Badlands Journal

Background: Tulare Lake is an enormous lake dammed for the past 10-15,000 years by two large “alluvial fans” jutting out into the San Joaquin Valley (Figure 1). Before river diversion associated with modern irrigation practices, Tulare Lake was one of the largest freshwater lakes in North America. Currently it is mostly irrigated farmland.--Ancient Tulare Lake: Investigating Changes over the Past 15,000 Years
Adapted from CSUB Geology Department Lab developed by Dr. Rob Negrini
http://www.csub.edu/geology/CSTA_Paleoclimate%20Lab.Teacher.pdf

Dr. Negrini of CSU Bakersfield developed these course materials for middle and high school students. Presumably, many graduates of Bakersfield area secondary schools know that once, almost within living memory, most of Kings County was covered by a gigantic fresh-water lake, Tulare Lake. The present lack of subsidized irrigation water for subsidized cotton in Kings County would seem to be a problem man made in the 20th century.

Badlands Journal editorial board

McClatchy's Big Eight

We didn't like this McClatchy article, "Health care overhaul: Tallying winners and losers." But we had to admit covering the results at the final bell of the year-long session of the free market for votes in the White House and Congress as if it were a wrap up article of a day's race card at Pimlico made some sense. But we had some bones to pick with it because for many ordinary readers, it will probably go down as pretty much the last word on the issue. We hope we get through the political campaign season without violence in the Valley.
The idea that Rep. Dennis Cardoza of Annapolis MD should get a few roses for his act on this bill is ludicrous. In a completely cowardly way, he refused to hold any town meetings on the bill last summer. He was stupid enough to crawl into the stinking bedsheets of water politics with Rep. Devin Hunes, Tulare Raver, and get politically sapped for his bad judgment. And he waffled on the bill until the last minute, like the proverbial "deer in headlights" pontificating sanctimoniously about proper House process and the suffering of members his own family all the way to the vote he had to make for the bill to avoid a future in the House broom closet if the Demcrats hang on this November. We think his vapors were authentic. People who spend their entire political careers denying the reality of history have a hard time dealing with historical situations.

I can't too highly recommend the latest edition (or any edition you can find) of Bob Baker's classic book on the news writer's craft: Newsthinking: The Secret of Making Your Facts Fall into Place.

I recommend it to everybody: working news writers, unworking news writers, editors, columnists, bloggers -- even publishers -- and perhaps most of all to readers of journalism. Whatever your relationship to the craft of journalism is, reading Newsthinking will increase your enjoyment of it.

Yes. Enjoyment. After reading Newsthinking, whether you write news, edit it or just read it, you'll have an appreciation for this highly disciplined, dramatic craft.

Some rightwing Anglos out at UC Merced recently posted a racially offensive video (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DDWAJYFi3UA). It's a cartoon featuring a semi-bald Anglo with a snotty British accent interrogating a female Chicano student, with no accent, involved in trying to start a Chicano Studies Program at the limping U. The Brit gets the best of the staged argument (sic). The Chicano students are stereotyped as entitled, racists themselves, who want their own program now just because they want it, and as incapable of arguing why. There was nothing "intelligent," "spirited" or "responsible" about the video dialogue between the two cartoon characters, despite what is said by an unnamed "university representative."

Since a Chicano Studies program is, by definition, about people of Mexican descent who are American citizens, the question why the Chicana doesn't wish to "identify as an American citizen" is purely bogus, displaying the classic rightwing combination of ignorance and racial hatred. Chicano means Mexican-American, and there is quite a history behind the origin of the word. But that history would be beyond the Little White Men on Campus and it gives UC Merced administrators and Chicano elders of influence on the campus a shuddering case of the vapors -- a disease that turns guts to mush.

Similization

Like the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, our Valley economy is an especially fragile ecosystem and investment capital has long been our most endangered species. Although we have aspired to economic diversity, the truth is that most of our Valley's capital is still quietly tucked away in farms, orchards, F-150's and processing plants.
The real value of that capital is vaporizing with every drop of water that doesn't reach our land and every day that passes without a predictable picture of what those flows will look like in the future. (Fresno Bee, 3-14-10)

The only problem with this elegant simile, likening the processes of capital investment to Nature, is that it is a lie, in a long line of lies about the "natural" inevitability of capitalism that go back to the dim beginnings of the Industrial Revolution to justify the enormous cruelty to man and the destruction of Nature "self-regulating, free markets have always entailed.

The great theoreticians of the economy that ate Merced speak in lovingly of "creative destruction." I suppose, from the vantage point of a tenured chair in a university economics department committed to free-market ideology, it all must seem terribly exciting. The public and elected officials (currently enjoying the lowest popularity ratings since such records began), may be excused for not fully embracing our culture's universal approval of all that is "creative." The destruction is not a new problem. The modern approach began with the passage of the Poor Law during the reign of QueenElizabeth I, back when Shakespeare was writing plays.

From time to time we are fortunate enough to receive a dispatch from New Orleans sent by Gary McMillen, an old friend, dynamite writer and photographer -- Badlands Journal editorial board

Hot, dark and spicy---look into a bowl of gumbo and see the reflection of the city of New Orleans.  Throw the recipe out the window.  Empty the freezer.  The key to a good pot of gumbo is lots of different ingredients.  Chicken, crabs, okra, cayenne pepper, oysters, smoked sausage and shrimp: stir it all up and serve over rice. 

The great bubble brains among us are buying signatures this spring for a November initiative that would suspend AB 32, California's global warming law, until the state's unemployment rate dropped below 5.5 percent. The unemployment rate, now at 12.4 percent, has not dipped below 5.5 percent since September 2007, when the speculative real estate bubble was popping, with a sound heard round the world.
The game is to blame environmental law and regulation for popping the real estate bubble. The game is to blame environmental law and regulation for what finance, insurance and real estate special interests did to the entire global economy.
Many subdivisions in this state were built by wholesale corruption of the enforcement of environmental law and regulation. Environmental law and regulation aren't foreclosing on peoples' homes.
The plutocrats who pillaged this economy are afraid that economic pain is waking people up to the massive political fraud that was the handmaiden every step of the way down. So, they hope to start a big fight among the citizens and watch the circus from their box seats as the people fight over imaginary bread.

Badlands JOurnal editorial board

Fresno County leaders are trying to salvage a farmland protection plan that has drawn resistance from at least one small city and, ironically, from some farmers as well.-- Fresno Bee, 3-6-10

 

Flak, propaganda, public relations, political campaign messaging -- there are a hundred names for what millions of dollars of broadcasted lies can do to public memory. We are going to get another dose of it this spring in the Proposition 16 campaign, the purpose of which is to make it practically impossible for any local government to establish a public power utility.

If, however, the public can manage to hold onto enough sanity to remember that distant time nine years ago, known as the Energy Crisis of 2001, people might recall noticing that the localities served by municipal power utilities did not experience nearly as much disruption of electricity services as did the areas served by Pacific Gas & Electric Co.,Southern California Edison and San Diego Gas and Electric. To keep energy flowing that year, the state spent down its $12 billion surplus to a multi-billion deficit buying long-term energy contracts and has been in debt ever since. Now the creators of the deregulation of utilities in California want the icing on the cake -- no possibility of any future competition from municipal power.

Prop. 16 stinks.

Badlands Journal editorial board