RECEIVED an excited e-mail about last week’s celestial events from the vivid Tom Cahill, formerly of Fort Bragg, presently in self-imposed exile in France. “I've been waiting for this all my life!” he said, “Jupiter and Saturn are going to be in conjunction today, the very winter solstice of 2020.” Tom's life-long yearning for this rare heavenly occurrence heralds, to the mystically inclined, great events which, I'd say, see already to be in disastrous motion given the catastrophic daily news.”
OVERHEARD IN UKIAH: Young man: “I finally had to file a sexual harassment complaint about him.”
Young woman: “Hah! Now you know how it feels.”
Young man: “Not as good as I'd hoped.”
YIKES: Preliminary math suggests that we're likely to see more than 3.2 million total deaths this year, which is a 15% jump from 2019. It would mark the largest single-year percentage death leap since 1918, when 116,516 US soldiers died in World War I and 675,000 Americans died in the Spanish Flu pandemic. Deaths rose 46 percent in 1918, compared with 1917. Mortality rates might go even higher for 2020 once all fatalities from this month are counted. COVID-19 has so far killed more than 319,000 Americans this year with many more expected over the next week as coronavirus deaths surge this month to record highs with the national seven day average now at more than 2,600 a day. December is on track to become the deadliest month of the pandemic.
ATTA BOY, DONNIE. Trump said last week that he would veto the chintzy $900 billion “relief” package passed by Congress on Monday unless checks are more than tripled from $600 to $2,000. ($5,000 would be more like real help, but…) Trump said it had “taken forever” to get the bill passed and called the terms “a disgrace,” adding Queeg-like, “Send me a suitable bill or else the next administration will have to deliver a COVID relief package and maybe that administration will be me and we will get it done.” Nancy Pelosi replied, “Let's do it!” in a tweet responding to Trump. “Republicans repeatedly refused to say what amount the President wanted for direct checks. House Democrats will pass such a measure on Christmas Eve, using a procedure called unanimous consent. The $2,000 checks will pass automatically unless a lawmaker verbally objects.” Which a bunch will, of course. But all of this was mutual woof-woofing, and Trump, after a hard day on the links, signed the bill late Sunday night with the token $600 per American.
UKIAH SHAFTS JENNY: “Any qualified individual who would like to make a difference in the community and is interested in serving for the unexpired term ending November 2022, may apply for this vacancy,” the official notice reads. “The candidate must reside within the city limits of Ukiah and be a registered voter at that address.” The salary for the position is $490 per month and $837 per month in health benefits, with an expected time commitment of 25 to 35 hours per month.
ORDINARILY when there's a vacancy on an elected body after an election, the next runner-up gets the appointment. Not in Ukiah. Ms. Kimbler came in third in a two-seat city council election, garnering more votes than incumbent pwog, Steve Scalmanini.
THEN A SEAT became vacant when Mo Mulheren was elected Supervisor, but instead of seating Ms. K an anonymous decision was made to “select” someone other than Ms. K.
WHY?
BECAUSE MS. K is a Trumper. Additionally, on her facebook page Ms. K made some “inappropriate” comments about the Breonna Taylor tragedy along the lines that in Ms. K's opinion Breonna's boyfriend is a “scumbag.”
A PERSONAL OPINION on a private social media site, plus a generally critical assessment of Ukiah's stumbling city government, sent up such a gasp of pure horror on the town's Westside it was heard in Boonville. And Ms. Kimbler was outta there!
ACCORDING to the UDJ's story on the L' Affair Kimbler by Justine Frederiksen, “Many of the letters [opposed to Kimbler] also advocated against the council appointing the candidate with the third-highest number of votes, Jenny Kimbler, describing comments she made in a since-deleted Facebook post regarding the shooting of Breonna Taylor and the protests that followed as alarming and inappropriate.
”Kimbler received 1,754 votes, 29 more than incumbent Steve Scalmanini (1,725).
"Kimbler did not immediately respond to an email requesting comment last week, but did send comments recently regarding her Facebook post and why she ran for a City Council seat.
“I would like to say thank you to all who supported me and voted for me,” Kimbler wrote. “I ran because I wanted to help Ukiah, the town I grew up in, and bring back the town I love. With that said, this election was not what I expected. I have said some things in a moment of anger, and what happened afterwards made me realize that this community is not ready to hear different opinions, and that people who have different views can be subjected to attacks, threatened and called names. I’m grateful to everyone who knew what was truly in my heart, and supported and voted for me.
