Oil Field Quotes

The first day of spring was once the time for taking the young virgins into the fields, there in dalliance to set an example in fertility for nature to follow. Now we just set the clocks an hour ahead and change the oil in the crankcase.

In all, his outfit required nearly two thousand man-years of research and development, eight barrels of oil, and sixteen patent and trademark infringement lawsuits. All so he could possess casual style. A style that, in logistical requirements, was comparable to fielding a nineteenth-century military brigade. But he looked good. Casual.

Central Intelligence cutting Meo opium fields! China Lobby copping poppies in Burma! How long this Addict government support our oil-burner matter-habit

Today the main source of wealth is knowledge. And whereas you can conquer oil fields through war, you cannot acquire knowledge that way.

The funny thing about almost-dying is that afterward everyone expects you to jump on the happy train and take time to chase butterflies through grassy fields or see rainbows in puddles of oil on the highway. It’s a miracle, they’ll say with an expectant look, as if you’ve been given a big old gift and you better not disappoint Grandma by pulling a face when you unwrap the box and find a lumpy, misshapen sweater. That’s what life is, pretty much: full of holes and tangles and ways to get stuck. Uncomfortable and itchy. A present you never asked for, never wanted, never chose. A present you’re supposed to be excited to wear, day after day, even when you’d rather stay in bed and do nothing. The truth is this: it doesn’t take any skill to almost-die, or to almost-live, either.

The road to India, the Suez Canal, the oil fields of Mosul, the whole complex of political and strategic requirements that drew Britain into Palestine in 1918, began with the enterprise of the Elizabethan merchant adventurers.

Venus, it turns out, is broiling hot. There are no swamps, no oil fields, no seltzer oceans. With insufficient data, it is easy to go wrong.

In effect, the Kutubu oil field functions as by far the largest and most rigorously controlled national park in Papua New Guinea.

Today the main economic assets consist of technical and institutional knowledge rather than wheat fields, gold mines, or even oil fields, and you just cannot conquer knowledge through war.

The people I love the best jump into work head first without dallying in the shallows and swim off with sure strokes almost out of sight. They seem to become natives of that element, the black sleek heads of seals bouncing like half submerged balls. I love people who harness themselves, an ox to a heavy cart, who pull like water buffalo, with massive patience, who strain in the mud and the muck to move things forward, who do what has to be done, again and again. I want to be with people who submerge in the task, who go into the fields to harvest and work in a row and pass the bags along, who stand in the line and haul in their places, who are not parlor generals and field deserters but move in a common rhythm when the food must come in or the fire be put out. The work of the world is common as mud. Botched, it smears the hands, crumbles to dust. But the thing worth doing well done has a shape that satisfies, clean and evident. Greek amphoras for wine or oil, Hopi vases that held corn, are put in museums but you know they were made to be used. The pitcher cries for water to carry and a person for work that is real.

What a ruler has to rely upon is only the human heart. Human hearts are to the ruler what roots are to a tree, what oil is to a lamp, water to fish, fields to a farmer, or money to a merchant.

Each time you love—be it a man or a child, a cat or a horse—you add color to this world. When you fail to love, you erase color.” She smiles. “Love, in any of its forms, is what takes this journey from a bleak black-and-white pencil sketch to a magnificent oil painting.” She touches my cheek. “It’s the sweet fruit that paints the field and wakes our senses. I’m not saying you must be on a constant quest for it, but please, if love comes to you, if you find it within your grasp, promise me you’ll pluck it from the vine and give it a good looking-over, won’t you?

The wealthiest place in the world is not the gold mines of South America or the oil fields of Iraq or Iran. They are not the diamond mines of South Africa or the banks of the world. The wealthiest place on the planet is just down the road. It is the cemetery. There lie buried companies that were never started, inventions that were never made, bestselling books that were never written, and masterpieces that were never painted. In the cemetery is buried the greatest treasure of untapped potential.

Dad's oil dehydrator was a contained electrostatic field, one electrode down the center, the other the container's inner wall. Principal problem was finding a dielectric to separate the two. Refuse oil poured in came out as oil of the highest grade, dry chemicals, and drinking water. Petroleum Rectifying Company successfully prohibited its use.

It is hardly surprising that the malodorous field of garbology has not attained the popularity of rocket science, oil exploration, or brain surgery.

The energetic charge that is strongest in your electromagnetic field, also known as your aura or light body, is constantly attracting more of itself.

But I’m never lonely, a man who believes can never be lonely. I ride around the villages—I used to find spaghetti, flour—even vegetable oil. Canned fruit. Now I go to the cemeteries—people leave food and drink for the dead. But the dead don’t need it. They don’t mind. In the fields there’s wild grain, and in the forest there are mushrooms and berries. Freedom is here. I

People are prepared for everything except for the fact that beyond the darkness of their blindness there is a great light. They are prepared to go on breaking their backs plowing the same old field until the cows come home without seeing, until they stub their toes on it, that there is a treasure buried in that field rich enough to buy Texas. They are prepared for a God who strikes hard bargains but not for a God who gives as much for an hour’s work as for a day’s. They are prepared for a mustard-seed kingdom of God no bigger than the eye of a newt but not for the great banyan it becomes with birds in its branches singing Mozart. They are prepared for the potluck supper at First Presbyterian but not for the marriage supper of the Lamb, and when the bridegroom finally arrives at midnight with vine leaves in his hair, they turn up with their lamps to light him on his way all right only they have forgotten the oil to light them with and stand there with their big, bare, virginal feet glimmering faintly in the dark.

Thank you for inviting me here today " I said my voice sounding nothing like me. "I'm here to testify about things I've seen and experienced myself. I'm here because the human race has become more powerful than ever. We've gone to the moon. Our crops resist diseases and pests. We can stop and restart a human heart. And we've harvested vast amounts of energy for everything from night-lights to enormous super-jets. We've even created new kinds of people, like me. "But everything mankind" - I frowned - "personkind has accomplished has had a price. One that we're all gonna have to pay." I heard coughing and shifting in the audience. I looked down at my notes and all the little black words blurred together on the page. I just could not get through this. I put the speech down picked up the microphone and came out from behind the podium. "Look " I said. "There's a lot of official stuff I could quote and put up on the screen with PowerPoint. But what you need to know what the world needs to know is that we're really destroying the earth in a bigger and more catastrophic was than anyone has ever imagined. "I mean I've seen a lot of the world the only world we have. There are so many awesome beautiful tings in it. Waterfalls and mountains thermal pools surrounded by sand like white sugar. Field and field of wildflowers. Places where the ocean crashes up against a mountainside like it's done for hundreds of thousands of years. "I've also seen concrete cities with hardly any green. And rivers whose pretty rainbow surfaces came from an oil leak upstream. Animals are becoming extinct right now in my lifetime. Just recently I went through one of the worst hurricanes ever recorded. It was a whole lot worse because of huge worldwide climatic changes caused by... us. We the people." .... "A more perfect union While huge corporations do whatever they want to whoever they want and other people live in subway tunnels Where's the justice of that Kids right here in America go to be hungry every night while other people get four-hundred-dollar haircuts. Promote the general welfare Where's the General welfare in strip-mining toxic pesticides industrial solvents being dumped into rivers killing everything Domestic Tranquility Ever sleep in a forest that's being clear-cut You'd be hearing chain saws in your head for weeks. The blessings of liberty Yes. I'm using one of the blessings of liberty right now my freedom of speech to tell you guys who make the laws that the very ground you stand on the house you live in the children you tuck in at night are all in immediate catastrophic danger.

Nothing was as it seemed in Leo Koretz’s make-believe world of mysterious syndicates and Panamanian oil fields. Accounts written long after his death added fresh layers of myth and distortion, but I was determined to learn the truth about a larger-than-life figure who rarely, if ever, told the truth. The real story of the man who pioneered and mastered the Ponzi scheme, is so gripping – and, at times, so incredible – that it needs no embellishment. And it’s a story woven into the fabric of the corrupt politics and gang warfare that plagued Chicago in the 1920s.

I got the feeling that if I moved the frames to the side, I'd see the artists watching me, as though through a two-way mirror, cracking their arthritic knuckles and rubbing their stubbled chins, wondering what I was wondering about them, if I saw their brilliance, or if their lives had been pointless, if only God could judge them after all. Did they want more? Was there more genius to be wrung out of the turpentine rags at their feet? Could they have painted better? Could they have painted more generously? More clearly? Could they have dropped more fruit from their windows? Did they know that glory was mundane? Did they wish they'd crushed those withered grapes between their fingers and spent their days walking through fields of grass or being in love or confessing their delusions to a priest or starving like the hungry souls they were, begging for alms in the city square with some honesty for once? Maybe they'd lived wrongly. (...) Or maybe not. Maybe, in the morning, they were aloof and happy to distract themselves with their brushes and oils, to mix their colors and smoke their pipes and go back to their fresh still lives without having to swat away any more flies.

Poirot looked at me meditatively. “You have an extraordinary effect on me, Hastings. You have so strongly the flair in the wrong direction that I am almost tempted to go by it! You are that wholly admirable type of man, honest, credulous, honourable, who is invariably taken in by any scoundrel. You are the type of man who invests in doubtful oil fields, and non-existent gold mines. From hundreds like you, the swindler makes his daily bread. Ah, well—I shall study this Commander Challenger. You have awakened my doubts.” “My dear Poirot,” I cried, angrily. “You are perfectly absurd. A man who has knocked about the world like I have—” “Never learns,” said Poirot, sadly. “It is amazing—but there it is.” “Do you suppose I’d have made a success of my ranch out in the Argentine if I were the kind of credulous fool you make out?” “Do not enrage yourself, mon ami. You have made a great success of it—you and your wife.” “Bella,” I said, “always goes by my judgement.” “She is as wise as she is charming,” said Poirot. “Let us not quarrel my friend. See, there ahead of us, it says Mott’s Garage. That, I think, is the garage mentioned by Mademoiselle Buckley. A few inquiries will soon give us the truth of that little matter.

