Pete Hendrickson (@LostHorizons)

Some Key Facts About "Fossil Fuels"; News Of A Miracle Medical Treatment... ...and a serious call to action on behalf of the heroic, hugely-important Julian Assange. About Oil-- A High-Utility Renewable Energy Resource I WONDER, DOES EVERYBODY REALIZE that oil is a renewable resource? Despite the childish association of oil with dinosaurs (dinosaur juice, right?), oil is a product of any and all organic material that has simply been processed by heat and pressure for a sufficient amount of time. Every day in the present another ancient day's contribution of organic material crosses the threshold into oil, constantly renewing/increasing the supply. Further, oil is a product of-- indeed, a concentration of-- solar power. It is by solar energy that the organics which become oil are generated and sustained in the first place. By the same token, when those products of past solar energy accumulation are consumed by the burning of the oil they have become, the carbon that is released (as carbon dioxide) contributes to the production of more organic material, by way of the plants it feeds and the animals that feed on those plants. I claim no expertise in regard to these matters, and I'm sure that my little sketch above is very much overly simplistic in the eyes of anyone who can claim such expertise. Disputes or corrections from such experts are welcome. But I think my summary is essentially correct, and that in this time of frothy and ruinous political assault on our long-standing, well-established and reliable existing energy infrastructure these facts need to be firmly in the minds of anyone involved in energy (and environmental) policy (which should be all of us)... Sharing Good Words About What I Will Unabashedly Call A Medical Miracle BACK IN MARCH of this year, I took several weeks off from writing this newsletter while I recovered from a medical procedure. The issue was a very badly torn (inner) biceps tendon. The tear resulted from the wear caused by decades of weight-lifting combined with the ill effect of one sloppy lift for a curl session, followed by a year of just pushing through the pain without laying off the weights long enough for any healing to take place. (It likely never would have taken place no matter how much of a holiday I took, adult tendons normally having very poor blood flow and being therefore notoriously hard to heal). When I finally faced the fact that the internet-informed physical therapy exercises I was deploying and the shoulder stabilizing braces I had begun wearing were just not doing any good last November, I went to my GP and was referred to an orthopedist. This fellow did some tests and scanned with ultrasound, ultimately announcing that the tendon was so far gone that he couldn't even find it with the scope. I was sent for an MRI, which I had at the beginning of December... Continued at https://losthorizons.com/N/198.htm#1