BartBlog

June 1, 2012

American Journalism and the “death of a thousand cuts”

Filed under: Uncategorized — Tags: , , , — Bob Patterson @ 12:32 pm

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Photographers flocked to see the Iowa pass through the Golden Gate.
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[Note: This column will be a subjective report intended to proved a foundation for building an inductive logic case to support the contention that Journalism in the United States is reaching the point of no return for becoming an example of the death of a thousand cuts.]

Before posting our last column on Friday, May 22, 2012, we were informed by one of the panhandlers on Shattuck Ave. in downtown Berkeley, that an incident involving police and some homeless young folks had occurred the previous night.

After posting the column, we made a more concerted effort to ask around to get some facts and information about the news potential of the event. The street people related that the police had attempted to ticket a sleeping person about midnight and when the fellow did not wake up the Police used extreme physical methods to try to wake him up so that they could engage him in a conversation.

At that point the columnist was aware that the story had two possible ultimate conclusions; either it was a case of biased criticism of police procedures or it was a newsworthy example of police misconduct.

This writer has been posting columns asserting that Journalism in the USA is on the endangered species list, so this latest incident in Berkeley seemed like it would provide a convenient handle for another similar installment in the series of columns contending that the prognosis for Journalism in the USA is: “dead man walking.” Instinctively, we knew that there would be resistance to any attempts to submit a news tip and that such reluctance to listen would be the topic for our next column. Has submitting a news tip taken on the same karma as offering a piece of Kryptonite to Superman?

Writing about the Berkeley event itself would require a massive amount of fact gathering which could not possibly be finished in time for a column that would be posted on the First Friday in June, so we decided to render help to the panhandlers in the form of a news tip to other area news sources which might report about the event which, according to hearsay, sent a young man to the hospital. (Later we were told that the fellow was a veteran who had served in Iraq.) On Friday morning, a lawyer from the East Bay Community Law Center was interviewing the young homeless people about what had occurred the previous night.

If the event was as serious as some contend, then it might develop into a Berkeley version of the Rodney King beating. A veteran had been injured last November at an Occupy Oakland event, so perhaps police beating up indigent veterans would be a trend-spotting story. Such a trend would outrage Liberals and put conservatives in an embarrassing position because they would have to choose between approving the new anti-veteran philosophy or endorse the criticism of the police. Either way the Conservatives would look inconsistent in their beliefs.

We called the California Center for Investigative Reporting and the phone operator said they weren’t interested in news tips about local events. She suggested that I could write up a query letter offering to do all the work myself and submit that via snail mail. Apparently if our news value judgment is better than theirs, we can prove it by doing all the work and then letting them take an agent’s cut for selling it.

Since the Berkeley Daily Chronicle is defunct and since the Berkeley Daily Planet’s weekly print edition has been suspended, the UC Berkeley student newspaper, the Daily Californian, has endeavored to take up the slack in that city’s local news coverage.

This example of a decline in local commercial news coverage is not a fatal wound for American Journalism, but it is a noticeable cut and entered as evidentiary exhibit for the contention being made by this column. The fact that the Times Picayune of New Orleans has suspended daily publication is a more pertinent example of a long slow decline in local newspaper journalism.

We walked to the office of the Daily Californian and were told by a young man acting as receptionist that there was no member of the editorial staff available to listen to the news tip. A receptionist can make a news decision or block a tip from being submitted? There is another example of a non-fatal cut for our “case.”

Now since our experience has been that the editor at the Santa Monica Independent Journal Newspapers always advised that a good journalist is always open to receiving news tips and since Doug Brew later became Time Magazine’s White House correspondent; we have always assumed that his advice about Journalism was reliable.

The World’s Laziest Journalist has always welcomed news tips. Our past columns on the Pascua Lama gold mining and Germany’s Pirate Political Party were spawned by news tips.

This kid wouldn’t give his name so that we could attribute the Cal Daily news decision to him, so we used our best “don’t take ‘no’ for an answer” reporter’s assertive attitude and continued our efforts until we were speaking to the editor. The editor took down the contact information for the lawyer from the East Bay Community Law Center and promised to look into the potential trend spotting value of the news tip.

We had to use our best “refusal conversion” debating style to get the audience with the editor and assume that most other potential tipsters would be cavalierly brushed aside by the receptionist (who looked old enough to drive but too young to purchase alcohol). Now one fumbled news tip won’t be fatal to American Journalism, but if the trend in America is to disregard new tips . . . that would appear to be more like a major gash than a small nick with a razor blade type cut.

In the past, we have learned that the New York Times’ Public Editor does not want to concern himself with criticism of missed stories, and the New York Times Letters to the Editor editor does not publish letters about news that was not covered by the Great Gray Lady. They obviously have a different attitude than the one this columnist was taught by the Independent Journal’s managing editor.

If the event that occurred on the night of Thursday May 24-Friday May 25, was one of a series of examples of police brutality, then a sensationalist might put the story with a headline that offers this opinion: “Kristallnacht for Berkeley’s homeless.”

On the Memorial Day Weekend, Jalopnik, the web site for car enthusiasts, ran a story about Police in the USA seizing cash and then (like the line in the Jerry Reed song) keeping all that money for evidence. (Google hint to learn more: http://jalopnik.com/5913416/cops-can-confiscate-money-and-property-from-law-abiding-citizens?popular=true)

Should someone call Fox News and give them a news tip about the arrest of Andy Coulson?

Why doesn’t the world’s laziest journalist do all the work necessary to write the “Are the Police in the USA out of control?” story?

The only possible motivation for such a labor intensive project would be self-satisfaction. If writing a column about potential police misconduct didn’t get a bit of police harassment in return, the best this writer could hope to get would be a noteworthy example of mass indifference to online content. Think along the lines of a soliloquy by Travis Bickel given to himself in his own home.

Do it gratis for humanitarian reasons? We can only quote a crusty old Santa Monica Outlook city editor who used to growl: “No good deed goes unpunished.” The payoff choice runs the gamut from nasty stealth political paybacks to massive public apathy and that bleak spectrum of rewards is supposed to provide the motivation? If this columnist is going to provide his own self-satisfaction, it will be by selecting assignments that are ipso facto fun to cover. It would be much easier to write a column that lived up to the headline: “Austerity measures will continue until prosperity returns.”

Getting from Berkeley to the Presidio in San Francisco takes a bit of time, but seeing United States Navy history occur, seemed worth the effort. Getting good photos was just part of the self-satisfaction aspect of the work. Doing the extra work to use photos to augment this weekend roundup column will be a “fielder’s choice” type decision.

If Freedom of the Press is actually in the process of dying the death of a thousand cuts, what’s the worst that could happen? The Amalgamated Conspiracy Theory Factory’s R & D Department is working on just such a prediction. Here is a preview: What if the Republican front runner gives a triumphant victory cry the weekend before the Republican’s National Convention, the last week in August, and (what if) the press (like a trained seal) issues a unanimous assertion that the fellow (just like it happened to Howard Dean) has suffered a complete mental breakdown and is unfit to receive the nomination? We’ll keep you posted on future developments regarding this potential item in the Conspiracy Theory world.

If, on the other hand, Journalism in America is in robust health, what is the harm in letting the World’s Laziest Journalist post some idle speculation to the contrary?

If the Republican National Convention were happening in Great Britain, there would be a possibility that some of the delegates would be vulnerable to some extortion and blackmail via the News of the World style wiretapping, but since it is happening in the USA It can’t (as Upton Sinclair would confirm) happen here. (But if it could . . . what’s the worst that could happen?)