Set yourself to becoming the best-informed person in the agency on the account to which you are assigned. If, for example, it is a gasoline account, read books on oil geology and the production of petroleum products. Read the trade journals in the field. Spend Saturday mornings in service stations, talking to motorists. Visit your client’s refineries and research laboratories. At the end of your first year, you will know more about the oil business than your boss, and be ready to succeed him. Most

One possibility is just to tag along with the fantasists in government and industry who would have us believe that we can pursue our ideals of affluence, comfort, mobility, and leisure indefinitely. This curious faith is predicated on the notion that we will soon develop unlimited new sources of energy: domestic oil fields, shale oil, gasified coal, nuclear power, solar energy, and so on. This is fantastical cause the basic cause of the energy crisis is not scarcity; it is moral ignorance and weakness of character. We don't know how to use energy, or what to use it for. And we cannot restrain ourselves. Our time is characterized as much by the abuse and waste of human energy as it is by the abuse and waste of fossil fuel energy. Nuclear power, if we are to believe its advocates, is presumably going to be well used by the same mentality that has egregiously devalued and misapplied man- and womanpower. If we had an unlimited supply of solar or wind power, we would use that destructively, too, for the same reasons.

Let's examine the nature of the beast, so to speak. The male animal. Isn't there a fund, a pool, a reservoir of potential violence in the male psyche?… Isn't there a deep field, a sort of crude oil deposit that one might tap if and when the occasion warrants? A great dark lake of male rage. ... Isn't there a sludgy region you'd rather not know about? A remnant of some prehistoric period when dinosaurs roamed the earth and men fought with flint tools? When to kill was to live? ... Only your code allows you to enter the system.

We were so invisible as to be misrepresented even in caricature, lumped in with other sorts of poor whites, derogatory terms applied to us even if they didn't make sense. We lived on the open prairie, so we weren't "roughnecks" in oil fields; Kansas had a humble tap on oil thousands of feet below the prairie, but nothing like Oklahoma or Texas to the south. "Redneck" and "cracker" didn't quite translate, since their American usage was rooted in the slave South, against which Kansas had lit many of the fires that sparked the Civil War.

Our grandfathers, however, had no interest in losing ownership of their lives—every one of them had turned down Pexton’s offer and returned to the thrill of killing for food as trees were felled all over the valley to make room for the oil field and pipelines and Gardens.

Rising demand for oil exposed Europe, and later America, to oil shocks - serious interruptions in supply. Like a pebble tossed into a pond, an oil shock creats ripples, or effects, felt everywhere. Oil shocks have two causes. The first is natural, because existing oil fields may not yield enough to satisfy demand. Scarcity results in higher prices for oil products, reducing our standard of living. Natural scarcity was not a problem in the world's major producing areas until recently. The second cause of oil shocks is political. Political shocks happen when governments of oil-producing countries reduce or halt supply to gain the upper hand in dealings with other governments. This is the case in the Middle East, where oil has often mixed with politics, religion, and blood. The reasons for this have shaped the history of recent times.

The Donbas was a heavily populated and productive manufacturing area, with Donetsk alone accounting for about 12 percent of Ukraine’s gross domestic product. The area nearby also accounted for something near 90 percent of Ukraine’s oil and gas production, and fracking technology promised to open new fields. Grabbing the Donbas was a twofer. Russia could cripple the teetering economy of Ukraine and scoop up a healthy supply of oil and gas. Novorossiya!

There was at least one exception to this description of the [Energy Task Force] papers as uninteresting. One document later obtained by Judicial Watch showed that Cheney's energy task force was studying Iraqi oil fields, and the companies that had drilling rights on them, as early as March 2001, two years before the invasion of Iraq.

By the time workers have picked a field, tens of thousands of words have flown from mouth to ear. Part of the landscape’s mind—its memories, connections, rhythms—is thereby held in human consciousness. Work among the olive trees does more than yield oil; it creates and deepens the stories from which are made human and ecological communities.

By day, contrary to common wisdom, you probably won’t see the Great Pyramids at Giza, and you certainly won’t see the Great Wall of China. Their obscurity is partly the result of having been made from the soil and stone of the surrounding landscape. And although the Great Wall is thousands of miles long, it’s only about twenty feet wide—much narrower than the U.S. interstate highways you can barely see from a transcontinental jet. From orbit, with the unaided eye, you would have seen smoke plumes rising from the oil-field fires in Kuwait at the end of the first Persian Gulf War in 1991 and smoke from the burning World Trade Center towers in New York City on September 11, 2001. You will also notice the green–brown boundaries between swaths of irrigated and arid land. Beyond that shortlist, there’s not much else made by humans that’s identifiable from hundreds of miles up in the sky. You can see plenty of natural scenery, though, including hurricanes in the Gulf of Mexico, ice floes in the North Atlantic, and volcanic eruptions wherever they occur.

Previously the main sources of wealth were material assets such as gold mines, wheat fields and oil wells. Today the main source of wealth is knowledge.

Oil patch lore suggests that on the sixth day, God made oil. He rested on the seventh day, because there’s nothing easy about makin’ oil..

Vietnam is still, as it was thirty years ago, a poor country of rice paddy farms and sandy harbors, where fishermen cast nets from boats with eyes painted on the bows. It is overcrowded, prey to floods and sweatshops, dotted by modern cities and tiny hamlets of thatched huts with TV antennae. It is not a great capital of industry, or an international oil field or bread basket. There is nothing in Vietnam, now, that America truly needs. And there was even less thirty years ago. This country, these people, posed no real threat to us. It was a strange place to send our youth - not to learn a new culture or to enjoy the beaches, but to kill and be killed, to be maimed and to patch up the maimed. I am convinced that, to our government, Vietnam really, truly Didn't Mean Nothing.

So this summer, this first summer when he was allowed to have “visitation rights” with his father, with the divorce only one month old, Brian was heading north. His father was a mechanical engineer who had designed or invented a new drill bit for oil drilling, a self-cleaning, self-sharpening bit. He was working in the oil fields of Canada, up on the tree line where the tundra started and the forests ended. Brian was riding up from New York with some drilling equipment—it was lashed down in the rear of the plane next to a fabric bag the pilot had called a survival pack, which had emergency supplies in case they had to make an emergency landing—that had to be specially made in the city, riding in the bushplane with the pilot named Jim or Jake or something who had turned out to be an all right guy, letting him fly and all.

The poor performance of the huge Soviet army against the tiny Finnish army had been a big embarrassment to the Soviet Union: about eight Soviet soldiers killed for every Finn killed. The longer a war with Finland went on, the higher was the risk of British and French intervention, which would drag the Soviet Union into war with those countries and invite a British/French attack on Soviet oil fields in the Caucasus.

Nuclear weapons have turned war between superpowers into a mad act of collective suicide, and therefore forced the most powerful nations on earth to find alternative and peaceful ways to resolve conflicts. Simultaneously, the global economy has been transformed from a material-based economy into a knowledge-based economy. Previously the main sources of wealth were material assets such as gold mines, wheat fields and oil wells. Today the main source of wealth is knowledge. And whereas you can conquer oil fields through war, you cannot acquire knowledge that way. Hence as knowledge became the most important economic resource, the profitability of war declined and wars became increasingly restricted to those parts of the world – such as the Middle East and Central Africa – where the economies are still old-fashioned material-based economies.

I mean to tell you, the Law's notion of justice is more cold-blooded than any outlaw I ever knew. And I mean 'outlaw,' not criminal. 'Criminal' doesn't distinguish between guys like men and the guys who own the banks and insurance companies and stock markets, who own the factories and coal mines and oil fields, who own the goddamn Law. I once said to John that being an outlaw was about the only way left for a man to hold on to his self-respect, and he said Ain't that the sad truth. The girls laughed along with us because they knew it wasn't a joke.... John got the publicity because he loved it ... he carried on like the whole thing was an adventure movie and he was Douglas Fairbanks. He wanted to to be a 'star.' That's how he was. Not me. I never even liked having my picture taken. All I ever wanted was to show the bastards who own the law that it didn't mean they owned me.

I recognized the emphasis on “grit” as a final throwing up of hands. Kids too young to speak would be held responsible for their own problems. It didn’t matter how they were wronged, or how preventable the harm; their job was to contain the damage, making the blast zone smaller by absorbing all the impact. When flagrant affronts drew the ire of society—like migrant children separated from their families and detained in tent cities, oil fields, and a converted Walmart—I found myself numb. Maybe it’s for the better, I thought. Maybe the adversity will make them stronger. The doctrine of “anything bad can be alchemized into something good” had been so drilled into me that it seemed to apply even in this extreme situation. I was horrified by the logic I’d internalized. The whole song and dance of resilience chipped away at my humanity. It required a profound lack of empathy. It erased any pain, no matter how great, as long as it resulted in productivity.

What, then, is the future of the $5 trillion global oil and gas industry that supplies almost 60 percent of world energy? The industry will continue to need to find and develop another three to five billion barrels a year just to make up for the natural decline in oil fields, which happens after a field has been in production for some time. The International Energy Agency estimates that over $20 trillion of investment in oil and gas development will be required over the next two decades.

