MIKE GENIELLA: Putting aside the apparent fact that baby face Noble [former Ukiah police chief] has a long tangled history with women (let's not forget Amanda Carley among others), what's up with months of so-called investigation into an alleged assault? Why does it take DA Dave weeks to review the Sonoma County investigation, and determine whether the woman was assaulted (a rape test reportedly was done)? Is it because the alleged victim is a pal of former Sheriff Tom Allman, and gulp, even the DA? Damn, this seems messy. To cast Noble as Mr. Innocent given his turbulent history with women, and his party-going supervision of Sgt. Murray, is perhaps bullshit.
BEYOND age ten, perhaps younger in these dissolute times, nobody's innocent, but I think these domestic dramas should be left to the participants to sort out, not the police unless a formal complaint has been made. Did Noble's girlfriend file on him? It doesn't seem so, so why was he summarily fired, and why the investigation by Sonoma County cops? He certainly isn't a Murray-quality predator. I think Noble has a wrongful termination beef here.
FORT BRAGG'S looming election is confusing, so confusing I'm simply going to list the people I'd vote for if I were a resident: Lindy Peters; Tess Albin-Smith; Scott Taubold; Mary Rose Kazorowski (Mary Rose and I were once co-defendants in a libel suit; her name appears here for nostalgic reasons). Jessica Morsell-Haye — It's a deep fly ball to centerfield! “I got it, Morsell. No, you take it, Haye.” Ms. Morsell-Haye seems like a conscientious person although, he said, suddenly swerving into total irrelevance, the Morsell half of that outfield has always annoyed me with his totally unfounded, fact-free opinions on the Bari Bombing scam. Which is no reason to oppose his better half, but I thought I'd throw it out there. I'd love to debate the guy but I'm the last person who seems to care, and Morsell's eternally promised book on the subject is on permanent hold.
CHRIS PUGH of the Fort Bragg Advocate, does a nice job with the candidates for the Fort Bragg City Council:
After a deadline extension caused by Councilmember Jessica Morsell-Haye’s announcement that she would not be seeking reelection, eleven candidates filed the necessary paperwork to fill four vacant seats on the Fort Bragg City Council this November. The candidates seeking two-year terms are Tess Albin-Smith and Alberto Aldaco. Richard Garcia, Jason Godeke, Mary Rose Kaczorowski, Richard Mohr, Blanca E. Pena, Lindy Peters, Marcia Rafanan, Michelle Roberts, and Scott Taubold seek four-year terms.
Albin-Smith is a retired forester with 32 years of service with the State of California and was elected to the City Council in 2018. She serves on the Finance and Administration Committee and the Public Works and Facilities Committee.
Aldaco owns and operates a downtown business. He is originally from Sacramento and moved to Fort Bragg in 2015. His main goal is to contribute to a better quality of life for all in the area.
Garcia is a realtor who was born and raised in Fort Bragg. He believes Fort Bragg is in a moment of change and needs leaders who will continue to prioritize those changes.
Godeke is a middle school teacher. He says he will bring imagination, creativity, and an aptitude for working effectively with others toward making Fort Bragg a resilient town with a diverse economy.
Kazorowski is a medical screener who will collaborate to promote transparency, spur housing investment, and increase city revenue by attracting innovative, diverse businesses.
Mohr is a retired contractor, and being a good listener is one of his qualities. He believes that civil duties take center stage and that compassion must be addressed.
Pena is a psychotherapist with a passion for new approaches to old problems. She represents strong neighborhood character, excellent services and programs, and fiscal responsibility.
Peters is a current City Council member who believes that experience counts now more than ever, so he’s decided to run for reelection. Peters has served two stretches on the Fort Bragg City Council. He served three terms from 1992 to 2004, took a 10-year hiatus, and was re-elected in 2014. He has served as Fort Bragg’s mayor twice, from 1996 to 1998 and 2016 to 2018.
Rafanan is a lifelong resident of Fort Bragg and registered with the Sherwood Valley Band of Pomo Indians and Rancheria. Her priorities include a strong desire to meet our community’s pressing need for quality workforce housing and continuing our commitment to public safety and mental health needs. She was elected to the City Council ins 2021 after former mayor Will Lee stepped down for a new job in another city.
Roberts is a fourth-generation Fort Bragger whose family dates back to the 1880s. She is a planning commissioner who cares deeply about our health, values, and the legacy we leave for future generations.
