THE ETERNAL matter of the The People vs. Douglas Stone, aka the Burglar of Black Bart Road, or Exhibit A of How the Mendocino County Superior Court allows defendants of means to delay their reckonings until they and those reckonings simply disappear. There’s no way these farcical (and cynical) delays should be allowed.
THE DATE for the jury trial of Doug Stone was to be set on 11/15/2022. Both Defendant and his Attorney were to be present. Instead, Mr. Clough, Attorney for the Defense, called in from Washington, DC, claiming a family emergency. A motion was made to combine the two cases (with their 25 charges) into one. Mr. Clough announced that he had not received the requisite papers — they had gone, in error, to the previous attorney — but Mr. Clough had no objections to the consolidation. Deputy DA Ms. Larsen replied that the papers for the request to combine would be sent to Mr. Clough.
ON 11/21/2022, Mr. Clough appeared by Zoom in Courtroom A and repeated that he had not received the documents for the motion to consolidate. After some discussion in the court as to whether the motion had been made/granted or not on 11/15, it was determined that it had been made and granted. Deputy District Attorney Heidi Larsen declared that the jury trial would take three weeks. Mr. Clough asserted that he was a “death penalty attorney” and was busy until 5/1/2022. A pre-trial settlement date of April 12, 2022 was set.
Previously: https://theava.com/archives/125212
ORWELL described international sport competitions as “war without the shooting,” as we note the nationalistic frenzies set off by the World Cup, one of which ignited in Brussels where dozens of Moroccan rioters set fires and pelted cars with bricks in celebration of Morocco’s victory over Belgium. It was a major upset at the World Cup and was enthusiastically celebrated by fans with Moroccan immigrant roots in many Belgian cities.
MORE BERSERK NATIONALISM inspired by the World Cup occurred last week when Iranian journalists descended on the pre-match press conference to fire a series of politically loaded questions at U.S. coach Gregg Berhalter and his player Tyler Adams, none of which concerned soccer and/or the World Cup. Berhalter and Adams were intensely quizzed on systemic racism in America, strict U.S. visa rules in place against Iranian citizens and Uncle Sam’s naval presence fleet in the Persian Gulf, among other soccer-irrelevant questions. Adams even faced flak from one journalist for his American pronunciation of ‘aye-ran’ during the half-hour press conference, during which the two Americanos deftly fended off the propagandists for Aye Ran posing as journalists.
SIGNS OF THE APOCALYPSE: The Department of Energy’s recently appointed head of Spent Nuclear Fuel Management has been charged with felony theft after allegedly taking someone else’s bag from Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport.
Sam Brinton, 35, who started working in June as the deputy assistant secretary of spent nukes, was seen on Sept. 16 on surveillance footage taking a bag from a baggage carousel that appeared similar to one which had been reported missing.
Brinton, who applies the pronoun plurals they/them to himself, then appeared to remove the “bag’s tag and put the bag tag in the handbag ‘they’ were carrying,” and “left the area at a quick pace,” the court filing continues. The complaint says Brinton initially told law enforcement: “If I had taken the wrong bag, I am happy to return it, but I don’t have clothes for another individual,” adding, “That was my clothes when I opened the bag.” Brinton allegedly contacted authorities at the airport later to say ‘they’ hadn’t been “completely honest” and “admitted to taking the blue bag,” explaining that they were “tired and took the suitcase thinking it was theirs.” Brinton has been on leave from the DOE for at least a month, according to reports. A hearing is scheduled in the case for Dec. 19. If convicted, Brinton faces up to five years in prison and a fine of up to $10,000.
FRISCO has a new model public toilet, most of the previous models setting new records for being out of service. When I used to spend whole days wandering around the city on Muni or on foot, I was dependent on the old pissoirs, when I could find one that wasn’t occupied by junkies or the unique lurks that make SF their home. One night, walking to the foot of California Street from the ballpark, my bladder so near to bursting I was close to audible whimpers, I lurched into the public kiosk in that little Embarcadero park across from the bus stop only to step into about six inches of fetid water and two oblivious drug sports shooting dope into their forearms. I relieved myself behind the bathroom.
AS SOCIETY IMPLODES, taking civic responsibility with it, the only way public bathrooms can be made to work properly, meaning safely and cleanly, is by assigning on-site attendants to each one, preferably unarmed attendants but leaving the choice to the attendants.
