Friday's Odds and Ends

Its a beautiful spring day here in East Texas and I was out early picking berries and then I took my dog for a walk. We have to enjoy these spring days before the blast of summer heat hits. Here is a picture of one of my favorite wildflowers. They grow abundantly in my front pasture and I have been known to drive around them when mowing.

 We're headed into run-off elections across the country and some of them could carry pretty hefty price tags. I like what one small town in Reeves County Texas did. The two candidates for city council, Bruce MacNair and Bryan Studer,  agreed to a coin toss to select the winner. All that cost was a quarter. A run-off election would have cost the small town of Wolfforth, which is near Lubbock, $10,000.

According to Texas election laws, a coin toss is a legal method to break a tie between two candidates, and it appears it may be legal in other states as well. In doing some research I found that a coin toss has been used in Illinois, New Mexico and even in the Philippines.

I have an idea. Why not make it law to have a coin toss to settle every election tie? Obviously those are the two candidates that most people wanted, and it could save so much money. And another plus is we would not have to suffer through all those horrid campaign ads that sling so much mud you want to put on your wading boots.

Here's a quarter to use.

 A Truthout article by Mike Ludwig shed new light on the controversial fracking method of extracting oil. Fracking is used in many states, Texas included, and right now there is an effort to halt the proposed fracking in areas surrounding New Mexico’s Chaco Culture National Historical Park. If you would like to urge the Bureau of Land Management to deny this proposal, you can sign a petition HERE

After reading Ludwig's article that opened with, "Energy Information Administration officials told reporters on Wednesday that they are cutting their estimate of how much oil can be drawn out of California's massive Monterey Shale formation by a whopping 96 percent."

Fracking involves forcing gallons of water, containing chemicals, deep into the earth to break up rock formations.

Ummm... do we really want to keep doing that?

Now lets close with some fun. I got these jokes from The Laugh Factory in the Family Jokes category.

A woman gets on a bus with her baby. The bus driver says, "That's the ugliest baby that I've ever seen. Ugh!" The woman goes to the rear of the bus and sits down, fuming. She says to a man next to her, "The driver just insulted me!" The man says, "You go right up there and tell him off – go ahead, I'll hold your monkey for you."

An elderly couple are in church. The wife leans over and whispers to her husband, "I just let out a long, silent fart. What should I do?" The husband replies, "First off, replace the batteries in your hearing aid!"

A to Z Challenge - V is for Volcano

Until I started doing some online research, I did not know that Texas has a number of extinct volcanoes.

In late-Cretaceous time, Central Texas was part of a vast marine shelf on which carbonate rocks were deposited with the entire area gradually subsiding as sediments were laid down. The volcano formed when magma worked its way to the surface and encountered water-laden, unconsolidated sediments with the existing water rapidly vaporizing into steam resulting in an enormous explosion that formed an explosion crater. Pilot Knob is one of around 75 late-Cretaceous Period volcanoes scattered around Central Texas from Waco to Austin, San Antonio, and Del Rio. All of these volcanoes have been extinct for millions of years.

The Pilot Knob volcanic complex consists of four small, rounded hills (including Pilot Knob proper) forming the volcano's core area in an area two miles in diameter. The hills are composed of trap rock which is an erosion-resistant, fine-grained mafic volcanic rock.

It's a relief to know that there is probably no threat of a volcano erupting in Texas. We have enough natural disasters without that one. However, I did find this little tidbit on the University of Texas wesite:   The only real threat from a volcano for San Antonio is if a super volcano, such as the caldera under Yellowstone National Park, should erupt with a cataclysmic eruption. Such events only occur about every 100,000 years, and if there were an eruption of the Yellowstone caldera, scientists state there is little if anything that anyone from Montana to Texas could do to protect themselves. 

While we may not have to worry about a volcano, earthquakes do occur in Texas. Within the twentieth century there have been more than 100 earthquakes large enough to be felt; their epicenters occur in 40 of Texas's 257 counties. Four of these earthquakes have had magnitudes between 5 and 6, making them large enough to be felt over a wide area and produce significant damage near their epicenters. There has been an increase in seismic activity in recent history, and some tie that to the drilling method of fracking. In this method, millions of gallons of chemically treated water are forced underground to break up rock and free trapped gas. Most of the drilling fluid returns to the surface where it is either recycled or disposed of in underground wells.

Researchers think an increase in waste water injected into the ground by drilling operators may be the cause of a sixfold increase in the number of earthquakes that have shaken the central part of the U.S. from 2000 to 2011, according to a U.S. Geological Survey study. U.S. Geological Survey researchers found that, for three decades prior to 2000, seismic events in the nation’s midsection averaged 21 a year. They jumped to 50 in 2009, 87 in 2010 and 134 in 2011, according to the study, which was presented April 18 at the annual meeting of the Seismological Society of America. 
Source - Bloomberg.com

Monday Morning Musings

The Romance Studio is having a Thanksgiving Party, with lots of prizes, a Nook and free books. Lots of authors participating and I am sharing my pumpkin pie recipe. 

Today I'm over at the Blood Red Pencil with a post about thankfulness. Hop over if you have a moment and let me know what you are thankful for.


An update from last Monday's musings. The Stock Act bill first introduced by Brian Baird and Congresswoman Louise Slaughter which would make it illegal for members of Congress to trade stocks on non-public information and require them to report their stock trades every 90 days instead of once a year has gained momentum. It was reported on Sixty Minutes last night that the bill now  has 25 sponsors and is scheduled to go to the Senate floor.

