Memories of bells and bygone newsrooms

Back in the days when newspapers were written on heavy mechanical typewriters and wire service news came from noisy teletype machines, everyone in a newspaper newsroom reserved a small part of their attention for the sound of bells.

To a reporter or editor working on a story, the sound of a bell signaled that you’d come to the edge of the page and needed finish or hyphenate the word your on, lift up you left arm and give a tug at the carriage return, bring you back to the left hand margin while advancing the paper into position of your next keystroke.

To an editor’s ears, bells induced Pavlovian pleasure. Reporters were producing a bounteous harvest of local news copy.

The number of teletypes depended on how many wire services a newsroom subscribed to—AP, UPI, Reuters, local services—and because of their noisiness the machines were usually kept in a separate teletype room or alcove, along with inked replacement ribbons and rolls and boxes of paper to keep the machines fed. Photos in those days came from separate facsimile machines, emerging damp on a continuous roll.

The teletypes were wondrous exemplars of the electric age, big, metal-clad hunks of paper-spewing machinery that also emitted streams of yellow punch tape which could be fed directly into typesetting machines. Back in the days when I worked as weekend editor [responsible for putting together all the pages of the weekend edition. When an editor out picked out a story to run, you pulled the copy, usually tearing with the ubiquitous newsroom ruler call a pica pole, which measured in picas—a sixth of an inch—as well as inches. Then you looked at the cache of punch tape for the appropriately coded strip, rolled it up, then paper-clipped it to the story.

After a go over with a fat Number 2 copy pencil — and, if needed, scissors and glue brush [cut and paste really was cut and paste back then]  you figured out a place for the story in your dummies [paper sheets marked to scale in column width and inch depth] then wrote a headline tailored to the column width, using a count system in which the lower case i, j, and l consumed half a space, uppercase M, W, and H counting for two-and-a-half, and lower case m and w rating one-and-a-half spaces. All the rest counted as one.

Most editors had a chart listing the numbers of spaces type sizes ranging from 14 points to 144 or more according to the column width slotted for the top of the story, ranging from a single column, two, three, four—up to eight, which was the standard number[now is typically five or six].

Once the copy editing and headline-writing was finished, the editor would roll up the accompanying punch tape and clip it to the copy. At that point, depending on the newsroom, the editor would either yell “COPY” and wait for the copy “boy” or “girl” [newsroom “clerks” or “aides” in these more enlightened days] to take it to the typesetting room. One paper had a conveyor belt to covey copy to the “back shop” to be set in type and fitted to the page, at another editors rolled up the copy, stuck it in a tube, then slammed the tube into the portal of one of the pipes of a pneumatic delivery system. . .call it an air-powered intranet.

But, for the newsroom, the most important piece of equipment was the bell attached to each teletype, the herald announcing the imminent transmission of something important.

Just how important was revealed in the number of times the brass or chrome-plated half-spheres mounted on the outside of the teletypes sounded out.

Three dings only moved the copy boy/girl, and maybe an editor on a slow news day. But four bells raised some more jaded heads, and five bells would bring anyone not working on a deadline story to their feet and headed to the teletype room. But ten bells? For ten bells, people ran.

Under wire service protocol, three bells meant an advisory, a heads-up to editors that something significant was about to happen. One additional ring meant an URGENT story would follow, a significant story deemed of likely and timely interest to most wire service subscribers. Five bells heralded a BULLETIN, a critically important and breaking news story. But ten—for UPI—or twelve bells—for AP? Ten or twelve bells meant a FLASH, banner headlines in big type, and an event certain to dominate the attention of most readers and listeners for days to come.

My first FLASH—at least the first one I remember—came late on a Thursday afternoon in April, 1968. Once the number of bells hit six, I was on my feet, headed to the wire room of the Oceanside Blade-Tribune, and by the time they’d finished I was already standing in front of the AP machine, watching the sheet of narrow paper as the strikers hammered out the news that Martin Luther King Jr. had been shot.

The computer era killed both the teletype and the photo fax, replacing them with purely digital data streams, displayed as pixellated screen images. Gone too the conveyor belt and pneumatic tubes [I still have one of the tube carriers from 1979, made by an outfit called Diebold].

A Diebold pneumatic tube from the late, great Santa Monica Evening Outlook.

The bells are gone, replaced by optional beeps and buzzes on editors’ computer terminals. The days when an entire newsroom would rise to the sound of the FLASH bells are long gone. Nowadays, sadly, a newsrooms resemble insurance company offices, complete with carpets and cubicles. . .

Had Edgar Allen Poe—no stranger to newsrooms—been around during the glory days of the teletype, he’d’ve added another verse to his most sonorous of poems, “The Bells.”

But for now, this will have to do:

Hear the loud alarum bells –
Brazen bells!
What a tale of terror, now, their turbulency tells!
In the startled ear of night
How they scream out their affright!
Too much horrified to speak,
They can only shriek, shriek,
Out of tune,
In a clamorous appealing to the mercy of the fire,
In a mad expostulation with the deaf and frantic fire,
Leaping higher, higher, higher,
With a desperate desire,
And a resolute endeavor
Now – now to sit, or never,
By the side of the pale – faced moon.
Oh, the bells, bells, bells!
What a tale their terror tells
Of Despair!
How they clang, and clash and roar!
What a horror they outpour
On the bosom of the palpitating air!
Yet the ear, it fully knows,
By the twanging,
And the clanging,
How the danger ebbs and flows;
Yet the ear distinctly tells,
In the jangling,
And the wrangling,
How the danger sinks and swells,
By the sinking or the swelling in the anger of the bells –
Of the bells –
Of the bells, bells, bells, bells,
Bells, bells, bells –
In the clamor and the clanging of the bells!

Local journalism is dying; COVID the coup de grâce

Consider this an obituary.

What follows is a series of alarms on the plight of community journalism, perhaps the most critical casualty of the ongoing pandemic.

My first newspaper job, in 1966 was at the Winslow Mail, an Arizona small town paper printed on a flatbed press, almost the same technology used by Ben Franklin. The Mail is gone, with no local print replacement, events, people, and movements fragmented, spun, praised, deplored, or ignored through endless and ever-more isolating retractions.

The Las Vegas Review-Journal is still there, a ghost of the paper I once knew and now run by a Trump-loving Likkud-backing casino billionaire who won’t let reporters dig into his own casino operations.

The Tucson Daily American, my next venue, died a month after I got there.

Also vanished is my next workplace, the Oceanside [California] Blade-Tribune, sold, merged feebly into a regional paper, then sold again to an investment firm, with downsizings at each step. Call it homeopathic journalism.

The family-owned Sacramento Bee, my penultimate pedestal, has been sold after numerous downsizings, to a hedge fund.

The Berkeley Daily Planet, my last employer, laid off staff [myself included, then went out of print, remaining online with voluntary contributors.

