Tag Archives: berkeley

NIMBYs could ruin Berkeley’s best chance of fighting climate change

by FredricRoderick Posted on June 14, 2018

My hometown, Berkeley, has a long history of making sweeping gestures at the bete noire of the moment. It called for the impeachment of President Donald Trump. It made mobile phones provide radiation warnings. And back in the 1980s, it declared itself a nuclear-free zone.

But now Berkeley has a foe that it could actually do something about. This week the city declared a state of “existential climate emergency” and said it plans to eliminate all city greenhouse gases as soon as possible. The city also pledged to start drawing carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, turning itself into a so-called “carbon sink” by 2030. It hasn’t defined how it will do this.

“Steadily rising temperatures have brought intensified wildfires, drought, and storms that have displaced and threatened thousands of people in California, and millions more around the world. We must act now,” said Cheryl Davila, the city councilwoman who proposed the resolution.

This is the kind of commitment governments around the world would be making if they actually took climate change seriously. Berkeley deserves kudos for taking this first step. The question is, will they take the next step? There are plenty of obstacles in the way: NIMBYs, town politics, and the powerful inertia of the status quo.

Cities that have pledged to eliminate their carbon emissions really can make a difference. In April, researchers found that cities in California can prevent a major portion of the state’s emissions all by themselves. But doing so would require huge changes, including a political reorientation.

The researchers looked at Berkeley specifically and found that the most significant way for the city to shrink its carbon footprint was by building more housing — filling in parking lots and vacant areas.

Building housing is the most significant way Berkeley can shrink its carbon footprint.Jones et al.

The problem is, it’s fashionable to say you support housing in Berkeley, then add a list of conditions and caveats that would make it very hard to to build anything. One of Berkeley’s subway stations is surrounded by a massive surface parking lot, which could turn into condos. But at the first community meeting to discuss the idea in March, neighbors lined up to oppose that change. The city council later opposed a state bill that would have made it easier for the regional rail system to build new housing.

Filling in cities with denser housing makes them more walkable, reducing the distances people have to travel and making transit and bike lanes more effective. Building more housing also allows more people to move into these environmentally friendly cities. Berkeley has traditionally put proposals for new apartment buildings through an exacting and expensive series of public hearings that can stretch on for years. The politics in Berkeley, and in many cities, usually favors existing residents.

Take this week’s meeting, in which the council pledged to eliminate emissions. Minutes earlier, the council had advanced regulations that would ensure new buildings didn’t mess up the views of existing residents. That would add another hoop for any housing development to jump through.

It’s understandable that many people want to keep their neighborhoods from changing. After all, they moved to Berkeley because they liked the way the city looked. As a result, things have remained pretty static. The current population stands at around 121,000; in 1950 it was 114,000. If Berkeley really is going to embrace the low carbon transformation, it will also have to change its approach to housing. And it would magnify its effect if Berkeley embraced development and allowed a lot more people to move in and enjoy a low-carbon lifestyle.

That’s just the first of many difficult political fights Berkeley faces. Dr. Janice Kirsch, an activist working with Climate Mobilization who was at the city council meeting on Tuesday, said campaigners are up to the task. “Now begins the hard work. We plan to show up to the city council meetings and hold their feet to the fire. We intend to be relentless.”

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NIMBYs could ruin Berkeley’s best chance of fighting climate change

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I Met the White Nationalist Who "Falcon Punched" a 95-Pound Female Protester

by WHRJacquie Posted on May 9, 2017

Mother Jones

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Punching a 95-pound woman in the face might be the best thing that ever happened to Nathan Damigo. The 30-year-old Marine veteran and leader of the white nationalist group Identity Evropa was until recently an obscure ex-con and member of a marginal hate group, but in the past three weeks he’s suddenly became an icon to the alt-right for being the man behind the fist that clocked anti-fascist protester Emily Rose Marshall at a rally of far-right groups on April 15 in Berkeley, California. 4Chan users created memes celebrating him for his “falcon punch.” The neo-nazi site Daily Stormer hailed him as a “true hero.” Berkeley police, meanwhile, have declined to state whether they are pursuing charges against him.

Twelve days after that encounter, at another far-right gathering—billed as a “fuck antifa” rally—admirers approach Damigo, who is dressed in a white hoodie, to shake his hand and pat him on the back. “You’re sort of famous now,” says Faith Gold from the anti-semitic Canadian website Rebel Media.

A video of Nathan Damigo (top) and Emily Rose Marshall (below) during the street fighting in Berkeley on April 15 went viral. Stephen Lam/Reuters via ZUMA Press

“I’ve just been really humbled,” Damigo tells Gold. “A lot of people have shown support and come up to me today and said thank you for fighting for our ability to come here and speak.”

The rally, held in MLK Civic Center Park, includes speakers Brittany Pettibone, a writer for AltRight.com who promotes the conspiracy theory of “white genocide,” and Vice cofounder Gavin McInnes, head of the Proud Boys, a “Western Chauvinist” street brawling fraternity. Large white men in motorcycle helmets, carrying sticks and bats, guard the stage. There are a surprising number of people of color in red MAGA hats including “Latina for Trump” Irma Hinajosa. Anti-fascist counter-protesters like Marshall are, for the most part, nowhere to be seen.