OUR SUPERVISORS natter endlessly on about low cost housing while Fort Bragg actually gets it built, the town’s can-do mayor, Bernie Norvell, pushing to get it done. Even Ukiah has managed to get some low income housing built, while exactly zero reasonably priced shelter gets erected in the unincorporated vastness of the county over which the supervisors allegedly preside.
RECOMMENDED READING: Paul Auster’s “Burning Boy: The Life and Work of Stephen Crane,” which is a reverent biography of a great writer by a very good writer. The friend who alerted me to it warned, “It’s real long but worth it.” It was. Crane used to be required reading in high schools back in the days before the didacts and moralists took over the classrooms. But he’s the ground floor guy for fiction in English, the break-through writer who set the standard for all the great fiction to come, and did it before he was thirty and dead. Auster’s bio includes a lot of writing Crane did as a war correspondent in Cuba and Greece, and a lot of journalism and uncollected short fiction I’d never read. Among his many triumphs besides the masterly Red Badge of Courage and the Blue Hotel, my faves and everyone else’s too, he managed to get himself prosecuted by New York’s blue noses (when Teddy Roosevelt was the city’s police commissioner) because he’d testified for a wrongly accused prostitute, an unheard of act at the time by a well-known person.
ALINE KOMINSKI-CRUMB
We’re very saddened that Aline Kominski-Crumb, cartoonist, mother and Robert’s wife for almost 50 years, has passed away at 74 years old. Aline previously beat her bout with colon cancer — changed her diet, stopped drinking and transformed her body with her intense yoga workouts — but quickly succumbed to pancreatic cancer in the last several months of this year. Because her father died from pancreatic cancer at an early age, Aline always feared it would claim her too, and her fears were ultimately justified.
She was the hub of the wheel within her family and community. She had huge amounts of energy which she poured into her artwork, her daughter, her grandchildren and the meals which brought everyone together. It was her energy that transformed the American Crumb family into a Southern French one, with her daughter Sophie living, marrying and having three French children there. Aline will be dearly missed within that family, and from the international cartooning community, but, especially by Robert, who shared almost the last 50 years of his life with her.
STEPHEN ‘STEVE’ SCHWARTZ. I knew him as Steve Schwartz long before he became Lulu LaFlamme. My first awareness of him came one night at a packed event on upper Market Street featuring Bertrand Russell’s secretary, Ralph Schoenman, soon fired by Russell who assessed him this way:
“I found him not only impetuous but aggressive and entirely undisciplined and I realized that these characteristics might well make him seem a ‘dangerous young man,’ as I had been warned that he was, to anyone of whom he did not approve. I early recognized his lively instinct for self-dramatization, his swash-buckling assumption of the importance of his own role in the center of the stage. His conviction of his unshakable belief in the penetration and breadth of his understanding were obvious…” But he could talk and he was interesting. Schwartz was yelling that he was some kind of traitorous Trotskyist.
MY BROTHER and I had become foot soldiers with Bay Area CORE, which involved communists from the old CPUSA, a fact known to us because we also knew the young Terrance Hallinan, later San Francisco’s DA, a guy who derived from the old CP, not that we cared, but a couple of years later I was held up in Peace Corps training while that bureaucracy and the FBI checked my democratic bona fides. Via a FOIA request years later I got the results of the FBI’s Anderson research which placed me at the famous ‘65 demo in Alabama where Bull Connor turned the dogs loose on civil rights demonstrators. I was in fact in the middle of Borneo at the time, and so much for the FBI’s sleuthing then and now. (See the AVA archive on the bombing of Judi Bari, a spectacular episode that also baffled the feds. Or did it? It’s more likely the perp was one of their own who got a free pass to murder his ex to spare the feds the embarrassment of his affiliation with the Hoovers.)
SO WE’RE listening to Schoenman when suddenly, from the back of the room this little fat guy with a penetrating buzz saw voice starts yelling at Schoenman for his perceived political sins. “Who’s that guy?” The reply was, “Oh that’s Steve Schwartz,” no further explanation necessary. The various Marxist sects spent more time and energy denouncing each other than they did undermining capitalism.