As the seemingly well-intentioned French journalist spoke about Africa’s scarcity and its limited resources, Nine smiled to himself almost condescendingly. He considered such statements an absolute joke. Africa did not, nor did it ever have, limited resources. Nine knew something the journalist obviously didn’t: Africa was the most abundantly resourced continent on the planet bar none. Like the despots who ruled much of the region, and the foreign governments who propped them up, he knew there was more than enough wealth in Africa’s mineral resources such as gold, diamonds and oil – not to mention the land that nurtured these resources – for every man, woman and child. He thought it unfortunate Africa had never been able to compete on a level playing field. The continent’s almost unlimited resources were the very reason foreigners had meddled in African affairs for the past century or more. Nine knew it was Omega’s plan, and that of other greedy organizations, to siphon as much wealth as they could out of vulnerable Third World countries, especially in Africa. The same organizations had the formula down pat: they indirectly started civil wars in mineral-rich regions by providing arms to opposing local factions, and sometimes even helped to create famines, in order to destabilize African countries. This made the targeted countries highly vulnerable to international control. Once the outside organizations had divided and conquered, they were then able to plunder the country’s resources.

In fact, Wen'an was the prefect location for the scrap-plastics trace: it was close, but not too close, to Beijing and Tianjin, two massive metropolises with lots of consumers and lots of factories in need of cheap raw materials. Even better, its traditional industry - farming - was disappearing as the region's once-plentiful streams and wells were run dry by the region's rampant, unregulated oil industry. So land was plentiful, and so were laborers desperate for a wage to replace the money lost when their fields died. As I hear these stories, I can't help but wonder: How much of the plastic that Wen'an recycles was made from the oil pumped from Wen'an's soil? Are all those old plastic bags blowing down Wen'an's streets ghosts of the fuel that used to run beneath them?

Previously the main sources of wealth were material assets such as gold mines, wheat fields and oil wells. Today the main source of wealth is knowledge. And whereas you can conquer oil fields through war, you cannot acquire knowledge that way. Hence as knowledge became the most important economic resource, the profitability of war declined and wars became increasingly restricted to those parts of the world – such as the Middle East and Central Africa – where the economies are still old-fashioned material-based economies.

Damen rose from the throne, and put his hand to the gold brooch at his shoulder. His garment dropped and the crowd roared its approval. The attendants took up his garment from where it fell, as he descended the dais and came out onto the field. On the grass, he reached his cupped hands into the receptacle held by the steward, and scooped out the oil, smearing it over his naked body. He nodded to Pallas, who he could see was excited, nervous, euphoric; and he put his hand on Pallas’s shoulder, felt Pallas’s hand on his own. He

Simultaneously, the global economy has been transformed from a material-based economy into a knowledge-based economy. Previously the main sources of wealth were material assets such as gold mines, wheat fields and oil wells. Today the main source of wealth is knowledge.

Rockefeller immediately put those insights to use. At twenty-five, a group of investors offered to invest approximately $500,000 at his direction if he could find the right oil wells in which to deploy the money. Grateful for the opportunity, Rockefeller set out to tour the nearby oil fields. A few days later, he shocked his backers by returning to Cleveland empty-handed, not having spent or invested a dollar of the funds. The opportunity didn’t feel right to him at the time, no matter how excited the rest of the market was—so he refunded the money and stayed away from drilling. It

Yes, it takes a lot of plant material to make a drop of oil, but a small drop of oil then contains the full force of the entire plant- of all of those plants. When you have a bottle of rose oil, you have the life force of 5,000 pounds of roses. That’s a lot of plant. And that means a lot of life.

And because I had the latest advanced mathematical training, I was given the job of analyzing the retractable landing gear for Jimmy Doolittle’s Lockheed Orion 9-D, a modification of the basic Orion. That was my first contact with any of the famous early aviators who would frequent the Lockheed plant. Others included Amelia Earhart, Wiley Post, Sir Charles Kingsford-Smith, and Roscoe Turner. Doolittle, of course, was an early record-setting pilot, both military and civilian, with a master’s degree and doctorate in science from M.I.T. Then he was flying for Shell Oil Company, landing in out-of-the-way fields, cow pastures, and other unprepared strips.

I argue against purism not because I want a devastated world, the Mordor of industrial capitalism emerging as from a closely aligned alternate universe through our floating islands of plastic gradually breaking down into microbeads consumed by the scant marine life left alive after generations of overfishing, bottom scraping, and coral reef–killing ocean acidification; our human-caused, place-devastating elevated sea levels; our earth-shaking, water poisoning fracking; our toxic lakes made of the externalities of rare-earth mineral production for so-called advanced electronics; our soul-and-life destroying prisons; our oil spills; our children playing with bits of dirty bombs; our white phosphorus; our generations of trauma held in the body; our cancers; and I could go on. I argue against purism because it is one bad but common approach to devastation in all its forms. It is a common approach for anyone who attempts to meet and control a complex situation that is fundamentally outside our control. It is a bad approach because it shuts down precisely the field of possibility that might allow us to take better collective action against the destruction of the world in all its strange, delightful, impure frolic. Purism is a de-collectivizing, de-mobilizing, paradoxical politics of despair. This world deserves better.

Poling says your feet they will crack and the germs they will have the field day, Hattie So she obliges, even though the body makes its own oil, if you allow the pores to breathe Although try telling that to the women in her family who slather themselves in unguents and other toxic substances in the name of beauty Then wonder why they get cancer

if animals can get more than they actually require to subsist, they take it, don’t they? If there’s been a battle or a plague, the hyenas and vultures take advantage of the abundance to overeat. Isn’t it the same with us? Forests died in great quantities some millions of years ago. Man has unearthed their corpses, finds he can use them and is giving himself the luxury of a real good guzzle while the carrion lasts. When the supplies are exhausted, he’ll go back to short rations, as the hyenas do in the intervals between wars and epidemics.’ Illidge spoke with gusto. Talking about human beings as though they were indistinguishable from maggots filled him with a peculiar satisfaction. ‘A coal field’s discovered; oil’s struck. Towns spring up, railways are built, ships come and go. To a long-lived observer on the moon, the swarming and crawling must look like the pullulation of ants and flies round a dead dog. Chilean nitre, Mexican oil, Tunisian phosphates—at every discovery another scurrying of insects. One can imagine the comments of the lunar astronomers. “These creatures have a remarkable and perhaps unique tropism towards fossilized carrion.”’ ‘Like

She loved the smell of old truck; thick cotton and vinyl seat covers, old gasoline and oil, the smell of country, decades of farmers, workers and families taking trips back and forth to town, up backroads to swimming holes, over fields, through all the weather. She imagined what this truck would have seen if it had eyes and a memory. She was about to become one more episode in its existence.

Why is it so difficult for major powers to wage successful wars in the twenty-first century? One reason is the change in the nature of the economy. In the past, economic assets were mostly material; therefore, it was relatively straightforward to enrich yourself by conquest. If you defeated your enemies on the battlefield, you could cash in by looting their cities, selling their civilians in the slave markets, and occupying valuable wheat fields and gold mines. Romans prospered by selling captive Greeks and Gauls, and nineteenth-century Americans thrived by occupying the gold mines of California and the cattle ranches of Texas. Yet in the twenty-first century only puny profits can be made that way. Today the main economic assets consist of technical and institutional knowledge rather than wheat fields, gold mines, or even oil fields, and you just cannot conquer knowledge through war.

Consider California. Its wealth was initially built on gold mines. But today it is built on silicon and celluloid – Silicon Valley and the celluloid hills of Hollywood. What would happen if the Chinese were to mount an armed invasion of California, land a million soldiers on the beaches of San Francisco and storm inland? They would gain little. There are no silicon mines in Silicon Valley. The wealth resides in the minds of Google engineers and Hollywood script doctors, directors and special-effects wizards, who would be on the first plane to Bangalore or Mumbai long before the Chinese tanks rolled into Sunset Boulevard. It is not coincidental that the few full-scale international wars that still take place in the world, such as the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, occur in places where wealth is old-fashioned material wealth. The Kuwaiti sheikhs could flee abroad, but the oil fields stayed put and were occupied.

The really crazy thing was that it was Oryx leading the pack, not bigger companies like Exxon, Mobil, and Amoco. Those companies had been focused on finding huge pools of oil abroad, not on improving drilling methods and squeezing out more from fields in the United States. Those “major” oil companies had been convinced that “elephant” fields in the United States were extinct. Now some were trying to figure out how to get involved in the Austin Chalk region.

Here at the creek mouth the fields run on to the river, the mud deltaed and baring out of its rich alluvial harbored bones and dread waste, a wrack of cratewood and condoms and fruitrinds. Old tins and jars and ruined household artifacts that rear from the fecal mire of the flats like landmarks in the trackless vales of dementia praecox. A world beyond all fantasy, malevolent and tactile and dissociate, the blown lightbulbs like shorn polyps semitranslucent and skullcolored bobbing blindly down and spectral eyes of oil and now and again the beached and stinking forms of foetal humans bloated like young birds mooneyed and bluish or stale gray. Beyond in the dark the river flows in a sluggard ooze toward southern seas, running down out of the rainflattened corn and petty crops and riverloam gardens of upcountry landkeepers, grating along like bonedust, afreight with the past, dreams dispersed in the water someway, nothing ever lost.

