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Off the Record (June 29, 2022)

WITH HALF the County vote tallied by the indefatigable Katrina Bartolomie and her too few worker bees, the only surprise to us at ava headquarters is the Hutchins-Glentzer race for Superintendent of Schools. We assumed it would be close, but we didn't expect Hutchins to lose, and maybe she won't, but at about the midway point in the count she's  down about 800 votes.

THE HUTCHINS-GLENTZER has been an issue-free, secret slander-soaked contest is the first time that I know of that the office has been contested. Used to be the lazee boys out at Talmage simply succeeded each other, the only glitch being an interim when one of them was packed off to the County Jail, another to the state pen, both of them beloved colleagues of Paul Tichinin, living proof of the Peter Principle, who succeeded his jailed pals as superintendent and, in retirement, has led the campaign against incumbent Superintendent Hutchins.

AS OUR READERS KNOW, last time around Tichinin and friends ran a man against Hutchins, always a loser in Mendo with its large population of women whose life experiences with men have been so unhappy they would self-immolate before they'd ever vote for one of the drooling phallocrats over a woman. So Tichinin and friends, with a big assist from Mr. Burble Gurble here in Boonville, got Glentzer, a woman, to run against Hutchins, a woman. Pretty slick, huh? Score one for the phallocracy. 

SO, WHAT'S AT STAKE? Fair distribution of edu-dollars primarily, and maybe your kid, assuming the county's lead educator can be elected on the basis of a secret slander campaign, and the people who did it are in charge of educating your heirs and assignees.

THE GOOD ELECTION NEWS for Boonville is the slam-dunk passage of Measure M, the bond approval that will raise money for badly needed repairs of our school facilities. And major credit goes to Superintendent Simson, the dynamo who drove M to victory.

SHERIFF KENDALL has handily routed his last-minute opponent, former Mendo cop Trent James. I think James, a young guy, like a lot of young, idealistic people, had his romantic expectations of adult life dashed on the rocks of reality, and hasn’t yet quite recovered.

TED WILLIAMS will go on and on and on as 5th District supervisor although his first four years in office should have gotten him fired. A laughably slavish tool of the Angelo regime, Williams, offered the choice of doing the right thing, invariably opted for wrong. Of course he wasn't alone; his four colleagues, with Haschak occasionally risking Mommy's wrath, were equivalently pathetic. I'm probably being too optimistic here, but I sense the Supervisors are acting more like the independent reps they're supposed to be now that Mommy is safely exiled to San Diego.

HASHACK predictably bashed Clay Romero, an electoral punching bag who habitually runs for Supervisor out of Willits. Romero, a Trumper, is apparently unaware that he swims in the tepid waters of Mendolib, where the libs dutifully vote for lib lab and vicey versy. No one outside the flab glab lib lab Democrat Sensory Deprivation Tank can ever be elected in Mendocino County (except for Cowboy John Pinches, a liberal on the marijuana issue). But, but, but look how incompetent the libs are! Don't matter. It's a big club and you ain't in it.

JOHANNA JENSEN:

612 county residents signed the petition in support of reasonable Short Term Rengal (STR) regulations! Unfortunately, a few realtors have written to the Board of Supervisors and Planning Commissioners in opposition of HAT’s balanced, commonsense proposal. Luckily the petition makes it clear that the views of those realtors, ones who want to protect livelihoods dependent on vacation rentals, are not shared by the vast majority of county residents.

164 people also used the petition to explain how their lives were upended when their homes were converted to short-term rentals, or to share their concerns about ways vacation rentals are hurting communities. 

HAT hopes you'll reinforce the petition by emailing bos@mendocinocounty.org and the Planning Commissioners at pbscommissions@mendocinocounty.org

Tell your story. Share your concerns, Urge them to adopt a STR ordinance before the end of the year!

FORT BRAGG POLICE OFFICER SAVES WOMAN FROM ATTEMPTED SUICIDE off Noyo Bridge

On Tuesday, June 21, 2022 at approximately 10:30am hours this morning several persons called police dispatch to report a female adult attempting to crawl over the bridge railing of the Noyo Bridge. 

Fort Bragg Officers as well as Mendocino County Sheriff’s Department personnel responded and observed an adult distressed female with one leg over the bridge railing. 

Arriving officers contacted and began communicating with the female victim. Fort Bragg Police Officer Padraic Ferris approached the female victim from behind, while she communicated with initial arriving officers. Officer Ferris was able to rush towards the female victim grab her around the waist and safely pull her away from the railing to the pedestrian walkway. 

