We’ll begin with the local. This has become an annual event. Throughout the year, the GV Union prints letters from readers complaining about the traffic and all the rude flatlanders moving into town by the trainload. Every developer who wants to build more expensive houses says, "Growth is inevitable. We must prepare for it." Then we get another year’s population figures from the state Department of Finance and learn that we aren’t really growing all that fast compared to the state as a whole or compared to other foothill counties. In ‘06, in fact, we barely grew at all. Grass Valley and Nevada City each had a net gain of 12 people, and all the unincorporated areas grew by 136. Maybe that explains why everyone wants to build houses, but no one is building shopping centers.

So those dreaded no-growth people are getting their way, sort of. There really are a lot of new people around, but the population doesn’t grow because the kids are growing up and moving away. Can’t find a good job and can’t afford a house. Many of the new arrivals are retired people. School enrollment is dropping. Just like the rest of the country, our median age keeps getting higher, but it has to top out somewhere because no one lives forever. Growth has to top out too. Economists and real estate developers tell us that growth is essential for a healthy economy, but they have to be wrong. Anything that never stops growing eventually starts splitting seams. Each community has to decide the point at which its clothes fit comfortably, then look for the balance that keeps it comfortable. The first step is to forget that "growth is inevitable" nonsense.

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I’ve always paid close attention to the letters from readers in the daily newspapers as one of the anal thermometers of public opinion. For the first five years or so, people who were outraged by the US invasion of Iraq would vent their rage in such letters while the pro-war, pro-Bush people would fire back that those people were just a bunch of fuzzy thinking liberals, drug addled old hippies, and the unkindest cut of all, Bush haters. The warmongers were on the defensive from the beginning. These days, they’ve almost disappeared. You can read the letters for days running without seeing even one letter attempting to defend the Bush gang. That says more than all the opinion polls I’ve seen.

Elected Republicans are backpedaling, too. The latest is the House Minority Leader, John Boehner. He says he still supports the troop surge, but it better be working by fall, or else. That ought to get the Bush gang in line. Actually, Boehner is setting the stage for some kind of bi-partisan compromise to pass a watered down deadline for troop withdrawal with enough votes to override a presidential veto. Those wheels turn slowly. By the time Congress gets a grip on the war, the Bush gang will be packing up their offices and hiding their Emails.

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A couple relatively new topics have been creeping into Local Views more and more. One is food, especially the stuff big corporations make and sell. They claim it’s fit for human consumption. They even claim it tastes good, but they make it with ingredients we can’t even pronounce, and every day the news piles up about so-called food that’s killing us.

Genetic modification has been forced down our throats, and then along comes Melamine First it was just a little dog food and a little accident. Then it grew to just about all dog and cat food. Next it was in the cattle feed and, therefore, in the meat and the milk. Then it was in the pig food and the chicken food, and now we hear that they feed the stuff to fish that are farmed for people to eat. Melamine is not fit for people to eat, but when it’s added to grain products, they test higher in protein than they really are. We’re told that China has been sending shiploads of melamine laced wheat gluten all over the world, and if you read the fine print on the labels, you’ll find that wheat gluten is in at least half the processed food you might be persuaded to eat. The way the stuff is permeating the supply of so-called food, I’m beginning to wonder if melamine is some sort of mind-control drug. Eat too much of it and you start to believe that genetic modification is a good idea.

I liked the bottled water story, but not because that stuff is just filtered tap water. Everyone already knew that. I was amazed that it outsells all types of liquid beverages except soda pop.

A couple of good news stories on the food front: Researchers at the United Nations are plugging organic farming as one of the solutions to world hunger. Among other recommendations, this research says that half the agricultural land in Europe and North American should be converted to organic farming methods withing the next 13 years. And a federal judge in San Francisco has upheld a lower court decision imposing a nationwide ban of the planting of genetically modified alfalfa seed, saying there’s no way to prevent it from polluting crops of conventional alfalfa.

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The media are the other theme that’s been creeping in, especially the way electronic communication has turned all forms of information and entertainment upside down. Again, good news and bad news. It seems that using the Internet to slam the people you don’t like has become a popular pastime, and that brings up the tough question about how traditional concepts of slander and libel apply to the place where you thought you could say absolutely anything. A self-employed woman in Louisiana says a dissatisfied customer posted a lot of nasty lies about her which wrecked her business. She won a judgement of $11.3 million.

A court in LA ruled against a guy who sued a credit reporting agency for trashing his credit on the basis of electronic information which wasn’t true. The judges said that even though the plaintiff was right, he wasn’t entitled to damages because the company, in good faith, believed the false information.