If Euripides was assigned to rewrite a new shooting script of Ben Hecht’s “Front Page,” would he turn in a story that portrayed America’s Free Press as being blindsided by fascism and use the word “hubris” to explain it all?

If police ever start to invade newsrooms to beat up reporters, who will the reporters call to give a news tip for that story?

William R. Hearst sent a cable to Frederic Remington, who had been sent to Cuba to provide illustrations of a war and was requesting permission to return to the USA because he couldn’t find a war to illustrate, advising the famous painter: “You furnish the pictures and I’ll furnish the war.”

Now, since this column will be posted on June 1st, which is Superman Day, the disk jockey will play: “O Superman” (done by Laurie Anderson), “I kicked Spiderman’s ass,” and the theme music from the TV show “Batman.” We have to go check out a news tip. Have a “Kryptonite free” type week.

May 31, 2012

Dontcha really miss the old Soviet Union?

Filed under: Uncategorized — Tags: , — Jane Stillwater @ 12:17 pm

When the Berlin Wall came down back in 1989, we all breathed a big sigh of relief. At last the evil Soviet Union had finally been defeated and destroyed. But perhaps now, deep down inside, a lot of us are starting to wish that we could get it all back again — back to the good old days when our enemies would stand still in just one place so that we could take potshots at the old USSR with impunity and not constantly be afraid of shooting our own selves in the foot!

Back in the day, Americans worked for YEARS and spent BILLIONS of dollars trying to bring down the old Soviet Union. And then it finally happened — and the Soviet Union went bust. “But who can we have as an enemy now?” asked the Pentagon’s top brass and Wall Street corporatistas and weapons manufacturers everywhere. “We still gotta have an enemy or else Americans will never be scared enough to pay for our bombs.”

So the big cheeses on Wall Street and K Street and in the Pentagon all looked around and decided that Islam should be our next major foe.

But it coulda been anyone.

“Pentagon & Friends” could have declared war on just about anyone after the Soviet Union fell. Liberals, for instance. Or Mexicans. Or gays. Or unions. Or medical cannabis users. Or women. Or cancer patients. Or families. Oops, they’ve already done that. But “Pentagon Incorporated” picked Muslims as their first choice — because a lot of them had access to oil.

But then Muslims actually had the audacity to start fighting back. And “Pentagon United,” mistakenly thinking that War is the ultimate consumer and that one can never have enough enemies, started growing its enemies’ list even longer as well — just to be on the safe side. Now its list also contains the Occupy movement, “American Terrorists” (whatever they are) and the infamous 99% — as well as the usual suspects: Women and gays and Mexicans and cancer patients and liberals and families and medical cannabis users and unions. http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/donna-smith/43448/fighting-the-real-enemy-cancer-in-america

And now K Street and Wall Street and the Pentagon have inadvertently created yet another big problem. Their ill-conceived plan to stage “Wars” on medical cannabis users and working people and cancer patients and women and (add a very long, long list here) has clearly backfired because now the “Pentagon Mafia” has added at least three to five billion more potential enemies to its list — both elsewhere in the world and right here at home; enemies who are now starting to get their ducks in a row in order to ready, willing and able to fight back.

“Pentagon & Friends” is now in big trouble because instead of having just a small self-contained “enemy” virus like the USSR to contend with, it now has to deal with a huge free-floating viral epidemic of “enemies,” an unstoppable deadly contagion that “Pentagon Unplugged” itself has created; one that has spread and spread and spread all over the world and here at home too.

I bet that the Pentagon and its allies are now probably starting to truly, sincerely wish that they could magically return to the good old days when all they had to fight was the old Soviet Union!

Further, instead of only having to fight a few Islamic fundamentalists in far-away places that nobody has even heard of, “Pentagon United” has now managed to piss off over one billion middle-of-the-road and even modern Muslims. That was a trick that was really hard to pull off — but “PentagonCon” somehow managed to do even that.

And then, of course, there are the additional three billion women, millions of liberals, a whole wide world of gays, all of Latin America and probably two billion Chinese and approximately 853,566,225 Africans that they managed to piss off as well. And also some Greeks.

That really took some doing but “Pentagon Incorporated” has managed to do it.

And now, instead of just doing some old-skool hatin’ on the Soviets who were all safely isolated in one spot east of the Danube and hemmed in by an Iron Curtain and a seemingly endless supply of vodka, the Pentagon, K Street, Wall Street, etc. now have to go around suspecting almost four-fifths of the world’s population and peeking into EVERYBODY’S shorts.

Wasn’t life a lot easier when no wars were being declared on most of the world’s tighty-whities — only on Khrushchev’s? Weren’t things far less confusing back in the day, when only the Kremlin was bad?

Dontcha really miss the old Soviet Union?

PS: Of course, nowadays Russia still does have all kinds to evil oligarchs for us to be hatin’ on — but now America also has all kinds of evil oligarchs to be hatin’ on too.

Bring back the old USSR? Please!

PPS: I just finished reading the spring issue of “Critical Muslim,” a nicely-bound periodical put out by some of the top modern Islamic thinkers in the world today. Wanna know what Muslims are really thinking? Check out the latest issue of CM at http://www.musliminstitute.org/critical-muslim. You’ll be pleasantly surprised. Unlike so many American hack journalists these days, a lot of Muslim writers really are actually thinking.

PPPS: “The Pentagon Group” also appears to be missing the old Soviet Union so much that it is actually trying to recreate it right here in America. And just exactly where does the money for all this group’s new militarized police forces, KGB-like surveillance operations, Stalinesque torture techniques, propaganda-mill news reports, Siberia-style prison gulags and Monsanto-run collective farms come from? From you and me? “Absolyutno, da!”

And is this a good thing? “Nyet, nyet, nyet, nyet!”

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Here are more photos from our recent fabulous trip to the Camp Tuolumne Work Weekend, up near Yosemite: https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.10150814955761618.392238.519281617&type=1&l=02a5bd1d2c

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May 23, 2012

Roseanne Barr for President: Fast times at the Victoria Theater

Filed under: Uncategorized — Tags: , — Jane Stillwater @ 1:07 pm

Last week I attended a very interesting debate between Green Party presidential candidates Jill Stein and Roseanne Barr, held at the Victoria Theater in San Francisco’s historic Mission District (watch the entire debate here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nGo6wg9TuH8).

Both Stein and Barr clearly supported single-payer healthcare — and this is a good thing for everyone over age 35 because, under America’s current healthcare system which only seems to benefit insurance companies and Congressmen, older employees are less likely to be hired because potential employers know that they will probably have to pay for more healthcare benefits to us old guys because we are more likely to get sick.

However, there is a far more important reason for voting in a Green president this year other than just to assuage healthcare and unemployment fears. The Green Party is also offering us a much better overall cultural myth to live by than the same old tired and ineffective cultural myth being forced down our throats by DemoPublican hacks.

According to economist Howard Richards, cultural myths perform the highly-important function of designing and fueling our society — and the most crucial myth currently holding our big blue marble together is this: Accumulating excessive amounts of individual profit is the best thing we can do, creating more profit than we can ever use is the most important thing in the world, and aiding the world’s top dogs in their race to make exaggerated profits justifies every other human act — no matter how profane or obscene.