The female victim was then transported to the Mendocino Coast Adventist Hospital for a mental health evaluation. 

This action of Officer Ferris, and all of the officers/deputies on scene, prevented the near death of this distraught female, I commend them all for their swift action! 

If you are in crisis or know of someone who might be in crisis please call the crisis line at (855) 838-0404, someone is at this number 24 hours 7 days a week, or call the Fort Bragg Police Department emergency phone at (707) 964-0200 we can provide a live person to speak to or resources. Please remember your actions effect so many other persons so at least allow us to listen to your crisis to provide a positive outcome. 

John Naulty, Fort Bragg Chief of Police June 21, 2022

JOHN SAKOWICZ WONDERS: “I don’t get it. Trent James has 4,330 Youtube subscribers, and Trent’s Youtube video about Mendo’s chomo, Bailey Comer, alone gets 16,052 views, but Trent only gets 837 votes.”

FARMER GIRL REPLIES, AND THEN SOME:

“Mr. Sackowicz, the answer to this is simple. In the US we had the circus which was considered family entertainment. However, we also had the sideshows. This was the secondary production.

Some people who went to the circus also would swing by the sideshows. Many of the sideshows were off limits to women and children. However, people still paid good money to see the bearded woman, the alligator skin boy, the monkey girl or some other anomaly.

I think people had an urge to see these things out of a morbid curiosity.

But at the end of the day it was just curiosity, not love or respect that drove this industry.

Trent James became the sideshow in our county. People liked watching the tattooed man spew whatever half cooked ideas he had. The people who were already predisposed to hate the police had a platform to stand on and say, “Look I was right all along!”

When he decided to run for office he was asking people to move from morbid curiosity into Holy Matrimony. Face it, not many sideshow performers were asked for their hand in marriage.

It was at that point people began asking him questions, real questions. They wanted to look behind the curtain. When we began looking, we suddenly saw anyone who asked him hard questions were shocked by either his total lack of ability to answer or the fact that anyone who had a different view was shouted down by he and his cronies.

Trent James was in Mendocino and was asked about the Sheriff’s Department Budget. His answer was he didn’t know anything about it and would need to get it through a public records request. At that point I simply left the meeting. I have seen the budget multiple times because it’s posted online. I quickly realized he was a sideshow act, not a real candidate.

Later, he and his friends began a smear campaign against a business who decided they didn’t want a sideshow in their building and asked he not perform there. This was their right. True to form, a Facebook post was sent out from the Trent camp asking people to boycott them. This only caused greater support for this business and less people to be impressed with the sideshow. Not to mention, he alienated everyone who supported that business the moment the Facebook boycott came out.

Anyway, the sideshows started declining in the 1930s as people began seeing them as exploitative and lacking in dignity for the performers.

Doctors also began to diagnose and treat some of the diseases that had caused the deformities. The final nail in the coffin was the rise of television, which allowed people to stay at home and watch other forms of “lowbrow” entertainment. Now we have the internet and that has degraded us even further.

Lastly, I would like to say anyone who would attach their horse to your cart is doomed from the beginning. Just saying, but I think he would have gone further without your support. Not trying to be cruel, simply calling it as I see it.”

THE HORRORS TO COME may not involve the orange monster. The rightwing Brit pundit, Piers Morgan, points out that a lot of the big fascist money — the Koch bros etc. — are shoveling mounds of cash to Florida governor, Ron DeSantis who, when you compare the two, Trump and DeSantis, DeSantis comes off as the far more plausible of the two. He’s very smart, articulate, big military vet credentials, a true son of the working-class still paying off his student loans who has not enriched himself in office — and totally wrong about everything. Or impeccably right about everything, depending on your political perspective. But if the Trumper moneybags are jumping the Trump ship for a more effective hard right candidate, Trump is probably in trouble. And so are we. A smart version of Orange Man is twice the menace.

THE DEMOCRATS? A bad joke that gets less funny by the day. Some of their out-of-it-leaders are actually talking about a second term for Biden! But who else do they have? Newsom maybe, but I can’t think of anybody else. Newsom might be able to beat Trump, which would be an interesting contest, not only because of the grotesque fact that Newsom’s ex-wife, the shrieking nutcase, Kimberly Guilfoyle, is Trump Jr’s girlfriend, but with millions of people seriously hurting from unchecked inflation, the Democrats, who won’t do what’s necessary to check it, are finished. Newsom is aware that the country is in big trouble, which puts him ahead of much of his party.

