This was a week of national news that ties in close to home.

As I write the voting rights bills look to be dead, thanks to Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin leaving gerrymandering and voter suppression alive and well. Closer to home, the Berkeley Independent Redistricting Commission met last Monday, January 10^th.

Berkeley, just like the rest of the country, is looking at the fallout from the 2020 Census population changes and redrawing voting district boundaries to equalize population. We had until November 15, 2021 to submit redistricting maps for Berkeley City Council districts, and I’ve been flipping back and forth among the 29 submitted maps until I feel dizzy. https://redistricting-commission-berkeley.hub.arcgis.com/ And, even though I attended the Monday meeting, I watched the video again before writing just to make sure I am accurate in my comments.

By January 20^th , staff with three commissioners will create or choose five maps, using the following criteria for every map:

1. Prioritize communities of interest (neighborhoods),
2. Follow major thoroughfares,
3. Correct accommodations for councilmembers (in the current map from 2010 there is a bulb out in District 4 north of Cedar-Arreguin and another in District 7 east of Telegraph to Hillegass-Worthington),
4. include a student district.

The commission requested that the five maps include a map with a West Berkeley district, a map with two student districts, and a map that aligns with the topography of the hills/fire zones/transit areas. Other considerations: a map that is more representative and diverse and a map with minor changes recognizing neighborhoods. -more-

Worth Noting:

The week starts with a virtual Breakfast at 9 am Monday to celebrate Martin Luther King Jr.

Tuesday at 6 pm City Council returns from recess for the first regular council meeting of 2022.

Wednesday is filled with 11 city meetings. FITES at 2:30 reviews update to Landscape policy to include native plants. Planning Commission at 7 pm agendized hearing is a condo conversion. The Civic Arts Commission and Commission on the Status of Women meet at 6 pm. The Health, Welfare & Community Action meets at 6:30 pm. The Commission on Labor meets at 7 pm.

Thursday is filled with 7 city meetings. The Land Use Committee meets at 10:30 am on streamlining toxic remediation in the manufacturing district. At 6 pm Council has a special meeting on infrastructure while NICJR conducts a Community Public Safety meeting for Districts 3 & 4. The Transportation Commission meets at 7 pm on Southside Streets and BerkDOT. The Rent Board and DRC also meet at 7 pm.



The January 25 City Council regular meeting agenda is available for review and comment.

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The modern concept of "race" seems to rise above the cultural structures by which society organizes itself. Though that privilege was called in question by the suggestion that "race" is a “social construct,” it still remains to articulate the structure of that construct? For instance, the issue of whether "race" is a noun or a verb has still to be debated. As a verb, it is an avatar for “to racialize,” which refers to what one group of people does to others. And that suggests that "race" cannot be understood apart from its history. -more-

On Jan. 11, 2002 leaflets were dropped by the U.S. Military offering rewards to Afghani and Pakistanis to identify suspected terrorists. The locals wishing to settle scores or accept generous bounties were only too willing to oblige. Hundreds were scooped up by local militia men and delivered to U.S. forces. Bush and Cheney were thrilled at the remarkable “success” of the program. What followed was a dark period in which the U.S. Military and CIA descended into the most barbaric forms of torture to extract “confessions” using "ticking time bomb" scenarios dramatized on the television show "24." The prisoners were sent to black torture sites to soften them up for “confessions” to satisfy US domestic anger following the 9/11 attacks. Prisoners ended up in Gitmo where many continue to languish. None of the prisoners were ever charged with a crime. They were identified as “enemy combatants” and unprotected from habeas corpus. A few were designated “forever prisoners” lest they share the horrors of their internment to the general public which would further erode U.S. standing in the world and make a complete mockery of our claim to be a moral force for good. Successive military commissions found no evidence of crimes committed and were profoundly disturbed by the total absence of any form of jurisprudence. -more-

The Right to Vote Should Not Be a Partisan Issue

Public Citizen notes that the Voting Rights Act (VRA), which was initially passed in 1965 during the height of the Civil Rights movement, was successfully reauthorized in 1970, 1975, 1982, 1985, and 2006. Each vote in support of protecting the ballot received overwhelming bipartisan support. Each extension of the VRA was signed into law by a Republican president. Furthermore, 16 Republican senators and congressmembers who supported the VRA in the past are still serving in the US Senate—where they are now refusing to reaffirm their support of a healthy democracy.

Here are their names: Sen. Marsha Blackburn (Tennessee), Sen. Roy Blunt (Missouri), Sen. John Boozman (Arkansas), Sen. Richard Burr (North Carolina), Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (West Virginia), Sen. Susan Collins (Maine), Sen. John Cornyn (Texas), Sen. Mike Crapo (Idaho), Sen. Lindsey Graham (South Carolina), Sen. Chuck Grassley (Iowa), Sen. Jim Inhofe (Oklahoma), Sen. Mitch McConnell (Kentucky), Sen. Jerry Moran (Kansas), Sen. Richard Shelby (Alabama), Sen. John Thune (South Dakota).

