Badlands Journal

  “Our situation here shows how important infrastructure investment is to economic development,” said Assemblyman Adam Gray, D-Merced. He said the effort to complete the expressway must continue. -- Thaddeus Miller, March 3, 2016, Merced Sun-Star

A basic standard for professional newswriting and editing is that everything in the story make some kind of minimal sense. This standard used to be applied also to the obligatory quote from the appropriate bigshot. These requirements of the professional newsstory have been known to clash. When they do, they create a momentary blank spot in the minds of readers as they try to follow a narrative of public events.

I have found that good taste, oddly enough, plays an important role in politics. Why is it like that? The most probable reason is that good taste is a visible manifestation of human sensibility toward the world, environment, people. -- Vaclav Havel http://blog.gaiam.com/quotes/authors/vaclav-havel/38812

10-29-91

New York Times

Down at the Whiners' and Beggars' Hall the other night, the boys on the Merced City Council tuned up and gave a highly harmonious howl and stamped their feet in a veritable clog dance of indignation.

What had happened was that after about a decade of brown nosing any and all representatives dispatched to them from the California High Speed Rail Authority so that the city would be sure to get one of the highly prized high speed rail stations smack dab in the middle of downtown Merced, the authority appears to have decided against it.

“Having research published in prestigious journals and being invited to present before the National Academy of Sciences should be sources of official pride, not punishment,” stated PEER Staff Counsel Laura Dumais. “Politics inside USDA have made entomology into a most dangerous discipline.” -- Steve Volk, Portland Press Herald, Oct. 28, 2015

 "We are in a kind of climate emergency now."  —Stefan Rahmstorf, Potsdam Institute of Climate Impact Research

3-14-16

In 1992, Bill Clinton ran a terrific campaign in the San Joaquin Valley. The campaign had a pleasant, hard-working Valley fieldman, abundant campaign materials arrived in headquarters on time, he had active campaign chairs in all the counties, and a dynamite T-shirt with the logo: "Adelante con Clinton." It was one of our favorite memorabilia of that political year.

This year his wife may well repeat that success, but the campaign will not find some who once proudly wore the Adelante T-shirt ready to display it again.

 "Paper-water bonds"

(with apologies to Billy Rose and Yip Harburg)

They're only paper-water bonds

 No more than creative accounting funds.

And the SEC wouldn't have given  a damn

 The title to this letter to the editor in the print edition of today's paper was "Blame the greenies for higher prices."

It began:

Who causes entanglements to keep their job? Environmentalists became stronger when they realize they never produced a product to sell. They constantly charged fees or taxes on manufacturing businesses, farms and electrical companies in order to keep their job and paycheck.

Yet even as many Oklahomans track seismic data on their smartphones and struggle to sleep through the long, rumbling nights, there has been one notable location where people rarely seemed rattled. That is here, in the state capital, where the oil industry holds so much sway that for decades drill rigs have extracted crude from directly beneath the Capitol building.

A Democratic state lawmaker, Cory Williams, said in an interview: “They own the place.” -- William Yardley, Los Angeles Times, March 6, 2016

In one of his books, the Uruguayan writer, Eduardo Galeano reported a conversation with Juan Peron. Peron was in Spain in one of his periods of exile from Argentina at the time and in a philosophical frame of mind. Peron, who as military attache from Argentina to Italy during Mussolini's reign, was a careful student of Italian fascism. He used much of what he had learned in Italy to founder his Partido Justicialista, better known as Peronismo, half political party, half movement, and wholly as the creation of its founder.

 As we've reported elsewhere in these pages, we were intrigued by a comment written some time ago by Patrick Cockburn, who, along with Robert Fisk, provide consistently the best reporting and reflections on war in the Middle East in the English language. Cockburn has mentioned more than once that Westerners who make bombastic judgments about the Middle Eastern conflicts with characteristic extreme self-righteousness -- the product of superiority in war technology and historical ignorance, the old imperial duo -- ought to read a good history of the Thirty Years War (1618-1648).

It turns out that there are not many to choose from in English, but Cicely Veronica Wedgwood (1910-1997) wrote a magnificent one on the eve of World War II.