NAPA COUNTY will make forgivable loans available to help people build accessory dwelling units — commonly called “granny flats” — with rents meeting affordability standards.
MENDO? We live in hope, but Fort Bragg gets it done, and even tiny Anderson Valley has managed a few units for people or ordinary means.
A LADY asked me the other day if I felt like she felt. Try me, I said. “I feel overall that a giant shoe has dropped and now I'm waiting for an even bigger shoe to drop,” she said. I agreed, and said I liked her metaphor for the low hum of anxiety many of us feel, fed by the pessimism that the deteriorated quality of our leadership has no idea, and less motivation, to do anything about anything, let alone the Big One — climate change. Adding to the general despair is today's news that Biden will soon announce he's running for a second term. Another term for him is certain to speed up The End of Days.
THE SUPERVISORS might create fewer problems for themselves, and fewer major probs for us, their captives, if they weren't so arrogant, so mindlessly rude, with long-time employees and administrators cursing the Supes as they scurry out the door. The Supervisors continue to scapegoat Ms. Cubbison for their own unwise, unilateral consolidation of the Treasurer's and Auditor's office, which caused a spate of departures of experienced people, with the sorely put upon Ms. Cubbison suddenly thrust into multi-taking as Auditor, Controller, Tax Collector, and Treasurer. Hell, why not make her Dog Catcher, too? Supervisor Haschak was the only Supe who dared point out that the crazy consolidation was being done hastily and with no planning.
PROBABLY not all that big a deal, but it's mildly frightening to see County Counsel Curtis sitting in the chair heretofore occupied by the CEO, with Curtis, the rhetorical heir of Professor Irwin Corey, answering a lot of the questions, as the ostensible CEO, Ms. Antle, sits behind him apparently mesmerized by her computer screen.
Curtis is one of these guys who puts out a lot of words with no audible links between any three of them. His first sentence is usually in meaning's ballpark, but after that it's free association time, a kind of verbal Scrabble.
THE PRESENT FUNCTIONING of the Supervisors reminds me of that scene from The Magic Christian where a chimpanzee, togged out in a business suit, is solemnly introduced as the new CEO of a major enterprise. If you introduced a chimp to our Supes as, say, a new County Counsel someone might think, but would never dare say, “Funny looking little dude, but Curtis says he knows his bananas, so we better not express any misgivings or the County could be looking at a discrimination action.”
THAT SABOTAGING of the North Carolina electric substation that left 40,000 homes without power rings a faint bell that a Coast guy once opened fire for the pure hell of it on Fort Bragg's power station. Given the level of estrangement in our fragged society, it's not surprising that the terminally alienated don't attack similarly vulnerable installations, most of which, coast-to-coast, can't easily be defended. The Fort Bragg vandal didn't have a political motive, as I recall, but groups like The Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers are much more ambitious.
HURRAH FOR PAT!
Pat Thurston, the ex-KGO talker, began her new KCBS gig on Monday night.
But, there's a bigger story here.
Thurston's new fill-in anchor position at KCBS is just that: as a fill-in anchor.
She was hired as the eventual talk-show host who will be the centerpiece of a new, probably nighttime format change at all Audacy stations, including KCBS.
The new format, I've heard through industry sources, is probably set to debut around the new year.
— Rich Lieberman, 415 Media
GRATIFYING to see that Barry Bonds and his fellow juicers were again denied a berth in the Baseball Hall of Fame. Bonds was a great ballplayer before he started on the juice, but on the juice, with pitches looking like basketballs floating up to the plate, all the Frisco cellphones jumped to their feet to watch the ball disappear over the rightfield wall and on into McCovey Cove, cheering and high-fiving a corrupted game.
LADY CHATTERLY’S LOVER, the Netflicks version, a reel short review: More or less faithful to the book with, of course for the modern voyeur audiences promised the prolonged graphic sex scenes the book's author didn't have to supply pictures to explain. But the acting, all Brit, is good and Lawrence's point, the same point he made in most of his books, that the ruling classes are effete, comes across as vividly as the sex scenes. If he'd lived in today's world he'd see that all classes are now effete, virility vilified and anyway pretty much confined to athletes, cops, firepeople, and other practitioners of strenuous physical activity.