EVEN NIXON went to wage and price controls when his re-election was threatened by an inflation much milder than this one. Biden should freeze prices and slap immediate sanctions on the oil companies. But Biden’s puppeteers seem to have no idea what to do about anything, from inflation to the war in Ukraine they’re funding. 

BAD IDEA, GAV. Giving Mendocino County nearly $8 million mental health dollars is like handing one of those no limit American Express cards to a 12-year-old. At least half that money will be grabbed by Redwood Quality Management Company, aka Mr. and Mrs. Schraeder, a private business. The rest will be a kind of non-profit feeding frenzy among the multi-agency “Continuum of Care.” The county’s mentally ill, the free range street nuts who most concern the average menaced citizen are beyond help even if it’s offered.

REMEMBER MEASURE B? The untreated, “non-reimbursable” mentally ill were going to be taken off the streets and out of the bushes and rehabbed. There was even an oversight committee appointed to make sure the sales tax source of Measure B funding would be prudently spent. But the money, so far, has gone to two wildly overpriced buildings, and the walking wounded are still out there.

OF COURSE Mendocino County funds a climate change committee which, so far as I’m aware, has done nothing but gab and turn in their travel reimbursement chits. How about this? Persuade the Ukiah City Council to ban lawns, beginning with the lawn at City Hall. Convert that sucker to cactus and other low-to-no maintenance vegetation. Or, better yet, to truly lead by example, how about a vegetable garden tended by the city manager and his over-large office staff? Then, once the City of Ukiah has demonstrated that they are at least aware of climate change, lobby County officials, beginning with our lead law enforcement officer, DA Eyster, to convert his lawn to… well, desert. 

THE DA might be a hard sell. He’s a hardcore lawn guy, but otherwise seemingly rational. But if the Climate Change Committee carefully explains that we’re in crisis mode, or should be, as an influential public official the DA’s got to lead by example! A softer, more effective follow-up strategy might be something along the lines of, “Look Dave. Giving up your lawn will spare you a lot of anxiety. No more rushing to your big picture window at all hours to check the lawn for dandelions and gophers. Big cash savings on chemical outlays. Reduction in water bills” and so on. Get cracking, Climate Change Committee.

FORT BRAGG INDEPENDENCE DAY FIREWORKS: July 2, 9:30 PM. The City of Fort Bragg will put on an Independence Day fireworks display. Viewing At Todd’s Point, South Coastal Trail at Noyo Headlands ($20 parking fee; lot opens at 5pm) or Pomo Bluffs Park. 

WE KNEW IT. We knew it! After listening to all the predictable outrage about the recent expected Supreme Court abortion ruling and the Democrats failed attempt to “codify” Roe v. Wade, we were curious as to why Roe v. Wade wasn’t “codifed” sooner. 

Google/USA Today provided the answer we fully suspected: 

“Why was Roe v. Wade never codified in Congress? Democrats since Clinton “kind of dropped it.” … 

Experts say there was a sense that passing abortion rights into law wasn't necessary, and Democrats didn't have the votes - even in their own party.”

THERE YOU GO. Another bad legacy of a very bad President.

(Mark Scaramella)

MENDOCINO COUNTY consists of parallel societies, hispanic and, I guess you could say, anglo, without breaking down anglo into its many ethnicities, all of whom share English as their lingua franca. But the two are separate and unequal.

OUR COUNTRY, beyond the odd set aside of Mendo, consists of two warring sectors, right and left, although left has been successfully conflated with liberal by the rightwing and is not “left” in any historical sense of “left.” There isn't a left in America, but there is a latent democratic left represented by people like Bernie and AOC, but no left in the sense of a left hostile to capitalism, although there are millions of Americans waking up to the stark fact that the system, whatever you want to call it, is not working for them. 

THE RIGHT is pretty much illiberal on social issues, potentially left, at least on the working person level, on economic issues, but both the right and the soft left as repped by Democrats, presently accept capitalism as the immutable basis for social organization, the irony being that many more millions of people on the right are more screwed by capitalism than liberals are screwed by capitalism. Many libs are quite prosperous. cf, the Westside of Ukiah, the entire Mendocino Coast inland through Comptche, the Anderson Valley, much of Hopland, and pockets of hill muffins west to Ukiah, immigrant Mexicans excepted without whom the non-government, free enterprise sectors of Mendocino County would collapse.

