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


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SITE NAVIGATION TIPS: When all else fails, read the instructions (A favorite John Hanks aphorism I've been using for decades)

Je Suis Charlie
"Our republic and its press will rise or fall together." — Joseph Pulitzer

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"Media is the plural of mediocre."
— Jimmy Breslin (1928-2017)

Happy High Holly Days to all
Merry
Christmas/Kwanzaa/Solstice/Festivus/
Chanukah

Hope you and yours enjoyed enthralling Thanksgibleting.
HAPPY NEW YEAR / Feliz Año Nuevo

Frohe Weihnachten und beste Wuensche fuer 2018

¡Viva Chávez!
César Chávez Celebration XVI / Celebración de César Chávez XVI
Saturday 31 March 2018
/ Sabado 31 de Marzo 2018

Highlights from the record-breaking 2017 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


Princess Cassandra and perpetual war machines
Barbwire by Andrew Barbáno / Expanded from the 12-20-2017 Sparks Tribune / Expansions in blue


Greatest Hits Dept.

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

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8 the hard way!
Barbwire wins 8th Nevada Press Association award

GOLD 2017
Don't ask Renown Med for marijuana to help your chemo
10-4-2016
We Don't Need No Education
12-13-2016
Kate Smith & Lady Gaga
2-14-2017

Bronze 6-pack
In the Uber-Nevada legislature, words can kill
4-28-2015
On artificial turf, don't breathe unless absolutely necessary
11-24-2015
Leading questions, lead-headed leaders
1-19-2016

Hopelessly trying to win an earthquake
4-18-2013
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

1997 Pulitzer Prize entries

Barbwire.TV
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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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A few thousand years after Troy allowed that wooden horse inside, Princess Cassandra was reincarnated in Canada in the form of a grandmotherly urban futurist.

Irving Berlin once said that the world was fortunate that his music's greatest performer, Ethyl Merman, had no vocal training. The same may be said about Jane Jacobs (1916-2006) who had no formal education in city planning, yet changed the way we look at the world. And how we live today.

She is best known for her still-influential 1961 book "The Death and Life of Great American Cities."

She detested suburbs which she called "ghastly communities" and recognized the obvious: Humans are social critters. Most people like to live near other people where they work and interact. Skyrocketing real estate prices are a testament to that obvious observation.

"Lack of variety in age and overhead is an unavoidable defect in large new shopping centers," she wrote, adding "even the most successful cannot incubate the unusual — a point overlooked by planners of downtown shopping center projects."

Sparks and Reno's grandiose downtown redevelopment schemes over the past half-century have crashed and burned, torching hundreds of millions for such follies.

You could shoot a cannon thru Victorian Square just about anytime and not hit anybody. Downtown Reno is a symphony of shuttered storefronts which city hall now treats with cosmetics. Changing the Reno Arch from warm, welcoming colors to icy blue will solve all problems, right?

Sparks lives on the edge of insolvency after subsidizing the Scheels/Marina corporate welfare project, blithely and blindly creating a competitor to its downtown corporate welfare debacle. The latter has been largely bulldozed for apartments, perhaps not a bad idea although city hall changed the rules in 2015 to import cheap labor.

Jacobs might approve of people being able to live within walking distance of their work.

Reno subsidized the Union Pacific train trench which has technically bankrupted the city. Goldman Sachs and Deutsche Bank can foreclose anytime they like and force court-imposed tax increases to pay the millions owed.

While Reno City Hall was partying away the future, the economy recovered and it turned out that not everybody had gone broke.

Largely without fanfare, small businesses sprang up in the oldest parts of downtown, followed by apartment construction — Jane Jacobs-style activity while city hall talked about abandoning streets for a pedestrian mall.

"There is no magic in simply removing cars from downtown," Jacobs wrote, adding "the whole point is to make the streets more surprising, more compact, more variegated and busier than before — not less so."

Jacobs could not save New York City's Penn Station but stopped Robert Moses from destroying Greenwich Village for a freeway. She was not optimistic for the United States.

In her 1984 book "Cities and the Wealth of Nations," she argued against both guns and butter. Military and domestic spending are always in conflict in any empire. Both lead to decline, Jacobs asserted.

The only solution she envisioned has begun to happen: Big countries breaking up into smaller ones. In 1984, she noted the success of Singapore and Norway. We've since seen the likes of the Czech Republic come into being and do very well. Yugoslavia had a chance, so did Iraq, both suffocated by religion-based war.

An independent Kurdistan and Catalonia might light the path to the future. But what about us?

After reading Jacobs and Joel Garreau's "The Nine Nations of North America" during the early stages of Reaganomics, I posited that states and regions would band to together in common interest if the central government became increasingly responsive only to the whims of the wealthy.

And so here we are this week with a huge new Reaganesque giveaway to our untitled aristocracy.

The de facto dissolution of the formerly United States continues. Can Humpty Dumpty be put back together again?

Agitate. Organize!

Happy High Holly Days to you and yours.