When I approach Damigo and ask him about the response he’s received to the video of the assault, he says it’s been “great.” Recruitment for Identity Evropa has “gone through the roof” since Trump’s inauguration, he adds, growing from just 12 people last year to more than 450 members across dozens of campuses. Cal State Stanislaus, where Damigo is a social sciences major, launched an “immediate investigation” after the video was posted online. Damigo says he thinks the investigation is “funny.”

After the punching video went viral, the alt-right unleashed a doxing campaign against Marshall and her family, publishing their home addresses and phone numbers online. Marshall received rape threats and other abusive messages and images of pornography work she’d done were turned into memes and posted to her grandmother’s Facebook page. Damigo tells me these actions were justified. “I think we’re engaged in cultural warfare right now,” he says. Anti-fascists, he claims, doxed him and his family last year. “This is part of that culture war.”

Damigo’s assault and the adulation that followed may indeed be new battles in a long culture war, but his story also shows how a young man from California has slowly been radicalized—in the military, in prison, and on the internet—and in turn how he’s helping “racialize,” or make racially conscious, a new generation of young white conservatives.

Damigo tells me he has returned to Berkeley because he supports free speech, which he’d like to exercise in order to promote Identity Evropa’s message that white people should take pride in their race and resist being “ethnically cleansed.”

As we talk, he forces a smile, but his quivering lip betrays an underlying frustration. He repeats catchwords like “radical diversity,” “radical inclusion,” and “multiracialism” throughout our interview. He speaks like someone who has practiced his talking points—a skill he teaches other white nationalists—but he hasn’t quite learned how to integrate them into a back and forth with a reporter.

I ask Damigo whether the free speech he is advocating for in Berkeley applies to everyone and not just white people, especially given the fact that he promotes the creation of an ethnically pure, white “ethnostate.” He pauses. His lip quivers. “We have a right to exist,” he says. “We have a right to an identity.”

When I press him and ask what measures he would go to in order to create that ethnostate, he admits that violence might be needed. “Politics,” he says, “is essentially the use of force and power.”

Damigo is a product of the rapidly growing right-wing ideology known loosely as “identitarianism,” and his current 15-minutes of fame has, in turn, made him one of its newly anointed popularizers. Born in Lewiston, Maine, to parents he describes as “fundamentalist Baptists,” his family later moved to San Jose, California, where Damigo attended a “small, private Christian school.” White people make up about half of San Jose’s population but for Damigo, it felt like “everybody was kind of a minority,” as he once told Countercurrents TV, a white nationalist YouTube channel. Many of his friends were Filipino and Latino and he noticed that they “had a very tight-knit group thing going on. I would go and I would hang out and there was always something that was kinda off, that wasn’t really fitting.”

Damigo’s parents imparted on him their “hawkish, neocon views,” and in 2004, at age 18, Damigo joined the Marine Corps and completed two tours in Iraq’s Al-Anbar province. “For the first time in my life, I was around a lot of white people,” he said. “I noticed that they seemed to share a lot of my views.” His friends of color back home were never mean to him, but he felt an ease with his new white comrades that felt much more “natural.” With his friends of color “it seemed like on every single issue politically we disagreed. No matter how hard I tried to convince them of the logic of the views I was espousing, it just didn’t seem to sink in and I couldn’t understand why.”

Damigo lost several friends in combat and when he returned home, “There were a lot of demons I was facing,” he said. “I felt betrayed by the government.” He found it hard to reintegrate and began drinking heavily. About a month after returning from his second tour, he went on a binge and held up an Arab taxi driver at gun point, robbing him of $43. He was convicted of armed robbery and spent a year in county jail followed by four years in prison.

Damigo was featured in Wartorn 1861-2010, a 2010 HBO documentary about PTSD coproduced by Sopranos star James Gandolfini. The film follows Damigo as he awaits sentencing. When Damigo’s brother asks him if PTSD made him do it, he replies, “I know it was PTSD.” His mother says that at the time of the crime, “he was drunk, he was confused, he was probably suicidal. And when he came up on this guy, all of a sudden he went into combat mode. He was back in Iraq in a heartbeat.” After Damigo was sentenced to six years in prison, his mother told the film crew, “They took him when he was 18 and put him through a paper shredder and then sent him back to us. We get to try to put all the pieces back together. Sometimes it’s like Humpty Dumpty: they don’t go back together.”

Prison, Damigo told Countercurrents TV, ended up “perhaps being the best thing that ever happened to me.” While locked up, he became “racialized.” Because California was under a federal court order to depopulate its prisons, Damigo was sent to a private facility in Oklahoma run by the Corrections Corporation of America. In prison, he told me, “everybody kind of breaks down on race. It’s constantly present.” He took to a white man who seemed to have a deep interest in politics, and who recommended Damigo read My Awakening by former KKK leader David Duke. This in turn led him to more serious sociological works like Thomas Sowell’s Intellectuals and Society and esoteric white nationalist texts like Guillaume Faye’s Why We Fight: Manifesto of the European Resistance. “From there,” Damigo said, “I think the rest is history.”

