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

Richard Blum, UC regent and former chairman of the regents, major stockholder in Tutor Perinni Corp, which won the bid to construct the first leg of the California high-speed railroad, and chair of the board of CB Richard Ellis, in charge of selling decommissioned post offices, is -- as everyone knows -- the husband of US Sen. Dianne Feinstein, chair of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. Feinstein remarked yesterday that the leak that in secret Verizon has turned over to the NSA information about the private communications of its American customers ought to be prosecuted because we have "a culture of leaks."

Badlands Journal editorial board

6-7-13

 The West TX fertilizer-plant explosion that killed 15, injured 200, destroyed two schools, a block of apartments and many nearby single homes, somehow got lost between the Boston Marathon bombing and the Oklahoma tornado. We continued to follow the story because it involved a very common agricultural fertilizer, ammonium nitrate, known until the end of WWII primarily as "the principal ingredient in making explosives," according to Michael Pollan.

 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. 

 People who take seriously the information that the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere is cvurrently at 390 ppm when science has stated that the tipping point (where catastrophic sea-level rise begins) is at 350 ppm, observe the current debate about oil – from academic institutional and state and national environmental groups’ divestment of holdings in fossil fuel firms to California’s governor, the Great Reflector’s jitterbugging on fracking the Monterey Shale Formation – and could notice that political hypocrisy is also a petroleum by-product.

Badlands Journal editorial board