Sarah Palin Hovers In Mid Air Unannounced And Unnoticed In Iowa Half Marathon

Sarah Palin Flying, Running or Hovering Unannounced And Unnoticed In Iowa Click on Image to enlarge.

Greta Van What’sHerName ran the photo at left on her blog on Sunday morning.

The Huffington Post reported:
Sarah Palin ran a half-marathon after giving a speech at a Tea Party rally in Iowa on September 4.
Palin ran unannounced in the “Jump Right in and Run” half-marathon sponsored by Storm Lake Running Club. She registered for the race under her maiden name, Sarah Heath, and listed her hometown as Des Moines.

News of Palin’s participation in the race broke after Fox News’ Greta Van Susteren posted a photo to her website of a runner she claimed was the former vice presidential candidate.

I’m no expert on Photoshop but this looks suspicious to me. Not only does she appear to be effortlessly flying along, or just suspended in mid air she’s the only one not running on the course… in the street, it’s that maverick thing again, I guess.

She does have an interesting running style though, if there were a broom involved she’d be in danger of being mistaken for Christine O’Donnell.

Greta doesn’t explain where she got the photo and there’s no credit or I’d run it here.

Bob Higgins

Sarah Palin Runs Iowa Half-Marathon Unannounced Over Labor Day Weekend.

Good Morning Irene

Hurricane Irene Beaufort, North Carolina Coordinates: 34°43′15″N 76°39′9″W

It’s 4AM on Saturday and I’m up early. When you cant go back to sleep in the 21st century you turn the on computer, then the news.

According to NOAA, and verified visually on Google Earth, Hurricane Irene is centered at 33.7N and 77.5W which puts it in position to munch Beaufort, North Carolina just a degree or so north and west at 4°43′15″N 76°39′9″W according to Wikipedia.

A degree of latitude is about 69 miles and NOAA tells me that the Lady is moving north at 12 knots which means landfall in a few  hours.

As you can see this is a monster of a storm stretching up the east coast from the Carolinas to New York and beyond.

Originally posted at Clean Technica: Good Morning Irene

Fire, Water, Wind or Sunshine, a Watt is a Watt

Unicorn Tears As An Energy Source?

I sometimes think that many of us have a deep seated mania that causes us to believe that for a substance to be an effective source of energy it must be something that can be burned. Not only must it be combustible, the substance must be hard to get. This manic belief requires that the energy source must be searched out and dug up or clawed from the earth at great trouble and expense.

What’s more, to be a credible source the fuel must be retrieved from the bowels of the earth or the deepest depths of the ocean in an odyssey by intrepid explorers with fedoras and a five day growth of manly stubble, all else is considered to be alchemy.

“We know that renewable energies like solar and wind at this point in time are not capable of addressing the world’s total energy demands.” The Remarkable Energy Potential of Methane Hydrate from Clean Technica by Glenn Meyers

Not to single out a fellow writer here at Clean Technica, I’ve heard and read similar statements many times but the fact that they grossly distort the reality of the potential energy sources all around us does make them nettlesome. Actually we “know” no such thing.

I don’t know where this belief comes from or how it got started, maybe it’s primal. It could be an archetype, lodged early in the human mind, left over from the terror, fascination, even trauma, when some guy with a five day stubble first dragged a burning branch from a lightning struck tree back to the cave for a mastodon roast.

Originally posted at Clean Technica: Fire, Water, Wind or Sunshine, a Watt is a Watt

WTF: What’s This Fracking?

Hydraulic Fracturing of Shale Gas Deposits in US / Source: Energy Information Administration Click for larger image

Reading” Looking for Gas in All the Wrong Places” a piece in Monday’s NYT by Stanley Fish I found a calm, collected, depiction of an equally calm and collected town meeting in Andes, N.Y. where the subject on the agenda was “fracking” or hydraulic fracturing of shale gas deposits.

Calm, rational, and civil aren’t normally descriptive of a gathering when fracking, the subject that is bitterly dividing communities from North Texas and Colorado to Pennsylvania, and from West Virginia to New York is under discussion. Fracking is a national and local hot potato.

This contentious issue has the oil and gas industries, development interests, and cash strapped landowners looking to make some quick lease money, on one side, facing down environmentalists, agricultural, tourism interests and other landowners, looking to protect the nature of their land and water from what they see as polluters and wastrels, on the other.

In the middle is water, the use and abuse of billions of gallons of it and the potential pollution, and ruination of billions, trillions… or some impossibly larger quantity, more.

