Off the Record (July 5, 2023)

THE MENDOCINO SHERIFF'S OFFICE held a ceremony for two new employees on Monday June 26, 2023. Corrections Deputy Megan Potter and Community Services Officer Jace Kroh were introduced during the ceremony held Monday morning. Deputy Potter was sworn as a Corrections Deputy and will immediately begin her training in the Mendocino County Jail in Ukiah. Community Services Officer Kroh will begin his training in the Field Services Division to assist patrol deputies with multiple aspects of their daily duties. Welcome and congratulations to Deputy Potter and Community Services Officer Kroh!

If you or anyone you know is interested in working for the Mendocino County Sheriff's Office, please visit www.mendocinosheriff.org and select "Careers" on the top right banner.

I’VE NEVER BEEN ABLE to read detective fiction. Even the good stuff by Hammett, Chandler, Ellroy etc. It doesn’t hold my interest. The biographies of the aforementioned are more interesting than their art, it seems to me. I have the usual complaints about tough guy fiction — the characters are one-dimensional, women are cartoon figures, and it’s hard to stay interested in either stick figures or plots whose resolution one is uninterested in. Besides which the so-called tough guys presented are so crudely drawn that it’s obvious the writers don’t know the difference between tough and vicious. But the other day I received an anonymous gift of a book called The Steam Pig by James McClure, a South African writer. I made the schedule-destroying mistake of reading the first page and didn’t look up for the next six hours. It’s much better than a mere detective story in that it also provides a hundred little glimpses of the reality of South Africa circa 1960, the kind of detail through which one finally gets the full picture of what the apartheid society really meant in human terms.

Over the years, I’ve relied on J.M. Coetzee, Doris Lessing and an essay writer named R.W. Johnson for my information on South Africa, but this mystery writer, McClure, manages to convey more about the country in this unlikely genre than all of them put together. Many thanks to the Ukiah person, whoever you are, for alerting me to this wonderful writer.

THE GREAT HOBO & MONEY MAGNET TRAIL (The money and hobos will happen here and there; the trail won't)

(From: https://greatredwoodtrailplan.org/faq/)

Amenities along the Great Redwood trail may include trailheads, parking, restrooms, water access, kayak launches, campgrounds, seating, viewpoints, public art, and more…

The Great Redwood Trail will be managed and maintained by a variety of regional and local public agencies and recreation-oriented non-profits. [None named.]

Adjacent property owners’ desires for privacy and protection along the Great Redwood Trail will vary by landowner and land use. The project team will work with adjacent landowners to understand their concerns and, as applicable, identify practical design solutions for the trail corridor as part of the Master Planning process. [I.e., not addressed.]

The Project Team will coordinate with local law enforcement and fire departments to inform safety and emergency procedures. Some ideas currently include law enforcement patrols, emergency call boxes, fencing, and other access control features. [“Ideas”? Which law enforcement agencies have agreed to participate?]

The Project Team will coordinate with local fire departments to inform fire safety along the trail. [“Inform”?]

The Master Plan will include a comprehensive strategy that outlines the legal and practical tools available to prevent or minimize camping in undesignated locations. Collaborating with housing and social service agencies to address this issue has been successful on this and other rail-trails trails in California. “Lessons learned” will be included in design guidelines and the Great Redwood Trail’s operations and maintenance plan. [Translation: whatever happens happens.]

The Great Redwood Trail Scammers have had over two years to work on this stuff with millions of dollars and all they’ve got are these vague generalities which only point to problems wherever little pieces of the Trail may be. (Mark Scaramella)

I'VE OFFERED to debate the Fort Bragg Name Changers, which official Fort Bragg, in the form of Lindy Peters, thinks is a good idea. Lindy offered to MC the event, which he's good at because he's overseen a variety of public affairs events over the years. Lindy said he thought we could charge a minimum gate fee to raise some money for the local Humane Society. A Name Changer called Mikael Blaisdell promptly agreed to represent the Name Changers, although I hoped, and still hope, the group's pied piper, Professor Zwerling, would step up to argue his team’s dangerously misguided effort to re-write history simply to accommodate current political fashions. I doubt the Name Changers would attempt to suppress, say, the 1619 curriculum, a true history of slavery that the rightwing wants out of the public schools. These unhappy days, there's always someone, or groups of someones, trying to re-write history to jam it into ideological straitjackets. 