WHAT are you getting at here, old timer? Our corrupted political system, staffed by corrupt persons, many of them professional officeholders with no ideas about anything beyond staying in office — cf Woods, McGuire, Huffman — is beyond reform and increasingly unable to manage the chaos it and they have created, as the capitalism that funds them begins to collapse inside the much grander global eco-collapse, not to mention war in Europe and the Horn of Africa and “food insecurity” in many parts of the world, including Mendocino County where several hundred families depend on food banks in addition to food stamps.

BUT the Warriors have had a good draft, the Giants are looking stronger than many of us expected, and the 49ers are already fascinating even before their training camp begins. Odd, isn't it, that we don't feel much alarm, much anxiety as the myriad rolling catastrophes roll on towards the apocalypse.

NOT SURPRISED that the Supreme Court has unraveled what we all assumed was settled abortion law because the rightwing has been stuffing the courts with their bots wherever they take power, as Trump did with the Supreme Court in a mere four years in office. Abortion is suddenly a state’s rights issue, guns a federal issue.

IT'S OBJECTIVELY NUTS to put more guns in circulation in a population teeming with violently deranged people, and close to nuts to rollback abortion protections that have been court-certified legal for almost sixty years.

PAUSE HERE for a clarifying on-line comment: “A series of polls by YouGov found that Americans don’t know much about abortions in general, like when abortions are typically performed (in the first six weeks), who gets them (people with kids), and how prevalent they are (42 percent of unplanned pregnancies end in abortion). The number of abortions in the US jumped 8 percent from 2017 to 2020, after decades of decline.”

I CAN SEE the issue both ways, the pro-choice way, which I agree with, and the mystic way as represented by religious people who basically argue that life being a miracle, especially in our obscure corner of the universe where we alone among life forms possess the consciousness to wonder at the staggering unlikelihood of our being, and are grateful for it, while simultaneously wanting to murder any other human-type being who disagrees with us.

DAVID EYSTER: “L and I made a quick trip out to Fort Bragg late Friday afternoon to help celebrate the latest retirement of FB Police Chief John Naulty ... Definitely one of the real good guys!”

A FRIEND sent me a best-selling book called ‘Hillbilly Elegy, A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis’ by J.D. Vance, a guy whose origins are in the white underclass, meaning a fragged working-class family characterized by instability exacerbated by drug and alcohol abuse and a child-like lack of impulse control. Vance is saved by his stable grandparents, especially his no bullshit grandmother, and four years in the Marine Corps.

A SMART, AMBITIOUS GUY, he draws all the wrong conclusions from his formative years in the underclass, becoming wealthy by lawyering for Silicon Valley tycoons and, lately, as a Trump-endorsed Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate out of his home state of Ohio. 

I SAY he draws the “wrong conclusions” because his family, like millions of poor families in this country who exist in a state of generational deprivation, would at least have a shot at stable lives if there were neo-New Deal liberal programs that made their lives easier. Vance, though, like his Republican soul bros, assumes that his people are hardwired to failure, that if he can lift himself out of poverty and despairing assumptions, they can, too.

THE BOOK accurately portrays the low life he grew up in, but the author comes off as a smarmy prig. No surprise he winds up with the fascists. His campaign for the Senate is heavy on authoritarian recommendations to take over public institutions from universities to KZYX, er, public media generally. “We should seize the institutions of the left, and turn them against the left,” he says, making the usual deliberate fascist argument conflating liberalism with “the left” as if conservative American libs are a gang of Bolsheviks. On their best, most idealistic days, Vance's “institutions of the left” are about as “left” as Nancy Pelosi and the Democratic Party.

THEY'RE HERE, the fascists, and they have a bunch of smart, able candidates and officeholders like Vance and DeSantis, both of them sons of the white working-class, while our side has… No one. (Newsom maybe.)

GREEN DAY MUSICIAN Billie Joe Armstrong proclaimed “America” and said he was “renouncing his citizenship” because of the Supreme Court's decision to overturn federal abortion protections. Armstrong, 50, said, “There's too much fucking stupid in the world,” which is hardly confined to this country and may be even more prevalent in England where Armstrong said he plans to become a resident. Armstrong's own intelligence could stand some fortifying. A passionate backer of President Joe Biden, Armstrong filed paperwork last year to run as a Republican in the 2024 presidential election.

