Under construction / Stay tuned
Inattention
abstention
Barbwire
by Andrew Quarantino Barbáno
/ Expanded
from the
Sparks Tribune 1-22-2025
Barbwire by Andrew Quarantino Barbáno (775) 747-0544
For the 1-22-2025 Sparks Tribune
1012 words including bio note.
Editor: "BigOil" and "phlaked" and "fergawdsakes" and "foolisher" and "Sierra Pacific Powerful" and "follytix" intentionally so expressed.
If possible, please italicize "Esté bien. Haga infierno." at the end.
Thanks.
AB
TITLE: Inattention abstention
If you paid attention on Monday, you paid too much no matter your preferences, prejudices or peccadilloes. I phlaked out.
For many, the bright blue high desert Monday proceeded from the philosophical to the poetic to the prosaic to the prophetic to the phlegmatic.
I resembled that last label. I knew that no matter who did what with which and to whom, all would be waiting Tuesday.
I took the day off. Got a little recycling out in time for the Teamsters to come around. I'm glad somebody was paying attention and getting overtime for the trouble. The fake news New York Times arrived before dawn.
If I have a lesson to impart, it's that one measure of success in life should be how well we manage our passions and/or compulsions. I have been a political junkie at least since age eight. That's when I first remember pestering my mom about how she should vote. (Insufferable child!)
Last Monday, I immersed myself in television inconsequentials: Various versions of shoot-em-ups and trite sitcoms.
Meanwhile, the nation and world were suffused and distracted with the good, the bad and the ugly. (In sync with the day, that Clint Eastwood title was available.) I checked my consciousness at the doors of the Long Branch Saloon, the OK Corral or the Top Gun School.
I was so disengaged that the most enjoyable were reruns of stuff I had seen multiple times. Typical short attention span American.
If there's a moral to my Monday battery recharge, it's the myth of Sisyphus: By Tuesday dawn's early light, we all continued rolling the rock back up the hill.
MOUNTAIN OF GOO. The local Waste Management monopoly will not accept plastic bags for recycling. Barbwire spies have reported that many retail stores have removed their recycling drops. Zounds!
A lot of the biggies publicly insist they are taking care of business. I've had tips otherwise. If you have been returning plastic bags to your store but now find that service zapped, lemme know who and where.
I get everything delivered. I've had all the shots and have never caught any of the plagues permeating the body politic. (Yet)
Annoying commentary is best produced by us anti-social misfits anyway. (It's better than honest work, fergawdsakes.)
This plastic project was spawned by an overworked, slightly surly grocery delivery guy. I asked if he would take in my stash of recycling bags for extra money on top of my usual generous tip. (Hey, I'm a union man. Hard work should be rewarded).
I was shocked when he said "they don't do that anymore." Zounds. Let's work on this.
We need to save all those petroleum trees that BigOil cuts down to make plastic stuff.
NVExtortion ALERT. I've been fighting NVEnergy's greed since it was Sierra Pacific Powerful. It took 21 years (from 1960 to 1981) to get a consumer advocate's office established under Nevada's attorney general. (Back when I was younger and foolisher, I managed the initiative petition drive and subsequent lobbying campaign to get it established.)
Now, billionaire Warren Buffett's monopoly is trying to emulate California, attempting to persuade Nevadans to fund an in-house wildfire self-insurance policy for the company. Last week's Tribune front page story carried nary a mention of the utility monopoly's stockholders shouldering any of the cost or the risk. Remember, WE -- us peons -- are always the company's insurer.
NVE also wants to start an insurance management subsidiary for the project. More cushy jobs for highly-paid execs, perhaps? Who gets the interest on investments? Will it be included in financial statements to facilitate borrowing money at lower interest rates? Will the benefits flow thru to ratepayers? Who controls the subsidiary's costs? Will they be subject to full disclosure and regulation?
Perhaps most instructive in veteran reporter Amy Alonzo's major story was the company's refusal to comment as to whether NVE electrical infrastructure had ever caused wildfires in the past.
Google "Pinehaven Caughlin wildfire Reno 2020" and see what you get. They continue to proceed according to the golden rule of modern follytix: You can fool some of the people some of the time, and that's usually enough.
The more things change, the more they stay the same at Nevada's monopolistic money machine. Whether back in the rape-and-pillage days of captains Neil Plath and Joe Gremban or today's smooth suede-shoe good ole boys, the greedy soul of the NVE pirate ship has done no penance for its sins. Stay tuned to the NevadaLabor.com Energy War Room.
