Nine years ago, the Sacramento Bee published a five-part series of articles exposing the elitist policies of the Sierra Club and other so-called environmental organizations.
The series has long since disappeared from the newspaper’s web site, but thanks to the Internet Archive, most of the content is still available.
Visit The Sacramento Bee’s Expose: Environmental Organizations Are Now Big-Business on this site to read the story of how these organizations seem obsessed with fund raising and lawsuits simply for the sake of the dollar, without caring how many of those dollars actually go to help the environment.
And worse, many of their actions have led directly to vast devastating forest fires that could have been prevented by careful thinning of dead and diseased trees.
The very liberal site Daily Kos ran an opinion piece on gun control this past Sunday, that has done about the best job I’ve ever seen at pointing out the hypocrisy many liberals have when it comes to one particular item in the Bill of Rights.
In Why liberals should love the Second Amendment, Kaili Joy Gray compares the liberal’s interpretation of the 2nd Amendment with how they interpret the First, Third, Fourth, Ninth, Tenth, Thirteenth, and Twenty-Sixth Amendments—all of which Gray argues that liberals would throw a hissy-fit over if one were to suggest limiting them or not applying them broadly to all citizens.
The Real Science Gap from Miller-McCune Online is a very interesting article that has a different perspective on the so-called scientist shortage. Looks to me a convincing case of supply and demand. Everything old is new again…
It’s been 10 years since this video was shot, but it still serves as a good example of how bad the government can be.
As someone who enjoys fishing greatly (and in particular, the challenge of catching salmon outside the Golden Gate), I share Bill Wattenburg’s disgust at the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife killing salmon returning upriver just because they were born in a hatchery. It is utterly amazing that the government can get away with killing, by the tens of thousands, a fish they claim belongs on the endangered species list.
Please read the rest of the details of the Oregon Salmon Killing in my original posting on the subject.
For your reading pleasure, I have completed migrating additional content from the old hand-coded PushBack site to the WordPress-driven site. The latest addition is the Energy section, which covers the California energy deregulation fiasco.
Next up is the Justice section, which contains the archives of the Robert Womack case, among other campaigns conducted here over the years.
I nearly missed coverage of the food drop technique in Science Insider, a blog from the editors of the journal Science, until I happened to notice a reference to it while reading the journal yesterday.
The January 20th posting Scientists: Shower Haitians With Food From the Sky details the efforts of Bill Wattenburg, Richard Muller of U.C. Berkeley, and Richard Garwin of IBM to convince Washington to implement the method.
Using “Fluttering” to Feed Disaster Victims—The Tri-wall Aerial Delivery System
According to an Associated Press news story, two weeks after the quake, some of the Haiti food aid is still locked in warehouses or being stolen by thugs. This is not surprising, and is to be expected in a disaster like this—especially one where all the prisons collapsed.
This is a crying shame, because the U.S. Military has a way to distribute the food fairly, so that everyone can get at least some food, without the machete-wielding thugs grabbing it in bulk.
Fluttering food is the process of dropping foil-wrapped packets of food directly from the rear of cargo aircraft, so that the food is distributed widely such that gangs, thugs, and the military can’t monopolize access to the supplies.
This 4-minute YouTube video shows it being used in Afghanistan during 2001, with a C-17 dropping tens of thousands of food packets: http://bit.ly/TRIADSvideo
Read the full article about MREs From Heaven for the full details. And click on the bumper sticker below to buy one for your car, school locker, or whatever:
Use the Tri-wall Aerial Delivery System (TRIADS) to Feed Haitians Now!
The U.S. Army and Air Force have available to them a well-proven emergency food air-drop system that will allow us to quickly deliver emergency food rations directly to the starving Haitians without the need for secondary ground transport from the recently established air-drop zones. It was used widely during 1993-1994 in Bosnia, and again during 2001 in Afghanistan.
It is called TRIADS, for Tri-wall Aerial Delivery System, can be used with both C-130 and C-17 cargo planes, and is documented in U.S. Army Field Manual 4-20.147/Air Force TO 13C7-37-31, “AIRDROP OF SUPPLIES AND EQUIPMENT: Humanitarian Airdrop”, last updated in January of 2005. Chapter 2 of this manual details the complete rigging details.