‘RETIRED UKIAH GUY’ WRITES:
Since the beginning of covid I have biked on the Redwood Trail in Ukiah at least 3 to 4 times a week. It’s been very enjoyable for me and helped with my health. I see many people using the trail and really no problems with pedestrian and bikes sharing the trail. A wide cross section of people use it, working people from the hospital and doctor’s office getting a walking break , store employees from the Walmart Costco shopping center, various runners and bike riders, people with babies and children, people without homes, some people with either mental health or substance problems, dog walkers , you name it and they are there. It is a safe place to walk and ride, the redone intersections at cross streets make it safe to cross. You can access the Sun House and you can get to Walmart for your medications without a car. People also use it to get to grocery stores. It is maintained by City of Ukiah, volunteer organizations and individual people who pick up the trash. Currently there is an effort to get the rusty old rails removed so mowing is easier. If seeing a homeless person or the back of a business with junk ruins your day probably isn’t the place for you. There will always be whiners and half assed journalists complaining but hey the world is not perfect. Have a nice day.
ED REPLY: I beg your pardon, sir. I’ve got both cheeks.
SF CHRON: “By now, in the wake of a Super Bowl appearance and trips to two of the past three NFC Championship Games, Shanahan’s reputation as one of the sport’s foremost offensive minds is familiar to most football fans. They’re aware of his gift for crafting opponent-specific gameplans designed to predict behavior, expose weaknesses and set up foes for kill shots.”
I DISAGREE. Cannon fodder running backs multiple fruitless times up the middle doesn't look all that genius from here in the TV seats, but as another fan explained, “Bruce, you don't understand. That's to set up the surprises.”
THE NFL, as we know, is operated by bad people. How else to explain, in no particular order, artificial turf, the blackballing of Colin Kaepernick, denial of pensions to the game's old timers, luxury boxes, and player exploitation generally. Overall, pro football is a perfect fit for the berserk capitalism it functions in.
GIVE ME JIM HARBAUGH, the only coach I've ever seen who got so excited, was so intensely into the game, that he was foaming from the mouth. If there's a football wizard on the present Niner coaching staff, it's DeMeco Ryans, coach of the defense.
NICK BOSA on artificial turf: “Yeah, a hundred percent agree it's bad, for sure. It’s usually the older guys who know more about it. Or guys who have dealt with injuries from it. Because when you’re young and in high school and college, you think it’s fast and fun and it looks good. And then you realize after a few years, it’s like, whew, I’ll do anything to get on some grass.”
NYT HEADLINE: “How to Watch the Christmas Tree Lighting at Rockefeller Center … The 90th annual celebration will take place on Wednesday and feature performances by Gwen Stefani, Alicia Keys, Blake Shelton and others.…”
SEE WHAT I MEAN about the NYT? And all this time I thought it was just a matter of showing up and keeping one's eyes open:
ESTHER MOBLEY: “I think it’s important you’re all aware that the Hallmark Channel just released a movie that takes place at … the San Francisco Chronicle! “A Big Fat Family Christmas” follows two Chronicle journalists assigned to cover a holiday party. To see what it got wrong about the reality of being a journalist, see my colleague Heather Knight’s hilarious Twitter thread.”
DAVID SVEHLA: Thumbs down on your Death Penalty comments, AVA. I had encounters with an infamous “Clown” in 1976, at a Democratic Party Fundraiser (I was 11), and a “Cannibal” in 1991, at a gay bar when I was 26; both in my native Chicago, both actually made physical contact with Me. The Clown got to live 14 years being fed, sheltered, on Our Dime before this “Compassionate Society” finally offed him. The Cannibal not quite so long as one of his fellow inmates executed him due to racial hatred and homophobia. I’m a bit surprised, as long as you’ve been in the Bay Area, throwing down w/ the likes of Scott Petersen, ala Our Illustrious Governor! Your Liberal Values are showing, Dude!
ED NOTE: But, but, but.... I had said if surviving family members would at least be required to administer the midnight needle themselves, the death penalty would be more defensible, but I think best of all would be that the executions be carried out in public football stadiums by firing squads so we could all be properly deterred from committing murder ourselves, all admission fees going to the survivors. The DP is supposed to be a deterrent, right? The prob with it is both its creepy secret pseudo-medical rituals and the obvious fact murders aren’t prevented by executing some of its worst practitioners. But the state offing our monsters in secret executions at midnight? Satisfies no one's revenge lust and defeats the death penalty's alleged purpose.
