Yosemite Besieged By Massive Wildfires

At more than 120,000 acres, the Rim Fire continues burning all through the Central Sierra Nevada range, and has burned areas within one of the nation's crown jewel national parks - Yosemite.

While Yosemite Valley is safe for now, the same can't be said of the Hetch Hetchy area.

Hetch Hetchy Reservoir taken 4/2013

The Hetch Hetchy Reservoir is San Francisco's primary water supply and is a major supplier of power to the Bay area. While the water supply is still functioning, the power systems have been damaged by the wildfires that have encroached on the area.

15,000+ acres have already burned inside the national park, and while wildfires are part of the natural landscape and even the sequoias need fires on occasion to help new growth, the lack of rain and snowpack over the past few years has left the area a tinderbox for extreme fire.

California Governor Jerry Brown on Friday declared a state of emergency for San Francisco, saying the fire had damaged the electrical infrastructure serving the city and forced the Public Utilities Commission to shut down power lines.

On Sunday, the fire moved to within 2 miles of the Hetch Hetchy Reservoir, which serves 85 percent of San Francisco with water, according to San Francisco Public Utilities Commission spokesman Tyrone Jue.

Flames were also raging near two famed groves of towering sequoias that are among the largest and oldest living things on the planet. The trees can withstand fire, but brutal conditions — including harsh winds churning as much as 40 mph and thick brush — have prompted park employees to take extra precautions in the Tuolumne and Merced groves, according to The Associated Press.

“All of the plants and trees in Yosemite are important, but the giant sequoias are incredibly important both for what they are and as symbols of the National Park System,” park spokesman Scott Gediman told the AP.

NBC Bay Area reported that the Berkeley Tuolumne Family Camp had been destroyed by flames. It said staff and campers were evacuated beforehand and no injuries were reported. The camp dates to 1922.

The Rim Fire is that kind of extreme fire. It's burning hot enough to create its own weather, and it's burning the crown of the forest, meaning that it's exceptionally difficult for firefighters to contain. The difficult terrain is also extremely challenging, and the firefighters are trying to protect structures and buildings in the fire zone, but they've been fighting a losing battle so far.

The fire is barely contained, and it may take a change in the weather pattern for firefighters to get the upper hand.

UPDATE:

This is a map of the affected area:


View Larger Map

Amtrak's $151 Billion Northeast Corridor Wishlist, and California's HSR Boondoggle

Let the numbers sink in.

$151 billion.

220 mph high speed rail between Washington DC and Boston, enabling 37 minute trips between Philadelphia and New York City, and 94 minute trips between Boston and New York or New York and Washington DC.

That was the promise once envisioned for the Northeast Corridor (NEC) when Amtrak settled for the Acela service that ended up being less than half that speed. Those kinds of numbers would get me out of my car and head down to DC or Baltimore to catch ballgames on the weekend and would make business travel even more convenient for those all along the NEC.

Now, Amtrak is resurrecting the true high speed rail vision for the Northeast Corridor. It has the potential to be a game changer considering that those trips would be a fraction of the time spent flying between those destinations (not counting the travel time from the airport to the city center or the security checks).

Current travel times from New York to Philadelphia on Amtrak's sleek Acela trains are 1 hour, 15 minutes. Travel between New York and Washington currently takes 2 hours, 45 minutes and New York to Boston takes 3 hours, 41 minutes, according to Amtrak's website.

"The NEC (Northeast Corridor) region is America's economic powerhouse and is facing a severe crisis with an aging and congested multi-model transportation network that routinely operates at or near capacity in key segments," Amtrak's President Joe Boardman said in a statement.

The traditionally cash-starved railroad is funded by Congress, where Republicans have been reluctant to finance prior plans to develop high-speed rail in the United States.

Amtrak spokesman Steve Kulm acknowledged a lack of federal support but said there were other funding options.

"You have to have a plan and if you have a plan, the money will follow," Kulm said.

Among the sources was $450 million in funding turned down by the state of Florida for a high-speed rail proposal there that will instead be used for rail improvements in New Jersey.

Starting sometime in the 2020s, the hyper speedy "NextGen" trains will replace Acela trains, which were first introduced in 2000, Kulm said.

The newest Amtrak improvement plan also calls for direct links to airports and listed Newark, Philadelphia, Baltimore and White Plains, New York, as possible candidates for Amtrak service. Some are already served by local commuter rail lines, such as Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority, which connects to the Philadelphia International Airport.

"The vision we will shape with the Northeastern states, Amtrak and all of our stakeholders will outlast the vagaries of politics, budgets and critics," said Joseph Szabo, administrator of the Federal Railroad Administration, which oversees Amtrak, of the 2012 report.

There's more than a little to be critical of when discussing Amtrak's record on high speed rail and upgrading its infrastructure. It has consistently lagged behind on its maintenance and upgrades of infrastructure, and while it has moved ahead with bridge replacement projects elsewhere on the NEC, particularly in Connecticut, the three major bottlenecks on the system are in New Jersey - the Portal Bridge, the tunnels into Manhattan, and the Harold Interlocking, which is Sunnyside Queens where LIRR, NJ Transit, and Amtrak trains have to pass through in a coordinated ballet to keep everything resembling a schedule. Those projects would apparently be included in the overall $151 billion approach.

Something has to give on the costs involved. There's no reason why Amtrak's costs to upgrade are anything approaching $335 million a mile for the NEC between Boston and DC. It costs France's SCNF far less to build a mile of new rail, but that has to be tempered by the fact that the Amtrak right of way is seriously constrained because of urban development throughout the NEC and acquisition costs would be far higher in the US. Still, there are ways that Amtrak can and should bring the costs to upgrade the system down.

Still, $151 billion as spread over 30 years is something approaching $5 billion a year - a major infusion of money but not nearly as eye popping. This is investment in infrastructure and it would mean tens of thousands of construction jobs up and down the East Coast. It would mean steelmakers and fabricators would be supplying new rail and equipment. Technology companies would be providing equipment to make the system more reliable. Engineering firms would be generating jobs for those to design and build the network.

In other words, while Amtrak would be spending the money, it would be private enterprises that are generating the jobs and revenues that would have long term benefits to the local and national economy. It would also build a robust backup to the creaking air travel system.

It's also worth noting that California is about ready to delve into a high speed boondoggle of its own where it's proposing to build a high speed rail network not to connect San Francisco with San Diego via Los Angeles, but rather, inland where there's a fraction of the population to support such a network. It was a political decision so that the money could be obtained, not because it made economic sense.

The California HSR project route was decided not because of practicality or revenue, but by which parts of the state would be able to get it to run through their communities, even though it would mean tearing up farmland and requiring condemnation of land (eminent domain). Instead of using a routing that required fewer eminent domain proceedings and a more direct route, they chose the one that had the political backing. So, California will find itself with a HSR that few will end up using, cost more than it should, and everyone will point to it as a reason not to do HSR in the US.

The HSR setup in France and Japan is similar to an airport hub and spoke approach. You build the hubs in the major urban centers, and connect those with HSR. As the system grows, you can expand the HSR to secondary satellite communities and then with urban rail networks. This way, you maximize population density that would take advantage of the HSR, you can achieve travel times that can not only meet but beat air travel (especially considering the time to pass through security, to say nothing of having to travel to an airport that is frequently on the outskirts of the city, not the city center as most rail facilities are located).