MR. BLAISDELL withdrew as quickly as he had agreed to debate, claiming that Lindy Peters, who is opposed to a name change for Fort Bragg, cannot be fair as moderator, which is not only insulting to Lindy but terminally wuss-worthy of Blaisdell. Dude, you either stand up for your convictions or you don't, and your withdrawal indicates a lack of faith in yours. Then the Professor stepped back up with a buncha debate rules and No Lindy, which is terminally unfair to Lindy, an eminently fair person and, I daresay, much fairer than any of the Name Changers.

I SAY the Name Changers are “dangerous” because historical rewrites gnaw at the foundation of historical truth, and when you do that you threaten the pursuit of truth itself. Famous case in point: When Stalin assumed power in Russia he soon decreed that all references to Trotsky be removed from Russian history, right down to eliminating his photographs from Russian history books. Russians could be killed or exiled merely on the suspicion of being Trotsky-friendly. The Fort Bragg Name Changers are spiritually in the Stalinist tradition. 

BY ERASING consensus bad guy, General Braxton Bragg, a Confederate traitor and slaveholder, from any association with Fort Bragg by renaming contemporary Fort Bragg to excise him, logically you'd also have to excise the much grander George Washington and Thomas Jefferson from history, and I doubt even the most precious Name Changer would dare try that one. 

HISTORY is complicated because human beings are complicated. I'd say that America is all the more glorious for not only having survived its murderous origins, but having tried, and is still trying, to make amends for its unforgivable crimes against two whole peoples. Just like our personal histories are what they are, complicated, so is the history of our country. Viva the pursuit of true history, Viva Fort Bragg! 

JUST IN; As we went to press we received an email from The Professor who said he is willing to debate but will not appear if Lindy Peters is the moderator, managing in the same message to suggest that Lindy is an anti-Semite! Take it away, Professor:

PHILIP ZWERLING:

"Mikael Blaisdell and I have each been contacted serially by Bernie Norvell to invite us to debate the Name Change of Fort Bragg with you. For my part, I would be happy to engage in such a debate. However, Bernie tells me that the Moderator of the debate must be Councilman Lindy Peters. Such a debate would require a strong and, most importantly, a fair Moderator. My last experience with Lindy was when he invited me to be a guest on his TV show to discuss the Name Change issue. Unfortunately I found him to be a verbal bully who made veiled anti-Semitic remarks and then stormed off the set of the very show he was hosting. Therefore, I have no confidence in his ability to Moderate such a public debate as you might envision. If you wish to move forward with this idea we can discuss other potential Moderators, of whom I can think of many, in whom we both have confidence. Phil

ED REPLY: The phrase ‘veiled anti-Semitic remarks’ seems anti-Semitic to me. 

THE GREAT DEBATE. The Fort Bragg Name Changers continue to malign Lindy Peters, the logical guy to moderate the argument between Professor Zwerling and I, but the Name Changers claim, with their apparent powers of clairvoyance, that Lindy wouldn't be fair, and they base that claim on Zwerling's claim that Lindy wasn't fair with him. 

WHO SAYS ZWERLING doesn't have a sense of humor? Among other alternative moderators, he suggests state senator Mike McGuire as moderator! And Kendall Smith!

I BELIEVE LINDY'S version of events, and by golly here's Lindy himself to explain Zwerling's hostility: 