THIRTY YEARS LATER, I was invited to a television show hosted by a couple of bewildered haircuts called Ross and Anne, one of my weirder media experiences. I thought I was going to talk about Redwood Summer, but no sooner had I begun my spiel, that buzzsaw voice from three decades earlier rang out, “Mendocino County seems to have released Mr. Anderson from jail so he could be here today.” It was Schwartz. Also on that panel, which had to have been the oddest in local media history, were a soon-to-be disgraced talk show guy, Bernie Ward, later convicted for possessing child pornography; a gay priest called Miles Riley; a voluptuous woman dressed in a mini-skirt and halter top who said she made pornography for women and, as I dimly recall, a mystified liberal who, like me, was disoriented by both Schwartz and his fellow panelists. I barked back at Schwartz and both our mikes were immediately unhooked as the live audience commenced slobbering over the lady pornographer. Redwood Summer was no match for that babe!
SOMETIME later, I was walking through North Beach when I saw a red-stenciled bit of street art proclaiming something like, “Steve Schwartz is a bourgeois prick.” Similar public denunciations of Schwartz, by then a Chron reporter specializing in libeling dead communists, popped up all over North Beach. I thought it was all very funny, but I knew lots of people who had serious intellectual beefs with the guy and were much less amused by him. And say what you will about Schwartz, he is an intellectual of sorts, with a lot of published books on a range of subjects, from defaming accounts of the Bay Area left, an ongoing specialty, to treatises on Muslim sects about which he seems quite knowledgeable. He says he’s became a Mohammedan, Sufi division, and has adopted the middle name, Sulyman. Other scholars on the subject say Schwartz is full of it, but I was startled one morning to see him introduced on CNN as a scholar of Wahabi Islam. “Wow!” I thought, “Zelig has nothing on this guy!”
I’VE READ two of Schwartz’s books, both of which I profited, from although… “From West to East: California and the Making of the American Mind” seemed at least ten degrees off as he bashed as alleged communists, among others, Maya Angelou, whom he claims was a party member when she was very young and living in San Francisco. I also liked his “Brotherhood of the Sea, A History of the Sailor’s Union of the Pacific, 1885-1985.” But his is the only book on the subject I’ve read.
ALL THE WHILE, which has only belatedly occurred to me, I was a regular patron of Minerva’s Owl, a wonderful SF bookstore on Union, then Levi’s Plaza, presided over by a gracious, erudite older woman who may have been Schwartz’s mother, wife of his leftwing father who’d started the store in the 1950s. Where he got his famous truculence from is a mystery, at least to me.
I’D HAVE PERIODIC contact with Schwartz, a master of invective, who would write in to the ava with creative insults at our efforts, typically signing off with versions of, “Have fun in amateur land, morons.” I remember one epistolary exchange with him that was so annoying, and wrong, that six of us denounced him in ed replies, a record for us.
BATTLING SCHWARTZ became a kind of family affair, with my nephew, then a young barista at Cafe Trieste, often exchanged insults with Schwartz, a regular at the famous North Beach salon/coffee shop where he would he’d wow the old beatniks with his encyclopedic knowledge of… Well, all kinds of things, that chainsaw voice rattling off the cappuccinos and on out Grant and Union. When Schwartz discovered that Robert Mailer was my nephew, he remarked, “I guess that makes you the monkey’s uncle.”
ABOUT A YEAR AGO, I began to get these strange communiques from “Lulu LaFlamme,” complete with celebratory color photos of Ms. LaFamme’s breasts. Mother of God! It’s Schwartz! He’d “transitioned,” as they say, and now writes almost daily accounts of his public life as a woman which, you can imagine, has inspired much comment from people who remember him as the male sage of the Trieste. But Schwartz-Lulu, arguably the most combative, and certainly the smartest, trans-sexual in the history of this whole new gender, has always seemed to revel in the animosity he inspires, and can be depended on to give as good as he gets.
I CONFESS that I’ve always had a soft spot for the guy/gal. I don’t understand why a man pushing eighty would undergo the cruelest cut of all, but I’m worried about Lulu. Her accounts of her many hostile public encounters are harrowing, although she/he always seemed up for verbal combat, but physical hostility? Of course Lulu never backs off, and says she carries bear repellent to ward off her enemies, of which she probably has more of the personal type than any living American. I wish her well.
