Columns

If License Plates Could Talk (Note: They Can!)

I recently spotted a car parked in front of the Berkeley Main Post Office with a license plate that read: LIFELIB. The driver returned from his visit to the PO as I was snapping a photo of his fashionable plate.

"Yes I'm a lifelong Libertarian," he confessed. And then he asked if I knew about Daniel Nussbaum's 1993 book, PL8SPK, published by Harper Collins. Turns out, I was already an admirer of Nussbaum's Platespeak, a 93-page book that retold classic tales (like Romeo and Juliette) using only quirky personalized license plates registered with California's Department of Motor Vehicles. Here are two examples:

The story of the Garden of Eden in Platespeak

'EVENADM CHOWDWN THAT TABOO SNACK
'YIIIKES' THEY SAY.
'LOOKITU! LOOKAME! GOGETA FIG LEAF.'
And here's the fable of 'The Emperor's New Clothes' (where no one has the nerve to point out the ruler's nakedness):
'CHEERZ ECHO THRU THEGREAT CAPITAL.
'LKNGUD EMP' 'WAYKUL ENSEMBL'
'FITS POIFEKT'' 

A Positive Earth Day Message 

My friend Kat, a long-time Berkeley resident who lives on a boat berthed at the Berkeley Marina, dropped a few words into the Earth Day email swirl that I'd like to share. 

I had a Dream: That there will be a million-child-march on Washington with all red-brown-yellow-black-and-white holding hand-in-hand to melt the calcified souls of those white boys in Congress... Hold on Greta! Enshallah 

Kudos and salutes to Captain Kat—Bay dreamer, poet-afloat, sail sister, rapt capt, and diva of the dock. 

A Darker Earth Day Message 

One has to wonder why this passionate plea by David Attenborough—one of the natural world's most informed and passionate defenders—has never been aired by any US television network. Attenborough's dire warning was first shared with the United Nations community in February. 

A Brighter Earth Day Message 

The Story Behind TIME Magazine's Earth Day Cover 

Malaysian artist Red Hong Yi and a six-person crew devoted two weeks constructing a 7.5 x 10-foot world map out of 50,000 green-tipped matchsticks. Then, she used torches to set the artwork alight, creating a cover image that communicates how the global climate crisis affects us all. Here's a video that records both the inspiration and the incineration. 

TIME: It Is A-Changin' 

A full-page ad on page 58 of TIME Magazine's Earth Day issue displayed a surprising announcement. As of April 19, TIME began offering subscriptions paid in cryptocurrency. [The concept of Non-Fungible Trokens is so new, Spellcheck flagged "cryptocurrency" as misspelled. And what is a NFT? According to Google: "A non-fungible token is a unit of data stored on a digital ledger, called a blockchain, that certifies a digital asset to be unique and therefore not interchangeable." 

According to Investopedia, leading cryptocurrencies include: Bitcoin Cash, Altcoin, Peercoin, Ethereum, Litecoin, Cardano, Polkadot, Stellar (XLM), Chainlink, Binance Coin (BNB), Tether (USDT), Monero (EMR) 

Words the Justice Department Lives By 

There seems to be a lingering uncertainty about how to properly translate the historic motto of the US Justice Department—Qui pro domina justitia sequitur. Given my poor Latin, the phrase appeared to say something like: "If you want to dominate, first apply the law." Not even close. 

According to the Department of Justice itself: Qui pro domina justitia sequitur could mean any of the following: "Who for Lady Justice strives," "Who prosecutes for Justice," "Who sues for the Lady Justice," "Who strives after justice for the sovereign," "Who prosecutes on behalf of the sovereign power," "Who follows justice as his mistress," "Who follows justice for a mistress." 

Apparently, the ancient Greeks had a thing for mistresses. 

Words that the Pentagon Is Prepared to Die By 

On April 20, Russia's Sputnik News shared an alarming story regarding the United States Strategic Command (STRATCOM), which oversees the US nuclear arsenal, air defenses, and space forces. STRATCOM is the agency assigned to launch US nuclear missiles. 

Sputnik reports: "STRATCOM has once again terrified its Twitter followers, this time by posting a late-night, context-free tweet previewing its nuclear posture update: 

“#USSTRATCOM Posture Review Preview: The spectrum of conflict today is neither linear nor predictable. We must account for the possibility of conflict leading to conditions which could very rapidly drive an adversary to consider nuclear use as their least bad option.” [Emphasis added.] 

Military-speak and Pentagonese are notoriously opaque pseudo-languages but, even by the standards of jug-head jargon, referring to world-ending nuclear war as a "least bad option," should trigger an immediate Congressional investigation. 

The Baton and the Shield 

The Daily Kos writes: "the unchecked power of police unions is one of the biggest obstacles to police accountability in this country. Derek Chauvin had multiple use-of-force complaints against him before he murdered George Floyd, and was shielded from consequences for years. Kim Potter—the Brooklyn Center police officer who killed Daunte Wright—is a former police union president who previously instructed officers who had shot and killed a man to deactivate their body cams." 