The role of journalism in America

Joyce Dehli, co-chair of the board of the board that awards journalism’s most coveted honor, the Pultizer Prizes, writes a telling essay on the plight of American journalism:

Many post-election observers have lambasted the national news media, the so-called coastal media elites, for missing the breadth of support for Donald Trump among white working- and lower middle-class voters living outside of major urban-suburban areas. Such criticism obscures a more important point. The stories of disaffected citizens in rural areas and small cities have been simmering for years, largely untold by local news organizations.

Newspapers, the backbone of local and regional journalism, have cut thousands of reporters and editors in the past decade, greatly diminishing their capacity to consistently and deeply cover residents’ lives and their political institutions, from school boards to state legislatures. We still see some superb local journalism. But even the best local newspapers struggle to fully and meaningfully cover their communities on a daily basis — work that, over time, reveals a community and a state to itself and its leaders.

It requires attentive listening to diverse sources, dogged examination of data and other records, and close observation of government at work. It takes time and skill, and requires on-site support of editors and other news leaders who live in the community and care about it. It does not guarantee publishers a return in eye-popping digital audience numbers.

In truth, journalists from big coastal news media, with a few exceptions, have never done a good job of covering people in the vast middle of the country. I know this well from decades of living and working as a journalist in Midwestern states as a reporter, editor, and vice president for news for a company with dozens of newspapers in small and mid-size cities across the country.

But big media journalists once routinely reviewed and absorbed the work of colleagues at good local newspapers, especially regional newspapers that excelled at statewide coverage. Journalism from smaller newspapers informed that of larger ones. The Associated Press (and others, to a lesser degree) connected each to the other’s journalism and offered its own robust state reports, too.

News deserts and silenced watchdogs

Sarabeth Berman, chief executive of the American Journalism Project, a venture philanthropy for nonprofit local news, offers more in a telling Los Angeles Times op-ed:

In the last 15 years, according to a report by Penelope Abernathy, a scholar at the University of North Carolina who tracks “news deserts,” more than a quarter of the country’s newspapers have closed and 1,800 communities that had a local news outlet in 2004 were left without any at the beginning of 2020. Without local newsrooms, the basic work of reporting — gathering accurate information and demanding transparency and accountability from local governments and powerful business interests — vanishes.

This loss directly imperils a functioning democracy, which requires an informed citizenry. In communities that have lost a local paper, voters become more polarized, according to a 2018 study by communications scholars. As voters rely more on highly polarized national outlets, they become less likely to cast ballots for candidates beyond any one party.

The closure of news outlets also makes governments more wasteful; with nobody looking over their shoulder, local officials tend to drive up government wages, taxes and deficits, researchers from Notre Dame and the University of Illinois at Chicago have found. Conversely, access to reliable local news is associated with higher political participation. Towns with newspapers have greater voter turnout, according to a study led by Matthew Gentzkow, a Stanford economist.

The disappearance of local journalism has been particularly damaging this year. In the early weeks of the pandemic, news organizations reported spikes in traffic to their websites as people sought out information about COVID-19 and its effects on hospitals, schools and businesses. When protests against racial injustice erupted in June, Americans looked for detailed reporting on policing and criminal justice policies. This year’s elections, likewise, generated record traffic from voters seeking information.

Yet despite the surging demand for news, the industry has continued to falter. Since the pandemic hit the United States, 36,000 newspaper employees have been laid off, furloughed or subjected to pay cuts. In many cases, advertising, the foundation of the traditional newspaper model, virtually vanished in the economic downturn. And while paid subscriptions rose sharply for some national outlets, most local news organizations do not have large enough markets to sustain even a modest professional newsroom. The result is a familiar spiral: A smaller staff produces a poorer product, which attracts fewer customers, depriving a community of a basic public service.

Missing COVID coverage, tribal woes

A report from the Brookings Institution also examines impacts of the COVID pandemic on the nation’s remaining newsrooms:

Amid the public health crisis, many communities across the U.S. suffer from a lack of local reporting. Of the 2,485 U.S. counties that reported COVID-19 cases as of April 6^th, 50% are news deserts (home to only one local newspaper or none at all). Fifty-seven percent of counties that have reported cases of COVID-19 lack a daily newspaper and 37% saw local newspapers disappear between 2004 and 2019.[1] It is impossible to know what will not be told in the communities that have seen local newspapers disappear in recent years, but undoubtedly, important stories will go uncovered as the coronavirus spreads across the country.

While the coronavirus has so far hit cities the hardest, it has already expanded into more rural parts of the country which have been the worst impacted by the local news crisis. Of the U.S. counties without a daily or weekly newspaper, 68% are located outside of the country’s metropolitan areas. These rural parts of the country have also seen a decline in the number of hospital beds in recent years. These two trends leave less densely populated communities both without the healthcare infrastructure necessary to adequately confront the coronavirus and the high-quality local journalism to report the consequences.

And some communities may be particularly vulnerable as a result of insufficient news coverage. A study from the Democracy Fund finds that since 1998, about 500 media sources that once served Indian Country have disappeared. This further threatens tribal communities, who receive health care from the underfunded, struggling Indian Health Service. Meanwhile, news organizations that offer information in other languages can play a critical role in helping communities in the U.S. whose first language is not English stay informed during the coronavirus outbreak. Only recently did the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention release its coronavirus guide in Spanish following pressure from Latino groups.

While the country’s news deserts confront a unique threat in the wake of the coronavirus, many places in the U.S. do have plenty of local reporters and news organizations working hard to cover the impact of COVID-19 in their communities. Local newsrooms across the country, however, are suffering from a dramatic loss in advertising revenue in recent weeks.

Many advertisers do not want their advertisements to appear next to stories about COVID-19 and have blocked their ads from appearing on any webpages containing the word “coronavirus.” At the same time, many businesses that are newly cash-strapped in the wake of the coronavirus as the result of event cancellations, mandated closures, and a drop in consumer demand cannot afford to spend money on advertising. This is a particular problem for the nation’s alt-weekly newspapers that depend on advertising revenue from the types of businesses hit hardest by social distancing measures such as concert venues, bars, and restaurants, businesses which also serve as their main points of distribution.

Canada comes to the aid of community media

The Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University reports on how our neighbor to the North is handling its own journalism crisis:

The Local Journalism Initiative is a $50 million, five-year effort created and funded by the Canadian government to support local and civic journalism for underserved communities. To administer the fund while “protecting the independence of the press,” the Department of Canadian Heritage entrusted seven nonprofit organizations representing various segments of the news industry with soliciting applications from news outlets, creating independent panels of judges, and administering one-year, renewable grants.

The largest share of funding is being distributed through News Media Canada, an industry group representing majority-language news organizations writing in English, French, and Indigenous languages, is the largest of the administering organizations and has the biggest share of funds to distribute. (The other nonprofits represent radio, television, ethnic press, and minority-language organizations, such as French-language publications outside of Quebec.)

News Media Canada announced the first wave of funded reporting positions in December, with a second round announced, after a coronavirus-related delay, last month. They add up to 168 new reporting positions in more than 140 newsrooms across the country; you can see the full list here. Each position will be funded with a maximum of $60,000 per year, 5 percent of which can go toward equipment.

