To the community,

The board of directors and staff of Austin’s House would like to thank the entire community for the tremendous support of our ninth annual Cowboy Mardi Gras fundraiser in February.

Our successful event was another display of how wonderful and supportive the Carson Valley and Carson City communities are. Each dollar raised is used to support ongoing operational expenses at Austin’s House to provide emergency shelter and compassionate care to children ages 0-18 who have been removed from their homes due to abuse or neglect.

We would like to express a special thank you to Patty Clark, founder of the Austin Kirby Foundation, and foundation supporters, for their very generous donation of $52,500. A huge thank you to our event sponsors, Dick Campagni Carson City Toyota and GE Oil & Gas. The fundraising committee also thanks Bill Henderson and his staff at the Carson Valley Inn for the exceptional customer service during the planning of the event and the event itself. The fun and flashy table decorations were donated by Jennifer McLaughlin at Sierra Event Rentals. Much appreciation to each business and/or individual that donated items for the silent auction/raffle, the list is long and we appreciate your generosity. We also could not have pulled off such an event without the help of our many volunteers. You know who you are and you are invaluable to Austin’s House.

Additional appreciation goes out to the following businesses/individuals for purchasing tables:

Coldwell Banker – Minden/Carson City
Douglas County
Edward Jones – James Berston
Guild Mortgage – Minden
Heritage Law
Hettrick Electric
Sierra View Equipment
Town of Genoa
United Electrical Services
Patty Clark
Rick Lusby
Vicki Preston
Brenda Robertson
David Shriver.

Austin’s House relies on the generosity of the Northern Nevada community to continue our mission of caring for children who have been removed from their homes due to abuse or neglect. We must raise more than 50 percent of our operating expenses, and we are so grateful for your support. For other ways to assist throughout the year, call 775.267.6711.

Thank you,

Jacquie Manoukian, vice president board of directors

By David Gershwin

My grade school summer vacations seemed to last forever, pairing well with the Beach Boys’ “Endless Summer” double album I wore out on the record changer.

During those hot and humid Northern Virginia summers, I headed each weekday to the summer camp held in my elementary school’s nearly-abandoned cafeteria. It was a low-key affair—ping pong and table hockey on the cafeteria lunch tables, kickball and football on the playground, key chains and macramé in arts and crafts—while mix tapes with Gerry Rafferty’s “Baker Street” in heavy rotation played over the school’s PA system. And in what must have been one of the greatest bargains of the 1970s, camp tuition was $20 for the entire summer.

Today, such an easy-going camp would be trashed on Yelp, despite its unbeatable price, for failing to deliver any quasi-academic or super-creative purpose. Imagine my camp competing with today’s Computer Camp, Robotics Camp, Animation Camp, and (my personal favorite) New York Film Academy Camp, which is in, of all places, Burbank.

Kids’ summer camps in Los Angeles enter parents’ collective consciousness around Jan. 15, just after the three-weeklong Los Angeles Unified School District winter break, which was the dream of the teachers’ union (which also negotiated an entire week off for Thanksgiving) and the owners of, yes, winter camps. The most popular summer camps are said to fill up by mid-February, so the camp arms race begins before one even has a chance to plan a basic family vacation.

Our daughter, now 8, is already enrolled in four camps (with a fifth still possible) so that we, her two professional working parents, can earn a living and thus afford said camps. We’re signed up for a weeklong, overnight, all-girls sleepaway camp at Griffith Park, an arts camp at a synagogue three blocks away, a swimming/all-around recreation camp at Valley College, and Beach Camp, which, for our fair-skinned daughter, requires bulk purchases of SPF 50 sunscreen.

There’s also the matter that plenty of LAUSD families simply can’t afford private summer camp at all, since absolutely none of them can be found at the bargain, 1970s price of $20. Half of all LAUSD families qualify for free lunch programs, meaning their household income is just over or below the federal poverty line. Some summer camps offer scholarships on a very limited basis, but that just means families in need must compete for these coveted slots and complete additional administrative paperwork.

Mind you, this is on top of the dizzying registration process that often involves web sites crashing after anxious parents overwhelm the system immediately after the online enrollment period opens.

For lower-income families, the availability of formal and informal municipal resources – public swimming pools, kids’ day camps at city parks, and air-conditioned public libraries – is critical. For tens of thousands of Los Angeles-area kids, poverty doesn’t take a summer vacation.