(AVA July 2001…)
BILL MANDEL, former KPFA Russian specialist (one of the first to be fired during the station’s early ‘90s purges) was kind enough to autograph a copy of his book, “Saying No To Power,” when I bought one at his table at the Anarchist Book Fair last Saturday in San Francisco. I took the opportunity to show him the current AVA and the letter denouncing him by the AVA’s communist beat reporter, Steven Schwartz. When I came back around to his booth about half an hour later Mandel replied, “Hey, Schwartz spent almost a whole column denouncing me, and he never mentioned my book!” — ms
SCHWARTZ, who seems to haunt the more excitable elements of the Bay Area left, came up again a couple hours later. A man who looked like a younger version of Allen Ginsberg came up to the AVA table and asked, “Are you the editor?” “No, I’m the typist. Who are you?” “I’m Howard Besser,” he replied. “Steve Schwartz called me a ‘tenured ape’ in your paper last week.” (Schwartz also called him a “gorilla.”) According to Schwartz, Professor Besser screamed at Schwartz about Schwartz’s Spanish Civil War writings “in a deranged manner.” Professor Besser was obviously irritated at Schwartz’s characterization of him. “Why don’t you respond?” I asked. Professor Besser said he barely remembered the incident, but he certainly didn’t remember shouting at Schwartz. “I hardly know the guy. I don’t know what I did to deserve this,” Professor Besser said. “I don’t think it’s worth replying to.” Professor Besser went on to inform me that he had been told of Schwartz’s mention of him in the AVA by Kevin Keating. Keating, AVA readers will recall, is a long-time nemesis of Schwartz and a self-styled “anarcho-communist” who created a mini-media furor in The City a couple years ago when he launched his one-man “Yuppie Eradication Project.” Keating was arrested last year at SFO when he emerged from the first-class section of an Air France flight during which he’d gotten into a fight with the crew over the quality of the wine; both the first-class flight and the nature of the dispute are believed to be anarcho-communo-syndicalist firsts. — ms
TRULY GREAT REPORTING from one of the last truly independent giants of the genre, Matt Taibbi. Thanks to Taibbi, and Musk, we now know for a fact what we suspected: Twitter execs responded they “handled” two requests from Team Biden to remove content about Hunter Biden’s leaked laptop files.
MUSK, via Taibbi, revealed the back-end messages showing members of Biden’s inner circle attempting to remove criticism of Hunter from the platform before the 2020 election. The “Twitter Files” reveal new details on Twitter’s shady censorship decision, which Musk said was made behind the scenes “at the highest levels of the company” at the behest of Biden officials, confirmation “based upon thousands of internal documents obtained by sources at Twitter.” Weeks ahead of the election in October 2020, Twitter prevented the sharing of a story about Hunter’s involvement with a Chinese oil giant – and his then-presidential candidate father Joe Biden’s potential slice of a multi-million-dollar deal with a Chinese firm
FROM the time of Burton Abbott’s arrest in 1955 for the kidnapping and murder of 14-year-old Stephanie Bryan it took less than two years to execute him at San Quentin.
I BRING it all up because Abbott’s crime was so singular at the time — the placid 1950s — that from the day of the girl’s disappearance to Abbott’s execution at age 29, the story was front page news in all the San Francisco newspapers. Similar events now take place every day in every area of the United States. We read about them, shudder, and wait for the next day’s atrocities.
SAN FRANCISCO, AP, 1957 — Doomed by massive circumstantial evidence in a sensational trial, mild-mannered Burton W. Abbott paid with his life for the bludgeon murder of 14-year-old Stephanie Bryan. Abbott, a shy-appearing tubercular, 27-year-old who showed the world a dour man with high purpose, gasped his last in the San Quentin gas chamber without confessing he had killed the youngster. But the jury did not believe the righteous picture Abbott painted of himself. And they did not appreciate his sneering laughter as the prosecutor grilled him on the witness stand.
I HAVE a gift subscription to the New York Times, the first time ever for me as a daily reader, and I’m here to assert, boldly, megalomaniacally, that the tiny rural Boonville weekly more accurately reflects the American reality than does the New York monolith. And is much more readable, too.
THE TIMES is awful, awful I tell you, as awful as these gory times themselves. And not particularly truthful either. (cf Judith Miller.) These days we have the titans of received opinion, David Brooks and Thomas Friedman, the paper’s big guns, although together or singly they are the prose equivalent of chloroform. There’s at least one article every day titled, “How to think about whatever,” like we need help from overpaid Democrat ideologues who limo back and forth to work to tell us how to think? Here’s today’s how to think about from the newspaper of record. “After Fanning Covid Fears, China Must Now Try to Allay Them.” Got that China? Got yer notebook out America?