All material published by LJI reporters will be made available to other news outlets through a public portal run by the Canadian Press and a Creative Commons license.

The funds come at a critical time. More than 250 media outlets closed across Canada from 2008 to 2019, according to a 2019 study by the Local News Research Project. The coronavirus and attending economic fallout has only accelerated the trend, as the Canadian Journalism Project mapping of the impact has shown.

“We know firsthand that papers in Canada and everywhere are having a really hard time staying afloat,” said Christian Dognon, who helps coordinate the initiative for News Media Canada.

Legislative action pending in the U.S.

In October the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation relesased a major report. Local Journalism: America’s Most Trusted News Sources Threatened confirms the plight of community journalism:

Already, 200 counties nationwide have no newspapers covering their communities, and half of all U.S. counties are down to just one, a problem that is particularly acute in the South. Newspapers have been forced to let go more than 40,000 newsroom employees, a full 60 percent of the journalistic work force that creates unique local content.

America’s local newsrooms now have thousands fewer watchdogs exposing crime, corruption, and keeping elected officials accountable to their constituents. Small businesses have less information on local conditions and fewer opportunities to reach customers in their community. Communities are losing access to trusted, non-partisan information that keeps our civil institutions cohesive and resilient.

Americans want and appreciate the accurate and unbiased reporting that local journalists provide. According to a 2019 Knight-Gallup study, Americans favor local news over national news to “report the news without bias” by a two to one margin. A 2018 Poynter Media Trust Survey likewise found that three of every four Americans have a “great deal” or “fair amount” of trust in local media. Similarly, polls find that more than eight in ten Americans want journalists to be personally engaged with their local area and understand their community’s history.

Local news is irreplaceable because other sources do not have the economic incentive or capability to credibly report on local issues. The loss of thousands of experienced journalists is the loss of a highly-valued resource and a process that cannot be easily replaced. These are the professionals with the necessary expertise to sort through news reports to determine what is real, what is fake, and what matters most to the communities they serve.

The COVID-19 crisis provides a sobering case-in-point, as Americans are turning to local media at unprecedented levels for information about local pandemic response and disease spread. In a public health crisis compounded by an economic downturn and political acrimony, local journalism is uniquely positioned to provide unbiased facts and stories that strengthen our communities.

Unfortunately, the revenue losses and employment trends impacting local journalism are now becoming acute as the COVID-19 crisis makes an already-difficult situation nearly impossible. Newspapers will likely lay off another 7,000 employees in 2020, leaving only about 30,000 newsroom jobs left nationwide. If this rate continues, newspaper newsroom employees may all but vanish in the next few years and, if pandemic-related revenue losses continue for TV and radio broadcasters, local broadcasting could face a similar fate.

Legislation proposes aid to community newspapers

The Senate report comes as a bipartisan bill awaits action in the House of Representatives.

Thee possible lifeline is the Local Journalism Sustainability Act, legislation now pending in the House of Representatives and co-sponsored by 58 Democrats and 20 Republicans.

The measure would aid local newspapers through a series of tax cuts [via Wikipedia]:

Up to $250 per year per individual to cover 80 percent of subscription fees to local newspapers for the first tax year and 50 percent for subsequent tax years (4-1 match the first year, 1-1 match for an additional four years).

Up to $12,500 per quarter ($50,000 per year) to reduce employment taxes for a local newspaper to hire and pay journalists.

Up to $5,000 per year for a small business to cover 80 percent of advertising with local media (local newspapers or broadcast stations) the first year after this act takes effect and up to $2,500 per year for another four years to cover 50 percent of such advertising.

This act defines a ‘local newspaper’ as any print or digital publication whose (A) primary content is news and current events, and (B) at least 51 percent of its readers (including both print and digital versions) reside in a single (i) State or a single possession of the United States, or (ii) area with a 200-mile radius. To qualify, a ‘local newspaper’ must have been in continuous operation for two years prior to the enactment of this bill.

Other places, unanswered questions

Many European nations provide direct cash payments to newspapers and guaranteed advertising.

But critics of the programs in the Scandinavian countries have rightly noted that governments often channel to the funds to newspapers supporting the party in power. Hungary, though, is perhaps the worst offender in Europe.

Australia, too, offers subsidies. And the U.K. And Austria. And Luxembourg.

One point is inescapable: The lack of context once provided by community journalism by localizing the impact of national and international issues has played a direct role in the rise of Rightists authoritarian regimes.

When I began reporting in 1965, much of the work I did was writing stories showing how national legislation and the tide of social movements would impact the communities where I reported.

With delocalizing and the rise of the internet, there is no longer a community forum where readers would be exposed to multiple sides of an issue. The Internet has replaced community orientation with an infinite echo chamber, where no one has to consider alternative viewpoints, except in the context of derisive screeds and rants.

We have become decentered, and that can only bode ill.

Atomic catharsis: Humor in the nuclear age

Younger folks have no real concept of the terror many folks of my generation lived with, the threat of nuclear war at any moment.

Television public service announcements about what to do when the air raids sirens blasted out their shrieks of imminent death were common, along with “duck and cover ” exercises at school, with youngsters told to hide beneath their desks [as if a school desk would save your life in the event of a 20-megaton blast].

Oh, and those sirens sounded out every fourth Friday of the month, and if you didn’t know what day it was, you’d experience of a few seconds of absolute terror, until either someone reminded you about the date. Otherwise you’d stay in a state of panic until the siren sounded the “all clear” a minute later.

Death was the specter looking over your shoulder, all day, every day.

And you wonder why your parents and grandparents were a little bit fucked up [or a lot].

The first comic relief I experienced came in 1964 during my sophomore year of college, when I went to the movies in Boulder, Colorado to see Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, the brilliant Stanley Kubrick film with Peter Sellers in no less than three of his most memorable roles as President Merkin Muffley, British RAF Group Captain Lionel Mandrake, and Dr. Strangelove himself, a wheelchair-bound ex-Nazi scientist working for Uncle Sam as the government’s leading nuclear war expert].

Here he is as Strangelove in a climactic scene:

Watching the film I experienced first shock, then found myself laughing along with audience, almost hysterically, the first real catharsis about the terror that haunted our lives. I walked out of the theater feeling momentarily relieved of an impossible burden.

Then, as a 19-year-old reporter for the Las Vegas Review-Journal, I covered an underground atomic blast at the nearby Nevada Test Site by sitting at a bar in Sin City’s then-tallest building, the Mint Hotel and Casino, to see if I could feel the structure shake with the blast detonated [didn’t feel a thing, as it turned out].

And it was in Las Vegas that I discovered a great newsstand on the Strip, featuring lots of foreign newspapers and magazines as well as a few exemplars of the then very small alternative press.

One late night after work [I got off at 11 p.m.] while browsing through the newsracks I discovered The Realist, a brilliant little magazine printed on the cheapest newsprint and featuring some of America’s finest writers and cartoonists offering works their usual publishers [like the New Yorker] wouldn’t touch for fear of controversy.

