Columns

A Glow of Hope in a Dark Time

During a weekly visit to the Chavez-Huerta Memorial—perched atop a summit at the Berkeley Marina—Santiago Casal found a votive candle left in front of the site's iconic "HOPE" stone.

A hand-written message taped to the outside of the container read: "For those who have lost, are suffering, and in memory of 300,000 people who died of covid-19. We remember you. Love."

Have an Xfinity Xmas

For the holidays, Xfinity has hired Steve Carrell to play an "overbearing, stress-eating, stay-at-home Santa" in a TV ad called "The Greatest Gift." In the video, Santa's elves save the day by filling empty gift boxes with "The Little Things" that count — "the smell of grandma's cooking," "grandpa's same old stories," and "family snowball fights."

But Xfinity's radio spots are not so jolly. They begin by conjuring familiar images of families gathering to share holiday memories but then listeners are warned that they'd better be prepared to increase their Internet speeds so that everyone can watch the day's football broadcasts and download their favorite holiday movie classics. And, of course, if your extended family includes children "who are gamers," make sure to expand your bandwidth so the young ones can go online and gun down avatars "to their hearts' content."

What a strange, isolating message: Gather everyone together under one roof so that each individual can feed their addiction to computer games, sports events, and social messaging. Not a word was heard about sharing thoughts in actual human conversation. Instead, the holiday becomes a hollow day with everyone in the family masking themselves behind glowing screens while practicing "anti-social distancing."

Karmic Strips

Covid-19 seems to be everywhere these days—except in the nation's comic strips.

Peanuts and the weekly Doonesbury strips can be excused—they're re-runs. But most panels still feature lots of unmasked characters crammed inside lots of tiny, crowded panels. So, here's a salute to the few who have set a good example. In recent weeks, masks have popped up in the panels of Foxtrot, Lio, and Candorville.

Politics in Strange Places

A special elbow bump goes out to Darrin Bell's Candorville comic strip for daring to wade into the turbulent waters of post-election politics. 

In his December 14 episode, Bell's alter-ego, journalist Lamont Brown, calls Joe Biden's transition team to protest the nomination of retired Army Gen. Lloyd Austin as Secretary of Defense. Lamont points out that "Mr. Biden will be ignoring the same law Trump ignored four years ago." 

Austin, a former commander of the US Central Command, should be ineligible to serve in a position traditionally filled by a civilian. By law, Austin should not be offered the DoD post until he has been retired from the military for seven years. (Donald Trump won an exemption to install former general Jim Mattis as Defense Secretary even though Mattis had only been out of uniform for a few years.) 

Austin's real disqualifier, however, should be the fact that he left the Pentagon to serve on the board of Raytheon, one of the Pentagon's largest weapons manufacturers. (This year, Raytheon won a $20 billion contract to build nuclear-armed Cruise missiles at the same time it was shipping billions of dollars of weapons to despotic regimes in the Middle East.) 

Appointing an arms promoter to lead the Pentagon would create a profound "conflict of interest" since Raytheon profiteer Austin has clearly demonstrated that he has "an interest in conflict." 

Comic Quips re POTUS Quits 

Will he or won't he? Will Donald Trump and his awful offal orifice peacefully exit the Oval Office or will he dig in and dare the Deep State to dig him out? 

According to CNN: "In his moments of deepest denial, Trump has told some advisers that he will refuse to leave the White House on Inauguration Day" but in a New York essay, Jonathan Chait predicts: "Even the scholars who expressed the deepest fears of Trump's intentions to undermine the system did not put credence in the possibility he could defy the outcome by simply refusing to leave." 

If Trump opts to overstay his tenancy (more likely now that his potential Mar-a-Lago neighbors are objecting to the idea of Trump and his kin resettling in the neighborhood), the Oracle Prize for Political Prognostication would not go to the pundits but would be handed to comedian Bill Maher who has been predicting Trump's Last Stand since April 13, 2018. Maher nailed it—over and over, again and again—building his case that Donald Trump will not willingly emerge from the depths of the White House bunker. 