Aomame knew that he worked for a corporation connected with oil. He was a specialist on capital investment in a number of Middle Eastern countries. According to the information she had been given, he was one of the more capable men in the field. She could see it in the way he carried himself. He came from a good family, earned a sizable income, and drove a new Jaguar. After a pampered childhood, he had gone to study abroad, spoke good English and French, and exuded self-confidence. He was the type who could not bear to be told what to do, or to be criticized, especially if the criticism came from a woman. He had no difficulty bossing others around, though, and cracking a few of his wife’s ribs with a golf club was no problem at all. As far as he was concerned, the world revolved around him, and without him the earth didn’t move at all. He could become furious—violently angry—if anyone interfered with what he was doing or contradicted him in any way.

A girl and a boy, sitting lazily cross-legged under a pale green willow, picking at the grass. She is lying with her head in his lap, long red hair fanned against his knee. Her skin is not my unnatural red but like honeyed cream. She grins up at him, his eyes the color of an evergreen forest, of dragonfly wings, his corn-gold, too-long hair falling over his forehead. And she laughs. When she does her back, her throat arches slightly, and he blushes. He smells of wheat fields and fallen autumn apples soft against the earth, and it is a smell she knows like her own. Under the filmy reed-curtain of the old willow tree, they hold hands and talk quietly, shoes discarded like peach pits. The sun is low in the sky, warm and orange-gold on their young faces, their strong white smiles and freshly washed hair. The light spills onto their shoulders like water from a well. There are sharp-smelling rosemary branches braided into her hair, with their little blue blossoms, and the oil is on their brown fingers. The boy whispers something in the girl’s ear, and she closes her eyes, lashes smoking cheekbones like bundles of sage.

In Charly Cruz’s garage there was a mural painted on one of the cement walls. The mural was six feet tall and maybe ten feet long and showed the Virgin of Guadalupe in the middle of a lush landscape of rivers and forests and gold mines and silver mines and oil rigs and giant cornfields and wheat fields and vast meadows where cattle grazed. The Virgin had her arms spread wide, as if offering all of these riches in exchange for nothing. But despite being drunk, Fate noticed right away there was something wrong about her face. One of the Virgin’s eyes was open and the other eye was closed.

We decided to attend to our community instead of asking our community to attend the church.” His staff started showing up at local community events such as sports contests and town hall meetings. They entered a float in the local Christmas parade. They rented a football field and inaugurated a Free Movie Night on summer Fridays, complete with popcorn machines and a giant screen. They opened a burger joint, which soon became a hangout for local youth; it gives free meals to those who can’t afford to pay. When they found out how difficult it was for immigrants to get a driver’s license, they formed a drivers school and set their fees at half the going rate. My own church in Colorado started a ministry called Hands of the Carpenter, recruiting volunteers to do painting, carpentry, and house repairs for widows and single mothers. Soon they learned of another need and opened Hands Automotive to offer free oil changes, inspections, and car washes to the same constituency. They fund the work by charging normal rates to those who can afford it. I heard from a church in Minneapolis that monitors parking meters. Volunteers patrol the streets, add money to the meters with expired time, and put cards on the windshields that read, “Your meter looked hungry so we fed it. If we can help you in any other way, please give us a call.” In Cincinnati, college students sign up every Christmas to wrap presents at a local mall — ​no charge. “People just could not understand why I would want to wrap their presents,” one wrote me. “I tell them, ‘We just want to show God’s love in a practical way.’ ” In one of the boldest ventures in creative grace, a pastor started a community called Miracle Village in which half the residents are registered sex offenders. Florida’s state laws require sex offenders to live more than a thousand feet from a school, day care center, park, or playground, and some municipalities have lengthened the distance to half a mile and added swimming pools, bus stops, and libraries to the list. As a result, sex offenders, one of the most despised categories of criminals, are pushed out of cities and have few places to live. A pastor named Dick Witherow opened Miracle Village as part of his Matthew 25 Ministries. Staff members closely supervise the residents, many of them on parole, and conduct services in the church at the heart of Miracle Village. The ministry also provides anger-management and Bible study classes.

He wanted to call his mother, to let her sweet voice swathe him, but instead he watched a documentary about Krakatoa on his laptop. He was imagining what the world would look like under volcanic ash. As if some mad child had come along and scribbled black and gray over the landscape: the streams gone greasy, the trees powder puffs of ash, greensward a slick of gleaming oil. An image of Hades. Fields of punishment, screams in the night, the Asphodel Meadows. The dead clacketing their bones. Luxuriating in the horror, he was. In the unhappiness of being broken. There was not not a kind of wallowing joy in this.

We were running on borrowed time, but we didn't know just how borrowed it was, those free and wild days. The whole blessed country came to be paved over, and how I wish we were short on concrete instead of oil. There's shopping malls in the pinewoods, houses in the tomato fields, and our lonesome two-lane blacktops are all six lanes plugged tight with traffic. Hurricanes, earthquakes, wars, plagues, and pirates for three hundred years, but it always came back. And then in thirty years it was gone, paved over and gone. But we did not know all that when we were sitting there in the shade of those courthouse oaks, trying to wish up money.

Sweeping the dorm soon's it's empty, I'm after dust mice under his bed when I get a smell of something that makes me realize for the first time since I been in the hospital that the big dorm full of beds, sleeps forty grown men, has always been sticky with a thousand other smells - smells of germicide, zinc ointment, and foot powder, smell of piss and sour old-man manure, of Pablum and eyewash, of musty shorts and socks musty even when they're fresh back from the laundry, the stiff odor of starch in the linen, the acid stench of morning mouths, the banana smell of machine oil, and sometimes the smell of singed hair - but never before now, before he came in, the man smell of dust and dirt from the open fields, and sweat, and work.

We are glad to visit your beautiful country. It is prosperous—you all live far from the struggle. Nobody destroys your towns, cities, fields. Nobody kills your citizens, your sisters and mothers, your fathers and brothers. I come from a place where bombs pound villages into ash, where Russian blood oils the treads of German tanks, where innocent civilians die every day.” She caught herself up, exhaled slowly as she marshaled her next words. No one moved, least of all the marksman. “An accurate bullet fired by a sniper like me, Mrs. Roosevelt, is no more than a response to an enemy. My husband lost his life at Sevastopol before my eyes. He died in my arms. As far as I am concerned, any Hitlerite I see through my telescopic sights is the one who killed him.” A frozen silence fell over the room. Only the marksman’s eyes moved as he looked around the table, cataloging responses. The Soviet delegation leader sat clutching his butter knife, looking like he wanted to saw off her head and bowl it through the window into the White House gardens. The smart Washington women in their frills and pearls looked appalled. The First Lady looked . . . Embarrassed? the marksman wondered. Did that horsey presidential bitch look embarrassed? “I’m sorry, Lyudmila dear,” she said quietly, laying down her napkin. “I had no wish to offend you. This conversation is important, and we will continue it in a more suitable setting. But now, unfortunately, it is time to disperse. My duties are calling, and I understand

couldn’t they join a good fight? The coastal land of Louisiana had long been slowly sinking into the Gulf of Mexico. The state’s coast provides 40 percent of the nation’s wetlands, and its commercial fisheries provide a quarter to a third of the nation’s seafood. Experts agree that a major cause of the land’s subsidence is the extraction of oil and saltwater intrusion. Over the years, oil companies have dredged hundreds of canals and laid down pipeline through which oil drilled in the Gulf has been piped inland. Saltwater seeps in along the canals, killing grasses that once provided protection against Louisiana’s frequent tropical storms. Since 1930, the state had already lost an area equal to the size of Delaware—an average football field every hour.

FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover “mistrusted and disliked all three Kennedy brothers. President Johnson and Hoover had mutual fear and hatred for the Kennedys,” wrote the late William Sullivan, for many years an assistant FBI director. Hoover hated Robert Kennedy, who as Attorney General was his boss, and feared John. In turn, the President distrusted Allen Dulles, and eased him out as CIA director after the 1961 Bay of Pigs debacle. When JFK moved to lower the oil depletion allowance, he incurred the displeasure of John McCloy, whose clients’ profits would be trimmed. Hoover, Dulles and McCloy did not belong to the Kennedy fan club. Hoover controlled the field investigation when the president was shot. Dulles and McCloy helped mold the final verdict of the Warren Commission.

The funny thing about almost-dying is that afterward everyone expects you to jump on the happy train and take time to chase butterflies through grassy fields or see rainbows in puddles of oil on the highway. It’s a miracle, they’ll say with an expectant look, as if you’ve been given a big old gift and you better not disappoint Grandma by pulling a face when you unwrap the box and find a lumpy, misshapen sweater. That’s what life is, pretty much: full of holes and tangles and ways to get stuck. Uncomfortable and itchy. A present you never asked for, never wanted, never chose. A present you’re supposed to be excited to wear, day after day, even when you’d rather stay in bed and do nothing. The truth is this: it doesn’t take any skill to almost-die, or to almost-live, either.

