When President Donald Trump bragged that his nuclear “button” was bigger and more efficient than North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un’s “button,” he was perpetuating the myth that the leaders of nuclear-armed nations control their weapons. But you do not have to be Trump, Kim, Vladimir Putin, Theresa May, Xi Jinping, Narendra Modi, Mamnoon Hussain, or Benjamin Netanyahu to push that “button.” There are thousands of buttons and thousands of people who can initiate a nuclear war.

Indeed, the very nature of nuclear weapons requires that the power to use them is decentralized and dispersed. And while it is sobering to think of leaders like Kim and Trump with their finger on the trigger, a nuclear war is far more likely to be started by some anonymous captain in an Ohio-class submarine patrolling the Pacific or a Pakistani colonel on the Indian border.

In his book ”The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner,” Daniel Ellsberg says that the recent uproar over Trump’s threats to visit “fire and fury” on North Korea misses the point that “every president has delegated” the authority to use nuclear weapons. “The idea that the president is the only one with the sole power to issue an order that will be recognized as an authentic authorized order is totally false,” he told National Public Radio. 

If a single “button” were the case, decapitating a country’s leader would prevent the use of nuclear weapons. Take out Washington (or Mar-a-Largo), Moscow, or Beijing and you would neutralize a nation’s nuclear force. In reality, the decision to use those weapons merely shifts further down the chain of command. The Russians call it “dead hand”: Moscow goes, and some general in the Urals launches an ICBM or the captain of a Borei-class submarine in the Sea of Okhotsk fires off his multiple war head SS-N-32 “Bulava” missiles. 

During the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, a single commodore on a Soviet submarine off Cuba, Vasili Arkhipov, refused to okay an order by the sub’s first and second in command to launch a nuclear tipped torpedo at U.S. warships that were harassing the vessel. If he had not intervened, according to Ellsberg, it is quite likely there would have been a nuclear war between the U.S., its allies, and the Soviet Union. 

The problem with nuclear weapons—besides the fact that they are capable of destroying human civilizations and most life on the planet—is that they are actually quite fragile, with a very limited life span: “use them or lose them” is the philosophy of nuclear war planners, because if you hesitate, your opponent may destroy them before they can be launched. 

The more efficient and accurate your nuclear force, the more destabilizing it becomes. For instance, the U.S. has thousands of nuclear weapons deployed in a “triad”: air, land and sea. To attack the U.S. with nuclear weapons would be tantamount to committing suicide, because no matter how large the attacking force was, it would be almost impossible to eliminate every warhead. 

Russia also has vast numbers of weapons, although they are more vulnerable than those of the U.S. Russia has fewer ballistic missiles subs, does not really have a modern strategic bomber force, and its land-based missiles are endangered by recent American breakthroughs in warhead technology. According to the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, the U.S. now has the capability to “destroy all of Russia’s ICBM silos” in a first strike and still retain 80 percent of its warheads in reserve. 

A “first strike” attack—also called “counterforce”—has always been central to U.S. military planning, and was recently adopted by the Russians as well. As a result, both nations keep their nuclear forces on a hair trigger, fearful that the other side could neutralize their nuclear weapons with a first strike. 

The danger here, of course, is war by mistake, and there have been at least a half dozen incidents where the two countries have come within minutes of a nuclear exchange. A weather rocket, a flock of geese, an errant test tape, have all brought the world to the edge of disaster. 

The time frame for making a decision about whether one is under attack or not is extremely narrow. It is estimated that the U.S. would have about 30 minutes to determine whether an attack was real, but, because the Russians do not have a reliable satellite warning system, that time frame would be about 15 minutes or less for Moscow. 

China and India had a no-first use policy, but recently New Delhi adopted a “counterforce” strategy. Britain, France and Pakistan all reserve the right to first-use, The Israeli government refuses to admit it has nuclear weapons, so it is unclear what its policies are. 