Taubold retired from Mendocino County Behavioral Health and Recovery Services and most recently served on the citizen’s committee regarding the name change of Fort Bragg. He will focus on the central business district, believing that government grants will not fix our problems.
Complete candidate statements can be found at: www.city.fortbragg.com/departments/city-clerk/city-election
SOME YEARS AGO, an angry resident of Fort Bragg during a tumultuous time in the town's always vivid history, forcefully suggested, “Why don't you stay in Boonville? We have enough problems without you constantly butting in.”
(NORM VROMAN, then DA, advised me, “Bruce, don't go to Fort Bragg without a gun,” startling advice coming from the County's top lawman, but to Norm, guns were an all-purpose problem solver, and in those days the Boonville weekly was indeed unpopular with the more volatile sectors of the Fort Bragg population. I took his advice, and for several months always had a gat in my car until it occurred to me that the odds of me getting plugged in broad daylight were heavily against. We've always sold a lot of papers in Fort Bragg, having become the town's in lieu of media.)
FORT BRAGG has always been my fave place in Mendocino County because it offers more unspoiled seashore beauty than any coastal town from San Diego to Astoria, and it has remained mostly untouched by the worst kinds of development. I tried to persuade my wife to move to Fort Bragg, but she successfully argued it was too far from the Bay Area where the main stem Anderson family makes its headquarters. You dodged a bullet, Fort Bragg, and I probably did, too.
UKIAH'S A MESS. Incumbent council people do not deserve re-election except for Juan Orozco, a Boonville old boy who's fallen into bad company over the hill. We think Susan Sher and Thao Phi will bring some badly needed clarity to the reeling Mendo county seat, reeling from serial police scandals, reeling from having become an open air drug market cum homeless center, reeling from basic street maintenance, reeling from the absence of not only civic leadership but reeling from an odd obliviousness to the town's deteriorated condition by the present leadership. Susan Sher and Thao Phi for Ukiah City Council.
WILLITS will continue to run serenely along with Larry Stranske and Greta Kanne on the city council, not only because of their many committed years to the Gateway to the Redwoods, but because Willits, contrasted to Ukiah, is a well-run little town except, it seems, for its police department, where a long-time officer was recently fired and a triple-dipping chief, retired out of LA, is assumed to be a large part of the officer retention problem as he was a problem with officer retention in Fort Bragg prior to his over-compensated stay in Willits.
USED TO BE that neighborhood cranks were isolated. It was a simple matter of avoiding them. But with the internet, they've massed-up and even elected their own president. Locally, and globally, the technology makes it easy for all kinds of nuts to register their unsupported, often lunatic views, but here at the AVA we try to keep a close watch on opinion's drawbridge. Whenever certain people try to weasel their way onto our comment line with straight-up lies, racist or anti-Semitic slurs, or merely egregious stupidity, we propel them back into cyber-space where their tiny wrongnesses about big subjects will whirl forever, lost in the vastness of cosmic idiocy. “But you censor me because you're afraid of the facts,” whines one screwball race man who tries to slip past us and on into comments. “The Facts.” That's a hot one, especially coming from a guy so limited he can't tell the diff between fact and opinion, but he keeps coming back with his copy of “the facts,” the one copy he alone possesses.
GOT MY BALLOT LAST WEEK. Without going into detail, or revealing my flawed reasoning, I can say I'll be voting NO on the 13 state judges clogging up the November 8th exercise in futility. It's worse than insulting that incumbent judges, all of them appointed to life jobs at pay and emoluments most Americans can only dream of, don't deign to identify themselves beyond “incumbent,” but us saps out here have no idea how these hacks and hackettes render justice which, as we know, is routinely denied citizens who can't pay to get it. In the interests of justice and democracy, Vote NO on ALL of them.
I'VE BEEN in the appellate courts a couple of times. Lost both times, although in one of them the late State Supreme Court Justice, Stanley Mosk, saw my case my way. In the other, after winning a jury trial in less than an hour in Mendo Superior Court, I got slam-dunked at the appellate level in a written rejection deficient in law, logic, and basic prose, the decision overall teetering on the border between moronic and cretinous. Cost me a lot of money I didn't have. I would have liked to have appealed the loss, but I couldn't afford to go on, and anyway I figured if the state supreme court judges might be as dumb as the decision the Frisco appellate featherbedders had rendered in my case. I got screwed.