But what if this current “huge profit at any cost” myth that both Republicans and Democrats seem so fond of isn’t true after all — or has become sadly outdated since it was first invented back in Adam Smith’s time, way back in the eighteenth century, back when folks were just starting to come off the farm. What if it is finally time to update and modernize our most major myth?

And what if there are other myths out there right now that would serve us even much better? Consider, for instance, one alternative myth that comes highly recommended by Jesus, Buddha, Mohammad, Abraham, Rama and good old-fashioned common sense: That cooperation is the lodestone of human society — not huge individual profit at the cost of everything else.

Richards maintains that early human beings only survived because they learned how to form a supportive community that worked together for the good of the whole — not just so that a few people on top can make a killing. “For the good of the whole.” Got that?

And now that everyone in the world seems to be placing huge individual profits for the top dogs above every other human value, we are rapidly slipping back into those very early days of the human race before communal activity was invented — and our lack of community now, like our lack of community back then, is still endangering us. Profits won’t raise or protect our young. Profits won’t bring food to our tables. And profits won’t keep our world safe.

Wars create more huge individual profits than any other activity that humans can perform — even more profitable than owning a WalMart or stealing homes and jobs from the more gullible of us or fracking for oil. But wars also greatly lessen any chances that our human race will survive.

At the Green Party debate last week, Stein and Barr each talked about the programs that they would run if they were elected to the White House. And either one of these candidates would do an infinitely better job with regard to protecting and preserving the human race than did Bush I & II, Clinton, Romney, Reagan, Nixon and Obama did — all combined.

Both Barr and Stein talked about the insanely urgent imperative for us all to work together to cut greenhouse gases down to zero — using community-based solutions for these problems, solutions that would also offer us all meaningful jobs while we are in the process of saving the world.

Working together to save the human race? Now there’s a myth I can live with. Plus it’s so much tastier than the myth that profit for the few at the expense of the many is our eternal God.

Both candidates offered programs that will not only save our own lives but those of our children and grandchildren. And the idea that anyone with even half a brain in his or her head would chose Romney or Obama, slaves to an outmoded myth, over either of these two excellent candidates is just totally incomprehensible to me. Why chose bad over good? Why choose an 18th-century broken-down system over one that has been repeatedly proven effective over the last 250,000 years? It’s a complete mystery to me. Yet in 2012 you just know that we are gonna be stuck with either Romney or Obama (or yet another Bush). That just doesn’t make sense.

Are Americans currently suffering from the Stockholm syndrome or what? Yeah I guess.

Also please note that the debate between Stein and Barr took place at the Victoria Theater, a rather appropriate location considering that we now live in a world that completely embraces and supports the for-individual-top-dog-profit-only myth, one that wasn’t even working way back in Victorian times.

“Please, sir. I want some more…” young Oliver Twist asked of his betters way back then http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sZrgxHvNNUc. And if this current myth of the Material God of Profit continues to reign supreme, then America in the future is going to make Dickensian England look like a walk in the park. And it will be you and me who will be bleating out, “Can I have more, sir?” to our betters, frequently and with fervor.

And what makes us think that our betters will ever let any of their ill-gotten wealth trickle down to the likes of us mere wretched drudges? Never gonna happen.

Under our current anything-for-profit mythology, America is definitely on a fast track back to Victorian times. “Fast times in Victorian England.” And 99% of us won’t be the ones that will be living Upstairs either. We’ll all be huddling together precariously in the cold, damp Downstairs instead — if we are lucky.

At the Victoria Theater last week, Stein and Barr both proved that they know something that both Democrats and Republicans clearly do not — that it is love and community that makes the world go around, that protects us and our families and that will save our future. Not profits for the rich.

PS: I will be going off to the Netroots Nation http://www.netrootsnation.org/ convention on June 7-11 in Providence, Rhode Island — featuring speakers like Krugman, Trunkpa, McKibben, Warren, Schneiderman, etc. So. Can anyone out there recommend a cheap hotel in downtown Providence where I can stay? Hopefully, near the convention center or at least on a bus route that runs past it on weekends?

PPS: I’ll be going up to Berkeley’s Tuolumne Camp near Yosemite over Memorial Day weekend, to stare at trees for a change instead of computers. But I will still be remembering our troops — remembering how they are sadly being used and abused by America’s wealthy top dogs. American soldiers should be heroically fighting to keep Americans safe, not profits of the unpatriotic neo-Victorian rich.

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May 17, 2012

America: Losing its true moral compass

Filed under: Uncategorized — Tags: , — Jane Stillwater @ 11:50 am

I’m currently reading a rather good book entitled “The Nurturing of Time Future,” by Howard Richards http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-nurturing-of-time-future-howard-richards/1109407001. Although the author’s love affair with run-on paragraphs causes eye-stain at times, he does make several very important points — including that whenever a country loses its true moral compass, it soon becomes vulnerable to having pseudo-morality imposed upon it from above.

And Richards isn’t talking about God here.

Richards is talking about dictators — dictators who are able to impose their own moralities on us because we no longer have any moral code of our own.

Take, for instance, the folks in Washington and on Wall Street who are currently leading our nation away from its traditional Judeo-Christian values — while at the same time declaring themselves to be doing God’s work. Really? “Screw Christ’s message of tolerance, compassion and love for our neighbors,” they constantly preach to us. And we let them. “Justice is dead. Greed is now God.”

So much for greed being the Third Deadly Sin.

Take, for instance, what is currently happening to the Occupy Movement. After a few of us started to wake up and demand economic morality? We got punched in the face by corporatistas who want none of that. “Screw fairness,” the One Percent chant — and then the rest of America sides with the Big Guys and applauds from the sidelines as black-shirted cops beat our moral minority to a pulp.

Take, for instance, Palestinian non-violent protesters who dare to think that it is morally wrong to blatantly seize other people’s land. Israeli corporatisitas then kill these protesters — using weapons paid for by Americans. “Screw non-violence!” yell our leaders, happily rejoicing that they now get to kill unarmed humans beings instead of having to fight men with guns. And we let these dictator-wannabes get away with this because making obscene profits by any means necessary now matters more to us than morality. No surprise there.

Take, for instance, American women’s demands for equality. “Keep them barefoot and pregnant!” scream our leaders. Where’s the morality in that, you might ask. But most Americans don’t even bother to ask, not even American women. Corporatistas on the prowl for cheap labor would love to see women treated like chattel. And we let them. Why not. There’s profit involved.

Take, for instance, all the television commercials we see daily. In the course of only one half-hour of TV, we sit through perhaps 20 to 30 commercials. But that in itself is not immoral. What is immoral is the messages embedded in these commercials: “Keep buying!” Keep buying and buying and buying — even as we cannibalize our own planet.

And those of us Americans who demand a fair tax rate for the rich, one that would only be in proportion to their obscene profits at our expense as we pick up their tab for infrastructure, worker training, healthcare, pensions, resource loss, weapons supply, etc.? Dare to object? Boy are we put in our place fast. Obscene profits should never get taxed — no matter where they come from. Only Jesus and communists think like that. “Screw Jesus!” the Big Boys cry. And we let them.

And then of course, there is the morality of Endless War http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=30875 that seems to be catching everybody’s eye right now — wars paid for by monies taken from America’s veterans, little old ladies and our working class.

The Good Old Boys’ Club has found a whole new way to “Support the Troops” — by taking away their pension plans.

And with regard to small businesses that demand a slice of the pie because it’s the moral thing to do? Too bad for them also. Corporate morality doesn’t care about anything but itself.