Originally posted at Clean Technica: WTF: What’s This Fracking?

More Drilling In The Gulf, The Death Of A Thousand Cuts

Map of the northern Gulf of Mexico showing the nearly 4,000 active oil and gas platforms. NOAA Photo

There are about 4000 active oil and gas platforms in the Gulf of Mexico, a fact I bumped into while researching an article on BP’s Macondo field Deepwater Horizon disaster last year.

In addition, there are more than 27,000 abandoned oil and gas wells that dot the Gulf, actually it’s much more like a blanket.

This morning I ran across a map and a video by tsinn at The Sword Press in which he plots these wells by time and position as well as location as in the NOAA map above.

Watching the brief video is a bit ominous as the rigs spread east and west along the Gulf coast and retreat farther from shore and into ever deeper water over a time span from 1942 through 2005.

I had oil on my mind over coffee this morning because the first item in my Email was a NYT article “U.S. to Offer Oil Leases in the Gulf.” Times writer John M. Broder reveals the administration’s new lease plans and he stopped me cold with this statement:

The lease offering includes parcels from nine to 250 miles offshore and in water depths from 16 to nearly 11,000 feet. The Interior Department estimates that the tract could produce 222 million to 423 million barrels of oil and 1.49 trillion to 2.65 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. “ U.S. to Offer Oil Leases in the Gulf.” John M. Broder NYT

Please note that many of these wells will be more than five times as far from the coast and in more than twice the water depth as BPs colossal failure of last year, greatly increasing the technological problems and challenges while making recovery and mitigation of a spill vastly more problematic.

Originally posted at Clean Technica: More Drilling In The Gulf, The Death Of A Thousand Cuts

You Don’t Need A Weatherman To Demonstrate The Obvious

Weatherman Braced For Hurricane

The guy is standing on the beach, back to the driving rain, hoodie and trousers flapping crazily, shouting into a microphone, like Ahab standing in the bow of the Pequod screaming at the fates.

They cut to a woman reporter at another location wearing the obligatory hoodie and speaking more reservedly into a microphone, slightly sheltered on the boardwalk above the seawall but sill being pelted by stinging rain and buffeted by the cyclonic wind.

And so it goes, hour after hour, on every cable news outlet, in every storm, the weather critters offer their graphic demonstrations of wind or rain, if it’s snowing they’ll seize a handful and hold it up for the camera as if it was an alien substance found in a meteorite.

In a flood they don waders and plunge in to their thighs to prove beyond doubt that the water is really stacking up out there. A good flood or snowstorm in a city calls for boat rentals to truly show that the water  is deep enough to… row a boat or ski rentals to demonstrate… ad nauseum.

If you watch for awhile or you’ll notice that from channel to channel they all perform the same schtick, the dialog is numbingly similar and I’m sure that there are specialized courses of study for weather critters, Severe Weather Coverage 101, or Advanced Weather Drama 201, Theory of Disaster Props and Costumes and so on.

Meanwhile the camera cuts back and forth between our hardy hero braving the elements and the anchor person seated cozily at the anchor desk, with a sheaf of anchor papers and a mouthful of stupid anchor questions to fill another five minutes between Enzyte or Geico commercials.

Big Coal: Making Mountains Even Better

Making Mountains Better

Coal provides jobs. The jobs are dirty, they produce a product that’s harmful to the planet, hazardous to the health and welfare of the workers and their neighbors, but… hey, they’re jobs.

Besides, some of those jobs involve improving our mountains. They blow the tops off them, and haul away the coal, leaving flat tops, suitable for landing pads, parking lots, Nascar racing, or Appalachian soccer matches.

Where once was a vista of jagged, irregular, disorganized peaks we now have a neat, orderly range of mountains that looks like a platoon of Bob Haldemans.

They also leave behind some pretty ugly mountains.

CNN ran a documentary Sunday night by anchor Soledad O’Brien titled “Battle for Blair Mountain” which should have carried a warning that it was an advertisement for Big Coal.

Bob Higgins

Originally posted at Clean Technica: Big Coal: Making Mountains Even Better

Fukushima To Do List: Take a Walk, Lunch, 100k Chest X Rays, Pick Up Kids

Residents of Ohkuma-cho attend a memorial service

There’s not a lot of information coming out of Tokyo Electric Power (TEPCO) or the Japanese government regarding the severity of the ongoing meltdown at the Fukushima Daichi nuclear facility.

