Public Comment

Sidewalk Preaching

The sidewalk on the south side of MLK Jr. Middle School is still painted with a half-dozen uplifting words colorfully covering the path to the stairs leading to the entrance of the school's main building. The words include RESIST, UPLIFT, and PROTEST.

This got me wondering: Why do we have a word like "uplift" but we don't have a word like "downput"? One the other hand, we have the word "off-putting" but we don't talk about "on-putting."

And then there are the pros and cons of prose. The opposite of Protest is not Contest (they are actually closer to being homonyms than antonyms). On the other hand: The opposite of protrude (to extend beyond) is contrude (to crowd together). The opposite of provoke (to spread mayhem) is convoke (to draw together). The opposite of proscribe (to forbid or exclude) is conscribe (to enlist).

Signs of the Times

There's a public service sign on display in the bus-booth and the northwest corner of San Pablo and Ashby with a disturbing message. "Pressure," it states, "Stops Bleeding." The ad shows two hands pressing down on a blood-red background above the words: "Simple Acts Save Lives." How's that for a status report on the current hazards of urban living? 

What's next? Instead of containers of plastic doggie bags for poodle-poop, will our neighborhoods start seeing displays of metal containers stuffed with bales of bandages and tourniquets? 

Another oddity. A block north of the San Pablo/Ashby intersection, Heinz Street ends at San Pablo Avenue. Although there's no cross traffic on the east side of the street, there are still two push-to-walk boxes on the sidewalk in front of the C&M Meat Company parking lot. In theory, you can't walk down that roadless part of the sidewalk without stopping to wait for the "light to change" from red to green. 

Three Servings of Champagne 

A local performance artist scored a rare trifecta in the SF Chronicle's Sunday (March 13) Datebook section. Champagne Hughes managed to rack up not just three, but five citations/references/appearances in two different stories on three pages of that single edition. 

In a historical review of the pandemic ("2 Years that Felt like 20") and Lily Janiak's investigation of the local theatre world's tradition of hiring "interns" and "fellows" for cheapo pennies-on-the-hour service, Hughes was mentioned on pages 11, 12, and 23, while photographs of Hughes performing were featured on pages 4 and 11. Hughes was described as an Oakland educator, storyteller, board chair, and nonprofit leader. In both articles, Hughes also was identified as a "pleasure activist." A curious visit to her Instagram page further informs that the multi-talented Hughes is a deejay, an actress, a devotee of raw vegan food, a marathon runner, and a sex coach. 

World Court to Putin: "Nyet!" 

The International Court of Justice (aka ICJ, aka The World Court), the principal judicial organ of the United Nations, has ordered Russia to immediately halt its military operations in Ukraine and announced that the ICJ order to do so is legally binding.  

But you can stifle that sigh of relief. The jurists also noted that, while the order is "legally binding" it is not "enforceable." 

In a related note, Nicholas J.S. Davis writes: "It is 36 years and counting since the ICJ ordered the United States to pay reparations to Nicaragua for its crimes of aggression, including training and dispatching Contra mercenaries to massacre civilians and destroy civilian infrastructure, and mining Nicaraguan waters. Will President Biden finally pay up now, to set a good example for Russia?" 

Leagalese, If You Please 

While perusing some of the articles in the March issue of the Law & Society Review, I chanced across a criticism of a Canadian politician whose "inchoate attempt at reconfiguring her defense of genocide into concern over 'tax dollars' requires theorization." The article went on to criticize "fiscal racism" in the context of "settler colonialism." At one point, the author lamented how "ostensibly fiscal concerns are imbricated with white political entitlement." (Emphasis added.) 

I had never encountered that word before and—judging from the red line that appeared beneath it on my laptop screen—neither had Apple or Spellcheck.. 

In order to suss out the meaning of this red-lined verb, I had to walk to a different room and pull out a dusty artifact known as a "dictionary." Buried deep inside its dusty pages was the following definition of imbrication: "to cover with gutter tiles." 

Musk and the Monkeys 

An animal rights message from care2: "He's a billionaire who's famous for making cars that are neither self-driving nor very safe, and for taking over whole towns with his rocket company. He's Elon Musk and his recent research ventures into 'brain chip' technology involved mutilating the brains of monkeys.  

"More than one dozen of these innocent animals died because of Musk's mad-scientist experiments. While Neuralink, Musk's brain chip company that's responsible for the shoddy research, is denying the claims and asserting that it acted in line with ethical principles for research, watch groups claim otherwise.  

"The Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine has filed an official complaint with the USDA against Neuralink. In its report, PCRM claims Neuralink's research caused animals "extreme" suffering — as evidenced by signs such as vomiting, stress and anxiety, hair loss, and loss of appetite. Some monkeys even displayed self-mutilating behaviors, including painfully removing their own fingers." 

It appears that Neuralink violated the Animal Welfare Act, but the USDA has yet to respond to Musk's critics. 

Adding to the scandal, the care2 Petition notes that the University of California is also involved in these grisly experiments, to wit: Sign the petition to demand that the USDA investigate Neuralink and the University of California Davis for their treatment of animals during these unethical experiments! 

Free Speech Fettered by US Clampdown on News from Russia 

In early March, while attempting to sample Ukraine-invasion coverage on RT News (aka "Russia Today," a Moscow-based international news agency), I was blocked by an alert that announced the link could no longer be made because of a problem with "the upstream server. That's all we know." 