And apparently American morality doesn’t care much about anything but obscene profits for large corporations either — and, under America’s new moral code which lacks any compass at all except for one that points toward the Pentagon and Wall Street, our country is moving closer and closer to becoming a dictatorship.

It looks like Howard Richards is right.

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May 11, 2012

Ye Olde Scribe’s Election Year TRUTH of the Week

Filed under: Uncategorized — Ye Olde Scribe @ 9:40 am

paperbagromneyPaper bag candidate Mitt Romney. Image courtesy Wiki. While his Flipper rhetoric should mean he can’t talk his way out of a paper bag, he probably would have no problem using it to smother puppies, especially if it would help him politically.

However:

If someone keeps making excuses or defends bullying, or THEY CAN’T REMEMBER… there’s a DAMN good chance they were, and may still be, one of the biggest bully assholes on the block- Ye Olde Scribe

May 10, 2012

Fair Trade: It’s not just for coffee any more

Filed under: Uncategorized — Tags: , , — Jane Stillwater @ 3:29 pm

How many times have you walked into Starbucks, ordered a “Fair Trade” latte and felt all proud of yourself for supporting small coffee farmers in Central America? Virtuous, even? A lot of times, I would bet. But exactly how many times have you also walked into a computer store or a jewelry store or a grocery store or a sporting goods store and said, “Hey, I’m looking to purchase one of those Fair Trade diamond rings,” or “I need to buy a Fair Trade MP-3 player.” Almost never.

Heck, how many times have we even driven into our local Shell or Arco or Exxon station and ordered up ten gallons of Fair Trade gas? Definitely never. But guess what? Perhaps it’s time that we did.

Fair Trade isn’t just for coffee any more.

It’s high time for consumers to follow the Fair Trade coffee example and also start forcing big-business international monopolies and cartels to instigate Fair Trade practices on a lot more than just coffee. It’s also now time to offer Fair Trade options to all those dirt-poor miners and workers who now bring us tin, gold, tantalum, tungsten, diamonds, coal, gasoline and oil at an enormous personal cost to themselves, and who risk their very lives daily for peanuts — so that global corporatistas can turn around and gouge out higher prices from you and me, and make outrageously obscenely high profits off of someone else’s blood, sweat and tears.

Without our coffee in the morning, we’d merely have a bit more trouble waking up. But without highly-important minerals such as the tin, gold, tantalum, tungsten, diamonds and coal that make our individual worlds work, there would be no computers, no gold tooth fillings, no traditional wedding rings, no cell phones, no durable drill bits and nothing for joggers to listen to as they run through the park.

Without our coffee, sure, we’d be grumpy. But without our gasoline, we’d be faced with starvation — or at least faced with having to live mostly by what we can grow in our victory gardens or whatever we could haul in on wagons. But, hey, that might not be such a bad thing after all. Improvising in order to avoid starvation seems to be, in the long run, a far better solution than dying from carbon-dioxide poisoning and its resultant fires and floods. But then that’s just me.

Fair Trade oil? That would mean giving individual Iraqis, Iranians, Nigerians, Sudanese and even Californians and Texans a piece of the action — just like they now do in Alaska. I’ve been to Iraq. I’ve seen dirt-poor villagers with no shoes on their feet standing upon oil-rich land worth billions to anyone but them.

Fair Trade!

In Africa, where so many of our strategic minerals come from, miners can’t even imagine what Fair Trade might look like. They might even live a few years longer maybe, or have shoes on their feet or learn how to read. Who knows? How about giving them the same breaks that we now give to coffee farmers?

PS: In the Democratic Republic of Congo, Rwanda, Uganda and Sudan, many so-called “conflict minerals” are taken out of the ground and then sold in order to buy more guns for bad guys — and so the SEC has been working on methods that will allow buyers to trace the origins of the metals they buy, thus making it harder for gun runners and human traffickers to make a profit from selling ill-gotten gains.

Nordic Sun http://www.nordicsw.com/ has recently developed a cute little hand-held mineral-assessing thingie that allows perspective buyers to trace their mineral purchases back to untainted sources. However, no one seems to be in any big hurry to buy this cute little app. Why mess with a sure-fire profit maximizer — buying conflict minerals with no provenance — even though such purchases lead to supporting devastating blood-wars and completely screwing over poor miners working their fingers to the bone?

All across the world, people who care about the future of our planet helped to organize a wonderful Fair Trade movement to protect coffee farmers. Good for them! And now it’s time for us to get together and organize a Fair Trade movement for conflict-mineral miners as well — and then also a Fair Trade movement to protect all the rest of us workers too, especially those of us here at home. “We have nothing to lose but our chains.”

In these enlightened times, a society that creates only billionaires and match girls no longer works.

PPS: I recently went on a virtual tour of an oil magnate’s house. Actually, I think it was only his secondary vacation home. Set on ten acres of valuable urban real estate, it had fifteen bedrooms, a kitchen with five (5) work stations, a spare baggage room for racks of last year’s Chanel gowns, a Rolls Royce in the driveway, a huge swimming pool, a vineyard and even a freaking TOPIARY garden.

Now compare that super-deluxe massive mansion to the homes of those poor villagers I saw in Iraq or the homes of poor miners in the DRC or even the homes of all us poor California taxpayers who get nothing back from the oil giants who are currently making off with OUR black gold. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qM1syI0UA3Y.

PPPS: I’m trying to leave for Uganda in July so I can witness all this stuff for myself and report back regarding the corporate exploitation of miners, human trafficking and the plight of child soldiers — as well as to, hopefully, also report back on any and all progress being made toward establishing Fair Trade in Africa too.

Feel free to donate to my “Jane goes to Uganda” fund by clicking here: https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_s-xclick&hosted_button_id=96QQEH6YNBA3N

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May 6, 2012

Kids Praying in Florida

Filed under: Opinion,Toon,Uncategorized — Tags: , , , , , — RS Janes @ 5:04 pm

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May 3, 2012

Cruel & unusual punishment: What if Pelican Bay & Leavenworth went organic?

Filed under: Uncategorized — Tags: , — Jane Stillwater @ 3:20 pm

Back in America’s wild colonial days, the main form of punishment for criminals was either flogging evil-doers mercilessly or hanging them in public. In the 1680s, however, William Penn spearheaded a movement to “reform” criminals by placing them in “penitentiaries” instead of just beating them to a pulp or snuffing them out. And the resultant penitentiaries were supposed to be places where bad guys would have enough time on their hands to see the error of their evil ways and repent.

Boy, have we come a long way since then.

Prisons in America today seem to have other purposes in mind than mere reformation — such as to warehouse dissidents and minorities, employ prison guards and AFT commandos, shower billions on War-on-Drugs profiteers and their drug kingpin counterparts, turn borderline-neurotic prisoners into true psychopaths, and provide cheap labor for the prison-industrial complex.

Is William Penn rolling over in his grave right now or what!

According to Information Clearinghouse, “Nationwide, the number [of imprisoned Americans is] staggering: Nearly 2.4 million people behind bars, even though over the last 20 years the crime rate has actually dropped by more than 40 percent http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article31156.htm

Further, many of America’s new high-tech and for-profit prisons seem designed solely to break prisoners’ bodies first and then break their souls.

And if (not necessarily when) prisoners finally do get paroled out of America’s brave new prison system, they’re more often than not sent back into society so mentally broken down and/or physically debilitated that they can’t hardly even walk down the street by themselves — let alone become good citizens, repent their past follies or even hold down a job.