Of all the nuclear-armed countries, North Korea is the most vulnerable, simply because it probably has no more than 50 or so nuclear weapons. There is a caveat here: U.S. intelligence has been consistently wrong on Pyongyang’s capabilities. It underestimated its ability to produce long-range missiles, it disparaged its capacity to produce a hydrogen bomb, and it miscalculated its capacity to wage cyber war. In short, the U.S. has no idea what would happen if it attacked North Korea. 

Almost all estimates are that such a war would range from calamitous to catastrophic. And nuclear weapons are likely to make it the latter. The recent talk in Washington about a limited attack on North Korea—the so-called “bloody nose” strategy—could be seen by Pyongyang as an attempt to take out its small nuclear force. Under the rule of “use them or lose them,” North Korea might decide to launch them locally—South Korea—regionally—Japan—or even at the U.S. Estimates of the outcome of such a war range from the hundreds of thousands to several million dead. 

Apparently there is also a plan to take out Kim Jung-Un, but decapitating North Korea’s leadership merely devolves the decision to use nuclear weapons to some commander in the field. Plus eliminating a nation’s leader would make it almost impossible to halt such a war. Who would one negotiate with? 

In the end, the problem comes down to the nature of nuclear weapons themselves. Their enormous power and ability to strike quickly makes them vulnerable, and that vulnerability requires that the decision to use them be decentralized. 

The recent scare that a ballistic missile was headed toward Hawaii was a bureaucratic screw up, someone pushing the wrong button on a computer. But that is how the world could end. Consider the following scenario: 

An Ohio-class submarine armed with 24 Trident II ballistic missiles is on patrol in the East China Sea. Each Trident II missile has eight W-76 or W-88 warheads, 192 in all. The former pack a 100-kiloton punch, the latter up to 475 kilotons. In total, the submarine can generate up to 91,200 kilos of explosive force. The bomb that destroyed Hiroshima was 15 kilotons. The U.S. has 18-Ohio class submarines. 

A report comes over the COM that a missile is headed toward Hawaii, and then communications go dead, a not uncommon occurrence, according to Ellsberg. The captain of the Ohio-class sub knows he is not alone out there. Stalking him could be a Russian Yasen-class or Chinese Shang-class hunter-killer submarine. The U.S. captain needs to make a decision: use them or lose them. 

It doesn’t take a major crisis to touch off a nuclear war. Maybe things get a little out of hand between Indian and Chinese troops on a disputed Himalayan plateau. Maybe India employs its “cold start” strategy of a limited military incursion into Pakistan and some local Pakistani field officer panics and launches a tactical nuclear weapon. The recently released U.S. “Nuclear Posture Review” posits using nuclear weapons in the case of a major cyber attack. 

As Beatrice Fihn of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons puts it, “Our extinction could be one insult away.” 

Some 252 million years ago something catastrophic happened to the planet. A combination of massive volcanic activity, asteroid strikes, and the release of stored up carbon dioxide in the oceans killed 96 percent of life in the sea and 70 percent of land life. Called the Permian-Triassic Extinction Event, it was the greatest die-off in our planet’s history. 

Unless we get serious about abolishing nuclear weapons—something 122 nations voted to do last July—some unnamed captain in a submarine could do the same. 

There are lots and lots and lots of buttons out there 

---

Conn Hallinan can be read at dispatchesfromtheedgeblog.wordpress.com andmiddleempireseries.wordpress.com 

 

 

 

It's happening now in Berkeley. A funny, clunky, three-leg legislation race about poverty on a collision course. 

First you have the city's Ad Hoc Subcommittee on Homelessness, which may have started with diverse voices but quickly devolved into something disdained by the very people about to be impacted by the Subcommittee's (surprise!) new sidewalk laws headed for the council in February and which may convert the new BART Plaza into a year-long conflict zone. It's now a sprinkle of council voices and city staff most of whom still think homelessness can be ticketed away. 