Amtrak's Northeast corridor is the opposite approach - it's already a profitable route for Amtrak and if Amtrak could get the system up to speeds approaching HSR found in Europe or Asia, it could not only win commuters away from the airlines, but it would reduce congestion in the air- improving the travel for fliers too since commuter flights between Boston, DC, and New York are a significant cause for delays throughout the US airspace because of congestion at the New York area airports. It's all the more reason to throw support behind the Amtrak plan. It has a path to profitability and generating economic development to say nothing of jobs.

UPDATE:
The Amtrak documentation can be found here. It's a manageable 42 page document, complete with charts, graphs, and how the new right of way would be organized. It would essentially create a 4-track express/local track configuration with the express track capable of handling the HSR.

Capital investment would be phased in - with the section around New York City being key to the overall strategy. That means getting the Gateway/Portal Bridge/Harold Interlocking done is critical to the overall strategy. It also means a significant chunk of the $151 billion is going to the New York metro area for design and construction. Considering that the Portal Bridge is estimated to run $1.3-1.8 billion, while the Gateway Tunnel is another $13-15 billion ($14.7 billion as per page 24). Page 31 addresses the segment costs. Interestingly, rolling stock is the lowest cost of the entire package - $5.2 billion, which makes sense since the infrastructure construction costs are the lion's share of the project.

It also addresses expanding existing capacity - including acquiring 40 additional Acela express passenger cars to lengthen train-sets by 2015 (expanding capacity by 40%). By 2020, Amtrak hopes to acquire new high-speed train sets (doubling service from NYC to DC) as well as complete the Portal Bridge and Harold Interlocking/Sunnyside Yards projects as well as upgrading the power systems through New Jersey.

By 2025, it hopes to get Gateway Tunnel done and to finally get more regularly scheduled Acela trips between NYC and DC and Boston. It's only by 2040 that the full HSR would be realized.

The document also provides new renderings for the Moynihan Station, which would expand Penn Station under the Farley Post Office. It wouldn't expand capacity, but rather rejigger space under the post office and MSG.

What's interesting is that the HSR plan for the NEC would include an entirely new alignment inland from New Rochelle, New York through Providence, Rhode Island. The alignment wouldn't change south of New York City. A newly configured Shoreline Express would cover those cities covered by the current NY to Boston alignment, with regional service supplementing service.

The Amtrak vision also indicates that there would be express and super express service - direct NYC to DC and NYC to DC routings - with no intermediate stops. Other trains would stop at designated city stops.

The Amtrak plans for rolling stock - the locomotives and train sets, would depend greatly on whether the FRA would allow an off-the-shelf solution or needing to build a system from the ground up. Frankly, it would be far cheaper to go with an off-the-shelf system, but that would mean likely buying from a foreign source (think France, Japan, or other European or Asian providers).

1,000 Acre Fire Hits Sequoia National Monument

The headline is somewhat misleading.

Fire Threatens Grove of Giant Sequoia
The blaze in the Sequoia National Forest covered more than 1,000 acres by Monday morning.

Yes, there's a fire, but fire is integral to propagating sequois and clearing out deadwood and underbrush. It's not exactly a bad thing. This particular fire is away from the roads and is in the backcountry of the park. It's a part of the park we never had the chance to see when we were there last year.

Protecting human-made structures is important, but fire has to be part of the environment, particularly in the national parks to maintain the ecology. In fact, the National Park Service has essentially indicated that fire suppression within the confines of various national parks, including Sequoia and Kings Canyon has made protecting the very trees that give the park its name all the more difficult.

Fire suppression had eliminated one of the key factors in propagating the trees - it requires fire to set the pine cones and release the nutrients stored within the forest floor all while eliminating lower-tier trees that block the sequoias from getting enough sun.

All throughout Sequoia and neighboring Kings Canyon National Park, one sees the results of fire - the sequoias themselves are quite resistant to fire - trees that are scarred and even cored by fire are still standing and growing around the damage.

California Considers Tobacco Tax Hike With Legislature On Sidelines

California currently imposes a cigarette tax of 87¢ per pack of 20 cigarettes. That's well below the rates imposed in a number of other states, including neighboring Arizona ($2 per pack) or Oregon ($1.18 per pack). It's slightly higher than Nevada's 80¢ per pack. By comparison, New York imposes a $4.35 per pack (NYC is $5.85), New Jersey is $2.70 per pack, and Connecticut is $3.40. Out on the West Coast, Washington imposes a more than $3 a pack tax.

Consumption rates have dropped in the NYC metro area with the combination of higher taxes and more restrictive locations where smoking is permitted, which creates its own problems.

Health programs funded with tobacco taxes would see lower appropriations unless the taxes are increased to cover losses (and those who kick the habit because of higher taxes/restrictions). If the state doesn't hike the taxes periodically, the programs lose necessary funding and have to curtail their operations or else draw upon general funds instead (which in CA isn't possible due to its budget woes).

The question becomes whether the tax hikes will deliver the revenues projected, and what happens to the programs when the revenues fall short (does it require higher and higher taxes or shifting funds from other programs to cover the health programs funded by the tobacco taxes).

Californians not only have to deal with the potential windfall due from a potential $1 per pack tax hike on cigarettes, but a general distrust of the state legislature to spend the money wisely. They might be for a cigarette tax hike, but they're against the legislature spending it.

The tax, which would raise an estimated $735 million, is being voted on as California is reeling from a new wave of bad budget news. Gov. Jerry Brown announced last month that the state was facing a deficit of $16 billion, and he proposed a round of severe spending cuts to deal with it.

But none of the $735 million would go to close the deficit. Organizers argued that the tax would have less chance of passing if voters thought it would go into the state coffers, and said that their only goal here was cutting down on smoking. Raising the cost of tobacco has proved to be the most effective way of discouraging smoking, particularly among teenagers.

“The voters in this state are disinclined to give money — even tobacco money — to the Legislature to spend: they don’t trust them with the money,” said Don Perata, a Democrat and former president pro tem of the State Senate, who is the author of the proposition. “We’ve become such a damned antitax state that we’ve demonized any kind of tax.”

Still, the image of a $735 million windfall rushing in at a time when California is facing a three-week cut in the school year has proved, at the least, discordant. The editorial board of The Los Angeles Times, while proclaiming itself uncomfortable to be siding with the tobacco industry, urged voters to defeat it.

“It just doesn’t make sense for the state to get into the medical research business to the tune of half a billion dollars a year when it has so many other important unmet needs,” it said. And opponents have seized on this as one of their central arguments.

“Isn’t that a little strange?” said Michael C. Genest, a former director of finance for the state who worked as a consultant to the “No on 29” effort, noting that Mr. Brown had just announced the state’s latest budget shortfall. “It’s astonishing to me that someone would go to these lengths to have a major tax increase and none of it would go to the budget.”

At 87 cents, the cigarette tax here is about half the national average, and it ranks 33rd in the nation — down from the third highest in 1999. California is one of only three states that have not raised the cigarette tax over the past decade. About 12 percent of Californians now smoke.

The money would be dedicated to cancer research and smoking cessation programs, not balancing the budget. Proponents believe that the limitation on where the money goes in the state budget is a plus; anti-tax sentiment is such that no one trusts the legislature to spend the money appropriately.

Opponents in the tobacco industry are apparently so fearful of this initiative's passage that they're throwing serious money to stop it: $47 million.

