I’m going to be rich, I tell you, not because some African princess wants to launder money through my bank account. Nope, I’m too smart to get caught by THAT old ploy.

This one’s the REAL DEAL. This woman is going to WILL me her money:

Subject: CHOSEN ONE!!
From: (withheld–Ed.)
Date: March 13, 2006 7:25:56 PM EST

Jenny Brooks
Email: (withheld–Ed.)

Dear Sir/Madam

My name is Mrs. Jenny Brooks, I am a dying woman who have decided to donate what I have to you/ church. I am 59 years old and I was diagnosed for cancer for about 2 years ago, immediately after the death of my husband, who has left me everything he worked for.

I have been touched by God to donate from what I have inherited from my late husband to you for the good work of God, rather than allow my relatives to use my husband hard earned funds ungodly. Please pray that the good Lord forgive me my sins. I have asked God to forgive me and I believe he has because He is a merciful God. I will be going in for an operation in less than one hour.

I decided to WILL/donate the sum of $2,500,000 (two million five hundred thousand dollars) to you for the good work of the lord, and also to help the motherless and less privilege and also for the assistance of the widows.

At the moment I cannot take any telephone calls right now due to the fact that my relatives are around me and my health status. I have adjusted my WILL and my lawyer is aware I have changed my will you and he will arrange the transfer of the funds from my account to you.

I wish you all the best and may the good Lord bless you abundantly, and please use the funds well and always extend the good work to others. Contact my lawyer (Barrister Parker Brown) with this specified email: (withheld–Ed.) and tell him that I have WILLED ($2,500,000.00) to you and I have also notified him that I am WILLING that amount to you for a specific and good work. I know I don’t know you but I have been directed to do this. Thanks and God bless.

NB: I will appreciate your utmost confidentiality in this matter until the task is accomplished as I don’t want anything that will jeopardize my last wish. And Also I will be contacting with you by email as I don’t want my relation or anybody to know because they are always around me.

Regards,
Jenny Brooks (Mrs)

I withheld the e-mail because I don’t want any my dear readers jumping ahead of me.

And of course, I’ll use the money for the noble purposes Ms. Jenny Brooks intends.

Cool:

First there was Google Earth, then Google Moon. On Monday, Google Inc. (GOOG) expanded its galactic reach by launching Google Mars, a Web browser-based mapping tool that gives users an up-close, interactive view of the Red Planet with the click of a mouse.
The Martian maps were made from images taken by NASA’s orbiting Mars Odyssey and Mars Global Surveyor.
Google Mars doesn’t provide driving directions, but users can see the planet in three different formats: The Martian elevation map is color-coded by altitude; the visible-imagery map shows the surface in black-and-white pictures; the infrared map indicates temperature, with cooler areas dark and warmer areas bright.

I guess the women’s maps for Venus will just have to wait a bit.

Welcome to Mark’s Remarks.

It’s an expansion because Mark has been a co-poster at Weapons of Mass Discussion for at as long as I’ve been blogging (a bit over a year).

Now maybe some ding-a-lings won’t confuse Mark and Matt (see the update at this WoMD post) and make utter fools of themselves.

Maybe.

Via Bill Millan, via LGF, via Tim Blair, Lionel Shriver at the UK Guardian notes, and mourns, The One-Man Global Content Provider’s absence:

Lastly, let me rue the passing of Mark Steyn’s syndication in Britain, for his column has now been dropped by both the Sunday Telegraph and the Spectator. I don’t know the inside story, so I can’t be certain that the jettisoning of this notoriously conservative Canadian constitutes political self-censorship.

Thus my indignation is solely on account of my own entertainment. Fair enough, few Guardian readers would share his hard-right views. I don’t always agree with him either, but I love Mark Steyn. Even though I write them, I cannot bear most columns, which when light-hearted usually err on the trivial, and when serious usually err on the po-faced. But however you may deplore his opinions, Steyn is funny. How often do you read comment pages and laugh aloud? He writes about big issues with tremendous energy, and he has a sensibility now more pertinent to British politics than ever: a refined sense of the absurd.

