Off the Record (December 9, 2020)

WE ASKED Silent Dan Gjerde, Fort Bragg’s mute supervisor, and FB’s man in Ukiah, if he might deign to weigh in on the ongoing problem with Hospitality House, but true to form, No Reply. Given that almost all HH’s funding is routed through the supervisors, Gjerde might exert some authority with HH’s board of directors, the usual Mendolib collection of wealthy, arms distance do gooders, most of whom do not live in Fort Bragg and, therefore, do not live with the consequences of a large population of troubled people, most with drug and alcohol dependencies, plunked down in the middle of their town.

EVEN IF TRUMP gets his unfounded vote fraud case before the Trump-majority Supreme Court, you don't suppose they're fanatical enough to dare reverse the election results, do you? If they dared, the country would instantly veer into total chaos, and it's chaos-close now, with millions out of work, millions “food insecure,” covid killing a citizen a minute, millions existing in a state of high anxiety.

INTERESTING DEVELOPMENTS on the South Coast via the Independent Coast Observer, include a surprisingly candid story by Susan Wolbarst in which Point Arena school administrators forthrightly admit that distance learning is not working well for their students. Superintendent Warren Galletti responded to the report with a windy blast concluding, “We will do anything and everything we possibly can to get all students on track for graduation and success with their future.” Futures, that is, but if concern about their futures were sincere the edu-bloc would be daily impressing on their funding units that their world is not going to be the easy, plump ride their elders like Galletti have had.

ON PAGE 3 of the Gualala-based weekly we find, “PA city council appoints new city manager.” Mendocino County's most heavily governed town — a five-person city council and a city manager and an assistant city manager managing and assistant-managing a population of fewer than 500 people. A retired Ukiah pol, Richard Shoemaker, got himself installed as part-time city manager at fifty (count 'em) thousand dollars a year. Then Shoemaker got his Ukiah pal, Paul Andersen, appointed “administrative assistant” at around forty grand, this typical Mendolib hustling no problemo ratified by PA's oversight trustees, no questions asked. And now Andersen is manager all by himself until he gets himself an assistant, someone to say, “That's right, boss,” and “Coffee, boss?” 

FINALLY, on page 7, a whining letter-to-the-editor from Point Arena City Councilman Richey Wasserman. It's titled, “Meanness, vitriol,” in which Wasserman claims “the toxicity of Trump” has even infected, gasp! Point Arena! … “In our small bubble such vitriol has the potential to fracture community.” Community as defined, presumably, by the high minded city councilman, you can bet, community consisting of him and his friends. Unfortunately, Wasserman's letter doesn't live up to the promise of its title by repeating the vitriol the poor guy has had to suffer. Nor does the self-embattled Wasserman name the villains bedeviling him, or tell us what the “baseless accusations” are.

THE RIGID ACTION TAKEN by the Fort Bragg Board of Health has squashed the dreaded diphtheria squarely in the head and at the present writing, health officer Dr. L. C. Gregory, reports that there are no new cases and that the two patients who were sick have recovered. The public library, school, motion picture show, etc., which were closed down, are again running and Fort Bragg is once more wide open. (Fort Bragg Advocate, Nov. 26, 1915)

LAST THURSDAY got off to a resoundingly apocalyptic start with the Santa Anas blowing up fast-moving fires in LA as SoCal utilities cut power to tens of thousands of homes to stall the flames from breaking into new areas. LA's mayor announced “It's time to cancel everything” as he issued a stay-at-home order for everyone with no particular business being outside. The Governor and SF's mayor are expected to announce comparably strict orders any time now perhaps, in their cases, over lunch at the most expensive restaurant in the state. Biden tottered on-screen to read from his telepromoter's big block print that more than three thousand people had died Wednesday, and that he expected a quarter of a million deaths by January. He said that one of his first acts as president will be a 100-day national mask order. The leader-elect seemed rather elated; either that or his emotions are seriously out of sync with what he's saying. The experts are urging people to stay home over Christmas which, other experts are speculating, could mean shutting down air travel.