Click here to remind these senators that they once recognized the importance of voting rights and it's time to put "democracy before party."

How to Improve Political Dialog

One of the biggest political/legal issues in the country today involves protecting the freedom to vote. But you wouldn't know it by visiting Sen. Dianne Feinstein's online comments page.

Because there is no standard guideline for submitting comments to our elected reps, senators and congressmembers are free to create their own list of "fave" topic options. In Feinstein's case, there are 29 topics—including "animals," "trade," and "housing"—but there is no option for "voting." The closest topic I could find was "Homeland Security." -more-

My Lords, I, too, congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Alton, on securing this important debate on the root causes—I emphasise “root causes”—of conflicts that lead to the displacement of millions of people around the world. -more-

Taking an antipsychotic is not easy. People who lack firsthand or secondhand knowledge of this invariably will not understand it. It may seem as though mentally ill people are just sick people, and any differences from what is accepted as normal are just because we are sick. However, when someone has a psychotic disorder and must take antipsychotics, many of the problems we face, and the externally observable differences, are due to the medication and not just the psychiatric condition. -more-

If you want everyone to get vaccinated

Just enact and widely publicize a policy

That hospitals will no longer treat

The unvaccinated.



If people choose not to get the protection

of the vaccination

Why should we save them?

They chose freely to eschew safety.



They assert the freedom to not get vaccinated

There is no freedom to sicken or kill other people. -more-

Although I’ve lived in the Bay Area for years, I’d thought today’s pressures to build lots of housing at any cost were unprecedented. I also thought our region’s spectacular parkland and green space just somehow “happened,” through wisdom and consensus.

Wrong on both counts, as I learned by watching Nancy Kelly and Kenji Yamamoto’s jaw-dropping and inspiring 2019 PBS documentary Rebels with a Cause. Produced for the North Bay’s KRCB, it’s currently free online here, where it’s well worth an hour’s viewing.

Spanning the 1960s through the early ‘70s, the film shows how visionary activists, legislators, lawyers, and meeting-crashers fought and won hard battles to preserve the Marin County parkland and agricultural open space we now enjoy – along with the Golden Gate National Recreation Area (GGNRA) that rings San Francisco’s coastline and the Marin Headlands.

The jaw-dropping parts cover our region’s alternative future – one we wouldn’t want to live in. To flesh this out, I’ve added some details from 2014’s Bay Area: What Might Have Been website (archived here), from other online sources, and from a conversation with Greenbelt Alliance’s former executive director, Larry Orman. -more-

Thirty years ago January 9th, 1992, my phone rang early in the morning. A male voice said the next morning I had to be in Oakland Superior Court giving me a room number and a time. I thanked the voice for letting me know. I put down the phone, baffled. It rang again a few seconds later. My fellow activist David Nadel said, “did you just get a strange phone call?” I said yes. He said Bob Sparks had gotten the same call. We arranged to carpool to the Oakland Superior Court in his pale green pickup.

I’m not sure how, but when we arrived together the next morning we had a full complement of the very best civil rights lawyers there to help. Osha Neumann, Jim Chanin, David Beauvais, and Dennis Cunningham were all there flipping through pages they were seeing for the first time of whatever was going on. David, Bob, and I had worked hard to speak up for People's Park, but were part of a huge movement and had no clue what this was about.

David and I had no criminal history. I’m not sure about Bob Sparks, who had worked for years as a housing activist trying to challenge Berkeley’s nascent “just house the rich” policy which worked so well for the wealthy and the politicians. We all knew each other in a peripheral way. But this was not a club I belonged to, or an organization I had joined. We were just swept up together in this civil suit along with someone else I had never met before named Michael Lee.

Our lawyers flipped furiously through the pages and at one point Jim Chanin said David and I should leave, that we had not been served, and until we were served we should leave so that the unexpected convention of lawyers assembled could have a bit more time to research what we were being charged with and what was going on. -more-

Israel is rapidly descending into a pariah state following its appalling crimes against indigenous Palestinians. B’Tselem, the Israeli human rights organization, reports Israel killed 313 Palestinians last Year including 313 minors, demolished 300 residential structures and imprisoned scores of Palestinians without trial. It was the deadliest year for Palestinians since 2014. -more-

The return to city meetings from the winter break was slow with a mostly quiet week. The secretary for the Public Works Commission did not get the agenda posted or at least functionally posted to meet the 72-hour notice requirement. The Public Works Commission meeting was canceled and rescheduled for this coming week and the agenda is still not posted. In fact, the agenda for the Public Works Commission has always been held to the last minute for all the years I have been pulling together the Activist’s Calendar. -more-

An inherent political corruption in our system

The brand name emblazoned on our system of governance is “the republic." It is a system of periodic elections for legislators and top administrators who, once elected, are said to represent their electorate. There have been times when the elected have actually represented the people who elected them. But not many.