“The past few months have made me realize that I do not need to be on the City Council to make a difference for my community,” Kimbler continued. “I can do all that on my own, therefore I do not plan on accepting a seat on the Ukiah City Council. I will continue supporting our community in every way I can, especially our small businesses. I plan on volunteering locally and being involved in my community now more than ever, and making sure we continue to demand accountability of our city officials. I hope this brings everyone peace and I hope you can give my family the same peace.”
INTERESTING ITEM posted recently by freshly elected supervisor, Mo Mulheren about a famous Ukiah brothel called Madge's that flourished in the county seat in the first quarter of the 20th century. Madge's business was so essential to Mendo male morale that a memorial plaque was affixed to the front of the building where it was once housed, which was a convenient one block from the County Courthouse. Madge is even commemorated in “Boontling, An American Lingo” by Charles C. Adams as two parts of boontling speech — “madge n. A prostitute,” and madge v. “madgin' to uke,” as in going over the hill to Madge's place in Ukiah.
TAKE IT AWAY, MO: "Where there’s a will there’s a way. Many people have asked me where “The ladies of the night” plaque went. It was removed. The peace pole has returned and the community now has the plaque back. I’ll be reaching out to the City Manager and the Historical Society to ask that it be placed in a public location so that change of ownership or other private property challenges don’t come up in the future. This was not related to the Streetscape project and I just want to empathize with the community that all that we have gone through this year, this was a sudden shock. I’m glad that it was retrieved and I look forward to finding a new location for it.”
SUSPICIONS CONFIRMED. A Samsung poll reveals that our attention spans have dropped from 12 seconds to eight since 2000 and our song skipping culture has emerged on streaming services like Spotify where, I guess, the new 8-second generation can flit from one "song" to the next faster than Ben Bolt can run the hundred.
ANYWAY, isn't there just one lyric these days? A million variations on “Oh baby.”
AS A PERSON shuffling as fast as he can to stay a step ahead of the Reaper, I'm not particularly eager to get a covid shot, I mean I'm not so eager as to wonder when it will reach Boonville, although when it does I'll get jabbed if for no other reason than to protect my family and my fellow Americans, even Trump voters who, like dogs, have to be vaccinated for their own protection. But I still hope the one-shot vaccination by Johnson & Johnson reaches the outback before the others, which are two-shots, the first shot and then the necessary booster. With the anti-vaxxers busily circulating so much misinformation against covid-prevention, and having effectively persuaded so many of US to return to medieval voodoo, I wonder if enough of US will get covid-proofed to protect the whole herd of US.
A BRIT'S reaction to covid travel and freshly imposed trade restrictions: “We have never been anywhere in the world where we haven't been asked to leave.”
INTERESTING LOOK BACK at the Dope Wars of the early '80s by Matt LaFever writing for HumCo’s crucial on-line newspaper, Redheaded Blackbelt, produced daily by the indomitable Kym Kemp. The Sheriff at the time, Tom Jondahl, probably reflected majority popular opinion in his hostility to marijuana, declaring it was so dangerous to the young that eradicating it amounted to “saving” them.
THE SHERIFF had a point. What parent in his or her right mind wants their kid to light up regularly before his brain is fully formed? Look around. Thanatoids coming in the windows, and millions of the young get into dope too young.
IF JONDAHL were still with us, I'm sure he’d be duly horrified that drugs of all kinds are now simply a matter of choice, so readily available that a young person either decides to do it or not do it, and most parents hope their heirs and assignees won't do it, but choice is what it's come to.
FEVE'S story carried me back along Memory Lane when mom and pop growers lived in dread of two cops, Bill Stewart and Doug Silva, who descended on hippie growers to not only arrest them but to also to tear up their humble habitations and water lines. (That was the constant charge from the raidees anyway.) These two preceded the annual CAMP (Campaign Against Marijuana Production) and, in Southern Humboldt, a full-on military invasion of pot gardens before the authorities finally grasped the obvious — thousands of Northcoast people were growing the love drug and millions were smoking it, including most lawyers when they weren't snorting cocaine. Fast forward to 2020 and right here in Boonville, overlooking the junction of 128 and 253, an industrial grow sits in plain view, electronic gate and all. But for years prior to partial legalization, the annual eradication effort accomplished nothing more than keeping prices attractively high, the cops functioning as a kind of price stabilization unit.