What we are getting is alarming and according to an Al Jazeera story yesterday Japanese scientists and doctors are sounding the alarm.

There is a spreading feeling that the government and TEPCO are under-reporting the severity of the situation, the radiation levels and the extent of the affected areas.

There are a number statements that jump off the page in the Al Jazeera piece:

“… the total amount of radiation released over a period of more than five months from the ongoing Fukushima nuclear disaster is the equivalent to more than 29 “Hiroshima-type atomic bombs” and the amount of uranium released “is equivalent to 20″ Hiroshima bombs.” Dr Tatsuhiko Kodama, a professor at the Research Centre for Advanced Science and Technology and Director of the University of Tokyo’s Radioisotope Centre quoted in Al Jazeera.

Or this one:

When on August 2nd readings of 10,000 millisieverts (10 sieverts) of radioactivity per hour were detected at the plant, Japan’s science ministry said that level of dose is fatal to humans, and is enough radiation to kill a person within one to two weeks after the exposure. 10,000 millisieverts (mSv) is the equivalent of approximately 100,000 chest x-rays.

Originally posted at Clean Technica: Fukushima To Do List: Take a Walk, Lunch,100k Chest X Rays, Pick Up Kids

Evacuate Fukushima

Evacuate Fukushima Save the children of Japan Please Watch The Video And Sign The Petition We are demanding that all residents living within 80km (50 miles) radius around Fukushima Daiichi Power plant be evacuated at once. We are demanding that the Japanese Government assists ALL refugees with proper subventions for their relocation and other allowances. We are demanding that all schools be shut down immediately without conditions within this 80km evacuation zone. All children must be transferred to other schools around Japan and great efforts must be provided by the government to integrate these children into their new environment. We are demanding that across the land of Japan, the “safe” legal limit in radiation exposure be reset to the default of 1 milisievert per year!

Please Sign The Petition

An Ocean of Oil, A Toxic Brew

An older oil rig in the North Sea

Another oil spill, the worst in the North Sea in a decade according to several media sources. I didn’t bother to call Donald Trump when news of Shell’s North Sea oil spill broke on this side of the pond. He’s not taking my calls.

I would have asked him if he found it ironic that a week after publicly berating Scotland for wanting to site a wind farm off the coast of his golf development near Aberdeen, Shell dumped more than 55,000 gallons of oil into the North Sea out beyond where the wind farm would stand.

Big oil seems to work night and day adding layers of tarnish to their negative image.

I don’t know how expensive or difficult it is to properly maintain oil fields and pipelines in a safe and responsible fashion, I’m not in the oil business. The difficulties must be extreme and the costs prohibitive though, because some of the largest, wealthiest and most powerful corporations on earth are unable to keep this poisonous beast it its cage.

Every few weeks bring news of another escape, another ugly load of toxic crude oil in some greater or lesser quantity is added to the already overtaxed, over fished and slowly over heating ocean on which all of the life on earth ultimately depends.

Bob Higgins

Originally posted at Clean Technica: An Ocean of Oil, A Toxic Brew

Weekly Reads From Common Dreams

Bill McKibben: This Is Getting Exciting David Michael Green: The Grubby Species Ray McGovern: Did Tenet Hide Key Info on 9/11? Naomi Klein: Daylight Robbery, Meet Nightime Robbery Joel Federman: The World Should Be Watching Tahrir Square Glenn Greenwald: A Prime Aim of the Growing Surveillance State Dean Baker: President Obama Joins the Cult of Economics Deniers Linh Dinh: Looting Frenzies: Thinking about the Federal Reserve while Nursing a Cheap Beer Chris Hellman: How Safe Are You? What Almost $8 Trillion in National Security Spending Bought You John Nichols: Can We Have Health Reform Without an Individual Mandate? Yes, It’s Called ‘Medicare for All’

An Ill Wind From Aberdeen Blows Donald Trump No Good

A Great Spot For The Condos

Donald Trump is upset with the possibility of the construction of a wind farm off the coast of Aberdeen, Scotland where he is in the process of building another of his splashy monuments to ostentation.