Second, you have the Commission on Homelessness, which consistently reflects common sense and best practices: bathrooms, wash stations, safe camping places, and trash pickup for groups of people with literally nowhere else to go. Commissioner Carol Marasovic, invited to present the Commission's recommendations to the Berkeley City Council on January 23rd, 2018, remained amused and upbeat as she was outflanked by city representatives at her table insisting that they were already doing those things, or were about to get around to it. The Commission on Homelessness's recommendations were passed on in favor of a companion report by the city recommending that the city was almost there anyway. 

Third, you have an array of outside pressures: the lawsuit by First They Came for the Homeless, with U.S. District Judge William Alsup allowing the group to broaden their complaint against the City of Berkeley if the city attempts to enforce or threatens to enforce a state law during the housing shortage; the actions of nearby cities including Oakland in recognizing the necessity of bathrooms, wash stations, medical assistance, campgrounds, and trash pickup for people in need; a growing Hepatitis C outbreak; a visit by a United Nations (UN) representative for an upcoming international report on the treatment of people forced to live outside on the streets. 

The battle over who gets to use the sidewalks is even more fascinating given that the City of Berkeley has joined other municipalities in creating "public-private partnerships" in public spaces governed uneasily by commercial restaurants and cafes. Did your path to the post office just get narrowed by permanent or semi-permanent tables and chairs? Do neighboring businesses now routinely put out permit-free tables and chairs cluttering and obstructing access through commercial areas? Can someone who doesn't buy anything sit down? 

No one can miss these comical phenomena. But somehow the sidewalk laws being unveiled by the Ad Hoc Subcommittee on Homelessness are tailored toward making it difficult for people, not merchants who routinely try to capitalize on their proximity to a public sidewalk. 

The next move should be to send the new sidewalk rules proposal from the Ad Hoc Subcommittee on Homelessness to relevant commissions. Skipping this step will guarantee conflict and ensure misunderstanding, not to mention legal challenges. The UN rep was clear; while other countries organize to attend and assist people in need, US cities, and California in particular, have build an ineffective mountain of confusing ordinances -3 feet from here and 5 feet from there plus sunset laws requiring careful attendance as to whether it is 7 am or 6 am, idiocy designed to trap and catch people who circle the courts or the drain depending on their health and stamina.

We're better than this as a city. There are a few voices on the council who share community concerns about the city's and the Downtown Berkeley Association's (DBA) decades of discrimination. But the oversight the DBA needs is still missing, something that should be a no-brainer after all the court cases and discriminatory legislation born in their back rooms, often with the council's help.

An informal overture to the DBA, which is being given a contract to control BART Plaza, to enlist their cooperation with a small group of community members tasked to clarify policy and field complaints could still come from commissions and councilmembers. The DBA's current promotions are highly selective; entire festivals are left out of their ad campaigns, which makes no sense even from a business angle. But still there is currently no independent group to whom one can raise the issue. 

Filtering these decisions through DBA CEO John Caner, who plunked his friend's strange bear sculpture down in a public plaza because he could is a good example of how even art can be used to reinforce cliques and conventions of discrimination instead of our city's commitments to inclusion and innovation. It's especially bewildering in a city with so many arts and civil rights groups working tirelessly to recognize institutional discrimination and affirm the need to include more diversity, more history, and more avenues to inclusion. Our arts and our legislation benefit wildly from the embrace of brilliant, if unexpected, community voices. 

# # # 

Caption: First They Came for the Homeless's lawsuit survived a legal challenge and is being allowed to broaden its complaint against the City of Berkeley by U.S. District Judge William Alsup.

A federal judge in San Francisco has turned down a request by the city of Berkeley for dismissal of a civil rights lawsuit filed by a group of homeless people.

U.S. District Judge William Alsup said two members of the group called First They Came for the Homeless could pursue claims that the city violated their due process and free speech rights during evictions from municipal land. 

Alsup, in a ruling issued on Friday, dismissed some additional claims against the city and also dismissed BART as a defendant. 