Damigo’s activism started after he was released in 2014. He became enamored with the French nativist movement Bloc Identitaire, whose so-called identitarian ideology aims to extend the insights of identity politics to white people in order to preserve and promote “white” culture. Identitarianism was a far-right, anti-immigration movement, but it was influenced in part by socialist ideas. It opposed “imperialism, whether it be American or Islamic.” But most of all Damigo was impressed by the movement’s “professionalism” in advocating for the “interests” of white Europeans. “They have mastered this branding, this aesthetic. They’ve really done an amazing job with it.”

Around the same time, Damigo came across YouTube videos by a man named Angelo Gage, another white nationalist Iraq veteran who has struggled with severe PTSD. Damigo commented on Gage’s videos and the two struck up a friendship online. Damigo eventually assisted Gage in founding the National Youth Front (NYF), a youth-oriented offshoot of the white nationalist American Freedom Party. The NYF’s main tactic was to wage provocative, media-courting campaigns against college instructors. “A lot of what we were going after were…professors…teaching these cultural Marxist, anti-white theories like white privilege theory and critical race theory, who were publicly making anti-white statements on social media.” They posted flyers on campuses with professors’ pictures, branded with the term “anti-white.” At Arizona State University NYF members pressured administrators to discontinue a class called “U.S. Race Theory and the Problem of Whiteness.” Damigo seems to see no contradiction between his claim to defend free speech and his efforts to silence a professor. “I’m pretty big on freedom of speech obviously…but right now in the school system what they have is really just indoctrination…We had an issue with that.”

When another organization named Youthfront threatened to sue NYF for using its name, NYF fell apart. Damigo saw it as an opportunity. He had wanted NYF to be more overtly “pro-white.” At the same time, a broader, loosely knit movement was forming called the alt-right, which mostly existed on the internet. Damigo thought it was “the next natural step to take this decentralized internet-based movement into the real world. We’re trying to create a fraternity and brotherhood for people who have awakened and who see the world in a different light. We want to get the normies’ attention.”

Identity Evropa, formed in 2016, is an exclusive organization with a stringent interview process for membership. “We want people who represent us with their presence,” Damigo said. The organization tries to challenge stereotypes about white nationalism, which is part of its seduction. There are no skinheads or white hoods or swastikas. Its members wear suits and focus on debate and rhetorical strategy. Its main focus over the past year has been branding. Members hang posters and put stickers around campuses and busy downtown areas, trying to build name recognition and “bring attention to the concept of becoming racialized.”

The biggest obstacle to getting that attention, according to Damigo, is restrictions imposed by online platforms. Google began cracking down on alt-right YouTube accounts after companies threatened to pull advertisements. White nationalists, in turn, have migrated en masse to Twitter, where they are relatively unrestricted. Damigo says when he joined Twitter a couple years ago, there were “perhaps only 20 pro-white accounts and I just watched it blossom over the last couple years.”

“We are exponentially growing right now,” Damigo said. “Next semester, Identity Evropa is going to have much more of a face than we’ve had over the last semester. We’re going to be going to schools, setting up tables. Our members are going to be out there talking to students.”

At the rally in Berkeley, an argument has erupted. A black woman is yelling at a group of white men on the right-wing side. “You’re racist!” she shouts.

“She’s pulling the black card,” someone mutters.

“You’re racist!” she repeats.

“Fuck Donald Trump!” a Latino man standing next to her shouts.

Damigo is off standing at a distance by himself, aloof. One of the white men goes and finds a black woman with a Trump shirt and brings her back to argue.

I later ask Damigo what he thinks about the fact that there are people of color at the rally on his side. “I’m fine with it,” he says. “It’s not the same movement, but this is a big tent coalition.” He says he is okay making strategic alliances with everyone on the far right, even if they aren’t white, united by shared issues like pressuring Trump to build a border wall or end the amnesty program for illegal immigrants. But none of this, he makes clear, amounts to a belief in racial equality. “No one’s really equal to anyone else in a biological sense,” he says.

“We have a right to preserve our heritage,” he adds. “And part of that requires having a nation and having a country where we can preserve ourselves.” He recognizes that a whites-only ethnostate is a “utopian idea”—or a dystopian one, to everyone else—that will take many steps to achieve. For now, he’s content to focus on “racializing” white people and stopping immigration. “It’s not a human right to live in a white country,” he tells me, “or live next to white people.”

Two white women in Trump t-shirts stand by politely as we talk. When Damigo looks over, one mouths, “I support you.” She holds her phone forward, asking for a picture. Damigo excuses himself from me. The woman thanks him for punching Emily Rose Marshall. They take a selfie together. Damigo smiles wide.

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I Met the White Nationalist Who "Falcon Punched" a 95-Pound Female Protester

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How Ann Coulter and the Far Right Are Using the Lefty Playbook to Troll Berkeley

by TracyEldredge05 Posted on April 26, 2017

Mother Jones

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Saul Alinksy’s Rules for Radicals, published in 1971 at the height of the counterculture movement, has long been required reading for community organizers on the left. It inspired activists with the labor movement, Occupy Wall Street, and Black Lives Matter. A young Hillary Clinton wrote her senior thesis on Alinsky and fawningly corresponded with him. But recently Alinsky has drawn a less likely group of devotees: the white nationalists and other bigots who make up the so-called alt-right.