THAT 6-ON-2 COVELO kidnap and murder was more appalling than even that beleaguered town's criminals usually manage: An axe was the murder weapon. One of the defendants forcibly held up the head of the female victim to make her watch while the male victim was bludgeoned to death. Then it was her turn.

A CALLER said his grandchildren were being sexually propagandized at their inland Mendo elementary school. He was a little light on specifics, but since he mentioned a widely circulated story from, I think, the LA area, about a transvestite reading to third graders, an event that seems to have traumatized millions, I called Mendo County school superintendent, Michelle Hutchins, for clarification. Are our schools indoctrinating the young ones in off-schedule sexual practices? Superintendent Hutchins said that the law requires schools to teach sex ed starting in 7th grade, and the state recommends that schools start this education as early as fifth grade but that she was “unaware of any elementary schools in our county that address sex ed prior to seventh grade. Most districts collaborate with local health care providers and bring in health workers to present and work with students or the teacher addresses it themselves. It is part of the science curriculum in 7th grade and health curriculum in 8th grade.”

I HAVE A DIM memory of the nice lady who taught biology at my high school being terribly embarrassed by a classroom smart ass who, pretending to seek clarification of her technical explanations of zygotes and fallopian tubes as they involved insemination, kept asking versions of, “But is this process kicked off by a penis inserted into a vagina?” (Both terms were regarded as first cousins to obscenity in ’56.) She answered a hurried yes and we returned to the hard (sic) science. 

THE AVA'S COMMENT LINE faces a prob faced by all on-line publications. To be blunt, How to keep crazy talk to a minimum. So we issued our guidelines which, of course, will seem arbitrary to the certifiable and also, of course, assumes our judgement is, well, sound, not that we're reluctant to argue this or that comment. Here you go, boys. (Girls, generically being smarter, understand without basic and repeated instruction.) Same as newspaper LTE's only a little looser, meaning we assume we have the duty to cull what we think is unfair or simply irrelevant or.... Well, yes, our editing can seem arbitrary to the everyday chronophage because we don't want our comment section to go all to hell like the MCN chatline where a handful of lunatics insult each other round the clock, crowding out or intimidating into silence sensible people who'd rather not associate with or expose themselves to the outpatient community. Imagine yourself writing to a paper-paper. Would you assume the paper-paper is obligated to print whatever pops into your fraught head? No. Same here. 

GUN SAFETY, an on-line comment: “Never, never let your gun be pointed at any one. Not an accidental discharge, as there is no such animal, it was a NEGLIGENT discharge! Keep your boogerhook off the bangswitch, numbnuts…”

RIGHT THERE are two handy new additions to the formidable arsenal of American slang — “boogerhook” for trigger finger, “bangswitch” for trigger. Bingo! Numbnuts seems to have been around forever. But curious about the origins of these handy terms sent me to that invaluable resource, the American Dictionary of Slang: “Numbnuts n. a stupid fellow.” The first formal awareness of “numbnuts” seemed to be a 1960 play called Do Not Go Gentle where the term is applied to the 1940s as in, “Makes a man weary, Al, havin’ ta ’sociate with numbnuts like these.” (Still researching boogerhook and bangswitch, but Doug Coulter said he heard both in the Marine Corps circa the 1970s.)

RECOMMENDED VIEWING: ‘Maradona in Mexico,” a documentary film about the legendary soccer star's year of coaching dangerously in Sinaloa, Mexico where the ebullient Maradona took the Mexican team from the doldrums to success in a very short period of time. Maradona, who died last month at age 60, is an interesting character by himself, as legendary for his off-field excesses as his brilliant on-field performances. The film is also a fascinating look at the life of professional soccer off the field as it plays out in Mexico's infamous drug city. 