A Trip of Extremes

A few weeks back, I had the opportunity to travel to Death Valley and Sequoia/Kings Canyon National Parks by way of Las Vegas. Along the way, we got to experience some of the most extreme conditions and phenomenon in the Western Hemisphere and the world. We also ended up putting more than 1,700 miles on two cars over little more than a week (200+ miles on a Jeep for offroading in Death Valley).

Death Valley is the lowest spot in the Western Hemisphere, with Badwater being 282 feet below sea level. Yet, just 85 miles away, the tallest spot in the lower 48 states is Mount Whitney at more than 14,505 feet (located in Sequoia National Park).

That's a huge variation in terrain and it makes for some wondrous vistas.

Death Valley is amazing for wide range of terrain within the park, from dry salt beds, playas, to badlands and mountains. It has its own Joshua tree forests and scrub brush. It has volanoes and sand dunes. Many of the following photos are composite images stitched together to convey the grandeur of the sights.

Racetrack Playa as seen from Grandstand

Ubehebe Crater at Death Valley

The mysterious rocks of Racetrack playa

Death Valley sand dunes in the twilight

From Death Valley, we drove through Lone Pine and visited Manzanar National Historic site, which was one of Japanese internment camps during World War II.

We then drove over to Barstow, from which we traveled through Visalia and fruit groves to Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks. There's no real way to convey the size of the massive giant sequoias that are found no where else on the planet. They are larger than buildings found across much of the country and had branches that were bigger than the 90 foot tree I recently had to take down on my property because it was threatening to fall:

The General Sherman Tree - one of the largest in the world by height and volume.

We stayed at Wuksachi Lodge in Sequoia Park, and that's probably your best bet if you want to stay in the area and experience as much of the park as possible. The restaurant has good food at a reasonable price, and it's the only year-round lodging in the park. There are campgrounds and several other lodging options available, but this is the premier location in the park (the National Park Service previously had lodging in and among the giant sequoias, but that was doing too much damage to the trees so they relocated the lodging and restored the area).

Finally, before returning to Las Vegas, we stopped at Red Rocks Canyon National Conservation Area, where we got to take in the light and scenic vistas before heading home:

[updated to fix photo linking]

Amazon.com Cuts Deal With California On Sales Taxes

Amazon.com has cut a deal with California over collecting sales tax on Internet sales. The company will have until July 31, 2012 to collect the tax, and the company has agreed to drop efforts to contest the tax.

States have been looking to Internet sales for years as consumers buy more and more products online rather than in brick and mortar stores. At issue is a concept known as nexus - and states are pretty much prohibited from imposing sales tax on out-of-state companies because those companies lack nexus under Quill v. North Dakota.

Instead of being hit with the additional regulatory and reporting burdens, the company ended its affiliate programs in those states like California. Amazon.com made the business decision that it doesn't want to incur additional regulatory burdens and tax obligations. That's completely within its rights as a business. Ending the relationship with the Colorado affiliates prevents it from being hit with that tax burden. End the tax burden, and Amazon.com would likely resume doing business in states like California and the California affiliates can go back to making money that ends up being taxed in the state (under the gross income tax or the corporate income tax). Claiming that the company is playing foul by fighting the tax obligations ignores that the current law likely violates existing federal law. The law isn't on California's side but the company.

The problem for Amazon is that they're taking a publicity hit because they didn't notify their affiliates in a timely fashion and they look like a bad guy here.

Of course, the state isn't blameless here either. The state imposed this regulatory burden immediately rather than phasing it in, unlike most other state requirements. California hoped that the measure would raise $200 million for the current fiscal year. Most states give a grace period to impose the regulatory requirements - but the California act was effective immediately. That led Amazon to immediately end its affiliate program.

The only real solution is for Congress to clear things up - this affects interstate commerce after all. Congress needs to stand up and set forth what states can do in terms of taxing internet sales, and one possibility is that Congress could allow states to impose sales tax collection burdens but only for the state-level sales tax or state-collected taxes, rather than requiring companies to collect all local level taxes.

This could be further modified by exempting companies with less than $1 million in sales annually or some other similar limit - companies that may not have the capabilities to provide tax filings for all states where such businesses have sales.

It would require amending the Internet Tax Freedom Act, but it's time to deal with the reality of e-commerce and would stop states from trying to do an end run around Quill and would impose a measure of certainty for retailers and states.

Crisis Continues In Japan As Relief Efforts and Nuclear Emergency Take Toll

How to help.

The death toll continues rising, and is over 3,600, and the number of missing is still over 8,000 as hope fades for finding more survivors. Half a million people are without homes and getting aid to the stricken areas is complicated not only by damaged roads, washed out bridges, and debris fields that stretch on as far as the eye can see, but snow, rain, and the radiation danger from the damaged Fukushima reactors is omnipresent on the minds of Japanese and the rescue crews sent in to the area to look for victims and assisting survivors. It's a herculean effort to get supplies into the damaged areas even without worrying about a nuclear crisis.

The damage from the quake, tsunami, and nuclear emergency is likely to cost upwards of $200 billion, making it the costliest natural disaster in history, and it puts tremendous pressure on the Japanese government.

The stricken reactors continue to vex operators trying to get the pressure and temperatures under control. After considering using helicopters to dump water on the damaged reactors, operators have turned to using water cannons as used in riot control to spray water on the reactors because of the radiation danger posed to helicopter crews.

There are further reports that a second reactor at the stricken nuclear power complex was damaged and may be leaking radiation. Reactor 2 has been the focus of scrutiny since an explosion rocked that reactor facility and appears to have damaged the suppression chamber that holds the water and steam necessary to cool the reactor core. While experts believe that the containment structures at reactors 1 and 3 are intact, they aren't sure about the damaged reactor 2.

As a result of the explosions, radioactivity levels rose sharply around the Fukushima Daiichi plant on Tuesday. The Nuclear Energy Institute reported that a dose rate of 1.19 rems per hour was observed at the site boundary and dose of 40 rems per hour was seen close to the plant (a rem is a measure of biological damage to tissue). The 1.19 rem reading dropped to about 0.06 rems per hour later in the day, however.

The readings are considered high, engineers said. On average, individuals are subjected to about 0.6 rems per year. Nuclear power plant workers are typically limited to about 5 rems per year. According the 1982 book, Nuclear Power: Both Sides by Michio Kaku, 1,000 rems would kill a person a few days after exposure, 500 rems would kill half of the exposed population within a few weeks, 200-400 rems would cause radiation sickness and hemorrhaging, and 50 rems would cause no immediate visible effects, but could induce long-term damage.

As if all that wasn't enough, a fire was detected at a fourth reactor at Fukushima, which lasted for about 30 minutes before it was put out.



TEPCO reports that they're continuing to inject sea water into Unit 1, along with boric acid to soak up the neutron emissions that release the heat that is causing the pressure to rise - and raising the risk of further explosions and breach of containment. As for the other reactors:

*Unit 2
At 1:25 pm, March 14th, since the Reactor Core Isolation Cooling System has failed, it was determined that a specific incident stipulated in article 15, clause 1 occurred (failure of reactor cooling function). At 5:17 pm, while the water level in the reactor reached the top of the fuel rod, we have restarted the water injection with the valve operation. At approximately 6:14 am, March 15th, the extraordinary sound was confirmed near the suppression chamber and the pressure inside the chamber decreased afterwards. It was determined that there is a possibility that something extraordinary happened in the suppression chamber. While sea water injection to the reactor continued, TEPCO employees and workers from other companies not in charge of injection work started tentative evacuation to a safe location. Sea water injection to the reactor is still under operation.

