Badlands Journal

UC Merced making water data available…JOSHUA EMERSON SMITH

http://www.mercedsunstar.com/2012/08/29/v-print/2502928/uc-merced-making-water-data-available.html

As concerns heat up around predicted losses in average mountain snowpack, UC Merced researchers have launched a new program to study the effects of climate change on the San Joaquin River and the millions of people who depend on it.

Was it just one more lie UC told us? -- BLJ

Distinguished guests, parents, students, members of the UC Merced family, our good neighbors throughout the Valley, our wonderful Chancellor - referred to as Carol by the young and old, and everyone will soon know her as Carol - on behalf of the Regents and the entire University, I thank you for joining us on this momentous day.

UC Merced has been in the making for 17 years since the Regents first proposed adding a 10th campus to address the education needs of the Valley and accommodate the rapid population growth projected for California. That makes the planning process as old as some of the freshmen who will begin college careers here this week.

* Javanese shadow-puppet theatre

"It's just money," people say. But reading this article, one recalls that money talks.

Multi-layered escape from responsibility

Somewhere in an arid state to the east someone is figuring out the odds on a levee break in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta. And the latest move by the US Army Corps of Engineers reported below may alter the morning line on the Great Delta Collapse.

The Army Corps, somewhat less controlled by the Obama Peripheral Tunnel Axis than is the Department of Interior, which contains both the Fish & Wildlife Service and the Bureau of Reclamation, declared yesterday that "the city of  Sacramento and 15 other areas of the Central Valley ... have failed federal maintenance criteria.

Restore The Delta

Finding faults…RTDJess

http://www.restorethedelta.org/cant-find-my-way-home/

Most recent discussion of earthquake risk in the Delta have been based on the Delta Risk Management Strategy (DRMS). DRMS was prepared by consultants (URS Corporation) for the Department of Water Resources.

Experts disagree about many of the findings in DRMS, which assumes five Delta fault systems.

For example, new modeling of the “Montezuma Hills Zone” fault by Shell Oil (which is doing a pilot test for CO2 injection wells) has confirmed what PG&E apparently knew years ago: that one of the faults identified in DRMS doesn’t exist, but is instead an “erosional feature” resulting from a meander of the Sacramento River.

In the lengthy compilation below you will find much fine insight, invective, wit, humor and history on water in California, as fascinating and horrifying to us Californians as the drug trade. The whole story is like a dark novel in which we are living and no one doubts that it will all end worse than we can imagine.
Jerry wants to get shit done. But, as one homeowner activist from LA put it, what would you say to a contractor who proposed building you a new house but didn't have either a blueprint or a budget?
Thus it is with the famous peripheral tunnels that would take fresh Sacramento River water, before it entered the Delta,
 around the Delta to tie into the grand canals that take so much Delta water south to the Heavy Metel Acres of the west side of the San Joaquin Valley and to Southern California for more growth. One question so far left undiscussed in the media as far as we know is how deep does the Delta peat go. This is not discussed because that Delta peat is the most fertile soil in California and "getting shit done" requires that we turn its water into salt to sent the fresh water down to Heavy Metal Acres. Don't ask. It has something to do with campaign contributions.
Nor do the new water literati mention the Public Trust Doctrine, enshrined in federal and state law, which requires that the government manage the resources for the benefit of all the public, rivers specifically for navigation, fishing and recreation, two out of three of which will be severely impacted if Jerry gets his shit done.

http://www.deathrattlesports.com/archives/8388/victory-for-gmo-free-movement-plantings-halted-in-oregon/

The ongoing food fight between massive biotech companies and grassroots activists has continued on the west coast, with a monumental vote on the mandatory labeling of genetically modified foods looming in California this November.

The GMO-free movement took home an important victory on August 16 against canola in the latest round between the two sides, as GMO canola plantings were halted due to a successful lawsuit in Oregon.

We don't know how you fell but we loathe people who blame their children in front of others for their own failures, and we despise Dennis Cardoza for blaming his children in front of the entire national media (or whoever would be interested in anything this fat, little slimebag did) for quitting his congressional seat before his term expired to take a job with the Manatt firm of bottom-feeding lobbyists for more money, The job was no doubt arranged for Cardoza by Tony "Honest Graft" Coelho, an old friend of the firm dating back to the days when Ol' Honest ran the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and, with his characteristic manic energy, succeeded in selling most of the Democratic Party into the bondage of lobbyists and fundraisers like Manatt. These are the sort of grimey people that Cardoza has chosen to sell his votes and his district's welfare to all along.

What about all the people in his district who have teenage children but do not have fulltime medical staff at home (Dr. Kathleen McLoughlin aka Mrs. Cardoza) and the best health insurance that political graft can extract from public funds? The only interest Cardoza and his fellow Blue Dogs had in the health-insurance reform fight was in how much they could shake down the insurance companies for. He never held one open meeting in his district to find out how his constitutents thought and felt about the issue because, aside from the usual local oligarchy of rich white men, Cardoza never gave a damn about opinion in his district.