FRED GARDNER WRITES:

A poem (I'm guessing it's by Terry Allen, a great songwriter whose father had a cup of coffee with the St. Louis Browns c. 1941) and an article from the NY Times:

Growing up in Abilene

Dwight D. Eisenhower

Hit the longest homer ever seen

People talked about his power

His best friend in Abilene

A boy who could really pitch

Dreamed of being president

Neither fellow got his wish

They got everything but

What they asked for…

Everything but

What they wanted most

related article: Eisenhower’s Baseball Secret

NURSES ON THE COVID FRONT. Message from an ICU nurse… “I am passing on, with permission, the emails a friend recently received from her daughter, an ICU nurse in Oakland. Please share if you wish. Friends I am passing on this information from my daughter, an ICU nurse in Oakland. She urged me to share ...with my friends. I know all of you are very careful with regard to Covid but it doesn't hurt to be reminded again....and again. I am adding my own preface based on her email to me.... One nurse in The ER at her hospital has recently died of Covid and many nurses have been exposed to it. Many of the other nurses are so burned out and depressed by the covid situation which they have been dealing with since March, that they are cutting back their hours to half time just as the number of patients is ramping up. This is true of all hospitals throughout the country. Also, many front line medical workers have died of Covid. My daughter has described to me in detail the horrific treatments and lonely, painful deaths of several Covid patients of all ages...nothing like flu whatsoever.

(Her) hospital is seeing not only an upswing of Covid patients but more suicides and injuries due to violent crimes as people lose coping skills under present circumstances. The medical staff are silent, unsung heroes of this crisis. They do their jobs day after day, dealing with horrendous, relentless, personal medical tragedies that most of us have absolutely no awareness of.

Here is (her) message: Could you spread the word that if people want to support us on the front lines, supporting us by making social sacrifices. I know it’s hard and people have been already doing that to an extent. With the cold weather driving us indoors small gatherings indoors need to stop (even amongst people who think they have been safe). Stick to outdoor visits at most. Masked outdoor walks. Occasional out door small dinners (masks on when not eating). Any flying get tested before hand and wear a mask and face shield.

If you could encourage people in your circle to make this winter commitment it will help us survive the next few months. They are estimating over 400k dead by spring. Northern California is a hot spot.

Haven’t seen people in denial. I think it’s generally accepted as real in this part of the country.

What I do see is intense fear and grief. The ones that really hurt your heart are the young people or couples. We've had a few young men who took a turn for the worst and had to be intubated. They ALL cry and look at you with fear and desperation. Some call their mom or family to say good bye. The crying and gasping goodbyes before being tubed is heartbreaking. Some stay sedated and even chemically paralyzed for weeks. And if they die, that moment before sedation, when they are crying and praying and saying goodbye to their mom or asking you to hold their hand and not leave them alone because they are scared, that was their last interaction of their life. Which is so profoundly tragic and a waste. Because it was preventable.

I find it gross that people don't believe the virus is real. That rests at the feet of this administration, the GOP, and Fox. They created this disconnect from reality. They knew their audience and knew exactly how to manipulate them into a narrative that served their needs. The ignorance and susceptibility predated covid. But the leaders of these people knowingly fed them disinformation causing people to act in ways of self-harm. And now people are dying of disbelief. Coming to the hospital in crisis and on the verge of death.. .What an awful moment to have an epiphany that Covid is real.”

AN APPRECIATIVE READER: “I am especially thankful for the new ava format when going back to previous issues that I missed. The archival lineup is great, the old pictures and stories are incredible, the whole design, and content: incredible! Congratulations to all involved.” 

ED NOTE: One guy involved, the brilliant Mr. Kalantarian of Navarro, who got 'er done by himself. In all modesty, and thanks to Mr. K, the AVA is the county's sole repository of much of county history in all its manifestations, from the blandly factual to the unique-to-this-place. 

THE HELD-POAGE is another trove but less, (how you say in Ingress?) eccentric in the better sense of the term. This newspaper's letters-to-the-editor, random bits of opinion, local government's deceptive agendas, the endless accounts of ever increasing levels of the cruder crimes — all of it — combine to give a sense of what this place is like in this time. And given that this time is the acceleration of the great slide into… I'd guess fascism first, then regional set asides, and finally banditry followed by medieval-like strongman fiefdoms. Coastal Mendo will eventually consist of a more or less benign feminist-oriented dictatorship perpetually at war with The People Over The Ridge, where primitive tribes more or less headquartered in Ukiah and Willits are led by high school linebackers who are constantly beaten back by the superior tacticians of Boonville, Mendocino and Fort Bragg. Hopland and Laytonville become like the borderlands between Scotland and England circa 1100.