After the white nationalist figure Nathan Damigo was filmed punching a female counterprotester at a provocative “free speech” rally this month in Berkeley, California, fueling a backlash online, his fans on the fringe message board 4chan/pol/ turned to Alinsky’s playbook. “Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals is like Antifa’s Quran,” one 4channer wrote. “They follow his rules explicitly and inflexibly. Why not turn them back against them?” Everyone agreed that at the next scuffle they should spray female counterprotesters with silly string—an idea inspired by Alinsky’s Rule 5: “Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon.”

“The Left is getting massively out-Alinskyed, and the hilarious thing is that this band of withered hippies, unemployable millennial safe-space cases, and unlovable + unshaven libfeminists don’t even know it,” wrote right-wing columnist Kurt Schlichter recently in TownHall. “Thank you, Andrew Breitbart. You yelled ‘Follow me!’ and led a movement that had previously been dominated by doofy wonks and bow-tied geeks over the top in a glorious bayonet charge against the paper tiger liberal elite.”

Begrudging respect for Alinsky and the leftist protest tactics he inspired is nothing new on the right; FreedomWorks, the Koch-funded political organization, reportedly handed out Rules for Radicals to tea party activists. But the alt-right appears to have really taken Alinsky’s strategic thinking to heart—or at least when they are not just straight-up hyping their next opportunity to beat the hell out of some antifa.

“A lot of the strategy of this site is based on it,” Andrew Anglin, the publisher of the neo-Nazi Daily Stormer, wrote in September, urging his followers to read the book. In November, another neo-Nazi site, The Right Stuff, published a detailed analysis of Alinsky’s rules, concluding that “the Alt-Right is already in something of an unholy alliance with (((Alinsky))).” (The “echo” parenthesis are used by white supremacists to single out Jews.)

Far-right provocateur Gavin McInnes, whose “Western chauvinist” Proud Boys were among those who waged bloody fights with antifa in Berkeley, described Alinsky to me as “an immoral human being”—but nevertheless professed to be a student of his writings. “This isn’t us taking on a brilliant book because we admire the guy,” he told me. “It’s us seeing what your tactics are and using them against you.”

Nowhere has that strategy more clearly been on display than in Berkeley, where supporters of Trump-boosting media provocateurs Milo Yiannopoulos and Ann Coulter have gleefully taken their cue from the Free Speech Movement of the 1960s. Although the University of California-Berkeley canceled each of their planned speeches over mounting security concerns—exacerbated by the mayhem around Yiannopoulos’ scheduled appearance in March—officials worked to reschedule Coulter’s speech. She declined. On Monday, conservative student groups filed suit against the university, arguing that canceling Coulter’s talk violated their free-speech rights. Then Coulter vowed to show up anyway. Then she vowed not to come—on Wednesday the New York Times reported she was out. “Everyone who should believe in free speech fought against it or ran away,” Coulter declared. (Alinsky’s Rule 4: “Make the enemy live up to their own book of rules.”) Then she told Fox News that she might still come: “I think I am still going to Berkeley, but there will be no speech.”

Though most of Alinsky’s devotees on the left eschew violence and laud, as he did, the passive resistance techniques of Mahatma Gandhi and the civil rights movement, his writings are not necessarily inconsistent with the alt-right’s and antifa’s embrace of street battles. “The future does not argue for making a special religion of nonviolence,” he wrote. “It will be remembered for what it was, the best tactic for its time and place.”

The alt-right’s repeated physical clashes with counterprotesters in Berkeley and elsewhere represent an evolution in tactics for what had been mostly an online movement. They also dovetail with the alt-right’s penchant for generating viral memes: An image of Kyle Chapman (a.k.a. Based Stick Man) pummeling an antifa counterprotester in Berkeley made him an alt-right celebrity and led to the birth of his own anti-antifa Proud Boys militia group, the Fraternal Order of Alt-Knights. (Chapman was arrested in Berkeley in mid April on an outstanding warrant for battery.) Thanks to additional publicity whipped up by Coulter, discussion and planning for the next Berkeley showdown has consumed 4chan since last week, with more than 100 recent posts dedicated to the subject, including talk of busing people in from around the country. No one seems deterred by Coulter’s waffling. “Folks are still going to Berkeley as a protest against the Domestic Terrorist Organization known as BAMN,” began one 4chan thread on Wednesday. “Spread the word. This changes nothing.”

“She’s apparently still going,” said another 4channer, “so we’re still on to bash some Antifa.”

“Regardless of Ann Couture’s (sic) decision,” Chapman wrote on Facebook, “we will have our rally. We will go back to MLK Civic Center Park and stand against these demons.”

“The whole idea of having Trump/free speech rallies in Berkeley is the historic nature of it,” a 4channer wrote earlier this month. “In 1968 the free speech movement happened in Berkeley to support communism. Now it is happening again in 2017 to support anti-communism, in hostile territory. It’s a battle on the front lines and the lefties help us make fun memes for the ages.” (Alinsky’s Rule 6: “A good tactic is one your people enjoy.”)

Activists on the right have much less experience than leftists with turning street protests into media tools. The civil rights, anti-war, and Occupy movements rose to prominence with the spread of photographs and videos documenting police brutality against protesters, from the use of fire hoses in Birmingham, Alabama, to pepper spray by a police officer at the University of California-Davis. The viral video of white nationalist leader Richard Spencer getting punched is a relatively rare example of the radical left celebrating violence. Yet for the meme-makers of the far right, humiliating their rivals by presenting their street brawlers as physically dominant is the preferred theme: “We’re just braver, and that makes for better jokes,” says McInnes. “The left are the new Church ladies. They’ve been sheltered in their own bubble for so long, they don’t know fun.”

