One of the latest — and sillier — local whines against fracking is that it is a profligate consumer of water that takes 33,000 acre feet of the stuff permanently out of the state’s hydraulic cycle.

In the case of the Aurora massacre (12 dead so far, 58 injured), there were more than 300 people in the theater when James Holmes allegedly started shooting and no one shot back; that suggests the theater was 99.66 percent gun free. And that alone tells you that the sort of disarmament gun control advocates want does not prevent mass murder, it enables it.

Let’s begin with a short quiz. What two things do the following nine states have in common: Colorado, Pennsylvania, Arkansas, Ohio, Louisiana, Texas, Montana, Oklahoma and North Dakota?

At a recent debate on fracking, Peter Champe of the Longmont anti-fracking group Our Future, Our Health, Our Longmont, summed up his group’s brief. Fracking is a major industrial activity, he said, and major industrial activities aren’t allowed in residential neighborhoods. Trouble is, that’s not quite accurate.

Planetary Resources Inc. made international news when it held a coming-out press conference in Seattle April 24 and announced 1) its goal was to mine near-Earth asteroids, and 2) it had the backing of some serious, high-profile, and deep-pocketed entrepreneurs, including Google Chairman Eric Schmidt, Google co-founder Larry Page, real estate and software developer H. Ross Perot, Jr., and filmmaker James Cameron.

According to a story in the Sunday edition of Brand X paper, Boulder planners are looking for ideas about how to further develop Boulder’s “civic heart” — by which they mean the area bounded by Ninth and 17th Streets on the west and east, and Arapahoe and Canyon on the south and north, with Boulder Creek running through it.

According to a new Rasmussen poll of likely voters, 56 percent of those surveyed favor legalizing marijuana and regulating it like alcohol. That might turn into something of a problem for the current president of the United States, who according to a new biography was a serious stoner in his high school days.

A couple of weeks ago the price of natural gas dropped below $2 per thousand cubic feet, the lowest it has been in more than a decade before rebounding somewhat. For that, the 99 percent — the 99 percent of Boulder residents who heat their homes with natural gas, that is — can thank an oil company.

WHeh. According to a paper published in the latest issue of the journal Nature Climate Change, windmills can cause global warming.

CU has an interesting new strategy for dealing with the campus’s annual 4/20 rally and pot inhalation this year. It appears to have gotten it from North Korea.