The method is simple–simply drop foil-wrapped packets of food, such as granola bars, candy bars, and MREs (military Meals Ready to Eat) from the cargo ramp of a plane. Terminal resistance assures that these lightweight food packets will not harm anyone on the ground, and that they will remain sealed and edible, even if dropped from thousands of feet.
You can watch a 4-minute YouTube video showing an actual 2001 TRIADS mission in Afghanistan at http://bit.ly/TRIADSvideo
You can download the official Field Manual at http://bit.ly/TRIADSmanual
TRIADS relies on the geometry of the foil pouches the MREs are contained in to flutter them to the ground, directly over the population in need. Because of the wide dispersion, the starving children and adults have as much of a chance to get some food as do the thugs running around with machetes, and it becomes impossible for those thugs to take-over and hoard entire pallets of food.
This system was used in Bosnia and Afghanistan, and can distribute over 32,000 MREs per C-17 drop (816 MREs in each of the 40 TRIAD boxes it can carry). Because a TRIAD package can be assembled, rigged, and loaded far more quickly than the parachute-based air-drops we have seen used this week, and because there is no additional ground transport required, TRIADS can deliver far more food to far more people in less time than any other method that can be deployed in Haiti over the next week.
It also is much less costly than the parachute-based air-drops, which means far more food can be delivered for each donated dollar.
Please forward this message to anyone you know who might be able to get a high-ranking disaster relief official, military official, or politician to start using this system ASAP!
For those interested in more details of this “food fluttering”, here is some additional background:
- Dr. Bill Wattenburg’s pitch for dropping food from planes:
http://www.kgoradio.com/Article.asp?id=1662660&nId=0&spid=33179 - YouTube video of Afghanistan airdrops of individual meal packets:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kCxwprZekpM - Dropping food from airplanes — without parachutes?–class notes of U.C. Berkeley professor Richard Muller (author of Physics for Future Presidents)
http://muller.lbl.gov/teaching/Physics10/old%20physics%2010/chapters%20(old)/7-DroppingFood.html - High-Tech Cardboard Boxes Used In Afghan Food Airdrops–Describes the Tri-Wall Aerial Delivery System used in Bosnia and Afghanistan to deliver tens of thousands of MREs
http://www.defense.gov/news/newsarticle.aspx?id=44648 - U.S. Air Force Airdop News Page ((from the Internet Archive, because the military deleted this site)–has a ton of news items about the 2001 TRIAD air-drops that delivered 2 million packets of food in Afghanistan.
http://web.archive.org/web/20060222040836/www.usafe.af.mil/airdrop/news.htm
In the same pile of newspaper clippings as the previous post alluded to, I found a letter to the editor (likely the SF Chronicle, but clipped without the date or newspaper header), a teacher named Todd Toepfer from Modesto writes about a colleague who was denied a teaching credential because even though she had been teaching for 7 years, because the teaching university she had attended would not recommend her for one because she did not complete the student teaching prerequisite. Her teaching experience included two years at a Big 10 university, two years at a private high school, and two years at the school where she was denied a teaching credential.
With that experience and a master’s degree in two foreign languages, she was denied an official credential for a technicality, and thrown into the group that the education establishment moans about when they complain about the lack of qualified teachers each time they try to tighten the rules about what it takes to become a teacher.
P.S. If my Googling turned up the same Todd Toepfer who wrote the letter, he is a math and science teacher who received an Award of Excellence through the University of California, San Diego, Outstanding Teacher Recognition Program, and is also a member of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics. So don’t think this complaint was from someone unexperienced with teaching.
In browsing through some decade-old newspaper clippings, I came across one that discussed the infamous 1997 decision by the California Academic Standards Commission to turn down an offer by a group of three scientists who had won the Nobel prize in chemistry (and one of whom the Nobel committee described as “one of the most creative research workers of our age”) to write the state’s new science curriculum for free. In trying to find references to this online, I came across an interesting online group–Mathematically Correct, which according to David Gelernter of the NY Post, “fights the Establishment on behalf of sanity and quality in math education.”
The groups details of the 1997 science curriculum war is well worth reading, but you should also read their report on the National Center on Education and the Economy, How the NCEE Redefines K-12 Math, which Mathematically Correct describes as shallow, focuses on the use of calculators, and does not include any Ᾰtasks involving large numbers, negative numbers, prime numbers, operations with fractions, or operations with decimals.Ᾱ
