approach long promised by this administration.

“When and if a permit application is submitted – for Pebble or any other project – an independent scientific review is exactly what happens under the environmental review process that NEPA provides,” Murkowski said.

On Feb. 7, in response to being petitioned to preemptively veto development, EPA announced plans to conduct a watershed assessment of the Bristol Bay area in Alaska. In response, Murkowski sent a letter to EPA, and recently toured the Pebble site with EPA Region 10 Administrator Dennis McLaren. During that visit, Murkowski pointed out that the wetlands throughout the Bristol Bay region are similar in character, and a preemptive veto could have widespread and unintended consequences for any development project, including airports and other infrastructure.

Today, Murkowski once again stipulated her support for the normal environmental review process and her opposition to EPA attempts to expand its authorities to include preemptive vetoes of development.

Murkowski is the Ranking Member on the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee and the Senate Appropriations Committee’s Interior, Environment, and Related Agencies Subcommittee.

Right now the USA imports 97% of it’s copper from China. China also has a headlock on the “rare earth” minerals like rhenium and palladium. Attempts to re-open the rare earth mines in the California Rockies have so far not been successful. How is America going to become resource independent if we can’t be allowed to utilize our own resources?

Please read Beth’s post on the Pebble Mine situation. She wants people to get involved and put some “drill here drill now” pressure on the dear Senator. And her post has more info on Pebble, some neat videos, and a bit of dirt she dug up (hur hur hur) on her. Actually, the whole blog looks like a pretty good resource to me.

Can such a mine be made and not kill all the nice fish? I bet it can. Can we afford to let yet another vast national resource lie dormant forever? I bet we can’t.

Oh, and just so you know: there is a green movement afoot that is pressuring Obama and his power mad EPA to stop ALL mining in the entire country. ALL OF IT. Coal, oil, copper, iron, trap rock, you name it. It’s bad for the environment you know. And you know what? Their tactics are EXACTLY the same ones used by Washington State Senator Cantwell.

Environmentalists love the moras of federal regulation and rulemaking as they can almost always find one rule or law that contradicts another, thereby opening a means to sue. And if, by chance, the government does actually clarify contradictory rules the environmentalist merely attempt to move the goal posts.

That’s the tactic employed by Earthworks, an environmental Non-Government Organization (NGO). The group has been running a national campaign this week aimed at pressuring the EPA to provide additional federal regulations to close what they’ve deemed “loopholes” in the Clean Water Act. Their website claims that the bill as it stands now is confusing and allows American mining companies to “dump their toxic mining waste directly into our waters!”

They’ve selected the language “closing loopholes,” but the truth is that Earthworks and its supporters are looking to add layers of federal regulations to the Clean Water Act so that it is nearly impossible for the mining industry to function in the U.S. The fact that such a move would cripple American jobs and stall economic growth isn’t an issue for Earthworks.

Gosh, follow the rules to bring your product or service to market and still find yourself damned? That sounds a whole lot like the attitude the left had towards the gun companies during the AWB days. Because, gosh, the new government rules were supposed to SHUT DOWN that whole manufacturing industry, weren’t they? Crivens, what a bunch of one trick ponies. SSDD, forever.


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Posted by Drew458   United States  on 09/17/2011 at 08:02 PM   
Filed Under: • Democrats-Liberals-Moonbat LeftistsEconomicsEnvironment •  
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Yeah, what he said

“Political correctness is the sullen revenge of the spiteful, intolerant, and ill-willed dunce upon all the liveliness in this world. It is no more than the humorlessly insincere resort of minds so mediocre that, for them, a revival of Stalinism is preferable to the pain of a glimpse of self - it is the last sigh of the beast that Nietzsche identified as res-sentiment.”

Martin Seymour-Smith, author of The 100 Most Influential Books Ever Written: The History of Thought From Ancient Times to Today


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Posted by Drew458   United States  on 09/17/2011 at 05:48 PM   
Filed Under: • Politically-Incorrect •  
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Must … Resist … Temptation

Chinese female condoms too small for South Africans



JOHANNESBURG — A South African court has blocked the government from buying 11 million female condoms from China, saying they are too small, a newspaper reported Friday.

The finance ministry had awarded a contract to a firm called Siqamba Medical, which planned to buy the Phoenurse condoms from China, the Beeld newspaper said.

A rival firm, Sekunjalo Investments Corporation, turned to the High Court in Pretoria after losing the bid, arguing that their condoms were 20 percent larger than the Chinese ones.