Patriotism comes from the same Latin word as father. Blind patriotism is collective transference. In it the state becomes a parent and we citizens submit our loyalty to ensure its protection. We may have been encouraged to make that bargain from our public school education, our family home, religion, or culture in general. We associate safety with obedience to authority, for example, going along with government policies. We then make duty, as it is defined by the nation, our unquestioned course. Our motivation is usually not love of country but fear of being without a country that will defend us and our property. Connection is all-important to us; excommunication is the equivalent of death, the finality we can’t dispute. Healthy adult loyalty is a virtue that does not become blind obedience for fear of losing connection, nor total devotion so that we lose our boundaries. Our civil obedience can be so firm that it may take precedence over our concern for those we love, even our children. Here is an example: A young mother is told by the doctor that her toddler is allergic to peanuts and peanut oil. She lets the school know of her son’s allergy when he goes to kindergarten. Throughout his childhood, she is vigilant and makes sure he is safe from peanuts in any form. Eighteen years later, there is a war and he is drafted. The same mother, who was so scrupulously careful about her child’s safety, now waves goodbye to him with a tear but without protest. Mother’s own training in public school and throughout her life has made her believe that her son’s life is expendable whether or not the war in question is just. “Patriotism” is so deeply ingrained in her that she does not even imagine an alternative, even when her son’s life is at stake. It is of course also true that, biologically, parents are ready to let children go just as the state is ready to draft them. What a cunning synchronic-ity. In addition, old men who decide on war take advantage of the timing too. The warrior archetype is lively in eighteen-year-olds, who are willing to fight. Those in their mid-thirties, whose archetype is being a householder and making a mark in their chosen field, will not show an interest in battlefields of blood. The chiefs count on the fact that young braves will take the warrior myth literally rather than as a metaphor for interior battles. They will be willing to put their lives on the line to live out the collective myth of societies that have not found the path of nonviolence. Our collective nature thus seems geared to making war a workable enterprise. In some people, peacemaking is the archetype most in evidence. Nature seems to have made that population smaller, unfortunately. Our culture has trained us to endure and tolerate, not to protest and rebel. Every cell of our bodies learned that lesson. It may not be virtue; it may be fear. We may believe that showing anger is dangerous, because it opposes the authority we are obliged to appease and placate if we are to survive. This explains why we so admire someone who dares to say no and to stand up or even to die for what he believes. That person did not fall prey to the collective seduction. Watching Jeopardy on television, I notice that the audience applauds with special force when a contestant risks everything on a double-jeopardy question. The healthy part of us ardently admires daring. In our positive shadow, our admiration reflects our own disavowed or hidden potential. We, too, have it in us to dare. We can stand up for our truth, putting every comfort on the line, if only we can calm our long-scared ego and open to the part of us that wants to live free. Joseph Campbell says encouragingly, “The part of us that wants to become is fearless.” Religion and Transference Transference is not simply horizontal, from person to person, but vertical from person to a higher power, usually personified as God. When

Compared to cotton, synthetic fibers require a lot less water to produce, but that’s not necessarily a good enough argument for using them, since they have other significant impacts: they are still made of oil, and their production can require a lot of energy. MIT calculated that the global impact of producing polyester alone was somewhere between 706 million metric tons of carbon dioxide, or about what 185 coal-fired power plants emit in a year.2 Samit Chevli, the principal investigator for biomaterials at DuPont, the giant chemical company, has said that it will be hundreds of years before regular polyester degrades.3 Plus, while the chemicals used in production typically aren’t released to the environment, if factories don’t have treatment systems in the last phase of production, they can release antimony, an element that can be harmful to human health, as well as other toxins and heavy metals. Despite having just written a good amount about the impacts associated with the production of synthetic fibers, that’s actually not why I wanted to call attention to your yoga pants and dry-fit sweat-wicking T-shirts, which we wear out to dinner. It is hard for me to leave my fashion critique at the door, but what I actually want to say about synthetic fibers is that they are everywhere—not just in all of our clothes, but literally everywhere: rivers, lakes, oceans, agricultural fields, mountaintops, glaciers. Everywhere. Synthetic fibers, actually, may be one of the most abundant, widespread, and stubborn forms of pollution that we have inadvertently created.

Here at the creek mouth the fields run on to the river, the mud deltaed and baring out of its rich alluvial harbored bones and dread waste, a wrack of cratewood and condoms and fruitrinds. Old tins and jars and ruined household artifacts that rear from the fecal mire of the flats like landmarks in the trackless vales of dementia praecox. A world beyond all fantasy, malevolent and tactile and dissociate, the blown lightbulbs like shorn polyps semitranslucent and skullcolored bobbing blindly down and spectral eyes of oil and now and again the beached and stinking forms of foetal humans bloated like young birds mooneyed and bluish or stale gray. Beyond in the dark the river flows in a sluggard ooze toward southern seas, running down out of the rain flattened corn and petty crops and riverloam gardens of upcountry land keepers, grating along like bonedust,

... the exotic spices arriving daily from the East Indies and the Americas, the crates of sweet oranges and bitter lemons from Sicily, the apricots from Mesopotamia, the olive oil from Naples, the almonds from the Jordan valley... I have seen and smelled these delicacies at market. But does any English person know how to cook with such foods? I think back to my time in France and Italy, of all the delicacies that passed across my tongue. And then to the gardens I've seen in Tonbridge with their raised beds of sorrel, lettuce, cucumbers, marrows, pumpkins. Already the banks are starred bright with blackberries and rose hips, with damsons and sour sloes, the bloom still upon them. Trees are weighted down with green apples and yellow mottled pears and crab apples flushed pink and gold. Soon there will be fresh cobnuts in their husks, and ripe walnuts, and field mushrooms, and giant puffballs.

When you're responsible for half the planet's military spending, and 80 percent of its military R&D, certain things can be said with confidence: No one is going to get into a nuclear war with the United States, or a large-scale tank battle, or even a dogfight. You're the Microsoft, the Standard Oil of conventional warfare: Were they interested in competing in this field, second-tier military powers would probably have filed an antitrust suit with the Department of Justice by now. When you're the only guy in town with a tennis racket, don't be surprised if no one wants to join you on center court--or that provocateurs look for other fields on which to play. If you've got uniformed infantryman and tanks and battleships and jet fighters, you're too weak to take on the hyperpower. But, if you've got illiterate goatherds with string and hacksaws and fertilizer, you can tie him down for a decade. An IED is an "improvised" explosive device. Can we still improvise? Or does the planet's most lavishly funded military assume it has the luxury of declining to adapt to the world it's living in?

per hour. Handbrake knew that he could keep up with the best of them. Ambassadors might look old-fashioned and slow, but the latest models had Japanese engines. But he soon learned to keep it under seventy. Time and again, as his competitors raced up behind him and made their impatience known by the use of their horns and flashing high beams, he grudgingly gave way, pulling into the slow lane among the trucks, tractors and bullock carts. Soon, the lush mustard and sugarcane fields of Haryana gave way to the scrub and desert of Rajasthan. Four hours later, they reached the rocky hills surrounding the Pink City, passing in the shadow of the Amber Fort with its soaring ramparts and towering gatehouse. The road led past the Jal Mahal palace, beached on a sandy lake bed, into Jaipur’s ancient quarter. It was almost noon and the bazaars along the city’s crenellated walls were stirring into life. Beneath faded, dusty awnings, cobblers crouched, sewing sequins and gold thread onto leather slippers with curled-up toes. Spice merchants sat surrounded by heaps of lal mirch, haldi and ground jeera, their colours as clean and sharp as new watercolor paints. Sweets sellers lit the gas under blackened woks of oil and prepared sticky jalebis. Lassi vendors chipped away at great blocks of ice delivered by camel cart. In front of a few of the shops, small boys, who by law should have been at school, swept the pavements, sprinkling them with water to keep down the dust. One dragged a doormat into the road where the wheels of passing vehicles ran over it, doing the job of carpet beaters. Handbrake honked his way through the light traffic as they neared the Ajmeri Gate, watching the faces that passed by his window: skinny bicycle rickshaw drivers, straining against the weight of fat aunties; wild-eyed Rajasthani men with long handlebar moustaches and sun-baked faces almost as bright as their turbans; sinewy peasant women wearing gold nose rings and red glass bangles on their arms; a couple of pink-faced goras straining under their backpacks; a naked sadhu, his body half covered in ash like a caveman. Handbrake turned into the old British Civil Lines, where the roads were wide and straight and the houses and gardens were set well apart. Ajay Kasliwal’s residence was number

The principal energy sources of our present industrial civilization are the so-called fossil fuels. We burn wood and oil, coal and natural gas, and, in the process, release waste gases, principally CO2, into the air. Consequently, the carbon dioxide content of the Earth’s atmosphere is increasing dramatically. The possibility of a runaway greenhouse effect suggests that we have to be careful: Even a one- or two-degree rise in the global temperature can have catastrophic consequences. In the burning of coal and oil and gasoline, we are also putting sulfuric acid into the atmosphere. Like Venus, our stratosphere even now has a substantial mist of tiny sulfuric acid droplets. Our major cities are polluted with noxious molecules. We do not understand the long-term effects of our course of action. But we have also been perturbing the climate in the opposite sense. For hundreds of thousands of years human beings have been burning and cutting down forests and encouraging domestic animals to graze on and destroy grasslands. Slash-and-burn agriculture, industrial tropical deforestation and overgrazing are rampant today. But forests are darker than grasslands, and grasslands are darker than deserts. As a consequence, the amount of sunlight that is absorbed by the ground has been declining, and by changes in the land use we are lowering the surface temperature of our planet. Might this cooling increase the size of the polar ice cap, which, because it is bright, will reflect still more sunlight from the Earth, further cooling the planet, driving a runaway albedo* effect? Our lovely blue planet, the Earth, is the only home we know. Venus is too hot. Mars is too cold. But the Earth is just right, a heaven for humans. After all, we evolved here. But our congenial climate may be unstable. We are perturbing our poor planet in serious and contradictory ways. Is there any danger of driving the environment of the Earth toward the planetary Hell of Venus or the global ice age of Mars? The simple answer is that nobody knows. The study of the global climate, the comparison of the Earth with other worlds, are subjects in their earliest stages of development. They are fields that are poorly and grudgingly funded. In our ignorance, we continue to push and pull, to pollute the atmosphere and brighten the land, oblivious of the fact that the long-term consequences are largely unknown.