THOUSANDS of classified documents about the assassination of President John F. Kennedy are set to be released next week, despite several government agencies desperately trying to keep them under wraps. And guess which agencies they are?
THAT PIVOTAL EVENT looks more pivotal with the passing years, in that it seemed to inaugurate the National Security State as the true drivers of our national bus.
I'VE ALWAYS tended to swallow whole the most recent book I've read on the assassination because it's impossible, at least for the non-professional Kennedy obsessive like me, to keep track of it all, but for years I've been skeptical, like most Americans, of the official version of events, beginning with the fact that the alleged assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, was at Camp Pendleton with the Marines at the same time I was there trudging Pendleton's endless hills with a mortar baseplate on my back.
SO WHAT?, YOU SAY. I mention it because the idea that anyone among my fifties Semper Fi cohort could go to Russia and then return with a Russian bride (daughter of a KGB colonel yet) was simply unimaginable. Not plausibly doable by even this one odd guy. Even communists didn't want to go live in Russia, let alone an unskilled, haphazardly educated, straight-outta-poverty kid like Oswald. Sure, given his threadbare upbringing, Oswald could have been some kind of lumpen, proto-Stalinist, but to manage these travels not only to Russia and back, and later back and forth to Mexico where he met with Russian and Cuban officials, no way unless he was being sponsored by our infamous gringo intelligence agencies, specifically the CIA, with a big assist from that black-mailing, cross-dressing closet case, J. Edgar Hoover.
CLEARLY, Oswald was one of the persons, maybe the only person, shooting at Kennedy that day and now, all these years later, it's more apparent he was as he said he was, “a patsy.” And almost immediately knocked off by another implausible character, Jack Ruby. Incidentally, gun experts say Oswald's rifle, written off by a lot of people as a relic and not accurate, was a viable weapon, especially given that Oswald's surplus Carcano rifle was scoped and that he was shooting from above, a short distance away from Kennedy.
THE 15,000 CRUCIAL DOCS have been hidden away for half a century because they'll show that Oswald was on our federal payroll, meaning that Kennedy was shot by U.S. taxpayers.
AMONG the NYT's top concerns today, “A reader asks how much vitamin D to get in the winter.” And the NYT's Vitamin D desk of course has the answer! I feel so blessed having a subscription.
NEWLY RELEASED INTERNAL DOCUMENTS suggest that Twitter's former head of safety Yoel Roth was meeting weekly with the FBI, and show instances of the FBI flagging tweets related to the 2020 election for deletion. Journalist Matt Taibbi shared the claims in a new Twitter thread last Friday night, one week after sharing the first tranche of so-called “Twitter Files” turned over by the company's new owner Elon Musk. In an undated chat on the messaging app Slack that Taibbi says took place after the Capitol riot on January 6, 2021, Roth is seen joking about a mysterious meeting on his calendar, saying it is “DEFINITELY not a meeting with the FBI I SWEAR.”
DEB KEIPP RECOMMENDS:
Just finished the Netflix show on Madalyn Murray O'Hair.
My mum was a catholic who converted to presbyterian when she married.
She was ever after me with “Say your prayers!,” when we went off to bed.
Worried for her mortal sins, she was very interested in Madalyn Murray O'Hair's story, but I never heard this ending before. Well-written article. Netflix movie, “Most Hated Woman in America,” also okay.
http://www.crimemagazine.com/murder-madalyn-murray-ohair-americas-most-hated-woman-1
IT'S ONLY one more sign of the general collapse that genuine authority, like the genuine authority of Dr. Fauci, can be not only challenged but vilified by people who reject the basic principles of contagious diseases and the immunology that prevents them and prevents them from spreading. The Covid virus has always shape-shifted, and with each shape-shift, Fauci, for the sin of trying to keep up with the disease's morphs, found himself, and even his family, threatened and insulted by people who have no idea what they're talking about.
ON-LINE COMMENTS OF THE WEEK
[1] The Uniparty will remain in control until after the dollar dies. By then, living conditions will become *very* primitive in the USA, and there will likely be waves of shocked hysteria erupting from people everywhere unable to cope with the sudden changes. A lot of the hysteria and “Karen” type behavior will be coming from suburban and liberal/academic type females experiencing their planet suddenly changed to something totally alien and very frightening.
