Ball and Scepter vs. Ball & Chain

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I can’t help noticing, even in the alternative electronic press which should know better, that headline after headline includes the name that has become the new mantra. Starts with T, ends with P.

It is a Ball and Scepter framing of our current malaise, whereas the true king is the corporate, multinational Ball & Chain. Bottom feeder politicians are merely the enablers. The real tyranny comes from the smoke stacks, and the antennas, and their marketeers, not the political schemers and dealers except in their forceps role, even though they seem to think otherwise.

Parties on The Roof

Story in point: I live in a building whose Board of Trustees by their own verbal admission have begun to negotiate with Verizon which wants to install cell phone antennas on our roof requiring a 50’ X 50’ foot space. The foot-print of the building in question measures about 200 X 200 feet. If my figures are anywhere close to accurate, the total roof area is approximately 40,000 square feet. Facilities where the building’s boiler and ventilation systems are housed occupy a centrally located structure measuring roughly 50 feet square, or 2500 square feet, leaving 37,500 square feet for Verizon whose plans call for 2500 square feet and an additional 22 foot limit marking the extreme danger zone which workers cannot enter without protective gear. One imagines lead-backed Halloween costumes and aluminum foil headgear in the 31,571 square feet remaining, ample room for roof parties where those humming antennas will supply the background music. That, believe it or not, is the scheme one board member is advancing in all seriousness!

What is even more to the point, Verizon has our membership attached to a ball & chain, namely a board which is indifferent to the damage such a scheme would do to property values (https://www.emfanalysis.com/property-values-declining-cell-towers/), human, animal, bird, insect and plant life (http://www.mystreetmychoice.com/sebastopol.html) and to our neighbors living within the 1300 impact radius of such antennas, let alone the havoc it is already creating in a community of aging folks, some of them already in fragile health.

Finials with a Tail

Finials with tails

At about the limit of 1300 feet from our building, a church in the neo-colonialist style has mounted multiple cell phone antennas disguised as finials at the base of its tower. Normally, finials in  the neocolonial style would be “turned,” but not only are these disguised as tapered pentagonal boxes, they sport tails. The tail of course houses the necessary electrical conduit! More ingenious might be cell phone antennas masked as kangaroos. 

Aesthetics aside, catty corner to the House of God, the University of California has just opened a multi-storey student dorm capable of housing nearly 500 innocent young lives, while the House of Money slow cooks them.

1942 Japanese roundup. Urn-shaped finials faintly seen

Moral of the story: the Men of God, like certain board members, do not necessarily concern themselves so much with their neighbors, as with the lures of Mammon.

Petition Governor Newsom to order testing of Diablo Canyon for embrittled, earthquake-prone reactors in  light of PGE’s criminal negligence at https://petitions.moveon.org/sign/gov-newsom-test-diablo

Demand Europe’s biggest public bank to #stopfundingfossils at

https://act.priceofoil.org/sign/EIB-stop-funding-fossils/?t=3&referring_akid=undefined

MAJOR HEADLINE: French Police To Join Yellow Vests After Realizing Government Is Extorting Them Too

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Death penalty, mostly targeting people of color, ended by California’s Governor Newsom who “can’t sleep at night.”

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Congress ends #45’s State of Emergency 59-4l, with 12 Republicrats crossing the aisle.

Millions of students in over 120 countries skip school in the name of planetary transformation and to protest climate collapse.

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