Ohio hadn’t gone through the same real estate boom as the Sun Belt, but the vultures had circled the carcasses of dying industrial towns––Dayton, Toledo, Mansfield, Youngstown, Akron––peddling home equity loans and refinancing. All the garbage that blew up in people’s faces the same way subprime mortgages had. A fleet of nouveau riche snake oil salesmen scoured the state, moving from minority hoods where widowed, churchgoing black ladies on fixed incomes made for easy marks to the white working-class enclaves and then the first-ring suburbs. The foreclosures began to crop up and then turn into fields of fast-moving weeds, reducing whole neighborhoods to abandoned husks or drug pens. Ameriquest, Countrywide, CitiFinancial––all those devious motherfuckers watching the state’s job losses, plant closings, its struggles, its heartache, and figuring out a way to make a buck on people’s desperation. Every city or town in the state had big gangrenous swaths that looked like New Canaan, the same cancer-patient-looking strip mall geography with brightly lit outposts hawking variations on usurious consumer credit. Those entrepreneurs saw the state breaking down like Bill’s truck, and they moved in, looking to sell the last working parts for scrap.

Planted rows went turning past like giant spokes one by one as they ranged the roads. The skies were interrupted by dark gray storm clouds with a flow like molten stone, swept and liquid, and light that found its way through them was lost in the dark fields but gathered shining along the pale road, so that sometimes all you could see was the road, and the horizon it ran to. Sometimes she was overwhelmed by the green life passing in such high turbulence, too much to see, all clamoring to have its way. Leaves sawtooth, spade-shaped, long and thin, blunt-fingered, downy and veined, oiled and dusty with the day—flowers in bells and clusters, purple and white or yellow as butter, star-shaped ferns in the wet and dark places, millions of green veilings before the bridal secrets in the moss and under the deadfalls, went on by the wheels creaking and struck by rocks in the ruts, sparks visible only in what shadow it might pass over, a busy development of small trailside shapes tumbling in what had to be deliberately arranged precision, herbs the wildcrafters knew the names and market prices of and which the silent women up in the foothills, counterparts whom they most often never got even to meet, knew the magic uses for. They lived for different futures, but they were each other’s unrecognized halves, and what fascination between them did come to pass was lit up, beyond question, with grace.

In ancient agricultural societies, most religions revolved not around metaphysical questions and the afterlife, but around the very mundane issue of increasing agricultural output. Thus the Old Testament God never promises any rewards or punishments after death. He instead tells the people of Israel that ‘If you carefully observe the commands that I’m giving you [. . .] then I will send rain on the land in its season [. . .] and you’ll gather grain, wine, and oil. I will provide grass in the fields for your livestock, and you’ll eat and be satisfied. Be careful! Otherwise, your hearts will deceive you and you will turn away to serve other gods and worship them. The wrath of God will burn against you so that he will restrain the heavens and it won’t rain. The ground won’t yield its produce and you’ll be swiftly destroyed from the good land that the Lord is about to give you’ (Deuteronomy 11:13–17). Scientists today can do much better than the Old Testament God. Thanks to artificial fertilisers, industrial insecticides and genetically modified crops, agricultural production nowadays outstrips the highest expectations ancient farmers had of their gods. And the parched state of Israel no longer fears that some angry deity will restrain the heavens and stop all rain – for the Israelis have recently built a huge desalination plant on the shores of the Mediterranean, so they can now get all their drinking water from the sea.

king contributed from his own possessions for the morning and evening burnt offerings and for the burnt offerings on the Sabbaths, at the New Moons and at the appointed festivals as written in the Law of the LORD. 4He ordered the people living in Jerusalem to give the portion due the priests and Levites so they could devote themselves to the Law of the LORD. 5As soon as the order went out, the Israelites generously gave the firstfruits of their grain, new wine, olive oil and honey and all that the fields produced. They brought a great amount, a tithe of everything. 6The people of Israel and Judah who lived in the towns of Judah also brought a tithe of their herds and flocks and a tithe of the holy things dedicated to the LORD their God, and they piled them in heaps. 7They began doing this in the third month and finished in the seventh month. 8When Hezekiah and his officials came and saw the heaps, they praised the LORD and blessed his people Israel. 9Hezekiah asked the priests and Levites about the heaps; 10and Azariah the chief priest, from the family of Zadok, answered, “Since the people began to bring their contributions to the temple of the LORD, we have had enough to eat and plenty to spare, because the LORD has blessed his people, and this great amount is left over.” 11Hezekiah gave orders to prepare storerooms in the temple of the LORD, and this was done. 12Then they faithfully brought in the contributions, tithes and dedicated gifts.

In the Middle Ages, sugar was a rare luxury in Europe. It was imported from the Middle East at prohibitive prices and used sparingly as a secret ingredient in delicacies and snake-oil medicines. After large sugar plantations were established in America, ever-increasing amounts of sugar began to reach Europe. The price of sugar dropped and Europe developed an insatiable sweet tooth. Entrepreneurs met this need by producing huge quantities of sweets: cakes, cookies, chocolate, candy, and sweetened beverages such as cocoa, coffee and tea. The annual sugar intake of the average Englishman rose from near zero in the early seventeenth century to around eighteen pounds in the early nineteenth century. However, growing cane and extracting its sugar was a labour-intensive business. Few people wanted to work long hours in malaria-infested sugar fields under a tropical sun. Contract labourers would have produced a commodity too expensive for mass consumption. Sensitive to market forces, and greedy for profits and economic growth, European plantation owners switched to slaves. From the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries, about 10 million African slaves were imported to America. About 70 per cent of them worked on the sugar plantations. Labour conditions were abominable. Most slaves lived a short and miserable life, and millions more died during wars waged to capture slaves or during the long voyage from inner Africa to the shores of America. All this so that Europeans could enjoy their sweet tea and candy – and sugar barons could enjoy huge profits. The slave trade was not

The Rockefeller Foundation was established in 1913 to maintain the control of the family’s oil empire. Today this foundation is the most important shareholder of Exxon with 4.3 million shares. Additionally, the foundation has two million shares in Standard Oil of California and 300.000 shares in Mobil Oil. Other smaller foundations belonging to the Rockefellers have three million shares in Exxon, and 400.000 shares in Standard Oil of Ohio. The total asset of this group of Rockefeller companies, amount to more than fifty billion dollars.[20] For a researcher who concentrates on the Rockefeller family, it won’t be difficult to prove that this immensely rich family has played an important role in the American politics of the twentieth century. The drift and decisions of American politics lead directly back to the Rockefeller family. The Rockefellers immigrated to America from Spain. The best-known member of this family was the influential industrialist, banker John Davidson Rockefeller. He asserted himself as the richest man of his time. Before going into oil transport, he was a wholesaler of narcotic drugs.[21] With an unbridled energy, he set up the Standard Oil Trust, which now possesses ninety percent of the oil refineries in the United States.[22] John Davidson Rockefeller also bought the Pocantico Hills territory in New York, which is the domicile of over a 100 families with the name Rockefeller. David Rockefeller, an absolute genius in the field of finances, has been managing Chase Manhattan Bank, the most important bank in the world, since 1945. The power of this bank is great enough to bring about or destroy governments, to start or end wars, and ruin companies or let them flourish worldwide, ultimately exerting great influence on the entire human race.

These usages are attested in the most formal manner. “I pour upon the earth of the tomb,” says Iphigenia in Euripides, “milk, honey, and wine; for it is with these that we rejoice the dead.”10 Among the Greeks there was in front of every tomb a place destined for the immolation of the victim and the cooking of its flesh.11 The Roman tomb also had its culina, a species of kitchen, of a particular kind, and entirely for the use of the dead.12 Plutarch relates that after the battle of Platæa, the slain having been buried upon the field of battle, the Platæans engaged to offer them the funeral repast every year. Consequently, on each anniversary they went in grand procession, conducted by their first magistrates to the mound under which the dead lay. They offered the departed milk, wine, oil, and perfumes, and sacrificed a victim. When the provisions had been placed upon the tomb, the Platæans pronounced a formula by which they called the dead to come and partake of this repast. This ceremony was still performed in the time of Plutarch, who was enabled to witness the six hundredth anniversary of it.13 A little later, Lucian, ridiculing these opinions and usages, shows how deeply rooted they were in the common mind. “The dead,” says he, “are nourished by the provisions which we place upon their tomb, and drink the wine which we pour out there; so that one of the dead to whom nothing is offered is condemned to perpetual hunger.”14 These are very old forms of belief, and are quite groundless and ridiculous, and yet they exercised empire over man during a great number of generations. They governed men’s minds; we shall soon see that they governed societies even, and that the greater part of the domestic and social institutions of the ancients was derived from this source.

