Recently a lot of fuss has been made about the behavior of the police in various areas in response to protesters, particularly an incident at UC Davis. The focus in these discussions is almost always some contrast between the legality and appropriateness of the protesters’ behavior and that of the police officers. I’d like to instead take a look at the people standing by with their cameras. The onlookers. The enablers.

To quote from StopBullying.gov:

What to Do When Someone is Being Bullied

• Take a stand and do not join in. Make it clear that you do not support what is going on.
• Do not watch someone being bullied. If you feel safe, tell the person to stop. If you do not feel safe saying something, walk away and get others to do the same. If you walk away and do not join in, you have taken their audience and power away.
• Support the person being bullied. Tell them that you are there to help. Offer to either go with them to report the bullying or report it for them.
• Talk to an adult you trust. Talking to someone could help you figure out the best ways to deal with the problem. Reach out to a parent, teacher or another adult that you trust to discuss the problem, especially if you feel like the person may be at risk of serious harm to themselves or others.

This is advice meant for teenagers witnessing other teenagers being horrible to each other, but I think it applies here as well. In the above photograph of Lt. Pike dousing students with pepper spray, there are no less than a dozen bystanders with cameras, not counting the photographer who took the picture itself. They represent for the police officer a dozen votes of confidence that his behavior is not outrageous, not outside the norms of society, not aberrant, that what he’s doing is OK.

Don’t be an enabler. Behave like you’d hope a teenager might.

There was a push by local credit unions to get a bunch of folks to switch over from big national and multi-national banks over to more Sonoma County-minded establishments *. Kudos to them. It apparently went quite well. I’ve never used a big bank, so I kinda missed the boat there. Rather than switching my deposits to a local bank, I’ve been sending my beer money to local brewers. A couple of notables:

• Bear Republic in Healdsburg makes one of my personal favorites, Racer 5. My local supermarket can barely keep this stuff stocked.
• Lagunitas, straight out of Petaluma. Their IPA is available at just about every store in Santa Rosa.
• Lost Coast Brewery is up in Eureka. That stretched “local” pretty badly, but their Downtown Brown is worth a shot.
• Mendocino Brewing Company in Ukiah makes Red Tail Ale. I make a habit of picking up a six-pack whenever they’re on sale.
• Moonlight Brewing Company in Santa Rosa makes a variety of somewhat severe brews. A mainstay at my work’s company events, but tread with caution.
• Russian River Brewing Company is renown for its limited-run Pliny the Younger, though Pliny the Elder will set you up just fine. Located in Santa Rosa.
• Sierra Nevada is way up in Chico, but is very much treated as a local beer down here in Santa Rosa. I was pleasantly surprised to find it available at restaurants in Washington, D.C. a couple years back. I abstain from their Celebration Ale for purely nostalgic reasons.

The specific brews mentioned above are just representative of what comes immediately to mind when thinking of these folks; there’s a lot of variety to be found from wheat beers to ales to stouts and reds and what-have-you. I’ve found the Lagunitas and Sierra Nevada beers to be a mixed bag, having partaken of them since my ne’er-do-well high school days. It’s good to know that your beer-buying money is heading right back into the local economy, where it’s brewed by the very people you honk at in traffic and silently judge while they take too long at the ATM.

Don’t confuse this with a call to political action. I’m just suggesting you put down your Guinness for a moment and give Death & Taxes a try.

* Move your Money Project

Today I caught word of an old steadfast friend’s demise. Well, an old friend metaphorically speaking, not a person I actually know. No, not that guy; the Sonic.net Usenet server. My boss fired of a note today announcing that news.sonic.net, long quietly understood to be terminally ill and in need of a number of costly, intricate, and risky transplants and upgrades, is being shifted over to palliative care. The deluge of warez and donkey porn and flamewars and spam have just been too much to justify as a value-added no-charge service. Dane explains:

Our Usenet infrastructure is dying. Due to this, I would like to encourage you join our new web-based discussion forums at http://forums.sonic.net/

Five years ago we spent a huge amount to build a massive cluster. Since then Usenet volume has grown at least four-fold. The systems are old, drives are failing, and the infrastructure cannot keep up with the total volume. As a result, we’re missing some percentage of headers, so while downloading of messages by message ID (for example by using an NZB index) generally works, relying on our headers results in many “missing posts”.

As less than 1% of our customers use the Usenet, we have no plans to reinvest in Usenet at this stage, and it’s only a matter of time before these old systems reach such a state that they can no longer be patched up. At that time, we plan to stop proving NNTP to customers, and will encourage folks to subscribe to one of the many services such as Giganews, EasyNews, Astraweb, etc.

The local discussions in the sonic.* groups have been a great opportunity for customers to interact with each other and with Sonic.net staff. Today there is a very similar growing community in the forums, so please check them out!

Sincerely,

Dane Jasper

I’ve long thought of Usenet as the last vestige of the old untamed frontier that the Internet used to represent. It is very informally organized, with each server administrator bearing sovereign authority for peering configuration, message retention, and propagation policies. Once something gets out on Usenet, there’s no telling how far it will reach, and no way of taking it back once it’s out. I’m not quite nostalgic enough to pay money out-of-pocket for access, but it will be sad to see this window to inter-networked anarchy finally put down.