DoYouDig

Check out this flash ad. Its very positive, got a good beat, and works better then most of the political ads Ive seen.

In what has been called "the most underreported story of the year", Safire provides an update on the UN's Oil for Food debacle in today's NYTs (Registration Required)

At least $5 billion in kickbacks went from corrupt contractors — mainly French and Russian — into the pockets of Saddam and his thugs. Some went to pay off his protectors in foreign governments and media, and we may soon see how much stuck to the fingers of U.N. bureaucrats as well.

Responding to a harangue in this space on March 17, the spokesman for Kofi Annan confirmed that the secretary general's soft-spoken son, Kojo, was on the payroll of Cotecna Inspections of Switzerland until December 1998. In that very month, the U.N. awarded Cotecna the contract to monitor and authenticate the goods shipped to Iraq.

...The money for the huge heist known as the Iraq-U.N. account passed exclusively through BNP Paribas. French companies led all the rest (what's French for "kickback"?), though Vladimir Putin's favorite Russian oligarchs insisted on sharing the wealth. That explains why Paris and Moscow were Saddam's main prewar defenders, and why their politicians and executives now want no inquiry they cannot control.


Its good to see this story getting traction!

Ok its one of those nights. You are drinking with friends and the conversation is going in every direction. Somehow oil comes up -- maybe it was the war in Iraq, or the high price of gas. In any case, the oil "situation" is front and center, a synapse fires, I remember an article from a couple of years ago detailing how oil is actually very plentiful and not really a fossil fuel.
In my drunken state, I make an attempt to explain why oil wells around the world are filling back up. I forget allot detail and even mess up some major points. The group gives a dismissive laugh leaving me chasten and drinking even more beer.

So I’m later at home thinking of the proper Google search term....in no time I find what I’m looking for:

The Deep Hot Bioshpere, by Thomas Gold

Who's Thomas Gold you ask? Is this guy creditable? Heres how Wired Magazine described Gold in a July 2000 article about the book

..Thomas Gold, a physicist who has enjoyed a career broad enough in its enthusiasms to make even Francis Crick look narrow. Gold has worked in the highest reaches of Big Science - overseeing the construction and operation of the world's largest radio telescope, in Arecibo, Puerto Rico - while also excelling at the sort of research that requires nothing more than a pencil, paper, and an idea. He has reimagined the whisperings inside the ear, the universe as a whole, and, most recently, the ground beneath your feet. And he's done so with a profound indifference to the opinions of others. Gold is not just wide-ranging: He's a world-class contrarian. Very few people agree with him on everything, which suggests he's sometimes wrong. But he's also sometimes right. And he's always either interesting or infuriating, depending on where you're coming from.

I went fishing and found out he also has a great and very detailed overview of his concepts on his Cornell Web site:

There have been numerous reports in recent times, of oil and gas fields not running out at the expected time, but instead showing a higher content of hydrocarbons after they had already produced more than the initially estimated amount. This has been seen in the Middle East, in the deep gas wells of Oklahoma, on the Gulf of Mexico coast, and in other places. It is this apparent refilling during production that has been responsible for the series of gross underestimate of reserves that have been published time and again, the most memorable being the one in the early seventies that firmly predicted the end of oil and gas globally by 1987, a prediction which produced an energy crisis and with that a huge shift in the wealth of nations. Refilling is an item of the greatest economic significance, and also a key to understanding what the sources of all this petroleum had been. It is also of practical engineering importance, since we may be able to exercise some control over the refilling process.
The debate about the origin of all the petroleum on Earth lies in the center of the subject. If we really knew that it is only biological materials, which, in their decay, could produce hydrocarbons, then the quanities that could ever be produced would be limited by the biological content of the sediments. But then the clear and strong association of petroleum with the inert gas helium would have no explanation; the finding of hydrocarbon gases, liquids and solids on most other planetary bodies in our solar system which have surface conditions quite unsuitable for surface life, could not be understood; the presence of hydrocarbons which we now find in abundance in basement rocks would also remained unexplained.

I just ordered the book. So maybe next time even in a drunken state I will correctly and convincingly tell the story of why oil wells are filling back up.