Paul Krassner, the editor, was a remarkable character, a child prodigy on the violin [he played Carnegie Hall], Krassner but chose the pen over the fiddle and my world was much richer for it].

And The Realist provided a more comic relief countering the terrors of the day, including this gem from Dick Guindon, published in the magazine’s May/June 1970 issue:

I was fortunate to have been able to interview Krassner a a decade before his death in 2019, and I treasure the memory.

Here’s what the late George Carlin had to say about Krassner:

“Paul¹s own writing, in particular, seemed daring and adventurous to me; it took big chances and made important arguments in relentlessly funny ways. I felt, down deep, that maybe I had some of that in me, too; that maybe I could be using my skills to better express my beliefs. The Realist was the inspiration that kept pushing me to the next level; there was no way I could continue reading it and remain the same.”

And should you want to check out The Realist, every issue is posted online here,

Photos from the last time we took psilocybin

When she heard that Oregon voters had opted for legalizing psilocybin [see the previous post], younger daughter called with a question, “So Dad, are you going to move to Oregon?”

That’s because I’d told her the only thing that ever alleviated the major depressions I’m prone to is the psilocybin mushroom. And that’s something, since I’ve tried about every Big Pharma antidepressant there is, all to no avail.

The last time I took the drug was 9 September 2006, when I bought some over the counter and fresh picked from a smart shop two blocks from the royal palace in Amsterdam.

We first paid a visit to a “brown cafe,” a coffee shop where you can’t get a side of has with your coffee.

This is the view looking out from our seat next to the window at a pool hall across the pedestrian street, featuring a pool hall sandwiched between to more brown cafes.

Nikon D70, 9 September 2006, ISO 320, 25mm, 1/50 sec, f/4

And here’s our purchases:

Nikon D70, 9 September 2006, ISO 320, 40mm, 1/25 sec, f/4.5

Our next stop was a smart shop, a brightly lit place with a stunning shopkeeper who showed us a menu of fresh produce, including a dozen or so varieties of mushrooms, each rated for the particular qualities of the effects produced.

Nikon D70, 9 September 2006, ISO 320, 62mm, 1/125 sec, f/5.6

I picked what was labelled as producing the most visually intense effects, a varietal called Psilocybe cubensis terencemckennaii, named for American psychonaut Terrence McKenna, then followed the Caterpillar’s suggestion from Alice in Wonderland:

In a minute or two the Caterpillar took the hookah out of its mouth and yawned once or twice, and shook itself. Then it got down off the mushroom, and crawled away in the grass, merely remarking as it went, ‘One side will make you grow taller, and the other side will make you grow shorter.’

‘One side of what? The other side of what?’ thought Alice to herself.

‘Of the mushroom,’ said the Caterpillar, just as if she had asked it aloud; and in another moment it was out of sight.

Alice remained looking thoughtfully at the mushroom for a minute, trying to make out which were the two sides of it; and as it was perfectly round, she found this a very difficult question. However, at last she stretched her arms round it as far as they would go, and broke off a bit of the edge with each hand.

The mushrooms came in a one of those baskets you find in a grocer’s fesh produce section, and the mushrooms were clean and freshly picked, much fresher than ever the grocer’s produce.

I chewed half the contents, then headed off with my camera, amazed at a pair of police officers who looked at me, recognized my state, then flashed broad, pleasant smiles.

The next stop was the great public square, with the palace on one side, government buildings on another, a cathedral on the third, and shops on the fourth side.

9 September 2006 18mm 1/500 sec, f11

9 September 2006, 18mm, 1/500 sec f11

One sight caught the eye in particular, an intersection of streetcar tracks one the cathedral side of the plaza:

9 September 2006, 18mm, 1/400 sec, f10

The rest of the day was spent in the countryside:

The smart shops are gone now, closed by a national law enacted two years in 2008 after a mushroom-intoxicated French died after a leap from an Amsterdam bridge.

I, however, had two pleasant trips, one in my first-ever visit to Europe, and the other purchased over the counter in an Amsterdan smart shop.

And, yes, Oregon is looking better all the time.

For plutocrats, COVID means a $1 trillion gain

From the online summary of Billionaire Wealth vs. Community Health: Protecting Essential Workers from Pandemic Profiteers [PDF], a new report produced by researchers from Bargaining for the Common Good, the Institute for Policy Studies, and United for Respect:

• As of November 17, the combined wealth of 647 U.S. billionaires increased by almost $960 billion since mid-March, the beginning of the pandemic lockdown — an increase of nearly $1 trillion in less than a year.
• Since March, there are 33 new billionaires in the U.S.
• Driving this exploding inequality are 12 companies whose profits are coming at the expense of workers and communities. These “Delinquent Dozen” companies are emblematic of the corporate greed that has grown rampant over the last 40 years.
• They include retailers like Walmart, Amazon, Target, and Dollar Tree and Dollar Store, gig economy companies like Instacart, and food producers like Tyson Foods.
• Also included is the investment giant BlackRock and private equity firms like Leonard Green Partners, Blackstone, Kohlberg, Kravis Roberts & Co, Cerberus Capital, BC Partners, and CVC Capital Partners.
• These private equity firms own several essential health care, grocery, and pet supply companies. Their business model of extreme cost cutting and debt loading to squeeze extra profits is fundamentally incompatible with protecting workers and communities during a pandemic.
• Ten billionaire owners of Delinquent Dozen companies have a combined worth of $433 billion. Since March 18, their combined personal wealth has ballooned by $127.5 billion, a 42 percent increase. These ten billionaires are Jeff Bezos (Amazon), Alice, Rob, and Jim Walton (Walmart), Apoorva Mehta (Instacart), John Tyson (Tyson Foods), Steve Schwarzman (Blackstone), Henry Kravis and George Roberts (KKR), and Steve Feinberg (Cerberus).

Sail cats flying low over the Las Vegas desert

In our previous post, we described the origins of one bit of law enforcement lingo, the creepy-crawler, but only eluded to meaning of another, the sail cat.

So here’s a repost of a 13 January 2011 offering, about how a 19-year-old cub reporter learned just what exactly is a sail cat.

Way back in the late Pleistocene, esnl landed his first job on a daily newspaper.

The venue was the Las Vegas Review-Journal, a heady place for a 19-year-old’s introduction into the world of daily journalism.

Among the beats we covered was night cops, “because that’s where we start reporters with no experience,” explained the editor, Jim Leavey.

But covering the cop shop in Sin City after the sunset was anything but a dull beat, particularly so when I was the lone reporter working for the night edition, a street paper written to shock jaded casino workers out of their dimes at shift change.

“Beef it up, Brenneman,” was a frequent command from night editor Dick Calhoun, leading to lots of adjectives to paid six-paragraph stories into ten, twelve, even twenty grafs: “A homeless man set himself on fire” became “Flames seared the corpse of a Las Vegas man.”

Working the cop shop also required a sharp ear to catch the all the squawks from the newsroom bank of police radios.