POLIO MAKES A COMEBACK. The cult of vaccine denial now has a new label, "health freedom." (Except for abortion, of course.)
"As vaccination rates decline, adults may become vulnerable to 'childhood' diseases," the NYTimes headlined this week. Childhood vaxx rates have plummeted since 2020. Polio -- POLIO! -- now sits between measles and whooping cough. Based on the last election, red state kindergarten vaxx "exemptions" are more than double those in blue states.
IT CAN'T HAPPEN HERE? IT HAS. A couple of decades ago, a young Washoe County area utility worker contracted polio while performing his below-the-street labors. He remains a quadriplegic.
MILESTONE. Last week, I got a Barbwire Confidential subscriber near London, UK. Welcome aboard!
POETIC JUSTICE DEPT. Anti-gay singer Anita Bryant's obituary recently appeared in The New York Times the same day as that of transgender artist and author Pippa Garner who termed her transition just another creative experiment.
The most fantastical: a chassis-reversed '59 Chevy which appeared to be driving backwards at full speed. Her book of whimsical creations included low-rider rollerskates, a birdbath Jacuzzi and "a device for shooting garbage out your kitchen window."
She made t-shirts emblazoned with "Iraqi Horror Picture Show," "These are my remains" and my favorite, "I'd rather butter myself than better myself."
GENDER EQUALITY: Both got front page promos and two-thirds page obits.
Get the latest boosters, mask up, stay safe and continue to pray for Ukraine and the world's 160 currently war-torn lands, including ours.
Be well. Raise hell. / Esté bien. Haga infierno.
––––––––––––––––––––
Andrew Quarantino Barbáno is a 56-year Nevadan, editor of NevadaLabor.com and a member of the César Chávez Nevada Labor Hall of Fame. Barbwire by Barbano has originated in the Tribune since 1988. E-mail <barbano@frontpage.reno.nv.us> Links and references with the expanded edition at NevadaLabor.com/
CWA 9413/AFL-CIO
BRWR CC1/22 Consumers/brwr/OPSN25 and 25a
-30-
The
Goats of the Ides of January
Barbwire
by Andrew Quarantino Barbáno
/ Expanded
from the
Sparks Tribune 1-15-2025
Barbwire by Andrew Quarantino Barbáno (775) 747-0544
For the 1-15-2025 Sparks Tribune
1018 words including bio note.
Editor: "BigOil" and "goo moguls" and "this monster mannunkind's" and "megalomaniacal" and "King of Gilt" and "Elon Mush" and "Mar-a-Loco" intentionally so expressed.
If possible, please italicize opening lyrics and "Esté bien. Haga infierno." at the end.
Thanks.
AB
========
TITLE: The Goats of the Ides of January
Everybody knows that you're in trouble.
Everybody knows what you've been through.
From the bloody cross on top of Calvary
to the beach at Malibu.
Everybody knows it's coming apart.
Take one last look at this Sacred Heart
before it blows.
Everybody knows. -- Leonard Cohen, 1988
As Los Angeles burns, a whole lotta scapegoating's going on so we may as well get down and dirty with the smelly herd.
Ray Charles once sang, "the danger zone is everywhere." Indeed.
So where lie the roots of what ails us? (Goats may be living lawnmowers but I'm not worried about edible roots. Just the ones shoved down our throats and up our psyches by snake oil-peddling pimps and thieves.)
GOAT ZERO: The fabled Industrial Age.
I can't get away from a tale told to me by a retired Greyhound bus driver who bought a house in Hidden Valley from my late wife. Her clients invited us to a celebratory dinner and I started coughing and wheezing before the first beer.
The ex-driver related a story from his earlier days, perhaps in the 1950s. Driving thru the region of my birth, California's San Joaquin Valley, he was using his handkerchief. A lot.
Two senior citizen ladies happened to be seated right behind him. They noted that when they were girls in the late 19th/early 20th Century, nobody talked about allergies and such. Not a problem.
The ladies on the bus laid the gnarly sniffles squarely at the feet of the polluting Industrial Age. Wise women. At about the same time as that bus ride, BigOil was developing research about what their products were doing to the environment. The goo moguls correctly forecast that expansive sales of their black gold would warm the planet for the worse.
Then, they decided to cover up the research and promote themselves as cleaner than drifted snow on Christmas morning. They still do.
