...and some invented newsrooms of their own
Posted by Anonymous (not verified) on Saturday, 2 April 2016
Badlands Journal
Social, Economic, and Environmental Justice
...doesn't make it right.
The federal Bureau of Reclamation began delivering water to Westlands in 1967, and up until the mid-1970s constructed some 70 miles of a planned 207-mile drain. Instead of reaching all the way to the Delta, it ended prematurely at Kesterson Reservoir. -- Michael Doyle, McClatchy, Jan. 12, 2016
Below, you'll find a few articles on the Westlands/Bureau of Reclamation deal. As is often the case with California water stories in recent years, the best reporting is done by Dan Bacher, who grew out of reporting on good fishing spots in the Delta to become one of the few fact-based voices in the bug swarm of flak hovering above the surface of water issues in this state.
This column by Neal Gabler addresses a phenomenon of this election "cycle" (as media advertisers and professional politicians call a campaign for election to public office) grotesquely manifests: politics as lurid entertainment, including the appeal to guilty political pleasures like fascism.
Westlands Water District is complaining about the Bureau of Reclamation announcement of a 5-percent water allotment for the year. Putting aside that this will most likely increase as the 2016 Water-Rhetoric Year wars on. -- blj
“We cannot permit Westlands to transform itself from heavily subsidized corporate farms into a water broker at the expense of taxpayers and the San Francisco Bay/Delta Estuary,” said Barrigan-Parrilla. -- Lloyd Carter, Chronicles of the Hydraulic Brotherhood, July 27, 2015.
We have met the enemy and he is us. -- Pogo
1735
Gulliver's Travels
Chapter Four: The Country of the Houyhnhnms
The Houyhnhnms Notion of Truth and Falshood.
Jonathan Swift
Oxford University Press, 1977
It seems like at the end of these semi-automatic 8-year presidential regimes of the best administrations money can buy, there is a scandal in California involving the federal and state resource agencies with responsibility for enforcing environmental laws to protect wildlife species on land, in rivers and the ocean.
11-10-14
High Country News
The desert-friendly cow
A rancher and a researcher search for a better bovine — and think they’ve found one.
Cally Carswell
https://www.hcn.org/issues/46.19/the-desert-friendly-cow
Below is a transcript from a spirited debate regarding the Democratic Party presidential primaries campaign hosted by Democracy Now! last week.
In it the strengths and weaknesses of both candidates show up in their advocates, both veterans of decades of progressive political commitment.
We thought it was important to post DN!'s transcript because there was more to the encounter than could be captured by just watching or even rewatching the video of Friday's show.
Robert Perry writes about the soaring "negatives" of both the front runners in the presidential primaries, HIllary Clinton and Donald Trump (the Hill and the Donald). He presents the bleak dilemma facing the Democratic Party after the nomination. This reminds us of the 1968 Democratic Party, gutted by the assassination of Robert Kennedy that depressed his supporters so deeply that they were unable to rally in time to help defeat Richard Nixon.
This pair of articles about our deteriorating air quality demonstrates a couple of disgusting sides to journalism and the "public information" racket today.
First, you cannot do a "balanced" story on a topic so obviously, totally out of balance as Valley air pollution. You simply cannot be permitted to correctly quote the Valley air board's sleazy flak telling the gasping public to take it all with a grain of salt.
He did it for his Mom:
Following the widespread oceanic observations (1) that ice packs everywhere are melting much more quickly than at first predicted, and that seas are consequently rising more quickly, Chris Clarke, the author of these two articles, puts the Delta tunnels project into the context of a Delta rapidly flooding with seawater.