Lebanon , Iran, Golan Heights, Prudhoe

juancole
Juan gets 66 comments... Why the Ashkenazis want to destroy Lebanon..

it may be that hawks are thinking this way: Destroy Lebanon, and destroy Hizbullah, and you reduce Iran's strategic depth. Destroy the Iranian nuclear program and you leave it helpless and vulnerable to having done to it what the Israelis did to Lebanon. You leave it vulnerable to regime change, and a dragooning of Iran back into the US sphere of influence, denying it to China and assuring its 500 tcf of natural gas to US corporations. You also politically reorient the entire Gulf, with both Saddam and Khamenei gone, toward the United States. Voila, you avoid peak oil problems in the US until a technological fix can be found, and you avoid a situation where China and India have special access to Iran and the Gulf.

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Iranian
Iran will start the initial phase of its planned Iranian oil bourse at the end of September...
The building that will house the oil bourse has reportedly already been purchased in the southern Iranian island of Kish in Persian Gulf.

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progressiveindependent

Water
why "Israel" will never willingly return to 1948 borders

February of 1996, the Arab world was stung by the announcement of a comprehensive mutual defense pact between Israel and Turkey which granted, among other things, Israeli warplanes access to Turkish air space. Syria was especially upset as it saw itself hemmed in by hostile neighbors both to the north and south. Tensions between Syria downstream and Turkey had mounted during the 1990s over water rights along the Euphrates River which supplies both countries. Turkey controlled 70% of the waters in the Tigris and Euphrates basin which impacted Iraq as well as Syria. Turkey had recently completed construction on a huge dam which had the potential of cutting off Syria's access to the river's resources completely. This was the keystone of Turkey's Southeast Anatolian Project (or GAP, as it is known).

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globalresearch
Virtually unnoticed, the inauguration of the Ceyhan-Tblisi-Baku (BTC) oil pipeline, which links the Caspian sea to the Eastern Mediterranean, took place on the 13th of July, at the very outset of the Israeli sponsored bombings of Lebanon.

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rense
The Israeli attack on Lebanon has revealed a pattern of double standards that may permanently change the global attack on terrorism and insurgency, if not warfare in general.

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A. said that the war in Lebanon bore no resemblance to that Israel has been waging in the Palestinian territories since the start of the second intifada, six years ago.
"It is nothing like the territories. During daylight hours, you do not see a living soul. You barely see anything at night either.
"During all the years that I served in the reserves, we had the best equipment but now that we have reached the moment of truth the equipment has vanished"
Gili, an Israeli reserve soldier
There are apparently people who pass Hezbollah information regarding the location of our forces and they fire mortar shells. The shells fall around you and that is frightening."
"Many soldiers don't have short-barreled M-16 rifles, communications equipment or even tourniquets." A. said.

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iraninformationagency
lotsa links about Iran

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theoildrum
platts
forum on why the Alaskan oil may be out for 6 months:
Bacteria. Very informative

SRB are probably most common in marine sediments: only the top few cm or so is aerobic, and anaerobic oxidation can extend 100s of m into the sediment column, mostly by SRB. There is also a type of SRB which also uses iron
8 SO4= + 2 Fe2O3 + 15 CH2O + 16 H+ -> 4 FeS2 + 15 CO2 + 23 H2O
This leads to huge deposits of reduced S, which is the source of sourness in petroleum. The FeS2 deposits as pyrite, or fool's gold, and is not stable in oxygen (though kinetics are slow):
4 FeS2 + 8 H2O + 15 O2 -> 2 Fe2O3 + 8 SO4= + 16 H+
(this is why mine tailings are acidic) In any case, those deposits of reduced S (~1.5x10^20 mol) are important in the global oxygen cycle. Clearly if we keep reduced material where oxygen can't get to it, that leads to a buildup of oxygen, and reduced sulfur currently accounts for ~1/3 of the total oxygen in the atmosphere. Deposits of reduced carbon account for the rest. So "fool's gold" actually has real value, if we don't dig it up, anyway. Unlike true gold, which just sits there looking shiny.

