The Obama administration versus the lumber industry

Lumber and regulation: First, the Obama administration is about to release its spotted owl recovery plan for the northwest United States, and no one knows what’s in it. Second, a timber industry group has sued the Obama administration for not selling “at least 502 million board feet each year, the amount provided for under the resource management plans for the agency’s districts in Western Oregon.”

With the first story, I wonder what happened to the “most transparent administration in history.” With the second, the Obama administration continues its pattern of ignoring the law in favor of its own preferences.

VA cemetery director accused of censoring religious speech

Freedom of worship in modern America: The cemetery director at the Houston National Cemetery, run by the Veterans administration. has been accused of censoring religious speech.

According to court documents, [Arleen] Ocasio banned members of the groups from using certain religious words such as “God” or “Jesus,” censored the content of prayer, and forbade the use of religious messages in burial rituals unless the deceased’s family submitted the text to her for prior approval.

Court documents also describe the closure of the cemetery’s chapel after Ocasio’s appointment as director two years ago. “The doors remain locked during Houston National Cemetery operating hours, the cross and the Bible have been removed, and the Chapel bells, which tolled at least twice a day, are now inoperative,” the complaint reads. “Director Ocasio only unlocks the Chapel doors when meetings or training sessions are held at the building. Furthermore it is no longer called a ‘chapel’ but a ‘meeting facility.’” [emphasis mine]

Charges against woman videotaping police from her front yard have been dropped

The charges against a woman, Emily Good, who was arrested for videotaping the police from her front yard have been dropped.

As far as I am concerned, the cop who did this should be fired. So should the cops who did this:

There will be an internal review into the original videotaped incident as well as one last week where police officers wrote five tickets outside a meeting supporting Good, using rulers to measure distance from the curb. [emphasis mine]

Sunspots and the danger of crying wolf

It’s that time of year again, buckos. Every June, like clockwork, stories and op-eds like these start to flood the media:

Not surprisingly, these stories always happen about the same time our federal bureaucracy puts together a one day June propaganda event called the Space Weather Enterprise Forum, designed to sell to journalists the idea that we are all gonna die if we don’t spend gazillions of dollars building satellites for tracking the sun’s behavior. Along with this conference come numerous press releases, written by the conference’s backers. Here for example is a quote from a press release emailed to me and many journalists:

Recent activity on the Sun, captured in stunning imagery from the Solar Dynamics Observatory, and the resulting threat of significant radiation storms and radio blackouts here on Earth are vivid reminders of our need to better understand the science, improve our forecasts and warnings, and better prepare ourselves for severe space weather storms as the next solar maximum approaches.

The problem for these fear-mongers, however, is that shortly before their forum the scientists who actually study the sun held another press conference, where they laid out in exquisite detail the sun’s astonishing recent decline in activity, and how the next solar maximum will likely be the weakest in centuries and might very well be the last maximum we will see for decades to come.

In other words, the annual effort by government bureaucrats to drum up funding for more space weather facilities has collided head on with the facts.

That there are science journalists from so many major news organization so easily conned into buying this fear-mongering is pitiful enough. More significant, however, is the fact that this annual effort at crying wolf has not been very successful. For years Congress has not funded any new space weather satellites, and doesn’t appear ready to do so in the future, especially with the present budget crisis.
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The shocking true size of our nation’s debt

The day of reckoning beckons: The shocking true size of our nation’s debt.

Add it all up, and total US debt actually exceeds 900% of GDP. That’s somewhere in excess of $120 trillion. We are beginning to talk real money here.

The Congressional Budget Office [CBO] also contains bad news for those who believe that we can fix this problem simply by cutting “fraud, waste and abuse.” As CBO points out, the projected growth in the debt “is attributable entirely to increases in spending on several large mandatory programs: Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and (to a lesser extent) insurance subsidies that will be provided through [Obamacare].” There is simply no way to deal with our debt problems without reforming those entitlement programs.

Finally, the CBO report makes it clear that we have a debt problem because spending is too high, not because taxes are too low. In fact, even though taxes are currently at a near historic low as a proportion of the economy, that is largely a result of the recession. If the economy returns to normal growth rates (a big “if”), federal revenues will not only rise, but will actually be higher than the postwar average percentage of GDP by the end of the decade. In fact, this will happen even if the Bush tax cuts are extended and the Alternative Minimum Tax AMT continues to be patched.

Infrasonic detection of a near-Earth object impact over Indonesia on 8 October 2009

From a paper published on Saturday in Geophysical Research Letters, scientists describe the after the fact detection of the impact of a near-Earth object about 6 to 10 yards in diameter over Indonesia in 2009. From the abstract:

We present analysis of infrasonic signals produced by a large Earth-impacting fireball, believed to be among the most energetic instrumentally recorded during the last century that occurred on 8 October, 2009 over Indonesia. This extraordinary event, detected by 17 infrasonic stations of the global International Monitoring Network, generated stratospherically ducted infrasound returns at distances up to 17 500 km, the greatest range at which infrasound from a fireball has been detected since the 1908 Tunguska explosion. From these infrasonic records, we find the total source energy for this bolide as 8–67 kilotons of TNT equivalent explosive yield, with the favored best estimate near ∼50 kt. Global impact events of such energy are expected only once per decade and study of their impact effects can provide insight into the impactor threshold levels for ground damage and climate perturbations.

Mary Black – A song for Ireland

An evening pause:

Dreaming in the night
I saw a land where no man had to fight.
Waking in your dawn
I saw you crying in the morning light
Lying where falcons fly
And twist and turn in your fair blue sky.
Living on your western shore,
Saw some sunsets, asked for more.
I stood by your Atlantic sea
And I sang a song for Ireland.

At House hearing head of NOAA challenged on ignoring Congressional law

At House hearings this week the head of NOAA was attacked for ignoring Congressional law in setting up a National Climate Service.

One big sticking point for legislators is language in this spring’s final 2011 spending bill that averted a government shutdown, which states that “none of the funds made available by this division may be used to implement, establish, or create a NOAA Climate Service.” Representative Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA) said the appointment of Karl and the hiring of six regional directors appear to have ignored those instructions. He quipped that NOAA was “living in climate sin,” a reference to Karl’s statement during an interview in December 2010 with ClimateWire that “we’ve moved in, … we’re waiting for the marriage certificate, but we’re acting like we have a climate service.”

Lubchenco defended her actions, saying that her appointments were “smart” and merely “good planning.” She said their salaries are drawn from “existing funds” and that legislation dating back to the National Climate Program Act of 1978 describes providing climate services as part of NOAA’s mission. She responded to Hall’s concerns that the climate service would take away from NOAA’s other activities by saying, “It’s good government to reorganize periodically.” She also referred to its economic potential, citing the $1 billion industry that has emerged around the National Weather Service.

Speaking with ScienceInsider after the hearing, she made it clear that NOAA intends to push ahead. “This is an idea whose time has come.” [emphasis mine]

In other words, so what the law forbids NOAA from doing this. We know best, Congress can go to hell.

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