Posted on 03/12/2012 2:48:59 AM PDT by Cincinatus' Wife
In the middle-of-frackin’-nowhere Pennsylvania,....
....Everybody here has a three-day beard and a hardhat and steel-toed work boots, but there’s a strong whiff of chess club and Science Olympiad in the air, young men who are no strangers to the pocket protector, who in adolescence discovered an unusual facility for fluid dynamics and now are beavering away at mind-clutchingly complex technical problems, one of which is how to get a 150-foot-tall tower of machinery from A to B without taking it apart and trucking it (solution: add feet). That giant robot may walk, but it isn’t too fast: It can take half a day to move 20 feet, because this isn’t a Transformers movie, this is The Play, and Boy Genius is a member of the startlingly youthful and bespectacled tribe of engineers swarming out of the University of Pittsburgh and the Colorado School of Mines and Penn State and into the booming gas fields of Pennsylvania, where the math weenies are running the show in the Marcellus shale, figuring out how to relentlessly suck a Saudi Arabia’s worth of natural gas out of a vein of hot and impermeable rock thousands of feet beneath the green valleys of Penn’s woods. Forget about your wildcatters, your roughnecks, your swaggering Texans in big hats: The nerds have taken over.
.....Cheap, relatively clean, ayatollah-free energy, enormous investments in real capital and infrastructure, thousands of new jobs for blue-collar workers and Ph.D.s alike, Americans engineering something other than financial derivatives — who could not love all that?
[BIG SNIP]
Benign environmentalists are opposed to pollution, as all sensible people are; malign environmentalists are opposed to energy and most of what it enables. Their enemy isn’t drilling rigs and ethane crackers and engineers and their technological marvels: Their enemy is the kind of civilization that makes such feats and wonders possible, the fact that a smart guy with a big idea can make a hole in the ground and summon up power from the vasty deep. Their enemy is us. We can debate best drilling practices, appropriate emissions regulation, wastewater-disposal techniques — the engineering stuff — and even hare-brained ideas like the Pickens plan.
But we can’t really debate the course of modern technological civilization with people who are opposed to modern technological civilization per se, your mostly middle-class and expensively miseducated (and forgive me for noticing but your overwhelmingly white) types afflicted with the ennui of affluence, who suddenly take a fancy to the idea that life might be lived more authentically with a bone in one’s nose and a trip to the neighborhood shaman — the shaman who might, if the spirits smile upon him, initiate you into the ancient mysteries of the burning spring. Full article
The perils of designer tribalism ..........................." [Roger] Sandall's real target is the assumption—common coin among anthropologists—that “culture” is a value-neutral term and that, as Claude Lévi-Strauss put it in 1951, one had to “fight against ranking cultural differences hierarchically.” In his book The Savage Mind—which argues that there is no such thing as the savage, as distinct from the civilized, mind—Lévi-Strauss spoke blithely of the “so-called primitive.” (It is significant that Lévi-Strauss should have idolized Rousseau: “our master and our brother,” “of all the philosophes, [the one who] came nearest to being an anthropologist.”) One of Sandall’s main tasks in The Culture Cult is to convince us that what Lévi-Strauss dismissed as “so-called” is really “well-called.” Sandall does not mention William Henry’s In Defense of Elitism (1994)—another unfairly neglected book—but his argument in The Culture Cult reinforces Henry’s accurate, if politically incorrect, observation that
the simple fact [is] that some people are better than others—smarter, harder working, more learned, more productive, harder to replace. Some ideas are better than others, some values more enduring, some works of art more universal. Some cultures, though we dare not say it, are more accomplished than others and therefore more worthy of study. Every corner of the human race may have something to contribute. That does not mean that all contributions are equal. . . . It is scarcely the same thing to put a man on the moon as to put a bone in your nose.
Henry’s quip about the bone in the nose elicited the expected quota of outrage from culture-cultists. But the outrage missed the serious and, ultimately, the deeply humane point of the observation. What Sandall calls romantic primitivism puts a premium on quaintness, which it then embroiders with the rhetoric of authenticity. There are two casualties of this process. One is an intellectual casualty: it becomes increasingly difficult to tell the truth about the achievements and liabilities of other cultures. The other casualty is a moral, social, and political one. Who suffers from the expression of romantic primitivism? Not the Lauren Huttons and Claude Lévi-Strausses of the world. On the contrary, the people who suffer are the objects of the romantic primitive’s compassion, “respect,” and pretended emulation. Sandall asks:
Should American Indians and New Zealand Maoris and Australian Aborigines be urged to preserve their traditional cultures at all costs? Should they be told that assimilation is wrong? And is it wise to leave them entirely to their own devices?
