I often think I should approach writing the Activist’s Diary like plein air painting by picking a .point in time and stopping, but the world and the City keep moving on while I write. -more-
Worth Noting:
The last day for members to join the Sierra Club to be able to vote in the Sierra Club election is October 31st. https://www.sierraclub.org/ways-to-give#renew-maintab
Responsibilities of the persons elected include: local conservation policies, administering programs and activities and endorsing political candidates and ballot initiatives. Please join or if you are already a member check to make sure your membership is current. The election bulletin of candidates and ballot will be sent in the Winter edition of the Sierra Club Yodeler.
I am a writer with hundreds of credits over a twenty-year span, but I am also schizoaffective, a diagnosis which is downgraded in the past decade, originally schizophrenia, paranoid-type. With this condition, I am more vulnerable to some of the hard things in life. Mentally ill people like me probably have a very hard time wrapping our minds around mindless destruction, murder, and idiocy. And to be specific, I am speaking of the armed conflict going on in the Middle East. -more-
SMITHEREENS: Reflections on Bits & Pieces:Boos&Dues&TheBlues
Spooky Speaking
On my Sunday morning run, I got a great pre-Halloween scan at porches populated with pumpkins and fences covered with fake webs and lobster-sized spiders. But one display on Eunice Street stood out. It consisted of three large figures leaning over a front-yard fence and each holding a sign. Together, their message read: "We really thought/Climate Change/Was a Hoax!" All three figures were life-sized skeletons.
Washington's Debt Spiral
Joe Biden has his hand out for another$100 billion to pay for military assistance to fuel the wars in Ukraine and Gaza (while prepping for a show-down, end-all collision with China and setting aside barrels of cash to secure US interests in Latin America and along the US-Mexico border.) Although the Pentagon famously has not won a war since 1945 (and Russia played a major role in that "win"), belligerent "We're top-dog" US foreign policy continues to call for more weapons, more war, more militarism.
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The cover of a recent New Yorker was a cleverish Barry Blitt caricature of four old folks running a race while pushing the kind of aluminum walkers used by mobility challenged people of all ages. Since I’m currently one of them (having been in bed with a broken ankle for a month) I sympathize. Apparently we’re supposed to snicker at these runners because they’re still involved in electoral races even though they’re kinda sorta (OMG) old.
Otherwise, they’re not that much alike.
From left to right:, visually, not politically:
Donald Trump. No need to say more about him—we know too much already.
Mitch McConnell: A canny political operator, wrong on most issues by my standards, but clever.
Nancy Pelosi: Another super clever politician, but good on most important questions.
Joe Biden: In his current incarnation, quite adept at identifying and promoting effective policies. He hasn’t always been so great, but he’s learned a lot on his journey.
A diverse set, but the common denominator is that they’re all now, well, old.
Luckily, Dianne Feinstein was not part of the group, which could have proved embarrassing.
New Yorker Editor David Remnick’s Talk of the Town comments in the same issue are headed “This Old Man” in print, “The Washington Gerontocracy” online. Pretty clearly, Remnick (b.1958) views with alarm some data he’s selected from assorted polls. He worries that “more than seventy per cent of respondents suggested that Biden is too old to be effective in a second term”.
The New Yorker, even before Remnick, has traditionally hoped that it caters to the youngster market, but I doubt that’s true. I only have anecdotes to support my opinion, but these are sometimes better than the data-lite often featured in glossy magazines like The New Yorker.
Harold Ross, its original editor, is often quoted in an urban legend as saying that his brainchild was “not for the little old lady in Dubuque.”
Well, maybe, but I learned to read it from my mother, born 1914 in St.Louis, which is probably more sophisticated than Dubuque ever was, but is not Manhattan, She missed out on college because of the Depression, but made up for it by being a voracious reader of the kind of snappy prose that the New Yorker has always favored. She claimed that the main advantage to not being employed outside home most of her married life was having first crack at the latest issue when it came in the mail, before my father got home from his office. She read every one of them until she died, finally a little old lady at almost 99,
I (b.1940) was rumored to have taught myself to read when I was about 5 with New Yorker cartoons, in those days funnier than the dreary self-centered ones in the current issues. I’d moved on to the heavier stuff by 1958, which was the year I started college and Remnick was born.
New York City has always been populated by the impecunious young and the rich old, and the magazine has reflected that, especially its ads. I would not be in the least surprised to learn that a stunningly high percentage of the New Yorker’s readers,young and old, poor and rich, have voted for Biden and will do so again.
John Lanchester in the latest London Review of Books in a great piece about how numbers are weaponized in politics says this::
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AUTHOR'S NOTE: In my review of this opera that was posted on September 29, there were unfortunately many errors, misnamers, and typos. What follows below is the corrected version of this review.
What I’d heard till now of music by Bay Area composer Mason Bates seemed to me glib, light-weight, and of llittle interest. For example, his Piano Concerto, which premiered at San Francisco Symphony in 2022, struck me as meretricious, hardly worth the valiant effort of the brilliant pianist Daniil Trifonov for whom Bates wrote the work and who performed it at its SF premiere. So now, as I attended the Sunday matinee of The (R()evolution of Steve Jobs on October 24, I didn’t expect great things. Well, though I certainly did not experience great things, I must say that, for the most part, Mason Bates’ pop-infused mix of traditional orchestration and computerized soundscapes worked reasonably well in this operatic tale about a Silicon Valley ihigh-tech mogul and ruthless executive.
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ON MENTAL WELLNESS: how vulnerable people with psychiatric issues can deal with war Jack Bragen 10-30-2023
SMITHEREENS: Reflections on Bits & Pieces:Boos&Dues&TheBlues
ON MENTAL WELLNESS: Pipe Dreams and Denial Systems Jack Bragen; 10-24-2023
ECLECTIC RANT: War in the Holy land — No End in Sight Ralph E. Stone 10-23-2023
SMITHEREENS: Reflections on Bits & Pieces:Stings,Rings&Dings Gar Smith 10-23-2023
Reflections Councilmember Kate Harrison, Berkeley District 4 10-25-2023
Open Letter to Councilmember Kate Harrison Eric Friedman 10-24-2023
Open Letter to President Biden Jagjit Singh 10-19-2023
A BERKELEY ACTIVIST'S DIARY: week ending October 29 Kelly Hammargren 10-30-2023
THE BERKELEY ACTIVIST'S CALENDAR;Oct. 29-Nov.6 Kelly Hammargren 10-28-2023
A BERKELEY ACTIVIST'S DIARY. week ending Oct.15 Kelly Hammargren 10-24-2023
THE (R)EVOLUTION OF STEVE JOBS at San Francisco Opera Reviewed by James Roy MacBeang 10-28-2023
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