CONSUMER ADVISORY: The men's socks at CostCo. I'm tellin' ya, boys, the best socks at the best price I ever bought. Made in China, unfortunately for the nationalistically inclined, but this globalist is so pleased with them I've kept a package of four still wrapped and propped up on my desk as a kind of shrine to inexpensive foot comfort. Four pair for $7.99! Probably hand knit by Uiger prisoners, but with imports from wherever you know you're seldom getting goods voluntarily produced by non-captive people. 

THE QUESTION before the house was, “Why so callous about old people?” Mr. Harvey Reading of Outback, Wyoming wins the Most Negative Comment Ever registered by the Boonville weekly:

TAKE IT AWAY, HARV: “Easy for me to understand. I’m old. I’m part of the reason the country is so screwed up. My generation didn’t stand up to Reagan and the other fascists; instead we let them walk all over us; let Reagan fire the PATCO air traffic controllers; shrugged when blow-job Bill ended Aid to Families with Dependent Children; did nothing when the fascist Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, “Patriot” Act, REALID, etc. were enacted; did nothing when wars based on lies were waged with cannon fodder provided by an economic draft; did nothing when the wealthy got tax cuts while we got the shaft; did nothing when privatization of Social Security almost happened (under Clinton, later Bush 2). And on, and on. The world would be a better place if people my age had never existed. I get so sick of people glorifying, even pretending to “honor” old people, and particularly sick when they feel that we “deserve” special treatment, like bringing us unsolicited meals on one or two fall holidays (how the hell do they think we manage through the other 363 or 364 days of the year?). We were young once, and we screwed up, TOTALLY. Our major accomplishment was to keep the course for the planet pointed straight toward oblivion, and soon.”

I'M WITH HARV on one point; the special set asides for the elderly. In an upside down society like this one it's no surprise that the elderly get a lot of funding, accompanied by unending boatloads of pure mawk as if they're children which, of course, many of them are, the child being the father to the man etc. And all because they vote. The bulk funding ought to be at the other end of the age spectrum, especially given the millions of children springing up out of sub-feral dens. The Russian commies did a few great things — they shot economic criminals and, given the high percentage of drunks in their imposed society, out of social necessity, they instituted round-the-clock childcare centers, which are one of the many civil institutions this country has needed since 1967, the onset of the Great Unraveling. 

BIDEN got off a uniquely rare, reality-based speech over the weekend, accurately describing the social-economic state of our society as bad going worse by the day. The question for him and his team of Clintonians is, Will They Go Big Enough?, with the sub-question being Are They Capable of Going Big Enough? 

THEN, in an interview with Biden and Harris, CNN's nuzzlebumming Jake Tapper asked how the two handle disagreements. It was the pair's first sit-down interview since their election. Here's the president-elect: “But like I told Barack, if I reach something where there is a fundamental disagreement that we have based on a moral principle, I'll develop some disease and say I have to resign.”

HUH? On first read I assumed it was just the latest confirmation of Biden's obvious fragile state, but thinking about it, the odd response may mean that Biden is aware that he's past it, has discussed his past it-ness with his handlers and, at some point when he's unable to read the teleprompters he'll turn the reins over to Kamala, a succession that will explode white heads from coast to coast.

KAMALA? I wish you would tone down your constant chuckling, which seems to me to border on hysteria. No one laughs all the goddam time. I'm old enough to remember when the political class said what they had to say without all this false bonhomie. Bring back solemnity! And spare us, please, all references to and appearances of “first husband,” or whatever cutesy designation the bulletheads advise for foisting this guy off on our exhausted population, With the Biden Gang it's already like being stuck in some kind of post-lobotomy recovery ward.

MEDIA NOTE

CNN interview of Biden/Harris

CNN to Biden:

• "How does it feel to have finally made it?"
• "What explains your overwhelming popularity amongst the American people?"
• "Tell us about your dog. How important is having a pet in these troubled times?"
• "What is your favorite color?"