“Let me attempt to set the record straight. Several months back, a man named Phil Zwerling wanted to meet with me at City Hall and try to convince me to get on board with changing the name of Fort Bragg. I took up his offer and cordially met with him in the conference room. He was adamant the name had to be changed. And right now.! I explained it was complicated and possibly expensive and that there were more pressing issues currently facing the City Council than to spend time and energy on this divisive issue.. we even had a few laughs. I liked him. I also informed Mr. Z I was personally opposed to the idea of the name change but the voters should decide not me or the Council. But as an olive branch, I offered him an opportunity to voice his opinion on my TV show “ What’s Goin’ On”. He jumped at the chance but then wanted “ someone from the other side” to be there too and debate with him. I explained to him that my interview show is one-on-one but that I, Lindy Peters, the moderator, would take the opposing position because that is what good journalists do. He agreed. But when I began to challenge his extremely opinionated claims on camera his only defense was to constantly interrupt me when I retorted his arguments. Every time. And he began raising his voice. I could not control him. Finally I said “You keep interrupting me every time I try and respond. Tell you what. Go ahead and speak your piece. I’ll just sit here and listen but then once you are finished? I get to respond without YOU interrupting ME. Deal?” He said okay and I let him speak. Then I said, “ Are you done? Is it my turn? Can I respond without interruption? “. He nodded. I didn’t get :30 into my retort and he loudly and rudely interrupted me mid-sentence. So I ended the interview, told him I never had to do that before and scolded him by saying his East Coast pushiness doesn’t play well in laid-back Mendocino County. I guess in his mind that is anti-semitic? Who knows. I was going to try and make this debate idea you had Bruce into a fun event and raise some money for the Humane Society. There were going to be both sides of the debate represented this time so no need to play devil's advocate as moderator. These two never even gave us the chance to explain the format or give assurances of neutrality. So now I’m the villain? I guess if they get their way and change the name it won’t be Marco McClean’s AVA suggestion of LindyPetersville.”

I ONCE applied for a seat on the county’s Mental Health Board. An important part of the application process was an interview with the present Mental Health board whose composition included several persons officially adjudicated mentally ill with whom I went over boffo. Killed it. They loved me and promptly endorsed me, perhaps, as one of my many detractors commented, “Because you’re one of them.” Which I regarded as a compliment. There are worse groups, for sure, the Pacific Union Club, for instance. The Democratic Party Central Committee for another instance. The allegedly sane members of the board were less enthusiastic and voted an emphatic no. 

SO MY NOMINATION went to the Board of Supervisors where I had one vote from Supervisor Pinches, and four certain No votes from the perceived liberals on the board who, then as now, are hyper-sensitive to criticism. Not all that long ago in America, libs were fighters. Now they simply whine and knife you when your back is turned, which is why I recommend to Mendo newcomers that they wear their kevlar vests on their backs, not their fronts.

SUPERVISOR PINCHES, bless him all his days, raised, in public session, the matter of the editor’s brusque rejection by the Mental Health Board. Pinches wondered about the process. “Didn't the supervisors make these appointments? Did the Mental Health Board even have the right to reject Mr. Anderson?”

PINCHES told his colleagues that he personally would like to see Anderson, a county resident and taxpayer, on the Mental Health Board. His colleagues were not surprised to hear this, since they knew the editor supported Mr. Pinches' campaign for the state senate at the time and was also an admirer of the Laytonville cowboy.

ACCORDING to their rules, appointments to County committees came from recommendations by the nominee's supervisor, who, in my case, was then-Fifth District Supervisor Charles Peterson, an illiberal liberal who was a one term supervisor and immediately disappeared after leaving the position.

Peterson agreed, in part, with Pinches: "Whoever does it [the rejection], it has to be done appropriately,” said Peterson, an appropriateness monitor from way back. Peterson noted that Supervisors often rely on recommendations from the boards and commissions themselves.

Editor of the Mendocino County Observer, Jim Shields — who, as it happened, was Pinches’ State Senate campaign manager — also spoke up for the editor of the AVA. He thought the Mental Health Board, had taken an unseemly “gleeful satisfaction” in rejecting Anderson, believed to be the only person ever turned down for a position on a county advisory board whose vacancies typically go unfilled for months and even years. “Is this any way to encourage public participation?,” Shields asked.

BUT WHEN PINCHES put my nomination before the full board of supervisors, my nomination was rejected 4-1, Pinches, as he often was on many matters, on the short end of the vote. But Pinches had anticipated my rejection and quickly nominated my wife to the Mental Health Board. In lib-think, she was impossible to reject, being not only a woman, but a woman of color whose origins were Third World. Mrs. Anderson was unanimously approved for the Mental Health Board. 