We’re a quick study, and within a couple of week’s we’d mastered the “ten codes” and the Nevada Penal Code sections needed to decipher the otherwise cryptic, static-laden calls that formed a constant background beat to the ongoing symphony of teletypes, ringing phones [they actually rang back then], and sometimes boisterous newsroom chatter.

But one two-word phrase left me stumped: “You gotta sail cat on Paradise just south of Flamingo,” or “Handle a sail cat on Sahara just north of the parkway.”

Back in those days, reporters could look over the crime reports filed by responding officers, a task which required a request to the desk sergeants at the police and sheriff’s departments. But nowhere in the reports did I ever come across the words “sail cat.”

One evening we heard the mysterious phrase just before setting out on our rounds, prompting a question to the burly, grizzled officer behind the desk at the LVPD.

Usually the officer was a study in surly indifference, but this time his eyes briefly lit up.

Cocking his head back, he suppressed a smile, pursed his lips, then gave a little snort.

“Well, kid, it’s like this.”

We nodded.

“You know how sometimes cars run over cats?”

We nodded again.

“Well, if you get to ‘em right away, they’re a real mess to clean up.”

Another nod.

You got all that blood, and sometimes there’s guts , brains, that type stuff. A real mess.”

“Uh-huh.”

“If you’re a few hours later, they can really stink. And then there’s all those flies. Pick up one of those things an you’ll never get rid of the stink in your car.”

“Right.”

“So what ya do is wait til the sun and the pavement bake all the juices out. And the traffic smashes up all the bones.”

“Yeah. . .”

“By then, they’re just a dry flat hairy circle on the pavement.”

Another nod.

“Well, then all you have to do is pry it up off the pavement and flip it off into the desert like a Frisbee.”

“Oh.”

“So that, son, is what ya call a sail cat.”

Homeless in one of California’s richest cities

We started reporting in California back in 1967, just as hippies started flocking to California’s sunshine in hopes of, well, who knows what?

Many of them arrived in old Volkswagen vans and battered panel trucks, mobile homes for those with little money but high on hope [and a lot of other stuff, too].

We had moved to Oceanside, working for the late, lamented Blade-Tribune.

Every newsroom back then had police scanners, tuned to the frequencies of local police,m sheriff’s, and state law enforcement agencies, so we kept our ears attuned to code numbers for significant crimes as well as the occasional cop-to-cop banter.

We also had to learn another kind of code, the peculiar terms used by local cops to describe people, things, and activities. [One such term we learned a couple of jobs earlier was sail cat.]

In Oceanside, we started hearing a new term, creepy-crawler.

Which I soon learned meant hippie.

When parking becomes a matter class politics

Oceanside was booming, thanks to the Vietnam War, because the engine of the town’s economy was the adjacent Camp Pendleton, a veritable factory for turning out well-trained Marines to fight in the jungles of Southeast Asia.

You saw the occasional pickup truck with a camper or a trailer, even cars like the Nash Ambassador with a front seat that dropped back level with the back seat to form a very comfortable bed, as we know from personal experience.

Until the creepy-crawlers came, the occupants of those vehicles had either been tourists or folks visiting Marines at the base, people who in any case looked like everybody else and contributed to the local economy by spending on meals and other things.

Creepy-crawlers, on the other hand sucked money out, what with their panhandling and all — or so the reasoning went.

But even worse, they freaked out the straights and scared people off, what with their long hair, unshaven skin and those weird clothes, the beads, and all that pot and other weird shit they were taking.

Not exactly what you wanted in a town where to official motto was Tan Your Hide in Oceanside.

Like many other cities up and down the coast, California began enforcing new or rarely used parking ordinances, aimed at hippies while simultaneously also banning those who had once been tolerated, thanks to all those pesky civil liberties lawyers who were fighting against selective enforcement.

In other words, the unwillingly unemployed and the working classes were also victimized along with the creepy-crawlers.

Hippies are, for the most part, long gone, but the poor remain, today’s victims of laws drawn up in a different era.

How a Santa Barbara tackles the problem

A few years after we worked in Oceanside, we took an interim job in Los Angeles, where we I handled printing jobs for an NGO. We met a graphics designed who lived in Santa Barbara, a town to the north I’d only passed through on the Pacific Coast Highway.

What’s it like? I asked.

You know what they say about Santa Barbara, don’t you? she replied.

Allowing as how I didn’t, she responded: It’s the home of the very rich and the very poor, the newly wed and nearly dead.

Just as Oceanside was middle class, Santa Barbara was home of some of California’s richest, and remains so today. And in very few places do the rich exercise their control so openly, with the shameless assistance of the local newspaper.

And in Santa Barbara, laws against folks sleeping in their vehicles are strictly enforced.

From BillMoyers.com:

Homeless in the Shadow of Santa Barbara’s Mansions

From the accompanying report:

Twelve years ago, the Safe Parking program, run by the nonprofit New Beginnings Counseling Center, began offering a provisional solution. Its program places those sleeping in their vehicles into 20 private parking lots scattered around the city and provides bathroom facilities and some security. The parking lots are available only overnight and the cars must move by early morning. The group estimates they take 125 vehicles off the street every night and help more than 750 people a year.

The stories that Safe Parking’s clients tell me often involve a catastrophic financial loss precipitated by unemployment, domestic violence, injury or illness and the resulting medical bills. Most are working, although they have often lost secure, decently paid jobs and now struggle to make ends meet with multiple part-time jobs. A growing number of those forced to live out of their cars are families. All have been priced out of a brutal housing market.

Rents in Santa Barbara have skyrocketed in recent years — 20 percent in the last year alone — with one-bedrooms priced at $1,500 or sometimes significantly higher. The simple calculus of supply and demand is partly to blame. With a vacancy rate below 0.5 percent, a crisis figure, the housing market is at the mercy of landlords. Nor are there enough subsidized units to make up the shortfall for low-income renters — or plans to build sufficient numbers of new ones to meet the need, advocates say. “Santa Barbara’s housing market is broken and has been,” explains Chuck Flacks, executive director of the Central Coast Collaborative on Homelessness.

A fond farewell to Carrie Fisher, friend for a week

Carrie Fisher is gone, and I’m sad.

It’s not because of her Star Wars roles or her books, though we have nejoyed both.

It’s because of five days we spent as guests at John Denver’s ranch in Aspen, Colorado.

The event was a “human potential” seminar run by a fellow named Marshall Thurber, and it happened just after the publication of the first book I’m written under my own name, Fuller’s Earth, a day with Bucky and the Kids.

Buckminster Fuller, that brilliant poet, mathematician, inventor, and designer, was an icon of the 1960’s and ‘70’s, the self-educated scion of a family of Boston Brahmans known for their patronage of the arts [Margaret Fuller, that brilliant writer (she was America’s first woman book critic), women’s rights movement pioneer, and a member of Boston’s famous transcendentalist circle was a great-aunt].

The event was organized by Marshall Thurber, a lawyer and real estate developer who runs a network of movement to teach business skills with a emphasis on developing cooperation skills to better the human condition.

