Author: Robert Zimmerman

Banned from using heavy equipment by the Forest Service to repair their water supply, Tombstone residents are planning a “Shovel Brigade” in June.

11:30 am

Banned by the Forest Service from using heavy equipment to repair their water supply, Tombstone residents are planning an event in June where thousands will gather to do the work manually with shovels.

According to the Tombstone Shovel Brigade’s website, the group was established for several reasons, including to bring public awareness to the issues facing the city regarding repairs to its historic water system and the “limited cooperation” the city has received from the Forest Service.

“Another goal of the Tombstone Shovel Brigade is to get a lot of work done using hand tools and horses. A few workers can only make so much progress but a couple of thousand people with picks, shovels, ropes and chains can accomplish a lot and will send a loud message to the National Forest Service and the federal government,” states the website.

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The rise of leftist eco-terrorism.

9:58 am

The rise of leftist eco-terrorism.

A group calling itself the Olga Cell of the Informal Anarchist Federation International Revolutionary Front has claimed responsibility for the non-fatal shooting of a nuclear-engineering executive on 7 May in Genoa, Italy. The same group sent a letter bomb to a Swiss pro-nuclear lobby group in 2011; attempted to bomb IBM’s nanotechnology laboratory in Switzerland in 2010; and has ties with a group responsible for at least four bomb attacks on nanotechnology facilities in Mexico. Security authorities say that such eco-anarchist groups are forging stronger links.

In other words, they can’t persuade with cogent rational arguments, so the answer is violence and terrorism. Nor is this surprising, considering that these violent groups are definitely leftist and therefore believe in a top-down command economy. The idea of letting people decide for themselves what’s best is beyond their ken.

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The Stratolaunch system has entered system design review.

8:12 am

The competition heats up: The privately-built Stratolaunch system has entered system design review.

The key quote from this article is this:

Scaled Composites, which is building the aircraft, has purchased two ex-United Boeing 747-400s, and is in the process of dismantling them. Stratolaunch will use the engines, hydraulics system and several other major components to build its own aircraft. The remaining fuselage and wing shells will be scrapped. SpaceX is building the rocket, which will launch approximately 13,000lb into orbit. “This is really going after the Delta II market,” says Steve Cook, Dynetics chief technologist. The group eventually hopes to qualify the system for human spaceflight and begin launched manned spacecraft. [emphasis mine]

Stratolaunch is not being built for NASA. It is aimed at the commercial market instead, with the intention of providing a cheaper alternative for getting large payloads into orbit.

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The head of the National Weather Service stepped down on Friday in response to an inspector general’s report that accused the National Weather Service of misappropriating $43 million.

11:12 pm

Tip of the iceberg: The head of the National Weather Service stepped down on Friday in response to an inspector general’s report that accused the agency of giving $43 million in unjustified bonuses and contract extensions.

NOAA officials could not, for example, provide written explanation for why they paid $303,000 in awards on a $10 million contract to upgrade personnel and equipment for a satellite operations control center, the report says. An $80 million contract for the National Weather Service’s river, flood and drought forecasting specified that the contract had to be evaluated annually. But the board assigned to evaluate the contract never met, the report says, nor had a chairperson been assigned. Even so, auditors found that the contract was renewed five times to the tune of $40 million.

Of the nine contractors, NOAA gave eight high ratings, which allowed contractors to reap the “substantial award fees,” the report says. As a result, auditors concluded that NOAA’s pay system “provided little incentive for contractors to excel in executing their contracts.”

As I said earlier this week, this kind of story isn’t the exception but the rule. For years now our culture has condemned anyone who dared raise questions about any of the funding for science, to the point where the funding of science could no longer be questioned at all.

The result: vast sums of money have either been wasted or handed out as payoffs.

It is time we question everything, to the penny. The federal government can no longer afford to spend its money so sloppily, and the world of science community will be better off anyway if they are forced to justify their projects more rigorously.

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Another right wing blogger has had the police called to his house because of a fake report of a shooting at his house.

9:52 pm

Leftwing civility? Another right wing blogger has had the police arrive at his house because of a false report of a shooting.

The intention of the false report is to cause a SWAT team to descend on the house, guns blazing. In this case this fortunately did not happen.

We don’t know yet who made the false report, but the MO is identical to the previous events that appeared to have been instigated because the conservative blogger had written about leftwing activist Brett Kimberlin’s criminal past.

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A graveyard of ships in the desert

9:35 am

A graveyard of ships — in the desert.