Why is that failure so familiar? Why is it so normal to see elected representatives go their own way, regardless of the needs to their constituents? Sometimes, there is real corruption, involving back room deals and money changing hands. But most often, the failure is owing to a mythological structure called “representationism.” It requires that people see what officials do as "representing" the people, though they clearly do not. It is an ideological disguise that hides the ethical pollution (rather than corruption) to which political proposals or actions fall prey. The notion of ethical "pollution" signifies that each enactment includes counteractions that neutralize it. That happens, for instance, when proposals get bogged down in procedures, so that the means prevent themselves from arriving at their proposed ends. -more-

Rich countries continue trying to achieve herd immunity by vaccinating a majority of their populations only to find new strains of the virus mutating in unprotected poorer countries. -more-

I'll preface this response to your recent piece with professing ignorance. Since I haven't traveled to Israel, I lack knowledge of any actual events taking place or that have taken place. -more-

Editor's Note: The latest issue of the Pepper Spray Times is now available.

You can view it absolutely free of charge by clicking here . You can print it out to give to your friends.

Grace Underpressure has been producing it for many years now, even before the Berkeley Daily Planet started distributing it, most of the time without being paid, and now we'd like you to show your appreciation by using the button below to send her money.

This is a Very Good Deal. Go for it! -more-

As we begin 2022, we're not lacking for challenges. There's the pandemic, climate change, economic turbulence, and political instability. A year after January 6, 2021, I had hoped that some of these challenges would disappear. That the United States would acquire "herd immunity" and the threat of coronavirus would recede. That Republicans would accept that Joe Biden was lawfully elected President and those responsible for the January 6th insurrection were traitorous criminals. Sadly all of these challenges continue. -more-

Chronic Puns

The San Francisco Chronicle got 2022 off to a snappy start with one of its classic headline puns. The January 2 edition included a page-one report on how COVID masking conflicts were exercising exercise emporiums. The headline read: "Gyms worry masks won't work out."

Fashion Plates

If Harry Potter owned a car, it would probably be a Tesla. With that in mind, I was entranced to encounter a parked Tesla sporting a license plate that read: DSAPAR8.

It took some Googling to sleuth-out the hidden message but I finally discovered that "disapparate" is a word created by J. K. Rowling to signify teleportation. According to the Wiktionary website, "in derived usage, it often means just to disappear completely"—usually with the wave of a wand. Which is pretty close to what would happen if you floored a Tesla's electron-pedal and bolted from zero to 60 mph in less than two seconds. -more-

In modern day society in the U.S., with our level of technology, medicine, and economic opportunity, government and citizens are obliged by common ethics to take care of those who could not survive on our own in the absence of economic and other help. -more-

The Republican Party's brand has become toxic as the GOP remains shackled to Donald Trump, too afraid to speak out against him for fear of alienating Trump’s base. -more-

Does psychosis take a break when you're kissing someone? Does depression take a break when you are eating a fresh, crisp, yummy apple? Does Mania take a break when you are stuffing your face with turkey or ham? Do psychotic symptoms take time off for Hanukkah, Christmas, or New Year's? --when you're playing badminton with a friend? --when you're on a hike in the hills? -more-

Worth Noting:

Monday the Agenda Committee meets at 2:30 pm to review the draft agenda for the January 25 City Council regular meeting. The 4:30 pm Council meeting is meeting to fulfill the requirement to vote on the resolution to continue virtual meetings during the pandemic emergency. The Youth Commission meets at 5 pm.

Tuesday the 4 x 4 Joint Task Force (Rent Board and Council) meets at 3 pm. The Mental Health Subcommittee on Santa Rita meets at 4 pm.

Wednesday at 5 pm will be the last meeting of CEAC before merging with the Energy Commission into the new “Climate and Environment Commission.” The Disability Commission is scheduled for 6 pm, however, the agenda could not be opened for review. The Homeless Commission and the Police Accountability Board both meet at 7 pm.

Thursday the Zoning Adjustment Board and Public works Commission meet at 7 pm. The Public Works Commission had to be rescheduled, because the agenda was not posted for the regular meeting. The Commission secretary is to post the agenda on Monday to meet the 72 hour posting requirement. There is a free 8 week quit smoking class that requires pre-registration (see links in listing). WETA meetings are listed because of the proposed pier and Berkeley Ferry Service.



The agenda for the January 18 City Council 6 pm regular meeting is available for comment and posted at the end before the list of building permits in the appeal period and council worksessions.

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Worth Noting: Council Winter Recess ends January 18, 2022

Four City meetings were found with two on Tuesday and two on Thursday. BNC meets Saturday.



Tuesday at 2:30 the Council Agenda Committee will finalize the agenda for the January 18^th regular Council meeting with two new Action items 24 and 25 on parking. Tuesday evening the Peace and Justice Commission is at 7 pm

Thursday the Reimagining Public Safety Task Force meets at 6 pm and the Landmarks Preservation Commission meets at 7 pm. The Public Works Commission usually meets the first Thursday of the month. No meeting notice is posted. Use the link to check later in the week.

Saturday, January 8^th the Berkeley Neighborhoods Council meets at 10 am. The zoom link is available.

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