And according to FireDogLake, “Another growth industry in our Age of Incarceration is prison labor, putting inmates to work making everything from uniforms to furniture for a few cents an hour…. What began in the 1970s as an end run around the laws prohibiting convict leasing by private interests has now become an industrial sector in its own right, employing more people than any Fortune 500 corporation and operating in 37 states.” http://my.firedoglake.com/tomengelhardt/2012/04/19/fraser-and-freeman-creating-a-prison-corporate-complex/

So. What’s my point? Here it is: Americans really need to seriously sit down and re-think exactly what we want our prison system to accomplish — rehabilitate crooks so that they can see the error of their ways and become productive members of society again? Or create thugs, psychopaths and terrorists unfit for human company? Or produce pathetic weaklings ground down by a slave-labor system that has made them old far before their time and who will be a burden on society for the rest of their lives?

Hey, here’s an idea. How about following William Penn’s lead and go back to designing prisons that will turn bad guys back into good guys again? So that when prisoners have paid their “debt to society,” they will emerge from jail ready to be a productive member of said society and even give something back? What a novel concept that would be: A prison-factory that grinds out good citizens.

“But, Jane,” you might say, “how can that possibly be achieved?” How about that we start with this concept: Using the healthy example of Alice Waters’ famous “Edible Schoolyard” and your local organic farmers’ market, let’s have all our prisons go organic too! Just the act of feeding prisoners decent food for a change would be a huge first step toward rehabilitation.

Think “Edible Prisonyard”.

And after that, we can even begin to work on the true cause of adult criminality: Child abuse. According to Jordan Riak, an authority on child-abuse prevention, the best way to eliminate criminality is to be kind to children! Now there’s another novel idea.

“The person who was respected and encouraged to explore in childhood is NOT in prison. …The person whose physical and emotional needs were met in childhood is NOT in prison. So who IS in prison? You will find people who were never played with, read to or hugged when they were children but rather growled at, whipped and smacked…. Violent criminals are made. We ourselves create them at home.” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=–I0X3-tOwE

So perhaps we can rehabilitate our prisoners by actually being kind to them too. “It’s never too late to have a happy childhood!” But if we do that, then almost everyone else will want to get hauled off to jail too — giving us a better quality of prisoners that way as well.

And at the cost of approximately $60,000 per year to incarcerate each prisoner, think of all the money we would save if prisoners could simply be rehabilitated and released — or if that amount of money had been spent on helping to nurture young children so that they wouldn’t become criminals in the first place.

PS: Back in the early 1960s, before anyone else was even thinking about recycling, there was a man named Cecil Geraghty who developed a process of changing processed sewage into compost and fertilizer http://www.google.com/patents/US2861877?printsec=abstract#v=onepage&q&f=false. How resourceful was that!

Just think of all those millions of tons of “night soil” that are currently being flushed down the toilet regularly when they could be put to good use instead. Let’s revive that process. Let’s get all those nutrients back! Let’s reclaim all the human waste that is currently being spewed out by our sewers.

And let’s also reclaim all the waste of human life that is currently being spewed out by our prisons.

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May 1, 2012

May Day Photo Report for Occupy Oakland

Filed under: Uncategorized — Tags: , , — Bob Patterson @ 6:21 pm

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Police prepare demonstrator for arrest.
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Photogs scramble to record Police vs. Protester scuffle

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Police in riot gear cordon off Broadway in Oakland, Tuesday morning, after first arrests were made.

The Noon May Day rally at Frank Ogawa Plaza in Oakland CA was marred by a scuffle between Police and Demonstrators.

The World’s Laziest Journalist has learned a thing or two about photo editing and we realize that the photos taken early on May 1st in Oakland aren’t strong candidates for winning any of the press photographer clip contests for this month, but after putting in time to get to the event, get images, edit them, and then get to the Public Library to post them, we figured: “What the heck, they are better than no images at all.”

Specific details were lacking in the initial news reports on Bay Area media. The World’s Laziest Journalist will include more details in Friday’s Week in Review Column.

April 27, 2012

Romney’s new housing policy: Offering the Grim Reaper a big helping hand

Filed under: Uncategorized — Tags: , , — Jane Stillwater @ 4:47 pm

The other day I went to visit an old friend of mine who I hadn’t seen in years — but now she was dying, truly dying. It was a very sobering experience. Who would have thought that this formerly enthusiastic, vibrant and energetic woman would now be reduced an almost-human shell, a mere skeleton that breathed?

But the Grim Reaper eventually comes for us all. Except, of course, for me.

Having never known a world that existed without me in it, I find it hard to comprehend that such a world might someday exist. It’s hard for me to believe that someday even I too will be dead. And so I will probably live forever — but the rest of you won’t.

However, don’t despair just yet. Currently, large numbers of doctors and scientists all over the world are working their butts off to make sure that you too will have lives that extend far beyond today’s actuary tables. But on the other hand, so many corporate-owned politicians in Washington these days are also happily working their little hearts out to make sure that you don’t.

So many corporate-owned politicians in Washington these days seem to be going out of their way to work side by side with the Grim Reaper. They declare unnecessary wars. They tax us (not themselves) right down to the bone. They steal all our safety nets in order to have more money to add to THEIR safety nets. They bust our unions, steal our pension plans, enable Wall Street to invent pyramid schemes that ruin our economy, encourage big health insurance companies to cut us loose just when we need them the most, and allow Monsanto to poison our food, mutilate our seed stock and kill off our bees http://blog.buzzflash.com/node/13459.

In America, death seems to be coming earlier and earlier to those who vote.

And now GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney has come up with an even more sure-fire plan to help out his new BFF, the Grim Reaper. Now Romney wants to not only eliminate most U.S. housing subsidies, he wants to eliminate the entire department of Housing and Urban Renewal as well. That will certainly speed up the Grim Reaper’s efforts for sure.

According to Forbes magazine, “In a closed-door Florida fundraiser for donors tonight, Mitt Romney offered a rare glimpse into his policy plans if elected President. And, as NBC reports, he got quite trigger-happy.” http://www.forbes.com/sites/markbergen/2012/04/15/mitt-romney-says-he-may-ditch-hud/

According to TruthOut, “Romney’s plan to eliminate HUD, assuming he didn’t shuffle its programs to other departments, would bring an end to critical programs like Section 8 housing vouchers and community development block grants. And eliminating housing assistance is even more problematic given the disproportionate percentage of veterans in the homeless population.” http://truth-out.org/news/item/8580-mitt-romney-tells-rich-donors-his-secret-plan-to-cut-housing-assistance

But what does Romney’s latest brilliant idea actually mean in terms of you and me? It means once again that the rich continue to get richer and live longer while the rest of us just conveniently die off too soon — because homeless people have a lot shorter life span than folks happily housed in the Hamptons.

You know that senior housing complex in your town where seniors now get a rent break courtesy of HUD? That will be gone. And without HUD, frail and ailing seniors will soon be wandering the streets of your town, dying in alleyways and hogging up all the space in your cemeteries.

You know those low-income “housing projects” on the other side of your town where all the poor people now live? Those will be gone too. Too bad for them. And now desperate poor folks will be wandering around in your part of town, homeless too. And did I already mention that they will be desperate?

And all those homeless vets? There will be a lot more of them now — also wandering around your city or town.