GREEN DAY, if you came in late, was assembled deep in the Mendo outback, Spy Rock, northeast of Laytonville, by Larry Livermore, also a pioneer 'zine guy with his memorable ‘Lookout,’ also the name of Green Day's first band called the Lookouts. 

TRE COOL, Green Day's drummer, aka Frank Edwin Wright III ,”was born December 9, 1972 in Frankfurt, Germany, making him the youngest member of Green Day. He grew up in the Mendocino mountains in California with his dad and his two older siblings. His dad, a helicopter pilot in Vietnam, decided to move the family there to insulate them upon his return to the United States. Tre's closest neighbor was none other than Lookout! Records owner Lawrence Livermore, who also owned the punk band the Lookouts. At age 12, Livermore recruited Tre to join The Lookouts, and that's when Livermore gave him the name of Tre Cool (“Tre,” a common nickname for someone named with a “III” is pronounced like “tres,” the French word for “very”). After Green Day's first tour around the country (following the release of ‘39/Smooth’), John Kiffmeyer decided to leave the band. Looking no further than Gilman Street, Billie Joe and Mike recruited Tre, who was already a five-year veteran of the Gilman Street scene.” (internet sourced) 

JEFF BLANKFORT: I have been reading Pepe Escobar for some time, once wondering if he was a real person, or a computer generated figure by the right whose positions on every issue reflect an admiration for authoritarian governments as long as they are opposed to the USA and an absolute lack of concern, of empathy for people, not just the powerless, who are beaten and jailed for dissenting against those regimes, but ordinary people who get trampled on in conflicts such as are now seeing in Ukraine today. Escobar will never tell his readers that Putin has embraced and has, in turn, been embraced by every dictator on the planet, including those who are Washington's allies and that he is supported, from everything I have read, by every right-wing, every neo-fascist party in Europe as well as by that wonderful democrat in Hungary, Victor Orban. That's the company in which Escobar is clearly at home.

CAROL MATTESSICH: Fascists In Our Midst: All those tasked in our society with interpreting the world around us forgot, as philosopher Karl Popper wrote in ‘The Open Society and Its Enemies,’ that “unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.”

BILL KIMBERLIN: In the aftermath of the 1906 earthquake in San Francisco, there was a homeless problem. Somewhere around 200,000 people were on the streets with no place to live because either their housing was destroyed or condemned. However, within a few months the problem was partly solved. Golden Gate park and many other city owned lands were used to build temporary housing. Apparently, the current mayor and supervisors can't figure out the answer to current problems with the homeless. Some version of this could still be done today.

ON LINE COMMENTS OF THE WEEK

[1] Market Street in The City is decayed because the city lets it decay. There is no consistent effort to improve it: No cops walking beats and telling the inebriates they can't lie on the sidewalks, sprawl over the bus shelters, lower their pants and relieve themselves on the sidewalks. I almost never see a cop in San Francisco not either in a squad car or standing in a group in front of a coffee shop chatting with other cops appearing to be on a break. In cities where downtown policing works the cops are out walking or riding bikes around and they take action when they spot crime happening. Yes, we know the old DA wouldn't prosecute drug crimes and maybe the new one won't either but the cops can confiscate illegal substances and paraphernalia and if they did the users would move out of sight which is all we ask of them. This kind of decay means businesses and honest people just stay away. Who needs to witness the degradation? It's a vicious circle: Crime and degradation drives away people which causes business to close which means there's no reason for any honest person to go there. Clean the place up and businesses will try again and gradually the honest folks will return, especially now that there are a number of new residential buildings along mid-Market.

Market Street is decayed because the city lets it decay. There is no consistent effort to improve it: No cops walking beats and telling the inebriates they can't lie on the sidewalks, sprawl over the bus shelters, lower their pants and relieve themselves on the sidewalks. I almost never see a cop in San Francisco not either in a squad car or standing in a group in front of a coffee shop chatting with other cops appearing to be on a break. In cities where downtown policing works the cops are out walking or riding bikes around and they take action when they spot crime happening. Yes, we know the old DA wouldn't prosecute drug crimes and maybe the new one won't either but the cops can confiscate illegal substances and paraphernalia and if they did the users would move out of sight which is all we ask of them. This kind of decay means businesses and honest people just stay away. Who needs to witness the degradation? It's a vicious circle: Crime and degradation drives away people which causes business to close which means there's no reason for any honest person to go there. Clean the place up and businesses will try again and gradually the honest folks will return, especially now that there are a number of new residential buildings along mid-Market.

