Month: June 2011

Obama to announce plans to cut government waste

9:59 am

Obama to announce plans today to cut government waste.

Though I applaud any effort to reduce the federal government’s out-of-control spending, to me this paragraph suggested strongly how symbolic and superficial this announcement by Obama will be:

One of the campaign’s first steps will be targeting waste and duplication among federal websites. The administration will halt the creation of new websites, as well as shut down or consolidate one-fourth of the 2,000 government websites in the next few months.

For one thing, having an employee launch an extra website is hardly very costly, as you are already paying that employee’s salary. Will they be laying off these workers as well? I doubt it.

For another, shutting down websites is hardly a demonstration of transparency in government.

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Inspector General report condemns NRC chief over his attempts to shut Yucca Mountain

10:50 pm

An inspector general report this week slammed the head of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission under the Obama administration over his attempts to shut the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste facility.

In the two years that Gregory Jaczko has led the nation’s independent nuclear agency, his actions to delay, hide and kill work on a disputed dump for high-level radioactive waste have been called “bizarre,” `’unorthodox” and “illegal.” These harsh critiques haven’t come just from politicians who have strong views in favor of the Yucca Mountain waste site in Nevada. They’ve come from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s own scientists and a former agency chairman.

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Atmosphere Above Japan Heated Rapidly Before M9 Earthquake

2:43 pm

New satellite data shows that the atmosphere above Japan heated rapidly in the days before the March earthquake.

The [researchers] say that before the M9 earthquake, the total electron content of the ionosphere increased dramatically over the epicentre, reaching a maximum three days before the quake struck. At the same time, satellite observations showed a big increase in infrared emissions from above the epicentre, which peaked in the hours before the quake. In other words, the atmosphere was heating up.

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UK eliminates all but two climate-change projects to balance books.

3:51 pm

The United Kingdom’s British Council is eliminating all but of its two climate-change projects in order to balance its books. Unfortunately, some taxpayer-funded propaganda will still continue:

The council says that two flagship global projects will continue: the ‘Climate Generation’ initiative, which engages young climate activists and the ‘Climate4Classrooms’ project, which provides resources for schoolchildren.

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Fires in Arizona: more than one

3:27 pm

Though the news has rightly been making a very big deal about the out-of-control Wallow wildfire in eastern Arizona, it turns out that this is not the only serious wildfire in the state.

Friends in Arizona clued me in on this website, Inciweb, which lists all the fires both active and inactive in the U.S. Of the active fires, Wallow is by far the biggest at almost 400,000 acres. However, there are three other big fires in the Coronado National Forest on the Mexican border whose total acreage exceeds 200,000 acres. These particular fires have shut down all public access to Coronado.

It is believed by one of my local Arizona friends that these fires are probably linked to either the illegal drug or immigrant smuggling that passes along the forest’s trails, coming north from Mexico. (When I was out in Tucson in January we saw clear evidence of this smuggling on these trails during one hike in the Huachuca Montains, with a lot of trash scattered along the trail and in several adjacent rock shelters.)

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Legislation to stop huge legal fee payments to environmental litigation factories

2:00 pm

Two senators propose legislation to stop huge legal fee payments to litigious environmental groups like the Center for Biological Diversity and WildEarth Guardians.

Just as important would be for people to stop giving these organizations donations. They aren’t helping the environment in any way, and are probably doing it harm by creating anger and distrust against environmental groups.

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A new study finds that more than 80 percent of the mosques in the United States feature Islamic literature advocating violence.

1:45 pm

A new study finds that more than 80 percent of the mosques in the United States feature Islamic literature advocating violence.

Further, 85 percent of the imams recommend this literature — both lay-written and authoritative Islamic texts (not including the Quran or Sunnah, writings said to be words and deeds of Mohammed). It is a slim 19 percent of the mosques that don’t feature such violent materials, and an even slimmer 15 percent of the imams who don’t recommend it. [emphasis mine]

Data like this once again illustrates how absurd it is to assume Islam has been hijacked by a small minority of violent radicals. Instead, the data horribly suggests that violence is a natural component of the religion.

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Israeli rocket victims sue Gaza flotilla organizers

6:43 pm

I like this: Israeli victims of the Gaza rocket attacks are suing the Gaza flotilla organizers.

The complaint argues that since supplies that are delivered to Gaza run the risk of being seized by the Hamas government for use by its military wing, the defendants’ acts “amount to both a conspiracy to injure and a conspiracy to use unlawful means,” and that “the defendants are acting in concert with Hamas to achieve harm on the plaintiff.”

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House Panel Slams Obama’s Decision to Shut Yucca Mountain

6:16 pm

A House panel today slammed President Obama’s decision to shut the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste storage facility.

The House committee’s report challenges the basis for the Administration’s rejection of the site, which was submitted for licensing review in 2008. “Despite numerous suggestions by political officials—including President Obama—that Yucca Mountain is unsafe for storing nuclear waste, the Committee could not identify a single document to support such a claim,” it says. The report includes a number of documents to support its charge that career government officials and scientists opposed the decision to close Yucca Mountain but were not consulted. In recent testimony to the committee, a former acting director of the Yucca Mountain program, Christopher Kouts, said of Secretary of Energy Steven Chu’s decision to terminate the program, “Technical information was not part of the secretary’s decision making process.”

The report highlights a section of an unpublished safety evaluation report by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission on the facility’s potential long-term effects. The evaluation, according to the committee, found that, in most details, the project proposed by the Department of Energy (DOE) met the government’s technical, safety, and environmental requirements—including the need to safeguard the site 200,000 years into the future.

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