OH YOU WERE, HUH? Yes, I'd say so, but judge for yourself, trusting my rendition of my claim which was simple enough. Ready? (Whine on, bro.) The Supervisors of the time, all “liberals” of course, had placed a legal ad in all the County papers except mine. Challenged, they lied, informing me that the ava was not on their list of approved publications. Which the ava was and had been for years.
THE LIBS — led by Shoemaker and Colfax — were using public money to retaliate against me for unkind assessments of their functioning. As mentioned, a Mendo jury saw it my way in less than an hour. It wasn't a complicated beef, and the County attorney, Frank Zotter, a wonderfully comic figure of the County Counsel's office, was so passionate in his one-word defense, repeatedly describing me and my newspaper as “scurrilous,” sputtering the descriptive so many times that a couple of the jurors were laughing. That was it. The County position. The ava was “scurrilous,” therefore, the implication went, how could the County possibly advertise in such a publication?
BUT THE COUNTY appealed, which they got to do free, courtesy of the taxpayers. I had to pay. Mightily. And I lost in a decision that wouldn't pass a freshman composition class. And I got sabbed by my lawyer. And about here I sound like one of those people who carry their cases around with them, “gunnysackers,” who, if you make the mistake of asking them how they're doing, they dump their whole big bag of grievances on you.
SO THE RECOMMENDED legal eagle who drafted my appeal, which I should have done myself or at least reviewed it before he sent it off, enclosed with my appeal a back copy of the ava which happened to feature the most inflammatory front page cartoon in the inflammatory history of the paper. By the brilliant Mary Miles of Potter Valley, now an attorney herself who has won big judgements against the City of San Francisco, the drawing, a pro-abortion argument, depicted the male, anti-abortion members (sic) of the Supreme Court as straining penises. I'm sure the judges said to themselves, “Well, golly, this here drawing of our black-robed big brothers as pricks in a newspaper is awfully insulting so bop moppa loo bop we find for the County of Mendo.” I should have known my lawyer was a lamebrain and probably hostile to me when I had to pass him questions when we were fending off Zotter the Scurrilous.
I'VE TURNED to the sage of Southern Humboldt, Eric Kirk, for a far more conscientious ballot analysis than I, an unbeliever in the two party system, can muster. I'm especially estranged from the three Democrats — Huffman, Wood and McGuire — routinely returned to office in our grotesquely gerrymandered Northcoast.
AS an embarrassed, default Democrat to the left of the party on most issues, I'm especially galled at how the party shoves Northcoast candidates down our collective throats. Who chooses these people? How did we get saddled with McGuire, Wood, Huffman? Like millions of Democrats, and probably 40 percent of Northcoast Democrats, I'm on the AOC-Bernie end of the Democratic spectrum, and like all of us I have no candidate, especially here on the “progressive” Northcoast.
STATE SENATOR McGUIRE is especially fraudulent even by prevailing political standards. His Great Redwood Trail is such an obvious scam it's downright thrilling. Simplified, all fiscal trails lead to former Congressman Doug Bosco who, with useful idiots like McGuire and the other active Democrats of the Northcoast, managed to make himself payee for the defunct railroad which used to run from Marin to Eureka pre-Bosco. In lieu of usefulness on any other issue in his jurisdiction, McGuire has made this Redwood Trail scam his main claim to fame.
HUFFMAN is an auto-vote for Pelosi-Schumer-Biden. He occasionally brings in a few porkish bucks for the Northcoast but is otherwise as invisible and irrelevant as McGuire and Wood, the latter being our alleged state assemblyman. Gawd, what a bunch of ciphers inflicted on us over the years: Wes Chesbro; Dan Hauser; Mike Thompson, Doug Bosco; Frank Riggs; Patti Berg.
HMMM. “From Sonoma County to Marin, Highway 1 resembles something of a quintessential Robert Redford film character: a stoic, formidable presence with an untamed heart.”
FROM MONICA HUETL’S recent report of the Redwood Valley Municipal Advisory Council Meeting: “Southern California Edison has upgraded 5,000 miles of power lines with steel-reinforced, triple-insulated power lines and new enhanced circuit breakers. These are much less likely to spark a fire, and the new equipment lets the utility company know exactly where the problem is so that repair crews can quickly be sent to the correct location. The reinforced, insulated power lines are still above ground. This is actually a better solution than burying the lines, as it will require fewer trees to be removed. PG&E has only installed 800 miles of the newer power lines. Seven counties and three cities have filed lawsuits against PG&E for its wasteful, ugly, and dangerous tree-trimming technique.…”
JOHN REDDING: “Life can be so bizarre when dealing with people with no sense of irony. At the hospital board meeting last night Supervisor Bow Tie Williams urged me to step down as Treasurer. Get it? He has done such a bang-up job with the County's finances he can lecture other people on the subject. Maybe when Bow Tie Ted gets around to straightening out the three sets of books he says the County has he can go on the lecture circuit. Until then his pronouncements are those of a buffoon.”