No males will be available to assist them in any way because the current crop of males has also been neutered, just as the females have been neutered. When feminism took over long ago, part of the agenda was ignored or even hidden from the public. Along with masculinizing females, the young males were to be feminized. Today’s males have no coping skills for subsistence living either. Today’s affluent males might be able to play football, ride fast motorcycles, or go mountaineering, but those skills have no relation to what will be needed in a world made by hand. Services formerly done for us by large corporations, services like raising, slaughtering, and preserving hogs for example – those services in the next economy will be done locally in back yards and at small farms. Instead of playing ball, males will be required to learn and perform new blue collar skills. To have shoes on our feet in the US, men will be required to step forward and start building shoe and boot factories. To have necessities like clothing, cooking utensils, hardware store items etc. men will be required to get busy and build new factories here. At some point in history, Asians will stop making the basic goods we need for civilized living. If males in the US lack the capability to rebuild our industries, then we’ll be occupying our land here in a lifestyle of abject poverty. This land will be cursed and nobody will wish to live here anymore.
[2] PLANNING & BUILDING, an on-line comment: I worked for the county for over 30 years and met a few people who let their positions go to their heads but nothing like the people who work at the planning/building department. We have had to work with them to get building permits, which you are supposed to get for just about anything that you do on your property and they seem to have a God complex. The inspector who came out to our property was a pompous jerk. We had a pile of dirt in the field from the site where our contractor was putting in a cement slab and he wanted it covered immediately because it was supposed to rain and it might wash it into the river which is about a mile from our property. It didn’t rain enough to move it at all. You get a different answer from each person you deal with.
[3] To be fair Brittney Griner did not belong in jail for being stupid.
These kinds of laws should be looked at for a small amount of personal use and the person sent back to home country with a word of caution never to return to Russia.
Had she been dealing then she belonged in jail for a while and then returned with the same caution.
It just shows how stupid this person is traveling with a substance deemed illegal in most countries and flying with it even more stupid.
I agree, it was ridiculous to jail someone over cannabis oil.
Yes, the sentence seemed a little harsh. There’s a temptation to want to punish her for arrogance and an attitude that she should be above the law–presumably as a sports figure and a POC and an LGBT+. (I don’t think it was stupidity.)
So, you’re left wondering what the penalty should be for the real (and frankly more serious) offenses; namely, expecting people to kowtow to you.
Instead of bitching on an American blog, why don’t you take your bitching to the Duma or the Politburo.
You really think that an American should be able to go to a foreign nation and flout that country’s laws if they think they’re a little harsh” and get away with it, don’t you?
[4] Re Eyster's stonewalling: Keeping in step with the times, even here in way-out Mendocino County the public is treated to a banquet of ineptitude, corruption, and malfeasance in government operations. It’s one thing after another, with rarely any sort of accountability. Disappeared into the churning black hole that swallows so many of our collective embarrassments. As above, so below, apparently.
[5] I just finished reading a novel titled Commonwealth by Ann Patchett (winner of all kinds of awards) and it has made me realize that I have lived a very boring life and am a very boring person.
[6] Somehow, people can’t get over the fact that the industrial age is/was just a tiny blip on the human historical timeline. Our species has been here for at least a 100,000 years, and possibly well over a million years. We lived here successfully via solar power coming our way via the plant world through photosynthesis. We had no fossil fuel inputs and we were successful, possibly due entirely to wolf/dogs giving us a lot of help in hunting. Once the energy and technology runs out and fails, we’ll be back to our default position.
We will NOT be occupying this planet in the future with cars, dishwashers, central heat and air, clothes dryers, airplanes, electronic devices etc. Forget about abiotic oil. If it’s there, they’d be pumping the easy stuff instead of the very complex and expensive fracking processes and off shore drilling. The future is not going to be like we think it is.
[7] OFFSHORE WIND TURBINES FOR HUMCO?
There will be a lot of bird blood and guts to clean on those blades of the Biden bird shredders… not to mention the effects of the vibration on the delicate marine environment . Nothing to see here, Just another money laundering scam. The only thing green about them is the money. 205 square miles. You gotta be shittin me!
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