This environmental disaster in the Soviet Union was caused more by that failed country’s centralized state-run command society than the technological society they were trying to create. Though technology in any kind of society can certainly do harm to the environment, when all decisions are controlled by a single entity — in this case the communist Soviet government — it is practically impossible to adapt and adjust when things start going wrong.

In a free democracy, however, you have many safety valves. No project is ever so big that it effects everything, and if things start to go wrong the chaos of freedom will allow people to choose differently, correcting the problem more quickly.

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So how’s that old Arab Spring going?

5:02 pm

“So how’s that old Arab Spring going?”

Not so good, based on the candidates running for president in Egypt.

Then there is this key paragraph which sums up the West’s entire response to the totalitarian Islamic threat since 9/11:

One of the basic defects of the Bush administration’s designation of a “war on terror” was that it emphasized symptoms (bombs and bombers) over causes (the underlying ideology). In the war of ideas, the West has chosen not to compete, under the erroneous assumption that the ever more refined delivery systems for its sensual distractions [the internet] are a Big Idea in and of themselves. They’re not.

We aren’t fighting an emotion (“terror”), we are fighting violent Islamic radicals who believe that God has given them the right to kill anyone who disagrees with them.

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It appears that the floating debris from the earthquake and tsunami in Japan last year is reaching North America sooner than expected.

10:01 am

It appears that the floating debris from the earthquake and tsunami in Japan last year is reaching North America sooner than expected.

I got a laugh from the last two sentences of this story. The early arrival of “more than 200 bottles, cans, buoys and floats” from Japan was immediately turned into a crisis that required government intervention.

With debris making landfall sooner than predicted, U.S. lawmakers have started to question whether the government is truly prepared. “Many people said we wouldn’t see any of this impact until 2013 or 2014, and now ships and motorcycles and this various debris is showing up and people want answers,” U.S. Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., said.

And if the debris was taking longer to get here? Cantwell would then argue we need to spend more money to track it more precisely. By her standards, no matter what happens, government has got to get bigger.

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Renovations at a Los Angeles restaurant in February uncovered a neon light, hidden inside a wall, that had been was switched on in 1935 and left burning for 77 years.

10:31 pm

It just kept going and going: Renovations at a Los Angeles restaurant in February uncovered a neon light, hidden inside a wall, that had been was switched on in 1935 and left burning for 77 years.

The walls of the restaurant featured numerous hand-tinted transparencies of mountain and forest landscapes, each of which was backlit by a rectangular neon light. One such light was installed in a window-like nook in a basement restroom, where it softly illuminated a woodland scene.

In 1949, the nook was covered over with plastic and plywood when part of the restroom was partitioned off as a storage area. But for some reason, workmen never got around to disconnecting the electricity. For the next 62 years the illuminated tubing was hidden within the wall. Meieran estimates that the neon tube has racked up more than $17,000 in electrical bills.

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The TSA has decided to no longer require the elderly to remove their jackets, belts, and shoes when going through airport security.

7:00 pm

How nice of them: The TSA has decided to no longer require the elderly to remove their jackets, belts, and shoes when going through airport security.

My emotional response to the TSA about this are two words not appropriate in mixed company, the first starting with “F” and the second with “Y”. My more rational response is to call for the end of this damn agency so the U.S. can get back to being the home of free and land of the brave.

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Europe ponders choosing the design of the next generation Ariane rocket.

4:25 pm

Europe ponders the design choices for the next generation of their Ariane rocket.

Though the article above makes no mention of Falcon 9 and its very low launch costs, I have no doubt that Falcon 9 hovers like a ghost over the negotiations on what ESA will do with Ariane 5, a rocket that despite an excellent launch record has never really been able to make a profit due to high costs.

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Two Democrats joined Republicans yesterday on a Senate committee to block the U.S. military from increasing its use of alternatives fossil fuels.

2:52 pm

Two Democrats joined Republicans yesterday on a Senate committee to block the U.S. military from increasing its use of alternatives fossil fuels.

What stood out to me in this article was the following quote:

As part of this support, in December the Navy agreed to spend $12 million for 450,000 gallons of “advanced biofuels,” which can be blended with petroleum in a 50:50 mixture and burned in conventional engines. The Navy and Air Force have both set a goal of using advanced biofuels for 50% of their fuel use by the end of this decade. But the current $26-a-gallon price tag angered congressional Republicans, who accuse the Obama Administration of using the military to support its green agenda. [emphasis mine]

$26 per gallon for biofuels? I find it astonishing that anyone voted for this program.

Of course the military wants options. And of course we want to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels, if only to reduce the money pouring into the hands of the radical Islamists of the Middle East. But at that price, these alternative fuels are simply not competitive or affordable.

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