MOVIE REVIEW: The American Dream Film

Garnering, as of this post, nearly 1 million views over 50 different You Tube channels and a myriad of links and emeds such as this, Tad Lumpkin has created a viral sensation over the internet.  In an interview with Reason Magazine (below) he explains his animated critique of the Federal Reserve and why he chose a 30 minute cartoon as his medium.

MOTHER OIL: A Renewable and Sustainable Resource

Because of the recent turmoil in the Middle East the price of oil is back on the front page for the first time since 2008 and in many ways it is threatening the global recovery, but why?  At the turn of the millennium we were drowning in oil and in almost Copernican fashion also entertaining the idea of adopting a new paradigm when it came to the origins of oil – in 2011 we still are and still should.

For purposes of this discussion we must suspend any objections we may harbor to the exploration for and use of oil especially when it comes to the issue of “global warming.”  When arguing whether or not oil is a renewable and sustainable resource we must free ourselves from this exhausting debate, at least for the moment. 

The Little Known Debate – Is oil abiogenic or biogenic?

We have all been taught in grade school science classes that most of our energy we use in our cars, at home, and at work come from burning what are known as fossil fuels, in other words, oil is biogenically created from the buried remains of living things.  Mikhail V. Lomonosov, the first professor of chemistry at St. Petersburg’s Acadamy of Science, is credited with being the first to come to this conclusion in 1757.  Lomonosov’s hypothesis has since become dogma in the West and is about as well established as the Earth is round and at many times as vigorously defended, however, much research posits a contrary view. 

The origin of oil according to Lomonosov’s theory or what is known as the biogenic theory rests on the premise that living matter (carbon based life forms) are over time covered by sediment similar to how a boulder is covered with sand in a river or how an animal is caught and covered in a mudslide.  This sediment and its carbon-based captive subsequently undergo intense and lengthy geological processes in order to eventually produce petroleum, hence “fossil fuel.”

Fossil fuel ultimately implies one thing – finite resource.  Sure, if we all want to wait around another 300 million years or so enough organisms will die and we’ll be able to shore up some more, but for our current purposes and in economic terms, it’s a scarce item, or so says conventional wisdom.

A preliminary search of recent news concerning this abiogenic or abiotic theory of oil yielded only a brief mention in Dag Blog buried within a review of an alarming interview with Richard Heinberg of the Post Carbon Institute.  In an archetypical breakdown of Peak Oil (a theory promulgated by M. King Herbert of Shell Oil) in it’s most eloquent and current permutation Heinberg succeeded in frightening his audience (me) with a formidable display of statistics, command, and conviction.  It was fascinating how such a seemingly innocuous man, in a 20-minute video, could crush all hope for future world growth, as I knew it.

My depression, however, was short lived once I realized Heinberg and Dag Blog omit the biogentic theory’s laudable opponents, whom if correct, undermine the premise of Heinberg’s entire argument; which is to say, we are running out of oil!  Furthermore, the peak oil theory rests upon the additional assertion we are doing effectively everything we can to find more oil when the fact is 77 percent of the world’s known oil reserves are in the hands of state-owned oil companies, not exactly the flagships of innovation or efficiency.  Additionally, the price of oil effects investment in exploration and as we saw in 2008, dollar devaluation, geopolitical turmoil, and market speculation can obfuscate the signals of supply and demand exacerbating an the already ineffectual model.

The opponents of the biogenic theory and its subsequent offspring are as follows: Dmitri Mendeleev, creator of the periodic table; Nikolai Kudrayavstev, credited with first articulating the Russian-Ukranian theory of deep, abiotic petroleum origins; Sir Robert Robinson, an organic chemist, Nobel laureate, and Presidential Medal of Freedom recipient; G.E. Boiko, VP of the Ukrainian Oil and Gas Company; A.S. Eigenson; Vladimir Porfiriev, Senior Petroleum Exploration Geologist for the USSR; Marcellin Berthelot, arguably one of the greatest chemists of all time; and among many others one Thomas Gold, “one of America’s iconoclastic scientists”, with over 60 years of study, over 280 published works from Astronomy to Zoology, and more accolades and prestigious appointments than I have time to cover here.   