We “can’t be certain,” but I would say we can be pretty sure that Steyn is no longer welcome because not only is he conservative, his arguments are irrefutably convincing and therefore unsettling to the media elite.

Leftists despise Steyn because, like Rush Limbaugh, he’s right at least 98% of the time. Also like Rush, he busts wide-open the myth that conservatism is joyless and without humor.

And leave it to Steyn not to utter a word of complaint on his own behalf.

Industrious Brits can of course still find Steyn at many places, a couple of them being his own web site and The Chicago Sun-Times. He’s needed over there now more than ever. Let’s hope that many continue to find him.

Max Schulz adds more, uh, fuel to the fiery debate at TCS Daily:

In the years after Col. Drake discovered oil at Titusville, Pennsylvania, on the eve of the Civil War, wildcatters could only drill down several hundred feet. If we were confined to relying solely upon the technology available in the 19th century — or, for that matter, the tools available just three decades ago — then yes, quite possibly we could be looking at the end of oil.

But we don’t use those outmoded technologies. Advances in seismology and engineering have placed well within our grasp supplies of oil previously considered inaccessible. Today they are easily and economically recoverable.

Today’s drills don’t stop at a couple hundred feet. They bore miles into the earth. They travel laterally as well, so that a well dug in one spot might recover oil underneath locations miles away. Because of directional drilling, today one derrick can do the work that once took dozens, reducing the surface footprint of oil extraction.

Energy companies today can drill far offshore, too, in very deep water. They recover deposits that doomsayers of the past thought would be impossible to get at. Other technologies and advanced processes have boosted the recovery rates of fields thought to be tapped out.

The Kern River Field near Bakersfield, California, for instance, pumped nearly 30,000 barrels per day throughout much of the first decade of the 20th century. After 1910, production declined for the next 40 years. The field was nearly abandoned.

Innovations like pressurized steam and hot water injections changed that. Production at the Kern River field steadily ramped up after 1960, and the field has produced more than 125,000 barrels of oil per day since 1980. Recent estimates suggest Kern River still holds an additional one billion barrels of recoverable reserves.

That example mirrors the larger trend about oil. In 1970, experts believed the world had 612 billion barrels of proved reserves. Over the next three decades, more than 767 billion barrels would be pumped. Did we use up all the world’s oil and then some? Hardly. Conservative estimates today place the world’s provable oil reserves at 1.2 trillion barrels. New deposits of oil haven’t been created. It’s just that human ingenuity has come up with ways to get hard-to-reach deposits.

Expect that trend of increasing reserves to continue. Earlier this month the Department of Energy released a set of reports suggesting that enhanced 21st century oil recovery techniques might quadruple the amount of recoverable oil in the United States. DOE predicted that carbon sequestration technologies that inject carbon dioxide into oil reservoirs could soon add perhaps 89 billion barrels to the 21.4 billion barrels of proven reserves. More fantastically, government researchers found that “in the longer term, multiple advances in technology and widespread sequestration of industrial carbon dioxide could eventually add as much as 430 billion new barrels.”

Note that all of this potentially recoverable oil doesn’t take into account the hundreds of billions of barrels recoverable from “shale oil” or “oil from sands” in Colorado and Canada.

So relax, we’re not running out of oil. Peak Oilers, that means you too.
______________________________________

Selected Previous Posts:

• Nov. 15, 2005 — Passage of the Day: The Wall Street Journal on the Car Luddites
• Nov. 3 — Peak Oil True Believers Are Going Through a Rough Patch
• Oct. 31 — More Real-World Evidence of “Peak Oil” Nonsense

It’s not often that a company worth $1.1 billion buys a company worth $4.8 billion, but that is what will happen if the apparently imminent purchase of Knight Ridder by McClatchy goes through.

Richard Siklos of The New York Times (link requires registration) is brutally frank about the deal:

Scant Bidding for Knight Ridder Tells Story of Decline

Knight Ridder ended up attracting only one newspaper bidder in the highly-publicized auction for one of the nation’s prestige newspaper operators, underscoring the fog hanging over the industry and the unique challenges facing the company.