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

Online Extras & Smoking Guns—>
Blast from the past: Pierre Rinfret on the ill effects of war spending
Christmastime investment advice from Al Capone
Barbwire by Andrew Barbáno / Expanded from the 12-13-2017 Sparks Tribune
Fake news Valhalla: Putin, my president and me
Barbwire by Andrew Barbáno / Expanded from the 12-6-2017 Sparks Tribune

Darryl K. Feemster 1962-2017
A sojourn into the life of a fallen Nevada giant
Barbwire by Andrew Barbáno / Expanded from the 11-29-2017 Sparks Tribune / Updated 11-30-2017
We Don't Need No Education Part LXXXII—>
Thanksgibleting 2017: Success, sorrow & sustenance
B
Barbwire by Andrew Barbáno
/ Expanded from the 11-22-2017 Sparks Tribune / Updated 11-23, 11-24, 11-26 and 11-29-2017
We Don't Need No Education Part LXXXI—>
Brain damage means never having to say you're sorry
Nevada's Most-Censored News Stories of 2017

Barbwire by Andrew Barbáno
/ Expanded from the 11-15-2017 Sparks Tribune
Throwing the book at big guns and little cowboys
Barbwire by Andrew Barbáno / Expanded from the 11-8-2017 Sparks Tribune
We Don't Need No Education Part LXXX—>
The poisoning of old Pizen Switch proliferates
Barbwire by Andrew Barbáno / Expanded from the 11-1-2017 Sparks Tribune
We Don't Need No Education Part LXXIX—>
Mississippi West don't need no education
Barbwire by Andrew Barbáno
/ Expanded from the 10-25-2017 Sparks Tribune / Updated 10-29, 10-30 and 10-31-2017 GMT
We Don't Need No Education Part LXXVIII—>
You've got to be taught to learn to hate
Barbwire by Andrew Barbáno / Expanded from the 10-18-2017 Sparks Tribune / Updated 10-19 and 10-29-2017 GMT
Window of opportunity: 48 hours for human rights
Barbwire by Andrew Barbáno / Expanded from the 10-11-2017 Sparks Tribune
Las Vegas 2017: Fire is the devil's only friend
Barbwire by Andrew Barbáno
/ Expanded from the 10-4-2017 Sparks Tribune
Rewriting the Civil War and the Mexican War
Barbwire by Andrew Barbáno / Expanded from the 9-27-2017 Sparks Tribune / Updated 9-28-2017
Freedom loving racists shoot to rewrite history
Barbwire by Andrew Barbáno / Expanded from the 9-20-2017 Sparks Tribune
Rewriting History
Reno News & Review Editorial: Remove Klansman's sculpture at UNR / 9-14-2017
Virginia City Nevada celebrates Slave Labor Day
Barbwire by Andres Luis Barbáno / Special online Labor Day edition 9-2-2017

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.

Ready for Trump TV? Inside Sinclair Broadcasting’s Plot to Take Over Your Local News
Its mix of terrorism alerts, right-wing commentary and “classic propaganda” could soon reach 3/4 of the US.
By Andy Kroll/Mother Jones Oct.-Nov. 2017

How Sinclair Broadcasting puts a partisan tilt on trusted local news
By William Brangham/ PBS NewsHour 10-10-2017

Top-down Democrats haven't learned
By Dennis Myers / Reno News & Review 8-10-2017

More Faux than Fox? Corporate octopus Sinclair moves to dominate Nevada and U.S. television
By Dennis Myers / Reno News & Review 8-3-2017


  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.

END OF TIMES SURVIVAL KIT. Defend yourself with humorous or humorless but always-peerless predictions for 2018 by subscribing to the Barbwire Confidential News Service.

Hush Hush!

 

"Media is the plural of mediocre."
— Jimmy Breslin (1928-2017)

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

It's cheap as well as enlightening entertainment. I suggest coming aboard now. Subscription prices go up soon. Thank you kindly for your support.

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

Andrew Barbano is a 49-year Nevadan, executive 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 BallotBoxing.US and SenJoeNeal.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 and received its 8th Nevada Press Association award and 5th first-place at the 30 Sept. 2017 NPA annual convention in Carson City. (That trophy and about six bucks will get you a Latte Mocha Cotsafracas Chingade at just about any Starbux worldwide, guaranteed.)

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All the news you never knew you needed to know 'til now: Tell your friends and friendly enemies to subscribe to Barbwire Confidential for warm laughter, cheap thrills, hot scoops and occasional cold logic at BallotBoxing.US/
Cheap at twice the price. (Hush Hush!)


SITE NAVIGATION TIPS: When all else fails, read the instructions (A favorite John Hanks aphorism I've been using for decades)

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Copyright © 1982-2017 Andrew Barbano

Andrew Barbano is a 49-year Nevadan, editor of NevadaLabor.com and SenJoeNeal.org; and former chair of the City of Reno's Citizens Cable Compliance Committee. He is the executive producer of Nevada's annual César Chávez Day celebration and serves as first vice-president, political action chair 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.

Betty J. Barbano
2-7-1941 / 12-27-2005

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