*Unit 3
At 6:50 am, March 14th, while water injection to the reactor was under operation, the pressure in the reactor containment vessel increased to 530 kPa. As a result, at 7:44 am, it was determined that a specific incident stipulated in article 15, clause 1 occurred (abnormal increase of the pressure of reactor containment vessel). Afterwards, the pressure has gradually decreased (as of 9:05 am, 450 kPa).

At approximately 11:01 am, March 14th, an explosion followed by white smoke occurred near Unit 3. 4 TEPCO employees and 3 workers from other companies (all of them are conscious) have sustained injuries and they were already dispatched to the hospital by ambulances.

*Unit 4
At approximately 6:00 am, March 15th, an explosive sound occurred and the damage in the 5th floor roof of Unit 4 reactor building was confirmed. At 9:38 am, the fire near the north-west part of 4th floor of Unit 4 reactor building was confirmed. At approximately 11:00 am, TEPCO employee confirmed that the fire was off.

Due to the ongoing concerns about the radiation risks and ongoing seismic hazards, the US is warning against travel to Japan. Other countries, including Canada, are issuing similar warnings.

Meanwhile, damage estimates are being tallied for Hawaii and parts of California and Oregon where the tsunami came ashore. In Hawaii alone, damage is estimated at $300 million.

UPDATE:
The latest death toll is now 4,255 with more than 9,000 still missing.

UPDATE:
The relief efforts are still hampered by bad weather, the ongoing nuclear emergency, and that access to the hardest hit areas is still limited. The task is painstaking and heartbreaking all at once.

“In an earthquake, if it’s within 72 hours and we reach them, they’re likely to be found alive; and in an earthquake, you find them in place and evacuate them,” said Kazutaka Hiramatsu, 48, a Tokyo firefighters’ school official who was helping direct the Shishiori search.

“But because the tsunami carries everything so far away, it’s very difficult to find people. And because it’s a tsunami, when we find them, they are usually already dead.”

Because most victims are neither in their homes nor able to call for help, the search-and-rescue teams that attend most natural disasters are less useful. In this case, the first victims are found and zipped into body bags by the workers sent in to clear paths through the debris fields that the tsunami has left behind.

“The problem,” Mr. Sato said, “is that there’s a lot of water, and a lot of the debris is just too big to move. So our search has become search-and-removal — we have to do it all together.”

Sometimes other homeowners, coming back to pick through the rubble of their belongings, discover the dead. In Kesen-cho, a village in another tsunami-flattened coastal area eight miles northeast of Kesennuma, journalists on Tuesday encountered two victims by a plowed roadside, laid on planks and carefully covered with a beige duvet and a Mickey Mouse bedspread. Bodies also have been recovered at sea by the Japan’s Coast Guard and the United States Navy, which have mounted helicopter searches from ships offshore.

That leaves the most difficult and painstaking work to the squads of searchers from Japan’s military, the Self-Defense Force, and emergency bodies like the Tokyo Fire and Disaster Management Agency.

Here in Kesennuma, about 800 searchers are deployed in all, outfitted in mud boots and slickers and carrying the tools of their trade. “We use bars, axes, and breaking tools that look like spurs to lift and turn over debris,” said Keiichiro Horiguchi, one of the Tokyo agency’s searchers. “We break walls and windows, and use metal cutting tools to turn over the tiles that cover the roofs to see if there is anybody beneath.”

UPDATE:
The US Navy is continuing to provide search, rescue, and relief assistance. Ships, including the USS Ronald Reagan and USS Essex are involved in the efforts. Via Twitter, the Essex ARG w/ @31stMEU are in the Sea of Japan and are positioning themselves off Sakata to conduct disaster relief operations.

Perhaps, more importantly, the USNS Safeguard has offloaded high-pressure water pumps in Yokosuka for transfer to the Japanese government to be used in getting the situation at Fukushima under control.

Those high pressure water pumps are going to be critical to getting water on the damaged reactors to keep an already dangerous situation from getting even worse.

UPDATE:
US officials are extremely concerned and alarmed at the way Japanese officials are handling the crisis at Fukushima - and believe that the spent fuel pool at reactor 4 may be dry - exposing the cores to air - and releasing tremendous amounts of radiation to the point that it can be impossible to approach without being a suicide mission.

"We are all-out urging the Japanese to get more people back in there to do emergency operation there, that the next 24 to 48 hours are critical," the official said. "Urgent efforts are needed on the part of the Japanese to restore emergency operations to cool" down the reactors' rods before they trigger a meltdown.

"They need to stop pulling out people—and step up with getting them back in the reactor to cool it. There is a recognition this is a suicide mission," the official said.

The official said the United States is in very deep consultations with Japanese about the way forward and that the only thing that has been favorable is the wind pattern that is blowing the contaminated material out to sea instead south towards Tokyo and other populated areas, but that can't be counted upon.

The U.S. official says experts believe there is a rupture in two, maybe three of the six reactors at the Fukushima power plant, but as worrisome is the fact that spent fuel rods are now exposed to the air, which means that substances like cesium, which have a long half-life, could become airborne.

"That could be deadly for decades," the official said.

There is a growing concern around the world that a nuclear catastrophic disaster is in the works.

"There is talk of an apocalypse and I think the word is particularly well chosen," European Union's energy commissioner Günther Oettinger said today, according to various reports. "Practically everything is out of control. I cannot exclude the worst in the hours and days to come."

Yet, the IAEA director says that things aren't yet out of control.

I'm thinking that no one really knows the true extent of the damage and everyone's resorting to suppositions based on what information they do know (and however outdated that information may be - a pronouncement based on outdated information may lead to a vastly different conclusion than more current information).

Meanwhile, the US is deploying additional radiation sensors in Hawaii to detect potential radiation downwind of the stricken reactors.

Japanese Benefited From Early Alert System; Where Is US System?

This is pretty damned spectacular and cool. Tokyo and other areas of the country received alerts of the impending massive 8.9 quake before it could be felt.

In Tokyo, because of its distance from northern Japan, the warning message reached people before the quake actually jolted the capital. When an earthquake occurs, seismometers near its source detect the first shockwave, which is usually mild and harmless. This wave is followed by another wave that travels more slowly and is much stronger and potentially destructive.

The agency's computer system analyzes the first, faster-traveling wave and quickly estimates how powerful the second wave will be; if it is likely to be very powerful, the system immediately issues a warning message.

The message comes on TV and radio, and many Japanese cellphones can receive and display the message. Some power and gas facilities as well as railway and industrial systems automatically halt their operations the moment they receive the warning message, the spokesman said.

In places relatively far from the seismic center, people can receive the warning up to half a minute or so before the quake reaches those areas.

Japan is the only country that has such an early warning system, according to the meteorological agency. The agency developed the system with help from scientists and launched it in December 2007.

The system is designed to send out the warning only if the intensity of the quake is lower 5 or stronger on the Japanese scale. (The scale has three levels for each number, so there's lower 5, 5 and upper 5.) Friday's quake was 7 on that scale, and the system sent out the warning message 8.6 seconds after it detected the very first shock wave.

