Badlands Journal

As usual, an excellent diagnosis of the problem from Thom Hartmann but the solution makes the dubious assumption that there are enough hens left in the house to mount a serious counter offensive against the foxes, who have been lording it about that they own the joint for decades now. A national legislative body that cannot past gun-control legislation after a massacre of first graders does fill one with confidence that it can extricate itself from the jaws of the "national security" corporate profit centers.

But we can always hope for a change of heart in Washington. On the other hand, the president seems to be playing the game of "diverting the children" by increasing even the visitible operations of the US in Syria.

Two senators from outstanding military-pork states, McCain (R-AZ) and Graham (R-SC) are helping matters by calling the president everything short of Another Snowden if he doesn't bomb, invade, blitz and kill 50,000 Syrians regardless of their religious preferences.

We call the press approvingly, “the first Draft of History,” but it’s a pretty lousy Draft of History that has no historical perspective whatsoever.

We were struck by the beauty and balance of William Tweed's prose about his rail trip through the San Joaquin Valley. Tweed lives  in Three Rivers, gateway to Sequoia National Park. According to Amazon.com,

William Tweed, utilizing the knowledge and skills he developed during thirty years with the National Park Service where he worked as an interpretive writer, historian, and naturalist, specializes in writing that brings together the natural and human  worlds.

His major published works include: Sequoia-Kings Canyon National Parks: The Story Behind the Scenery (KC Publications, 1980);

Challenge of the Big Trees: A Resource History of Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks (Sequoia Naturalist History

 5-23-13

 Merced County Supervisor, John "Ol'Slippery" Pedrozo don't fell in it again, proving that if the money's good enough, Ol' Slippery will grab a toboggan for a ride down the next manure pile in his political career. 

Ol' Slippery knows his manure piles real good and this one smells plum delicious to the former dairyman rumored by members of his own family to have gone belly up before entering politics at the rear of the milking string to squelch the candidacies of a couple of Hispanic women who were interested in poverty and stuff. 

It just doesn't make investment sense to pour money into alternative technologies when such a splendid speculative bubble is developing over the Monterey Shale Formation, promising to be the largest fracking bonanza of them all in the nation. So, the US hurtles onward to extract more petroleum to create more global warming while polluting more groundwater. Power without care is an abomination.

Badlands Journal editorial board

5-7-13

myFoxla.com

Encroaching sea already a threat in Caribbean

http://www.myfoxla.com/story/22184745/encroaching-sea-already-a-threat-in-caribbean

TELESCOPE, Grenada (AP) - The old coastal road in this fishing village at the eastern edge of Grenada sits under a couple of feet of murky saltwater, which regularly surges past a hastily-erected breakwater of truck tires and bundles of driftwood intended to hold back the Atlantic Ocean.

For Desmond Augustin and other fishermen living along the shorelines of the southern Caribbean island, there's nothing theoretical about the threat of rising sea levels.

"The sea will take this whole place down," Augustin said as he stood on the stump of one of the uprooted palm trees that line the shallows off his village of tin-roofed shacks built on stilts. "There's not a lot we can do about it except move higher up."