Badlands Journal

 This article, which appeared earlier this month in the Farm Bureau's AgAlert magazine, is a masterpiece of the neo-Farm Bureau Gibberish. We say "neo" because whole new generations of young sophists have taken over from older, less grammatical, folksier whining feeders at the government trough.

We would suggest you spend some time with the article, but we also suggest some orienting questions before you leap into the thicket.

(1) Is the federal government a subsidiary of California agribusiness?

Be careful of whose stocking you consider stuffing this book into. It is recommended only for people with a greater ability to reflect than to be ditto heads because it puts into question every sacred cow that has ever ambled beneath Modesto's famous arch: Water Wealth Contentment Health -- to which there can be only reply: "Not! Not now!

And they say these are the smart people. -- blj

There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don't know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don't know we don't know. --Donald Rumsfeld

BrainyQuote.com

Sometimes when the Blood of the West is Up and we've got wogs in the gunsights, it's good to sit back a moment and read.

I remember a lecture I received from a bespectacled scholar of about 11 one morning when I was splitting firewood for his family in return for a night's lodging in the hills out of Grenoble. My little professor, a Sartre in short pants, with great dignity and extreme seriousness, told me all about Charles Martel and the Battle of Tours, which stopped the Arab advance into France in the 8th century. I have again been reading about the grandfather of Charlemagne tonight, more than 50 years later.

 “They (environmental groups) can emotionally appeal to the general-election voting base a whole lot more effectively than they can in an off-election cycle,” Koehn said.

Jeff Marchini, director of Division 1, said things are different than in 2011. If MID wants to protect its water from the environmental groups in Sacramento, switching the election years is the right thing to do, he said.

"If you got the money, honey,

I got the water..."

 The Delta Whiners 

Osha Meserve, a lawyer for Local agencies of the North Delta, said delta farmers should be worried.

 Rabobank, a Netherlands-based bank with offices throughout the San Joaquin Valley which presents itself as primarily and agricultural bank, has been involved in recent years in two major financial scandals in which for once the dairy industry doesn't figure at all. They are Mexican drug-cartel money laundering on the US/Mexico border and participation in rigging the London interbank interest-rate offer. The latter, explained below, has been a catastrophe for smaller banks.

Felix Smith, who as a US Fish & Wildlife Service biologist was one of the first to recognize the disaster unfolding at the Kesterson wildlife refuge caused by toxic agricultural runoff, recently wrote a long paper, rich in information and richer in reflection, on the history of water in California and on the currently most pressing water issues in the state. We post it here for all who think they are still students of these complex, critical problems and remain more interested in learning than in blaming. -- blj

Water: A Multiple Use Resource Forever   

by

Felix Smith 1/ 

American Business people -- in agriculture and elsewhere -- tend to blame environmentalists for the economic ills of the nation the way their fathers blamed communists. It doesn't really matter who the enemy du jour is or whether the evil doer has been fingered by the chamber of commerce or the farm bureau. The important thing seems to be to avoid accountability, responsibility or blame for the clearly ruinous economic future before us. An enormous amount of money is spent constantly on public relations and lawyers to villify and sue critics, all for the sake of "proving" that it is "Not Our Fault!" What good do you think an economy that grows wealth for a few and unemployment and poverty for the many? What good is this kind of economy? Who do you think you are to treat your fellow citizens this way? Dr. Roberts again lays down the ABCs of this dismal process so that even an unemployed rocket scientist could understand. -- blj 

 “If it wasn’t for having crop insurance right now, I would have lost everything three generations of Messonniers have created. If it wasn’t for that, I wouldn’t be here. It’s that simple.” ... “This was the first year ever we didn’t do any rice,” (Tom Roduner) said. “Sometimes we have a little bit. It’s so bleak this year, between the water allocation and how dry things were, it just wasn’t feasible to do any.”

-- Calix, Merced Sun-Star, Oct. 28, 2015