ALSO NOTE that the newspaper of record has not yet condescended to report on Hunter’s laptop and the cozy censorship deployed by Twitter at the request of the Democrats. And nothing on social media censorship generally. “The paper of record”? Really?
EVERY DAY a new atrocity occurs somewhere in our crumbling country, this one today on Saturday the murder by a FedEx driver of a 7-year-old Texas girl. Cynics say this is nothing new, that horrific crimes have always been an integral part of the American experience. Nope. There’s been an obvious increase in the incidence of the worst of the worst out of all proportion to the radical increase in the U.S. population, driven, in my opinion, by poverty, the degraded and degrading influence of popular culture, pornography, the easy access to guns, collapse of true community, the visual squalor of towns and cities, a corrupt political system, and Scott Simon-ism, aka NPR.
YOU CAN’T CALL the Democratic Party’s almost unanimous decision to back a strikebusting bill against railroad workers a “betrayal.” It’s more like the ultimate fulfillment of a project begun in 1985 with the birth of DLC (Democratic Leadership Committee) designed to unshackle the party from its decades-long bond with organized labor so that it could free itself up to fill its campaign coffers with corporate cash.
The DLC was founded by the likes of Al Gore, Bill Clinton and Joe Biden, after Mondale’s loss. The DLC cynically titled their “think tank” the Progressive Policy Institute, although the only thing “progressive” about it was how it progressively moved away from the New Deal political programs which had come to define the modern Democratic Party.
Justified as a reformation of the party to attract white working class voters (the so-called Reagan Democrats), the “free” trade policies of the DLC and the Clinton/Gore administration hit the working class harder than almost any policies of the Reagan/Bush era. As the job losses from NAFTA took hold, Clinton (with Biden’s support) slashed the social safety net that would have cushioned the blows.
Now, Biden himself stands forth as the latest Reagan, whose poll numbers soared after he busted the PATCO strikers, prepared to stomp on the very workers he claimed to represent but never has when push comes to shove. (For more on this history see our new book, An Orgy of Thieves: Neoliberalism and Its Discontents.)
Democrats are always “pro-labor” until that crucial moment when labor asserts itself against the machinery of corporate profit-making. How the neoliberal Biden–the go-to senator for bankers, credit card companies, and the DuPonts–has gotten away w/ his Scranton Joe routine for 50 years is a mystery. The only unions he ever truly supported are the ones whose members are cops, firefighters and prison guards…
— Jeffrey St. Clair
ED NOTE: Only three California Democrats voted No. Northcoast flab-glab lib-labs will be reassured that the noble three did not include Northcoast Congressman Huffman. The noble three were Norma Torres; Mark DeSauliner; Judy Chu.
OVERHEARD at Mendocino County Library - Fort Bragg:
A scared-looking man walks into the library and asks, “Do you have any books on paranoia?”
The librarian replied, “They’re right behind you! “
ON-LINE COMMENTS OF THE WEEK
[1] Everything today is fake! Fake religion, fake healthcare, fake money, fake and synthetic drugs, fake food, fake education, fake marriages, fake democracies. Hell, right now it seems we even have fake Nazis! Is nothing sacred anymore?
[2] I had to laugh the other day when I was in another lily-white suburb of my city, and all the multi-million-dollar mansions in the cul-de-sac had “Hate Has No Home Here”, “BLM”, and other such yard signs at the foot of their driveways.
[3] HOME INVASIONS:
Over time, I’ve come to the conclusion that most, if not all, of these home invasion type robberies are committed by people the victims know. Or set up by people they know. Otherwise, how would strangers off the street know that this person had shit they’d be interested in stealing? How did they know the victim had a safe? Someone told them, that’s how.
I hope they catch these cretins.
[4] They could turn Garberville into an authentic 80’s boomtown-era tourist Potropolis with everyone in costumes —camos and reggae beanies, long skirts and dirty sweaters. Stand back, folks, here comes CAMP! Stores with tourist crap, and of course, a dispensary. Like Frontierland, only stoned.
