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Mexicans ban further GMO planting

Posted by Badlands Journa... on Tuesday, 14 December 2021

A story that began at UC Berkeley almost 20 years ago seems to have ended this fall. We don't mean to credit UCB with a positive role because its administration did what it could to buery the research and the head researcher, Ignacio Chapela. But Chapela persisted and prevailed and now the government and highest court of Mexico, the natal home of corn, appears to fully recognize the danger GMO-corn cultivation poses to the diversity of corn varieties that grow in Mexico. -- blj

Giroux's warning

Posted by Badlands Journa... on Saturday, 11 December 2021

Nobody we know can discuss the relationship between education and society with both the focus and the breadth that Henry Giroux brings to this complex, vital collection of topics. And in these desperate times when the numbnut knuckleheads appear once again to be winning, Giroux's voice is more welcome and needed than ever. This is a long essay; take it bit by bit, let it enlighten and encourage you even as he describes the horrible intellectual and moral geology of the particular cave we're in right now. -- blj

DECEMBER 10, 2021

Waste of precious open space

Posted by Badlands Journa... on Tuesday, 30 November 2021

The VST development project was first conceived of in the 1990s, when the trust property was pledged to a burgeoning UC Merced. The university, which opened in 2005, was built on the trust land… In total, more 2,400 jobs and $8.9 million in city revenue is projected to come from the project, according to Merced Planning Manager Kim Espinosa. Merced City Council’s action on Monday gave support to the potential annexation of the VST development project. representing a critical step in a vision that is still decades in the making. – Merced Sun-Star, Nov 17, 2021

No more: "Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds"

Posted by Badlands Journa... on Friday, 1 October 2021

Capitalism has become so desperate for profits, any profits, that it is escalating the pace at which it devours society, government, and ultimately itself. -- blj

10-1-21

CBSNews

Mail delivery slowdown: USPS to slow delivery starting October 1

BY AIMEE PICCHI

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/mail-delivery-slower-usps-october-1/

Mail delivery for many Americans will slow starting on Friday, part of Postmaster General Louis DeJoy's blueprint for overhauling the U.S. Postal Service in order to slash costs. But critics say the slower delivery standards could cause problems such as late bill delivery while more broadly undermining the public's faith in the USPS. Almost 4 of 10 pieces of first-class mail will see slower delivery, according to Paul Steidler, senior fellow at the Lexington Institute and an expert on the postal service. That "means mail delivery will be slower than in the 1970s,"

9/11: Memorial to Blowback

Posted by Badlands Journa... on Sunday, 12 September 2021

The hijackers who carried out the attacks on 9/11, like all radical jihadist groups in the Middle East, spoke to us in the murderous language we taught them. I was in Times Square in New York City shortly after the second plane banked and plowed into the South Tower. The crowd looking up at the Jumbotron gasped in dismay at the billowing black smoke and the fireball that erupted from the tower. There was no question now that the two attacks on the Twin Towers were acts of terrorism. The earlier supposition, that perhaps the pilot had a heart attack or lost control of the plane when it struck the North Tower seventeen minutes earlier, vanished with the second attack. The city fell into a collective state of shock. Fear palpitated throughout the streets. Would they strike again? Where? Was my family safe? Should I go to work? Should I go home? What did it mean? Who would do this? Why?

"Farewell to Bourgeois Kings," by tinkzorg

Posted by Badlands Journa... on Thursday, 26 August 2021

Democracy, as bourgeousified in the post revolutionary era, would reveal itself to Tocqueville as likewise inadequately endowed with concern for the political but, unlike aristocracy, it threatened to become over-generneralized. Democratic equality is one way of promising commonality, but bourgeois individualism can undercut equality while bourgeois competitiveness destroys both equality and solidarity. The consequence is the perversion of generality and the prelude to democratic despotism. That dire condition is immanent in the democratic form of apartness, individualism, an over-particularization that withdraws from the public domain and thereby allows power to generalize itself, to extend its rules without encountering differences. Where traditional societies included distinctions of wealth, birth, and status within the political, democratic societies attempted a separation of the public and the private realms with social distinctions forbidden in the one and sanctioned in the other.--Sheldon Wolin, Tocqueville between two worlds (2003), p.160.

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