He was also a mentor to Tony Robbins, the infamous self-help huckster who soared to fame by holding seminars culminating with firewalks [that is, until people started to get burned]. He later held seminars in the White House for the Clintons and their staff]. Robbins was also there that week, and did his firewalk thing — pitched as a near miracle, but easily grasped by folks with a knowledge of physics, and yes, I walked the coals that week].

Two other folks with Bucky Fuller connections were also there that week. Allegra Snyder, Fuller’s daughter, and Amy Edmondson, his last student and his chief engineer, and now Novartis Professor of Leadership and Management at the Harvard Business School.

The seminar was, as Fuller’s daughter whispered to me, “just a bit too California woo-woo,” filled with self-affirmation declarations and singing. and I had no specific role other than to serve as a catalyst, so I got to hang out.

Thurber also made the mistake of bring out the staff of Fuller’s World Game, a very socialist endeavor with the aim of devising the fastest way of bring an equitable share of the world’s resources to all of its inhabitants. They made what to Thurber’s mind was a great mistake, “a downer”, by very graphically revealing what would happen to the planet in the event of a nuclear was by tossing plastic disks representing the area nuclear weapons would destroy onto a vast world map. This was when the Cold War was at its peak under Ronald Reagan and the year Soviets very nearly launched their missiles when their early detection system malfunctioned and war was averted because of the reservations of a single Soviet air force officer.

Very quickly Carrie Fisher, Amy Edmondson, and I started hanging out, talking, laughing, joking.

I was the elder of the group, then 37 and ten years older than Fisher and 13 years older than Edmondson, but somehow we clicked,.

I don’t remember the details of our conversations, only that we were uniquely sympatico. What I do recall vividly with the several hours the three of us spent dancing and laughing way into the wee hours under one of he vast tent structures Denver had built on his ranch for gatherings such as Thurbers.

Fisher was wry, witty, profound, silly, exuberant, and able to see the world with a faintly cynical detachment, and very, very human.

That night of dancing was perhaps the happiest time of my life.

I never saw either woman again.

When I returned to California, my spouse of one year was very jealous, but she had nothing to fear. And it was that lack of sexual tension which had, perhaps, enabled the brief, intense, bonding of that week in Colorado, a memory I cherish.

So I bid a fond farewell to a remarkable and singular person, a woman of deep passion and conflicts, exuberant, thoughtful, and compassionate, a woman who gave me one of my fondest memories.

Goodbye Carrie, you are missed.

AT&T Internet, the worst service ever

We haven’t been ale t post today because our Internet service has been down,. We’ve had three different technicians out, and yet this morning we were down for four hours.

We’re up again, but for how long we haven’t the foggiest.

For the last three weeks or so, service has been terrible, and just why they can’t seem to determine.

Meanwhile, we’ll keep posting.

When we can.

 

Internet went down to most of 10 days

AT& sent one tech out who didn’t fix the problem, and it too four days to get another one out.

Thus, almost no posts except for a couple of windows when it was working.

Hopefully, things are fixed now.

Image of the day: Daughter and granddaughter

Just a simple case of grandfatherly indulgence, featuring daughter Jackie and granddaughter Sadie Rose:

Panasonic DMC-ZS19, 14 October 2016, ISO 1600, 4.3 mm, 1/60 sec, f3.3

UPDATE: We couldn’t resist adding another image,featuring Sadie Rose and her rocking pig:

Panasonic DMC-ZS19, 14 October 2016, ISO 1600, 9 mm, 1/60 sec, f4.4

Politics and the strange silence on financialization

Random musings on a Saturday night. . .

The financialization of active citizens, reconfigured as passive consumers, is the keystone of the game, creating a demand for all that stuff peddled by corporations a peddled as objects of desire both in advertising through placement in media content as symbols of wealth, power, and sexual desirability. Note to that those media, like the the corporations selling the stuff, are owned in large part by investment banksters and massive pension funds, public and private, while a new class of billionaires arises through the flood of cash generated by all that stuff — at least in advanced economies but to an alarming extent in second- and third-tier economies.

In addition to direct profits earned by manufacturers, wholesalers, and retailers, even more wealth is generation by the financialization that makes it all possible. Without a scale of consumer credit unparalleled in modern history, banks generate vast sums through interest payments and fees charged for the borrowed cash that make us seeker out in order to accommodate all that stuff we’ve financed on credit cards.

And then there’s all the money needed to finance two car loans, because a second car is essential for many families with two income earners rather than the one that was the norm back when esnl was growing up in the 1950s.

And then there are those student loans you’ve got to get to land a job that gives you a crack at all that stuff, loans bigger than a lot of home mortgages and taking just as long to pay off.

Our blog flag features some very perceptive words from Aldous, Huxley, even truer today than when written more than sixty years ago:

Armaments, universal debt and planned obsolescence — those are the three pillars of Western prosperity.

The U.S., of course, by far the world’s largest arms merchant, and planned obsolescence is the prime directive of the “information economy,” where folks by phones every year chasing the latest gotta-have-it features and computer software that comes in an unceasing parade of enumerated editions, with creations made on an early version oftens unreadable by the latest programs. [For the first decade as a journalist, we wrote our stories on typewriters, many of them newsroom veterans older than we were. In those days, modst folks had one telephone, a heavy black two-piece contraption that never borke and you kept as long as you owned or rented your dwelling.

Similarly, back in those days credit cards were unheard of and when folks wanted to buy something like a television of some living room furniture and they couldn’t pay in full couldn’t pay, stores would put the item on lay away, holding the item until the customer was able to make a series of payments over time to cover the item cost. Or, if you had a good reputation in the community, you might get store credit and have use of them items whilst paying them off.

But when federal law changes allowed banks to operate across state lines, credit cards exploded on the scene and private debt soared.

Issues unspoken during the election

These are the most important issues confronting American society today, along with the recrudescence of racism stirred up by the President-elect.

Yet only Bernie Sanders raised the debt/financialization issue, generating the ire of Hillary Clinton and John Podesta, even though they were classic staples of New Deal-era Democrats.

Trump exploited the ire generated by the loss of class position and the hope of advancement that once inspired the American working class, but he focused that anger on the least powerful and most oppressed among us.

We had a race between a candidate who measures her wealth in the hundreds of millions and one who wealth is somewhere in the billions. Neither candidate worries about whether they can pay the rent, and the daughter of the Democrat is married to a Goldman Sachs star, whilst her opponent craps on a gold-plated toilet.

Welcome to Trump’s America, where things can only get worse.

And we’re officially on hiatus for a week. . .

Or maybe more.

We’re moving this weekend, and there’s lots to be done.

From Berkeley to Gardena, what a move.

We’ve made some good friends here in Berkeley, and we’ll miss them, but in Southern California we’ll have a two kids and a granddaughter close by.

Once we’ve got a new Internet connection, we’ll be back up and running, though posting will be slow as we get settled in.

Oh. We may add an occasional posts during the remainder of the week as we pause for a breather, but don’t count on it.

