Man arrested for releasing red helium balloons for girlfriend

Found a rather strange story about Anthony Brasfield, who was arrested by the Florida Highway Patrol on a felony charge.

His crime: releasing a dozen or so red and silver heart-shaped balloons into the sky for his girlfriend.

From the article at Sun-Sentinel.com...

Also watching the romantic gesture: an FHP trooper, who instead noted probable cause for an environmental crime.

Brasfield was charged with polluting to harm humans, animals, plants, etc. under the Florida Air and Water Pollution Control Act.

Endangered marine turtle species and birds, such as wood storks and brown pelicans, seek refuge in John U. Lloyd State Park, about 1.5 miles east of the motel.

Between 2008 and 2012, the Florida Department of Law Enforcement said there were 21 arrests statewide under the rarely used environmental crime statute. The third-degree felony is punishable by up to five years in prison.

Five years in prison for setting loose some cheap helium balloons? He should feel lucky. Back in the old days, releasing red balloons into the air could possibly trigger World War III.


I'll 'fess up: in addition to this being a screwy story about environmentalism gone amok, I just wanted a reason to post Nena's "99 Red Balloons" video.

(And yes, I know the original German title is "99 Luftballons"...)

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Scott Adams tries to build a "green" house

In addition to being a great cartoonist and creator of Dilbert, Scott Adams has emerged in recent years as being a brilliant and respected commentator on a wide variety of subjects. In a piece that he wrote for The Wall Street Journal Adams turns his keen intellect on the challenges of building an eco-friendly house... and the quickly-mounting problems that come with seriously undertaking the endeavor.

Here's a snippet...

As a rule, the greener the home, the uglier it will be. I went into the process thinking that green homes were ugly because hippies have bad taste. That turns out to be nothing but a coincidence. The problem is deeper. For example, the greenest sort of roof in a warm climate would be white to reflect the sun. If you want a beautiful home, a white roof won't get you there. Sure, you could put a lovely garden on your roof, because you heard someone did that. But don't try telling me a garden roof wouldn't be a maintenance nightmare. And where do you find the expert who knows how to do that sort of thing?

Second, the greenest sort of home would have few windows because windows bleed heat. In particular, if your lot has a view to the west, forget putting windows on that side because your family members will heat up like ants under a magnifying glass. Try telling your architect that you don't want a lot of windows on the view side. He'll quit.

Remember to skip the water-wasting lawn. White pebbles are the way to go if you want to save the Earth. I was born with almost no sense of style whatsoever, and even I hate looking at pebble lawns, although I do respect the choice.

There's plenty more at the link above. Or just click here if you're lazy. Hey, it's Monday morning...

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Kevin Costner's invention could clean up BP oil spill

Before anything else in this post, I'm gonna get this off my chest: I've never understood why Waterworld has such a bad rap. I saw this movie during its first week in theaters in 1995 and thought it was pretty good. Not overwhelmingly "excellent", and the science behind it is atrocious (namely that there isn't enough water in the polar caps to cover the Earth's surface if they melted) but Waterworld was still a great action flick that has only gotten better with age.

Anyhoo, that photo is Kevin Costner at the till of his vessel in Waterworld... and not Kevin Costner at the controls of his very own real life invention: the "Ocean Therapy" water cleansing system. Who'da thunk that all this time he was making Waterworld, Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves and Open Range, that Costner was also working behind the scenes with millions of dollars of his own money to develop the system?

Well, it now looks like Kevin Costner's innovation is going to come to the rescue of the Deepwater Challenger oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico. New York Daily News has the story...

Could there be a happy Hollywood ending to the Gulf oil spill?

Enter "Waterworld" star Kevin Costner, who has spent years and millions of dollars perfecting a device that cleans oil from seawater.

British Petroleum - desperate for ideas - gave the okay to test six of Costner's gizmos this week, said BP Chief Operating Officer Doug Suttles.

Costner's high-speed centrifuge machine has a Los Angeles-perfect name: "Ocean Therapy."

Placed on a barge, it sucks in large quantities of polluted water, separates out the oil and spits back 97% clean water.

"It's like a big vacuum cleaner," said Costner's business partner, Louisiana trial lawyer John Houghtaling.

"The machines are basically sophisticated centrifuge devices that can handle a huge volume of water," he said.

The "Field of Dreams" star first got a team together to create the device in the wake of the 1989 Exxon Valdez spill in Alaska.

His scientist brother, Dan Costner, helped develop the device, and together, the brothers formed Costner Industries Nevada Corp. to pursue various energy projects, including a non-chemical battery that could last 15 years.

The 55-year-old actor eventually sank $26 million into the Ocean Therapy oil separator project. He obtained a license for the device from the Department of Energy in 1993 and has been trying for years to promote it.

In 2007, he told London's Daily Mail that he had blown millions on "technologies I thought would help the world" and had nothing to show for it.

"I've lost $40 million-plus," he said. "But I knew that if I was right, it would change things in an incredibly positive way."

