Badlands Journal
Social, Economic, and Environmental Justice
Two recent articles, representative of a flurry of similar ones about banking – even sharing one common bank, the Bank of England – contain information so radically at odds that it is hard to get them focused in the same planet.
The US Supreme Court's 2010 "Citizens' Alliance" decision, authored by Sacramento's own legal gift to the finance, insurance and real estate special interest, Justice Anthony Kennedy, ushered in the occasional use of the word "plutocracy" to describe our actual form of government. Plutocracy means rule by the rich. The Court's "McCutcheon" decision yesterday, in light of the babblocracy's recent demonization of Eastern European "oligarchs," has issued in a new favorite work to describe our system of government, "oligarchy," rule of the few.
Although the primary environmental focus of Badlands Journal was momentarily diverted by the West installing a neo-Nazi government in Ukraine and the US Supreme Court shredding the last best defense the mortally wounded US democracy had against the plutocratic oligarchy created by monopoly special interests, we noticed the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) published an extremely grim report on climate change a week ago.
"Alicia Forsythe, restoration program manager for the Bureau of Reclamation, said: 'We have a long way to go in terms of improved hydrology to start releasing water for the program again.'" -- Mark Grossi, Fresno Bee, April 5, 2014
Hydrology:
Scientific discipline concerned with the waters of the Earth, including their occurrence, distribution, circulation via the hydrologic cycle, and interactions with living things. It also deals with the chemical and physical properties of water in all its phases.
We fought a revolution to establish in a government of laws, not tyrannical monarchs who abused laws. We fought a Civil War and two world wars with the Great Depression between them to uphold this great principle. In the depths of WWII, in 1941, President Franklin Roosevelt announced the Four Freedoms for which we were fighting against fascism and nazism: freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom from want, freedom from fear.
President Barack Obama recently visited our Central Valley and blamed our meteorological drought on global warming. Has radical environmentalism gone wild, or is this a leftist political agenda being pursued under the frauds of drought, global warming and Delta smelt? – John Michelena, Modesto Bee, April 15, 2014
Although far be it from the Badlands Journal editorial board to judge intemperate utterances of any kind, we’re not sure if Michelena is playing with a full deck, as sincere no doubt as his outrage is over the drought.
The neocon Khaganess of the State Department, Victoria "F**k th EC" Nuland Kagan, remains at her post. Why?
"For the first time in the history — I've been a farmworker the majority of my life, and I've never seen the coalitions that have been formed — farmers and the farmworkers have united," Lopez says. "This is an issue that's going to affect the world."
Insight was provided at this morning's Merced County Board of Supervisors' meeting on current local, state and federal efforts to cope with the drought. Summarizing the discussion, we concluded that the supervisors believe a "no-brainer, diverse collaboration" is what is needed to deal with our water issues. Or was that the description of the actual state of our water-coping mechanisms?
We looked for awhile on the Internet but could not find anything written by Milan Kundera (1) about Gabriel Garcia Marquez, author of the fabulous One Hundred Years of Solitude and many other wonderful novels who died last week. However, I did find an interview with Eduardo Galeano (2) about him.
Pepe Escobar has a great quote in Globalistan from Garcia Marquez's Nobel speech I hadn't seen elsewhere: "Do you recognize our right to create literature? Then recognize our right to create our History."
We don't hold out the greatest hope that what Rep. Jerry McNerney has called for will help much but at least it bears witness to a deteriorating social situation in the San Joaquin Valley and is therefore closer to the truth of things than the Great Valley Eternal Whiners for anything to put another layer in the already gold lined pockets of those whose views monopolize respectable opinion. -- blj
4-18-14
Stockton Record
Valley in desperate need of help…Michael Fitzgerald
"Gross, gross, gross," remarked a combat veteran who occasionally offers a thought to the Badlands Journal editorial board.
Sick, sick, sick. Worse than the drone research and design going on at UC Merced in the midst of a student "body" too fearful to know or too drunk to care. -- blj
4-21-14
RT.com
US Navy to deploy combat dolphins for Black Sea military drills – report
http://rt.com/news/us-dolphins-black-sea-896/
One could have a terrible sense that the whole California high speed rail scam was designed finally to end in this: Sen. Darrell Steinberg, High Speed Rail Baronet-Sacramento, and President Pro Tem of the state Senate, proposing to "securitize" cap-and-trade auction funds, generated through the authority of Prop. 32, the Greenhouse Gas Initiative, to fund a project neither courts, private investors, the major railroad companies, or the public wants.
Following the lead of several California counties, the Russians are joining other wimpy nations of the earth in rejecting genetically modified organism seeds and the pesticides that are created to resist, mainly RoundUp.