“When I saw this piece of land I was overwhelmed by the imposing dunes and rugged Aberdeenshire coastline. I knew that this was the perfect site for Trump International – Scotland. I have never seen such an unspoiled and dramatic sea side landscape and the location makes it perfect for our development. Our site is close to two of the world’s most famous courses and is just 15 minutes by car from Aberdeen Airport.” Donald Trump from the Trump International National Golf Links Website

I’ve seen unspoiled coastlines from the Carolinas to California’s Big Sur, from Mendocino to Puerto Rico. I’ve walked pristine beaches in Mexico and Vietnam but nowhere while strolling the clean wet sand of a peaceful tide line or hiking the powdery dunes, enjoying an onshore breeze, have I ever had a lustful vision of development, of neon and glitz, and billboards with my name in six foot letters.

Originally posted at Clean Technica: An Ill Wind From Aberdeen Blows Donald Trump No Good

A Legacy: The Eternal Nuclear Dump

I got an email this morning inviting me to host a screening for a documentary film titled  “Into Eternity.” It’s the story of Onkalo which means hiding place or cave, a nuclear waste repository being constructed in Finland,  The film delves into the ethical questions of storing nuclear waste for centuries and the building of a facility to last 100,000 years when no structure that we know of has lasted a tenth that long.

I’ve been against the continued development of nuclear power and weapons since grade school when they used to send us to the basement to prepare for a Russian nuclear attack by crouching in the boiler room, covering our heads with our arms and kissing our little butts goodbye.

Originally posted at Clean Technica: A Legacy: The Eternal Nuclear Dump

Tripoli: Rebels Stand Ready to Welcome Advance

Rebels Advance, Surround Tripoli, as Qaddafi Totters

Rebels Advance, Surround Tripoli, as Qaddafi Totters

By Juan Cole / Informed Comment

The long slow slog of the Libyan struggle to throw off the rule of Muammar Qaddafi, accelerated this weekend, possibly decisively, with rebel forces making major advances. Tripoli was said to be ready to embrace the rebel youth when they came into the capital.

Free Libya forces made substantial advances over the weekend, coming up from Zintan to take much of Zawiya on the coast, with the help of the majority in the city that opposes dictator Muammar Qaddafi. Zawiya was the site of among the first and biggest anti-Qaddafi demonstrations, and was brutally repressed with tank and artillery fire on unarmed noncombatants by Qaddafi brigades. Since March it has been under secret police rule, but that was thrown off jointly by locals and by their allies from the Western Mountain region to the south.

Read more:  Rebels Advance, Surround Tripoli, as Qaddafi Totters | Informed Comment.

Discovering Solar: It’s a Radiometer, I Wanted a Magic 8-Ball

One year they gave me a Crookes Radiometer I wanted a Magic 8-Ball

When I was a kid my parents were big on educational toys. Most Christmases, in addition to a new bike or other barely affordable extravagance, I could expect to find, surrounded by a detestable pile of new socks and underwear,  an erector set or a chemistry set, a microscope perhaps and a couple of dime store curiosities like the device pictured at left.

I don’t remember much about that long ago Christmas morning when I unwrapped the Crookes radiometer. I do remember that I was fascinated by it and still am today. It sat on my desk or window sill for a year or so until shattered by one of my brothers. Which brother was the culprit has never been determined but I’m still on the case.

At the time it was a quiet, inexpensive, solitary treat for a geeky 8 year old. To watch the gizmo respond when I switched a desk lamp on and off or spin wildly when I placed it in direct sunlight and wondered about light and heat, atoms and the mysterious forces that surrounded me was better than TV. These were the days of the Indian Chief test pattern, there wasn’t much on.

Thinking about it this morning I couldn’t remember what the gadget was called and had to search for solar powered toys and solar vanes until I discovered with amusement that the Crookes radiometer has its own Wikipedia page.

Originally posted at Clean Technica: Discovering Solar: It’s a Radiometer, I Wanted a Magic 8-Ball

Children of the Corn Back Bachmann in Iowa

The Corn is Pleased

In what is being described as a total repudiation of sanity, the red eyed followers of “He Who Walks Behind the Rows” have selected Michelle Bachmann as Corn Queen.

The corn is pleased.

Congress Searches Universe for Grand Unified Theory

Super Committee's Solution, Un-Debateably Pretty

Superman, Super bowl, super size, super model.

Put the word super in front of another noun and it supposedly becomes larger than life itself. A marketing gimmick used by everyone from defense contractors to hamburger hucksters, super has become a super cliché.

Now the appellation is used as a modifier to name a congressional committee that we are to believe will go where no committee has gone before, to the far edges of the deficit universe in search of the dark matter of budget reform. The committee and the discoveries and conclusions it returns to the mother ship, will be immune, we’re told, from partisan bickering, from argument, from filibuster and amendment.