It was hardly much of an auction. No other newspaper company ended up submitting a formal offer for Knight Ridder, including Gannett, the nation’s largest publisher, which had looked closely at it. Analysts and industry executives said they were also surprised that various consortia of private equity firms also demurred — newspapers, these executives noted, have the capacity to generate large amounts of cash flow that could be used to pay down debt.

Not long ago, the second-biggest newspaper company in the country would undoubtedly have drawn a fair amount of interest. That it did not does not speak well for newspaper companies; their stock prices have already fallen because of the Internet’s increasing popularity with readers and advertisers. But the auction, and its meaning for the newspaper industry, could have been worse: at least Knight Ridder found an acceptable offer.

As the operator of 32 daily newspapers, Knight Ridder offered potential buyers access to major newspapers in such markets as Fort Worth, Tex.; St. Paul, Minn.; Kansas City and Miami. Yet overall, the company has underperformed other large newspaper groups as it struggled to make a financial success of some of its biggest markets, including Philadelphia, where it owns both of the city’s major dailies.

And despite the decision of the chief executive, P. Anthony Ridder, to move the company’s headquarters from Miami to San Jose, Calif., in 1998 to be closer to Silicon Valley, the company has failed to reassure investors that the digital age represents more of an opportunity than a threat to its business.

In agreeing to be acquired by the McClatchy Corporation, a significantly smaller company — but one with a strong recent history of operating results — Knight-Ridder is acceding to pressure from its largest shareholder, Private Capital Management, which basically said the company’s managers had run out of time and chances.

Knight Ridder’s stock had a tough time of it for about 18 months until it put itself up for sale:

But someone else’s stock has had a hard time, too:

Perhaps Mr. Siklos should take a closer look at his employer’s situation. I wonder how much interest there would be in The Times if it put itself up for sale in its current agenda-driven condition.

Free Links:

• 243,000 Net New Jobs were generated last month, and unemployement went up a tenth of a point to 4.8%. Betcha didn’t know that “Hourly wages, whose gains lagged inflation in 2004 and 2005, rose 0.3% from January and 3.5% vs. a year ago. That’s the best annual growth since September 2001″ (4th paragraph at link).
• Another Foreign Automaker to Manufacture in the US — Kia will build in West Point, Georgia. Further sweat will be noticed coming out of Metro Detroit.
• “Homesourcing” is the New Name for “Telecommuting,” and it’s on the rise — “as companies look to cut costs — and more employees seek jobs that allow them to work remotely. The number of home-based agents will nearly triple over the next few years, says research group IDC, as major employers and independent call-center providers step up their hiring of contractors to do telephone work from home — dubbed homesourcing.” The article’s glaring weakness is that it doesn’t give an estimate of how many homesourcers there currently are.
• France Tries to Do Something Designed to Reduce Chronic Twenty-Something Unemployment, and it appears that its effort will be stymied — The government essentially wants the employer-employee relationship to be “at will” during someone’s first two years with a company, i.e., companies can terminate someone without cause. Given that this is how most employment situations are here in the United States, and given that the US unemployment rate is about half that of France, you would think that this would be seen as a desirable change. You would be wrong; young people who prefer unemployment to employment at will are marching in the streets.
• Larry Kudlow points to a Linda Chavez column that identifies a bigger security concern about port operations than the one that has been discussed ad nauseam for the past few weeks — mob control:
  

  Despite the International Longshoremen’s Association’s sordid history (of mob ties), few lawmakers who profess concern about port security seem in the slightest bit worried that the ILA’s role on the docks may constitute a huge security risk. The ILA contributes millions of dollars each election cycle. In the 2004 election cycle, the ILA’s political action committee (PAC) had over $7 million cash on hand to distribute to candidates.

  Among the top recipients of ILA PAC money in the last few elections were Sens. Frank Lautenberg, D-NJ, Robert Menendez, D-NJ, Barbara Mikulski, D-Md., Chuck Schumer, D-NY, and Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-NY, all of whom represent states with important ports. Some of these same senators are among the chief critics of the Dubai port deal, but they are noticeably silent when it comes to mob influence in the union that actually controls who works on these ports.

  How offensive it is that both senators from the state where the towers fell don’t seem to care about THAT security risk.

They say they “just did what had to be done“:

Teens Save Family From Burning Minivan

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