An alt-right meme based on the Damigo punching video

Few people on the far-right have done more to turn the ideas of the left against it than Yiannopoulos, who enjoyed a rising career of co-opting “identity politics” in the interest of white males, before a pedophilia scandal knocked him from his perch. On Friday, he doubled down on the strategy of appropriating leftist concepts, announcing that he will host a “free speech week” this year that may include “a tent city on UC-Berkeley’s Sproul Plaza.” The idea repurposes an approach last seen on a large scale in 2011 at UC Berkeley and other university campuses in solidarity with Occupy Wall Street—but this time, in service of the right to say nasty things about women, people of color, and Muslims.

Which points directly to another Alinskyism that the alt-right is now testing: “If you push a negative hard enough, it will push through and become a positive.” As one proponent of the idea explained on the neo-Nazi site The Right Stuff: “We want to get to the point where being labeled by the establishment as a racist, sexist, or antisemite (sic) is a sign of having done something correct.”

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How Ann Coulter and the Far Right Are Using the Lefty Playbook to Troll Berkeley

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I Was There When an Undercover Cop Pulled a Gun on Unarmed Protesters in Oakland. Here’s How It Happened.

by ceramide-capsules1 Posted on December 13, 2014

Mother Jones

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Over the past 24 hours, photos showing a plainclothes police officer pulling a gun on unarmed protesters in Oakland have gone viral. Tens of thousands of people, and news outlets like Gawker, Buzzfeed, The Guardian, and NBC have shared them, often including outraged comments. But there have been few accounts of what exactly happened, and how the incident came to pass.

I was one of the few reporters with the protesters at that point, around 11:30 p.m., and what I saw may add some useful context.

The protest was the latest in a series that have filled the streets of Berkeley and Oakland in the past couple of weeks in response to the lack of indictments for the officers who had killed Mike Brown and Eric Garner. (I covered most of them via Twitter.) Marchers generally remained peaceful. Sometimes they overtook highways and blocked intersections. Parents pushed strollers, students kept stride with older marchers, and people from all across the Bay Area joined in. But there was also infighting among the crowds, and breakaway factions looted stores, smashed windows, and burned trash cans. Police officers responded with tear gas, flash-bang grenades, and fired non-lethal bullets*, and their actions were often met with outrage.

Protesters run after police set off flashbang grenades in Oakland, Calif. Gabrielle Canon

Wednesday night seemed as if it was going to end differently. Organizers with hoarse voices rallied the crowd of some 150 with updates on the movement that they said was building across the country. They presented a petition listing demands, including for Darren Wilson to be indicted and protesters who’d been arrested to be released without charges. Starting at the Berkeley campus, the group marched peacefully toward Oakland as a rainstorm approached.

A little girl rides along on her stroller, chanting in a march last week. Gabrielle Canon

About 10:30 p.m., a small group from within the march broke windows at a T-Mobile store and smashed Bank Of America ATMs. Protesters blocked photographers documenting the violence, pushing us and putting their hands in front of lenses.

Marching floods into the streets in Berkeley, CA early on Wednesday night Gabrielle Canon

Shortly after this, police presence increased. Squad cars and white vans full of officers followed the march slowly as announcements rang out over a police intercom informing protesters that police were there for their protection and that their right to demonstrate was being respected. They also warned that any vandalism or violence would lead to citation or arrest.

According to reporter David DeBolt, writing for Inside Bay Area, officials say it was then that two undercover officers joined the march, both wearing dark handkerchiefs and hoods that covered their faces. I had not seen them earlier, and they did not appear in any of the photos I took.

A marcher does a different take on “Hands up don’t shoot” Gabrielle Canon

Suddenly, behind me, someone started to yell. A protester had discovered the undercover cops and shouted an alarm. Others began to join in, calling them pigs and telling them to go home. The two men passed me in silence, at a hurried pace. Suddenly, a scuffle erupted as one protester attempted to pull off one of the officer’s hoods. The officer tackled someone involved, and was quickly surrounded by a small crowd and kicked from several directions while on the ground. (That officer, who was African American, is who you see in the ground in the photo above.) The other officer stepped in front of his partner and brandished a baton. When the crowd did not back up he drew his gun, pointing at protesters and photographers. Moments later, police flooded the area, scattering marchers and blocking others, as the undercover officers arrested the man who had been tackled in the skirmish.

Protester in Oakland, CA Gabrielle Canon

DeBolt reports the undercover officers were later identified as members of California Highway Patrol, assigned to follow the march on foot. They had been following in a vehicle providing information to stop protesters from blocking highways. Officials said in a press conference that the agency is investigating the incident, but believes the officers did what was necessary to protect themselves. They said that undercover cops had been deployed in prior protests and would be again, and that Twitter accounts had also been used to gather information.

The incident and photo have sparked anger and questions about police tactics in crowd control. Protesters are expected to resume marching over the weekend throughout the Bay Area and I will send out updates on Twitter as events unfold.