The only opponent of Peak Oil and the established fossil fuel theory which Dag Blog actually mentions by name is its most public, unqualified, and controversial figure, Jerome Corsi, columnist for World Net Daily and author of both Unfit for Command, the swiftboating attack on John Kerry and The Obama Nation, a wide-ranging attack on President Obama.  Dag Blog blatantly used this unabashed partisan to set up an obvious straw man, dubbing him the “chief proponent”, while implicitly dismissing some of the most brilliant minds of the past two centuries.  These men and their arguments, however, can be found in Corsi’s book, Black Gold Stranglehold: The Myth of Scarcity and The Politics of Oil.

Considering the opponents (hardly just a doctor of political science/author leading a rag tag group of pseudo-intellectuals) and after pondering some of the opposing arguments Heinberg in hindsight almost looks as if he’s coming out of left field.  Moreover, Heinberg looks as though he has climbed in bed with two groups of scientists from big oil and big environment, both of whom have dedicated their lives to an ideology that seems to have very little to offer when it comes to overcoming some very tough contradictions or when it comes to effectively searching for oil.

Extraterrestrial Evidence for Abiotic Oil

Down to brass tax.  The late Thomas Gold provides two shocking insights among others; one, “petroleum and its component hydrocarbons are present throughout the universe…in meteorites…in interplanetary dust…and you can detect them quite abundantly on one of the moons of Saturn.  About all this there is no scientific argument.”  

In 2008 the Cassini probe found "hundreds of times more liquid hydrocarbons than all the known oil and natural gas reserves on Earth."  However, Wired Magazine made sure to admonish their audience immediately before their report on this fact:

“Before we get too excited here, let’s remember. There’s still an energy problem. Global warming, too. Nobody’s going to be importing oil substitutes from Titan anytime soon.” 

While Wired correctly referred to Titan’s abundance of hydrocarbons and not to its abundance of fossil fuels, they did not, however, explain the importance in distinguishing the two or that here on Earth we incorrectly use them interchangeably! 

The corroborating evidence found on Titan supports what many astrophysicists and astronomers already knew and poses somewhat of in interesting if not underreported contradiction to that school of thought which would have us believe oil and natural gas are finite resources derived only from ancient life here on Earth.

Mother Oil

Whichever theory one may subscribe to (abiotic or biogenic) oil is nonetheless as natural as water, which will make what I am about to tell you easier to swallow.  That “primordial soup” they were always talking about in grade school may in fact have been oil – what irony!  If the Exxon Valdez and the recent Deepwater Horizon oil spill taught us anything it was that life above ground does not do well covered in oil.  Underground, at ultra low ocean depths, and in the genesis of life, however, it is a different story entirely.  Thomas Gold’s summarized hypothesis from the Washington Post:

“Oil and gas were born out of the Big Bang [although Gold posits an alternative called the steady-state theory] and trapped in the Earth 4.5 billion years ago in randomly dispersed molecular form. But the intense heat of the Earth's volcanic core "sweats them out" of the rocks that contain them, sending them migrating outward through the porous deep Earth because they are more fluid and weigh less. In a region between 10 and 300 kilometers deep, the hydrocarbons nourish vast colonies of microbes where all of earthly life began, and where today there's a vastly greater mass of living things than exist on the surface of the planet. The migrating oil and gas ‘sweep up’ the biological wreckage of this life as they percolate upward, together with molecules of helium, all of which eventually get trapped and concentrated for periods in near-surface reservoirs where oil is usually found.”