The LAUSD academic calendar also plays a role in making summer a tough sprint for families. The long winter break is offset by making the summer break short, just over two months long, with school ending June 9 and starting up again Aug. 15. So while the fabled and possibly archaic family summer vacation is possible for those with means, it’s the hottest, priciest, and most crowded time of year for travelling.

It’s taken our family three years of practice to finally figure out how to make this unconventional school schedule work for us. We did this by giving up on a conventional week of summer vacation; we might get a long weekend or two if we’re lucky. Instead, we opt for vacation during the tail end of winter break, after the holidays, when most other school districts are back in session and airfares and hotel prices drop significantly.

But our coping strategy is under fire. The LAUSD board, in their infinite wisdom, has considered changing the academic calendar as the solution to several of their administrative woes. You see, other school districts start at a far more conventional time: after Labor Day. Not only do some board members observe other school districts with a jealous eye, but they are also under the impression that a later start will result in lower air conditioning usage and, hence, lower energy costs district-wide. This past fall, it looked like a move toward a more traditional start, one week later in 2017 and an additional week later in 2018, was going to pass.

In December, however, forces far greater than Computer Camp took hold, shocking the school board into reversing their position—and reverting (for now) to the calendar with the two-month summer break and the three-week winter break. Why? For two big reasons. First, the teacher’s union likes the status quo. Second, changing to a calendar with a shorter winter break would result in more student absences, since a considerable number of parents would still yank their kids out of school for a few days for holiday-time visits to relatives and winter vacation destinations. These additional absences would result in LAUSD losing some of its funding from the state of California, which allocates resources based on average daily attendance.

But the scheduling issue remains white-hot. The board’s decision on the calendar was so divisive that the board President abstained—yes, abstained—when the academic calendar issue came before them. So while the calendar is set for the school year beginning this coming August, the board has yet to decide on the calendars for the 2018-19 school year and beyond.

I wonder if this lack of leadership, leading to unnecessary uncertainty for parents, would even matter if we had the informal, cheap, carefree, drop-in nature of the summer camp I remember. But I recognize that in our current era of instant access and gratification, kids like our daughter might not know what to do with the unstructured fun I had when I was a kid. None of today’s summer camp options offer any time for being lazy or hazy—there’s only a short break before your next camp activity starts at 10:10am.

What memories will she have? What sport will she remember playing that didn’t come with rules or equipment? And with her day’s activities lined up on a scheduling grid, will she even have the time to reflect on her summer music soundtrack?

As for me, Gerry Rafferty’s sax solo will always remind me of those slow and easy summers, with the click-clack of a table hockey puck adding some percussion. Just don’t tell the Beach Boys.

David Gershwin is a Los Angeles-based public affairs consultant, Zócalo Public Square board member, and teaching fellow at UCLA Anderson School of Management.

By Mick Akers, Las Vegas Sun

NV Energy has reached its mandated renewable energy goals for the seventh straight year.

In a filing with the Public Utilities Commission of Nevada, NV Energy reported it achieved a 22.2 percent renewable credit level last year in Southern Nevada and a 26.6 level in Northern Nevada.

The legislated requirement for 2016 was 20 percent, based on total retail energy sales. The requirement rises to 25 percent in 2025.

NV Energy said there are 43 renewable energy projects in Nevada from which its customers benefit.

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By Gregory Rodriguez

When I was a gloomy 16-year-old grasping to find some meaning in the world, my father gave me a tattered copy of social philosopher Michael Novak’s “The Experience of Nothingness.” Seriously.

There have been times over the past few decades when I’ve considered this “gift” a few yards short of insensitive and maybe even borderline teenager abuse. But I’m quite certain dad’s intentions were no more malicious then than when he took me to see “Annie Hall” when I was 11.

The essence of Novak’s argument—and to some extent Woody Allen’s classic 1977 rom com—is that individuals can achieve some semblance of wisdom if they stop believing culturally sanctioned sentimental pablum about life (and love) and embrace the essentially tragic nature of human existence.

In my dad’s defense, Novak’s 1970 book was in no way a prescription for fatalism. Rather, it was an exhortation to find enlightenment on the other side of disillusionment. Accepting life’s despair and emptiness, Novak argued, was a prerequisite for becoming a liberated and fully conscious human being.