THE MENDO HEALTH DEPARTMENT used to keep clap stats, which in my memory never showed any signs of abating and, presumably, venereal disease of all kinds still rages in the county.
IT SEEMED like a good idea to post rates of infection to alert the general public — the uncontrolled lust sectors of the population anyway, not that they were likely to see the statistics or take heed if they did — that syphilis of the congenital type has increased every year in California. In 2020, 107 cases per 100,000 live births were reported, a staggering 11-fold increase from a decade prior. That rate far exceeds the California Department of Public Health’s 2020 target to keep congenital syphilis numbers below 9.6 cases per 100,000 live births — a goal it outstripped almost as soon as it was set.
I TURNED to Betsy Cawn, a one-person general information office, to see what she could find on current rates of infection:
Betsy:
Following up on your query about STDs in Mendocino county, I rang the department’s main number this afternoon (472-2600). After waiting on hold for 16+minutes the call was answered by a very nice woman who said she was the only person available to take calls and she apologized for the long wait. I said I was in search of basic public health data such as STDs, and she answered first by saying that the department used to produce an annual report but she thinks it’s all done by the state now. She also explained that her supervisor, who might know more about it, will not be back in the office for another week and some days.
I then went to the state websites.
But I couldn’t find an easy way to get the info, so I resorted to asking our Lake County Public Health Department’s Public Health Officer, who is just a whiz and very very customer oriented. In the space of a couple of hours, he replied as follows (below).
I’m curious to know, now, why you’re interested in the STD numbers. I think I relayed to you the report that was provided to the county Board of Supervisors in 2000 about the results of the county “suspending” the provision of “family planning services” for the previous 15 years and the consequent rises in all of the related health factors, including STDs. I was stunned that there was even a question of whether such services should be reconsidered, and even more shocked to hear a newly elected Supervisor vociferously oppose the re-instatement of those services (because of his family’s religious beliefs, which were supported by many of the people in the jam-packed chambers, who also “identified” themselves as vineyard/winery owners/operators and … Catholic).
That experience was one of the early ones here that spurred me to create the Essential Public Information Center, and I’ve been battling the goddamned county ever since.
So lovely to have a real PIO to get help from, eh?
YES, Betsy, although we had a PIO in Mendo not that long ago, he disappeared soon after he was hired. I can say, though, that most of Mendo's individual departments are good about providing information, although the DA has gone silent since Mike Geniella retired.
AS A KID in Marine boot camp, 1957, 15 weeks of shocks to the central nervous system apart from constant physical beatings long since prohibited, they showed us lean, mean fighting machines a short film on venereal disease that began with a couple of Marines in dress blues walking down a bar-lined street when a convertible bearing two impossibly beautiful women pulls up alongside them. “Wanna have a good time, boys?” The good time boys fairly leap into the vehicle and off they go. But the very next segment featured a National Geographic-like clip of a guy whose testicles are so swollen he's carrying them in a wheelbarrow. The message? Well, for openers women are so dangerous — the Marines were hopelessly retro on all social subjects even for 1957 — that even wholesome-looking babes in a Cadillac convertible will get you basketballs where your nuts used to be. It wasn't until I took a college biology class that I had a clear idea of what venereal disease was and how it circulated.
ACCORDING to the Press Democrat, Santa Rosa and Sonoma County, combined, have spent $44 million so far this year on a homeless population estimated at about 3,000 people. (That’s almost $15,000 per.) As with VD stats in Mendocino County, there is no estimated figure available for how much is spent on the Mendo homeless, but you can be sure it's a lot, almost all of it public money spent on a very small population of people, two of whom I spotted huffing dope at the bus stop next to the Ukiah Co-op just last week, which used to be misdemeanor crime.
ON-LINE COMMENTS OF THE WEEK
[1] In clown world we currently have sky high gas prices, supply chain issues, record inflation, rampant crime, crumbling infrastructure, 20k illegals swarming across our southern border daily, a government printing money out it’s ass & handing it out to to foreign countries and welfare leeches, career politicians who aren’t even trying to hide their corruption, violent homeless drug addicts clogging up our cities, insane levels of “gun violence”, over 100k a year dying of drug overdoses, children who don’t know their gender & parents who let them mutilate themselves for life, and a senile president (his puppet masters) itching to start a nuclear war with another nuclear super power… yet renaming a military base is what the cross dressers who run our military are concerned about.
