California’s Monterey Peninsula Unified School District has barred students from wearing any clothing with the California flag, maps of the state, bears, the NorCal star or any references to the Bay Area. School officials say police warned them those symbols may now be associated with gangs.
So … no California flag, no map of the state … that’s going to make civics and geography classes kinda difficult to teach.
As a big fan of our open spaces including national forest, state parks, and so on I firmly believe that using them to grow marijuana is a bad idea. It’s not that I’m against the plant in any way – I’m very 420 friendly – I just don’t believe public lands should be used to grow it. I’m a firm supporter of the Mendocino County, California’s yellow zip-tie program from a couple of years back. It was a great idea, and it’s a shame the state of California didn’t stand behind it and allowed the federal government to swoop in and wipe out the legal and law-abiding growers crops.
Being a conservationist and being cannabis friendly and living in a state where medical marijuana is legal, I was surprised to see that the unnecessary immigration reform bill includes ANYTHING having to do with pot or federal lands. It seems to me that a bill about immigration should be about … immigration.
From the Richmond Times-Dispatch:
The Senate recently approved a measure that would add — on top of the sentence for illegally growing marijuana — up to 10 years in prison for those cultivating the drug on federal land. The measure, a little-noticed addition to the immigration overhaul bill, also calls for new penalties for environmental damage such as that caused by the use of toxic chemicals.
According to Science Daily, researchers at the Solar Observatory in Big Bear, CA have been taking some pretty detailed photos of the sun with their new solar telescope.
From the article:
The photographs reveal never-before-seen details of solar magnetism revealed in photospheric and chromospheric features.
“With our new generation visible imaging spectrometer (VIS),” said Wenda Cao, NJIT Associate Professor of Physics and BBSO Associate Director, “the solar atmosphere from the photosphere to the chromosphere, can be monitored in a near real time. One image was taken with VIS on May 22, 2013 in H-alpha line center. The lawn-shaped pattern illustrates ultrafine magnetic loops rooted in the photosphere below.”
The other photospheric photograph is the most precise sunspot image ever taken: A textbook sunspot that looks like a daisy with many petals. The dark core of the spot is the umbra and the petals are the penumbra. “With the unprecedented resolution of BBSO’s NST, many previously unknown small-scale sunspot features can now be perceived,” said Cao. In particular, there are the twisting flows along the penumbra’s less dark filaments, the complicated dynamic motion in the light bridge vertically spanning the umbra’s darkest part and the dark cores of the small bright points or umbra dots.
Peter T. Hoss has penned an editorial for the Monterey Herald about the idiotic Draft Merced River Plan. In it, he lays out issues with the plan which I wholeheartedly agree with.
From the editorial:
An ad hoc group of retired people from all aspects of Yosemite life, small in number but vast in experience, has protested the current Draft Merced River Plan and the accompanying environmental impact report, which led to my testimony before a congressional subcommittee on July 9.
This plan, which would dramatically reduce recreational use of parts of Yosemite National Park, is not a political issue. Followers of all political persuasions cherish visiting Yosemite.
The Wild and Scenic Rivers Act, applied to the Merced River, was never intended by its draftsman, now-retired Congressman Tony Coelho, to apply to the 81 miles of the river within Yosemite. That portion made the final draft because of an administrative oversight when the House and Senate versions of the legislation were combined.
The National Park Service is reporting that on July 5, 2013, a smoldering fire was discovered in the crown of a giant sequoia tree along the Congress Trail in Sequoia National Park’s Giant Forest. This fire is a hold-over from the Circle Meadow Prescribed Fire, conducted in the summer of 2012.
An unusual combination of conditions enabled this fire to smolder through the winter and re-surface as the weather became warmer and drier. The severe drought conditions of the past winter created the dry environment that allowed this fire to continue to burn undetected within the giant sequoia.
The smoldering giant sequoia continues to intermittently emit smoke along the upper portions of its trunk and from the very top of the tree. A few branches have fallen from the tree. The Congress Trail is closed between the House and Senate groups of trees until conditions are safe for visitors. Over 95 percent of the Congress Trail remains open, and visitors can still see the trees that make this trail so popular, including the House and Senate groups of trees, the President Tree and the McKinley Tree.