Climate change and its precursor, global warming (which our once-and-future president still insists do not exist), has caused mass displacement, starvation and migration. Couple that with the lucrative worldwide arms trade facilitating wars which cause further migration, and you end up where we are today.
Throw in a plague or seven rooted in this monster mannunkind's disruption of places we should not go (Ebola or MPox anyone?), stir in megalomaniacal pols (T-Rump and Xi Xin Ping ignoring Covid), and here we are: A world burning up figuratively and literally.
Wannabe dictators need scapegoats to enhance their power. Our golden toilet entrepreneur Czar Donaldov, the King of Gilt (props to Maureen Dowd), has recently been shopping for a disease to blame on immigrants.
He was elected to form a government but has instead been casting a television show. His highest appointments must look great on camera, qualifications or criminality be damned. (That's not an exaggeration. He chose his cabinet picks by watching video of their onscreen presence.)
As Saturday Night Live legend Billy Crystal often lampooned actor Fernando Lamas, "it's more important to look good than to feel good. And you look marvelous." (Crystal just lost his longtime home in the LA holocaust.)
I have had readers ask me for rays of light and referred some to my Nov. 13 Barbwire, "President Hoover, meet Smoot and Hawley."
Dictators usually begin wars of empire after they have totally silenced, subjugated or assassinated any opposition. T-Rump wants to go the likes of Hitler and Putin one better by starting early. Canada? Greenland? Panama? Denmark? What's next. Vatican City?
Republican President Herbert Hoover had a stellar career as an able public servant. He managed European relief after World War One. Hoover was pushed by Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon to ignore the chaos caused by the 1929 Wall Street crash. The market would right itself, quoth Megabucks Mellon. (His grandkid Timothy was T-Rump's biggest early contributor, eclipsed only by Elon Mush.)
Alas and alack, a garden variety recession was turned into the Great Depression after Hoover signed the smothering Smoot-Hawley Tariff in 1930.
T-Rump may indeed impose some heavy tariffs, at least on countries or industries which can't buy him off with multi-million dollar Mar-A-Loco memberships and such.
We, the poor unenlightened unbelievers outside the King of Gilt's cult, can only do everything we can to blunt the damage until Smoot-Hawley 2025 craters the economy once again. Those who ignore history are condemned to repeat it.
Buckle up, we're in for a bumpy ride.
SHORT ATTENTION SPAN R US. Lately, I have seen many comments pegging 2010 as the time that the Democratic Party started losing its working class support.
Hateful Republicans started the 2010 "Tea Party" in backlash against anything and everything about that Black president who got elected just in time to clean up the 9/11 and Wall Street real estate bubble disasters left by Bush the Lesser.
Their wave-the-flag protests remain effective to this very day. Who doesn't remember fondly the Boston Tea Party's tax increase protest? Except it was a demonstration against a British TAX CUT which would have put colonist tea smugglers out of business. Same thing happens today with black market gasoline. Steal it and sell it to filling stations without charging any taxes on the transactions. The avoided levies are the profit. Same with imported tea in 1773.
The Boston Tea Party is like the Alamo, another misplaced reverence. American heroes Davy Crockett and Jim Bowie were actually in revolution against Mexico's BANNING of slavery. Take that, John Wayne and Walt Disney. Fantasyland indeed.
CESAR XIX APRIL 2. Last year's César Chávez Celebration had the Circus Circus banquet facilities bursting at the seams. This year's event, the 19th since the legendary labor leader was first honored by the City of Reno in 1986, will be held at the Grand Sierra. Nominations are open for the hall of fame, union organizer, union project and employer of the year. Monitor CesarChavezNevada.com for details.
Get the latest boosters, mask up, stay safe and continue to pray for Ukraine and the world's 160 currently war-torn lands, including ours.
Be well. Raise hell. / Esté bien. Haga infierno.
––––––––––––––––––––
Andrew Quarantino Barbáno is a 56-year Nevadan, editor of NevadaLabor.com and a member of the César Chávez Nevada Labor Hall of Fame. Barbwire by Barbano has originated in the Tribune since 1988. E-mail <barbano@frontpage.reno.nv.us> Links and references with the expanded edition at NevadaLabor.com/
CWA 9413/AFL-CIO
BRWR CC1/15 MALIBU/brwr/OPSN25 and 25a
-30-
Dark
depredations & golden opportunities
Barbwire
by Andrew Quarantino Barbáno
/ Expanded
from the
Sparks Tribune 1-8-2025