Note that this was developed by the Japanese equivalent to the American NOAA.

30 seconds might not seem like a lot - but that's enough time to duck and cover or get others to a safer location. It can also help shut down chemical processes before the tremor hits - limiting damage further.

Scientists have been working on developing alert systems for years - discerning trigger signals that act as precursors to the movement that causes the potential damaging shaking.

­­P-waves and ­S-waves. Both types leave the fault surface at the same time, but there the similarities end. ­­P-waves, like sound waves, are compression waves. They travel relatively quickly, but they do not carry much power. During an earthquake, you feel the ­P-waves as a sudden, vertical thump. ­S-waves are more like ocean waves, slow movers that contain most of the energy and bring the strongest shak­ing. The ground motion is horizontal and vertical, and they can bat entire buildings around like they were dinghies in the surf.

In addition, not all waves look alike; they take on different shapes depending on the size of the slip patch. The ­P-wave radiation for small slip patches has relatively low amplitude and high frequency—a small but sharp pulse. Bigger earthquakes rupture larger areas of a fault and have more slip, so the ­P-wave is larger in amplitude and lower in frequency. It is akin to the difference between the squeak of a small bird and the roar of a grizzly bear.

A single seismometer could estimate the magnitude of the earthquake based on just this information. Any ­P-wave with high amplitude and low frequency would trigger a warning. This single-station approach is the fastest way to give warnings near the epicenter. Yet the character of earthquake ruptures varies—not all magnitude 5.0 earthquakes look the same—and the specific sediments underneath the seismometer modify the ­P-wave. This variability increases the risk of both false alarms—warnings when there is no earthquake—and missed alarms when a damaging earthquake is under way.

The Japanese meteorological agency managed to install their system, but the US has been sorely lagging in this department.

The US, and particularly the West Coast and California, would benefit from such a system, but work on a similar system is well behind the curve. Even Mexico has a system in place, but the Japanese have taken it to another level with alerts that are broadcast not only on televisions and radio, but with text messages and email alerts for all manner of communications paths.

The Japanese system's merits were proven in earlier quakes, coincidentally hitting near Sendai (the epicenter of the worst damage in today's quake), when factories managed to shut down key systems reducing fire and other damage.

So, why has the US lagged? Funding - or the lack of same. Part of the problem is the deployment of thousands of sensors around California and the most quake-prone areas. There are significant gaps in the sensor placement. That's critical data that is missing.

And the cost for the installation? $80 million.

That's a small price to pay for the potential of saving countless lives, and reducing property damage.

Bell, California Overwhelmingly Voted For Recall Of Corrupt Municipal Officials

Bell, California is the poster child for all that can possibly go wrong with municipal government. It included favoritism on lending, obscene salaries for politicians in a community that is primarily low-income, and various schemes to defraud the citizens of the city. These officials cultivated a culture of corruption that is shocking as to its extent and duration. The more investigators look, the more signs of corruption they find.

Robert Rizzo, the former city manager of Bell, Calif., shocked the nation when it was revealed that his salary in office was $800,000 a year.

Now, the Justice Department has uncovered a document that may help explain, in part, how city leaders financed their lavish salaries. The one-page memo was titled "Bell Police Department Baseball Game."

"All of this was just a means by Rizzo to nickel and dime the community to death to get more money out of them," Christina Garcia, a community activist, said.

The memo assigned "hits" to traffic violations and infractions. Officers could score a "single" by giving out parking tickets. Impounding a car was worth a "triple." Police in Bell charged up to $2,000 for drivers to get their vehicles back -- many times more than any other community in the Los Angeles area.

Bell took in $1 million by impounding cars in 2008.

The US Department of Justice is also investigating the situation in an effort to determine whether the accused officials violated the city citizens' rights.

Voters went to the polls yesterday and emphatically voted to kick these corrupt officials out of office.

More than 95 percent of voters cast ballots Tuesday in favor of recalling council members Teresa Jacobo, George Mirabal, Mayor Oscar Hernandez and former Councilman Luis Artiga.

All four have pleaded not guilty to dozens of fraud and other charges. They are accused of looting the city of millions of dollars by doling out enormous salaries to themselves.

In the race to fill Jacobo's remaining term, retired baker Danny Harber won with 54 percent of the vote, according to final election returns.

Attorney Ana Maria Quintana received 44 percent of the vote to fill Artiga's remaining term. Miguel A. Sanchez, who died last week, came in second with 23 percent.

In the race to fill three four-year terms on the council, the top vote-getters were businessman Ali Saleh, followed by Nestor E. Valencia and Violeta Alvarez.

Lorenzo Velez, the only member of the current council who was not charged, sought re-election, but lost. He was paid just $7,500 a year for his part-time service.

Velez was upbeat, however, when he spoke to The Associated Press, saying the big victory was for the community.

These officials treated the city as their personal piggy bank, and the residents suffered for their malfeasance.

The recall isn't without controversy as there are claims that an out-of-town donor with ties to the Tea Party was hoping to skew the results and the police union sent out mailings that might have broken the law.

Mailings from Bell’s police union spurred an assertion by the city attorney that uniformed officers promoted candidates, violating the law. Campaign contributions totaling $60,000 from Gwilym McGrew, a retired executive from Woodland Hills, 33 miles (53 kilometers) northwest of Bell, and his wife, Peggy, prompted a state Assembly member to press for the return of the cash.

“I am shocked to hear that any candidate with strong community ties would accept funds from the very people who work against the working families they are looking to represent,” Ricardo Lara, an Assembly Democrat from neighboring Bell Gardens, said in a statement. Lara, whose district includes Bell, said McGrew supports the Tea Party movement, as well as anti-worker candidates and legislation.

McGrew, who started medical-supply retailer AllHeart.com, said in an interview that he has backed causes related to Democrats Hillary Clinton and Barney Frank and went with a candidate he supported to a Tea Party event. He said he helped honest people in Bell who he believes will do a good job.

"Environmentalists" Opposing Renewable Energy Projects

If you want yet another example of why the United States lacks a coherent energy policy, all you have to do is go out West to see how people who claim to be environmentalists sue to block building solar power projects near them.

They like the projects on paper, but once it has the potential of going into their own backyard, NIMBY rears its ugly head and the lawsuits commence. Those lawsuits are time consuming and add significant costs to all energy projects, no matter how environmentally sensitive or green they are touted to be.

The push to create an alternative to carbon-based fuel has hit an unlikely snag: environmentalists.

The split between Peterson and Williams illustrates this awkward state of affairs. To a growing number of environmental advocates, the dozens of large solar plants that are springing up in vast areas of the western wilderness are more scourge than savior.

The upshot is that those who on paper seem to be perfect allies for solar are turning into its biggest enemies.

That includes the Sierra Club, which last week filed what senior attorney Gloria Smith says is its first suit against a solar plant, a giant 664-megawatt project called Calico that is slated to go up in the desert near Barstow, California. It would lie smack in the middle of habitat for rare plants and animals, in an area Smith calls "a very unfortunate site."

The legal brawl comes as the U.S. is racing to adopt renewables. In the United States, renewable energy, including solar, makes up just 8 percent or so of electricity generation, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. That figure was expected to jump to 13 percent by 2035 -- but that was before the Green vs. Green feud.