This theory turns the fossil fuel debate on its head!  In an apparent case of oversimplified causal relation Lomonosov got it backwards.  This very different way of looking at and understanding oil and its place in our biosphere is found to be copasetic with microbes found living in oil what happened after the BP oil spill, when life was actually created as oil loving bacteria went to work cleaning up our mess.  Similar bacteria are also being used to create endless supplies of methane fuels.

Dig Deeper

Gold’s theory is buttressed and expounded upon by chemists and thermodynamicists G.E. Boiko and E.B. Chekaliuk whom studied 322 samples of oil from around the world, which culminated in a body of work spanning from 1950 to 1982.  Their calculations concerning the isomeric composition of oil has shown all natural oils are at equilibrium at temperatures and pressures far exceeding those found within the sedimentary blanket known as “source rock”, the accepted layer where oil is supposed to be created.  Boiko, therefore, concluded that the synthesis of oil according to his analysis could only take place in the upper-mantle, i.e. at depths around 40 -160 kilometers, where the proper temperatures and pressures are believed to be.  More support for this perspective comes from diamonds found in crude oil; diamonds of course require upper-mantel levels of heat and pressure to be formed.

Further support for upper-mantel formed petroleum comes from A.S. Eigenson’s studies of oil in which he discovered nickel and vanadium porphyrins in not most, but all of the petroleum deposits he studied.  According to the biogenic camp the presence of porphyrin molecules in petroleum is attributed to chlorophyll from photosynthesizing plants, and to the heme of the blood in animals, however, if that is their source these particular porphyrin molecules would need to contain the metal atoms, magnesium and iron.  No single case is known of magnesium or iron porphyrins having been found in petroleum anywhere!  Thomas Gold expounds here in a 1996 article:

“An explanation that on every occasion in all oils the original metal atoms had been exchanged for just nickel and vanadium from the rocks in their surroundings, seems extremely improbable. No explanation has been offered how plant debris would have produced the nickel and vanadium molecules, while, in the other explanation, nickel and vanadium complexes may well be expected, since these two metals are particularly prone to make organometallic compounds. This find therefore favors a deep origin, and at the same time a common origin for all oils.”

Replenishing Wells

In 1999 Eugene Island 330 was an offshore oil well in the Gulf of Mexico, which like many oil wells met its peak production level and later was expected to shut down when suddenly it started producing at nearly peak capacity.  This can be explained in two ways; one that a low pressure system was created from the depleted oil reserve thereby sucking in more oil from the surrounding area or two as Dr. Whelan of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) believes “there is a huge system of oil just migrating” deep underground which feeds many wells.  Moreover, WHOI has documented this phenomenon not only in the Gulf, but also all over the world and in geologically varying areas including the North Sea, the Niger Delta, the Mahakam Delta, the Trinidad Basin, the Taiwan Basin, and the Alaskan North Slope.

Does the Abiotic Theory Bear Fruit?

In a word, Russia.  In the 1950s, through the lens of the fossil fuel theory, Russia was ruled out as a potential energy producing power house, however, as we saw in 2009 Russia has eclipsed Saudi Arabia as the worlds leading oil producer.  The seed, which produced this energy giant is the abiotic theory of oil planted, ironically enough, by Joseph Stalin himself in arguably one of the only recorded successes of his tyrannical career, his 1947 scientific oil commission which gave rise and credence to the aforementioned theory.  Since that time 80 oil and gas fields in the Caspian district have been developed from crystalline basement (bedrock) far below the sedimentary blanket.  Moreover, exploration in the western Siberian cratonic rift has led to the development of 90 petroleum fields of which 80 produce either partly or entirely from the crystalline basement.  The list goes on…

At the very least the conventional attitude toward the origins of oil seem to be based on very old theories of which the largest oil producer in the world rejects outright.  Moreover, we have prominent scientists and much evidence to at least cast doubt on our previously held notions.  If the world is content with crisis after crisis and dreading a day without oil just over the horizon, by all means we shouldn’t investigate.  However, if we wish to live in harmony with our planet and wish to comprehensively understand its abundant gifts – we must begin and expand this crucial debate. 

