On Healing Wings

On Healing Wings

When despair for the world grows in me and I wake in the night at the least sound in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be, I go and lie down where the wood drake rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds. I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief. I come into the presence of still water. And I feel above me the day-blind stars waiting with their light. For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

Wendell Berry

"Like a rolling thing before the whirlwind...." @ AMERICAN DIGEST

"Like a rolling thing before the whirlwind...." @ AMERICAN DIGEST

1 Behold, Damascus is taken away from being a city, and it shall be a ruinous heap.
2 The cities of Aroer are forsaken: they shall be for flocks, which shall lie down, and none shall make them afraid.
3 The fortress also shall cease from Ephraim, and the kingdom from Damascus, and the remnant of Syria: they shall be as the glory of the children of Israel, saith the Lord of hosts.
4 And in that day it shall come to pass, that the glory of Jacob shall be made thin, and the fatness of his flesh shall wax lean...
9 In that day shall his strong cities be as a forsaken bough, and an uppermost branch, which they left because of the children of Israel: and there shall be desolation....
12 Woe to the multitude of many people, which make a noise like the noise of the seas; and to the rushing of nations, that make a rushing like the rushing of mighty waters!
13 The nations shall rush like the rushing of many waters: but God shall rebuke them, and they shall flee far off, and shall be chased as the chaff of the mountains before the wind, and like a rolling thing before the whirlwind.
-- Isaiah 17

Of course life is unfair, but what did you expect?... - Adamstanley

Of course life is unfair, but what did you expect?... - Adamstanley: Of course life is unfair, but what did you expect? From the start the game is rigged. It’s all backwards. When you are old, you have to live in a world you created when you were nothing more than a kid. Whatever stupid shit you did when you were 20, you have to live with for the rest of your life. It should be the other way round.

Eagle Ford shale sees oil production soar

Eagle Ford shale sees oil production soar: Eagle Ford shale sees oil production soar

 

World Oil News Center

Eagle Ford shale sees oil production soar

LONDON - The Eagle Ford shale play in Texas is benefiting from increasing production, as crude oil growth overtakes natural gas production, pushing up the shale’s profitability, claims a new report by GlobalData.

The new report cites that several oil and gas majors have moved in on the shale play, investing millions of dollars in an attempt to reap valuable fossil fuel rewards.
Eagle Ford production showed a three-fold increase in overall production in 2011 over 2010 levels, thanks to an increase in crude oil prices over natural gas prices. Texas has seen the Eagle Ford shale churn out four times as much liquids in 2011 as compared to 2010, with production growing from 10.8MMboe to 57.5MMboe, and the profitability associated with the crude oil prices is supporting this trend.

Production booms in the Eagle Ford play have rewarded companies such as Anadarko Petroleum Corporation, Petrohawk Energy Corporation, EOG Resources Inc, Burlington Resources Inc, and Rosetta Resources Inc with high volumes of natural gas and high-quality liquids. According to the Railroad Commission of Texas, Briscoe Ranch field reported the highest gross production of around 26.2MMboe from the Eagle Ford shale during 2011.

The Eagle Ford shale in Texas has therefore witnessed a significant rise in drilling and exploration activities in 2011–2012, with many oil and gas companies continuously exploring the play in hopes of increasing their production base. A total of 4,286 drilling permits were issued in the play throughout 2011, while the first four months of 2012 have seen 1,620 drilling permits distributed already, and GlobalData anticipates that the Eagle Ford shale play will continue to see increased drilling activity during the coming years.

Tempted by such huge rewards, Chesapeake Energy Corporation was issued a record number of around 724 drilling permits in the Eagle Ford shale (Texas) during 2011, and allocated around $2,250m–$2,400m of planned capital expenditure for drilling and exploration activities in the Eagle Ford play throughout this year. This level of investment in the shale promises more activity in the future, as major companies fight it out to win a piece of the Eagle Ford shale’s wealth

Total gross production from the Eagle Ford shale increased from 0.02MMboe in 2006 to 105MMboe in 2011 at a CAGR of 4.4%, and is expected to reach 207.3MMboe in 2012, and stabilize at 1,386.3MMboe in 2020.
07/05/2012

