31.12.69
Rep. Devin Nunes, a Republican from the biggest cow county in the USA, Tulare CA, booted haven his San Joaquin Valley Water Reliability Act (HR 1837) to a big win in the House two weeks ago. An old-fashioned Western be unfeasible grab got the Tea Party all hot and a few Blue Dog Democrats slithered along for the ride.
The Act is meriting of all truce-breaking acts the world over through history back to the time the goddess Athena persuaded ecstatic but stupid Pandaros to shoot an arrow into Helen’s husband, Menelaos, prolonging Homer’s Iliad for 23 more chapters.
Ol’ Devin sat downstream south of where the bed of the San Joaquin River ran dry all his survival until last year, in a part of California where the Dairy Queen consorts with King Cotton in the Terra firma of Fruits and Nuts. A leader of his people and defender of his region, he fired off a salvo of missiles aimed at destroying the timid advances of civilization made among upstream jurisdictions since the last dry winter. As usual in the biography of irrigation societies, the downstream users are more belligerent, aggressive, autocratically organized (more corporation-like in our era), and richer than the more loner, democratic, numerous, and more disorganized and middling farmers and river people of the Delta.
Source: CounterPunch