Remember back in the 1970s when Reagan shut down all those mental institutions and suddenly we had all sorts of crazy people wandering around, hopefully taking their meds but probably not? And if Romney’s latest hot new scheme takes hold, even more of them will be back on your streets.

And physically handicapped people will have no place to live either. They too will be wandering around, trying to elude the Grim Reaper.

And the number of homeless children will dramatically increase. A lot more little kids will be living in cars — if they’re lucky.

And all of these homeless people, millions of them, will be pouring into the streets of your city or town, herded in your direction by both corporate-owned politicians in Washington and the Grim Reaper himself — who also will have a sharp eye out for YOU.

Currently, about the only thing that stands between what America looked like back during the 1930s Great Depression and what America looks like now is the department of Housing and Urban Renewal. HUD.

When we taxpayers give our money to HUD, what we are basically buying is window dressing, the illusion that America is still prosperous, still offers possibilities of advancement to its citizens and is still a First World country. Without HUD’s Section 8 vouchers and other forms of help with housing needs, that curtain of illusion will be pulled back and those rose-colored glasses will be unceremoniously jerked off. And America’s current dysfunctions will be seen clearly by all. And the Grim Reaper will be set free to wander our streets at will.

But Romney and his friends will never have to worry about the Grim Reaper coming into their homes. Why should they worry — when the G.R. will find it so much easier to come into ours. If we still have homes, that is.

PS: I truly do not understand why Americans seem so fearful of far-away “terrorists” and are so willing to spend trillions of dollars to protect themselves from this rather small threat — but won’t spend hardly a nickel to protect themselves from the corporatista politicians in Washington who are an infinitely larger threat to our lives.

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April 21, 2012

The GOP’s ‘Scarlett O’Hara’ Problem in the South

Filed under: Opinion,Toon,Uncategorized — Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , — RS Janes @ 6:05 am

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April 19, 2012

U.S. Supreme Court: A great example of Shariah Law

Filed under: Uncategorized — Tags: , , — Jane Stillwater @ 2:05 pm

Currently many Americans hold a rather low opinion of Shariah Law, a system of jurisprudence used in Muslim countries that appears to be rather harsh, especially with regard to the rights of women and the common man. However, this all-encompassing system of laws is not, as many have assumed, based on the teachings of the Qur’an but, according to Islamic scholar Ziauddin Sardar, was conceived, developed and established by the powerful Abbasid Caliphate (749-1258) in order to help caliphs run their empire — which at that time stretched from India to Spain.

As I understand it, the Abbasid caliphs of that time became more and more concerned with consolidating their hold over the vast territories under their control and with subduing their opposition — and less and less concerned with the niceties of religion. With this new imperial goal in mind, Abbasid top dogs and their jurists began inventing laws mainly designed to make the accumulation of wealth and seizure of power easier for themselves and harder for anyone else.

The Qur’an’s emphasis on community and justice for the common man (and woman) was thus set aside and replaced with more Draconian laws geared to subdue the main population, women, the working class and minorities in favor of the Abbasid Caliphate’s top one percent.

Sound familiar?

And now, as the American empire continues to expand under the leadership of its own modern caliphate, jurists in Washington are once again developing Shariah Law — a system of laws basically designed to strengthen the top dogs and to subdue the rest of us.

And just like the Abbasid powers-that-be pretty much ignored the Qur’an when developing Shariah, so the U.S. Supreme Court seems to be pretty much ignoring the Constitution in order to develop their own brand of Shariah Law.

While the Qur’an speaks idealistically about all people working together for justice and for the good of the community, Shariah Law was originally designed as a power-grab and a war on the working class, women and anyone else who tried to rise above their station.

And although many Shariah laws do appear just and fair, we must always remember the basic reason why Shariah Law was invented: To maintain and control an expanding empire and to benefit the caliphs.

Likewise, the purpose of many current Supreme Court decisions — from the illegal appointment of George W. Bush to Citizens United and beyond — appears to be the same one that drove those men in black robes over 1,200 years ago: To seize and maintain the power of the few over the many.

Both the Constitution and the Qu’ran were originally intended to set men’s souls free — not to enslave them.

PS: At the Berkeley-Albany Bar Association luncheon the other day, our guest speaker told us about some of the decisions made by the U.S. Supreme Court over the past year. Some of these decisions were actually quite fair and good, but many of them only seemed designed to allow the new American Caliphate to consolidate its power more quickly.

For instance, there’s the Supreme Court’s recent strip-search law validation wherein anyone taken into custody, no matter what their alleged crime was, can expect to be strip-searched automatically. Ugh. And apparently “Expectations of Privacy” is a thing of the past as well, to be replaced by Judge Scalia’s favorite “Tresspass to Chattels,” whatever that is. And you used to either have to get a warrant or show probable cause in order to search premises — but not any more.

And with regard to voter-redistricting in Texas, the Supremes didn’t want to get into that one at all. “That’s a states’ rights issue,” they earnestly declared, a really big turn-around from when the high court chose to overrule states’ voting rights in 2000 and foist GWB off on us.

But we still have a right to petition our government. However, we now apparently no longer have the right to get an answer from it. And now it’s gonna be much harder to mount a class-action lawsuit against a corporation too — especially one against WalMart!

PPS: Speaking of Shariah Law justice here in America, according to an article by Chris Hedges ironically entitled, “First they came for the Muslims,” Muslim-Americans are now being falsely persecuted by the U.S. judicial system right and left http://readersupportednews.org/off-site-opinion-section/257-justice/10978-focus-first-they-come-for-the-muslims

According to Hedges, “[Attorney Stephen Downing stated that], ‘I was unprepared for the fact that the government would put together a case that was just one lie piled up on top of another lie…. And when you pointed it out to them they didn’t care. They didn’t refute it. They knew that it was a lie. The facts of most of these pre-emptive cases don’t support the charges. But the facts are irrelevant. The government has decided to target these people. It wants to take them down for ideological reasons.’” Reasons like keeping the American Caliphate up and running? Yeah.

PPPS: If you want to understand some of the higher goals and wisdom of Islam, I highly recommend Ziauddin Sardar’s enlightening (and very entertaining) book, “Desperately Seeking Paradise” http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/reviews/desperately-seeking-paradise-by-ziauddin-sardar-6167246.html.

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April 13, 2012

Government entitlements: The Pentagon gets them but we don’t?

Filed under: Uncategorized — Tags: — Jane Stillwater @ 2:45 pm

It seems that all we ever hear coming out of Washington these days are statements such as, “The only way America can pay off its debts is to cut Social Security,” always followed quickly by, “For our own good, we have to eliminate MediCare!”

And these vociferous demands for cuts to entitlements for America’s senior citizens always come in tandem with heart-rending cries of “Single-payer healthcare is Socialism,” and “Government must cut all pork from women’s healthcare and the Veterans Administration,” and “Unemployment benefits are government entitlements and government entitlements are WRONG!”

Cutting government entitlements to Americans appears to be the brave new order of the day in Washington DC right now.

Everyone in Congress and the White House and the Supreme Court seems to be obsessively intent on cutting back on all “Big Government” entitlements.

Except….