platts

Typical Alaska North Slope crude buyers may have to seek crudes from as far away as West Africa or Asia to fill the void on the US West Coast, market sources said August 7.
"California may have problems," Standard & Poor's Chief Economist David Wyss said. "The entire West Coast could be in trouble."
..only smaller tankers can move through the Panama Canal to take crude to the West Coast.
..Other mid-grade Latin crudes that could be alternatives to ANS are Colombian Cano Limon at 29 API and 0.5% sulfur, and Venezuela Mesa at 30 API and 0.9% sulfur. Both grades are sold primarily on term contracts and are not available on the spot market.

dieoff


dailykos

thepetitionsite
care2
lungfish petition: Stop Queensland Dam

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selvesandothers
he [Olmert] has proven that he is the most failure, hopeless and stupid Prime Minister ever to rule the entity of the Zionist enemy. I also say to them: let each Israeli ask himself a question at present about the performance of his political and military command, and question this entire war which they conducted after the capturing of the two Israeli soldiers. Did it lead to the release of the two Israeli soldiers? Will it bring back the two Israeli soldiers? Never... Instead, he could have negotiated like Sharon did in the past. But he did not want to employ this style. He went extreme. They must also ask themselves and their leadership a question after they said that the aim of this war was to restore the capacity of deterrence at the Israeli army. Did this capacity enhance? They said that they wanted to correct the image and reverence of the Israeli army. Was this image corrected or was it tainted further and further?

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"Well, civil war this, civil war that" GW

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hybrid solar lighting systems Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
..collect sunlight and pipe it into buildings using bundles of small optical fibers
..natural light is vastly superior to artificial light.
..a rooftop-mounted 48-inch diameter collector and secondary mirror that track the sun ..focuses the sunlight into 127 optical fibers connected to hybrid light fixtures equipped with diffusion rods visually similar to fluorescent light bulbs... One collector powers eight to 12 hybrid light fixtures illuminate 1,000 square feet. During times of little or no sunlight, a sensor controls the intensity of the artificial lamps to maintain a constant level of i
llumination.
..savings up to $8,000 per unit. For large floor spaces 1-200,000 square feet ..cost savings of $1-2 million over 10 years (Sunlight Direct_. Operation and maintenance savings ..$300,000 in savings
..within five years 5,000 hybrid solar lighting systems.. saving 50 million kilowatt hours per year...
..to reduce the cost from about $12 to $4 per square foot...
[note the typical pattern: active technology, supplements existing system, levels controlled by sensors. This pattern may apply to heating & cooling systems, drive trains... note that maintenance costs are reduced, although complexity is increased.
Once urgency is attained, huge energy savings can be found all over the place
We are going to be fussing with pumps, fans,ducts, sensors.. ]

book: Field Notes from a Catastrophe: Man, Nature, and Climate Change
Elizabeth Kolbert Bloomsbury Publishing, 2006

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newswise
universe could be 15 percent bigger and 15 percent older than any previous calculations suggested.
.. new method ..
They studied two of the brightest stars in M33, which are part of a binary system, meaning that the stars orbit each other.. one star eclipses the other every five days.
They measured the mass of the stars, which told them how bright those stars would appear if they were nearby. But the stars actually appear dimmer because they are far away. The difference between the intrinsic brightness and the apparent brightness told them how far away the stars were -..
To their surprise, the distance was 15 percent farther than they expected: about 3 million light-years away, instead of 2.6 million light-years as determined by the Hubble constant.
If this new distance measurement is correct, then the true value of the Hubble constant may be 15 percent smaller -- and the universe may be 15 percent bigger and older -- than previously thought.
"Our margin of error is now 6 percent, which is actually pretty good
Lebanon Iran Heights Prudhoe