The chorus of criticism culminated in a May 27 White House press conference that had me fielding tough questions on the oil spill for about an hour. I methodically listed everything we'd done since the Deepwater had exploded, and I described the technical intricacies of the various strategies being employed to cap the well. I acknowledged problems with MMS, as well as my own excessive confidence in the ability of companies like BP to safeguard against risk. I announced the formation of a national commission to review the disaster and figure out how such accidents could be prevented in the future, and I reemphasized the need for a long-term response that would make America less reliant on dirty fossil fuels. Reading the transcript now, a decade later, I'm struck by how calm and cogent I sound. Maybe I'm surprised because the transcript doesn't register what I remember feeling at the time or come close to capturing what I really wanted to say before the assembled White House press corps: That MMS wasn't fully equipped to do its job, in large part because for the past thirty years a big chunk of American voters had bought into the Republican idea that government was the problem and that business always knew better, and had elected leaders who made it their mission to gut environmental regulations, starve agency budgets, denigrate civil servants, and allow industrial polluters do whatever the hell they wanted to do. That the government didn't have better technology than BP did to quickly plug the hole because it would be expensive to have such technology on hand, and we Americans didn't like paying higher taxes - especially when it was to prepare for problems that hadn't happened yet. That it was hard to take seriously any criticism from a character like Bobby Jindal, who'd done Big Oil's bidding throughout his career and would go on to support an oil industry lawsuit trying to get a federal court to lift our temporary drilling moratorium; and that if he and other Gulf-elected officials were truly concerned about the well-being of their constituents, they'd be urging their party to stop denying the effects of climate change, since it was precisely the people of the Gulf who were the most likely to lose homes or jobs as a result of rising global temperatures. And that the only way to truly guarantee that we didn't have another catastrophic oil spill in the future was to stop drilling entirely; but that wasn't going to happen because at the end of the day we Americans loved our cheap gas and big cars more than we cared about the environment, except when a complete disaster was staring us in the face; and in the absence of such a disaster, the media rarely covered efforts to shift America off fossil fuels or pass climate legislation, since actually educating the public on long-term energy policy would be boring and bad for ratings; and the one thing I could be certain of was that for all the outrage being expressed at the moment about wetlands and sea turtles and pelicans, what the majority of us were really interested in was having the problem go away, for me to clean up yet one more mess decades in the making with some quick and easy fix, so that we could all go back to our carbon-spewing, energy-wasting ways without having to feel guilty about it. I didn't say any of that. Instead I somberly took responsibility and said it was my job to "get this fixed." Afterward, I scolded my press team, suggesting that if they'd done better work telling the story of everything we were doing to clean up the spill, I wouldn't have had to tap-dance for an hour while getting the crap kicked out of me. My press folks looked wounded. Sitting alone in the Treaty Room later that night, I felt bad about what I had said, knowing I'd misdirected my anger and frustration. It was those damned plumes of oil that I really wanted to curse out.

You make springs gush forth in the valleys;         they flow between the hills;     11 they give drink to every beast of the field;         the wild donkeys quench their thirst.     12 Beside them the birds of the heavens dwell;         they sing among the branches.     13 From your lofty abode you water the mountains;         the earth is satisfied with the fruit of your work.     14 You cause the grass to grow for the livestock         and plants for man to cultivate,     that he may bring forth food from the earth         15 and wine to gladden the heart of man,     oil to make his face shine         and bread to strengthen man's heart.     16 The trees of the LORD are watered abundantly,         the cedars of Lebanon that he planted.     17 In them the birds build their nests;         the stork has her home in the fir trees.     18 The high mountains are for the wild goats;         the rocks are a refuge for the rock badgers.     19 He made the moon to mark the seasons; [1]         the sun knows its time for setting.     20 You make darkness, and it is night,         when all the beasts of the forest creep about.     21 The young lions roar for their prey,         seeking their food from God.     22 When the sun rises, they steal away         and lie down in their dens.     23 Man goes out to his work         and to his labor until the evening.     24 O LORD, how manifold are your works!         In wisdom have you made them all;         the earth is full of your creatures.     25 Here is the sea, great and wide,         which teems with creatures innumerable,         living things both small and great.     26 There go the ships,         and Leviathan, which you formed to play in it. [2]     27 These all look to you,         to give them their food in due season.     28 When you give it to them, they gather it up;         when you open your hand, they are filled with good things.     29 When you hide your face, they are dismayed;         when you take away their breath, they die         and return to their dust.     30 When you send forth your Spirit, [3] they are created,         and you renew the face of the ground.     31 May the glory of the LORD endure forever;

As you know, the public conversation about the connection between Islamic ideology and Muslim intolerance and violence has been stifled by political correctness. In the West, there is now a large industry of apology and obfuscation designed, it would seem, to protect Muslims from having to grapple with the kinds of facts we’ve been talking about. The humanities and social science departments of every university are filled with scholars and pseudo-scholars—deemed to be experts in terrorism, religion, Islamic jurisprudence, anthropology, political science, and other fields—who claim that Muslim extremism is never what it seems. These experts insist that we can never take Islamists and jihadists at their word and that none of their declarations about God, paradise, martyrdom, and the evils of apostasy have anything to do with their real motivations. When one asks what the motivations of Islamists and jihadists actually are, one encounters a tsunami of liberal delusion. Needless to say, the West is to blame for all the mayhem we see in Muslim societies. After all, how would we feel if outside powers and their mapmakers had divided our lands and stolen our oil? These beleaguered people just want what everyone else wants out of life. They want economic and political security. They want good schools for their kids. They want to be free to flourish in ways that would be fully compatible with a global civil society. Liberals imagine that jihadists and Islamists are acting as anyone else would given a similar history of unhappy encounters with the West. And they totally discount the role that religious beliefs play in inspiring a group like the Islamic State—to the point where it would be impossible for a jihadist to prove that he was doing anything for religious reasons. Apparently, it’s not enough for an educated person with economic opportunities to devote himself to the most extreme and austere version of Islam, to articulate his religious reasons for doing so ad nauseam, and even to go so far as to confess his certainty about martyrdom on video before blowing himself up in a crowd. Such demonstrations of religious fanaticism are somehow considered rhetorically insufficient to prove that he really believed what he said he believed. Of course, if he said he did these things because he was filled with despair and felt nothing but revulsion for humanity, or because he was determined to sacrifice himself to rid his nation of tyranny, such a psychological or political motive would be accepted at face value. This double standard is guaranteed to exonerate religion every time. The game is rigged.

Nevertheless, it would be prudent to remain concerned. For, like death, IT would come: Armageddon. There would be-without exaggeration-a series of catastrophes. As a consequence of the evil in man...-no mere virus, however virulent, was even a burnt match for our madness, our unconcern, our cruelty-...there would arise a race of champions, predators of humans: namely earthquakes, eruptions, tidal waves, tornados, typhoons, hurricanes, droughts-the magnificent seven. Floods, winds, fires, slides. The classical elements, only angry. Oceans would warm, the sky boil and burn, the ice cap melt, the seas rise. Rogue nations, like kids killing kids at their grammar school, would fire atomic-hydrogen-neutron bombs at one another. Smallpox would revive, or out of the African jungle would slide a virus no one understood. Though reptilian only in spirit, the disease would make us shed our skins like snakes and, naked to the nerves, we'd expire in a froth of red spit. Markets worldwide would crash as reckless cars on a speedway do, striking the wall and rebounding into one another, hurling pieces of themselves at the spectators in the stands. With money worthless-that last faith lost-the multitude would riot, race against race at first, God against God, the gots against the gimmes. Insects hardened by generations of chemicals would consume our food, weeds smother our fields, fire ants, killer bees sting us while we're fleeing into refuge water, where, thrashing we would drown, our pride a sodden wafer. Pestilence. War. Famine. A cataclysm of one kind or another-coming-making millions of migrants. Wearing out the roads. Foraging in the fields. Looting the villages. Raping boys and women. There'd be no tent cities, no Red Cross lunches, hay drops. Deserts would appear as suddenly as patches of crusty skin. Only the sun would feel their itch. Floods would sweep suddenly over all those newly arid lands as if invited by the beach. Forest fires would burn, like those in coal mines, for years, uttering smoke, making soot for speech, blackening every tree leaf ahead of their actual charring. Volcanoes would erupt in series, and mountains melt as though made of rock candy till the cities beneath them were caught inside the lava flow where they would appear to later eyes, if there were any eyes after, like peanuts in brittle. May earthquakes jelly the earth, Professor Skizzen hotly whispered. Let glaciers advance like motorboats, he bellowed, threatening a book with his fist. These convulsions would be a sign the parasites had killed their host, evils having eaten all they could; we'd hear a groan that was the going of the Holy Ghost; we'd see the last of life pissed away like beer from a carouse; we'd feel a shudder move deeply through this universe of dirt, rock, water, ice, and air, because after its long illness the earth would have finally died, its engine out of oil, its sky of light, winds unable to catch a breath, oceans only acid; we'd be witnessing a world that's come to pieces bleeding searing steam from its many wounds; we'd hear it rattling its atoms around like dice in a cup before spilling randomly out through a split in the stratosphere, night and silence its place-well-not of rest-of disappearance. My wish be willed, he thought. Then this will be done, he whispered so no God could hear him. That justice may be served, he said to the four winds that raged in the corners of his attic.

