Posted on 07/05/2012 11:39:29 AM PDT by lbryce
Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir famously lamented that Moses led the children of Israel for forty years of wandering in the desert until he found the only place in the Middle East where there wasn’t any oil.
But could Moses have been smarter than believed? Apparently the Canadians and the Russians think so, as both countries are moving to step up energy relations with a tiny nation whose total energy reserves some experts now think could rival or even surpass the fabled oil wealth of Saudi Arabia.
Actual production is still minuscule, but evidence is accumulating that the Promised Land, from a natural resource point of view, could be an El Dorado: inch for inch the most valuable and energy rich country anywhere in the world. If this turns out to be true, a lot of things are going to change, and some of those changes are already underway.
Israel and Canada have just signed an agreement to cooperate on the exploration and development of what, apparently, could be vast shale oil reserves beneath the Jewish state.
The prospect of huge oil reserves in Israel comes on top of the recent news about large natural gas discoveries off the coast that have been increasingly attracting attention and investor interest. The apparent gas riches have also been attracting international trouble. Lebanon disputes the undersea boundary with Israel (an act somewhat complicated by the fact that Lebanon has never actually recognized Israel’s existence), and overlapping claims from Turkey and Greece themselves plus both Greek and Turkish authorities on Cyprus further complicate matters. Yet despite these tensions, following Russian President Vladimir Putin’s surprisingly cordial visit last week, Gazprom and Israel have announced plans to cooperate on gas extraction.
(Excerpt) Read more at blogs.the-american-interest.com ...
The timing of these energy discoveries could not have come at more auspicious moment. The loss of key allies like Turkey ,Egypt, the US, the very real threat of Iran's vituperative antipathy towards Israel openly threatening to destroy the Jewish state has put Israel in its greatest peril in decades. Russian involvement is a stroke of genius with its navy being kept on patrol to safeguard the area. If indeed the extent in which the gas deposits are enormous turns out to be true, an unprecedented geopolitical realignment is taking shape putting Israel in an enviable vantage point with all the diplomatic, economic, military benefits it entails. Divine intervention never looked so real.
Good news and bad.
Good is that Israel becomes less dependent on people like Barack Obama.
Bad is that there are now three reasons for genocidal war in the middle east: (1) Palestinians are Palestinians and will continue to act like Palestinians; (2) Muslims are Muslims and continue to act like Muslims; and (3) Oil and gas. The three together could turn into a very toxic blend.
So... the Arabs will hate the Jews even more than before?
Good for Israel. Maybe the international pressure on it will subsist.
Putin plays chess. Obama doesn’t even play checkers.
Nothing, neither gas, oil, unobtanium (fuel from the movie Avatar) could push Israel's enemies to hate them more than they do know.
Excellent. I hope this leads to improved relationships between Israel and Europe, particularly with Britain. I suspect a lot of the Arabist tendencies in Britain and Europe are basically due to our dependence on Middle Eastern oil.
Realpolitik will now come more down in favour of improving relations with Israel, which is a beacon of western civilisation in an otherwise benighted region...
In the film Avatar, unobtanium was not a fuel, it was a room-temperature super-conductor.
In engineering, fiction, and thought experiments, unobtainium (also spelled unobtanium) is any extremely rare, costly, or impossible material, or (less commonly) device needed to fulfill a given design for a given application. The properties of any particular unobtainium depend on the intended use. For example, a pulley made of unobtainium might be massless and frictionless; however, if used in a nuclear rocket, unobtainium would be light, strong at high temperatures, and resistant to radiation damage. The concept of unobtainium is often applied flippantly or humorously. The word unobtainium is derived from unobtainable + -ium (the suffix for a number of elements). It pre-dates the similar-sounding IUPAC systematic element names, such as Ununoctium.
*SNIP*
Science Fiction
Unobtainium can refer to any substance needed to build some device critical to the plot of a science fiction story, but which does not exist in the universe as we know it. A hull material that gets stronger with pressure in the film The Core was nicknamed unobtainium, but the concept under different names can be seen in the anti-gravity material cavorite and the super-strong material scrith from Larry Niven's novel Ringworld, which requires a tensile strength on the order of the forces binding an atomic nucleus together. Unobtainium can also refer to any rare but desirable material used to motivate a conflict over its possession, making it a MacGuffin (it appears in the story as something to obtain, not something that is significantly used). An example is unobtanium (sic - per traditional element naming not "unobtainium"[12]) in the film Avatar, a mineral valued at "20 million a kilo". Unobtainium can be used in a disparaging context (e.g., "That idea is silly; you'd need unobtainium wires to hold the planet up!") or a hypothetical one ("If one were to build an unobtainium shell around a black hole's event horizon, what would happen to the material piling up on it?").
And of Asher he said, Let Asher be blessed with children; let him be acceptable to his brethren, and let him dip his foot in oil.
Ha! Points for you!
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And they’ll carry protest signs through the streets of Ghaza City demanding “SPILL BLOOD FOR OIL!” and “IT’S OURS, ‘CAUSE WE WANT IT!” The Leftists here and in America will some how manage to believe this is because of Israeli oppression of the poor Palestinians, and the MSM will echo their arguments.
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