The committee of twelve has been stacked with 6 republicans and Max Baucus and its conclusions must be voted up or down by the full congress without further discussion or amendment. It would be lovely to test the constitutionality of this super legal committee in the SCOTUS but more than half of the court’s super annuated members have been super politicized by super PAC super dollars.

This “super committee” is yet another misdirection play, a sleight of hand to distract the public from the fact that the deal has already been done in the boardrooms and executive suites of our self-serving corporations. The marching orders have already been written, the lobby lizards are working the aisles and congress is drooling over the checks that are about to hit their campaign accounts.

Disappointing Policy, A Half Mile Short of Inspiration

Imported Gasoline Was Available in Oregon During the Fuel Crisis of 1973-74 at Double the Cost of the Domestic Fuel. Photo: David Falconer /National archives

I’ve just been notified by one of my senators, I have two, that the administration has announced a hike in CAFE standards to 54.5 miles per gallon by 2025. I heard the news several day ago but most of us have better sources than the Senate.

I had to sit down for a minute to let that shocking information sink in. I wondered for a second or two why they went for the fraction, what was it about the last 2640 feet per gallon that so tested their courage or was so beyond the range of their vision that they didn’t simply roll all the way to 55 mpg.

I was around in 73 when OPEC crashed the party and I can remember feeling that the oil pirates were probably doing us a favor and we would learn to conserve and begin to shift away from fossil fuels toward more sustainable and responsible alternatives. I was very young.

I was driving a car back then that got perhaps 16mpg and maybe 20 on the highway and with gas at 35 cents a gallon I could fill the tank for less than ten bucks, today, payday lenders are making extortionate fortunes loaning workers money to drive to work… the ones with jobs to drive to that is.

I can remember having conversations back in those days when many of us seriously contemplated seeing 75 or even a hundred mpg by the turn of the century. These weren’t pipe dreams driven by the Grateful Dead and Ganja, but by top engineers, physicists and techno visionaries of the time.

Today the standard for that car or today’s counterpart would be 27.5 mpg (there’s that chicken crap half mile again) and I’m bothered by the fact that over thirty six long years of oil wars, polluted air and water, acid rain and a litany of other negative products of our oil dependency that we’ve only gained a paltry 10 mpg to date and our vision for the future is so limited and calcified that it still  fears overreaching by a half mile.

Bob Higgins

Originally posted at Clean Technica: Disappointing Policy, A Half Mile Short of Inspiration

Weekly Reads from Common Dreams

1. John Atcheson: The Beast Is Starved: Welcome to the Next Great Depression
2. Linda McQuaig: Tycoons Laughing All the Way to the Bank
3. Sarah Churchwell: The Willful Ignorance That Has Dragged the US to the Brink
4. Ralph Nader: ‘Retreat, Surrender, Can He at Least Plead?
5. Amy Goodman: War, Debt and the President
6. Robert Reich: Ransom Paid
7. Matthew Norman: The Unmaking of a President
8. Jim Rigby: Five Scriptures You Won’t Hear at Rick Perry’s Prayer Event
9. Nick Turse: A Secret War in 120 Countries: The Pentagon’s New Power Elite
10. Ray McGovern: Obama Blows a Judas Kiss to the Poor

Class Warfare, Coming Soon to a Community Near You

Honduran Police Burn Community to the Ground

Homes, churches, schools, and crops all destroyed as the post-coup government continues to side with wealthy plantation owners over the country’s organized farmers. 

Watch this video from: The Real News and know this: If these hideous crimes against working people can be committed in Honduras by police and military units likely trained and supported by US dollars they can be committed here.

Economic collapse, debt crisis, gas and food prices through the roof, no jobs, terror in the streets, endless wars and the destruction of all societal safety mechanisms? These are the gifts being offered by the ever expanding modern industrial society.

But there’s more. After the capitalist class has gambled away the wealth of the country and squandered another generation of our youth in their wars for resources and empire they will force you to pay the bill.

They’re working on it now, night and day wrangling over the republican manufactured debt crisis, they are preparing the complete destruction of the middle class and the total privatization of all government functions where everything will be paid for at the company store at several times the price.

You will be called on to tighten your belt, to pull yourself up by your bootstraps, to make a greater sacrifice for your country except that your country will have become a wholly owned subsidiary of a consortium of stateless and soulless corporations.

