Have you had a chance to read “In Which Our Hero Is A Curmudgeon”? It’s the travelogue of Anthony Jastrzembski, one of my friends from Minot, who travelled to Ireland for a semester of university and is presently working in Tanzania.

It was announced yesterday that Minot Air Force Base is getting a new addition: a small staff for a nuclear weapons maintenance and security headquarters — something that Minot of all places would need most, given its widely-publicized recent slip-ups.

In a longer view, with the fate of the base tied largely to the ageing B-52 fleet and the nuclear arsenal we should be dismantling, I wouldn’t count on it being a permanent fixture.

Renovations of Minot’s Amtrak station were completed recently, replacing the falling-off stucco exterior with a Victorian peak-roof structure.   The group that managed to repair the outside in such a grand manner are now seeking to raise more funds for internal repairs.

It’s great to see the station back in good repair.   Now if only it could see a train more than twice a day…

A new 1 GW wind farm will be put up across Ward, Burke, and Mountrail counties starting in 2010, to be built in two 500 MW phases.     Still no local ownership — The project is a joint venture between energy firms in Minnesota and Texas.

There’s a proposal circling around Senator Conrad’s office to put Minot Air Force Base, home to a clown car of weapons management problems, in charge of our nation’s entire nuclear arsenal.   While I respect the Senator’s diligence in seeking new opportunities for North Dakota, it’s a self-evidently deluded proposal.

These are not isolated incidents — they are a pattern of careless neglect.   It shows that among everything else wrong with keeping land-based nuclear weapons around, the newest generation of Air Force personnel do not have the same fearful respect for The Bomb as their Cold War counterparts.

Environmental groups are taking notice of North Dakota’s abundance of potential wind energy, and have sent in grassroots organizers to build pressure on state and federal leaders for a greener future.

Minot’s own Pete Williams has returned from university and is working as Green Corps organizer, promoting the 1sky platform in Fargo and beyond.

1sky is an ambitious plan to invest in renewable energy (which, you know, creates jobs) and slash pollution levels.   It’s definitely worth looking into — as the economy is tanking, it’s certainly time to look at more sustainable business models.

Planes, trains, and automobiles will soon all meet at one spot in Winnipeg, in an initiative by the Manitoba government to focus the city’s extensive transportation infrastructure into an intermodal port. The port will be located northwest of the Winnipeg airport, on farmland near existing rail lines.

One thing that Manitoba laments in its construction of this new port is the fact that there’s no legislation to provide for “free trade zones” like in the United States, where cargo is only inspected when leaving the trade zone for a destination in the host country.   Traffic running through to international destinations pauses but isn’t constantly bossed by Customs.

Now if North Dakota were to build a similar type of port, we wouldn’t have that kind of problem. Think of all the opportunities a single port with access to all our transport options would provide. The Port of North Dakota is almost close enough to the Minot airport to try something similar.

The number of transit operators in Minot has decreased from three to two. Effective January 1st, Souris Basin Transportation, the oft-forgotten rural transit service in the Minot region, will absorb the call-ahead transit service presently provided by the Minot Commission on Aging. SBT will still operate alongside the (woefully inadequate) fixed-route services of Minot City Transit.

Despite the rearrangement, there’s no planned expansion of service at either transit operation. I said it years ago and I’ll say it again: the hours transit operates in Minot are impossible for commuting workers to use, and the city has grown outside of its old bus routes.

Minot Air Force Base is undergoing another round of inspections for nuclear weapons handling this week.   Meanwhile, the punishment of the sleeping servicemen and the retrieval of the overturned missile gives the appearance of improvement in the precarious situation of North Dakota’s nuclear arsenal.

It still doesn’t change the fact that land-based nuclear missiles are irrelevant to modern deterrence strategies, and that these bombs are not needed in our state any more.   Converting the missile silos into spaceports would be a better investment for our state’s future, anyway.

Even as NAWS opens its first major delivery leg, Minot is getting opt-outs now that Canadian lawsuits have held up construction of the pipeline that would bring Missouri River water to the Souris River basin.

This seems to say that if Canada wins the court case, Minot isn’t interested in spending the money to sterilize water pumped up from Lake Sakakawea, and would rather abandon the whole project.

Considering that lake levels have only recently started to rise again, and that barge traffic is still the priority for flow control on the Missouri, counting on the river to feed North Dakota still seems foolhardy to me.   How about wastewater recycling instead?