Mid-Week Ramblings: Local News And Views In The Age Of “Naw, That Can’t Be Right”

“Writing is easy. All you have to do is sit down at the typewriter, cut open a vein, and bleed.” – Red Smith

Partial as we are to sportswriters, words, and our selected craft it’s tough grinding out a column, however irregularly released they may be. At times they bring us as close as we’ll ever come to giving birth, our heads a’swirl, the words begging for delivery but coming hard as we pick through the wreckage of the past week in search of inspiration.

That’s getting more difficult as recent developments often defy reason. No amount of investigation or introspection seems to help. All we’re left with at the end is an unhelpful “Jeepers, why?” – and the answer to that is getting increasingly hard to suss out.

Sliding past the fact that, yes, we still use Jeepers, we’re lucky enough to have mined a Mother Lode of the Literate here at News24/680 and we’re grateful for our readers’ time and increasing engagement. “Favorite Words Used This Week” included plectrum – which struck a receptive chord with one musically accomplished reader, and brume, which tickled a Briton who said it pleased him to see it resurrected. You’re welcome, mate, thanks for reading.

On a not-so-pleasant note, we added another word to our weekly ledger – accelerationism – and that one hurt as we explored its etymology. Surfacing in reference to the adopted philosophy of two heavily armed, suicidal teenagers who looted their parents’ home arsenal before storming the Islamic Center of San Diego, it argues that the prevailing system of capitalism should be aggressively accelerated to hasten its inherent collapse. Teenage boys arming themselves and dressing in camouflage for a one-way “mission” to kill as many as they could before turning the guns on themselves. Jeepers… why?

We heard some other nasty words this week as locals tipped off to imminent layoffs at places like Meta and LinkedIn checked in with less-than-flattering things to say about their former employers, the irony of using their own platform to look for new gigs not lost on freshly terminated LinkedIn employees. The firings follow others this year, releasing thousands of tech workers – most of them engineers – back into a tightening job market with bald-faced promises of more to come.

And academia proved it wasn’t safe from the effects of a tightening marketplace as dozens of long-serving adjunct professors at Moraga’s venerable Saint Mary’s College were told they were no longer needed. In mid-March, faculty members with ten, twenty, or more years of teaching experience at the college were informed of the cuts, which the administration attributed to “structural changes.” The adjuncts questioned the move, of course, and outlined their case in a change.org petition.

Real estate – always a hot topic in the wildly desirable 24/680 – bubbled to the surface of the conversational sauce pot this week as local agencies reportedly sought out new offices or to shed those no longer meeting their needs. Oakley registered a hard “no” on new AI data center proposals connected to parts of the proposed, 164-acre Bridgehead Industrial Project, city officials saying they needed more time to study the impacts of AI-driven server farms – which require water and large amounts of electricity to power advanced computing complexes.

Lastly, several readers noted with more than a tinge of rancor that the current administration’s plans for a bunker under the East Wing — historically known as the Presidential Emergency Operations Center (PEOC) — is reserved for the President, the Vice President, the First Family, key Cabinet members, and essential national security staff when, you know, things go South. Built largely with taxpayer funds, the hardened facility has proven controversial both for its cost and for who gets to use it, with some wags maintaining that at least a token segment of the civilian populace should be given access before the blast doors clang shut for what could be the final time.

With our own place in the Super Bunker all but a whimsical pipe dream we forced down our resentment at being asked to pay for it while remembering the immortal words of Mr. George Carlin, who argued that wealthy business interests, billionaires, and corporate giants actually own the country while the rest of us are merely here to serve. 

“It’s a big club,” Carlin riffed, “and you and I ain’t in it.”

Jeepers, George… why?