[2] 93% of the thousands of protests involving millions of people were peaceful. And a higher percentage were peaceful until night fell. More than a few acts of vandalism and arson have been attributed to right wing provocateurs. That said, here's the roster: excitement freaks, (I know, I used to be one); anarchists, who are anti-government--they come in Left wing and Right wing flavors; looters--people who like to steal other people's stuff. There isn't a shred of evidence that BLM was "pushed" by BLM--quite the opposite, it hurt their cause. As for "antifa," to the extent that it exists, there is huge overlap with the aforementioned antigovernment anarchists.
[3] Cataract Surgery:
Yesterday morning I underwent Cataract surgery on my left eye. As often as people tell you “it’s no big deal” I defy you to contemplate for days in advance of your approaching surgery date not feeling anxious about someone cutting into your eyeball and replacing your lens. It cannot be done. You WILL be anxious.
There’s all kinds of preliminary shit that goes on before the doctor even sees you. Nurses hook you up to a monitor with wires running to either side of your chest and wires to the lower shin area of each leg. A sleeve is slid up onto a bicep much the same as a blood pressure taking device. They turn it on and it begins to inflate and squeeze… Oh Boy does it ever squeeze… and then it very slowly… tick… tick… tick… begins to deflate… Whew, thank God that’s over. But several minutes later it does it all again, all automatically. And it keeps doing this throughout the entire procedure.
And then a nurse begins trying to find a vein that will puff up enough to insert a needle which will be a port for the anesthesiologist to run some dope into you which does not put you “out” but supposedly leaves you awake but with a “don’t give a shit” attitude. You have to remain awake or your eyes would roll back in your head and they couldn’t operate on them. My needle nurse effed up and failed to make a good needle insertion so a second nurse came in and chose a different spot on my arm near where my watch band resides. This needle hurt quite a bit but at least she made a good connection.
BTW, if I never mentioned it before, in the summer of 1949 when I was 8 and a half years old I caught polio and wound up in a very specialized hospital for infectious diseases and was there for a month. Every day I was jabbed 6 times (each thigh, each buttock, each arm) so that when a nurse entered my room for the next jab I began to cry. Somehow I overcame polio (and was somewhat of a local hero in my neighborhood and school for having done so) and from then on until I went into the Air Force I was able to avoid all needles. But then I had to grow up and be a big boy. Even so, whenever I have to endure a needle I never look at the hypodermic, not even dentistry Novocaine needles and I DEFINITELY do not watch the insertion.
So anyway, where was I? During these prelims someone was forever coming to me and asking me to open my eyes wide (actually, only my left eye) for them to administer more eye drops. The drops must have been huge and they ran annoyingly down my cheek. No one bothered to dab up the excess. My ear with its hearing aid had to be covered to avoid an eyedrop/hearing aid short out.
At some point the anesthesia guy began to run in the stuff that was supposed to make me not give a shit about anything but I don’t think I ever achieved that blissful state. My bed was rolled to the surgery area and I saw none of this since I was instructed to keep my eyes gently shut.
The surgery itself took about 15 minutes during which I would occasionally realize that I was tensing my leg muscles or squeezing the bed sheets with my fingers and I’d have to remind myself to “fucking relax already”! When the top sheet was first put over me I realized it had come out of a warmer so the warm sheet felt really great.
I was raised up slowly from my horizontal reclined position, was given the bag containing my jacket, wallet, watch and all other possessions and walked out the exit door to my wife who had to wait in her car… and thence to home. Forgot to mention, I had to wear a covid mask through the entire procedure.
This morning I went back to the main office (not where the surgery was done) for a “post-op exam” by another doctor, not my actual surgeon. Various things were checked and I was declared to be perfectly normal and OK for the first day following surgery. Slight swelling and inflammation of the eyeball. All I have to do now is administer 178 more drops over the next 30 days, wear a clear plastic guard over my eye when in bed for the next week and go to another post-op visit in early Nov.
I just now raised my eyes to look at the TV and noticed a definite improvement in my left eye’s vision. The literature says it can take some days before being fully effective.
