Badlands Journal
Social, Economic, and Environmental Justice
This $1.2 billion news organization just pulled its money out of fossil fuels:
Bill McKibben - GoFossilFree.org
1:28 PM
The intensity of Washington’s propaganda war is driving the world to destruction... Americans, and the populations of the American puppet states, desperately need to understand that Washington is incapable of speaking the truth about anything. Washington is an evil force...-- Paul Craig Roberts, PaulCraigRoberts.org, March 30, 2015
At the usual place and time, Echo Summit at the beginning of April, the Immortal Snow Doctor, Frank Gehrke (chief of the California Cooperative Snow Survey Program), one end of his long, hollow wand quietly resting on dirt beside his feet, stood mostly silently beside the Governor of California, Jerry Brown, who spoke at some length about the drought crisis without once using the political cliche du jour, "we must move forward."
This morning we found two letters to the editors of the Modesto Bee from April 2 that express a growing public sentiment, likely to get more pointed as the drought wears on through the summer: Almonds are not good for the Valley; they are good for the very few Valley residents and some people who are not Valley residents who grow them, but they aren't good for us.
To put this version of the California 2015 Drought Story in some perspective, there will be litigation by agribusiness and the damage from over-pumping groundwater is not something the Governor and his perpetually upwardly mobile functionaries want to think about. However, the state may be operating at its legal limits and probably costly litigation will verify that.
• Several central San Joaquin Valley communities may be required to conserve 35% of their residential water use under proposed state conservation goals. -- Robert Rodriguez, Fresno Bee, April 8, 2015
In Merced County, both Merced (279.6 gal. daily per-capital home water use) and Los Banos (228.2 gal.) will be asked to reduce water use by 35 percent by the State Water Resources Control Board.
We don't know what the problem in Los Banos is but suspect it is related to its development as a bedroom community for Silicon Valley.
Hey, we've got enough worries right here in the Valley, the Garden of the Sun, the California Cornucopia, without looking outside for more trouble than the worst drought in 1,200 years, right? Our economy is about agriculture and our main interest in foreign policy is more trade and better terms. Right?
California Inc. wetdream
Badlands editors ran into this poiuted, 2-sentence public utterance in the Modesto Bee yeterday. We thought we'd pair it with a sample of the flak from the Trinitas website. We marvel at how much money the hedgefund doubtedless paid for the presentation of so much lack of information in such expansive, high-class fontage. We spared you the pictures of "our team," which may be real or may be additional expenses from Central Casting.
All is definitely not well in the former "Ladino Clover Capital of the World." The cowboys is all gone nuts. -- blj