Fix SAPD, a citizens' group in in San Antonio, Texas, is pushing legislation that would rein in the local police union and give the community a larger role in contract talks and policymaking.  

Unlike other public employees, most police are not held accountable for misdeeds. Instead, the police union oversees all "disciplinary procedures" involving union members. Under San Antonio's current contract: 

• Officers must have at least 48 hours notice before being questioned
• Accused officers can review the evidence against them before being interviewed
• Past disciplinary actions are not considered
• 180 days after alleged incidents occur, they are wiped from an officer's record
• Non-police oversight is only "advisory" and non-binding

If San Antonio's Proposition B succeeds, it could serve as a national example of how communities can reassert community control over local police departments. 

Will Killer Cop's Cohorts Face Judge or Jail? 

Derek Chauvin wasn't the only police officer on the scene the day George Floyd was murdered. There were three other officers standing by and protecting Chauvin while an angry, frightened crowd shouted and begged the officer to remove his knee from Floyd's neck and allow him to breathe. 

Now that Chauvin stands convicted of three counts of homicide, his fellow officers are facing complicity charges for "aiding and abetting" Chauvin's lethal actions. 

Ironically, two of the three co-defendants are "cops of color"—officer J. Alexander Kueng is African-American and Tou Thao is Hmong-American. 

One line of defense would be to claim the officers failed to take action owing to the "bystander effect." But this excuse is unpersuasive since there was an active crowd of civilian "bystanders" on the scene actively begging the officers to stop the assault on George Floyd. 

It's possible that defense attorneys may resort to an ironic defense: claiming that Kueng and Thao were themselves victims of "racism"—that they felt compelled to defer to the actions of a white officer who was also their superior. There's also the "Thin Blue Line" defense. As former police officer Rosa Brooks noted in Politico: "For cops, backing up fellow officers is akin to a sacrament, and apparent group disloyalty is a quick route to ostracism." But this can be overcome, Brooks insists, by training police to learn "effective intervention" skills. 

Tone Down the Rhetoric  

On April 22, a sheriff's deputy in North Carolina shot and killed an unarmed 42-year-old man when he attempted to drive away from his family home. The police were reportedly sent to Andrew Brown, Jr.'s home "to execute a search warrant." 

I don't know how much this might influence future encounters, but how about replacing the phrase "execute a search warrant" with "serve a search warrant"? 

So Why, Then, Are They Called Assault Rifles?  

The reason we need to ban assault rifles can be found in the very name of the weapon: "Assault." 

These are not defensive weapons — they are tools of mass-murder. 

As of April 21, there had been 147 mass-shootings in US cities in 2021. Around 45 of these mass shootings occurred within the past month. 

The Senate's Feinstein-Cicilline Assault Weapons Ban would outlaw the sale, transfer, manufacture, and importation of military-style assault weapons and high-capacity ammunition magazines. You can sign on to support the Assault Weapons Ban bill by clicking here. 

Abe and Ike Both Feared the MIC 

In his Farewell Address in 1961, out-going president Dwight D. Eisenhower famously voiced his concern about the growing power of the Military-Industrial Complex and spoke eloquently about how unrestrained militarism would leave more Americans unhoused, unfed, uneducated, and unemployed. Here is a clip: 

It turns out that "Ike" was not the only Republican president to express alarm over the growing political power of the US arms industry. 

Veterans for Peace activist Buzz Davis has forwarded a little-known presidential letter in which Abe Lincoln confesses to a friend that his greatest fear was the growing power of the corporations that proliferated and profited during the Civil War.  

Davis notes with irony that "Old Honest Abe, the cabin dweller, was actually one of the nation's most powerful lawyers." [Lincoln actually worked for the Illinois Central Railroad, one of the country's largest railroad monopolies.] "My guess is he knew what was going on before the Civil War with corporations—and what happened during the war scared him as it does so many of us today." 

Here is what President Lincoln had to say in a letter to Col. William F. Elkins, written on November 21, 1864: 

“We may congratulate ourselves that this cruel war is nearing its end. It has cost a vast amount of treasure and blood. . . .
“It has indeed been a trying hour for the Republic; but I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country. As a result of the war, corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed.
“I feel at this moment more anxiety for the safety of my country than ever before, even in the midst of war.
“God grant that my suspicions may prove groundless.” 

Make No Mustake 

I used to be a big Elon Musk fan. After all, he boldly pioneered the mass-production of electric cars and was one of the first to warn that Artificial Intelligence would destroy human civilization (but today, he's heavily invested in AI). 

Now Musk is busy launching thousands of Starlink 5G communications satellites into Earth orbit and boasting that he's ready to "Nuke Mars" to melt the planet's polar ice and make the Red Planet more habitable for human settlement! 

Wouldn't it be a better challenge to work for solutions to prevent the collapse of our own planet's ecosphere? Instead, Musk is busy coveting Mars. 

These days, I find myself wishing Musk would just launch himself to the moon and move into some luxuriously loony, lunar "pad" for the rest of eternity. 

Earth Day 2021: Survival or Collapse? The Odds Are Equal