November 2013

Learn to remember

    
"I am the people, the mob"
Carl Sandburg
 
 
I AM the people--the mob--the crowd--the mass.
Do you know that all the great work of the world      is done through me?
I am the workingman, the inventor, the maker of       the world's food and clothes.
I am the audience that witnesses history. The           Napoleons come from me and the Lincolns. They die. And then I send forth more Napoleons and Lincolns.
I am the seed ground. I am a prairie that will             stand for much plowing. Terrible storms pass over me.

“Markets are lethal”

 
It was reported that the new assemblyman, Adam Gray, and his family (mother Candice, uncle Robin, Gray’s most senior political advisor, and his in-laws the Condit Tribe led by his wife, Cadee, brought a real old-fashioned political dog-and-pony show on fracking to Merced on Friday. The report explains why Gray, why Merced, why now:
 

Analysis of defeat of fracking moratorium in California

 This is a surprisingly good narrative and political analysis of what happened in the California Legislature re. fracking. That it was written by a state Democratic Party leader, chair of its environmental caucus, makes it doubly unusual. At least it confirmed our deeper suspicions about what happened and how. It also confirmed our suspicion that our new assemblyman, Adam Gray, Adam/Medifind Party-Merced, is not worth mention on this issue except in his own press releases.

Delano responds to typhoon devastation

 The powerful, durable Filipino community of Delano is “taking action” as the LA Times headline accurately announces, to do what it can to help people, some of them family and friends, hurt by the monstrous typhoon that hit the Philippines last week. As this wonderful article relates, this is one immigrant community in the Valley that has always taken action at the necessary time.

Yo, Republicans and Blue Dogs: keep your hands off our Social Security

 Because we live in The Valley That Feeds the World, we are very poor and need our Social Security. -- blj
11-2-13
Commondreams.org
Growing Movement: Expand Social Security or 'Pay a Price'
Sen. Warren: 'Social Security is incredibly effective, it is incredibly popular, and the calls for strengthening it are growing louder every day.'
- Lauren McCauley, staff writer
http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2013/11/20-6
 

Scientific masturbation

 In a more vigorous intellectual era -- it takes more historical knowledge than we have to imagine an American intellectual era more flaccid than the present -- we called the sort of exercise described below as "intellectual masturbation." In the case of this circle of scientists (grant hustlers) and special interests (known as "stakeholders"), the problem of course is our old friend, Consensus, that blunt instrument the corporate state has imposed on every "decision-making process" in the land (except the important decisions made in their own boardrooms by anything but "democratic" means).

Arctic methane: worse than borborygmic, flatulent San Joaquin Valley cows

  
11-25-13
CommonDreams
The Climate Disaster Bubbling in the Arctic
Study: twice as much methane as previously thought being released from East Siberian Arctic Shelf
Andrea Germanos
http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2013/11/25-3
New research reveals that the amount of the potent greenhouse gas methane escaping from an area in the Arctic is over twice the amount previously estimated.