CNN to Harris:

• "What should we call your husband? The first dude? Honey?" (laughter)
• "Do you realize the great historical significance you present to young girls across the country?.
• "What is your favorite color?"
• Ahahahahaha ahahahaha ahahahahaha!!”

THE BASIC political dilemma that the true covid experts face is created by non-medical government, especially its elected people like Governor Newsom. With them, and their bureaucracies, we get the basic obscenity of highly paid people in secure jobs driving small business people to the poor house. Count me as one of thousands happy to see California sheriffs refusing to enforce state covid edicts, which are not only unfair to working people but often arbitrary. And always confusing. Most people are already masking up and conscientiously keeping their distance from the rest of the herd, so why shut down, for instance, outdoor dining?

I WAS DIMLY aware that Trumpers were unhappy with Fox News because a couple of their fascist-lite commentators had demanded that Trump put up some evidence of election fraud. When their leader is even too much for Fox… To catch our leader live last night (Saturday) out of Valdosta, Georgia, I had to go to the new home of mass delusion, NewsMax.

AS USUAL, Trump delivered more than an hour of stream of consciousness riffs about how the election was stolen from him, but with timeouts for long, filmed segments from some nut raving about the great fraud on a big screen that the NewsMax crew was unable to capture, instead lingering for long minutes on the portly figure of Trump casually leaning up against his podium. The president offered no evidence of election fraud beyond a grainy film clip allegedly from a Georgia election office showing a small bunch of boxes he said contained jiggered ballots. 

THERE wasn't any election fraud, but it creates a sustaining myth for Trump's credulous millions, as untrue as Hitler's sustaining myth that Jews had stabbed Germany in the back after World War One. 

AS THE ORANGE ORACLE rambled on to great cheers from the Georgians, a sales pitch for a book called, ‘Socialists Never Sleep’ scrolled across the bottom of the screen. 

HARRUMPH! INSOMNIAC SOCIALISTS? This socialist logs 7 hours a night, and he seldom misses an afternoon nap, but he won't presume to speak for the rest of the comrades. Drumming up big fear about socialists, let alone communists, and maybe a coupla thousand self-identified Marxists in the whole country, none of whom lead a political party with more than twenty people active in it? Excuse me, but where's the threat? (Boredom maybe, if you get one of them going.) But the Trumpian point is to scare the remedial readers with a non-existent threat from social democrats of the Bernie type, and to scare the dimmer rich that their money is at risk from, of all people, Biden. 

IF THERE'S a single Marxist on the entire Northcoast I'm unaware of him/her. Socialists? A few probably who know what socialism is and identify with it. Marxists? Maybe a couple of plump, caponized academics of the harmless type you might hear on KZYX, but probably not. Thousands of NorthCoasties went for Bernie not because he identifies as a socialist but because millions of people identified with his economic program, which included most famously single payer. Interesting that a lot of Trump voters said they would have gone with Bernie if he'd been the Democrat nominee.

WELL, WELL. Look who's here, George Orwell with another brain tickler:

“The following often-quoted passage comes from Act V of Shakespeare's tragedy, Timon of Athens:

Come not to me again: but say to Athens

Timon hath made his everlasting mansion

Upon the beached verge of the salt flood:

Who once a day with his embossed froth

The turbulent surge shall cover.

This passage contains three errors. What are they?”

HMMM. Who should be whom, dare I or anybody else correct The Bard. I guessed at who/whom but figured the other two errors had something to do with the Mediterranean Sea, about which I know virtually nothing.

A FEW PAGES ON, George gives us the answer:

(a) The 'who' should be 'whom.'

(b) Timon was buried below the high tide mark. The sea would cover him twice a day, not once, as there are always two high tides within twenty-four hours.

(c) It wouldn't cover him at all, as there is no perceptible tide in the Mediterranean.

ONE OUT OF THREE? Not bad. Maybe a C in a lenient classroom.