[5] A LOOK BACK: In 1983 I was out of Willits, just over the hill into the very upper watershed of Big River. We hiked in 5 miles through logging land to out guerrilla patch on that hill. Didn’t own land and there was really no way forward for a poor man to own land…so we squatted on land that had been raped and scraped to feed the ever-thirsty investors who lived in the cities. There was a war over whose drugs would be allowed but also there was a war at that time over our very survival on the planet. We lost. These are the mopping up times now, waiting to see what comes to decimate our massive, consumptive overpopulation- famine, war, disease? 1983 many of us still had hope for the future but we knew we were up against large forces of evil and destruction. Where were you?
1983 was the early stages of CAMP and also the nationwide War On Drugs. A war that would join Reagan, Bush and Biden (yes- he was actually harsher than the others) together in making America the most incarcerated nation in the world. Fighting the drugs that their own CIA was bringing in and distributing. (refer to Contra funding and Freeway Ricky, Arkansas air fields, etc). By mid-80’s the FBI had a program called Operation Dead End that focused on my friends in the Grateful Dead scene and was arresting people, refusing them bail and handing them mandatory 20 year sentences for “conspiracy to distribute”. That could mean making a phone call, being in the room, hell- they did not care. Many urban folks had the same thing happen in crack neighborhoods. WAR ON DRUGS. I was a part of Families Against Mandatory Minimums (FAMM) as we sought for relief against these Stalinist-type tactics. Where were you? In your Mommy’s basement? The CAMP tactics of warrantlessly kicking down doors and holding children at gunpoint was real. Our local hero attorney Ed Denson formed Citizens Observation Groups (COG) and trained many of us to observe, record and report. I followed raids in the Laytonville area and recorded what I could. Boy- they didn’t like me! But I did not like letting them get away with what they did. Oh yeah- where were you? Were you even here?! I could write a book about the War On Drugs. We who were here understood what it really was- a War on Certain Drugs. Weed and psychedelics. Cocaine/Crack and Heroin were government-approved. Just like the pharmaceutical mood-changers and anti-depressants that were being forced down the throats of troublesome children across America…yeah-that was just getting started too. Why was Dan Quayle ever installed as Vice-President? His father was the head of Lilly Pharmaceutical out of Indianapolis. Nancy (Just Say No) Reagan’s maiden name was Davis. Nancy Davis. Yes of Parke-Davis Pharmaceuticals. Coincidences? No. It was a War On Our Drugs….it was a War On Us, the marginalized….for Money…And it is still going on.
[6] NORTHCOAST FASHIONS
The Humboldt Honey Poster is inaccurate, in many ways…
Generally speaking, the woman pictured here is much too trim, svelte even, to qualify. Also, like the woman on the Garberville Farmer’s Market T-Shirt, Humboldt County Women tend to be busty, and generally they can’t afford to go out in the winter in Birkenstocks, especially not Arizonas, which would be quickly destroyed in the rains of Northern Humboldt, and not unless the socks are Merino Wool, not just those Army Surplus Wool socks we all used to wear in college…
Long skirts are so over, and these days you will observe Lululemons and Crop Tops on nearly everyone female, with an “ugly sweater contest” perpetually held, or a simple down vest, and nobody wears a Babushka or remembers the “Grateful Dead” any more than they remember Bob&Carol&Ted&Alice…
Some things don’t last, and earrings are still cheap and made everywhere by neo-hippies, but the Southwestern Hippie Ethic has melted into the Millennial Ooze, and you should have to travel further North, like to Coastal Oregon, to find even one woman dressed like an 80’s college woman…
The poster is an interesting cultural artifact, that nobody outside your weird county would understand, but it was amusing, the first time I saw it, some ten years ago in the used book store in Garbistan…
I might, just might revive it myself, except that I would study the women of Olin College of Engineering in Needham Mass, looking for important trends to ridicule, searching for a style which may not exist at all, like a “typical” “Humboldt State Woman”…
I will discuss it with the women software engineers of San Francisco, and get back to you, but the Humboldt Honey is probably insulting to most, grossly inaccurate, and overall, an insignificant artifact from a colorful time that never existed at all…
[7] HILL MUFF STORM PREP, AN ON-LINE COMMENT:
I made a few emergency kits for myself and family using leftover Mcann’s Steel-Cut Oatmeal tins, after having previously seen this valuable tip in the RHBB comment section. These oatmeal tins work great due to their removable/resealable lids. (Avoid the new plastic containers—the metal tins are still available in some stores.) Alternately, similar containers can also be purchased at any paint store. I also included matches, a compact emergency blanket, a small Maglite flashlight, extra batteries, a flint/steel fire starter, along with tiny soduku & crossword puzzle books. An emergency NOAA-certified radio with a hand crank is also advisable. These typically have built-in flashlight and can also be used to charge a cellphone.