Correction: An earlier version of this article erroneously stated the location from which nonlethal bullets were fired. The language has been changed to fix the error.

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I Was There When an Undercover Cop Pulled a Gun on Unarmed Protesters in Oakland. Here’s How It Happened.

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Your odds of getting struck by lightning just increased

by TodWarfield Posted on November 13, 2014

Shocking news

Your odds of getting struck by lightning just increased

By

13 Nov 2014 6:43 PMShare

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Your odds of getting struck by lightning just increased

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We already know that climate change is bringing more hurricanes, floods, droughts, typhoons, heat waves, and extreme rainfall. Now comes the hair-raising news that we’ll get more lightning, too.

Researchers from the University of California, Berkeley, explore the climate-lightning connection in a paper coming out tomorrow in the journal Science. The Guardian explains how these scientists put numbers on a link that was already well-known but under-investigated:

The researchers used data from federal government agencies to establish the connection between warming temperatures, more energetic storms, and increased lightning strikes, and combined the findings with 11 climate models.

And the not-so-shocking results:

The scientists found lightning strikes would increase by about 12 percent for every 1C of warming, resulting in about 50 percent more strikes by 2100.

See what they did there? Assumed nearly 4 DEGREES of warming this century! These scientists-of-little-faith evidently doubt that we’re going to pull off the climate comeback, and stop warming before we hit the agreed-upon 2-degree doomsday threshold.

The take-away message: 2100 will feature three lightning bolts for every two today unless humanity gets its shit together and stops burning fossil fuels.

Think these findings aren’t a big deal? Or that it only means more dazzling displays of electric energy from the heavens? Well, you obviously don’t live in Florida, the state that leads the nation in lightning-related injuries and fatalities. Six people have been struck dead in the Sunshine State this year alone.

Then again, Florida is already going to be fucked by sea-level rise, whether or not we get our collective act together. But looking on the bright side, LARPers will dig all the additional lightning bolts.

Source:
Lightning strikes will increase due to climate change

, The Guardian.

Projected increase in lightning strikes in the United States due to global warming

, Science.

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From GMOs To Soda Taxes, Here’s What the Election Means For Your Fridge

by LucaDavison Posted on November 5, 2014

Mother Jones

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States and localities nationwide voted yesterday on a host of hot-button food and agriculture issues, from GMO labeling to soda taxes to food stamps. The outcomes of these contests have major implications for policy—and your dinner plate. Here’s a roundup of how they shook out:

Colorado Proposition 105: This statewide ballot initiative pushed for the labeling of genetically modified foods, requiring most GM foods to bear a label reading, “produced with genetic engineering.” Burrito chain Chipotle and Whole Foods came out in support of the measure, while agribusiness giants Monsanto, PepsiCo and Kraft came out against it. (Unsurprisingly, 105’s opponents raised more than $12 million—many times what supporters brought in.) Outcome: Colorado voters resoundingly rejected Prop 105, with nearly 70% of voters voting no.

Oregon Measure 92: This ballot measure was nearly identical to Colorado’s, requiring foods with GMO ingredients to be labeled. Like in Colorado, Big Ag mobilized big-time against Measure 92, raising more than $16 million. But 92’s supporters—including Dr. Bronner’s Magic Soaps—raised an impressive $8 million. Outcome: Undecided

San Francisco Measure E and Berkeley Measure D: These two Bay Area cities both considered levying taxes on sugary beverages. San Francisco’s Measure E proposed a two-cent per ounce tax, while Berkeley’s Measure D proposed one-cent per ounce. Both races were considered something of a last stand for the soda tax—if it couldn’t pass in these two bastions of liberalism and healthy living, it was essentially doomed everywhere else. No surprise, then, that Big Soda spent more than $7 million in San Francisco and over $1.7 million in Berkeley (population: 117,000) to defeat the measures. Outcome: Failing to gain the necessary two-thirds supermajority, the San Francisco soda tax failed. Berkeley’s is undecided.

Maui County, Hawaii, GMO Moratorium Bill: Hawaii’s Maui County—which includes the islands of Maui, Lanai and Molokai—considered one of the strongest anti-GMO bills ever: a complete moratorium on the cultivation of genetically engineered crops until studies conclusively prove they are safe. Agriculture is big business on Maui: the island is a major producer of sugarcane, coffee, and pineapple, among other things. Monsanto is among the companies operating farms in Maui County, and this bill would’ve effectively shut it down. (Under the law, farmers knowingly cultivating GMOs would get hit with a $50,000 per day fine.) Opponents raised nearly $8 million against the measure, making it the most expensive campaign in state history. Outcome: Undecided

Florida Second Congressional District: Rep. Steve Southerland, a tea party darling, faced Democrat Gwen Graham in his attempt to get re-elected in this Florida Panhandle district. Last year, Southerland attempted to pass legislation that would’ve cut $39 billion in food stamp funding, forcing millions out of the program. (He called the cuts “the defining moral issue of our time.”) Widely considered the most sweeping cuts in decades, they were not passed, and made Southerland an extremely vulnerable incumbent. Outcome: In a rare House flip for Democrats, Rep. Southerland was defeated by Democrat Gwen Graham.

