Public Comment

SMITHEREENS: Reflections on Bits & Pieces: SmitherDrafts&Drifts

Gar Smith
Sunday August 07, 2022 - 04:22:00 PM

Managing to Make a Difference—With Ice Cream Sandwiches

ActivSpace, a block-long triple-story office building on Seventh Street (where I rent an office) recently got a new office manager. I first encountered Chandra Thomas in a second-floor hallway, standing atop a chair and adjusting one of the building's wall-mounted emergency lamps.

I noticed further evidence that there was "a new sheriff in town" when the scramble of business cards and publicity fliers haphazardly splayed across the building's bulletin-boards were suddenly up-dated and rearranged in a neat and visually pleasing manner.

But the biggest sign of the new ActivSpace Era came in the form of a colorful flyer posted in the shared elevators. The posters announced that an hour-long "Ice Cream Social" was slated for the office parking lot—"Wow!" "Good Times!" "First Come, First Served!" "Enjoy Every Moment!"

The host for the event: our new office manager Chandra "Chan" Thomas. 

Alas, on the promised day, there was a glitch. The food company that was supposed to deliver a bunker load of ice-cream bars at 3:30, showed up at 1 instead. It was a hot day and there was no way the frozen snacks were going to survive until mid-afternoon. What to do? 

Chandra turned out to be a true problem-solver. She found a two-wheel handcart in storage, filled it with scores of wilting ice cream sandwiches, and set off on foot to deliver the snacks by hand. Going door-to-door, Chan managed to meet every promise on the poster with the sole exception of "First Come, First Served." 

I got my sweet treat hand-delivered as CT wheeled the goods down Seventh Street and paused to stop at my table outside Nina's Café, where I was enjoying a cup of hot chai and a muffin. 

I caught up with Chan a few days later and gathered some details. 

"I actually went door to door to reach the customers," she explained. "I didn’t want it to melt and go to waste, so the next best thing was to hand them out—and meet some new folks in the process.' Fortunately, she had some assistance: "The lady that came along was my 74-year-old mother. I figured she could hang out with me and we could spread the joy of ice cream together." 

And that they did. Call it "Ice Cream Socialism"—sweet treats for the working class. 

Fashion Plates 

Some personalized license plates spotted around town: 

A brash red Dodge sportscar: MUSLPUP (Think: A young dog on steroids) 

A Subaru speeding away flashing a plate that read: BYEEEUH 

A black VW with Washington, DC plates: GH 1961 (The bottom of the plate bore the embossed statement: "End Taxation Without Representation.") 

A Toyota: 34MERSO (A 34-year-old who is "merso"?—happy on the outside; depressed on the inside?) (Three roommates who share a fondness for "Merso Labs," a cannabis testing business in Lompoc?) 

Vintage Scully 

I grew up in Southern California listening to sports announcer Vin Scully covering the LA Dodgers. Scully's recent passing at the ripe vintage of 94 brought forth a flood of tributes, including wonderful audio clips of Scully at his warm and rambling best. 

There was Scully retelling an encounter between one of the players and a wolf he mistook for a dog (the tale rolled out over the course of several minutes, occasionally interrupted by reports that a strike had been called or a ball had been bunted off to left field). 

One of my favorite Scullyisms was his response to a reporter who asked why Scully (unlike most of his colleagues) seldom filled his airtime with recitations of ballgame statistics. Scully's reply: "Statistics are used much like a drunk uses a lamppost—for support, not illumination." 

The New York Times, the LA Times and the Chronicle were among the many publications paying tribute to Scully and posting selections of the broadcaster's on-air adlibs—including Scully's majestic summation of the difference between baseball and football: 

“Football is to baseball as blackjack is to bridge. One is the quick jolt. The other the deliberate, slow-paced game of skill, but never was a sport more ideally suited to television than baseball. It’s all there in front of you. It’s theater, really. The star is the spotlight on the mound, the supporting cast fanned out around him, the mathematical precision of the game moving with the kind of inevitability of Greek tragedy. With the Greek chorus in the bleachers!” 

A Few Hot Tips 

With the local weather about to warm up a bit, here are a couple of Hot Weather Tips that popped up in my email. "Cover Your Windows. Place tin foil with the shiny side facing outward in your window to reflect the heat." "Freeze your water bottles overnight so you'll have ice cold water to drink during the day." "Make yourself an electrolyte-infused hydration drink by mixing ¼ cup lemon juice, 2 tbsp lime juice, 2 cups water, 2 tbsp raw honey, 1/8 tsp sea salt." 

Actions Have Consequences: Pelosi's Payback 

Author/activist Steven Starr recently shared these thoughts on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's controversial China-provoking traipse to Taiwan. 

"The Monroe Doctrine has now been replaced with the Moron Doctrine. Actually, it is the Neocon Doctrine: 'Follow My Rules Or Else!' 

"We will see who 'wins' when China nationalizes all US factories built in China and cuts off trade to the US. There won't be any supply lines to disrupt . . . good luck getting anything at WalMart. And that will only be one byproduct of this insane policy of confrontation." 

Protests Outside Pelosi's San Francisco Office 

 

A Voice from Kyiv 

Yurii Sheliazhenko, the executive secretary of Ukrainian Pacifist Movement, has had a front-row seat for the chilling spectacle of war between Russia and Ukraine. He recently shared the following thoughts. 

"I live in Kyiv, the capital of Ukraine, and every day my house shakes because of the Russian’s bombing. You may ask me why I didn’t leave? It’s because I am not allowed to leave Ukraine. President Volodymyr Zelensky is currently pushing everyone to become soldiers to fight against the Russians. 