Novak knew that what he was prescribing was no easy task. “Because it lies so near to madness,” he wrote, “the experience of nothingness is a dangerous, possibly destructive experience.” Having no recourse to the comfort of broadly embraced cultural symbols and benchmarks requires inordinate doses of honesty, courage, and ethical self-reflection. 

Novak’s brand of transcendent nihilism was itself a response to a cultural breakdown caused by the rapid social change of the late 1960s. Neither nostalgic for tradition nor putting full stock in the coming of the Age of Aquarius, Novak’s push to accept the void was more a do-it-yourself guide to living in the void than it was a viable call to collective action.

I’ve been thinking a lot about nihilism lately, both because Novak passed away in February and also because I just finished reading Indian writer Pankaj Mishra’s brilliant new book, “The Age of Anger: The History of the Present.” Mishra offers a sweeping, textured, unified theory of our dysfunctional age and explains what angry Trumpites, Brexiters, and radical Islamists all have in common: an utter fear of the void.

Eschewing facile political or religious explanations for the rise of nihilistic social movements around the world, Mishra points to a crisis of meaning wrought by globalization. He sees the destruction of local, intimate, long-rooted systems of meaning as the opening of a spiritual Pandora’s box within which lies infinite doubt and disillusion. Mishra sees these negative solidarity movements as the psychically disenfranchised targeting what they see as “venal, callous and mendacious elites.” Brexiters railed against liberal cosmopolitan technocrats, as did Trump’s white nationalists. Radical Islamists loathe the hedonism and rootlessness of wealthy Muslims who’ve surrendered to Western consumer society. Rather than advocate for an agenda that would provide them tangible returns, they all cling to nostalgia for simpler times and rally around their hatred for those they see as the winners in a new world order.

In Mishra’s view, this new world order isn’t simply neoliberal capitalism allowing money, goods, and services to flow unimpeded across the globe. It’s also the attendant ideal of liberal cosmopolitanism first advocated in the 18th century by Enlightenment thinkers like Montesquieu, Adam Smith, Voltaire, and Kant. It’s the belief in a universal commercial society made up of self-interested, rational individuals who seek fulfillment.

Theoretically, modern global capitalism liberates individuals from the constraints of tradition, and encourages them to move about freely, deploy their skills, and fulfill their dreams. But the burdens of individualism and mobility can be as difficult to carry for those who’ve succeeded in fulfilling that modern vision as for those who cannot. A decade ago, one study found that a disproportionate number of Muslim militants have engineering degrees, a prestigious vocation in the developing world. So, while accepting the conventions of traditional society may leave a person feeling as if he or she were less than an individual, rejecting those conventions, in Mishra’s words, “is to assume an intolerable burden of freedom in often fundamentally discouraging conditions.”

What concerns Mishra most is that when personal freedom and free enterprise are conflated, the ambitions released by the spread of individualism overwhelm the capacity of existing institutions to satisfy them.  There are simply not enough opportunities to absorb the myriad desires of billions of single-minded young people. As Mishra sees it, today’s nihilistic politics are themselves a product of the sense of nothingness felt by growing numbers of uprooted outsiders who’ve failed to find their place in the commercial metropolis. “A moral and spiritual vacuum,” he writes, “is yet again filled up with anarchic expressions of individuality, and mad quests for substitute religions and modes of transcendence.”

Despite his call to harness the experience of nothingness, Michael Novak duly warned of its dangers and potential for destructiveness. Unfortunately, his exhortation to lean in and embrace the void strikes me as about as helpful to frustrated millennials as it was to me when I was an angst-ridden teenager. The answer to today’s nihilistic political movements clearly isn’t more hyper individualism. Nor is a violent return to a traditional past realistic. Clearly, no one knows how to escape from our current global age of anger. But I suspect that whatever answer there might be will first require us Western liberals to admit that we have finally reached the limits of the Enlightenment’s cult of secular individualism.

Gregory Rodriguez is editorial director of the Berggruen Institute and the publisher of Zócalo Public Square.

By David H. Petraeus

Over the past quarter century, the information technology revolution has transformed relations between people and between states, including in the conduct of warfare.

