Welcome To Badlands Journal

The real Merced River Stakeholders agenda, time and place

Merced River Stakeholders Meeting

September 24, 2007

6 p.m.-8:30 p.m.

Washington School

4402 W. Oakdale Road, Winton

AGENDA

6:00 Introductions, Minutes Approval, Agenda Review

6:15 Updates

Merced Irrigation District Ted Selb

Merced County Planning Department Jeff Wilson

Grant Reporting

DOC II: Watershed coordinator update:

Reports from Gwen Huff, Cindy Lashbrook

Prop. 13: Merced River Alliance:

Badlands replies to local lit doyenne's bad vibes

The Badlands Journal editorial board received this e-mail from Ocean Jones, director of the Valley Voices Writers Project and partner in the unsuccessful grant application by the East Merced Resource Conservation District for a half a million dollars to turn the Merced River into a public relations extravaganza. The people of California would have paid staffers with the Merced River Alliance a large part of that grant for the benefit of this hoopla.

East Merced Resource Conservation District not lookin' too good

The Badlands Journal editorial board believes it is necessary to clarify some matters. We are aware, from reports of people who fear reprisal and whose anonymity is safe with us, that there is quite a propaganda campaign going on against the Merced River Stakeholders, claiming they are “obstructionists.”

Antidote to Petraeus Week

“From the moment a soldier enlists, we inculcate loyalty, duty, honor, integrity, and selfless service,” Taguba said. “And yet when we get to the senior-officer level we forget those values. I know that my peers in the Army will be mad at me for speaking out, but the fact is that we violated the laws of land warfare in Abu Ghraib. We violated the tenets of the Geneva Convention. We violated our own principles and we violated the core of our military values.

Proximity to a boom-doggle

We thought UC Merced's First Chancellor Carol "Cowgirl" Tomlinson-Keasey's late-Nineties slogan --"Proximity is destiny" -- was about the finest piece of UC Merced Bobcatflak in an era of budget surpluses we ever heard. For those uninitiated in the Fabulous UC Bobcatflak or merely forgetful, the Cowgirl used the slogan to emphasize that -- although no one has yet figured out exactly why -- proximity to a UC campus raises the percentage of the population who goes to college. This percentage is supposed to be the best measure mankind has found for Truth and Beauty.

Growth robs water from existing residents

Until our water authorities base their new commitments on an actual -- legally sound -- surplus we will continue to subsidize new development while we experience rationing, reduced use forced by rate increases, cost-prohibitive landscaping and a gradual decline in agriculture.-- Glenn Carroll, North County Times, Sept. 11, 2006

9/11/07

North County Times

Behind the curve

Politics attracts all sorts. In fact the personalities in politics are probably as complicated as a number of the systems in nature. However, politics never resembled a Sunday school class.

One of the many rough distinctions one can make about people in politics is between those who read and those who don't.

Some thoughts on Daniel Cassidy's How the Irish Invented Slang

This book is a great gift, a revelation, a genuine invasion of one's speech patterns (I’ll be looking over my tongue's shoulder for the Irish from now on). Cassidy beautifully handles the problem of our unconsciousness of this, or as I used to put it in high school, my "street" rather than "home" (proper grammatical English) language. What a pain it was to have to speak only the one at college. It made working on peach loading docks in the summers a deep relaxing into the rhythm and twang of Oklahoma speech. And there were words that fit with our work that had no utility in college.

Stressors

State officials and water contractors said the pumping reductions would do little to help the 2- to 3-inch-long, silver-colored fish, which is listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act.
"Clearly the judge is focusing on a particular stressor in the delta," Snow said. "There are so many other stressors in the delta system that we still have to address."

Hun meets environmental Typhoid Mary

The Hun Our Governor panicked a few weeks back when a bunch of young activists did some demonstrating in front of the Fresno offices of the San Joaquin Valley Air Quality Control Board, which had just decided to forestall pollution cleanup, accept the worst designation of air quality the federal government has to offer until 2023, to keep its viability with the Federal Highway Authority.

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