Sandall is right that the answers, respectively, are No, No, and No: “The best chance of a good life for indigenes is the same as for you and me: full fluency and literacy in English, as much math as we can handle, and a job.”
........Sandall speaks in this context of anthropology’s tendency to “normalize the primitive while treating civilization as aberrant.” Consider the Maoris. In contemporary New Zealand, Sandall notes, one finds “a miscellaneous army of teachers, academics, government servants, clergy, radical lawyers, progressive judges, journalists, and numerous other bien pensants promot[ing] the revival of traditional Maori culture even more fanatically than the Maori do themselves.” He cites an Anglican priest who rails against the “monocultural grip on all our institutions” that British colonialism supposedly still exerts (if only!), and cites various teachers who wish to return the education of Maori children to the tribes. In the background is a rose-tinted view of the Maoris as a peace-loving, ecologically conscious, spiritually delicate people who have been abused for two centuries by hard-bitten, materialistic Europeans.".....
Today President Obama is claiming credit for the increase in Gas and Oil production made possible by Fracking... But six months ago, the President and the Democrats were in high dungeon about how Fracking was going to pollute the groundwater and render Western Pennsylvania and New York State virtually uninhabitable.
But today the President needs to pretend to be in favor of energy development, so all of that is conveniently forgotten.
INGSOC has nothing on these guys. We have always been at war with Eastasia, and the chocolate ration has just been increased from fifteen to ten grammes per week...
.” He cites an Anglican priest who rails against the “monocultural grip on all our institutions” that British colonialism supposedly still exerts (if only!), and cites various teachers who wish to return the education of Maori children to the tribes. In the background is a rose-tinted view of the Maoris as a peace-loving, ecologically conscious, spiritually delicate people who have been abused for two centuries by hard-bitten, materialistic Europeans.”.....
Not sure what to call the writing style, but it sure isn’t an easy style IMHO. Plainspeak it isn’t IMHO. But, I was able to fathom the rose tinted view of the Maoris, at least I think I was able too. Somehow the Haka comes to mind.
Obama's lie.
Fracking is being done on STATE and PRIVATE land.
North Dakota is having a boom! They're paying $18/hour at McDonalds (with a $300 signing bonus). Their city, county and state coffers will be over-flowing
Oil production is down under Obama's control (Alaska, Gulf). The economy is down under Obama, as Federal spending and deficit is wildly out of control
It’s a brainful of truth.
For years, the environmental movement raised funds from people who feared our dependence on imported energy and those who think coal is dirty.
These new sources of abundant, clean, domestic energy, produced by American workers, will set the environmemtal movement back 100 years.
THIS is what they really fear.
All their carefully connected groups: How the Left Moved into Religion (The National Council of Churches Eco-Justice and Obama's Social Justice.
There has been very little oil production on Federal Land under any President's term. Oil production in Alaska has not risen in part due to federal blocks.
But it not down on Federal land in Alaska due to Obama, it never really started.
The high state taxes are some of the biggest roadblocks to increased production outside of the Federal blocks.
As someone who has been following the Natural Gas phenomenon for the last 3 yrs, I was unaware of the Techology and "Nerds" involved at the drill-site as well as "the robot" and fracking-water recycling.
Amazing what occurs in the private sector after years of R & D and going from "big and stupid" to "smart and cheap", It just took a billion to get their.
Obama's Solar Fantasy is stuck on Big and Stupid and he is picking up the tab via us. Not a recipe for success...
The following will disprove the crazies.
Lisa J. Molofsky
John A. Connor
Shahla K. Farhat
GSI Environmental Inc.
Houston
Albert S. Wylie Jr.
Tom Wagner
Cabot Oil & Gas Corp.
Pittsburgh
Results from more than 1,700 water wells sampled and tested prior to proposed gas drilling in Susquehanna County, Pa., show methane to be ubiquitous in shallow groundwater, with a clear correlation of methane concentrations with surface topography.
Specifically, water wells located in lowland valley areas exhibit significantly higher dissolved methane levels than water wells in upland areas, with no relation to proximity of existing gas wells. The correlation of methane concentrations with elevation indicates that, on a regional level, elevated methane concentrations in groundwater are a function of geologic features, rather than shale gas development.
The only reason he tolerates fracking is that local and state Democrats are orgasmic over the additional money it gives them to spend, and a serious move to shut it down will trigger intra-Democrat Party War.
It is that important to our future as a nation..
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