BARBWIRE
by
ANDREW BARBANO
Pirate Laureate of the High Desert Outback of the American Dream


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Je Suis Charlie

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¡Viva Chávez!
César Chávez Celebration XV / Celebración de César Chávez XV
Wednesday 29 March 2017
/ Miércoles 29 de Marzo 2017
2017 info and highlights from the record-breaking 2016 event at Circus Circus Reno

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   Everybody knows the dice are loaded.
Everybody rolls with their fingers crossed.
   Everybody knows the war is over.
Everybody knows the good guys lost.
   Everybody knows the fight was fixed.
The poor stay poor, the rich get rich.
   That's how it goes.
Everybody knows...
Everybody knows the scene is dead
   But there's gonna be a meter on your bed
That will disclose
   What everybody knows...
   Everybody talking to their pockets.
Everybody wants a box of chocolates
   and a long red rose.
   Everybody knows. Everybody knows.
That's how it goes.
Everybody knows.


I hope you understand I just had to go back to the island.
Leon Russell, 1942-2016


The last question
Barbwire by Barbano / Expanded from the 1-24-2017 Sparks Tribune / Expansions in blue

"The earth isn't going anywhere. We are!" — George Carlin


WE WON: BIG NEWS FROM THE NEVADA PRESS ASSOCIATION CONFAB IN GOMORRAH SOUTH —> BARBWIRE NOMINEE GUY RICHARDSON INDUCTED INTO HALL OF FAME ON FIRST BALLOT

Support Don Dondero next
Note: Alas and alack, Dondero did not make it in 2015.
Wait 'til next year!

7-COME-11!
Barbwire wins 7th Nevada Press Association award

BRONZE 2016
4-28-2015
11-24-2015
1-19-2016

6-pack: BRONZE 2014
Hopelessly trying to win an earthquake / 4-18-2013

The 2013 Loony Tunes Legislative Lexicon / 5-30-2013

The politics of media ga-ga boosterism / 3-20-2014

We Don't Need No Education—> Neverending Barbwire Series

Barbwire.TV
Watch NevadaLabor.com for show times.
Help us get the word out.

Support the project at http://resurge.tv#donate

SUING FOR SCHOOLS
Reruns on Carson-Dayton 226

Additional programs
on Boulder City cable. Go to bcnv.org and then
go to the BCTV link.

If Reform Fails: Health Care, Jobs and Unions — new power to the people on the public airwaves

The program premiers were available to every television set in the region because of a high-mileage media hybrid.

The shows appeared on both commercial and community stations. The non-corporate entity produced the events, commercial TV greatly expanded distribution.

Thus began an ongoing series of sane public interest programs which generate both entertaining heat and more than a little light.

Please spread the word and consider contributing to the cause online at ReSurge.TV.

You may also take the public option known as the U.S. Postal Service and send a check or money order to ReSurge.TV, P.O. Box 10034, Reno NV 89510.

Your contribution will help fund the distribution as well as ongoing efforts at developing new media, including a regional, non-corporate community radio station and the return of community television to Reno-Sparks-Washoe.

You are present at the creation of what I hope can become a new media model where the programming accurately reflects what's happening on the ground and the media impact is powerful enough to forcefully pass the message upward.

Thanks.

Be well. Raise hell.

Andrew


Click here for selected on-demand re-runs from the Barbwire.TV archives

Barbwire.TV:
15-year overnight success

Daily Sparks Tribune 2-10-2008

The Barbwire's Greatest Hits
Highlights from radio days
mp3 file


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Are we pox, predator, protector or merely proprietor of the beautiful tiny blue marble flying around at 66,000 mph?

To some ways of believing, God gave man dominion over the earth. (I love the use of "dominion" because it begins with Latin for God, perfectly appropriate given that so many billions refuse accept any god not made unto man's image and likeness.)

We may not live alone in the vastness, but how we got the way we are came via divine providence, happenstance or perhaps both.


If not for divine intervention by an asteroid about 65 million years ago (reduce it to a few thousand if you're a hardcore fan of bestselling fiction), we'd be scaly reptilian descendants of the scary velociraptors of Jurassic Park fame.

Their brains were just starting to fold when nuclear winter wiped them out, allowing their favorite snacks, our relatives, to emerge from the ground to begin our conquest.

So what have we done to repay the Good Lord for our good fortune? There will soon be about nine billion of us. President Trump can buy us all for a buck each and have change left over on his Amex.

We have evolved in a world with violence hard-wired into its very DNA, from volcanoes cooking the primordial soup of our spawning, to eating each other, to killing for far less justifiable means.

Poet e.e. cummings wrote that we should "pity this monster mannunkind not. Progress is a comfortable disease: your victim (death and life safely beyond) plays with the bigness of his littleness."

Abraham Lincoln once mused "If we could first know where we are, and whither we are tending, we could then better judge what to do, and how to do it."

Now we know whither we are tending: Into the sun in a billion years or so, plenty of time for us to go the way of the velociraptors and for our hardy replacements (rats? roaches?) to see if they can do better.

What if we survive our exploitive and suicidal tendencies? If so, how?

Try innate electricity. Our brains produce chemical electricity, the essence of communication. We primitives just don't know how to use the power very well.

This monster mannunkind's basest motivation is survival, the primary protector of which is fear. Flight or fight?

Perhaps we can evolve so that the current trend of our primitive computer age continues, ever-improving electronic communication aided by the artificially intelligent tools we continue to create.

If and when all communication inhibitors are removed and we can converse wordlessly via self-generated electricity, we will have overcome fear because each will instantly know everyone else's intentions. No need to second-guess. No need for red buttons to launch missiles.