Even though Williams and her cohorts support the broad goal of reducing dependence on fossil fuels, they say it comes at too high a cost if it means building on undeveloped land. Helping their case: the proposed plants are often slated for areas with threatened or endangered animals, including kit foxes, kangaroo rats, rare lizards and others.

Now, the groups have gone from complaining to litigating. That means solar companies must take funds and management time that would have been spent on developing their plants and spend them instead on fighting lawsuits. For some companies, the likely result is that plants won't be built.

For the solar industry overall, the situation marks a fundamental shift in attitude. Where previously almost any bare patch of desert seemed like a prospective solar plant, now the reality is that much of the nation's most fertile ground for alternative power and energy independence may well remain undeveloped.

Undeveloped and cheap land near existing transmission lines are ideal for solar power development and yet these groups are suing because they claim that the projects will have a negative ecological impact.

Any construction will have an impact - the idea is how to minimize the effects while providing a cost-efficient and sustainable energy source. By suing, Sierra Club and other environmental groups are showing that they are against energy development of any sort - no matter how green they claim to be. California has a legal requirement to get 33% of its energy needs from renewable sources, which means that the state's ability to reach its goal is threatened as environmentalists fight to stop solar projects around the state.

It also means that solar power companies are not going to get involved in US projects because it isn't cost effective and are looking elsewhere - China for one, where the benefits of solar far outweigh the alternatives of more coal powered plants that emit noxious chemicals.

Yet, it should be pointed out that the footprint of a solar powered project is several times greater than a nuclear power plant of the same energy output.

NIMBYism is killing technological development and a shift from existing energy sources to cleaner, renewable sources. This will have dire consequences in coming years no matter how much money in incentives are thrown at the industry because the underlying fundamentals have not changed. Fix the issues arising from NIMBY types who thwart all manner of necessary and critical projects and it will reduce costs for a wide range of infrastructure projects that will help catapult US infrastructure into the 21st century.

Another issue is that China isn't exactly an environmentally constrained culture as factories continue to belch noxious chemicals and heavy metals into the air injuring those around those factories. Hundreds of children were poisoned by lead from factories making batteries in just the latest of such incidents. China is ramping up production of a wide range of green products, including batteries, wind turbines, and solar power systems, but few are looking at the consequences of China looking the other way as these very factories pollute their localities with all manner of toxic chemicals befouling waterways, the air, and people living downwind.

Defense Department Says Mysterious California Contrails Wasn't Produced By Military Missile; UPDATE: Did Blogger Solve Mystery?

The US military has ruled out that the contrails seen off the California coast weren't produced by one of their missiles, but they can't say what exactly did produce the plume.

More than a day after a CBS camera caught video of an unidentified projectile leaving a condensation trail off the California coast, the situation remains a mystery, with the Defense Department insisting that it was not a missile.

The Pentagon is still not sure what that was in the sky off the coast of California -- except that it was not a missile fired by the U.S. or some other country, reports CBS News Pentagon correspondent David Martin.

The video of what looks for all the world like the contrail of a missile was shot Monday evening by KCBS cameraman Gil Leyvas from a news helicopter over Los Angeles.

"I saw a big plume coming up, rising from looked like beyond the horizon and it continued to grow," Leyvas said.

He zoomed his camera in and stayed on it for about 10 minutes. To him it looked like an incoming missile.

They figure it was either an amateur rocket or aircraft contrails. ABC News says that there are no indications that this was a foreign military weapon system either. The FAA says that they didn't catch anything on their radar tapes, and the military says that they didn't schedule or inadvertently launch missiles in the vicinity.

UPDATE:
The NY Post reports that a blogger may have solved the mystery by noting that one of two flights were in the vicinity of the suspect contrails. It was either an America West or UPS flight.

Liem Bahneman on Wednesday pinpointed America West flight 808 as the likely cause -- backing up an explanation offered by a senior military official to Fox News Channel that the contrail caught on video by a news helicopter “was more likely caused by an airplane than anything else."

Bahneman wonders if he is the first to call it: "I did a lot of extrapolation of what flights could be at the right position (off the coast) at the right altitude (for contrail formation) and came down to two possibilities: UPS flight 902 (UPS902) or America West flight 808 (AWE808)."

UPDATE:
The Post gets the flight information wrong. Bahneman says that it was US Airways flight 808. The flight originates in Phoenix and ends in Honolulu.

Mysterious Missile Launch Off California Coast Confounds

No one quite knows for sure who or what was launched off the coast of Southern California.



The US Defense Department is thus far saying that it isn't one of theirs, but that isn't exactly a comforting thought. If it is one of our missiles, it could have been a secret test launch and that would explain the denials.

However, the alternative, that some foreign entity fired a missile off the coast and no one at NORAD or other military branches knows who or what fired the missile is far more disconcerting.

UPDATE:
The Defense Department continues denying any role in the missile launch and they are working with the FAA to determine who fired off the missile and what was the purpose/payload. There is speculation that it could have been an amateur or commercial launch, but the specter of terrorism is present as well.

UPDATE:
Reports that this might be a previously announced military test, as the FAA appears to have sent out a warning to avoid the general vicinity where the missile was launched don't match the timeframe of the launch. This information is for a period of time starting today into tomorrow for the affected area:

KZLA LOS ANGELES A2832/10

– THE FOLLOWING RESTRICTIONS ARE REQUIRED DUE TO NAVAL AIR WARFARE CENTER WEAPONS DIVISION ACTIVATION OF W537. IN THE INTEREST OF SAFETY, ALL NON-PARTICIPATING PILOTS ARE ADVISED TO AVOID W537. IFR TRAFFIC UNDER ATC JURISDICTION SHOULD ANTICIPATE CLEARANCE AROUND W537 AND CAE 1176. CAE 1155 WILL NOT BE AVAILABLE FOR OCEANIC TRANSITION. CAE 1316 & CAE 1318 WILL NOT BE AVAILABLE FOR OCEANIC TRANSITION. CAE 1177 WILL BE AVAILABLE FOR OCEANIC TRANSITION. W537 ACTIVE, CAE 1176 CLOSED. SURFACE – FL390, 09 NOV 20:00 2010 UNTIL 10 NOV 01:00 2010. CREATED: 08 NOV 20:52 2010

from pilotweb.nas.faa.gov

We'd have to search back further to see if there was a similar warning for the evening of November 8 (last night) and thus far there is no indication of any similar warning on the FAA website.

UPDATE:
US Northern Command says that they don't know what it was, but it wasn't a threat to the US.

U.S. Northern Command says it’s “unable to provide specific details … [but] can confirm that there is no threat to our nation, and from all indications this was not a launch by a foreign military.”

Come again?

What they appear to be saying is that it was a not-nearly-as-secret secret US program and even NORTHCOM hasn't been read into the program to comment? Because that's what the implication of their statement is. Expect CYA alerts in 3...2...1...

Because the possibilities of the alternatives is quite disturbing (that a foreign country/entity launched a missile within miles of the US coast and no one in the DoD seems to know what happened.

UPDATE:
Danger Room has some more updates, and castigates NORAD and NORTHCOM for their inability to promptly determine what exactly was shown in the video:

Meanwhile, naval analyst Raymond Pritchett makes a smart point: that the mystery itself is becoming a security problem.