THE DREAD STEWART was subsequently murdered by dopers in Oklahoma at the age of 42. The Sooner state’s outlaws are apparently much more ruthless than Mendo's hill muffins. Some of the local muffs talked tough about Stewart and Silva but I'd be surprised if the two cops were ever in the kind of danger that's out there in the hills these days.
TO THE DAILY DELUGE of annoying terms, I'll add “history buff.” It's too dismissive, as if a non-academic person interested in history is unserious about what happened before he occurred. There are lots of us “history buffs” with a special interest in Mendo history, and there are plenty of local historians — Ernie Branscomb and David Heller, to name two whose work I see posted here and there, and several on-line that are fascinating such as Kate Mayo's “Shadow of the Cahto.” Like them, and like many Mendo people, I read whatever I can find about local history, and I'm here today to recommend a monograph called, “Ranching Near Laytonville, 1902-1907 — The Beal Family in Mendocino County, California” by Blanche Beal Lowe (Excerpt below). From her memoir, Mrs. Lowe gives us the best account I've seen of a young family carving out a self-sustaining living from a few hundred acres of unpromising land just south of today's Laytonville. These people, right down to their youngest children, worked, mom hardest of all, and the work they did is described in such detail it can often serve as a how-to manual. The Beals worked up enough capital to move to Palo Alto where two of the children attended Stanford, then a free university, having been thoroughly prepared for higher study at Ukiah High School, and all of them, became well known in various professions.
CASPAR MURDER ALLEGED. The Sheriff’s presser in reduced form: “On Thursday, December 24, shortly after 5:40 AM, officers with the California Highway Patrol were dispatched to a reported traffic collision causing injury in the 15000 block of Caspar Road near the Pacifica Drive intersection in Caspar.
Upon arrival the initial CHP officer discovered the traffic collision involved a 2003 Chevrolet pick-up truck driven by Shayne Wrede, 35, of Fort Bragg.
Additionally, a 1994 Honda 650 motorcycle was present in the roadway. It was determined the motorcycle had been operated by Mark Hutchinson of Willits who was dead at the scene
Mendocino County Sheriff's Deputies were dispatched to the reported coroner's case. It was learned that Wrede (who was identified as also being on County Parole. Wrede reported being the victim of a shooting earlier that morning in Fort Bragg prior to the traffic collision.
FORT BRAGG POLICE had been dispatched to an apartment complex on South Street, Fort Bragg, where evidence was located that was consistent with a shooting.
FOLLOWING the shooting, Wrede pursued Hutchinson over a 4.5-mile southbound vehicle chase, their vehicles reaching speeds of at least 90 MPH through the city of Fort Bragg and the unincorporated southern portion of Fort Bragg before continuing south onto Caspar Road where the subsequent traffic collision occurred resulting in Hutchinson's death.
Following their scene investigation, speaking with eyewitnesses and reviewing surveillance video associated with the shooting and vehicle chase, Sheriff's Detectives developed probable cause to believe Wrede intentionally struck Hutchinson's motorcycle with his 2003 Chevrolet pick-up truck at a high rate of speed while on Caspar Road.
WREDE was arrested for Murder and Violation of Post Release Community Supervision and booked into the Mendocino County Jail where he was to be held in lieu of $500,000 bail.
ANY residences or businesses with surveillance video facing US Highway One between Walnut Street (near Safeway) continuing south to Caspar Road are asked to contact the Sheriff's Office.
The time frame requested is from 5:00 AM to 6:00 AM on December 24th."
RECOMMENDING histories in a country of amnesiacs is probably a waste of time, but if you've never at least dipped into “The History of the Great American Fortunes” by Gustavus Myers, reprinted many times since its inaugural publication in 1907, and still available in paperback, well, hell, you don't know the half of capitalism's noble beginnings. Gus himself was born into poverty and had to survive in the jungles of free enterprise from an early age, which got him to thinking about the Big Picture, hence his marvelous book on a theme summarized by Balzac as “Behind every fortune lies a great crime.”