Meanwhile, enjoy the show!

Well make the rest of our signoff graphic:

First, from the Sacramento Bee:

Jack Ohman: Give him a small hand. . .

Next, from the Arizona Republic:

Steve Benson: Donald Trump’s teapology

We give equal time, first with the Minneapolis Star Tribune:

Steve Sack: The Hillary Clinton stash

And from the Indianapolis Star:

Gary Varvel: Clinton Foundation money

And finally, the show must go on, via the Atlanta Journal-Constitution:

Mike Luckovich: Faux

Destructive ‘afterslip’ followed Napa earthquake

And free books, too

We’ll begin with the free books.

We were once buried in books.

It was at 0136 hours on 3 September 2000 and we were sitting in our recliner in the livingroom of our apartment in Napa California when the lights went out and we were pummeled repeatedly by invisible assailants.

It was a magnitude 5.2 earthquake, and our assailants were books, an avalanche vomited forth by falling and collapsing bookcases.

We’re moving this weekend, and we again are buried in books, too many to carry south to L.A., so every day this week we’re putting lots of them out on the media between sidewalk and street, free for one and all.

The address is 2032 Prince Street in Berkeley [one house south of Shattuck Avenue between the Starry Plow and the Ashby BART station], and subjects range for brain/mind science to history, science, biography, media, and much more.

Fresh offerings daily through Saturday.

And the afterslips from another Napa quake

A map shows the location of the August 24, 2014 earthquake just south of Napa, California. In a new report, scientists from MIT and elsewhere detail how, even after the earthquake’s main tremors and aftershocks died down, earth beneath the surface was still actively shifting and creeping — albeit much more slowly — for at least four weeks after the main event.
Image: Gareth Funning/University of California, Riverside

A fascinating story from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology:

Nearly two years ago, on August 24, 2014, just south of Napa, California, a fault in the Earth suddenly slipped, violently shifting and splitting huge blocks of solid rock, 6 miles below the surface. The underground upheaval generated severe shaking at the surface, lasting 10 to 20 seconds. When the shaking subsided, the magnitude 6.0 earthquake — the largest in the San Francisco Bay Area since 1989 — left in its wake crumpled building facades, ruptured water mains, and fractured roadways.

But the earthquake wasn’t quite done. In a new report, scientists from MIT and elsewhere detail how, even after the earthquake’s main tremors and aftershocks died down, earth beneath the surface was still actively shifting and creeping — albeit much more slowly — for at least four weeks after the main event. This postquake activity, which is known to geologists as “afterslip,” caused certain sections of the main fault to shift by as much as 40 centimeters in the month following the main earthquake.

This seismic creep, the scientists say, may have posed additional infrastructure hazards to the region and changed the seismic picture of surrounding faults, easing stress along some faults while increasing pressure along others.

The scientists, led by Michael Floyd, a research scientist in MIT’s Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences, found that sections of the main West Napa Fault continued to slip after the primary earthquake, depending on the lithology, or rock type, surrounding the fault. The fault tended to only shift during the main earthquake in places where it ran through solid rock, such as mountains and hills; in places with looser sediments, like mud and sand, the fault continued to slowly creep, for at least four weeks, at a rate of a few centimeters per day.

“We found that after the earthquake, there was a lot of slip that happened at the surface,” Floyd says. “One of the most fascinating things about this phenomenon is it shows you how much hazard remains after the shaking has stopped. If you have infrastructure running across these faults — water pipelines, gas lines, roads, underground electric cables — and if there’s this significant afterslip, those kinds of things could be damaged even after the shaking has stopped.”

There’s lots more, after the jump. . .

esnl becomes a septuagenarian. Godfrey Daniel!

For those who might not recognize those last two words, they were employed by the late, great comedian W.C. Fields to elude the film censors of his day, who wouldn’t allowed the words “God damn!” to be uttered from the silver screen.

esnl, left, was feted by good friends from UC Berkeley, Ignacio Chapela, center, and Gray Brechin, right, and Chapela’s family for a delightful evening of great food, good wine, and delightful companionship.

UPDATE: We had an extra cause for celebration, since it was only four years ago our oncologist told us we have only a 17 percent chance of making it this far. . .

29 July 2016, PanasonicDMC-ZS19, 4.3 mm, 1/60 sec., f3.3, ISO 160

Repost: Our two most popular photo posts

For some odd reason, of the many of our own photographs we’ve posted, two images draw esnl readers back time and again, so we decided to repost both.

Our first and most popular image was original posted 19 January 2012, along with an essay:

The view from the gunfighter’s seat

Nikon D300 16 January 2011, 20mm, 1/250 sec, f4.5

Two phrases from the days of the Old West still resonate in modern speech. The first, of course is “Shotgun!,” the call made when claiming the front seat next to the driver.

The term originates from the days when folks traveled by stagecoach. When passing through dangerous country or when the stage contained a valuable cargo, an armed, shotgun-toting guard as assigned to sit up top on the bench beside the driver.

The other term, less well known, is “the gunfighter’s seat.” It’s the chair in the corner of the room farthest from and facing the door. Its name comes from its preference by ever-vigilant armed men who lived in daily expectation of violent confrontations with other armed men.

Sitting in the gunfighter’s seat gives a panoramic view of everyone in and entering the room.

We snapped this shot the other day while waiting for a friend at a local tavern. The Stetson belongs to esnl. Appropriate to our theme, it’s the Gun Club model.

Back in the 1970s, we had a friend who’d been a Los Angeles Police officer before signing up with the Central Intelligence Agency, then retiring to take a job in private security in the corporate sector.

We took him to a nice little French restaurant in Santa Monica, and planted our posterior in the gunfighter’s seat, which left him, the former cop and spook, seated facing the corner of the room.

We talked a few minutes, and then he stopped. His eyes lit up, followed by a grin, then a quick shake of his head. Then he fixed me with a bemused smile and intense gaze, followed by a laugh as he shook his head again.

“Brenneman, you son of a bitch, you did it on purpose!” He didn’t have to say what “it” was. I’d put him in the one seat in a crowded room certain to make to make him the most uncomfortable.

I smiled. He nodded.

We’ve always picked the gunfighter’s seat, a lesson our children quickly learned, sometimes to our disadvantage, as when they prankishly plant themselves in our chair of preference, forcing us into the blind seat because they know it’ll bug us, just as it did our ex-spook friend so many years before.

The journalist and the gunfighter

In many ways, the mindset of a journalist shares many traits with the gunfighter of yore, most particularly a peculiar sort of hypervigilance, attuned to changes and anomalies in the environment.

Because of our life circumstances, we’re particularly attuned to environmental changes and out-of-the-ordinary events.

We’d like to think that we turned what might have been a handicap into an asset, as is the case of many of the best journalists we’ve met during the course of the decades we spent behind first a lens and a typewriter, and later, a lens and a word processor [what an infelicitous pair of words].