The group, which has an estimated 20 to 30 members, camped on land owned by BART on the west side of BART tracks near the Oakland border for about 10 months beginning in January 2017. The homeless residents left the site in early November, following BART's posting of notices to vacate the property in late October. 

The group members claim that before that, Berkeley police moved them from 12 different locations on city land between October 2016 and early January 2017 and seized and threw away property they could not carry or left behind. 

Alsup dismissed BART as a defendant because plaintiffs are no longer camping on BART property and that area is now fenced off. 

But, he said that Clark Sullivan and Adam Bredenberg, who joined the group before January 2017, can proceed with their claims that Berkeley unconstitutionally seized their property during the earlier evictions, failed to give them adequate notice and retaliated for their comments criticizing Berkeley's response to the homelessness crisis. 

Alsup said three other individual plaintiffs did not join the group until after January 2017 and therefore could not sue over the city's actions before then. 

EmilyRose Johns, a lawyer for the plaintiffs, said they will ask Alsup to certify the lawsuit as a class action on behalf of all members of First They Came for the Homeless or possibly a larger group of homeless Berkeley residents. 

"We're pleased the judge is allowing the case to go forward," Johns said. 

Group members are now living in three different locations on city land, she said. 

City of Berkeley spokesman Matthai Chakko said, "The city's motion to dismiss was based solely on the plaintiffs' allegations, and no evidence was presented to the court. 

"The city is confident that once the facts are presented, it will prevail on plaintiffs' remaining claims regarding unlawful seizure of property and First Amendment retaliation," Chakko said. 

The next hearing in the case is a case management conference before Alsup on Feb. 8. No date for a trial has been set. 

The lawsuit was originally filed on Oct. 23 as a handwritten complaint against BART by three encampment residents acting as their own lawyers. Three days later, a group of five residents, now represented by lawyers, filed an amended complaint that added Berkeley as a defendant. 

The lawsuit alleges Berkeley "has consistently failed to provide enough shelter beds for its homeless population." It cites a 2017 study that said two-thirds of about 1,000 homeless people lacked shelter beds. 

The city has said that helping homeless people get housed is a priority and that it devotes "significant resources to help address, on a local level, what is a regional, statewide and national issue."

Our legislators get their pay in time while poverty stricken citizens worry whether they can scrape together enough to feed their families. The legislators forget they were sent to Washington to fix the broken economic system, the immigration policy, employment, education and healthcare. They were not sent to Washington to enjoy the good life. The legislators must solve the problems of an economy where the rich get richer and the poor become poorer. Access of the very poor to schools and colleges gives them a ladder on which to climb from poverty into the middle class. Assurance of continued healthcare and social security gives our poor elders the safety net they need to live in dignity.  

It is high time now to include the welfare of all American in our national policies. The latest revision to the tax code helps the wealthiest Americans, jeopardizing the status of low income and middle income Americans. Let’s stop paying out the salaries of our legislators, so they can experience for themselves, what it is like to be poor and resource-less. We must make the US not merely a wealthy society but a just society.

The appeal of the first six-story apartment building on San Pablo Avenue will be heard at the City Council meeting on Tuesday January 23, which starts at 6 pm; it’s the first item on the action calendar. The project is a 63-unit density bonus venture designed and sponsored by Rony Rolnizky, the architect of Hillside Village at 1797 and 1801 Shattuck Avenue and 3001 Telegraph Avenue, across from Whole Foods. In many ways, this is “just an apartment building” to quote the applicant, but he has added a twist in requesting that the 12 below market rate units (BMRs) – six for very low income and six for low income – be set aside for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities (I/DDs) and has requested a waiver of the City’s Section 8 and Shelter+Care requirements: 40% of the six very low income (VLI) apartments for each category. In this case, that would amount to 2 Section 8 and 2 Shelter+Care units. 

The waiver created controversy at the Zoning Adjustments Board (ZAB) meeting of July 27, 2017 with three members voting against the project because of the waiver and design issues, and prompted an appeal by Susan Henderson, the CEO of the Disability Rights, Education and Defense Fund (DREDF) located at the Ed Roberts Campus, who feels that the waiver pits one group of disabled against another, and that Rolnizky and his lawyers stereotype homeless people. 