TAKE IT AWAY, GUS: "Living in a more advanced time, in an environment adjusted to bring out the best instead of the worst, Astor [John Jacob] and his henchmen might have been men of supreme goodness and gentleness. As it was, they lived at a period when it was considered the highest, most astute and successful form of trade to resort to any means, however base, to secure profits… Like all other propertied interests, Astor's company regarded the law as a thing to be rigorously invoked against the poor, the helpless and defenseless, but as not to be considered when it stood in the way of the claims, designs and pretensions of property.”
ASTOR made his first pile swindling Indians out of animal hides by trading them whiskey for pelts, The net effect of the fur trade was to destroy both Indians and whole species of natural life, but Astor is commemorated in Astoria, Oregon by a great tower with no mention, of course, how he made his fortune.
(ASTORIA also had a direct impact on Fort Bragg and other Northcoast seaports where immigrant Finns settled. Astoria was where both red Finns and white Finns published competing newspapers, importing their editors from the old country. These rival newspapers were distributed up and down the coast from Astoria to San Francisco. The red Finns, I believe, built Eagle's Hall in FB, and please correct me if I've got my building pedigrees wrong here.)
FAST FORWARD to imploding 2020 America where a recent Rasmussen poll reveals that nearly 60 percent of US don't like Ocasio-Cortez, that a majority of US prefer a free-market economic system over a socialist economic system, although it's a rare American who knows socialism from Swahili. Ocasio-Cortez, a democratic socialist, was seen as “very unfavorable” by 38 percent of the 1000 respondents, none of them presumably interviewed in a food bank line. Another 20 per cent said they have a “somewhat unfavorable” impression of the Democrat. Only 18 percent said they have a “very favorable” view of AOC, while 19 per cent said she is “somewhat favorable.” About 15% (the honest responders) said they are not sure, meaning they were honest enough to admit they hadn't thought about the kid one way or another. (Stupid men are especially terrified by smart women.)
MYSELF, rigged polls to the contrary, I think AOC is absolutely boffo, mondo boffo in fact, whose modest suggestions for basic social guarantees would make America a much happier, much less violent country (Between us Mendos, I'll say I think Ilhan Omar of the so-called left congressional squad, is a bit of a nut, but as Orwell (a socialist) pointed out, the mere mention of socialism and the outpatients come running.)
TO BE HOSTILE to Ocasio-Cortez means you think single-payer Medicare for All, tuition-free public college and trade school, a federal job guarantee, the cancellation of all $1.6 trillion of outstanding student debt, guaranteed family leave, ending the privatization of prisons, enacting gun-control policies, and an energy policy relying on 100% renewables are all bad ideas. If you're the average person it also means you're against yourself, and probably against the only kind of social welfare programs that will save this sucker from sinking beyond all possibility of salvage.
DELAY of the meager stimulus bill is the usual demonstration by secure elected people to haggle over meager help for the insecure. The party of the people, the Democrats, har de har, were/are ready to approve it with 600 bucks for the insecure while even Trump held out for two thousand each to the millions of desperate, the whole pathetic show a perfect example of bipartisan Let Them Eat Cake.
RECOMMENDED READING: “W.C. FIELDS by Himself,” the biography, gets off to a funny start with his famous remark, “My family was poor but dishonest,” and goes on in interesting detail for four hundred pages. He's the only comedian of the old Chaplin-Keaton times who always makes me laugh. The book is more assembled than written by the great man's grandson, but grandson says he's faithful to the material left to the family by Fields.
"BE WELL AND STAY SAFE." Am I the only person kinda like irritated by this now-common valediction? Looking at the sentiment objectively it seems based on a naive assumption that wellness and safety are choices, which they are but only up to a point, but wellness and safety are, at bottom, pure luck. I mean you can exercise, eat right, give and receive nothing but good vibes, and still be standing in line at the Safeway checkout counter when you get a stray bullet between the eyes from a gun battle out in the parking lot.
GESTALT n. Something such as a structure or experience that, when considered as a whole, has qualities that are more than the total of all its parts. Boiled down, gestalt is a handy term for “everything else.” My flash of insight this week is that most Trumpers aren't so much in thrall to the orange blimp as they are opposed to everything else that they see as having gone terribly wrong in this country, and believe that Trump shares this feeling and represents them, the deplorables. As a lib lab myself, every time I see Newsom or Pelosi or the three Demo amigos who allegedly represent the Northcoast at the higher levels of government, I'm as repulsed and as despairing as any deplorable, the diff being that I think the only practical hope we have for a more or less United States is via socialist programs of the type enacted by Roosevelt the last time the country was in a jam. It's a much larger jam this time with no Roosevelt in sight, but AOC is correct about what's needed. If Trump had the ability of his soul bro, Herr Schickelgruber, and waddled out with AOC's program, he'd be a much more of a menace than he is.
