(America On Line- “AOL”- recently stripped some of the functionality of their old operating system. Accordingly, the image of the protest on State Road-447 out in Nevada is attached only for identification purposes).

The kids appear to be back in school here “north of Richmond.” Congress is threatening to return to that area as well, and we can already feel the loss of a minute or two of sunlight as we swoop into Autumn. Here at Big Pink, The neighbors are packaging their two kids for school. Our pal Jon-Without is teaching algebra in the local Public School. It was fun to talk to him about that ancient and elegant subject in the context of an educational system reportedly in crisis.

That was just the north of Richmond weekend business we conducted over at the Mexican restaurant on Henderson Road. President Bush- the younger one- one brought his family to dine there and there is still a somewhat shopworn elegance to the place. There is a bunch of other stuff to register as the breaking news is reported. Like yesterday. What a swirl of disparate affairs!

The Japanese are dumping the radioactive contaminated water from their Fukushima reactor disaster back into the ocean. On this side of the Pacific, a new hurricane named ‘Idalia’ has popped up, headed for Florida. Landfall is expected tomorrow, so the storm track was quick breaking news. The Governor down there is reportedly running for the Presidency in the forever campaign, but he took a break to address his state’s approach to disaster response. His remarks were quite the contrast to the disaster out on Maui that simply roared and raced down slopes, killing more than a hundred citizens.

The ineptitude of the Hawaiian state government’s response was no surprise to those who have lived out there. But there was other news under the spotlight and much closer. This one featured a campus-wide shutdown in the state just south of Richmond. The reporting was interesting, since the alleged gunman’s image was on the lower right side of the flatscreen. This morning there were reports of a single death, a professor who we will doubtless discover had committed some social aggression against the gunman.

The stand-off ended with the gunman in custody and flood of students released from lockdown. The whole campus had been under shelter-in-place orders due to reports of an “armed, dangerous person” holed up in a Chemistry Lab on the central campus of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. For some hours it was uncertain if there had been a mass shooting event inside the building and another social horror to digest.

We had been talking with Jon to update elements in the weekly Weather Report. It is surprising to look at our Public Schools. According to Monday’s reporting they don’t appear to work. We have seen some alarming statistics on student proficiency in “reading” or figuring stuff our with numbers. We think that was called “math.”

We were starting to talk about why the system was in trouble when another social-justice related story popped up and held center stage for a while. It was a sub-set of an issue that has been with us most of our lives: the Climate. It has been portrayed in a variety of alarming aspects. We were assured it was cooling, then warming. According to some, it is now boiling. There has been a new and strident tone in a series of highly visible social disruptions.

This one was interesting. A group of climate protesters decided to block State Road-447, a two-lane highway out in rural Nevada near Pyramid Lake. You may have noticed the last time you were in Vegas that there is some colorful urban space out there but not a great deal of it. Besides the year-round gambling in the small area of bright neon lights there is a unique open-air annual festival out there called “Burning Man.” It features music, to a degree, but also all sorts revealed wisdom and various truths.

The events yesterday were intended to showcase the annual Burning Man Project. That is a temporary “global ecosystem of artists, makers and community organizers” who co-create art, events and local initiatives all around the world. More specifically, they produce the annual Burning Man event in Black Rock City, Nevada, connected to the rest of the world by State Route-447. Burning Man adherents have a ten point program that provides year-round support in connections, education, and financial grants to a network of regional communities in more than 35 nations and 40 US states.

So that was the protestor side of the rhetoric. The other side was composed of other environmentalists, but with a difference. The protest was held on tribal land protected by the Paiute Rangers of the tribe that owns it. That means there is another factor- another independent layer- of governance in the response to the protest. This duty section apparently reflects the demographics of the people who live near the two lane-road. They appeared to have a different tolerance for roadblocks established in their communities. The images of one irritated Trooper driving his truck through the signs and another pointing his service revolver at the protesters.

The response from the protestors is the woman wailing in the background, “We’re not criminals; we’re environmental protestors!” Since the Burning Man folks seem to share the climate alarmism we are uncertain about the actual target of the protest. The people who actually live there- the Paiutes and their Rangers- would prefer to see them to keep moving.

It doesn’t seem unreasonable here, but we are just retired and impecunious people located north of Richmond and well east of Black Rock.

Copyright 2023 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com