STEP ONE: Admit There is a Problem.

Is there any doubt at all that when Janet Napolitano and Co. sat down and formulated the recent policy to backscatter x-ray and patdown airline passengers that an ideal model would have seen the American public enthusiastically compliant?  Put another way, if Big Sis and her bureaucratic automatons wanted a debate they would have asked Congress to mull it over.

Let us make no mistake about it; radiate and fondle first, ask questions later, is a bureaucracy’s modus operandi.  Testaments to this fact are found on every line of the Federal Register’s staggering 70,000 plus pages of yearly rules and regulations amassed by the arbitrary decisions of an alphabet soup of government agencies.  If anyone thought sifting through a Wikileaks dump or reading over 2500 pages of HR 3590 i.e. Obama Care was daunting I’d suggest an aspirin regimen and a few Five Hour Energies to chase before attempting to tackle this legal juggernaut.  Bills have been introduced that would force Congress to vote on these laws individually, thus mitigating their volume, and be held accountable for their promulgation, but appropriately they have never enjoyed an up or down vote.

These agencies stand outside the Constitution and as our de facto fourth branch of government – unelected, entrenched, and relentless.  Bi-partisan in the most nefarious way, transcending administration after administration and retaining the modern day status of oracles these agencies (recently doubled in size by the passage of HR 3590) have effectively usurped all three branches of government.  They enjoy undue autonomy legislating, judging, and enforcing virtually anything they please.  For Congress they are sometimes a political whipping boy other times a trophy.  For the Courts they alleviate bottle necking and are deferred to for “technical expertise.”  For the Executive and its countless Czars they are, in aggregate, the iron hand of American democracy, a zombie relic, built over the years by countless executive orders and maintained under constant deference by Congress.

For those of you unfamiliar with Thomas Hobbes perhaps Transformer’s Devastator is a better metaphor for what has increasingly come into view.  What was once out of reach and buried in the monotonous layers of government white papers, internal memos, the Federal Register, and obscure declassified documents is now easily accessible and out in the open.  The foreign and domestic arms of American governance have clasped around the people.  The byproducts of our “Global Force for Good” and its military adventures over seas are being used literally in our own backyard.  The seamless connections from the military industrial complex buttressed by a private amalgam of domestic defense contractors to their ties and influence on these domestic agencies is simple to trace and easy to understand.

You couldn’t write this stuff any better than how it is unfolding… Pre-crime software is being used in Baltimore, Philidelphia, and DC, multi-million dollar insect spies are an order away from swarming all over the US, the very same military spy blimps ordered by our military “for use overseas” will be used against/for us very soon here at home laden with field-tested military technology that will scan 3000 license plates per hour, see at night, are easily retrofitted with facial recognition cameras, and will tie into hundreds if not thousands of external cameras in a real-time virtual “crime” network. 

The information gathered is capable of being stored and shared with threat fusion centers (admittedly ran without Congressional oversight) easily disseminated to DC or what will be, for all intents and purposes, NSA West, a 1.5 million square foot Cyber Security Center that might even make the Pentagon blush.  Do we want to become like England, where this type of surveillance is soon to become commonplace?  Has Orwell’s clairvoyant Nineteen Eighty Four become just another benighted warning?

Airport patdowns were just the beginning!  Homeland Security (DHS) and its Visible Intermodal Prevention and Response (VIPR) teams have rolled out in “pilot” programs industrial grade radiation units for use on America’s highways, backscatter x-ray vans have been sold in the US able to “image vehicles and their contents” as well as “penetrate clothing”, a veritable Google Van on steroids.  Mobile interrogation trailers saturated with Future Attribute Screening Technology (FAST) developed in cooperation with “industry leaders” for headline events are on standby, portable DNA scanners are in beta testing and are able to identify a human being in under an hour. 