But will we so evolve at peril to our humanity as defined by our emotions. Love or hate? Laugh or cry? Joy or sorrow? Flight or fight?

Will we miss transfiguration by morphing into semi-organic transformers?

Art, music, beauty — all may survive but will our super-intelligent, perfectly attuned descendants see their purpose when human expression is instantly communicated and thus homogenized by internetic-kinetic energy?

A world without mystery, surprise and, yes, fear, becomes a world without wonder. When all is known, will everything that makes us human get lost?

That is the question.

Godspeed.

Be well. Raise hell. / Esté bien. Haga infierno.
______________
Andrew Barbano is a 48-year Nevadan and editor of NevadaLabor.com. E-mail <barbano@frontpage.reno.nv.us> Barbwire by Barbano has originated in the Sparks Tribune since 1988.

HAPPY NEW YEAR / Feliz Año Nuevo
Frohe Weihnachten und beste Wuensche fuer 2017

Happy High Holly Days

Merry
Christmas/Kwanzaa/Solstice/Festivus/
Chanukah

Hope you and yours experienced enthralling Thanksgibleting.


Be well. Raise hell. / Esté bien. Haga infierno. (Pardon my Spanglish.)

ONLINE EXTRAS —>

END OF TIMES SURVIVAL KIT. Defend yourself with humorous or humorless but always-peerless predictions for 2017 by subscribing to the Barbwire Confidential News Service.

Last year's dark foreshadowings unfortunately became reality, so I suggest inoculation by signing onto the HushHush! list at BallotBoxing.US/

Subscribe today to get the exclusive End of Times Retrogression, a Procession for Progression, an Obsession to relieve Depression, Proselytizing Prayer for Divine Intercession at the Legislative Session. Don't wait— procrastination is the devil's dislocation. Hie thee hence to BallotBoxing.US/

TOMORROW'S NEWS TODAY: FEEL UP YOUR FIRE METER. The Reno Gazette-Journal did big spreads on three consecutive Sundays (Sept. 14, Sept. 21 and Sept. 28, 2014) on NV Energy smart meter fires. Welcome aboard. Barbwire readers were two years ahead on the fire meter issue. (Touch a Smart Meter, Go to Jail — 11 October 2012)

FIRE METER UPDATES: THE NEVADA FIRE MARSHALL'S INVESTIGATION concluded "don't worry, be happy." I'm still worried and will continue fondling NVE's precious equipment —> If your smart meter feels very hot, not just from sunshine, call 911.

In its Sunday 21 Dec. 2014 front page headline major story, the Reno Gazette-Journal published results of the NVEnergy-commissioned "don't worry, be happy" echo study. On 1-27-2015, the RGJ published an analysis based on veteran reporter Anjeanette Damon's review of more than 1,000 pages of documents.

Barbwire
bottom line: NVE handles this like auto manufacturers handle defects —> It's cheaper to pay legal settlements after people are injured or killed than to fix
the problem.

Don'tcha worry 'bout a thing! If you can't trust your power company, whom can you trust?

Smoking guns: Rooftop solar assassination
NevadaLabor.com Energy War Room

DIDN'T THEY MAKE A MOVIE CALLED "THE INCREDIBLES"? On 2-6-2015, the RGJ reported that the Public Utilities Commission has ordered NVE to hire an independent laboratory to review the material.

UPDATE: The report said all is well. I still recommend feeling up your fire meter on a regular basis.

ANTE INTO THE GAME: Support the new season of Barbwire.TV by putting your money where my mouth is. A thousand thanks to those who keep sending show suggestions.

"Media is the plural of mediocre."
                              — Jimmy Breslin

  Stay tuned.

  I encourage you to donate to the cause at Barbwire.TV/ The medium that shapes public opinion needs at least one refuge where it is not filtered through the distorted green eye shades of prissy corporate accountants for whom profit is the only priority; where self-censorship is the journalist's normal work environment and where all sins of omission are tacitly encouraged and forgiven with the wave of a balance sheet. This is important. We've got a lot of work to do.

Get ahead of corporate-influenced news—>Subscribe to Barbwire Confidential

Be well. Raise hell. / Esté bien. Haga infierno. (Pardon my Spanglish.)


Andrew Barbano
is a 48-year Nevadan, chair of the Nevada César Chávez Committee, producer of Nevada's annual César Chávez Day celebration, first vice-president and political action chair of the Reno-Sparks NAACP, labor/consumer/civil rights advocate, member of Communications Workers of America Local 9413/AFL-CIO and editor of NevadaLabor.com and JoeNeal.org and DoctorLawyerWatch.com/ As always, his opinions are strictly his own. Check local listings for other Nevada cable systems. E-mail barbano@frontpage.reno.nv.us. Barbwire by Barbano has originated in the Sparks Tribune since 1988.


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Copyright © 1982-2017 Andrew Barbano

Andrew Barbano is a 48-year Nevadan, editor of NevadaLabor.com and JoeNeal.org; and former chair of the City of Reno's Citizens Cable Compliance Committee. He is producer of Nevada's annual César Chávez Day celebration and serves as first vice-president, political action chair and webmaster of the Reno-Sparks NAACP. As always, his opinions are strictly his own. E-mail barbano@frontpage.reno.nv.us.

Barbwire by Barbano moved to Nevada's Daily Sparks Tribune on Aug. 12, 1988, and has originated in them parts ever since.
Whom to blame: How a hall-of-famer's hunch birthed the Barbwire in August of 1987
Tempus fugit.

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