Kansas Senate: Pat Roberts, the three-term Republican Senator from Kansas, faced independent challenger Greg Orman in a surprisingly tight race for this deep-red state. The race was considered a key indicator of the GOP’s Senate hopes, and important for agriculture too: Roberts had said that in the event of a Republican majority, he would be Senate Agriculture Committee Chair—given that he won his own contest, of course. Roberts, once considered a “savior” of food stamp programs, attempted to cut $36 billion from the program last year, and would certainly advocate for similar policy as chairman. Outcome: Roberts won re-election, and the GOP won the Senate majority. Look for Chairman Roberts in 2015.

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Oakland votes to keep coal and oil trains away

by EugeneWrixon Posted on June 18, 2014

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Oakland votes to keep coal and oil trains away

By

Paul Sullivan

The working-class city of Oakland, Calif., wants to stop trains carrying crude, coal, and petroleum coke from reaching local refineries and export terminals.

The city council voted unanimously on Tuesday evening to “oppose” the “transportation of hazardous fossil fuel materials” along existing rail lines and through “densely populated” and waterfront areas — which includes much of the city.

The city will now formally urge California and regional governments to take action on oil-train safety, and will consider formally opposing projects that threaten to bring fossil fuel–bearing trains into Oakland.

Lawmakers in the Californian cities of Davis and Berkeley have passed similar resolutions that attempt to block oil trains. San Francisco is considering something similar too. Tuesday’s vote was particularly significant, given that Oakland operates a large port, which has recently been rejecting coal industry efforts to use its terminals for exports. Like Berkeley and San Francisco, Oakland, which is also in the Bay Area, is located close to major oil refineries, some of which are being expanded.

Local governments up and down the West Coast have been voting to keep coal-carrying trains out of their communities, aiming to protect themselves from coal-dust pollution and to prevent coal mined in the Intermountain West from reaching power plants in Asia.

Secrecy by railway operators makes it difficult for anybody in Oakland, or in any other city that’s home to an extensive rail network, to know for sure whether crude oil is being hauled through their communities. But oil trains are increasingly common in California and other states, as drillers in Canada, North Dakota, and other parts of the U.S. turn to rail cars to move their products to refineries.

The morning after Oakland’s vote, the Natural Resources Defense Council published results of a new analysis revealing that nearly 4 million residents in California’s Bay Area and Central Valley could be in danger should an oil train be involved in an accident. The NRDC found that crude-by-train deliveries spiked in California to 6 million barrels last year — up from a mere 45,000 barrels in 2009.

Local ordinances probably won’t be effective in limiting rail transportation of fossil fuels. Industry argues that only the federal government has the legal right to regulate such shipments. Unfortunately, the feds are doing a shoddy job of it.

“There’s a question over the ability of cities, or anyone else, to regulate the railways, if that entity is not the federal government,” said Roger Lin, a staff attorney for the nonprofit Communities for a Better Environment, which advocated for Tuesday’s vote. “But I feel that if as many cities as possible do this, it sends a great message — a very positive message — to the federal government.”

As if to truly sink the boot into the bloated body of the fossil-fuel industry, the Oakland City Council also approved a fossil-fuel divestment bill Tuesday might. Among other things, the city will now urge its pension funds to dump their dirty-energy stocks.

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.Find this article interesting? Donate now to support our work.Read more: Climate & Energy

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Oakland votes to keep coal and oil trains away

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Laws banning harassment of cyclists spread like a wonderful virus

by Felixct7yh Posted on February 20, 2013

Laws banning harassment of cyclists spread like a wonderful virus

By Susie Cagle

Cyclists may be the happiest commuters, but not when they’re getting shit from passing drivers. Flashback to the summer of 2011, when Los Angeles passed an ordinance to make harassing cyclists a civil and suable infraction. Throw a thing at a cyclist and they can take you to court and seek damages — revolutionary!

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L.A. City Council President Eric Garcetti at the time said, “If L.A. can do it, every city in the country can do it.”

Well, we’re not quite there yet, but in the year and a half since L.A. passed its law, Washington, D.C., and the California cities of Berkeley, Sunnyvale, and Sebastapol have all passed similar ordinances. Healdsburg, Calif., is now considering one, too.

To be fair, Columbia, Mo., was actually the first city to enact an ordinance banning harassment of cyclists in 2009, but it didn’t include the all-important civil infraction bit. L.A.’s law and those modeled after it make it possible for cyclists to take their harassers to civil court, where there is a lower burden of proof.

“The biggest problem with prosecuting bicyclist harassment in the past has been the high level of proof needed in a criminal case — you pretty much needed a police officer to witness the crime in order to get the city attorney to take it to court,” said Chris Kidd, a cycling advocate who worked on the L.A. ordinance.

So, how long until we see a bike harasser takedown on a courtroom reality TV show? I wanna see Judge Judy ream some SUV drivers.

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Silicon Valley’s ‘unbuilt Manhattan’ is best left unbuilt

by gerdi Posted on January 11, 2013

Silicon Valley’s ‘unbuilt Manhattan’ is best left unbuilt

By Susie Cagle

Over the past two decades, an influx of tech money has sent rents in San Francisco skyward. It’s the fastest growing rental market in the country, with the East Bay’s Oakland coming in second. Last year, landlords in San Francisco used the “Ellis Act” to evict three times as many tenants as they had in 2011, in order to circumvent rent control.