Our young ones aren’t safe either, the government has been successfully sued for taking and cataloging newborn DNA, the only problem is that it’s essentially legal to do since the “Newborn Screening Saves Lives Act” was singed into law.  Incidently this passed unrecorded by voice vote in the House and unanimously in the Senate, also unrecorded.  Sometimes even when Congress does vote they make sure it is a secret!

If DHS doesn’t stop you in the airport or on the streets, they have invaded Walmarts all over the country with thousands of government-sponsored screens inundating a routine grocery run with their exhausting “See Something Say Something” campaign.  In another nauseating example of "agency initiative" was in 2007 when Congress revealed DHS created, without approval, the National Applications Office (NAO) charged with turning spy satellites on the US.  Recently, in a totally unrelated vein, the US and Germany (US occupied territory) under the popular guise of an innocuous “commercial program” are planning on deploying multiple billion dollar spy satellites in 2012 and 2013.  One has to wonder why the US would need another set of cutting edge multibillion dollar spy satellites since they have already launched into space “the largest [spy] satellite in the world” and plan on sending more.

I was going to include more on internet kill switches, internet IDs, and how the US Air Force has been soliciting persona software management in order to operate an army of fake virtual people replete with their own IP address, hair color, significant others, but most importantly opinion.  Yes, they're planning for a potential clandestine campaign to “manufacture consensus” or to be used for “cognitive infiltration.”  These you’ll have to look up on your own!

This barrage of information is just a smattering of what we encounter on a weekly if not daily basis and is almost too much to cover and Purple Serf and Free Humanity need your help.  It would be like sand through our fingers if it wasn’t for archival technology and hyperlinks.  Many of us have started to report on what is going on ourselves, turned off our TVs and along with it the obnoxious graphics, $1000 suits, and 10,000watt smiles that used to represent legitimacy and which still propagandize and compartmentalize our information.  This is only the first step – admitting and we have a problem and talking about it.

RT's "America's New Regime Change Formula"

When the ol' cloak and dagger seems a little passe and morbid and the world has caught on that certain "revolutions" might not be as genuine as advertised, be a little more explicit.  At least that is what the United States has seemingly learned from the Cold War.  Now that communism has failed and democracy is in (as if they were mutually exclusive) supporting insurrection as long as you're up front about it seems to be politically speaking - kosher.  The old tricks utilized by clandestine operations in the foreign intelligence field are now being overlaid in a hip and seemingly innocuous bureaucracy funded by US taxpayers, but the results are the same as before violence, delegitimization, waste, and those pesky unconstitutional (or perhaps more aptly put for those neo-cons out there extraconstitutional) issues keep popping up.



To read the rest of Russia Today's article.

Lion Of Liberty Says...

"It is much more important to kill bad bills than to pass good ones." – Calvin Coolidge

VIDEO: The Ultimate Read Pill is Truly Inspirational

VIDEO: INSPIRATIONAL - This is the video which supplied the fuel for my interest in liberty, which woke me up to the systems which silently pervade our society and deliberately reduce our freedom of mind, body, and soul. Take the red pill and open your mind!

End of History for the Middle East?

In 1989 Francis Fukuyama wrote an article called "The End of History?" in which he claimed the fall of the Berlin Wall signaled the ultimate victory of western liberalism over its fascist, socialist, and communist alternatives.  Moving forward, Fukuyama predicted the world would no longer suffer from large-scale confrontations between super power states where the threat of weapons of mass destruction, legions of warriors, and iron horses held the masses in the grip of terror.  

Fukuyama subscribed to a Hegelian Dialectic (a linear view of human political progress), which at its apex held liberalism as the lone victor in a world of peace and prosperity.  The proceeding years in this new ideological environment according to Fukuyama’s dialectic would witness an inevitable expansion of liberalism to those corners of the globe, which it had yet to take root.  The non-liberal world, those he deemed still "living in history", would experience those final acts (religious, nationalistic, ethnic, and feast-famine economic struggles) which had already been played out and resolved themselves in the liberal or "post-historical world" of the North Atlantic nations.  