[4] Post-pandemic San Francisco is a hollowed out version of itself. I do believe SF will bounce back but what that new SF will look and feel like is hard to envision. What makes the situation so disheartening is that our city leaders show no ability to communicate a vision. What we get are whack-a-mole and one-off initiatives that create no sustainable improvement. Until we see sustained improvement people will keep leaving and tourism will continue to flounder. The city has lost most of the qualities that made it attractive and desirable. Aside from the rampant petty crime—and I can remember a time when it was very safe and even property crime was minimal for a dense city—San Francisco is now a sea of boarded up storefronts, great stores, restaurants, and night spots that used to be but are no longer. When you don’t have to live in the city—”work from home”—and there’s nothing attractive about the city lifestyle because everything attractive has closed or left, people with jobs and incomes will leave and nobody will be left but the benefit-dependent and the politicians who dole out the benefits and thereby control the recipients.
[5] I’ve worked outside for 22 years and it’s getting hotter faster and longer, I think the motoring world is completely nuts, either electric or gas …..but I never understood what people deny the weather is getting messed up. I never get sticking up for a terrible world of shitty stucco houses, shitty toyota camrys, and shitty strip malls, screw the Suburban man and his Lawn and polo shirt.
Anybody who doesn’t believe me come work on a Jobsite with me, or come to work in the woods ……
[6] TED DACE: Unfortunately we have a lot to be anxious about right now. President Biden has stated that if Putin resorts to nukes in Ukraine, the result will be Armageddon. Presumably he means that the US will counter with an equal or greater strike and that the back and forth could easily escalate into full scale nuclear war. This would of course mean the end of civilization and possibly the extinction of the human race.
If Putin does resort to a tactical nuclear strike, it will be in response to the huge amount of advanced weaponry the West is pouring into Ukraine. So the obvious resolution is to stop arming Ukraine and start talking instead. Putin has just in the last few days reiterated his desire for talks, and the Biden administration refused, perhaps thinking that a NATO-fueled Ukraine can decisively win this war. One thing we can all agree on is that Putin wants to incorporate Russian-majority areas of Ukraine into Russia. These are areas where most people speak Russian and identify as Russian and who no longer wish to be part of Ukraine. Even if it means letting the “bad guy” win, are we seriously going to risk the future of the human race over this? What about all the people around the world don’t care in the least about this conflict? Why should their lives be threatened by nuclear winter because of our obsessive need to punish the object of our hatred? And what about our own descendants? All out nuclear war kills not only the current generation but all future generations. It’s the greatest crime imaginable. For that matter, why do we even still have these horrific weapons? Not only is it imperative to negotiate an end to this crisis, but we need to get serious about destroying the nukes once and for all.
We were warned for many years by our own authorities, including renowned cold warrior George Kennan, that expanding NATO to Russia’s border with Ukraine would provoke a very nasty response from Russia. Since the 2014 coup that overturned Ukraine’s Russia-friendly government, Kiev has been not just pro-Western but contemptuous of Russian-majority regions in the east, shelling cities and killing thousands of people. According to OSCE, shelling sharply increased each day starting on February 16th, eight days before Putin invaded. Clearly this action served no purpose except to provoke Putin. Zelensky did this despite the fact that he won overwhelming support from his people by running as a peace and reconciliation candidate, promising to stop the violence in the Donbas and pledging to keep Ukraine out of NATO. Instead he betrayed his people and brought them war and death. My point is not to justify Putin’s invasion but only to make it clear that the West, which backed the 2014 coup, is complicit in this. We had a hand in creating this catastrophe, and it’s up to us to put a stop to it before it escalates to Armageddon.
Proving that we’re right and the other guy is wrong is a great way of containing and minimizing anxiety, but it’s not helping us deal constructively with the awful situation we now face.
[7] Solutions:
Clothes Dryer: put them on a line to dry instead.
Dishwasher: wash dishes by hand or use disposable.
Indoor climate control: Don’t get that Nest thermostat!
Trash/garbage disposal: Burn it in the backyard or take to a public park for dumping. (Redact all names and wear that trusty face mask when you do this.)
Kitchen gadgets: Use a manual whisk, a hand blender, etc.
Water heater: Simply do without hot water, or boil a basic over your backyard fire.
Automobiles: buy something pre-1995 with less electronics, stable a horse or mule, best yet ride a bike (manual powered, not battery).
Lawn mowers: Let it grow longer, weeds be damned, or get goats to keep it cropped; better yet get a manual push mower with the spinning blade that lops off the top, no oil or gas necessary.
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