I joined the appeal to ensure the BMR allotment met the new mitigation fee rules, passed by the Council on June 27 but not effective until September, and to make a plea for City wide density standards, now on the Planning Commission’s work schedule. Other appellants include merchants across the street from the project. 

The Waiver

The new Shelter+Care program provides subsidies for the chronically homeless, using funds from HUD administered by the Berkeley housing department in collaboration with several community agencies. Participants pay approximately 30% of their income towards rent and receive ongoing supportive services. To qualify, an individual must be chronically homeless and disabled, physically or mentally. Rolnizky doesn’t want such people in his building because he says they may have “a past history of violence, drug/substance abuse and severe mental issues” and pose a risk to the I/DDs who are “vulnerable, defenseless, and fragile” and require “an integrated safe, supportive housing community.” 

Henderson claims his are “prejudicial ideas about people with low incomes or mental health disabilities” and that “local law must promote fair housing opportunities and cannot act as a constraint.” It’s hard to imagine that the inhabitants of two units out of 63 would significantly alter the safety of another small minority in the building, but this conflict indicates how the disadvantaged compete for limited resources. A few apartments in one building represent a drop in the bucket of housing needs for the homeless and disabled. People who pass for normal might pose more dangers than those whose troubles are known. 

Several elements of the interior design create more logistical problems for the disabled than any formerly homeless person could; these include the single elevator, a cramped laundry room on the top floor, narrow studios, dim corridors, limited indoor common areas, and a shady roof deck. One elevator in a tall building is especially risky, as failure forces tenants to stay home or navigate up many flights of stairs during repairs. This is a common complaint from disabled tenants in such situations, like the elevator outage at Acton Court in November 2015. 

The interior corridors on four floors have no natural light, which means the building must operate on an emergency generator during power outages, and no common space other than the stairwells. Thirteen of the studio apartments are exceedingly narrow, about 12 feet wide, and a disproportionate number of the smaller apartments have been designated as the BMRs despite Berkeley’s rules that state, “All inclusionary units shall be reasonably dispersed throughout the project, be of the same size and contain, on the average, the same number of bedrooms as the non-inclusionary units…and be comparable with the design or use….” Presumably, the housing department will correct size differentials in designating the BMRs. 

Private decks consume almost half the usable open space, and huge inequities exist between apartments with spacious decks and those with small balconies or none at all. Of the 18 units with private outdoor space, only one BMR has a balcony. For those without, the available open space is a large roof deck located on the northeast corner and surrounded by walls and the mechanical penthouse. The deck will have spectacular views of the hills but only receive direct sunlight on midsummer mornings. Roof decks have become a popular way of providing required open space because they allow a developer to maximize the lot coverage and residential square footage, especially with the density bonus. But the City has never studied the use of roof decks to fine-tune the standards such as the preferred placement for sun access. 

The desirable southeast corner of the top floor is occupied by the owner’s apartment, a 1,165 square foot master suite with three bedrooms and 502 square feet of deck on the east and south sides. It’s the only three-bedroom apartment in the building and enjoys most of the available sun. Sharing the sixth floor are five two-bedroom units, a studio, a small common room off the deck, a laundry room with eight washers and dryers, and an accessible toilet. 

Ronizky likes laundry rooms rather than washer/dryer stackers in each apartment that provide convenience and reduced laundry costs for the tenants. For example, 3001 Telegraph has a coin-operated laundry that has prompted bad reviews, while buildings by other developers contain a W/D in each apartment. The top floor laundry room at 2527 San Pablo Avenue prompted comments from ZAB member Patrick Sheahan, an architect who asked how caretakers would manage the laundry. Would they leave their charges unattended? Will the laundry facilities be included in the rent or be coin operated? Tenants will not have convenient laundry machines in their apartments, but they shouldn’t be burdened with extra costs. 