For the U.S. military, the manifestations of this revolution have covered the full spectrum from the dramatic to the prosaic. Unmanned aerial vehicles, ships, and ground systems now carry increasingly sophisticated surveillance capabilities and precision guided weapons.

David H. Petraeus

Less visible, but also hugely important, has been development of the ability to integrate and analyze vast quantities of intelligence from all sources and determine precise locations of friendly and enemy elements.

Finally, we cannot overlook growth of the seemingly matter-of-fact but nonetheless essential reliance on email, video teleconferences, and applications like PowerPoint to communicate, share information, plan, and perform the tasks of command and control.

Information technologies that did not exist at the time of the first Gulf War are now so fundamental to the conduct of military operations that it is difficult to imagine functioning without them. And the growth of the Internet, social media, and now the “Internet of Things” represents a further stage in the information technology revolution whose full consequences are still unfolding. Nonetheless, some preliminary implications of such cyber capabilities for warfare are already clear.

First, cyberspace is itself now an entire new battlefield domain, adding to the existing domains of land, sea, air, subsea, and space. This reality has enormous ramifications for military doctrine, operations, organizational structures, training, materiel, leadership development, personnel requirements, and military facilities. Most significantly, it adds a powerful new element to the challenges of the simultaneous “multi-domain warfare” in which we are now already engaged and for which we need to do more to prepare in the future.

Second, cyber technology is adding another element to the already ongoing dispersion and fragmentation of global power. While no nation has contributed more to the growth of the Internet and the digitized world than the United States (and no nation has developed more sophisticated cyber military capabilities), the nature of these technologies ultimately presents one more disruptive challenge to the preeminence that the U.S. has enjoyed since the end of the Cold War, as others exploit the potential of offensive cyber capabilities in new and increasingly sophisticated and diabolical ways. Examples of this include the use of cyberspace by extremist networks like ISIS and Al-Qaeda to inspire far-flung terrorist strikes; by Russia to wage ideological and political warfare that seeks to undermine the cohesion and self-confidence of the Western democracies; and by China to collect the technological know-how that is speeding its already rapid rise and undercutting America’s conventional military edge and industrial advantages.

Third, cyber capabilities are further blurring the boundaries between wartime and peacetime, and between civilian and military spaces. These are distinctions that have, for various reasons, been eroding in recent decades and which technological developments are now accelerating. At present, it is likewise clear that offensive capabilities are outstripping defensive and retaliatory options. And as long as difficulties in identifying and attributing responsibility for cyberattacks persist, that reality is likely to undercut deterrence and encourage aggression in cyberspace.

Yet even as technological changes inspire us to speculate on the future of warfare, perhaps the most important insights about the implications of the cyber age can be gleaned from the past.

While technology promises to disrupt the conduct of war, it is equally important to recognize what it will not alter—namely, the causes of war, which continue to lie in the character of humanity. As Thucydides documented more than two millennia ago, it is the elemental forces of fear, honor, and interest that are the wellsprings of conflict, and it is often the choices of individual leaders that determine how conflicts develop.

It was for this reason, in fact, that, when I was in uniform, I argued against the concept of “network-centric warfare”—put forward in the late 1990s—and instead contended that a better formulation would be “network-enabled, leadership-centric warfare.” It is, after all, still leaders who determine strategies and make the key decisions. And even as development of autonomous weapons systems and other such capabilities proceeds, parameters for actions by such systems will continue to be established by human beings.

Furthermore, history suggests that humanity’s capacity for technical innovation often outpaces our strategic thinking and development of ethical norms. Indeed, the methodical development of doctrine around nuclear weapons by the “Wizards of Armageddon” in the 1950s and 1960s, which did much to help prevent a nuclear apocalypse, appears to have been the exception rather than the norm.

More typical is the experience of the European powers of the early 20th century, which failed to recognize that the mass industrialized armies they were constructing were the components of a doomsday machine that would unleash a civilizational slaughter that none of the combatants had previously considered possible. As we and other major powers race to develop cutting-edge cyber capabilities—expanding swiftly into realms such as robotics, bioengineering, and artificial intelligence—we would be wise to devote equal energy and attention to considering the full implications of our ingenuity.  Security in the century ahead will depend more on our moral imagination—and with it, the ability to develop concepts of restraint—than it will on amazing technological breakthroughs.

