ahaught:

As I was browsing social media articles (something I do on a daily basis), I came across an article that suited the state of mind I was in earlier today. It was an article regarding how to blog. Since I have never blogged before, I was clueless of how to begin. Yes, I understand that I am supposed…

 There’s no need to complicate a simple thing. Blogging is telling a story using interesting words and images. Not complicated. If you can scribble on a sidewalk with chalk then you can blog…

Of course, that doesn’t make it something that people want to read…As with network television, cable, books, magazines, music, etc….most of what you’ll find on the internet is garbage…

It is the same with all things, and thus, the forum of public opinion (aka; “the mob”) will decide this for you…But always remember, the “mob” are the same people who have given their collective thumbs up to “The Twi-Light Saga”, “Justin Bieber” and “Vanilla Ice”….Really?

Because there isn’t enough snow in Arizona to support a ski range, the Snowbowl (Toilet Bowl?) Resort is making its own snow. But the only water available is wastewater. Some people are not pleased.

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It’s not uncommon for ski resorts to make artificial snow when the real thing can’t be found, but the Snowbowl Ski Resort in Flagstaff, Arizona, wants to take the practice to another level by covering its slopes with snow made out of 180 million gallons of recycled wastewater. It’s a plan that is drawing ire from local Native American tribes and environmental activists alike.

Snowbowl first received the go-ahead to make artificial snow in 2005 to compensate for unpredictable weather (that’s what happens when you build a ski resort in the desert). More recently, the city of Flagstaff agreed to sell 1.5 million gallons of wastewater daily from a local treatment plant to the resort.

The ski resort plans to construct a 15-mile pipeline from the city that goes to a reservoir. When Snowbowl is low on real powder, it will be able to pump the wastewater into large fans that churn out a fine mist of water droplets, which can quickly freeze into snow.

Perhaps the largest impediment to Snowbowl’s plan is the Hopi Tribe, which sued Flagstaff for its decision to go ahead with the wastewater plan. The problem: Snowbowl’s wastewater runoff will likely end up on land that the tribe considers to be sacred. In fact, 13 Native American tribes worship at the San Francisco Peaks—the inactive volcano range that is home to Snowbowl. And having soiled water on sacred land so that people can go skiing doesn’t sit well with the tribes.

The Hopi Tribe explains:

The contract provides for the use of reclaimed wastewater in a mountain setting where runoff and overspray cannot be prevented, as Arizona law requires. Additionally, restrictions on limiting human contact with wastewater cannot be met, and harm to the unique alpine environment in the area, including rare animals and plants, cannot be prevented. The contract is also illegal under Arizona law because it will result in unreasonable environmental degradation and will further deplete limited drinking water resources.

The Hopi tribe also contends that the project violates its water rights, which guarantee that the tribe has enough water to meet the needs of its reservation.

The Coconino National Forest’s environmental impact statement for the project contains a laundry list of other potential problems: visible “scarring” of the local landscape, increased local noise levels from the snowmaking machines, the potential to change soil chemistry and moisture, and destruction of wildlife habitats.

And then there are the health implications of skiing on treated poop water. Mother Jones points us to a study claiming that Flagstaff’s treated wastewater may contain hormones, endocrine disruptors, pharmaceuticals, carcinogens, and more. This could cause toxicity and reproductive issues for wildlife surrounding the ski slopes. And as for the humans at Snowbowl? It’s hard to say what the health impact may be—this is the first time a ski resort has attempted to use 100% treated wastewater to churn out snow. Skiers should just hope that they don’t fall and get a mouthful of the stuff.

Despite the Hopi lawsuit, Snowbowl began construction on its wastewater system this past spring. But if the project fails, we have another suggestion: When real snow arrives, cover the ski slopes in bubble wrap. Patrons may be more inclined to ski on plastic than on recycled sewage.