ON LINE COMMENTS OF THE WEEK

[1] Is the CIA an enemy of the people? Of course it is, and has been since the 50’s and 60’s. All but the most brainwashed (or stupid) know this at some level. JFK all but said so, and we see how he was treated/disposed of. Also enemies of the people are all of those who cry ‘conspiracy theory’ at the mention, or discovery, of any untoward, unlikely, ‘can’t happen here,’ or obviously nefarious government behavior. Same process occurred in the USSR, where the KGB diagnosed mental illness (and put into ‘mental hospitals’) any who mentioned/discovered nefarious government behavior. JFK knew this long ago. The idea that modern prog wokesters are pro-CIA is one of the most unintentionally funny events of the past four years — and that is saying a lot. History rhymes.

[2] Why am I having to save up to buy a tractor?. I want to get an old Case or IH with big rear wheels, drive it up and down the street, freak out the neighbors. Also, to drag large stones around the property to rebuild a boundary wall that was originally put up c. 1650-1700. I’m not sure how they moved these boulders back in the day, maybe with oxen and block & tackle? And how did these large rocks — which weigh as much as 500-600 lbs — get scattered? It’s almost like at some point they grew legs and tried to get away.

[3] When I first considered moving north in the late nineties, I visited Covelo and would have chosen it had not a young Native American friend of my god-daughter’s explained that I would be virtually eaten alive by the piranhas who victimize dumb white people like me. (I loved the Yolla Bolly press and aspired to work there, as a professional in the publishing field, live humbly on a little plot of farmable land, help organize services for elder care, stuff like that.) I picked Lake County and discovered the same political nightmare on this side of the Cow, and the horrific disfunctionality of abused (and subsequently self-flagellating) tribal families. The miraculous efforts to stop the Army Corps of Engineers, resulting in Reagan’s unwitting last minute decision, is a true “cliff-hanger” — the ending is as astonishing as the present reality is today. 

[4] History is full of opportunities to miss opportunities, fully taken advantage of and not in a good way.

Going back not too far, Palestinians had a decent chance at their own country in the West Bank. But, when it seemed that the long process of negotiation and bribery and arm-twisting by the US was about to bear some fruit, Arafat called out the intifada and that was that. 

So, what have they got now? A wall built by Israel (which proves that walls do work and do solve problems) and no country but instead a shit-hole dominated militarily by Israel and the prospect of steadily diminishing life-chances for Palestinians for the foreseeable future. 

Britain and France had a good chance to shorten the Great War by means of bold action in early 1915 against Turkey by way of the strait leading to Constantinople and the peninsula alongside the waterway. If the Royal Navy and French ships had appeared in the Sea of Marmora the post-war consensus was that Turkey would have sought terms. Enver Pasha himself said that if only Britain had had the courage. And, early in 1915 Turkish fortresses in the peninsula, though heavily gunned, had limited ammunition, Turkish troop presence in the area was small, and with some quick action, Britain and France could have pulled it off.

But the initiative, though started, was delayed by weeks by hesitancy, second thoughts, reluctance by the Royal Navy to take risks, until “no” took root in the higher echelons, and then when action was finally started, the Turks had massively increased their forces, the Brits in the area got one third less than what they needed and a month late at that and the opportunity was missed.

What does this have to do with anything? The USA is presently all a-bristle with opportunities to reset the clocks if only skillful and resolute action is taken by Trump people with respect to this farce of an election. 

It’s not just chances in the short term but longer-term also. What this last five years showed was that what the America First movement needs is institutional back-stopping because what we saw was a determined though incompetent effort to get rid of Trump, and a better effort to legally harass officials working in his administration. That cannot go on if the America First movement is to take root and become effective. It’s no good just to have a bunch of guys in camo doing target practice in the backwoods, what it needs is people embedded in the unelected machinery of government, in investigative and intel agencies, in the Pentagon, the DOJ, in the foreign affairs Blob etc., to counteract those working in concert with Democrats and Republicans.

But it seems that all these many openings will get whiffed the same as did the Palestinians and the Brits and the French. Failure to see clearly, failure of nerve, failure to think things through, this could be the death of it, giving a chance to nastier alternatives. Because there are always alternatives. 

