While I Was Gone

I haven't posted anything here for a few days, as I was taking a long weekend in Washington, D.C.

I spent most of the time visiting friends and enjoying the fine dining of the city, but I did get out to the Mall and some of the Smithsonian museums.

The Mall is currently home to a group calling themselves The New CIA (Cowboy and Indian Alliance), protesting the

Keystone Oil Pipeline.

Digging up the tar sands

For those who don't already know (why don't you?), in Alberta, Canada, huge areas of natural beauty and wildlife habitat are being destroyed.  The sands up there are saturated with tar.  The tarry sand is excavated, the tar diluted with organic solvents, and then the whole lot is piped south.

For some strange reason, these people don't want a pipeline carrying dilbit across the country.

One of the Koch Brothers' little operations wants to build a pipeline all the way from Alberta to Texas.  The diluted bitumin (dilbit) will be piped across our country, where it will be processed in Texas and then shipped overseas.

The big selling point for this environmental destruction is that it will provide jobs.  Sadly, those jobs will be for doctors, nurses, and those who clean up oil spills.

Mayflower, Arkansas, just last year.
Oil pipelines are completely safe and never leak

Epidemiologists have already noticed the high levels of cancers and other health issues among the people who live near the tar sand operations.

I still think that we should save those precious tar sands until we run out of wind and solar power.