Courtesy of ARIEL SCHWARTZ

Ariel Schwartz is a Senior Editor at Co.Exist. She has contributed to SF Weekly, Popular Science, Inhabitat, Greenbiz, NBC Bay Area, GOOD Magazine and more

Arizona Sheriff (and notorious douchebag) Joe Arpaio, who was rebuked in December by the Justice Department for alleged civil rights violations, said on Tuesday that he will release his findings on President Barack Obama’s birth certificate on March 1.

Arpaio further implied that the president should be thanking him for looking into whether his Hawaii birth certificate is a fake.

“When I took this mission on, I took it on to possibly be able to clear the president,” Apraio said during a speech in Maricopa County, where he serves as sheriff. “I was doing him a favor. We’ll see what happens.”

He didn’t give any hints as to what his birther “Cold Case posse” had found, but insisted his press conference was not driven by a desire to gain media attention. “I don’t have press conferences just to get my name on television,” he said. (Granted, he gets his name on TV plenty as it is, particularly for mishandling immigration enforcement authority until his office was banned from a federal partnership program.)

Arpaio insisted that he is investigating the racially-charged “birther” claims, which have been thoroughly debunked, because of demand from Tea Partiers. Obama released his long-form birth certificate in April 2011, but that was not enough for Arpaio, who said in November 2011 that he wants to see the microfiche of that document.

Arpaio met with ”birther queen” Orly Taitz in October 2011 to discuss the investigation, again declining to give findings to the press.

“What should I do, throw it in the waste basket and forget about it, like everyone else is this country has done?” Arpaio said on Tuesday. “But once again, I take my elected sheriff’s status very serious, and when the people ask me to do something I try to do it regardless of the repercussions, the politics and the media.”

Arpaio spoke after an appearance by presidential candidate and former Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum, with whom Arpaio said he met for about 20 minutes. But Arpaio did not issue an endorsement, although he was for Texas Gov. Rick Perry before he dropped out of the race.

More than talking about candidates, Arpaio touted his immigration enforcement methods, which he said are merely part of his job description as an Arizona sheriff. He said he is glad that the state’s lawmakers passed SB 1070 and that his job is now to enforce it — though in July 2010 a federal judge blocked parts of the controversial immigration law, ruling it unconstitutional.

Arpaio said Obama should thank him for his efforts to drive out undocumented immigrants, too, insisting he is creating jobs through raids on employers.

“Every time we raid a place we remove illegal aliens, that makes another opening for U.S. citizens,” Arpaio said. “How come the president doesn’t thank me for doing what I can for the economy? I never get any thanks.”

Courtesy of Elise Foley of the Huffington Post

February 9, 2012:

The recent actions by the ASU administration to block access to the Change.org tuition petition are despicable. Worse, the University’s justification for these actions was a bold-faced lie.

For the University to block an online petition just because it advocates something they may not like is the height of institutional censorship, which is contrary to the most deeply held virtues of the academy.

Does AT&T disconnect your phone call if you’re telling a friend that their service is overpriced? Does your MacBook stop working if you go to download a Linux distribution? Of course not.

Worse, far worse, is ASU’s claim that they blocked access to this website to conserve their network resources. This is a lie, plain and simple. They know it, and they purposefully lied to the University community anyway. This website uses a miniscule amount of bandwidth. Students and faculty transfer tens of gigabytes of data without thinking twice, or stream multi-GB movies from Netflix. Compared to these everyday “acceptable” uses of the network, the amount of bandwidth consumed by Change.org‘s petition is utterly trivial — maybe a few hundred kilobytes. This has nothing to do with the cost of tuition at ASU. It’s about censorship and about using lies to justify it.

Sun Devils, you deserve better. You deserve for your university to foster open discourse, something that has been cherished by academics for a thousand years, and not censor ideas just because they’re afraid of them. You also deserve for your university, to whom you each pay thousands of dollars a year, to not lie to your faces about what they’re doing and why.

Walter Freeman
Ph.D., Computational Physics

Originally published February 8, 2012 at 5:18 pm at statepress.com