Ken Layne at The Awl harkens back to a simpler time when you could rent a studio in SF for less than $2,400, and compares that to now:

In 2013, the bigger tech companies are still in Silicon Valley, but the people working there—from Mark Zuckerberg to the newest $100K hires straight out of college—want to be in San Francisco. Zuckerberg is a part-timer, with a fancy apartment in the Mission. The rest are part-timers in Silicon Valley, commuting to and from work on immense luxury buses run by Google, Apple, EA, Yahoo and the rest. This has caused problems, notably for San Francisco residents unlucky enough to survive on less than a hundred-grand starting salary. Talk of raising the city’s skyline is met with anger. People argue endlessly over the appropriate comparisons to New York. Is Oakland the Brooklyn to SF? What about Berkeley, or Marin, or the Outer Sunset? And what does that make Bayview or Burlingame?

All of this assumes that urban San Francisco equals Manhattan. It does not. San Francisco, with its leafy parks and charming row houses and distinct villages and locavore restaurants and commuters fleeing every morning to work, is the Brooklyn to an as-yet-unbuilt Manhattan.

To some extent, this is true. Many parts of San Francisco have become bedroom communities for tech workers who take company-sponsored shuttles or hellish Caltrain routes to work many miles south, to a place where rents are cheaper, but the living is decidedly suburban. The youngs making six figures at start-ups seem to prefer the hell of Caltrain to the hell of Silicon Valley suburbia.

Nobody wants to move to the Bay Area for work and then discover they actually have to live in a completely different climate an hour’s drive (without traffic) from the actual bay. The magical part of the Bay Area is really confined to the Bay Area, with its relatively green hills and foggy mornings and cool ocean air.

So Layne proposes building dense, walkable, appealing neighborhoods in the bleak, sprawling stretch between San Francisco and Silicon Valley some 40 miles to the south. “[I]n the post-automobile era, where else would you look to expand your metropolitan area other than the underused sections in the middle of your metropolitan area?”

[T]he areas around and in between the tech giants of Silicon Valley are mostly ready to be razed and rebuilt. There are miles and miles of half-empty retail space, hideous 1970s’ two-story apartment complexes, most of it lacking the basic human infrastructure of public transportation, playgrounds, bicycle and running and walking paths, outdoor cafes and blocks loaded with bars and late-night restaurants. This is where the new metropolis must be built, in this unloved but sunny valley…

With local light rail at street level and express trains overhead or underground, the whole route could be lined with native-landscaped sidewalks dotted with pocket parks and filled on both sides with ground-floor retail, farmers markets and nightlife districts around every station. Caltrain already runs just east of Route 82, and BART already reaches south to Millbrae now.

Alexis Madrigal at The Atlantic calls this “a wisp of a suggestion, an opening statement, perhaps,” but a “fascinating” one.

But as Layne himself notes, people don’t move to the Bay Area because they want to live an hour’s drive south of San Francisco. Even if we brought a Robert Moses-style urban reckoning upon Silicon Valley (an idea that does have its appeal!), why assume the techies would move there?

This is an aggressively naive idea for a region with a dire housing shortage and a serious cultural bias against density. Instead of a Silicon Valley raze-and-rebuild, how about infilling in San Francisco and East Bay cities where young tech workers already want to be anyway? How about rezoning and remaking Oakland and Berkeley’s desolate, unused industrial brownfields along the waterfront? If it can’t be done in the bigger cities, how likely is it to get done in the many suburbs of Silicon Valley? Not likely at all. Much of the Bay Area doesn’t even want more public transportation, let alone more housing density.

Don’t get me wrong, I love the idea of taking a wrecking ball to empty strip malls. But as a Bay Area resident wishing on a star for the region to grow smarter and denser, I see many more worthy routes to take besides bulldozing the ‘burbs, however delicious the thought.

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Here’s how you can get conservatives to care about the environment

by Myrna Posted on December 10, 2012

Here’s how you can get conservatives to care about the environment

By Susie Cagle

theworldfortune

Stop appealing to climate-change deniers with science and moral arguments, folks — it ain’t gonna work. Just get them worrying about their own health and the “purity” of their local environment. At least that’s how I’m reading this new study from UC Berkeley published today in the journal Psychological Science.

From the press release:

A UC Berkeley study has found that while people who identified themselves as conservatives tend to be less concerned about the environment than their liberal counterparts, their motivation increased significantly when they read articles that stressed the need to “protect the purity of the environment” and were shown such repellant images as a person drinking dirty water, a forest filled with garbage, and a city under a cloud of smog …

“These findings offer the prospect of pro-environmental persuasion across party lines,” said Robb Willer, a UC Berkeley social psychologist and coauthor of the study. “Reaching out to conservatives in a respectful and persuasive way is critical, because large numbers of Americans will need to support significant environment reforms if we are going to deal effectively with climate change, in particular.”

The researchers found that conservatives weren’t so motivated by the greater good, but rather by concerns about the the purity of their bodies and the Earth, patriotic arguments, and reverence for a higher authority (Father Earth?). Basically we need a lot more stock images of dirty drinking water.

Overall, the study found that the purity-themed message inspired conservatives to feel higher levels of disgust, which in turn increased their support for protecting the environment.

Incidentally, I too am now feeling higher levels of disgust. Hm!

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