Also blocked from our screen-feeds: Lee Camp, the host, head writer and creator of the RT News-hosted commentary, Redacted Tonight, which had excoriated US politicians for eight raucous years—until it was abruptly canceled due to US sanctions. 

Camp was recently a guest on Talk World Radio, whose host, World BEYOND War peace activist David Swanson, noted that Redacted Tonight was "the only anti-war anti-corporate comedy show on US TV." The very same week, Lee’s podcast, “Moment of Clarity,” was summarily removed from Spotify while his YouTube channel was banned across Europe, leaving him clinging to his last remaining perch at: https://www.patreon.com/LeeCamp 

Camp reflected on being booted into the media shadows during a recent appearance on Talk World Radio. 

Newsrooms No Longer Clatter 

In a recent column, Chronicle book critic Barbara Lane the recalled with fondness the classic "newspaper world" of the past century: 

"What an intoxicating place it was: clattering typewriters, clanging phones, teletype machines ringing bells and flashing with big stories, the rumble of the presses, boys running copy downstream, ripped copy and paste pots. And, of course, fishbowl-size martinis, endless cigarettes and political gossip at Harrigan’s, the bar where reporters gathered." 

Lane then bemoaned the newsroom of today: 

"Walk into any big-city newspaper today and it’s strangely quiet. Everybody staring at their screens, writing and transmitting copy electronically. No clattering, no clanging, no rumbling. And certainly no cigarettes." 

And then, in a flash of inspiration, Lane considers the ramifications of the electronic commons projected onto the art of storytelling:
"[T]he digital revolution has not only transformed big-city newsrooms, but would have drastically altered the very plots of so many well-known stories." 

For example:
"The plot of 'Pride and Prejudice' would be destroyed without all the letters going back and forth and the time that elapses between them. Romeo and Juliet had epic communications issues that would have been easily solved by cell phones."  

Imagine what Shakespeare might have written: "To 'hit send' or not to' hit send,' that is the question." "Romeo, Romeo, where posteth thou?" "If you troll us, do we not hit 'delete?" "Is this an emoji I see before me?" "If music be the food of love, play Lady Gaga, Siri." "All the world's a platform…." 

"Don't Lie Like Boris Johnson" 

A message from Yurii Sheliazhenko, executive secretary of the Ukrainian Pacifist Movement. 

"The UK Prime Minister lied three times about the war in Ukraine in the video FYI Kids Q&A with Boris Johnson, streamed by Sky News. Putin's invasion to Ukraine indeed is evil, but Putin is not a war criminal convicted by the court for perpetrating genocide. 

"Also, the West and Ukraine are not innocent victims who did nothing wrong. Current two-layer conflict between the West and East and between Russia and Ukraine happened in the first place because of the widespread wrong view that good guys should wage just war and kill bad guys. 

"In this video, I explain how lies incite war, describe hardships of war resisters' life in Ukraine under Russian attack, and advocate peace talks instead of shooting." 

Venezuela Orders 18-fold Increase in the Minimum Wage 

That's an unexpected headline that stopped me in my tracks. Last time I heard, Venezuela was suffering from inflation aggravated by US-imposed economic sanctions. But on March 4, before a crowd of 10,000 cheering government workers, President Nicolas Maduro announced he was acting to meet their demands for improved salaries. "You proposed to [raise] the workers' basic minimum wage," Maduro declared. "Approved! And that pushes all salary tables upwards." 

Maduro's action increased the value of the country's currency by a factor of 18, increaing the new minimum wage to 126 bolivars, which is the equivalent of $28.* 

But workers won't be paid in bolivars. For the past four years, Venezuela's economy has been pegged to a digital cryptocurrency called the "petro" (a fitting term for a country whose economy is hitched to oil extraction). Unlike other currencies, one bolivar is worth the value of one barrel of oil.* The new minimum wage is set at "half a petro." 

* With the current global shortage of oil and resulting price hikes, Venezuela's economy must be soaring. 

The Brookings Institution poop-poohs the petrocurrency as a means to "create foreign currency reserves from thin air." ('Course, since Richard Nixon abandoned the "gold standard" back in 1971, it could be said that the dollar, itself, is also backed by little more than "thin air.") 

Pen Pals 

As the director of Academic Publishing, Inc.—the designated nonprofit caretaker of the Berkeley Barb archives (www.berkeleybarb.org)—I occasionally get requests from publishers and museums to reprint articles and reproduce artwork. Last week, two requests arrived in the AcPub mailbox on the same day. One was a request from the People's Oral History Project in Salinas. The other was a handwritten note from a prison inmate named Wintworth Foster. It read as follows: 

"I remember your newspaper from back in the 70's. Was under the impression that it went out of business. I really enjoyed the extensive 'pen pal' section because of the myriad opportunity to meet a variety of people. I wonder if it remains like that today." 

Wintworth asked for a recent sample copy to see if the Barb still publishes the Pen Pals section in the same format. And he inquired about the subscription rate. 

Alas, the Barb's last issue spilled off the presses in July 1980. However, I'll be happy to send off a rare collector's edition of the historic weekly. In the meantime, if anyone is interested in writing to an inmate ( a real-life "pen pal)", here's Wintworth's mailing address: Wintworth Foster #21181, Southeast Correction Center, 300 East Pedro Simmens Dr., Charleston, MO 63834.