Some of the best journalists are misfits. Why else would smart, perceptive people work at a craft where they earn much less than they might had they opted for law, medicine, business, or countless other “careers”? We suspect a lot of good reporters heard the same phrase we heard from our mother more than once: “Why a reporter? You could’ve been a doctor!”

Journalism, at least for us, is a calling, an engagement with the world that evokes the fullest possible use of our abilities, knowledge, and experience, turning an innate and potentially enervating vigilance into a positive force engaged, hopefully, for the benefit of the larger community.

But such is life in the Gunfighter’s Seat.

And the second image, originally posted 18 January 2012. . .

Isle of San Giorgio Maggiore, Venice

Shot from the Bridge of Sighs [Ponte dei Sospiri] on a cloudy summer day. Folks aren’t supposed to take cameras into the Doge’s Palace, but the staff was gracious enough to let me take my camera so long as I didn’t shoot interiors. Lord Byron gave it a name, poetically describing the last gasps of prisoners marched through its artful enclosure to the prison across the canal.The church with the dome and spectacular Romanesque facade is Andrea Palladio’s 16th Century Church of San Giorgio Maggiore.

To see the photo full size, go to the original post and click on the image, since WordPress no longer offers that option on newer posts:

29 August 2006, Nikon D70, 38mm, ISO 320, 1/2000 sec, f4.2

Here’s a romantic addition to the original post from the Wikipedia entry on the bridge:

The enclosed bridge is made of white limestone and has windows with stone bars. It passes over the Rio di Palazzo and connects the New Prison (Prigioni Nuove) to the interrogation rooms in the Doge’s Palace. It was designed by Antonio Contino (whose uncle Antonio da Ponte had designed the Rialto Bridge) and was built in 1600.

The view from the Bridge of Sighs was the last view of Venice that convicts saw before their imprisonment. The bridge name, given by Lord Byron as a translation from the Italian “Ponte dei sospiri” in the 19th century, comes from the suggestion that prisoners would sigh at their final view of beautiful Venice through the window before being taken down to their cells. In reality, the days of inquisitions and summary executions were over by the time the bridge was built and the cells under the palace roof were occupied mostly by small-time criminals. In addition, little could be seen from inside the Bridge due to the stone grills covering the windows.

A local legend says that lovers will be granted eternal love and bliss if they kiss on a gondola at sunset under the Bridge of Sighs as the bells of St Mark’s Campanile toll.

Intermittent posting back on the agenda

Our move has been delayed for a month, but there’s much packing to do, so we’ll be posting on a much reduced basis over the next few weeks.

That’s it. We’re officially on a brief hiatus. . .

This will be our last post until we get settled in our new digs in Los Angeles. Or maybe Redondo Beach. Or wherever.

We hope to be back up in a week or so, but until then, a little something for your amusement from The Late Show with Stephen Colbert:

Hungry For Power Games: Democratic National Convention Edition

Program notes:

Julius Flickerman and his pet weasel Caligula are back, descending into the belly of the beast to report from the DNC in Philadelphia.

We’re saying adios to Berkeley, gentrification wins

We can no longer afford to live in Berkeley, after our rent was jacked up by $800 a month.

We hate to leave the San Francisco Bay Area, which has the best climate we’ve ever experienced. but we’ve been gentrified out.

Our own neighborhood used to be mainly African American, but it’s now a haven for Anglo professionals, a phenomenon that’s happening throughout the region, recently named as the country’s most expensive place to live..

So we’re headed to Torrance in Southern California, where two kids and a grandkid live, and two bedrooms in a home in Torrance where our younger son and his spouse live.

We’ll be leaving behind the best friends we’ve ever had, the kind of friends who’ll stick by you when times get rough.

We’ll keep posting here at esnl, though infrequently till the move is over.

We’ll keep you updated.

Jeff Danziger: Choice 2016

From the nationally syndicated editorial cartoonist:

Which prompts a graphic response to a graphic. . .

Trump and why the media can’t beat him

The news media and their critics are full of columns and op ends on the deplorable Mr. Trump, all revealing that The Donald is a sociopathic hustler willing to say anything to keep the attention focused on the man with the orange adornment and diminutive digits.

But all the rant and raving doesn’t change a thing, and Trump remains a genuinely viable candidate for the commander in chief of the most powerful military on earth.

Admittedly, Trump’s viability owes much to the loathsomeness of his opponent, a candidate who, unlike the exuberantly spontaneous Trump, seems to be a product of a calculating artificial speech technology that hasn’t yet managed to find the way to add warmth to its synthesis.

So while you can’t believe anything Trump says, you do somehow get the sense that he believes it, even though it contradicts something he said five minutes earlier.

In other words, Clinton is a cold, calculating liar, while Trump is a passionate impulsive and wholly egotistical liar.

Back to the question

So why doesn’t all that media fact-checking and hand-wringing make a dent in the Donald?

Simple.

Because Trump’s supporters don’t trust the media, save for Fox News, and that only with qualification.

They know that the media really are run by a liberal elite, that “effete corps of impudent snobs” as former Spiro Agnew speech writer Pat Buchanan once described them, those “nattering nabobs of negativity.”

Now having spent our working lifetime moiling in the vineyards of the newspaper craft, we must add that most of the journalists we worked with were good, honest folk who really worked hard to report on matters of vital import to their communities.

But during those same years, we also saw journalism debased as locally owned publications either closed down or were subsumed by conglomerates, more interested in pandering that in community service.

The rise of social media, devoid of any filters, has unleashed both a powerful organizing tool [just ask Hosni Mubarrak if you have any doubts] and transformed a medium of public discourse into the digital equivalent of bathroom graffiti, allowing us to indulge both our highest aspirations and our basest instincts.. . .Occupy and cyberstalking.

Trump, the message of the media. . .

Our new media landscape is a perfect fit for a Donald Trump, a man who, as with most sociopaths, is preternaturally attuned to cunningly manipulating feedback to gratify his own infantile needs.

Trump plays to suspicion and fear, the offers simplistic and easily graspable — and thoroughly flawed — solutions, conveying with them a promise of security.

Trump eagerly lays blame — sometimes, and sadly, quite accurately — at the feet of the media for ignoring or trivializing the deepest concerns of his target “marks.”

To an audience well-primed by their own experiences, Trump can easily brush off all that fact-checking and hand-wringing as simply ploys by the establishment to his pursuit of a White House he vows to use in support of their interests, not those of the establishment elite.

That it’s an elite he was born into is ignored, as is the fact of his irreligious hedonism and his life of serial polygamy.

The Trumpian art of the deal is the art of the sociopath, an art sufficiently refined to overpower the reason and self-interest of his marks.

And then there’s Hillary. . .

Let’s put it this way. If Trump was a little bit more sophisticated he’d beat Clinton in a heartbeat.

esnl won’t be voting for the candidate who, as Secretary of State, pursued policies instrumental in the rise of ISIS, a candidate who refuses to tell us what she was so highly paid to tell the people who brought the country to the brink of total collapse. The kind of folks her own daughter married.

That’s why esnl won’t be picking up either revolver come November.