(Fun facts: The White House boasts six floors, 132 rooms, 35 bathrooms, 412 doors, 147 windows, 28 fireplaces, 8 staircases, 3 elevators and one bomb-proof bunker buried five stories below ground.) 

Media for the Masses? Reich On!  

It troubles UC Berkeley economics professor (and MoveOn.org Media Mensch) Robert Reich that "eight of the top ten most popular posts on Facebook were created by far-right extremists—including Donald Trump, Ben Shapiro, and Franklin Graham." But Reich was more than ready to stand up to these Orators of the Oligarchy. Armed with little more than a video camera, a Sharpie, a paper easel, and a profound knowledge of monetized political gamesmanship, Reich has created his own antidote to Big Right's media-inoculations of feverish lies and contagious conspiracies. 

Reich's Inequality Media has now become a titan of gut-honest online economic education. As Reich proudly notes: "Our videos and posts are shared seven times more than Sean Hannity's, our Facebook page receives 15 times more engagement per post than Ben Shapiro, and our videos have been viewed more than 440 million times." If you'd like to increase the spread on those stats or haven't yet checked out Inequality Media (not the best working title, by my reckoning), have a look at Reich's latest video. 

Chron Blows the Pentagon's Cover: Kudos, Kiddos! 

Speaking of Berkeley profs, President-elect Joe Biden has just announced he has chosen a second UCB professor to join his cabinet. First was economics prof (and former Federal Reserve chief) Janet Yellen who was tapped to serve as Treasury Secretary and now, UC Public Policy prof (and former two-term Michigan governor) Jennifer Granholm has been named to serve as Energy Secretary. 

In the course of reporting on Granholm's selection, the San Francisco Chronicle revealed one of the US government's Big Lies. While the Department of Energy is typically associated with All Things Carbon—oil, gas, coal, and fracking (with a touch of wind, solar and geothermal)—the Chron laid out the truth in the first paragraphs of its December 17 news report when it noted that Granholm's expertise includes renewable energy systems while the Department of Energy's main focus is "maintaining the nation's stockpile of nuclear weapons." (And, the Chronicle could have added, "the nation's stockpile of aging nuclear reactors.") 

Global Warming Threatens to Detonate Pentagon's Ammo 

Need another good reason to cool the planet's carbon-induced fevers? 

December 23 marks the first anniversary of the publication of a Scientific American article that warned rising temperatures in the Middle East could lead to "instability and possible unplanned detonations" of US ammunition and explosives stored in countries under US military occupation. Bombs and bullets stockpiled at scores of US bases in Iraq and Syria (as well as bases in Afghanistan and on the African continent) are increasingly vulnerable to "intense heat [that] can weaken munition's structural integrity," causing "thermal expansion" that can trigger massive detonations. 

The Center for Climate and Security reports that "heat-related detonations are 60% more likely in ammunition depots between late April and mid-September." 

Temperatures are rising around the planet but countries in the Middle East—where summer temperatures routinely top 113 degrees Fahrenheit—are especially at risk. 

It's not a theoretical danger. In June 2018, an arms depot in Iraq exploded, sending bullets, artillery shells, and rockets flying in all directions. A year later, another blast lit up an Iraqi arms deport and destroyed millions of dollars worth of US ammo. In the summer of 2019, at least half a dozen munitions depots were destroyed in heat-triggered explosions. The problem has become so common that it now has an official Pentagon abbreviation—UEMS, for "unplanned explosions at munitions sites." 

A Covid Relief Plan to "Flatten the Curve" 

Despite the constantly soaring numbers of infected and dying victims of Covid-19, too many Americans are failing to adopt habits that would "flatten the curve" of the raging pandemic. Instead of flattening the curve, we find ourselves "fattening the curve." 

If Washington's new leaders really want to end the spread of Covid-19, they might consider sending every American $1,000 a week on the sole condition that we simply stay home and practice sensible hygiene for two months.
Black in the USSR 

Here's something to watch: a 25-minute documentary from RT, the Russian news service, that reveals a surprising piece of unknown history—the stories of African-Americans who moved to USSR in the 30s to escape poverty and institutional racism in the USA. 