IT COULD HAPPEN HERE! (Mendo, I mean, rural home of at least a thousand anti-vaxxers and who knows how many varieties of Tinfoil hat-ism.) The man believed to be responsible for a downtown bombing in Nashville died in the explosion, police said Sunday. Anthony Warner, 63, acted alone in carrying out the bombing, which injured three people and damaged dozens of buildings. According to the Tennessean, the RV played the song “Downtown” by Petula Clark before detonating outside an AT&T station, causing service outages throughout the area. Warner apparently thought that G-5 technology was such an extreme menace to life as we know it, he martyred himself in a vain attempt to thwart it. Oddest of all was his sense of humor as expressed in his final song selection. Your run-of-the-mill tinfoil hatter typically lacks irony.
QUESTION: What do anti-vaxxers and G-5ers have in common? Answer: They flunked all their high school science classes.
THE MODERN HISTORY of the British Royal Family, as fictionalized in the wonderful Netflix series “The Crown,” engrossed my feeble attentions over the holiday weekend. It seems to stay pretty close to historical fact, but one fact surprised me because I'd never heard it before, and that was the toff's first steps towards a coup against Wilson's labor government with Lord Mountbatten as their head of a national emergency government. Queen Elizabeth, at least in this telling, told Mountbatten she wouldn't support it, and that was it for Brit fascism. (For now.) Britain's major bankers were the driving coup force along with key elements of the Brit aristocracy, a group George Orwell said was mostly pro-Nazi during the war and fascist-minded after. It's all wonderfully acted as only the English seem able to do and often very funny. The Queen comes off as an absolute rock of stability throughout the drama and, as we know, is still going strong all these years after her first prime minister, Winston Churchill. Caveat: I think the drama is far too kind to Edward VIII, a friend of Hitler who advised Hitler that the Brits were about to give up during the blitz. Natch, he was lionized by wealthy Americans when he was kicked out of England.
BLAH BLAH OVERLOAD: We made the mistake of trying to watch the latest Newsom-Ghali “press conference” Monday afternoon. The Governor and his Doctor took every opportunity no matter how small to drone on at excruciating and repetitive length on practically every subject raised. It was painful and insulting. Who do they think they’re talking to, moronic shut-ins with nothing better to do? Why do these people think they have to covidsplain a simple yes-no answer multiple times? Or go on for several minutes when the answer is a single sentence? And they complain that nobody’s heeding their tiresome advice? It doesn’t help that Dr. Ghali comes across as a male valley girl complete with the up-talk.
MENDO’S Health Officer, Dr. Andrew Coren, does the same thing, sans up-talk fortunately — on and on and on wasting everyone’s time when his audience, in the case of the Supes in particular, have better things to do — or at least should. We don’t need to hear Dr. Coren tell the Supes or the public yet again that gosh, these are all state rules and they must be followed even when they make no sense and covid is bad and these are tough steps that have to be taken and we all hope things get better soon, but yes it’s bad now and everybody has to hunker down and… OK! OK! Stop! Enough already!
REMEMBER last summer when that other medical chronophage, Health Officer Noemi Doohan, issued 16 single spaced typed pages of health order minutiae, almost all of which were copied and pasted from the overbroad state rules? Most doctors are famous for being abrupt to the point of rudeness when talking to their patients individually; why can’t they take that same attitude in their public statements? We need blunt, direct, no nonsense statements from our public officials these days, not endless MEGO/TMI/TLDR style speeches that seem to never end. (MEGO/TMI/TLDR: My Eyes Glazed Over, Too Much Information, Too Long, Didn’t Read).