America our Birthday

A short list. In no particular order.
We told our children that any child could grow up to be President. And then we made it come true.
We had car shows, boat shows, beauty shows and dog shows.
We ran robots on the surface of Mars by remote control.
Our women came from all over the world in all shapes and sizes hues and scents.
We actually believed that all men are created equal and tried to make it come true.
Everybody liked our movies and loved our television shows.
We tried to educate everybody, whether they wanted it or not. Sometimes we succeeded.
We did Levis.
We held the torch high and hundreds of millions came. No matter what the cost.
We saved Europe twice and liberated it once.
We believed so deeply and so abidingly in free speech that we protected and honored and, in some cases, even elected traitors.
We let you be as freaky as you wanted to be.
We paid you not to plant crops and not to work.
We died in the hundreds of thousands to end slavery here. And when that was done continued for a century and a half around the world.
We invented Jazz.
We wrote the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Gettysberg address.
We went to the moon to see how far we could hit a golf ball.
We lifted a telescope into orbit that could see to the edge of the universe.
When people snuck into the country against our laws, we made parking lots and food stands off to the side of the road so they wouldn't get hurt, and we let them use our hospitals for free, and we made their children citizens.
We didn't care what God you worshipped as long as we could worship ours.
We let the People arm themselves at will. Just to make sure.
We gave everybody the vote.
We built Disneyworld. Just for fun.
We had a revolution so successful it was still going strong two and a quarter centuries later.
We had so many heroes, even at the end, that we felt free to hate them and burn them in effigy.
We electrified the guitar.
We invented a music so compelling that it rocked the world.
We had some middling novelists.
We had some interesting painters.
We had some pretty good poets.
We had better songwriters.
We ran our farms so well we fed the globe.
We made the automobile and the airplane.
We let you get rich. Really, really rich. And we didn't care who you were or what you were or where you came from or who your parents were. We just cared about what you made or what you did.
We had poor people who, even at their most wretched, were richer than any other poor people on the face of the planet.
We were the most nobel nation the world had ever known.
We had so much freedom that many of us voted to just throw it all away.
Even towards the end, as we dissolved into the petty bickering and idle entertainments that come with having far too much leisure and money, many among us were still striving to make it higher, finer, brighter, better and more beautiful.
Even towards the end, the best of us declined to give up and pressed on.

Carl Sandburg: The People Yes (excerpt)

Carl Sandburg: The People Yes (excerpt): Excerpt From The People Yes

Excerpt From The People Yes


Carl Sandburg

---

The people yes
The people will live on.
The learning and blundering people will live on.
    They will be tricked and sold and again sold
And go back to the nourishing earth for rootholds,
    The people so peculiar in renewal and comeback,
    You can't laugh off their capacity to take it.
The mammoth rests between his cyclonic dramas.

The people so often sleepy, weary, enigmatic,
is a vast huddle with many units saying:
    "I earn my living.
    I make enough to get by
    and it takes all my time.
    If I had more time
    I could do more for myself
    and maybe for others.
    I could read and study
    and talk things over
    and find out about things.
    It takes time.
    I wish I had the time."

The people is a tragic and comic two-face: hero and hoodlum:
phantom and gorilla twisting to moan with a gargoyle mouth:
"They buy me and sell me...it's a game...sometime I'll
break loose..."

    Once having marched
Over the margins of animal necessity,
Over the grim line of sheer subsistence
    Then man came
To the deeper rituals of his bones,
To the lights lighter than any bones,
To the time for thinking things over,
To the dance, the song, the story,
Or the hours given over to dreaming,
    Once having so marched.

Between the finite limitations of the five senses
and the endless yearnings of man for the beyond
the people hold to the humdrum bidding of work and food
while reaching out when it comes their way
for lights beyond the prison of the five senses,
for keepsakes lasting beyond any hunger or death.
    This reaching is alive.
The panderers and liars have violated and smutted it.
    Yet this reaching is alive yet
    for lights and keepsakes.

    The people know the salt of the sea
    and the strength of the winds
    lashing the corners of the earth.
    The people take the earth
    as a tomb of rest and a cradle of hope.
    Who else speaks for the Family of Man?
    They are in tune and step
    with constellations of universal law.
    The people is a polychrome,
    a spectrum and a prism
    held in a moving monolith,
    a console organ of changing themes,
    a clavilux of color poems
    wherein the sea offers fog
    and the fog moves off in rain
    and the labrador sunset shortens
    to a nocturne of clear stars
    serene over the shot spray
    of northern lights.

    The steel mill sky is alive.
    The fire breaks white and zigzag
    shot on a gun-metal gloaming.
    Man is a long time coming.
    Man will yet win.
    Brother may yet line up with brother:

This old anvil laughs at many broken hammers.
    There are men who can't be bought.
    The fireborn are at home in fire.
    The stars make no noise,
    You can't hinder the wind from blowing.
    Time is a great teacher.
    Who can live without hope?

In the darkness with a great bundle of grief
    the people march.
In the night, and overhead a shovel of stars for keeps, the people
march:
    "Where to? what next?"

Business - Matthew O'Brien - The Myth That Entitlements Ruin Countries, Busted in 1 Little Graph - The Atlantic

Business - Matthew O'Brien - The Myth That Entitlements Ruin Countries, Busted in 1 Little Graph - The Atlantic