This in turn suggests a final reality about warfare in the age of cyber. Regardless of the innovations that lie ahead, technology by itself will neither doom nor rescue the world. Responsibility for our fate, for better or worse, will remain stubbornly human.

Gen. David H. Petraeus (U.S. Army, retired) is chairman of the KKR Global Institute, a Judge Widney professor USC, and a member of the board of Optiv, a global cybersecurity services firm. This essay is part of an Inquiry, produced by the Berggruen Institute and Zócalo Public Square, on what war looks like in the cyber age.

To the community,

On behalf of the Tahoe Coalition for the Homeless, I would like to thank an anonymous donor who has donated $4,500 to extend the operating season of the South Lake Tahoe warm room through April 30.

This donation supports our mission of meeting the needs of our neighbors experiencing homelessness by providing warm beds and an overnight refuge from the elements to individuals and families experiencing homelessness in the winter months.

In addition to emergency winter shelter, the warm room provides access to community resources. This winter, due to an incredible collaboration in our area, our organization has been able to connect guests with county resources including mental health services; drug and alcohol counseling and rehabilitation programs; employment information; and case management referrals. An intake is performed on warm room guests to gather basic information to assess what resources might be available to her. This season, over 86 percent of warm room guests who provided us with their information reported living in our area — South Lake Tahoe, Stateline, El Dorado/Douglas counties –prior to becoming homeless.

Tahoe Coalition for the Homeless continues to collaborate with community agencies to work together to end homelessness on the South Shore. We appreciate the support of our local community, as we have received donations of funds or supplies from over 200 individuals and businesses this season. To date, our organization has not received any public funds or tax dollars. 

Donations are welcomed to aid in funding. Checks can be made payable to Tahoe Coalition for the Homeless and mailed to PO Box 13514, South Lake Tahoe, CA 96151 or on our website at https://tahoehomeless.org. We can be contacted at tahoewarmroom@gmail.com or 775.573.0822. 

Sincerely,

Marissa Muscat, Tahoe Coalition for the Homeless

By Andy Wirth

As locals, short- or long-time residents, or frequent visitors of North Lake Tahoe, we all know and have likely experienced firsthand that traffic and transportation throughout our region can be challenging. In fact, it’s not new, but rather a decades-old problem, as “the original local” Eric Poulsen, has pointed out to me a few times. Ironically, traffic experts have extensive modeling which suggests that the traffic congestion nowadays has actually eased since the early 2000s. I take no solace in that fact; our circumstance relative to traffic and roads congestion as a region is simply unacceptable.

Andy Wirth

From the 1940s to today, there hasn’t been a broad, material and credible set of solutions implemented by community leaders (civic entities “do” infrastructure) that has worked well to resolve or event mitigate this regional challenge. For me (albeit still being somewhat new to the region), there seems to be a fierce and unfathomable commitment to the status quo. Despite a great many acronymed agencies analyzing the challenges in our region, improvements have been slow at best and to the general public, it understandably appears that nothing actually gets done.

Part of the reason for that is that as a community, we simply haven’t worked together to remedy these decades old transit and infrastructure challenges. There have been disjointed efforts by various entities, and insular approach by civic entities, and it undoubtedly has felt like a daunting task that only gets more challenging. Moreover, the base population of the primary cities that are the basis to demand here in Lake Tahoe, increases year after year bringing more visitors to our region, summer and winter, and seemingly compounding the problem.

The good news is that many of us aren’t willing to throw in the towel on this one. In fact, my company and I are hell bent on developing and implementing a variety of solutions related to resolving road congestion and regional transportation. Key point here: The basis to the demand which creates traffic and roads congestion has many discreet layers and sources. In order to be impactful, the solutions have to address each discreet type and source of demand.

Regardless of season, much of our community relies on some type of tourism-related visitation. Mass transit and even “micro mass transit” and other traffic congestion alleviating solutions have and are being implemented, and the light at the end of the tunnel is getting brighter. As a region, we experienced success with these collective efforts during the recent FIS World Cup event that took place at Squaw Valley.

Collectively, our community demonstrated that it is possible to make every weekend like what we experienced during World Cup. Despite there being more than 20,000 people in town for this international event, transportation was efficient, and traffic delays throughout the region – specifically on Highway 89 kept to a minimum over that weekend.

How and why did it work?