They will come for your land, your homes, your meager wealth, using the tools, the police, even the army of the government that they bought, co-opted and finally seized. And finally having taken everything they want they will simply dispose of you, disappeared, dead, it doesn’t matter, as long as you are gone and they have room to ride their horses and cruise their yachts.

They will keep those who are acceptably docile to work in their mills and fields and to guard the remainder who show signs of resistance in their camps and prisons and maintain continued docility among a slave labor class.

Watch the video, prepare for the future.

Bob Higgins

More on the rape of Rigores and related stories:

• Rigores Community Attacked and Burned
• “Update and Action for the Campesinos of Rigores, Aguan”
• Why Democracy Is Public: The American Dream Beats the Nightmare
• Big Oil Companies Post Huge Profits On High Gas Prices
• When the Super-Rich Cry, “Class Warfare!”
• Why Americans Are So Angry 

Weekly Reading List From Common Dreams

You can’t go wrong with any of these:

• Tim DeChristopher: I Do Not Want Mercy, I Want You To Join Me
• Jeff Cohen: Obama is NOT “Caving” to Corporate Interests
• Paul Buchheit: The Question Conservatives Can’t Answer
• Paul Krugman: ‘Centrism': The Cult That Is Destroying America
• Christopher Brauchli: The Tax Burden of the Very Rich
• Robert Reich: Why Washington is About to Make the Jobs Crisis Worse
• Robert Scheer: Debt Madness Was Always About Killing Social Security
• Holly Sklar: CEOs to Workers: More for Me, Less for You
• Glenn Greenwald: On Not Freaking Out With Fear: An Un-American Response to Oslo
• Tom Tresser: None Dare Call it Privatization

Tim DeChristopher? They’re Jailing the White Hats

Keyhole Ruin, in Canyonlands National Park Once a Home to Pre-Columbian Cliff Dwellers Photo David Hiser / Flickr Commons

A few decades ago I lived across the river from Arches National Park in Southern Utah. Arches and nearby Canyonlands National Park are spectacular in their beauty but much of the entire “Four Corners” area is awe inspiring and filled to overflowing with stunning images, stark desert tranquility and a serene, almost mystical timelessness.

People from all over the world who have never visited the area are familiar with these canyons and mesas, haunting red rock vistas, from the movies of John Ford, from Marlboro Man ads and from more car and truck commercials than I can count.

It sometimes seems as if these towering mesas were created for the sole purpose of serving as pedestals for shiny pickups lowered from helicopters by Los Angeles ad agencies.

In my younger days I backpacked and camped in winter and summer through the west, from the mountains of the Cascades to the thermal pools of Yellowstone, I’ve witnessed up close the depths of the Grand Canyon and the stirring heights of Yosemite. I have never been more moved and inspired by the unadorned and unmolested beauty of the Earth than I was in the desert canyons and mountains of Southern Utah.

Yesterday a young man named Tim DeChristopher was sentenced to two years in federal prison for impeding the process of granting federal oil leases at nearly two dozen sites in close proximity to Arches and Canyonlands, both pristine and protected areas.

I cannot imagine looking over the rim of Bryce or the Grand Canyon and seeing a field of oil derricks, monster trucks hauling ore from a giant strip mine, or ascending a quiet fern-covered hill to discover boom trucks loaded with redwoods being hauled from the ancient rainforest framed by the swirling dust and diesel fumes of a backwoods logging rape.

Those visions are what Tim DeChristopher sought to prevent, or at least to forestall by his courageous and solitary act of defiance.

I cringe at the fact that we allow the people and interests involved in stealing the tops of our mountains, fouling our oceans and waterways with their industrial sludge and turning our atmosphere into an un-breathable, poisonous gas to walk free among us.

That we allow them to continue to exert their influence in state capitols and the halls of congress while this decent, justifiably concerned and creatively bold young person languishes in prison is a travesty and sets exactly the wrong example.

That DeChristopher committed a crime under the “law” is beyond dispute, but the fact that his actions were taken to prevent much greater crimes must be understood and recognized by the courts and fact that they are not points directly to the degree of control that money and corporate influence have over our courts.

A symbolic slap on the wrist, a suspended sentence or probation would have satisfied the “law” and sent the proper message to those who continue to wantonly assault our common resources, while destroying our environment and threatening our lives.

For more on this case and to take action please visit: Tim DeChristopher’s Imprisonment: Our Call to Action!

Bob Higgins

Originally posted at Clean Technica: Tim DeChristopher? They’re Jailing the White Hats