(Mark Scaramella)
ON LINE COMMENTS OF THE WEEK
[1] This year — maybe more so than any other — we all need to have a great holiday season. Not just for the usual warm-hearted corny reasons, but as an act of defiance. Defiance against what? Defiance against the attacks that have been waged on us all year by a virus but even more so by all the many little dictators around America who think it’s their job to micro manage our lives down to the smallest detail. They tell us to sit home, not see our loved ones, and be miserable. How nice of them. We’ll do that just as soon as we see THEM sitting at home, not seeing their loved ones (and side interests), and sitting at home miserable. And that will be never. So, maybe you’re not all that into the holidays this year or in general. Well, make a big change this year. Celebrate the living hell out of them. Send a big message that we’ve had enough of being bullied, dominated, abused, belittled, talked down to, and told who the damn “experts” are that we are supposed to bow down to and wash their feet and turn our lives over to. Special holiday greetings back to our blog host [Kunstler] who is one who still values his audience, still seeks truth, still allows honest feedback, still knows how to put “the words” together, and still (as I) seeks a true and modern passenger rail system for America. If they can conjure trillions upon trillions to bail out the Wall Street Bastards, they can do the same to finance and build a good rail system to compensate us for putting us all through a Year from Hell. Get to it, “Public Servants”.
[2] The Covid keeps inching closer to our family’s life:
My wife’s Uncle Ted, soon to be 87 y/o, has had one foot on a banana peel for a year or two. Respiratory issues. Twice in recent months he got out of bed in the middle of the night to take a leak and toppled over and cracked his head. Major head injury, many stitches. He recovered from the first episode then did it again. Oh yeah, and his wife, (my wife’s Aunt Elaine), died shortly before Uncle Ted’s first fall. We attended her funeral Mass. She was R.C. Catholic but only in a perfunctory sort of way. Ted is Greek Orthodox and has actually become more religious with growing age. We arrived late and so as not to be disruptive entered the church and slid into the very last pew at the back. At one point I noticed my wife looking downward and to her left. She was reading text messages on her phone. I gave her hell later… said “it’s one thing to be a non-believer but another to be THIS rude.” We were in the cortege following the casket to the graveyard. We stood right behind Uncle Ted as a Greek Orthodox priest said prayers and the box was lowered.
Ted was a mess, flyaway white hair that hadn’t been cut for months, massive ear and nostril hair sprouting out and Ted barely able to keep himself erect with a cane and a daughter-in-law holding him up. Recently Ted took his second fall and wound up in the hospital. Later transferred to a rehab facility. Then we got word Ted tested positive for Covid but has no symptoms. False positive? Who knows? My wife has been calling frantically all day today but no answer. Dead or alive? Who knows? In the meantime my daughter-in-law (and PTA President) down in Maryland calls and says her PTA Treasurer has come down with Covid and gave it to her husband and 8 year old boy. A couple three months ago I stated here that my b-i-l Peter would be lucky if he is still above ground as of Dec 31st. He is 74, lives in Estero, FL, and has really severe heart disease. One day around Thanksgiving he calls and tells my wife (his sister) his legs are so swollen with edema he can’t even walk and says “I can’t take care of himself”. My wife arranges for an ambulance to take him to a hospital. They do. Peter is carted away with nothing but the clothes on his back, his apartment keys, and his wallet. Not even his cell phone. His pet cat is left behind in an apartment that we learn later is in a state of squalor. Days later Peter calls a woman friend on the East coast of FL, 125 miles away. (He is on the West coast.) She drives across FL, gets his keys and retrieves the cat and takes it to a place to be boarded. She returns the keys to Peter and drives 125 miles back home. All this in a day. While in ‘the’ hospital (or as Brits would say, “while in hospital”) water is leaking directly out of Peter’s feet and slowly but surely the leg swelling is decreasing. A week or two goes by and he is transferred to a “skilled nursing” facility for rehab. That’s where he is as we speak but he still can’t walk. As all this is happening we here in NJ are trying to come up with a plan to bring Peter and his ‘beater’ car back to my house and close down his life in FL. Keep in mind, Peter basically moved to FL to escape creditors so everything is arranged in some half-assed scheming way involving bank accounts, mailing addresses, etc. He has various possessions in rented storage facilities here in NJ including a partially restored 1941 Trike motorcycle which supposedly is worth some significant money. Yesterday Peter received a Covid vaccine shot and… so far so good. I will spare you the details of our plan for retrieving Peter since those plans change daily. Only 1 day till Dec 31.
Why, you may wonder, am I telling you all this? I need to get it off my chest!