Last week, he was in Louisiana seeking redemption, demonstrating his Ocean Therapy contraption.

"I'm just really happy that the light of day has come to this," Costner said.

Though reporters largely greeted his ideas with snickers, BP apparently wasn't laughing.

At least 210,000 gallons of oil per day is gushing into the sea from the ocean floor where the BP rig exploded April 20. The oil company has tried several novel solutions, but none has worked so far to plug the leak.

The company is skimming the oil, spraying it with dispersant chemicals underwater and trying to burn it on the surface.

Nineteen percent of the Gulf's lucrative fisheries are closed, billions of beach tourist dollars are at stake and dozens of seagoing species are threatened.

Costner has 300 of his Ocean Therapy machines in various sizes. The largest, at 21/2 tons, is able to clean water at a rate of 200 gallons a minute - faster than the well is leaking, Houghtaling noted.

WOW!! This sounds like it could probably do a heap o' good. Gotta give Kevin Costner bigtime props for actively applying his mind and resources toward solving a problem like this. If ya ask me, that is what old-fashioned American ingenuity is all about :-)

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Climate data was DUMPED, East Anglia scientists admit

"Climategate" is a little over a week old but already is gaining steam faster than most scandals. Curiously most of the "mainstream press" has yet to pick up on it. Out of embarrassment, perhaps?

Well, this next item of news related to last week's leaking of confidential material from the Climate Research Unit outta raise ire even more: scientists at University East Anglia are now confessing to disposing of ONE HUNDRED AND FIFTY YEARS worth of climate data! There is now no raw data to analyze and determine if there has been any real global warming... or global cooling for that matter.

What the hell kind of researchers throws away a century and a half of raw data upon which their studies are based? That's like a courtroom prosecutor chucking out all the evidence in the hopes that a jury will simply take him at his word that the defendant on trial is a serial murderer.

(Methinks that while we're using legal metaphor, that there is becoming a growing body of proof that "scientists" worldwide have been engaging in a gross act of scheming to defraud in the first degree.)

Seriously: how much storage is required to contain all that data? A regular 500 gigabyte hard drive like the kind probably in your computer? Likely not even that much. So they can't excuse this away by claiming that there "wasn't enough room" to keep the raw data. The CRU eggheads have a lotta 'splainin' to do...

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Ahead of his time: Michael Crichton on the global warming fraud

"F---ing pissed!" And that was one of the more polite e-mails that have come in since Friday afternoon when this blog and many others spread the news about the Climate Research Unit at University of East Anglia getting hacked. That 61-megabyte .zip archive has gone viral across the Intertubes and bunches of blood-boiling stuff is still being gleaned from the correspondence between climate "scientists" that points to a decades-long conspiracy to promote paranoia about global warming at cost of rigorous and honest study.

Well, many people have been saying for a long time that global warming is fake. And few argued against global warming as articulately and passionately as did Michael Crichton. The acclaimed bestselling author of Jurassic Park and The Andromeda Strain addressed global warming in his novel State of Fear. It was one year ago this month that Crichton passed away, but I've no doubt that he would have been very pleased with this weekend's news... and would probably smile from knowing he was so far ahead of the curve. If you're interested in some serious discussion about the Earth and its climate, I greatly recommend reading Crichton's 2005 lecture "Complexity Theory and Environmental Management". It's a rather long read, but one rife with all sorts of solid information (the thing about Chernobyl severely made my jaw drop).

And I'm gonna do something that I've never done before: if you maintain a blog, SPREAD THE WORD ABOUT THE HACKING OF THE CRU! I'm seeing the traditional press start to finally disseminate this news, but they're (perhaps understandably but that's still no excuse) being awfully slow-pokish about it. This very well might be the biggest scam in modern history, when you consider all the money that's been wasted and legislation that's been enforced in the name of "global warming". Should that make everyone "f---ing pissed"?!? Yer #&@%ed right it should!!

If sincere investigation bears out that this has been a fraud, then careers must be forever destroyed and I'll even suggest that a lot of climate con-artists need to be strung up from the nearest telephone poles by their circular reproductive units. With piano wire.

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The Google Goats

In an effort to encourage "a more carbon-friendly, less polluting alternative to lawn mowers", Google has turned to employing goats to chew down the excessive vegetation on its sprawling California campus.

Here are the Google Goats hard at work...

The idea isn't entirely without precedent. During the World War I years First Lady Edith Wilson kept the White House lawn "mowed" by letting her family's sheep graze freely on the grounds. Maybe Obama could follow Google and the Wilsons' example and demonstrate some real environmentalism at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue? :-)

Well anyway, I think it's a pretty neat story. Having grown up on a farm with a number of goats I can attest that they can eat anything, and will faithfully keep the grass and weeds at bay. Who knows: maybe with some good PR, goats and sheep can become the next "cool" pets to own.

(And as an added bonus, they can provide goats milk and lambchops!)

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