[2] I’m not sure what Biden was doing on a racing bike in the first place. Beach communities seem to have plenty of those quaint-looking touring bikes available, there’s even a picture of Barack Obama riding one at Martha’s Vineyard or someplace.

That’s something I’ve noticed in general, in the last few years. Adults who want to ride a bicycle just for fun and exercise have stop getting all kitted out like Lance Armstrong.

[3] I haven’t been posting a lot lately because, frankly, a lot of the comments are the same old shit. I see a lot of interpersonal sniping between posters, a lot of opinions being written under the guise of facts, and very little discussion about issues that matter.

First, no one knows what will definitely happen in the future, so how can one talk about specific events that haven‘t occurred yet as if they are facts? I have nothing against opinions, but only if they are stated as opinions, including some idea of the probability of them happening.

Do we really know if midterm elections will be canceled? Will Biden last through the rest of his term, or will he die before then? What party will control Congress? What candidates will run? What’s the probability of WW3 happening? Is the economy crashing? Will inflation get out of hand? Etc. The point is no one really knows. So why talk about this stuff until it happens. 

I’d like to read discussions about what really matters, not whether Joe Blow the poster is an idiot. Issues like what we can do about losing our supply of potable water, rising temperatures, loss of topsoil, getting people adequate nutrition, overpopulation, fouling the oceans, and similar important topics. Let’s hear all sides of an argument, so we can get an idea of what’s actually happening. Is there any cogent argument saying covid vaccines are not poison? All I read is that some person says they are, but I don’t hear about others saying they aren’t. I’m not saying what’s really happening because I’ve heard only one side. What’s wrong about hearing both sides, and deciding for one’s self?

Anyway, I, personally would like cogent, open discussions, rather than name-calling and trolling. That’s just me.

[4] Thank goodness the month if June is almost over and behind us. That will conclude yet another year of “Pride” related events and Juneteenth celebrations. What will July bring? Who knows, maybe we can actually focus on more important things facing the nation. 

Apparently July is known for Disability Pride Month and National Cleft and Craniofacial Awareness and Prevention Month. Boy, those parades should be interesting to watch!

How exactly is a Federal gas tax holiday going to help us win against inflation anyway? Based on reasonable calculations, it will probably save the average person about $10/month. As a result, there will be less funding for infrastructure, pushing up the Federal borrowing to spend on such initiatives, such as the Green New Deal and Build Back Better agendas.

[5] I am furious about how “pride” has hijacked not only another perfectly good word but also a whole month that used to be the traditional time for celebrating the conferring of degrees (high school diploma, college and graduate degrees) and for weddings.

Both events being celebrations of moving forward in life, passing a milestone, acknowledging achievements garnered and commitments made in a person’s progress from adolescence to full-fledged adulthood.

Now this stupid pride thing comes along and pushes aside those celebrations, and the ideas and visions behind them, and replaces them with a celebration of . . . what?

Endless adolescence, performance, prancing, in-your-face sexual ideologies, and outright ugliness. 

Being a pronoun is not a life’s project. 

I have become very grumpy about gay.

[6] I got a plan for when the nukes starting hitting. After the dust settles I’m going to set up a Gin Joint down on US 10, serve shots to the Zombies coming up out of NYC which is about 110 miles SW of here. At first it’ll be just a 2×10 across two saw horses with a crude sign: Midnight Rose’s Apocalyptic Tonsilloreum, Proprietor: Marlin Williams, Gin $10 per shot. After that we’ll see. I got the idea from my days wandering around the Caribbean years ago; I’d be walking thru the boondocks in the middle of nowhere and suddenly happen upon a makeshift, ramshackle little bar where I could get a shot of rum and maybe (if I was lucky) a frosty Red Stripe beer. No formalities, no liquor licenses, no health expenses, just raw capitalism and small business in its purest form. 

Like in the Ray Milland 1962 film ‘Panic in Year 0’, about nuclear war, and starting over from scratch.

[7] Something along the lines of “tough times create hard men; hard men create easy times; easy times create soft/lazy men”. We are living proof. What an incredible opportunity we had as a nation to make the world such a better place, contributing to all. Instead we are a bunch of crazy, sadistic, moronic, deviants the likes of which the world has never seen. Remember when we were proud to be Americans and we could hold our heads up high whenever we traveled to less fortunate places in the world? Not anymore. Most of the people out there absolutely hate us. We start more wars than all the other countries combined and the world (and many of us here at home) are SICK OF IT.

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