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Life Arts    H4'ed 7/6/12

Got Tanks?

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Patient dumping?

Austerity budgets = patient dumping?

The Lenco BearCat, which is best described by the phrase "armored personnel carrier," is often called "a tank" in the media and at a recent city council meeting, during a routine report by the Berkeley Police Department the members of the city council were surprised to be informed that thanks to a grant from the Urban Areas Security Initiative, one was coming to Berkeley.   They were told that the vehicle will be jointly owned by the Berkeley, Albany, and the University of California at Berkeley (UCB) Police Departments and that it will be housed at UCB.  

If this bit of news had occurred in 1968, it probably would have been reported in a wide variety of media ranging from the weekly Berkeley Barb newspaper to the New York Times (which needs no introduction).   As it is, times have changed and the Barb is gone and the New York Times has to cope with a smaller full time staff, smaller stringer budget, and a shrinking amount of space for news in the printed hard copy.   Getting a surfeit of celebrity gossip is not a problem.   Fill in the blank - -_________ with your own favorite irrelevant example from the current events page.   (Did an online news site just use a public domain photo of Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle to illustrate a feature news story on obesity?)  

Since the vehicle will be acquired via the joint three department grant and will not require the authorization of funds, the Berkeley Police Department did not see a need to consult with the City Council about the matter.   At the last city council meeting in June of 2012, the Berkeley City Council voted unanimously to reexamine the questions raised by getting a tank.

Since many local police departments are getting similar vehicles, the fact that one is coming to Berkeley has a low priority for use on websites with national audiences, but what does make it relevant is the fact that a local decision seems to have been made for Berkeley by people who don't live in the area.

When one national political party makes a campaign issue out of the idea that there is too much government involvement in citizens lives, seeing people outside the area make the decision for bringing a tank to Berkeley (Oakland already has one.) seems to be an egregious example of saying one thing and doing the exact opposite.  

By Tuesday of the first week of July 2012, it was being reported online via Patch that Albany would not participate in the joint cooperation deal.   On Thursday morning, the UCB student newspaper, The Daily Californian, was reporting that Albany was pulling out of the tank deal.   By Thursday afternoon, the Berkeleyside website was reporting that all three police agencies had dropped out of the agreement.

An odd facet of the tank story was that on Monday Google News was leading fact checkers to a story in the San Jose Mercury News.   By Tuesday, it was very difficult to go back to and reread that story.   Reality, it seems, is becoming gelatinous in the Internets Era.

While doing some Google-news searching to see if Lenco BearCat is an issue in Concordia Kansa, we learned that the Cancun Underwater Museum is about to open.   Do they have a Scuba Dive shop in Concordia?   Do they have a tank?

Have you read much (any?) news coverage about the scuba team that is doing some wreck diving on the Graf Zeppelin, Germany's only WWII aircraft carrier?   (We leaned about that topic in a recent copy of Wreck Diving Magazine.)

Early in the first week of July 2012, we heard a report on KCBS news radio that the legislators in Sacramento were considering making a law that would permit a child to have more than two parents.  

Does Uncle Rushbo read our columns?   If he uses new topics after some World's Laziest Journalist's columns about those items are posted online, that might provide some circumstantial evidence to support the claim.  

The case that inspired the move to pass this new law is rather complex and involves a married pair of lesbians and two guys who are married, with (according to the news report) one of those fellows being the biological parent of the child in question.   It is sure to spawn a massive amount of righteous indignation from the ranks of the family values party.

This week CBS News was getting a lot of credit for breaking a story about the inner workings of the Supreme Court of the United States that preceded the announcement of the decision for the Obamacare cases.   Uncle Rushbo asserted that secret "in-fighting" was unprecedented.   Doesn't that claim completely invalidate the credibility of Bob Woodward's book "The Brethren"?   

On Tuesday, the police made a sweep and emptied the protesters at Lakeview school in Oakland from the school grounds.   Online reports indicated two people were cited and released in the process.

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BP graduated from college in the mid sixties (at the bottom of the class?) He told his draft board that Vietnam could be won without his participation. He is still appologizing for that mistake. He received his fist photo lesson from a future (more...)
 

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