Badlands Journal

 “This is typical Obama-era political science,” Bast said. “It’s all been debunked so many times it’s not worth debating anymore. Why are we still wasting taxpayer dollars on green propaganda?” -- Mooney et al, Washington Post, Nov. 3, 2017

Once in power, the shrill pack of lies of rightwing propaganda changes its tone. It casually dismisses a decade of sincere confrontation and effort to cope with global warming as something that you-know-what president did. Now in power, the Right delivers the propaganda of the deed.

-- blj

11-3-17

If the public does not have a newspaper that will dig into the county's business life, it will never be able to judge important to our citizens of anything important from the so-called "news." Like so "very, very" (to lapse into Trumpian) articles in this McClatchy Chain outlet, this is nothing more than a press release, pathetically concocted by the newspaper itself for the purpose of pleasing local "leaders."

One's view toward the computer invasion of another familiar field either with enthusiastic faith in new technology...or with dark laughter. I find the latter is better protection against the new religio-technodogmatics of our times. But we live close enough to Silicon Valley that sometimes its hot breath reaches across the Dumbarton Bridge over the Altamont and through the nut orchards to our door, generating slogans like the one to explain the land-developer boondoggle known as UC Merced as "this high-tech, bio-tech engine of growth!"-- wmh

 A biography Gardner submitted to the state says he is an economist with more than three decades of experience in program management, organizational leadership and strategic planning. On Hallmark’s website, he describes himself as a “project-turnaround specialist,” whose accomplishments include overseeing the development of the UC Merced campus in the early 2000s. -- Sabalow, Kasler, Sacramento Bee, Oct. 5, 2017

“They (the state) would have known that years earlier and adjusted the project or the plan accordingly,” Michael said. “To say we have to wait until the end to see who is in and out, it’s bad government.”Breitler, Stockton Record, Oct. 5, 2017

 

10-5-17

CALmatters.org

New law, born of UC scandal, will punish interference with audits

 “We just haven’t been building enough housing – not just low-income or affordable housing, but housing of any kind,” Uhler said  Angela Hart, Sacramento Bee, Sept. 21, 2017

Developers and the newspapers they advertise in will have had you believe that more housing construction is the answer to all California economic woes from the end of the Gold Rush to Kingdom Come.

But, what one sees all around are developments, final mapped with curbs and wires sticking up beside empty lots. Why not build on those first?

 Racism is a very powerful disease. It is endemic in the United States and sometimes, in moments like now, it becomes epidemic. Our observations make us skeptical about any cure for racism. Once some form of resentment has imported it into the human heart, it metastasizes to the brain, and that personality is Kaput, a waste of airspace.

Take the latest Big Noise from Oakdale, this Nathan Damigo, ex-Marine, ex-con, genuine White Man who founded an organization called Identity Evropa.

My own ideological affiliation?  “More research is needed.”  My ideological heresy? We don’t need all that much money for research if we work and communicate earnestly, and often collectively, to make research relevant and useful. -- Jay Lund is a Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of California – Davis, where he is also Director of the UC Davis Center for Watershed Sciences.

 8-18-17

Sacramento  Bee

Sacramento County sues to block Delta tunnels – and it’s not alone

By Dale Kasler And Ryan Sabalow

 Dana Goodyear, a Yale food journalist, has written an excellent article on Driscoll, the dominant corporation in the westcoast berry deal, as far as the article goes. I guess, for anyone who remembers Driscoll as an up-and-coming player, partnering with its growers as Bud Antle was with his lettuce growers with strict quality control, one wonders at times about the reporter's questions, or perhaps lack of them. There is also a strong similarity in terms of cosmetics over taste to what the Washington apple growers did to the Red Deliciou apple, millions of tons of whose packing-shed culls have been flowing into Watsonville's Martinelli Cider Co. for decades.

A kind of high-tech, corporatist, weightless obtuseness underlies the professionally written, fact-checked New Yorker production. One wants to know, in all this wonderful relationship with Driscoll's actual berry producers, what kind of deal these producers have with this ultra-modern, nearly Silicon Valley-perfect business firm.