Judge Sulet Potterill blocked the deal with Siqamba, ruling that the female condoms were too small, made from the wrong material, and were not approved by the World Health Organisation, the paper said.

South Africa has more HIV infections than any country in the world, with 5.38 million of its 50 million people carrying the virus.


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Posted by Drew458   United States  on 09/17/2011 at 11:52 AM   
Filed Under: • Africa •  
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What WMDs?

If we had delayed even a couple of months, until Saddam actually had his deadly pathogens and gas weapons, it would have meant the deaths of tens of thousands of American soldiers. And if those weapons had found their way into terrorist hands, it would have doomed millions. But did Saddam have these kinds of connections? Was he a global terror threat akin to al-Qaeda? The common wisdom says no. The common wisdom is wrong.

When American tanks smashed into Baghdad, Saddam had already completed construction of an anthrax production facility, which was a week away from going live. If it had been permitted to go into production, this one facility could have produced ten tons of weaponized anthrax a year.

Dual-use, mobile bio labs, hundreds of suicide bombers in training, direct links to dozens of terrorist groups throughout the Middle East and major funding to them, operatives kitted up and ready to attack in a dozen countries, half a thousand tons of yellowcake, a 40 fold increase in WMD spending ... the list goes on and on. Saddam Hussein was on the very, very cusp of the vertical part of the logarithmic curve of WMD growth when the USA invaded in March 2003. Another month’s delay would have given him enough poison to kill tens of thousands of our soldiers. Another year and he could have wiped out half the world. That was why we were “rushing to war” Senator Kennedy.

According to documents discovered after the war, by 1997 the number of university “instructors” doing solely WMD work numbered 3,300, with another 700 to 800 dispatched to WMD-related facilities to help with technical problems. Between 1996 and 2002 — the eve of the invasion — spending on WMD projects increased 40-fold, and the number of specific projects increased from 40 to 3,200. Top officials captured after the collapse of the regime repeatedly told investigators that Saddam’s WMD projects were in overdrive and ready to go into production the moment sanctions were lifted.

You mean those horrible sanctions that the evil USA was using to starve poor but happy kite flying Iraqi children? The sanctions the Democrats wanted lifted? The sanctions the whole Oil For Food scandal was doing an end run around anyway? (hey, whatever happened with Oil For Food? Why wasn’t France fined a hundred zillion for that? Did anybody anywhere get into any actual real trouble?)

A good analogy for the links between Saddam and bin Laden is the Cali and Medellín drug cartels. Both drug cartels (actually loose collections of families and criminal gangs) were serious national-security concerns to the United States. The two cartels competed for a share of the illegal drug market. However, neither cartel was reluctant to cooperate with the other when it came to the pursuit of a common objective — expanding and facilitating their illicit trade. The well-publicized and violent rise of the Medellín cartel temporarily obscured and overshadowed the rise of, and threat posed by, the Cali cartel, in the same way that 9/11 camouflaged the terror threat posed by Saddam. In reality Saddam and bin Laden were operating parallel terror networks aimed at the United States. Bin Laden just has the distinction of having made the first horrendous attack.

Given the evidence, it appears that we removed Saddam’s regime not a moment too soon.

And all of this is in the Duelfer Report, the document that the media claims proved there were NO WMDs in Iraq ... because they never even bothered to read past the first page’s Executive Summary.

And let’s not ignore the other salient facts: the pre-invasion inspectors were played like a violin, the post-invasion inspectors were often under fire, you can hide damn near anything under the sand in a desert, and allah alone knows how many of his researchers were silenced or never interviewed or killed during the invasion and their documents destroyed accidentally. In all likelihood things were even worse; we’ll never know.

via BlackFive


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Posted by Drew458   United States  on 09/17/2011 at 10:09 AM   
Filed Under: • IraqTyrants and DictatorsWar On Terror •  
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Not that very many people ever read this far down, but this blog was the creation of Allan Kelly and his friend Vilmar. Vilmar moved on to his own blog some time ago, and Allan ran this place alone until his sudden and unexpected death partway through 2006. We all miss him. A lot. Even though he is gone this site will always still be more than a little bit his. We who are left to carry on the BMEWS tradition owe him a great debt of gratitude, and we hope to be able to pay that back by following his last advice to us all:
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Oh, and here's some kind of visitor flag counter thingy. Hey, all the cool blogs have one, so I should too. The Visitors Online thingy up at the top doesn't count anything, but it looks neat. It had better, since I paid actual money for it.
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