Quite simply, there was a communitywide rallying cry around Alpine World Cup, followed by extensive cooperation and collaboration by multiple entities throughout our region, as well as substantial use of the transportation services offered by both residents and visitors. Thankfully, the insular aspect of the civic entities and agencies was suspended. Local media helped to spread the word about transportation options, highway patrolmen helped to direct traffic, satellite parking locations were used both in Truckee and Tahoe City, free shuttles were offered frequently throughout the day (and used!), people carpooled if they did decide to drive to Squaw Valley to watch the event, and free transportation provided by Chariot within the resort was utilized by residents and guests staying in Squaw Valley.

What we experienced as a region is that implementation of these effective solutions has a positive impact on regional transportation and traffic. It was evident that mass transportation solutions can and do work. With community support and participation, the tactics employed during World Cup are things that can be replicated region-wide on peak days in the future.

The reality is that each and every one of us has the ability to improve the situation – we just need to continue to work together to affect change. Let’s let go of the attraction to an old way of “doing business” amongst the various entities in our region, and what seems to be a bizarre and absurd attachment to stasis. As my friend, Joanne Marchetta with the Tahoe Regional Planning Agency and I agreed this past summer, we may be the last mountain community to figure this out. We know what success looks like by way of other mountain communities that figured this out a decade or two ago. We also know what success looks like here in this very community. The Alpine World Cup demonstrated what we’re capable of … the success of true collaboration.

In the future, with continued communitywide collaboration, there’s no reason why all the easily forecasted “busy” weekends can’t all be like Alpine World Cup.

Andy Wirth is the president and CEO of Squaw Valley Alpine Meadows.

By Dan Walters, Sacramento Bee

The decline of California’s Republican Party, as underscored by the most recent voter registration data, is a truly remarkable, even historic, phenomenon.

Dan Walters

Republicans dominated the state’s politics for much of the 20th century – personified by Ronald Reagan – but began to fade as the century closed.

The new registration report shows Republicans declining to just 25.97 percent of the state’s 19.4 million potential voters, 9 percentage points below the party’s nearly 35 percent share in 2000.

Oddly, however, Democrats didn’t gain. In fact, they’ve dropped about a half-point to 44.77 percent since 2000. The big increase came in voters without a party preference, from 14.36 percent in 2000 to 24.51 percent in 2017. By next year’s general election, they may outnumber Republicans.

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To the community,

The Go Local: Business Expo returned to the South Shore with huge success thanks to attendees, vendors, volunteers, and sponsors. Over 1,300 locals and visitors gathered inside the Harveys convention center March 31 as Tahoe Chamber member businesses showcased their latest programs, products, and services.

The night was highlighted with live entertainment from Heavenly Resort Mountain and The Loft lounge, vendor giveaways including a raffle of two cruisers bikes courtesy of South Shore Bikes, and tasty food and beverage samples from all the generous restaurant vendors.

Rounding out the evening was the announcement of best booth experience. Tahoe Chamber Ambassadors and volunteers surveyed over 90 booths to vote for this award, which represents best overall experience for attendees. After a close race, Barton Hospital was awarded the plaque. Barton Hospital’s Rehabilitation and Sports Department showcased an AlterG anti-gravity treadmill, which helps patients to rehab from surgery or train through an injury.

Tahoe Chamber thanks those individuals and business owners who dedicated their time to this event to make it the best year yet. For a full photo recap of the EXPO visit facebook.com/tahoechamber. We look forward to seeing you next year.

Brittani Curtis, Lake Tahoe South Shore Chamber of Commerce

By Lauren Sveen, Denver Post

I spend a lot of time discussing generational differences (which are, by definition, broad characterizations of groups of similarly aged people) and how best to handle them in the workplace.

Over the last couple years, most of the conversation has centered around millennials — the burgeoning, often hard to understand and newest generation of workers. I often receive a great deal of feedback on articles about millennials, particularly from baby boomer readers struggling to find common ground. But the conversation rarely lands on the smaller generation squeezed between boomers and millennials – generation X.

There are 65 million Gen Xers — generally defined as people born between 1965 and 1980 — in the workforce, increasingly poised to inherit key leadership roles from retiring boomers. In fact, Gen Xers already are leading some of the nation’s top Fortune 500 companies, including Google, Dell and Sprint.

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