So it was always at night, like a werewolf, that I would take the thing out for an honest run down the coast. I would start in Golden Gate Park, thinking only to run a few long curves to clear my head. . . but in a matter of minutes I'd be out at the beach with the sound of the engine in my ears, the surf booming up on the sea wall and a fine empty road stretching all the way down to Santa Cruz. . . not even a gas station in the whole seventy miles; the only public light along the way is an all-​night diner down around Rockaway Beach. There was no helmet on those nights, no speed limit, and no cooling it down on the curves. The momentary freedom of the park was like the one unlucky drink that shoves a wavering alcoholic off the wagon. I would come out of the park near the soccer field and pause for a moment at the stop sign, wondering if I knew anyone parked out there on the midnight humping strip. Then into first gear, forgetting the cars and letting the beast wind out. . . thirty-​five, forty-​five. . . then into second and wailing through the light at Lincoln Way, not worried about green or red signals, but only some other werewolf loony who might be pulling out, too slowly, to start his own run. Not many of these. . . and with three lanes on a wide curve, a bike coming hard has plenty of room to get around almost anything. . . then into third, the boomer gear, pushing seventy-​five and the beginning of a windscream in the ears, a pressure on the eyeballs like diving into water off a high board. Bent forward, far back on the seat, and a rigid grip on the handlebars as the bike starts jumping and wavering in the wind. Taillights far up ahead coming closer, faster, and suddenly -- zaaapppp -- going past and leaning down for a curve near the zoo, where the road swings out to sea. The dunes are flatter here, and on windy days sand blows across the highway, piling up in thick drifts as deadly as any oil-​slick. . . instant loss of control, a crashing, cartwheeling slide and maybe one of those two-​inch notices in the paper the next day: “An unidentified motorcyclist was killed last night when he failed to negotiate a turn on Highway I.” Indeed. . . but no sand this time, so the lever goes up into fourth, and now there's no sound except wind. Screw it all the way over, reach through the handlebars to raise the headlight beam, the needle leans down on a hundred, and wind-​burned eyeballs strain to see down the centerline, trying to provide a margin for the reflexes. But with the throttle screwed on there is only the barest margin, and no room at all for mistakes. It has to be done right. . . and that's when the strange music starts, when you stretch your luck so far that fear becomes exhilaration and vibrates along your arms. You can barely see at a hundred; the tears blow back so fast that they vaporize before they get to your ears. The only sounds are wind and a dull roar floating back from the mufflers. You watch the white line and try to lean with it. . . howling through a turn to the right, then to the left and down the long hill to Pacifica. . . letting off now, watching for cops, but only until the next dark stretch and another few seconds on the edge. . . The Edge. . . There is no honest way to explain it because the only people who really know where it is are the ones who have gone over. The others -- the living -- are those who pushed their control as far as they felt they could handle it, and then pulled back, or slowed down, or did whatever they had to when it came time to choose between Now and Later. But the edge is still Out there. Or maybe it's In. The association of motorcycles with LSD is no accident of publicity. They are both a means to an end, to the place of definitions.

Researchers in the field knew that some studies had raised disturbing questions about the trans fats found in hydrogenated oils; this evidence had not been much publicized, but it could be.

The term ‘democracy’ can have two kinds of meaning. It can refer to ways of making effective claims for a more just and egalitarian common world. Or it can refer to a mode of governing populations that employs popular consent as a means of limiting claims for greater equality and justice by dividing up the common world. Such limits are formed by acknowledging certain areas as matters of public concern subject to popular decision while establishing other fields to be administered under alternative methods of control. For example, governmental practice can demarcate a private sphere governed by rules of property, a natural world governed by laws of nature, or markets governed by principles of economics. Democratic struggles become a battle over the distribution of issues, attempting to establish as matters of public concern questions that others claim as private (such as the level of wages paid by employers), as belonging to nature (such as the exhaustion of natural resources or the composition of gases in the atmosphere), or as ruled by laws of the market (such as financial speculation). In the mid-twentieth century, this ‘logic of distribution’ began to designate a large new field of government whose rules set limits to alternative political claims: the field that became known as ‘the economy’.

FOR MOST OF MY LIFE I couldn’t have found Idaho on a map. I had no picture of the place in my mind, nothing like a California beach or a Texas oil field. Potato trees, is what I thought on the drive out. Rows

In introducing technical innovations, or using energy in novel ways, or developing alternative sources of power, we are not subjecting ‘society’ to some new external influence, or conversely using social forces to alter an external reality called ‘nature’. We are reorganising socio-technical worlds, in which what we call social, natural and technical processes are present at every point. These entanglements, however, are not recognised in our theories of collective life, which continue to divide the world according to the conventional divisions between fields of specialist knowledge. There is a natural world studied by the various branches of natural science, and a social world analysed by the social sciences. Debates about human-induced climate change, the depletion of non-renewable resources, or any other question, create political uncertainty not so much because they reach the limits of technical and scientific knowledge, but because of the way they breach this conventional distinction between society and nature.

The world, with all its impossible variegation and the basic miracle of its existence, draws most mourners out of their grief and back into itself. The homosexual forsythia blooms; the young Irish dancers in Killarney dance, their arms as rigid as shovel handles; secret deals are done involving weapons or office space or crude oil or used cars or drugs; new lovers, believing they will never really have to get up, lie down together; the Large Hadron Collider smashes the Higgs boson into view; snow drapes its white stoles on the bare limbs of winter; the crack of the bat swung by a hefty Dominican pulls a crowd to its feet in Boston; bricks for the new hospital in Phnom Penh are laid in true courses; the single-engine Cessna lands safely in an Ohio alfalfa field during a storm. How can you resist? The true loss in only to the dying, and even the won't feel it when the dying's done.

Affenlight leaned across it his wrist brushed against the mouse that was tethered to Owen’s computer. With a whir the screen came to life. He couldn’t help but look. Open in the internet browser was a picture of a man, a muscled, bronzed, hairless, oiled twentysomething man, sprawled in a wooden chair with one hand cupped over the tip of his erect and

Those Panthers ... those itsy, bitsy football players ... those hearty, gutsy guys from the oilfields ... what about 'em? Yep, its incredible, amazin' and unbelievable, but the li'lfellers do occasionally catch the best end of the stick. All the reasons for the phenomenal support of Permian had been embodied by this 1980 varsity team. They were a classic bunch of overachievers who had become living proof of all the perceived values of white working-class and middle-class America-desire, self-sacrifice, pushing oneself beyond the expected limit. They were the kinds of values that the Permian fans harbored about themselves. What made those boys great on the football field had made the fans great as well. Just as the boys had produced against all odds, so they had produced in the oil field against all odds, not with brains and fancy talk but with brawn and muscle and endurance and self-sacrifice.

People like Mike McConnell don’t really move from public office to the private sector and back again; that implies more separation than actually exists. Rather, the U.S. government and industry interests essentially form one gigantic, amalgamated, inseparable entity—with a public division and a private one. When someone like McConnell goes from a top private sector position to a top government post in the same field, it’s more like an intracorporate reassignment than it is like changing employers. When McConnell serves as DNI he’s simply in one division of this entity, and when he’s at Booz Allen he is in another. It’s precisely the same way that Goldman Sachs officials endlessly move in and out of the Treasury Department and other government positions with financial authority, or the way that health care and oil executives move in and out of government agencies charged with regulating those fields. In

I’m sure there are some readers who will choke on the word subsidy. The gasoline subsidy in the U.S. is not a visible thing that shows up in the budget documents, but it’s there. Keeping a standing Army and Navy at the ready to defend oil fields on the other side of the world is an extraordinary subsidy for gas-powered vehicles. Cheap leases on federal land for drilling and mining are subsidies. Tax breaks for the fossil-fuel industry are subsidies. If we enhanced the grid, subsidized electric vehicles, and let gasoline cost what people are really willing to pay (and what we really pay to get and protect it), we could bring a lot of our military home. And change the world.

Did you see the TV my boy Franklin sent me for Christmas? He’s working in the oil fields in Arabia, you know.” “Yeah.” I had seen that TV a half dozen times in the past month, and I had almost memorized Franklin’s life story. Whenever Opal got a telegram from him, we heard about it for weeks. “I was just glad to get a TV that worked,” Opal went on. “Our old one was shot. I never thought much about remote control. Always figured that anybody who was too lazy to get up and change the channel might just as well roll over and die. But you get used to it.” “I wish we had a remote control,” I said. “You don’t need it,” she snapped. “Young kid like you, it won’t hurt you to get up. You shouldn’t be watching television anyway. There’s so much dirt on, I’m surprised your mom lets you near the set. I saw something today that left me sitting here with my mouth open. I wouldn’t dare tell you about it.

Regardless of whether you think the industrial era has been good or bad, three profoundly fundamental shifts underlie this revolution. The first is that industrialists harnessed new sources of energy, primarily to produce things. Preindustrial people occasionally used wind or water to generate power, but they mostly relied on muscles—human and animal—to generate force. Industrial pioneers such as James Watt (who invented the modern steam engine) figured out how to transform energy from fossil fuels such as coal, oil, and gas into steam, electricity, and other kinds of power to run machines. The first of these machines were designed to make textiles, but within decades others were invented to make iron, mill wood, plow fields, transport things, and do just about everything else one can manufacture and sell (including beer)7. A second major component of the Industrial Revolution was a reorganization of economies and social institutions. As industrialization gathered steam, capitalism, in which individuals compete to produce goods and services for profit, became the world’s dominant economic system, spurring the development of further industrialization and social change. As workers changed their locus of activity from the farm to factories and companies, more people had to work together even as they needed to perform more specialized activities. Factories required more coordination and regulation. In

Do you think the businessman who found the pearl was sweating over its cost? An obviously ridiculous question! What about the one who found the treasure in the field—perhaps crude oil or gold? No. Of course not. The only thing these people were sweating about was whether they would “get the deal.” Now that is the soul of the disciple.

I came here in 1906. I had been in Arkansas and sold some land for a nice profit so I thought I’d try my luck here in Oklahoma. I thought maybe I’d manage to buy some land with oil beneath its surface, but it appears that I might have missed the mark on that goal. I bought 40 acres and opened a boarding house since it presented some difficulty for people of color to find lodging in these parts. I could see that many people were arriving here to work in the oil fields and they needed a place to stay, so I figured I might as well provide that service. It was a small property located on a dusty road but it did quite well. Then I ventured out and built three office buildings where doctors, lawyers, dentists, and realtors could set up shop. Later we added barbershops and beauty salons to take care of the tenants. Those ventures proved to be good investments and provided me with the capital to build this hotel. As you can see, we have a rather tame clientele but they pay the bills.