Fukuyama saw the post-historical world's struggles "replaced by economic calculation, the endless solving of technical problems, environmental concerns, and the satisfaction of sophisticated consumer demands."  Few would doubt that his view in many ways resembles our current state of affairs.  Fukuyama also alluded to interplay between that world wrapping up its historical baggage and the post-historical world; on the character of that interplay he did not opine.  In a melancholic vein, however, he did predict and recognized even in 1989 that in the "caretaking [for] the museum of human history" there would be a "powerful nostalgia for the struggles of the past" so powerful in fact that after a period of "boredom" that nostalgia would "serve to get history started once again."

It is Fukyama’s final words, which seem to perfectly illustrate or at the very least give us a lens through which to understand our government’s proclivities and its obsession with policing and intervening in world affairs, moreover it enables us to understand why US citizens allow it to happen, after all we’re “making the world safe for democracy” and spreading freedom; it’s an intoxicating prospect!  There is a looming question however, is the US and Europe really spreading liberalism as it is traditionally understood, is anyone for that matter?

If the rise of the Tea Party movement signaled anything it was that there are serious disagreements over the nature and future of our own liberal institutions.  Everyday we are bombarded by headlines: US national debt reaches parity with GDP, claims of a $1.5 Quadrillion derivatives bubble (the financial baggage leftover from the 2000s “wild ride”) threatens life as we know it, Wall Street Institutions whom are “too big to fail” and whom felt they deserved taxpayer bailouts to protect their defunct operations run unscathed, unaccountable, and even more powerful than before, the devaluation of the dollar and the commensurate threat of hyperinflation due to the Federal Reserve’s quantitative easing policies (printing money out of thin air) are real and pervasive (ask the Middle East), the alarming growth of the military industrial complex and a commensurate bona fide police state threaten our freedom, and an unprecedented centralization of health care decisions which equates to a usurpation of 1/6 of the economy undermines our decisions over our own health.  The question ultimately comes to the fore – do we really have a viable ideology to spread around the world?

In Egypt, Yemen, Libya, Mauritius, Jordan, Tunisia, Algeria, Bahrain, Iran, we hope to see the liberal democratic domino effect we never saw in Communism, but it seems the wrong dominoes are falling.  After decades of handpicking dictators and sending in troops to secure freedom foreign policy hawks are dreading democracy once again.  The successful ousting of Egypt’s Mubarak and Tunisia’s Zine el Abidine ben Ali leads to what exactly?  This isn’t a calculated ideological uprising based on the violation of inalienable rights and liberties, it is merely because food prices are soaring, jobs are hard to find, and the future is bleak! 

This area of the world is very much in the throws of history, rife with ethnic division, religious intolerance, playboy leadership, and rampant tyranny (both private and public), only now budding with trappings of consumerism and a myriad of ideas regarding the future of their society as people connect to each other via cell phones, email, Twitter, Facebook, You Tube, and Google. Liberalism plays no current role in the Middle East and never has.  If Egypt is the “trend setter” everyone claims it to be then the Middle East will remain right where it is in history stagnating among awkward opinions regarding gender segregation, stoning adulterers, cutting off thieves hands, and capital punishment for those whom convert out of Islam. 

It is highly dubious to believe billions of dollars in economic and military aid will soon deliver the Egyptians or anyone in the Middle East for that matter out of these bizarre notions of ideal society.  If the Protestant Reformation and the American Revolution taught us anything it is that real change requires a perfect storm, sometimes doesn’t come for generations, but most assuredly doesn’t come from foreign intervention.  

The region may not be at the end of history, however, did Egypt and Tunisia just experience a huge breath of freedom?  Are the rest of the Arab states flexing a primary muscle of liberty?  Yes and hopefully that will be enough to start brush fires in the minds of the Middle East.