"We don’t have the right to leave Ukraine and I may have to join the army against my own will. But, I will never kill another person, because I am a Ukraine pacifist, and I believe that war is wrong. It’s wrong to kill people. I will not go against my own conscience, even if they threaten me and put me in prison for five years. 

"I hope the war will end soon through peace talks. I believe that people should talk to each other instead of killing one another. . . . 

"No more killings and profits for merchants of death, please. Nobody knows how they plan to profit from the nuclear apocalypse, but escalation is now on the table." 

Lies of The Times: Today's A-Bombs Are "Much Less Destructive" 

On April 19, Ray Acheson, the Director of Women's International League for Peace and Freedom wrote a complaint castigating the New York Times for appearing to "normalize" the use of nuclear weapons:
"In this apparent attempt to either push for—or at least normalize—the prospect of nuclear war, much of the focus is on the type of nuclear weapon that Putin is 'expected' to use. The New York Times describes tactical nuclear weapons as 'smaller bombs,' 'lesser nuclear arms,' 'less destructive by nature,' 'much less destructive,' and having 'variable explosive yields that could be dialed up or down depending on the military situation.' 

"Even while acknowledging that one of these weapons, if detonated in Midtown Manhattan, would kill or injure half a million people, the Times suggests that the use of these weapons is 'perhaps less frightening and more thinkable.' 

The article says the billions of dollars that the Obama administration spent on nuclear weapons went towards 'improving' US tactical nuclear weapons and turning them into 'smart bombs' that 'gave war planners the freedom to lower the weapons’ variable explosive force,' would have a 'high degree of precision, and would lower 'the risk of collateral damage and civilian casualties.'”  

Minimizing the Unthinkable. The Question Is "Why?" 

In the notorious Public Service Announcement discussed below, a spokesperson for New York's emergency planning department schools viewers on how to avoid being vaporized by a nuclear warhead. She starts off by stating there are "three important steps" to take. She reinforces her message by holding up her hand and displaying … just two fingers. Guess we're back to "Duck and Cover." 

This recent 13-minute discussion with Glenn Beck just adds to the nuclear jitters—jitters that were only magnified by the UN's recent warning that humanity is just "one miscalculation away from nuclear annihilation." 

 

How Mark Made His Mark by Living the "Big Lie" 

Republicans like Trump's former Chief of Staff Mark Meadows have been quick to complain that extensive voter fraud has undermined “election integrity.” Meadows now runs the Conservative Partnership Institute where he continues to howl that the 2000 election was stolen thanks to massive voter fraud. 

Truth to tell, there is evidence of actual voter fraud—and it involves Meadows

Earlier this year, investigations revealed that Meadows (in the run-up to the 2020 national election) registered to vote in three states: Virginia, South Carolina and his native North Carolina. 

North Carolina election officials have since booted him from its rolls, but Meadows remains illegally registered in the other two states. According to a report in Buzzflash: "Meadows and his wife were listed as living in a rusting trailer home near the South Carolina border, but, in reality, the 14-by-62-foot mobile home trailer home was empty. Now, his right to vote in his home state has been removed." 

Our Mission Is Omission 

In an email with the subject-line "Oops, we did it again," Public Citizen writes: 

First it was the Secret Service. 

Then the Department of Homeland Security. 

And now even high-level Pentagon officials within the Trump administration. 

All of these entities—which, let’s remember, are funded by our tax dollars—had a significant role in the events on and leading up to the January 6 insurrection. 

  • And each of them has been exposed for deleting text messages that could advance our understanding of the breadth and depth of Trump’s attempt to remain in power illegally.
  • In some cases, phones may even have been wiped *after* texts were requested by people investigating the attempted coup.
Each of these agencies says the destruction of text messages related to January 6 was just part of normal IT procedures. 

Really? Count me skeptical.
Want to sound off? Here's a link: Tell the DoJ to get to the bottom of all these missing texts from military and law enforcement related to January 6. 

The Pentagon Researches the Cures; Big Pharma Pockets the Profits 

Think Pentagon and you'll most likely imagine some general dressed in a crisp uniform plastered with combat ribbons. It turns out the Department of Defense also has its own teams of white-jacketed doctors and scientists and some of the tax-dollar loot that the DoD sucks up actually goes to support military researchers who (among other things) have created and tested vaccines to repulse COVID-19 and its variants. 

But what happens after these taxpayer-subsidized cures are ready for public deployment? The Pentagon hands the cures over to powerful, private corporations that gain total control over the production, distribution, and—most importantly—pricing of these vaccines. 

As Public Citizen points out, this practice has lead to global vaccine shortages, rationing of medicines, long waits in vaccination lines, and having to "pay Pharma excessively high prices to vaccinate Americans."  

Public Citizen is adamant: "If life-saving vaccines are developed by government researchers with taxpayer dollars, corporations should not get to control their production and make excessive profits from these vaccines." 

What can we do about this? There's a petition afloat that has a demand for President Biden: Don’t give control of taxpayer-funded vaccines to private companies. Instead, the petition urges Biden to "share new vaccine technology with qualified manufacturers worldwide and not to give it away to private corporations who would monopolize the production of new vaccines.

Parting Shots 

"Yes, I'd like a receipt. If I don't like the contents, I may want to bring this item back for a refund."
— Spoken by a man with a cheeky grin buying a Sunday Chronicle. Overheard at the CVS in North Berkeley. 

Love Knows 

It's been a hard week so let's end on a high note. Let's hear it for Founders Sing—and The Beatles.