[8] DOPE CHAT, on-line comments from the Redheaded Blackbelt’s must-read website:
(a) From one lunatic to all the rest, we don’t call them “trimmigrants”, we call them “trimsients” which is more accurate…
Yes, the giant cartels were buying up large real estate holdings, but now marijuana is mostly grown in areas closer to major highways and large population centers, simply because it’s cheaper to farm nearer town.
The drought and the fire profile of Northern California will necessarily limit production, eventually, and the highly divisive and cohesion-less folk who live out in the boonies, while not necessarily ignorant hicks, are unable to form together and produce economically.
There is also a tendency to inflate the “quality claims” of NoCal pot, and if there is one single gram that actually tests over 30% THC, I would like to try it…
Your weed isn’t special, your lifestyle is nearly at an end, and commercial dope production will be in the hands of billionaires’ corporations some of which will be actually funded by Cartels…
Only by taking the money out of drug dealing, will the “drug problem” be corrected, but I doubt if this will occur in the next 25 years…
(b) OH and some of the people working in Marijuana Production are actually “slaves”, or abused persons under the control of criminals…
(c) So many people have misused the term “Cartel” that we’ve forgotten the definition. You say
“Cartels buying up land”, but what you really mean is
“Nonwhites buying up land”
A “Cartel” is competitors coming together to dictate prices. Which is a great idea. If there were any Cartel formed around growing weed, I’m all in. Current weed prices paid to growers is the best evidence against any true cartel existing in the weed biz.
(d) This is not a white vs brown or black issue. in fact the Russian cartels I would think are made up of people who happen to have white skin. And I have yet to hear of Black cartels growing weed. Weed prices are much higher where it can be sold illegally which is why it is being smuggled to those places.
(e) It’s the great schism. Those that truly know the industry and those that want to control the industry. It’s no secret that “mountain” justice exists and has forever in Nor Cal. Money n drugs = thugs. Individual or gooberment groups thugging is thugging. Sure there may be individuals involved that are legitimate, but the thugs worm their way in and take it over on every level. Trim tramps, trim hoes. That was the original base. The girls that would come around just in time for the weed and the money. Screw the boss cause a lot of family drama, party all night scene. Never really were any outsiders that ran anything and we didn’t mess with the boss or you could wind up in the trunk! Now in our more modern debacle freaks try to fill the boots of a lost legacy. They haven’t got a clue how to do it. Cute story Jorge but ya got a lot twisted in the wrong direction.
(f) After I ended that comment I thought about it a little bit longer it also used to be quite an honor to get invited to a trim scene. Very tight-lipped not everyone was welcomed in specific requirements. One being don’t screw the boss but many did and wound up getting in a lot of trouble . You’d be kicked off a crew pretty quick if the Mrs found out that you were messing with her man . You didn’t talk about it if the word got out you wouldn’t have any more work. Typically 6 to 10 ladies, maybe a few guys doing buck n hang. These much larger Crews that camped or stayed in town permanently was not really a thing until around 2006 and after.
[9] UFO’S, AN ON-LINE COMMENT:
I can say I saw an UAP here in Fortuna once, many years ago while I was working at the former St Luke’s. To this day I don’t know what I and the others who worked that night with me actually saw but I refuse to leap to any conclusions about it. Then, a few years ago, my Cranky Old Man was watching a program on TV about UAPs and they had many videos taken by people who had seen them. I don’t recall what I was doing, but I wasn’t really paying much attention to the program. I happened to look up at the right moment and there, they had video taken by someone in I think Phoenix of exactly the same thing I saw. According to the program, the official explanation was military flares but it couldn’t have been because we don’t have any military bases around here. And the objects were definitely much larger than a parachuted flare. Much larger.
Anyway, I guess my point is to say that I agree with Mr Degrasse-Tyson: “The fact that you don’t know what it is, is not evidence that you know what it is.”
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