Musk Versus Mars 

Tesla titan and Space X CEO Elon Musk is pushing an out-of-this-world project to drop 10,000 nuclear bombs on Mars to, as he puts it, “transform [Mars] into an Earth-like planet.” 

According to Business Insider, Musk believes that nuking the planet's icy poles “will help warm the planet and make it more hospitable for human life.” Musk posits that the massive explosions would “vaporize a fair chunk of Mars’ ice caps, liberating enough water vapor and carbon dioxide—both potent greenhouse gases—to warm up the planet substantially . . . .” 

The plan has a couple of faults. First, Musk's atomic arsenal would need to be shuffled across more than 34 million miles of space—a journey of seven months. The transport would require 1,000 of Musk's Starships. (Yep. Like the one that recently blew up on landing.) Oh, and the Musk bombing would leave Mars radioactive. 

But Musk remains characteristically cheeky, promoting the project by selling SpaceX T-shirts flaunting the slogan “Nuke Mars.” 

Here's hoping Musk puts his Nuclear Musket aside long enough to read a recent article in Universe Today that reports “a NASA-sponsored MIT think-tank has weighed up the future energy needs of a manned settlement on Mars and arrived at an interesting conclusion…solar arrays might function just as well, if not better, than the nuclear options.” 

Weird Work If You Can Find It 

An unsolicited voicemail left by a caller named "Neil," announced that I was targeted as a business that might be interested in the services of 4dollarstaffing.com. (Note: If you click on this url, you might get an alert that the website "may be impersonating '4dallarstaffing.com' to steal your personal or financial information.") According to "Neil," I could expand my staff by paying 4dollars' workers a record-setting sub-basement wage of "$3.90 an hour." Neil promised that 4dollar's hirelings could do it all: "real estate, medical, law, retail, and social media"—these tasks could all be tackled by "low-cost, outsourced" workers. 

Looking for a second opinion, I found that the Trusted website, gives 4dollar a "low" trust rating, flags it as a "risky" site, and reports the five-year-old site was Born in the USA but is "possibly located in Pakistan." 

My first thought when I heard the proposal was: "human trafficking?" 

But then I came across a Webpage for a company called DollarsStaffing.com that has a different take on the Employee Search challenge. It seems as though the search firm applies an hourly finders' fee for its job-matching services. As DollarStaffing puts it: "A dollar an hour from both the employer and the employee makes the difference in addressing the current industry challenges and helps the customers identify the best." 

Sounds like hiring a wedding arranger to match a groom and a bride—except the fee continues to be collected on an hourly basis for the duration of the marriage. 

Peace Heroes Revisited 

In the previous column, a salute to the "78 Peace Heroes Who Voted Against the Pentagon Budget," missed one of the heroes. Apologies to Squad member Ayanna Pressley (D-MA) whose name was inadvertently left off the previously posted roster of Peace Heroes. 

As a follow-up, here's a list of senators who subsequently voted "No" on the massive S.4049 war-funding bill. 

According to the US Senate Roll Call, 84 Senators voted for the massive package while 13 cast a “Nay” vote. The Senators who voted against the huge transfer of wealth to the military included seven Republicans, five Democrats, and one Independent. Dianne Feinstein voted for the Pentagon bill. Kamala Harris was one of three senators who failed to cast a vote. 

A List of Senate War Resisters 

Cory Booker [D] New Jersey 

Mike Braun [R] Indiana 

Tom Cotton [R] Arkansas 

Ted Cruz [R] Texas 

Josh Hawley [R] Missouri 

John Kennedy [R] Louisiana 

Mike Lee [R] Utah 

Ed Markey [D] Massachusetts 

Jeff Merkley [D] Oregon 

Rand Paul [R] Kentucky 

Bernie Sanders [I] Vermont 

Elizabeth Warren [D] Massachusetts 

Ron Wyden [D] Oregon 

Not voting: Lindsey Graham [R] South Carolina, Kamala Harris [D] California, and Mike Rounds [R] South Dakota 

Silent Right by The Founders Sing