Dirty Water, Dirty Tricks

 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

 One member of the Badlands Journal editorial board, from Brooklyn and old enough to have seen Jackie Robinson play for the Dodgers and to have seen the Dodgers leave for LA, in short a man who had experienced the highs and lows of life before entering high school, wished to inform the rest of the board recently that he saw absolutely no resemblance between Robinson and President Obama. 

"Obama like Jackie Robinson? Ferget it!" he said..

California High Speed Rail -- A boondoggle in search of a Pork Barrel 

There is a railroad boom going on right now in the San Joaquin Valley. At least there is a boom going on in the newspapers about railroads, fast and not so fast.

2-23-13
Fresno Bee
Merced County voting rights ruling to affect Valley agencies…Michael Doyle, Bee Washington Bureau…2-24-13
http://www.fresnobee.com/2013/02/23/v-print/3186242/merced-county-ruling...
WASHINGTON -- A Merced County legal victory has unexpectedly pulled it into one of the biggest U.S. Supreme Court cases in years.

The county's 2012 triumph was to successfully bail out from federal control under the Voting Rights Act. But now some conservative skeptics charge that legal victory was tainted by Justice Department politics.

The claims, in turn, compelled the county to invest in a Supreme Court brief to defend itself in advance of a key court argument on Wednesday.

"The county was surprised to become a subject of discussion in the (voting rights) case," Merced County Counsel James N. Fincher said Friday. "One of the reasons the county chose to pursue the bailout was to avoid being a political football in unrelated legal battles."

The bailout, or escape, from certain Voting Rights Act obligations means Merced County and some 84 political entities included within it, from school districts to city councils, no longer need Justice Department permission before making voting-related changes. A three-judge panel approved the bailout in August after the Justice Department assented following a two-year study.

Yet, according to a large consensus of government and private sources, by far the largest oil shale formation, the Monterey, is largely located in the south San Joaquin Valley. So, suddenly who owns subsurface rights to public as well as private lands becomes a major issue for people not eager to have their already record-breaking bad air quality get worse, have their groundwater polluted with chemicals the very names of which are proprietary to the companies that inject them thousands of feet into the ground, and there is a minor seismic issue, which we will take up later. -- BLJ

If you've ever studied the label on a container of pesticide it will tell you the "active ingredient" and then, usually an overwhelmingly large percentage of the contents is listed as "inert."

These inert ingredients are jealously guarded as company secrets but they aren't always that inert. There is for example the curious story of the best poison oak medication on the market, made from an "inert" ingredient found in many pesticides, the "sticker" or very light oil that allows the pesticide to stick to the leaves and fruit after being sprayed. Tests done by a government agency losing too many man hours to poison oak discovered that the sticker was the thing that floated the oils off the skin.

But the ingredients discussed below are not beneficial. They may very well prove to be the product of criminal irresponsibility of the manufacturers of GMO pesticides, companies in collusion with the US government which have used the entire population of the United States as largely ignorant guinea pigs in a vast chemistry experiment.

We are grateful as always for the tireless work of Thomas Wittman at the GE News division of the Ecological Farming Association in Watsonville for this and many other articles on genetically engineered pesticides, especially RoundUp, used more and more in the Valley as the price of corn is driven ever higher by ethanol production and market speculation here in the land of the free and the yo-man farmer.

Badlands Journal editorial board

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