[3] While Ca. rural counties go begging for money for mental health facilities, pay for fire fighters, better roads, and good foster homes, ICU beds, Doctors and Nurses, this is where Nancy Pelosi chooses to spend our money….Some of the items included in the bill, which is meant to fund our federal government for the next fiscal year:
$169,739,000 to Vietnam, including $19 million to remediate dioxins (page 1476)
“Unspecified funds” for not-for-profit gender-accessible education institutions in Kabul, Afghanistan (page 1477)
$198,323,000 to Bangladesh, including $23.5 million to support Burmese refugees and an additional $23.3 million for democracy programs (page 1485)
$130,265,000 to Nepal for development and democracy programs (page 1485)
$15 million for Pakistani democracy programs and an additional $10 million for “gender programs” (page 1486)
$15 million for Sri Lanka so they can refurbish a high endurance cutter patrol boat (page 1489)
$505,925,000 to Belize, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Panama to address the migration of unaccompanied, undocumented minors to the United States” (pages 1490-1491)
$461,375,000 to Colombia for programs related to counter-narcotics and human rights (pages 1494-1496)
$74.8 million to the Caribbean Basin Security Initiative (page 1498)
$33 million for democracy programs for Venezuela (page 1498)
“Unspecified funds” to Colombia, Peru, Ecuador, Curacao, and Trinidad and Tobago to mitigate the impacted of refugees from Venezuela (page 1499)
$132,025,000 for “assistance” for Georgia (page 1499)
$453 million for assistance for Ukraine (page 1500)
$500 million to Israel for “Israeli Cooperative Programs” (page 341)
In just what is listed here – and there is more in the legislation, the American taxpayers are on the hook for over $2.189 trillion! Read the report here.
US Rep. Andy Biggs (R-AZ), blasted the bill before the details even emerged saying, “Just another bill we have to pass before the American people discover all the goodies that special interests jammed into it over the past week.”
This is all money we are borrowing to spend.
[4] “The former so-called Yang-kees had squandered all their laid-up treasure turning their continent into a demolition derby — six-laners lined by muffler shops, chain stores, and fried food shacks… the self-demolition of America was fait accompli.”
The record of history — if there is such a thing in the future — will record that the high point of the American Experiment was the decade of the 1950s. Sure, there was the ugliness of racial injustice and bland conformity. But it also was the decade of the peak of middle-class American prosperity and national civility. And there was something else, too. A sense of HOPE reigned supreme. Hope that you and your kids could succeed. Hope that Tomorrow will be better than today. The hope born of a belief that as a Nation we stood for something special and we were on the right track. Little did we know that the Dark State (which had already long existed) had well-planned the demolition of the USA beginning with deindustrialization and propaganda programs for our youth and other hidden attacks on Americans and then coming soon… the murder of an American president.
The removal of JFK was the undeniable turning point for the Nation and for the loss of the sense of HOPE when the Nation fully went off the disappearing rails and began a long slow-running derailment and wreckage (just as the real American railroads were being erased and consolidated into nothingness). From that moment forward, the demolition project was on in full effect. These days, we are simply getting to the End Game of this long project of self-destruction and loss and erasure of National spirit.
“This was a hard enough year, of course, without completely demolishing what little remained of America’s battered Christmas spirit.”
The complete demolition of the Christmas spirit… of OUR spirit — and the theological and spiritual underpinnings of the Christmas season, is the climax-shot of all this foreplay if you know what I mean. That’s when the very last of the air is let out of the American psyche balloon and myth of Exceptionalism and then fear and confusion and rootlessness emerges in the aftermath to soon consume the Nation completely thus finishing the Grand American Demolition Project.
Ralph Kramden on The Honeymooners once said, “Be kind to the people on the way UP, because you’re going to meet the same people… on the way DOWN.” To which his pal Norton replied, “How true! Happens to me every day in the Sewer”. To that, we could all say, happens to us every day living in The Great American Swamp. So the lesson for 2021? Be kind.
[5] Americans will not get 2000 bucks. We will get the pathetic 600 that no one actually wants to take, but we will. And that will be that until probably next summer, when they decide it’s time to keep people “happy” again. Governors will keep any business that supports the middle class shut down for another 3-4 months minimum, knocking another 30-40% of them under for good. This is just ridiculous. Even more ridiculous is how predictable it is. How long before Congress just starts handing out Amazon gift cards?
Be First to Comment