[5] You can see the abject failure of the educational system (including colleges and universities) in the workplace. You see it especially in the younger set who spell very badly, can't construct coherent sentences, can't do cursive, don't know the multiplication table, are abysmally ignorant of elementary geography and history. It's depressing, all that money spent and all those years in the classroom and what the hell for.

[6] I have a couple friends who do not believe much in the virus and think masks are stupid. Yet they wear their mask when going into stores. I ask them why? They say “Hey- if it makes the old people less afraid then it’s a small thing to do”. Basic decency, good neighbors…It’s really up to us to treat each other well. Screw the political hype and just be kind to your neighbors…

[7] I’ve never taken a long time to recover from any illness, except CoV-19. 9 months later still breathing issues, cough, chest pain, extreme fatigue some days, muscle weakness, night sweats, brain fog. Had a few bad flus in my life and very recovered quickly. Multiple other people I’ve known to have gotten it also have had lasting issues. I’ve worked very hard to rehab myself over the last few months and I’m doing much better, but I wouldn’t consider myself fully recovered. I’ve spent thousands on medical care in the past 9 months, but my quality of life is not the same as before I got sick. People are coming down with chronic conditions like adult onset asthma, colitis, heart conditions after “recovering” from being sick. Blessed are you and yours that you got to walk away with a clean slate. It’s not the same for everyone and you won’t know how sick you may get until you are or aren’t extremely ill.

I was healthy, active, and relatively young. There are a lot of unknowns about exposure to how sick you become too. It’s possible wearing a mask helps decrease a large exposure and may lead to more mild symptoms. I was heavily exposed to people who were very sick in late feb/early march with no mask because we were told cov-19 wasn’t here yet. Possible that exposure played a role in severity of illness.

[8] Hey neighbors, let’s try hard to be gentle and kind to one another. I promise I will. This morning, a lady in Mendo who wasn’t wearing a mask lectured my elderly mask-wearing parents about how they needed to be sure to properly dispose of their masks so as to not harm animals. Unsolicited lecture that bordered cray-cray is how they described it - and this person was not one of our homeless friends. We are better than that Mendo. Let’s all be nice. Nice is so nice.

(9) Ahh the evil liberal excuse for society’s ills and for attempting to reform prisons to steer away from mass incarceration which leads to many more ills in society than it benefits is an always present blame game in the comment section and I see today is no exception. Remember we’ve had mass incarceration AND the death penalty here in California before and, alas, crimes were still rampant? It’s not the deterrent that we wish it was. The war on drugs has reduced use and crime by nothing, but damaged millions long term and still keeps doing so today. Nobody wants to talk about what actually leads to crime. Poverty, lack of hope and opportunities to better oneself, a lack in stable, safe places to live, enough food and income to survive. THOSE are actually the things that lead to most crimes being committed. And by the way things are looking in this country as we face mass illness, death and poverty just knockin’ on the door, logic says we haven’t seen nothing yet. But please let’s keep doing the same shit over and over again and avoiding the cause and wonder why things never change and/or get worse.

(10) Population of 1100+ in Covelo proper. Probably similar amount in the surrounding hills. Over half of the 911 calls for service in Mendo come from Covelo. Mendocino Counties’ entire population is under 90,000.

As kids pretty certain none of these thugs n thuggettes had any normal parental guidance. Then consider they are all parents who will never be parents. Probably never have been. Have recently had a few come forward talking about how the 9, 10, 11 year old boys were raping and forcing their 5 year old COUSIN to suck their d@☆&s. CPS closed the case due to lack of evidence. Does a 5 year old make this stuff up? NO, they saw or experienced something to know. Tragic ass terrible never ending bullshit. Come on wake the hell up. It’s not ok to be so out to lunch and support this dismal destruction of your community. Then pretend nothing happens. Ugh. So… KEEP TALKING. BRING KHADIJAH HOME TOO. THE REWARD FUNDS ARE WAITING FOR YOU. The key players in that are safely tucked away in the whoscow. Now is the time to sing. Let Connie have some peace in her soul. It is time.