"Every drop of water that runs to the sea without yielding its full commercial returns to the nation is an economic waste."-- Herbert Hoover,
"...water which is allowed to enter the sea is wasted."-- Joseph Stalin

What is curious about this Merced Irrigation District proposal to heighten the McClure Dam is that the district just sold 15,000 acre feet to a west side water district. During the last propaganda-manufactured drought, Merced ID's reservoirs were overflowing, just like all the reservoirs on the east side of the valley, which is watered by a number of rivers out of the
Sierra unlike the west side of the valley, which is watered by no river south of Mendota and until the San Joaquin River Settlement, the San Joaquin arrived from the Sierra to Mendota bone dry during the gorwing season for 60 years. So, while dams like the Don Pedro on the Tuolumne are overflowing and Modesto ID, which stores its water in Don Pedro Reservoir negotiates with San Francisco for a 50-year water contract, the west side of the San Joaquin Valley, the junior-most water partner, gets its water from the Delta via the Delta-Mendota Canal and San Luis Canal.

Although the usual reason for the dam raising -- the manic gread for more water, more power, more moeny that motivates the managers of irrigation and water districts --is probably sufficient, we have another suggestion.

Tt was not so long ago when Carol Tomlinson-Keasey, the Cowgirl Chancellor of UC Merced, in deference to finance, insurance and real estate profiteers using the campus as the anchor tenant for the absurdly destructive building boom, said she refused to use the term "global warming," and, induer administration orders and using the "best science," called it "climate change" instead.

That was before a great deal of research funding was made available to study the problem. Now, all public spirited Mercedians are global warming affirmers at least in public even if in private everybody who is anybody in this town and county is praying not for rain but for another housing bubble.

Hopefully high powers are not in the same rut.

Today, global warming can be felt by the skin throughout the Midwest and Southeast and researh funds re growing. So, woila, it exists, especially in the universities, right beside that "high-tech, bio-tech engine of growth causing -- Voila again -- global warming. 

You cannot get there on the magic carpet of empirical science. There must be a commitment deep in the society against doing more harm to the environment we share with all the other creatures. American society is incapable of making that commitment.  

Badlands Journal editorial board

Statistician John Williams (shadowstats.com) writes: “The July employment and unemployment numbers published today, August 3rd, were worthless and likely misleading.” ... The government that lies to you about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, about Iraq’s al Qaeda connections, about the Taliban in Afghanistan, about Osama bin Laden, about Libya and Gadhafi, about Iranian nukes, about Syria, about Pakistan, about Yemen and Somalia, about Bradley Manning, about Julian Assange and Wikileaks, indeed about everything under the sun, also lies to you about jobs, unemployment, economic recovery, GDP growth,  the “terrorist threat,” everything.  Try to find anything that the government has said over the past 6 presidential terms that is not a lie.-- Paul Craig Roberts, Counterpunch, August 6.

The drooling lunacy of high speed rail "planning" goes on. Would it be possible to find anywhere along even the allegedly rural route of the San Joaquin Valley, where more disruption and possibly more heavy equipment could be employed than in changing the vast underpass of Highwy 99 through the center of one of the valley's moe substantial burgs, Fresno (population 943,000)?

One of America's favorite old expressions, culled from bitter experience with the 19th century barony of finance, insurance and real estate, is, "This is no way to build a railroad."

This project is stupid, destructive, and driven by the greed of people in the county seats of the San Joaquin Valley half the size of Sinclair Lewis's Babbitt. Once, when America had a much lower percentage of college graduates and was a much better educated country, Lewis could create a national character of ridicule, the greedy small town businessman and chamber of commerce type, always boosting, always hustling, always the dupe leading his town to destruction. George Babbitt was the Dupe of Main Street.

As our nation became illiterate and lost its memory, the Babbitts sprang up again in every city hall and county building and state legislature across the land and in Congress. In the great game of oligopoly finance capitalism going on today, the neo-Babblitt is the local leader who lies to his constituents for his little crumb under the table.

Stockton CA is making news ever since it declared it wouls seek bankruptcy protection a few weeks ago. Assured Guaranty, the  Burmuda based insurance company that insures Stockton's bonds against default is livid because the city is "stiffing bondholders to give preferential treatment to employees and CalPERS.

The company called that 'a contortion of the bankruptcy rocess.'" Sacramento Bee, Aug. 3, 2010.

The conturbation grows as the off-shore finance operation lobs cannon balls across the bow of CalPERS, which manages many public employee pension funds in California, like a tax-evading Caribbean pirate ship.

CalPERS has seen it all before with the Vallejo bankruptcy and affirms that "pension obligations take precedence over lenders under California law."

There is no doubt that finance, insurance and real estate special interests have been screaming for the blood of public workers' pensions including every so-called "mainstream" newspaper, all of whom are so far in debt to the same special interests that independent thinking is not being encouraged.

So, if you just read this story about Stockton, it would look like the innocent port was being invaded by the above-mentioned pirates.

Yet, it is Stockton. In 2011 Stockton City Council, apparently failing to publicly notice it, voted Mayor Ann Johnston a large raise. Johnston turned down the raise but it still went to the mayor's office, still, according to the Stockton Record,
illegally.

8-2-12

The Business Journal

Farmers petition feds to end endangered status of whales

Business Journal staff

http://www.thebusinessjournal.com/news/agriculture/2800-farmers-petition...

“It is almost outrageous that killer whales out in the ocean reduce our water,” said Joe Del Bosque Jr., president of Empresas Del Bosque in a conference call

Or is what is really outrageous is that any old knucklehead farming a couple thousand acres out in Heavy Metal Flats can hire lawyers to help extirpate an entire species of wildlife?

Put an orca in that man's swimming pool.

Badlands Journal editorial board