No one ever mentions cutting back on Pentagon entitlements. And the subject of entitlements for weapons manufacturers is never even brought up. Bank-bailout entitlements are sacred and can’t be touched. The Federal Reserve is Big Government but no one in Washington is trying to drown the Fed in a bathtub. The filthy-rich are given entitlements in the form of huge tax breaks and concessions and the nuclear-waste-creation industry gets entitlements up the yazoo.  Big Pharma, possibly the world’s largest source of illegal drugs http://blog.buzzflash.com/node/13438, is supported by all kinds of government entitlements. And what about all the entitlements that agribusiness receives? And the so-called health insurance industry that never insures anyone’s good health but their own?

They get their entitlements bigtime but we don’t get ours? Where is the outrage in that?

And do we ever hear any hue and cry at all when oil companies receive government entitlements, subsidies and tax breaks? And what about Citizens United? How come they are entitled but we are not? What?

Are America’s middle class, homeowners, children, college students and the working poor — America’s 99% — all just supposed to sit down and shut up while they get no government entitlements or even any pitifully small bread-crumbs of benefits thrown their way like chicken-scratch? And then we’re supposed to feel all ashamed and guilty that we even get these small handfuls of crumbs?

Apparently yes.

You and me are not allowed to band together, pool our tax money and provide ourselves with any kind of mutual benefits at all. That would be Socialism!

Yet mega-corporations, war-mongers, stock-market cheats and advocates of a police state can and do band together — and are given buckets full and bank vaults full and wire transfers full of entitlement money like there was no tomorrow.

The Pentagon gets trillions of dollars in entitlements. Wall Street profiteers go to sleep at night on soft pillows filled with Socialism-for-the-wealthy entitlements provided to them by our tax money at work — and by Draconian cuts to OUR entitlements.

Homeland Security, FEMA, the War on Drugs and all those huge corporate-run for-profit prisons also get big bucks — even while our local police departments and fire departments have to sell tickets to strangers over the phone because their entitlements have been cut — and our public schools have to hold bake sales to pay for their books.

Have I missed anything here? Have I left anything out? Any other examples of “entitlement” hypocrisy that you can think of offhand? I just bet that there are.
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April 10, 2012

Ye Olde Scribe PRESENTS…

Filed under: Uncategorized — Ye Olde Scribe @ 2:05 pm

 

“While we will suspend our campaign effective today, we are not done fighting.”

Rickie (NOT Ricardo) Insanitorium.

Scribe says…

“This is like…”
“‘Hands up. You’re money or your life!’”
“‘OK, here you go, here’s all my money.’”
“As robber turns to leave: a lot richer.”
“‘At least you didn’t rob me.’”

April 6, 2012

Starving by accident: Are Americans actually eating real food?

Filed under: Uncategorized — Tags: , , , , — Jane Stillwater @ 11:22 pm

I’ve been thinking a lot about food lately. No, scratch that. I’m ALWAYS thinking about food. So the other day I wandered over to eat at Picoso, a family-run Mexican restaurant in north Berkeley that makes the world’s best guacamole. And while walking home past the world-famous Chez Panisse restaurant, I spotted a huge crowd of people standing around out in front.

“What’s happening here?” I asked one of the people in line.

“Michael Pollan and Maira Kalman are doing a book-signing event — and there is also free food.” Well, one of the major creeds that I live by is, “Never turn down free food” — so I bought a copy of Pollan’s and Kalman’s illustrated “Food Rules,” had it signed by the authors, went on a tour of Chez Pannise’s extensive stainless-steel kitchens and then sampled hors d’oeuvres that had been prepared using Pollan’s 83 rules about food. http://www.berkeleyside.com/2011/11/02/michael-pollan-new-food-rules-but-no-need-to-be-neurotic/

And I also ran into Alice Waters herself. “I usually celebrate my birthdays at Chez Panisse,” I told her, “because it gives me something to look forward to each year besides just getting old — but this year my birthday falls on a Sunday and you guys will be closed. And it’s my 70th birthday too! So what should I do?”

“Perhaps you could celebrate it here on either the day before or the day after?” Waters replied.

“Or you could try Aziza, a Moroccan restaurant over in San Francisco,” added Pollan. Then other people recommended trying Camino, Dona Tomas, Pizzialol, Quince, Cotogna and Commis. But it just wouldn’t be the same — not going to Chez Panisse on my big Seven-Zero. So we worked out a compromise. I’d have my dinner celebration at Chez Panisse the night before, eat very slowly, and then celebrate turning 70 at the exact stroke of midnight — even if it meant sitting out on the restaurant’s front steps after they closed. Perfect.

PS: Here are some of Pollan’s 83 really helpful food rules:

2. Don’t eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food [and nothing highly processed or containing unpronounceable chemicals either].

5. Avoid foods that have sugar or some form of sweetener listed in the top three ingredients.

11. Avoid foods that are advertized on television [this rule should also apply to restaurants too. Thank goodness Chez Panisse doesn't advertize on TV].

40. Make water [not soda] your beverage of choice. Do what animals do when they’re thirsty.

42. “The whiter the bread the sooner you’ll be dead.”

45. Eat all the junk food you want as long as you cook it yourself.

56. Eat when you are hungry, not when you’re bored.

82. Cook! Cooking just might be the single most important thing you can do for your dietary health.

Pollan then summarized his book in just seven words: “Eat [real] food, not too much, mostly plants.”

Which brings me to the “main course” of this article: Why food is so important to us: WITHOUT FOOD WE WOULD STARVE. So bear that in mind the next time you read about how Monsanto or Archer Daniels Midland or Congress is screwing with our food supply again.

Christopher Cook, author of “Diet for a Dead Planet,” states that, “It is no longer news that a few powerful corporations have literally occupied the vast majority of human sustenance. The situation is perilous…. This corporate occupation of our food isn’t just unfair and wrong; it’s impractical and destructive. It’s ruining farmers, the land and our future food supply.” http://www.democraticunderground.com/101616552

Yes, large for-profit-only corporations are endangering the food supply in places where people are barely subsisting and we’re always seeing photos of starving babies from there. However, here in America these same corporations are highly endangering you and me as well. Why? Because Americans just THINK that they are eating real food — when much of our food merely consists of the three Cs: Cardboard, chemicals and crap.

Americans may think that we are nourishing ourselves when we eat corporate junk-food but the reality is that all too many of us are dying young from heart disease or cancer or obesity or diabetes; that our thinking has become fuzzy due to lack of nutrients; and, even worse, we are always hungry even though we keep stuffing our faces with imitation “real” food.

A photo from Peter Wenzel’s book, “Hungry Planet,” shows a typical American family sitting around a kitchen table with all the food they will eat in a week — and there’s hardly even one real fruit or vegetable among all of that stuff! http://minnesota.publicradio.org/collections/special/columns/state-of-the-arts/content_images/HungryPlanet-USA.jpg

PPS: For a month now, I’ve been eating by the food rules of Dr. Terry Wahls’ famous “nine-cup” diet http://tedxtalks.ted.com/video/TEDxIowaCity-Dr-Terry-Wahls-Min — which consists of having every meal include one cup of colorful fruits or vegetables, one cup of deep greens and one cup of either cruciferous vegetables, onions, mushies, garlic and/or leeks. Eat nine cups of this stuff per day plus some salmon and grass-fed meat thrown in and see what happens.

“You get a long list of nutrients from [unprocessed] food that you don’t get from any other source,” stated Dr. Wahls, who cured herself of advanced MS on this diet. And, surprisingly, it appears to be making me feel healthier too — plus I’m actually starting to cook. Me? A chef? Who would have thought.

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Do Kerouac fans overlook Berkeley?

