Salt City Sinner

The New York Times' At War Blog is usually worth reading. It's where CJ Chivers does a lot of posting, and Chivers is a journalist I respect and follow as closely as I can. A recent entry, penned not by Chivers but by another Times blogger named Tim Arango, is called " Weapons Retrieved in Iraq Point to Iran ." In intent, it is similar to a series by Chivers that is one of the best pieces of war reporting I've ever read. If you haven't read it, it's worth reading from the beginning*. The $.25 version is that Chivers used social media and the expertise of professional weapons geeks in the following way: 1.) he took photographs of the debris left by munitions in Libya 2.) he used e-mail contacts with an expert who 3.) used Facebook to tap into a network of ordinance experts to 4.) identify the origins of the munitions, which provided strong evidence that Qadaffi used cluster bombs in Libya. Arango, unfortunately, relied on a different sort of expert with a ...

I've said before that I think that Utah's conceal-carry laws are far, far too lenient (arguably, they're the loosest in the United States of America, which would put them in the running for least restrictive worldwide, or at least in the Western world). It is entirely possible for someone who has never even held a gun, let alone fired one, to pass a CCW course and obtain a permit here. I love my CCW, and I conceal carry at my own discretion. I tried many different guns before I settled on the one I love and own, which is designed for concealed carry. This morning, the Salt Lake Tribune ran a headline that threw a scare into me for a moment: " Utah revokes record number of concealed gun permits. " Yikes! But, it turns out, not only is this new gun regulation sensible and completely reasonable, it actually doesn't go far enough (in my opinion). Quoth the Trib: For the first six months of this year, the agency revoked 539 permits. For all last year, the agency re...

The Salt Lake Tribune's editorial, " A sad day ," nails it: DeChristopher was not prosecuted because he caused harm to the government, to energy developers or to taxpayers, but because he was widely praised for his bold effort to draw attention to a crisis that has been largely ignored by our government. The lease auction that put some precious public lands on the block to be sold for development of fossil fuel energy was later deemed by courts and the federal government to have been illegal. In simple terms, DeChristopher was right. And, by his own admission, Benson punished him for pointing out something that conservatives do not want to hear: Human-caused climate change and government negligence in addressing its consequences are threatening the globe. Following the sentencing, the judge acknowledged that DeChristopher’s act of civil disobedience — for that’s precisely what it was — was “not that bad” and should not have prompted a prison term, and possibly no prosecut...

I made quite a big deal out of bamboo bikes when they started appearing on the scene - easy, zero-carbon transportation from what is arguably our most renewable resource (some varieties of bamboo grow more than 39 inches per day ). Looking at growth rates like that, I think we should be making damn near everything out of bamboo. The best science draws lessons from the processes it studies in nature. We can already produce hydrogen from water with an " artificial leaf ." Once we learn to use solar power - a virtually limitless, cost-free buffet of energy - effectively ( which is already happening ) we can join the rest of the biosphere by drawing our energy from our local star instead of relying on rotting carbon that has been locked away from the atmosphere for millions of years. The point is - there is a sub-field of science, which may even already be well-delineated in literature (I'm not a scientist), that attempts to work with nature and natural processes to help ad...

Yesterday, environmental activist Tim DeChristopher was sentenced to two years in federal minimum security prison for disrupting an oil and gas development bid of dubious legality. DeChristopher's crime was to "bog down" the lease process long enough to provide an opportunity to protect wild lands that were being sold off for resource exploitation - a sale that was of questionable legality to begin with*. I would go so far as to say that selling untouched land - for oil and gas development or for housing development - is one of the worst problems in Utah, ranking up there with air pollution. Paul Rolly, in an excellent column (but then, I've come to expect nothing less from him) makes an interesting point: So Tim DeChristopher received a sentence of two years in federal prison for his bogus bids that disrupted a BLM auction for oil and gas leases that many environmentalists believed was illegal in the first place. And rabid anti-environmentalist activist Mike Noel h...

The #bidder70 hashtag is very active right now with people chiming in on Tim's coming sentencing. Check it out, if you like.

Today's the day - Tim DeChristopher's sentencing will take place here in Salt Lake City, at the federal courthouse. A variety of peaceful solidarity actions are going to be going on - I'll be trying to update as the situation develops. I hope to see you there!