“When someone makes an unannounced launch what looks to be a ballistic missile 35 miles from the nations second largest city (at sea in international waters), and 18 hours later NORAD still doesn’t have any answers at all – that complete lack of information represents a credible threat to national security,” he writes. “If NORAD can’t answer the first and last question, then I believe it is time to question every single penny of ballistic missile defense funding in the defense budget. NORTHCOM needs to start talking about what they do know, rather than leaving the focus on what they don’t know.”

If this was indeed aircraft contrails, then the FAA should be able to figure it out from the radar tapes of the area. If it wasn't, then NORAD and NORTHCOM had better figure out what happened here.

Investigations Continue Into Malfeasance and Fiscal Shenanigans In Bell, California

The more investigators dig, the more they find. Shenanigans abound from the petty to substantial and it indicates a culture of corruption and entitlement pervaded the city government.

A separate redevelopment account, the Capitol Projects Fund, was also inappropriately charged $242,268 for labor. The former CAO was paid $171,444, the DAS was paid $38,117, and former Assistant CAO Angela Spaccia was paid $27,066 from the fund. Once again, these payments were made without any evidence that any work activity was related to the fund.

Members of the Bell City Council also served on the Redevelopment Agency’s governing board, and were authorized to charge $60 a month for serving on the agency’s board. The Controller’s audit revealed, however, that the members were receiving $55.38 every two weeks, instead of the maximum $60 a month. In addition, two former board members received a stipend of $27.69 every two weeks even though they were no longer members of the board. The audit revealed that the agency’s governing board rarely met, and when Bell City Council members did convene as the agency’s governing board, the majority of those meetings lasted for three minutes or less.

The Redevelopment Agency also was cited for repeatedly failing to comply with the State’s Health and Safety codes. The agency did not correctly adopt an annual budget, compile annual reports, properly set aside housing funds, or prepare five-year implementation plans. The agency also overstated its outstanding debt in financial reports.

A separate audit of the city’s Gas Tax Fund and Traffic Congestion Relief Fund disclosed a number of inappropriate expenditures. An earlier report from the Controller found the city had paid the consulting firm D&J Engineering – which, at the time, was owned by the city’s Director of Planning Services, Dennis Tarango – $10.4 million without a written contract. This audit found the city also inappropriately paid the firm $301,810 from the Gas Tax Fund during the past three years, and without a contract for services.

The Controller found several other unallowable payments made to contractors from the Gas Tax Fund, including:

* $129,600 in overpayments for general maintenance services on public streets
* $76,992 for street sweeping services without a written contract
* $7,806 for painting house numbers on curbs, a benefit to property owners, not the public
* $4,878 in overpayments to an asphalt contractor

All of these inappropriate charges, illegal billings, and costs were borne by taxpayers in Bell, who faced among the highest tax bills in the state despite being among the poorer municipalities per capita. It was part of the systematic fleecing of taxpayers in Bell by city officials and the arrests and indictments are not going to be sufficient. The state has enacted legislation to help Bell residents.

Taxing Times For Bell, California

City officials got arrested in a corruption bust in New Jersey-esque proportions. Eight officials, elected in nonpartisan elections, were arrested, including one who had to be removed from his premises after law enforcement had to use a battering ram to enter and effectuate the arrest, for misappropriation of $5.5 million in public funds.

Among those arrested were former city administrator Robert Rizzo, former assistant city manager Angela Spaccia, Mayor Oscar Hernandez, councilmembers George Mirabal, Teresa Jacobo, Luis Artiga and former councilmembers George Cole and Victor Bello.

"This is corruption on steroids," Cooley said.]

The charges are expected to be detailed at a morning press conference, according to a source with knowledge of the case who was not authorized to comment publicly. A witness told The Times he saw Councilman Luis Artiga taken away in handcuffs Tuesday morning.

A neighbor of Hernandez said authorities used a battering ram on his front door after he failed to answer the door.

"They broke the door down," said the neighbor, who only gave his name as Jose. "They knocked down the door and they brought him out in cuffs."]

For two months, the Los Angeles County district attorney's office and state and federal authorities have investigated Bell, where high salaries earned by former City Manager Robert Rizzo and other top officials have sparked widespread outrage. The Times reported last month that Rizzo was set to earn more than $1.5 million in 2010. Additionally, he gave loans totaling $1.6 million to more than 50 city officials, including himself.

The mug shots for the eight can be found here. Rizzo's lawyer says that the charges are politically motivated and that the prosecutor is running for attorney general in the state.

The scandal broke after it became public knowledge that this particularly poor municipality was paying exorbitant salaries and compensation packages to several public officials, including Rizzo. This is happening in a municipality where the average salary is about $30,000. When compared with Beverly Hills, you'd see that something is seriously wrong. The average salary in Bell is about 40% of Beverly Hill's ($93,327 versus $39,394), but Beverly Hills property tax rate is significantly lower.

This too is on the heels of a report by the State Controller that the city had systematically overcharged Bell residents in property taxes for years on end.

The overcharges were discovered during the initial phase of the Controller's audit into the City of Bell's finances. Property owners in the city paid an estimated $3 million in extra taxes during the past three years.

“While my investigation into the City of Bell continues, these unlawful taxes must stop immediately,” said Chiang. “Homeowners and property owners should not pay the price for this poor fiscal management.”

The Controller's letter explains that Bell's City Council began raising property tax rates in 2007 to pay for pension obligations, even though State law caps those taxes at the rate used in fiscal year 1983-84. Property taxpayers saw their assessments for pension obligations rise from .187554% in 2007 to .277554% in 2010.

It goes without saying that the residents were systematically fleeced by the city officials who used the illegally imposed tax revenues to apparently line their own pockets.

Higher State Tax Collections Don't Offset Serious Problems That Remain

My alma mater has released a report on the state tax revenue collections, and while the Wall Street Journal highlighted the fact that the state tax revenues were up year over year, the reason for the increased revenues was that those states raised tax rates to achieve the gains.

The states did not see organic growth in tax revenues. Instead, these states saw gains only after imposing higher tax rates.

And there are several high profile states that continue to see declining tax revenues, even with the higher taxes. Meanwhile, corporate income tax collections remains off as sales and personal income tax collections have moderated.

The second-quarter gains were driven by growth in sales and income taxes, both of which have been raised in many states. Second-quarter sales-tax revenue increased 5.9% in the 47 states surveyed by the Rockefeller Institute, while the take from personal income taxes grew 1.6%. Collections from corporate income taxes, which tend to be volatile and are just a small slice of most states' collections, fell nearly 19% over the period.

Some 30 states saw tax revenue in the second quarter rise from a year earlier. Many of the strongest performers were places where collections were hard-hit by the recession. Florida saw a nearly 14% increase. Arizona—which, like Florida, has been among the states most affected by falling real-estate prices and lackluster construction activity—saw a 3.9% increase.

Still, revenue declined in several big states. In California, tax revenue declined 0.9%, despite a nearly 12% increase in income-tax collections largely driven by higher taxes, according to the Rockefeller Institute. Illinois saw revenue decline 7%, while Michigan's collections fell 3.8%.

Whooping Cough Makes Resurgence In California To Epidemic Proportions

Whooping cough is a wholly preventable disease with a simple vaccination. Yet, California is struggling with a potential epidemic on its hands because far too many people are withholding the vaccinations and the lack of herd immunity that it confers on the community at large is enabling the disease to spread among the population.

Whooping cough is now at epidemic levels in California and the state could record the highest number of illnesses and death due to the disease in 50 years, the state's top health official said Wednesday.