There is no ground floor leasing office. The common room at the entrance will serve as a meeting area for people coming and going. The sixth floor common room space probably will probably be used as a lounge for people doing their laundry. Neither is large enough for programmed activities like classes and parties. 

It is obvious that design review, a subcommittee of the zoning board, and the ZAB itself are not addressing the interests of tenants, especially those with special needs. Design review tends to look at exterior features, while the zoning board evaluates a building’s adherence to the code, and state law has begun to limit their discretion. The City should improve objective building standards to protect tenant needs and comforts. 

Contradictions of Integrative Housing

The request for the waiver and the design problems of 2527 San Pablo Avenue originate with the developer’s desire to provide for his disabled 20 year-old son Simon. Those who have heard his impassioned pleas for a building where developmentally disabled people can mingle with the heterogeneous population have been moved by his drive. But his attempt to privately fund integrative housing for the disabled through the mechanism of the density bonus displays a fundamental contradiction. He has asked for a waiver of a handful of units based on the assertion that the I/DDs are “very vulnerable defenseless and fragile” while expecting them to thrive in a densely packed six-story building with one elevator, a laundry on the top floor, little access to sunshine, and where they will be a small minority. 

Perhaps the community and the Council can convince Rolnizky to follow the example of the Spirit Residential developers who abandoned their density bonus apartment project at 2100 San Pablo Avenue to build instead a facility serving the elderly including memory care. Like Belmont Village assisted living in Albany, it will be filled to capacity upon opening; the need is so great. The developer of 2527 could build a similarly successful facility for the developmentally disabled and their families that would house three times their number than his proposed project. 

---

Toni Mester is a resident of West Berkeley. 

About 65,000 people or more marched in San Francisco this afternoon in the 2018 Women's March to draw women to political action, organizers said.  

The march started at about 1:45 p.m. at Civic Center Plaza and ended at The Embarcadero, a main road on the east side of the city. "We had a huge rally, which was amazing," march spokeswoman Martha Shaughnessy, 38, of San Francisco, said.  

The attendance may have been lower than last year when an estimated 100,000 marched, but the 65,000 estimate may be revised upward, Shaughnessy said.  

The Women's Marches began in January 2017 in the wake of the election of President Donald Trump, drawing huge crowds at events across the globe. 

The march's co-leader Sophia Andary, 35, of San Francisco, said the march this year was about action in addition to coming out to resist.  

She said if women and others don't take action such as voting and getting involved nothing will change.  

When asked whether she is going to run for office, she said she's not against the idea.  

Three years ago she would have said definitely no. She now is interested in working for others who are running for office.  

Shaughnessy said women marchers were encouraged to register to vote, to commit to voting, to organize locally, to run for office and to get more women running for office. 

Speakers at the rally before the march spoke about both national and local issues, which was different from last year when speakers spoke only about national issues.  

Local issues included those coming up for vote in the city's June election, when among other things, San Francisco residents will elect a new mayor.  

Separate marches took place in other Bay Area cities such as Walnut Creek and San Jose and in Oakland where 40,000 to 50,000 people marched peacefully from Lake Merritt to Frank Ogawa Plaza, police said.  

Shaughnessy said this year's march also included talk about the #MeToo movement, which has prompted women to call out others who have sexually harassed or sexually assaulted them.  

She said the conversation among marchers was about women having more of a voice.  

Dezie Woods-Jones, the California president of Black Women Organized for Political Action, this morning issued a statement encouraging black women to participate in the march. 

Oakland police said the Women's March that took place in downtown Oakland today drew an estimated 40,000 to 50,000 attendees and took place peacefully. 

There have been no reports of arrests, citations, vandalism or injuries, police said. 

The march began with speeches by leaders including Congresswoman Barbara Lee in the vicinity of Fourteenth Street and Lake Merritt, and proceeded to Frank H. Ogawa Plaza in front of Oakland City Hall.  