A study for MIT states that "the environmental record of shale gas wells is for the most part a good one." In one of his columns, David Brooks interpreted that to mean the the risks of fracking can be managed if there are reasonable regulations and if the "general public has a balanced and realistic sense of the costs and benefits."

So, according to Brooks, all we need  to do to ensure that fracking is safe and environmentally okay is to buy into all the PR from companies doing the fracking as well as those who benefit from selling the gas. While we are at it, we should ignore the fact that the downside of the fracking method of extracting gas from shale is still being investigated.

People in Texas and Oklahoma, where a lot of the gas is being extracted, have been experiencing earthquakes at increasing rates, and there is a link between the drilling method and this increase. Even the companies doing the drilling admit it.  That report is from a company in the UK, and here in the States it appears that people are ignoring the dangers. A recent ruling in West Virginia allows fracking in and around one of the major cities in that state.

An article on PlanetSave.com, not only shows the connection between fracking and earthquakes, it has an alarming report that the recent quake in Oklahoma occurred on the proposed path of the XL Pipeline.

These are serious issues and energy companies and car companies need to be moving us away from our dependence on oil and gas as swiftly as possible. Instead of playing chicken with our safety and our planet, we need to put our best efforts into finding alternatives to fossil fuels.

And consumers need to do their part, too. Car pool. Consolidate shopping and errands and try not to drive every day unless you absolutely have to. Keep thermostats low in winter and high in the summer.

What are you doing to save on energy?

Friday's Odds and Ends

I started to do my usual odds and ends, then got into some research about this method of drilling for natural gas, and decided to just write about this issue today.  Wouldn't it be good to protect this beauty?

A town destroyed by Fracking - Dimock, Pennsylvania - “Fracking,” as it’s colloquially known, involves injecting millions of gallons of water, sand, and chemicals, many of them toxic, into the earth at high pressures to break up rock formations and release natural gas trapped inside. Not only has Dimock been affected on the surface with large areas of land cleared for drilling, the chemicals have gotten into the aquifer and seriously affected the water supply. People and animals are getting sick, dying, and wells are spontaneously combusting.

Yet the companies behind the drilling process claim that it is perfectly safe.

Hydraulic Fracturing - from the site Hydraulic Fracturing/Energy Tomorrow. Hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking,” is a proven and well-regulated technology. First used in the 1940s, hydraulic fracturing has unlocked massive new supplies of oil and clean-burning natural gas from dense deposits of shale — supplies that increase our country’s energy security and improve our ability to generate electricity, heat homes and power vehicles for generations to come. Fracking has been used in more than one million U.S. wells, and has safely produced more than seven billion barrels of oil and 600 trillion cubic feet of natural gas.

More Dangers - from the website, Earth Times - The dangers of fracking are not limited to the effect on water supplies. Fracking has been tied to earthquakes, and a recent study by a Cornell University professor shows that fracking has a higher greenhouse gas footprint than coal and oil because of the methane that is released during the drilling process. That gas is highly toxic, and one woman in East Texas who was exposed to that gas, now has a lung disease that is incurable.

Just like those favoring the XL Pipeline bringing tar sands oil from Canada to the Texas Gulf Coast, proponents of natural gas say it is all safe and we nay-sayers need to stop with the negative propaganda.  Of course they want us to stop. They want to be able to continue drilling and making profits without taking into consideration the long-term effects.

More Facts about Fracking

Friday's Odds and Ends

Thomas Sowell had a thoughtful column this past week answering the question, Does Constitution still matter in modern times. This was in response to commentary following the Supreme Court's decision that it is okay to sell violent video games to minors. Some analysts have said that the Constitution is out of date because the framers never envisioned  a world with computers, the Internet, and violent video games. Sowell writes, "Most people have enough common sense to know that a constitution does not exist to micromanage particular "events" or express opinions about the passing scene. A constitution exists to create a framework for government - and the Constiti\ution of the United States tries to keep the government inside that framework."

Thank you Mr. Sowell for pointing out what has been wrong with people's thinking about the Constitution. Here is a link to the entire article. It is well worth the read.

In a recent column Michael Lind wrote that conventional thinking about fossil fuels is wrong. He stated that there is enough natural gas and coal to sustain us for centuries. He also mentioned the studies being done by companies and governments in the U.s. Canada, and Japan to find ways to obtain energy from gas hydrates, which mix methane with ice in high-density formations under the sea floor. "The potential in gas hydrates may equal that of all other fossils."

Lind may have been trying to sound hopeful and encouraging, but I found those facts extremely disturbing. How long can we continue to take things out of the earth before we have more severe reactions than what we already have. Let's do a little physics experiment. Make a ball of rice, breadcrumbs, small nuts, and hold that all together with a paste of flour and water. When it dries, start taking bits of the rice and some nuts out. After a while the ball is going to crumble and fall apart.

Sure, that is a very simplistic example, but it illustrates what is wrong with the thinking that we can continually take from the earth with no bad effects. And the idea of messing with the ice under the sea is just ludicrous. It is melting from the surface of the earth faster than anyone can imagine, so we want to disrupt the foundation?

To end on a more upbeat note, a letter to the editor in The Dallas Morning News written by Arby Mason was clever. The headline was: Time-honored multitasking, and the letter read, "So, we're just now in the Age of Multitasking? That started when Eve had to cook apple pies, applesauce and baked apples while changing Cain and Abel's fig leaves and sweeping snakeskins off the front porch.