May 2014

Maybe it's getting to be time to tell David Mas Masumoto that "menos es Mas." Far be it for mere anonymous journalists to dare criticize our latest version of "Father of the Valley." Far be it for us to request that the great spiritus poeticus of Del Rey give us an actual argument, grammatical and everything. But we know that great writers are above the confusions of ordinary readers like us experience in the glare of their brilliance.
 

5-8-14
RT.com
Vermont governor signs first in US GMO-labeling law to go into effect
http://rt.com/usa/157744-vermont-gmo-labeling-signed/

Vermont will become the first state to enact a law requiring labels on foods with genetically modified ingredients after the governor signed the bill into law on Thursday afternoon. The bill will go into effect in July 2016.

 He lived a long, rich life and contributed enormously to the real human culture that will see us through environmental conflict. -- blj
Farley Mowat: the Greatest Canadian?
by PAUL WATSON
Today is a very sad day for me.
http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/05/09/farley-mowat-the-greatest-canadian/

The greatest Canadian I have ever known and one of my closest and dearest friends has died.

 The experience of reading one more article about the California High Speed Railroad Boondoggle
 
You read along and read along, plowing through the so-called “news” about some new “approval,” which is one piece more in the whole piecemealed project, that is being conducted that way so that the cumulative environmental consequences are as invisible to the public eye as the national phenomenon of inverted totalitarianism.
 

 We Californians are known as an artistic people. Those of us of a certain age grew up attending public schools with excellent art programs and these encouraged us toward a variety of expression, which becomes essential when one faces issues like the California Water Problem.

 
President Barack Obama, who next to former President George W. Bush sounded like the greatest orator since Mark Antony, evidently gave away US foreign policy and his fundamental source of metaphor, basketball, to a bunch of neocon hacks who don’t know the difference between diplomacy and their own unipolar disorder or a pivot and a tip off. No wonder the rats are scurrying about in the open and there is no guilt or shame. -- blj
 
 
5-15-14
World Socialist Web Site

 5-18-14
New York Times
Student Debt Grows Faster at Universities With Highest-Paid Leaders, Study Finds
By TAMAR LEWIN
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/19/education/study-links-growth-in-studen...

 In short, the Moneterey Shale Formation frackbubble was a pile of the well-known substance perpetrated by the same agency, the Energy Information Administration, http://www.eia.gov/, that now, under a new administrator, denies it. The EIA should be renamed PetroFlak, Inc. This one was right up there with the infinite rising of real estate prices, only it ended quicker. It was a bubble on speed.

 Why not look at the Del Puerto Water District's desperate water situation -- zero allocation from the Bureau of Reclamation from the Delta -- as a demand problem rather than a supply problem?