Filed under: Uncategorized — Tags: , , , — Bob Patterson @ 12:41 pm

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People’s Park
book-and-med
Legendary Berekely cafe
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Do the Beatnik fans going to San Francisco overlook Berkeley?

After the New Downtown Berkeley Launch Event was concluded on Tuesday, April 3, 2012, a reporter from KGO radio in San Francisco was walking on Adeline Street with John Caner, the Executive Director of the Downtown Berkeley Association (DBA), when one of the homeless people in front of John’s Ice Cream challenged her to talk to him and get both sides of the story. She declined the invitation to get a balanced picture of the situation and scampered quickly to her Mercedes Benz and drove off informing him that she had all the information she needed.

In the current issue of the East Bay Express (April 4 – 10, 2012) on page 12 of the hardcopy edition, reporter Robert Gammon recaps the skepticism that Joe Debro faced when he criticized the deal which was utilized to bring the Oakland Raiders back to Oakland from their temporary rebel encampment in the Los Angeles area. Debro was vastly outnumbered by sports fans, journalists and politicians who heartily endorsed the efforts to lure the absent rascals back to the Bay Area.

Debro’s objections seem more credible now that the city is in financial crisis mode and the football team might need to be reminded of the particulars of a loan that was instrumental in getting them to (like the prodigal son) return home because it is Debro’s continued position that no payments on the loan have been made and none are scheduled to be made. If families can live paycheck to paycheck, can’t a $53.9 million dollar loan be forgotten if a team is living from season to season?

Time magazine’s Reagan era White House correspondent, Doug Brew, advised reporters to take the time to listen to what people were trying to tell them and not prejudge the quality of their information based on their appearances or apparent financial status. How (you might ask) could the World’s Laziest Journalist possibly be the recipient of advice from such a highly qualified source for opinions on the art of Journalism? We were coworkers on the staff of the weekly Santa Monica Independent Journal Newspapers in the Los Angeles area. That brings up the question: “How well did you get to know him?” When he was welcomed into this columnist’s humble abode in Marina del Rey, Brew expostulated: “My God, Bob, this is a hovel!”

Could KGO’s gal reporter have possibly missed a good Berkeley sidebar story in her haste to get . . . some place else?

On Tuesday afternoon, we were informed by some of the folks in People’s Park that (irony alert!) the beloved guy known as “hate man” had been issued a stay-a-way order from the public park that he calls “home.”

The ten years that Mark Hawthorne (AKA Hate man) worked for the Metro Section of the New York Times were also known as “the Sixties” and we would pay good money to hear him tell his stories and just maybe get some advice on how to produce quality journalism. Hawthorne’s suggestions would probably be just as good as those provided by the fellow who worked for Time magazine.

If UCB’s school of Journalism can’t get hate man to teach there, perhaps they could get Hawthorne to do one guest lecture per semester? Hate man prefers to be outdoors and it is not unprecedented for some UCB classes to be held outside (like perhaps at People’s Park?).

How is that fair and balance act working out for Rupert Murdoch? Maybe if we learned how to do Journalism Fox style, we could wind up driving a Mercedes Benz? Don’t they always put their best sly digs in the form of a question?

Is it true that Rupert Murdoch is trying to buy a major league baseball team and get the town fathers in Foxboro Massachusetts to build a stadium to serve as home for such an enterprise? Could they call such a stadium “The Hen House”?

Could anyone convince the Los Angeles Board of Supervisors to build a brand new football stadium on county owned land in Marina del Rey and let a football team move in for little or no rent? Isn’t Los Angeles the biggest metropolitan area without a major football team? Shouldn’t the board be happy to build a stadium and make loans that can then sit abandoned? Where are the Brookly Dodgers Football team playing these days?

Whatever happened to the pro football teams that used to play in the Los Angeles area?
Is there a C&W song titled “You’ve got a cash register heart”? If not; why not?

Isn’t the University of California Berkeley renovating their football stadium? Aren’t college football games always played on Saturdays and aren’t pro football games always played on Sundays?

If the Berkeley Downtown Business Association really wants to bring shoppers and travelers to their town, why don’t they float a bond issue, take over management of the UCB football stadium and give the Raiders a better deal than a loan that doesn’t have to be paid back? They could pay the Raiders gigantic bonus to move a few miles north and become the Berkeley Raiders!

If Monterey can be world famous as the town where one writer (John Steinbeck) use to live and if Key West Florida can hold an annual Hemingway Days series of events because just one writer used to live in their community, then why don’t book readers from all over the world flock to Berkeley where Ursula K. LeGuinn was born, and Philip K. Dick, Alan Ginsberg, and Jack Kerouac used to live?

Since the Mediterraneum was open when Dick, Ginsberg, and Kerouac all lived in Berkeley, isn’t it natural to wonder if they ever had a brief chat there?

Charles Dickens, when he came to the United States to visit, made a particular point of going to visit Lowell Massachusetts because of its literary heritage because a famous magazine had been published there. That was years before Jack Kerouac’s father brought his family to that town. Isn’t the Berkeley Barb mentioned repeatedly in “Smoking Typewriters,” which is about the history of underground newspapers in the USA?

Last fall, when the high school finalists in the freedom of speech essay contest read their winning entries didn’t it get coverage on the TV networks by holding the event on the Mario Savio steps at the Sproul Plaza area of UCB?

Doesn’t the guy who runs the Daily Kos website for liberal online commentary live in Berkeley?

Is there a DBA suggestion box for ways to bring attention to Berkeley?

If the Journalism students at UCB were to produce a TV show all about Berkeley every day, wouldn’t it be quite likely that in this era of “low cost is no cost” broadcasting if they offered such a product to a cable TV company gratis, they would take it and offer it to viewers all over the world? (Fox seems to be ubiquitous in Australia. Lottsa sports.) Wouldn’t that be a career boost for the participating students and wouldn’t that win the DBA seal of approval?

Doesn’t Kalgoorlie, in Western Australia, lure visitors from all over the world with just one word? Gold! How far from Berkeley is Sutter’s Mill?

[Note: It was a challenge to find a way to illustrate this column. We used material from an abandoned photo project titled “On the road with a copy of ‘On the Road.’” Since Berkeley is specifically mentioned in “The Dharma Bums,” that might have been a better choice, but the photo editor had to go with what was available.]

National columnists’ Day is rapidly approaching and the World’s Laziest Journalist intends to write a column for the occasion about a fellow who was born in Berkeley (about a hundred years ago) and became one of the Bay Area’s top contenders for the right to call himself “Mr. San Francisco.” UCB has the Hearst School of Journalism and that particular Berkeley rascal was personally fired by William Randolph Hearst . . . twice. That notorious columnist might provide the basis for one installment of the aforementioned hypothetical student TV show “Berkeley Tonight” (or whatever).

Didn’t the Sixties officially start (in Berkeley) when Mario Savio said: “There’s a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious—makes you so sick at heart—that you can’t take part. You can’t even passively take part. And you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop. And you’ve got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it that unless you’re free, the machine will be prevented from working at all.” [Can you believe that that quote is not in Bartlett’s?]

Now the disk jockey will play Janice Joplin’s “Oh, dear Lord,” Ry Cooder’s “Crazy ‘Bout an Automobile (Every Woman I Know),” and Woody Gutheris’s “Go For a Ride in the Car, car.” Speaking of cars, we have to celebrate this weekend by watching “Rebel without a Cause” one more time. Have a “See the USA in your Chevrolet” type week.

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