There was a sound system with a DJ in the Plaza, where spontaneous volunteers ranging in age from about 14 months to over 80, mostly clever kids, entertained an enthusiastic audience with energetic dance moves.  

There was no program at the end of the march, but instead organizations staffed tables which touted activities to promote electoral and social change.

John Oliver Simon, one of the Bay Area’s most beloved poets, died in the early hours of January 16th, from cancer, in the home of his fiancée Susie Kepner. He is survived by daughters Kia Simon and Lorelei Bosserman, son-in-law J.D. Moyer, granddaughter Tesla Rose Moyer, and former wives Pam Simon Hazel, Alta, and Jan Courtright Simon. He was 75. 

Born in New York City in 1942, he wrote his first poem under a full moon in 1956. Educated at The Putney School, Swarthmore College (Phi Beta Kappa), and the University of California Berkeley, Simon was mentored by John C. Adler, Jeffrey Campbell, Daniel Hoffman, Gary Snyder, Lew Welch and Carol Lee Sanchez. 

While at Cal and after, Simon was active in the Free Speech Movement and in the famous struggle to liberate Berkeley's People’s Park. Of this time, he wrote "I was a newcomer to the Bay Area, having arrived in Berkeley in September 1964 in time to sit down in the crowd on Sproul Plaza surrounding the police car which was holding Jack Weinberg prisoner in the back seat in the first act of what would become the Free Speech Movement. I came west three months after graduating from Swarthmore College, planning to get my Ph.D. in English at Cal since I had not been accepted to graduate school at Harvard, and because my mother's forebears had arrived in San Francisco a hundred ten years before that and California was my terrain of legend.” 

Simon’s nine full-length books of poetry included “Caminante” (praised by Gary Snyder and Juan Felipe Herrera), “Roads to Dawn Lake” (Oyez Press, 1968), “Rattlesnake Grass” (Hanging Loose Press, 1978), “Lord of the House of Dawn” (Bombshelter Press, 1991), and “Grandpa’s Syllables (White Violet Press, 2015). His poetry was published in numerous literary journals and reviews, “from Abraxas to Zyzzyva.” He also co-founded and edited the poetry magazine Aldebaran Review, which ran from 1967 to 1978. 

In 1989 Simon was awarded an Individual Artist’s Fellowship by the California Arts Council. He also received an NEA Fellowship in Translation for his work with the great Chilean surrealist poet Gonzalo Rojas (1917-2011). On January 20, 2015, Simon's contributions to the Bay Area writing and educational community were recognized by the city of Berkeley with "John Oliver Simon Day." On May 14, 2016, the Berkeley Poetry Festival presented him with its Lifetime Achievement Award. 

As an educator, Simon devoted himself to teaching children to write poetry. He co-founded and taught at the People's Community School in Berkeley, 1969-1973. He was a former president and board member of California Poets in the Schools (CalPoets), and served as the Artistic Director of Poetry Inside Out, a program of the Center for the Art of Translation. In 2013, he was named the River of Words Teacher of the Year by former U.S. Poet Laureate Robert Hass. 

Despite not learning Spanish until the age of forty, Simon became a noted translator specializing in contemporary Latin American poetry. His cultural reporting was featured in Poetry Flash and American Poetry Review. In 2017 he travelled to Madrid to attend a conference of translators of Gonzalo Rojas. 

In addition to his daily writing practice, Simon was an avid backpacker, kayaker, gardener, and baseball fan. 

John Oliver Simon touched the lives of thousands with his teaching, friendship, and poems. Mexican poet Alberto Blanco wrote “The poems of John Oliver Simon, like all true poems, trace a map, a psychography, which allows us to enter, not only into another life but into the voyage of that life, and not only into another culture, but into other cultures: into another point of view.” Simon himself wrote “Language is the central human invention, the hive which we are ceaselessly elaborating, even as I speak.” 

A Memorial Service will be held at Chapel of the Chimes, 4499 Piedmont Ave. in Oakland, on February 3rd, starting at 2pm.