Reported cases of whooping cough, also known as pertussis, have quadrupled over the same time period last year, said Dr. Mark Horton, director of the California Department of Public Health. Five infants — all under 3 months — have died, including two in Los Angeles County and one in San Bernardino County.

Whooping cough is a bacterial disease that infects the respiratory system. There have been 910 confirmed cases of the highly contagious disease in California between Jan. 1 and June 15. During the same time last year, 219 cases were confirmed.

An additional 600 possible cases are being investigated.

The New York Times reports that the disease is most widespread in the migrant farm worker communities and among those who don't know to get vaccinated.

Dr. Chavez said that lack of information and inoculations in agricultural regions in the state’s Central Valley — home to many Latino farm workers — might be a culprit in the high incidence in that community. And indeed, Fresno County — in the heart of the valley — has the highest number of cases in the state, with 72 reported in May alone.

Periodic outbreaks of pertussis are not uncommon. The disease is endemic worldwide, and some 5,000 to 7,000 cases are reported in the United States in a normal year, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Epidemics occur every three to five years in the United States, with the most recent in 2005, when there were more than 25,000 reported cases nationwide, and nearly 3,200 in California, where 7 people died.

This is a wholly preventable disease through vaccination, and those in the anti-vaccination junk science crowd have reduced vaccination rates because of their fear-mongering and made it more difficult for public health experts to limit the spread of these kinds of diseases.

The deaths and illnesses could have been prevented with proper inoculations.

Can You Find These Women?

The NYPD has released a cache of photographs of women and children who were among the possessions of serial killer and rapist Rodney Alcala following similar photos released by California law enforcement agencies. Alcala is believed to have raped and murdered more than 100 people in New York and California, but the whereabouts of many of those pictured are unknown.

Secret photographs of women who may have been slain by serial killer Rodney Alcala were released by the NYPD Tuesday- a move that may help crack several cold cases.

Relatives of two Manhattan women who may have fallen victim to the notorious killer fumed cops didn't release the pics until after the Daily News reported exclusively on the stash Tuesday.

"They should be in every newspaper, on TV and on the Internet," Sheila Weller, cousin of victim Ellen Hover, said before the NYPD decided to release the pictures last night.

"It is rare that someone kept trophies of the women he came into contact with."

Hover, 23, was found dead in Westchester County in 1978, and Alcala - who lived in New York City off and on in the 1970s - has long been a suspect.

Alcala, 66, is on Death Row in California for killing four women and a 12-year-old girl - but there may be other victims among the hundreds of pictures of unidentified women and children he took in the 1970s.

Police in Huntington Beach, Calif., posted 120 pictures on their Web site last month, and 21 women have been identified and found alive.

Alcala posed as a photographer and may have lured women to their death by taking their photos.

Here are some of the many photos the NYPD is now circulating. If you have any information about those in the photos, please forward the information to the NYPD at (800) 577-TIPS.

I'm rather surprised that it took this long to get the photos circulating in the general public in the hopes of cracking these cold cases.

Sen. Feinstein Chooses Vistas Over Renewable Resources

Sen. Diane Feinstein (D-CA) seems to have made her choice. She'd rather prevent the construction of 13 wind or solar powered facilities on 1 million acres in the Mojave Desert than reduce the American reliance on coal, oil, and natural gas. She's hoping to turn wide swaths of the desert into National Monuments, and even if the legislation doesn't come to pass, she's now on the record on opposing the wind and solar power that can help reduce emissions that President Obama promised at Copenhagen.

But before the bill to create two new Mojave national monuments has even had its first hearing, the California Democrat has largely achieved her aim. Regardless of the legislation’s fate, her opposition means that few if any power plants will likely be built in the monument area, a complication in California’s effort to achieve its aggressive goals for renewable energy.

Developers of the projects have already postponed several proposals or abandoned them entirely. The California agency charged with planning a renewable energy transmission grid has rerouted proposed power lines to avoid the monument.

“The very existence of the monument proposal has certainly chilled development within its boundaries,” said Karen Douglas, chairwoman of the California Energy Commission.

For Mrs. Feinstein, creation of the Mojave national monuments would make good on a promise by the government a decade ago to protect desert land donated by an environmental group that had acquired the property from the Catellus Development Corporation.

“The Catellus lands were purchased with nearly $45 million in private funds and $18 million in federal funds and donated to the federal government for the purpose of conservation, and that commitment must be upheld. Period,” Mrs. Feinstein said in a statement.

California also promised to reduce emissions. How exactly can California or the US meet its goals if politicians like Feinstein can step in the way and thwart prime locations for alternative energy siting.

This is yet another sign that Democrats like Feinstein aren't serious about reducing emissions or about reducing the reliance on oil.

What Happens When the Money Runs Out

A government health care program to provide breast cancer screening for women in California has closed to new patients because the funding has run dry.

The "unprecedented fiscal challenges" claimed another victim this week as health officials decided to discontinue a cigarette tax-funded program that pays for breast cancer screenings for low-income women.

Mandatory changes were required this week by California Department of Public Health to the division, Every Woman Counts. The specialized division provides a cancer detection program for California's medically underserved women by giving them access to screening and diagnostic services for breast and cervical cancer.

The two biggest changes to the program according to a release are:

* They will stop paying for breast cancer screening for women under 50.

* They will stop enrolling all new patients for breast cancer screening until July 1.

Cigarette tax funding was supposed to provide a funding mechanism for health care programs around the nation, but higher taxes and fees on cigarettes combined with fewer smokers and raiding the tobacco settlement funds have meant that revenues have fallen or have already been committed to use elsewhere and aren't available to fund these kinds of programs. That means states have to look elsewhere, or they have to shutter useful health care programs such as this.

This should also serve as a warning for the national health care debate, where Democrats are busy trying to claim that a 10-year budget under the health care changes they propose will somehow manage to be deficit neutral even as they are taking 10 years of tax revenues to pay for seven years of spending on the new system.

That is unsustainable in any form since once you're 10 years into the tax revenues, those revenues will not be able to keep up with the costs for the program and will balloon the deficit or force a restriction on the spending - reducing access to health care in order to reduce costs.

California Docs Prescribing Medical Marijuana For ADHD

What will they think of next. Some doctors are taking the opportunity to prescribe medical marijuana for those kids suffering from ADHD.

Since 2004, California has given out more than 36,000 medical marijuana prescriptions. The number of these prescriptions going to children is not known, though experts say it's on the rise. And it's creating quite a controversy.

"Let me count the ways in which prescribing marijuana for teens with ADHD is a bad idea," Stephen Hinshaw, professor of psychology at the University of California at Berkeley, told Sphere.

"The active ingredient in pot, THC, causes short-term memory problems and inattention, the very same things you want a medicine for ADHD to help alleviate," Hinshaw said.

Others have fewer qualms about giving a kid with ADHD some pot.

"I'd have no hesitation giving a youngster with ADHD a trial of oral marijuana," Lester Grinspoon, emeritus professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and author of "Marijuana: The Forbidden Medicine," told Sphere.

Instead of simply prescribing a drug, how about double blind tests to see if there's actually any medical benefit from the use of medical marijuana instead of blindly claiming that it works or not.

Still, I can see plenty of opportunity for abusing this - both in diagnosis with ADHD and in treating with medical marijuana.