UNAWARE she’d even been nominated, let alone unanimously appointed to the board simply because she wasn’t me and that the libs were terrified to reject a third world woman of color, my wife said, “Please tell them thank you, but no thanks.”

SPEAKING of my long-suffering missus as we approach our sixtieth year together, it was 1965 and we were just married in Sibu, Sarawak, a disapproving Anglican minister performing the ceremony, and not my first experience of Brit colonial attitudes rooted in their assumption of racial superiority. They didn't like Americans either. 

For our honeymoon we booked, or tried to book, a two-night's boat trip to Singapore. There were three of us in the honeymoon party — me, my new wife, my best man, Al Johnson, who happened to be black. We wanted to sleep in the open air on the ship's deck, not only to save money but for the experience. My bride was not enthusiastic about deck passage, but Al and I, both of us accustomed to sleeping on mats on floors wherever we went, were for it, and Ling reluctantly agreed. We were young and intrepid. But when I went to the ticket office I was told white men were not permitted to travel on the deck with the “natives.” So I bought a second class cabin for three for something like twenty bucks U.S. The day of the voyage, we were met by the captain standing at the head of the gangplank in crisp whites greeting the first and second class passengers like his old tub was the Queen's charter. When he met us he harrumphed audibly and said sarcastically, “I take it you three are traveling together?” “Yes,” I said, merry as could be and with a big smile “we're a wedding party.” He abruptly turned his back on us and that was the last we saw of him and the Brit crew for the rest of the voyage. 

JULIA BUTTERFLY and her followers believed they could talk to trees and the trees talked back. I’d never tried to communicate with the poplars at my place before I got my old friend Ricky Owens to lop a few troublesome branches from some of my poplars. But no sooner had Ricky completed his surgery I noticed, in a post-op look at one of the trimmed trees, what appeared to be raw eggs splattered on its trunk. I stared at the stuff oozing from the base of the poplar, thinking at first that it might have been left by an upchucking drunk stumbling outside for air after an editorial conference. It seemed to come from within the tree itself — tree blood unlike any tree sap I’ve ever seen, and which had apparently resulted from tree trauma sustained during Ricky’s tree trimming. Looking upwards with all the piety I could muster, I apologized to the tree and promised never to molest her/him again.

WHAT with the announcement of a vitamin-fortified mineral water for canines, which will go for $2.95 per two-liter bottle, dog people have taken their anthropomorphic indulgences all the way into deep decadence. A 19-year-old kid hangs himself in the Mendocino County Jail. Silence from the public. But harm a dog and here they come, in force, the anthromorphs. Dogs are generally considered to be well down the evolutionary ladder, not that they should ever be mistreated just because of their unevolved state of being. But lots of creatures are unevolved. Look at Republicans, for instance. But the point is that lots of people in this country are a lot crazier than their pets when it comes to assigning proportionate value, not to mention proportionate resources.

SPEAKING of the animal kingdom, we have a cat problem at ava headquarters. Cats just keep showing up, and we’ve made the mistake of feeding a couple, who have since morphed into…. I don’t know, at least ten. So today I asked the lady at Farm Supply how to at least neuter some of them before we try to foist them off on friends. $200 to neuter a female, less for a male but not much less. Help!

IT CONTINUES to surprise me that lots of urban people don’t know that public forests like the little-visited Mendocino National Forest had been “managed” for years as tree farms for timber corporations. L-P, gone but not forgotten, logged the Mendo National Forest so thoroughly that its mills in Potter Valley and Covelo were closed after Big Timber had concluded its short-term profit blitz. Not only were the taxpayers picking up the expensive tab for destructive logging roads to the trees, the trees had been over-harvested and sold at bargain rates. 

I USED to hike in the Mendocino National Forest; the last time I was out there it was all welfare cowboys grazing their cows, skid trails and stumps. 

SMALL WORLD ETC. Bet you didn’t know it was Beth Bosk of Albion and the New Settler Interview who smuggled the manuscript for Robert Williams’ famous book, Negroes With Guns, out of Cuba way back in the middle 1960s. Williams, who was having none of this turn the other cheek stuff, fled to Cuba from North Carolina after winning a shootout with a gang of white supremacists who’d attacked his home. Somehow some bad writers took a very good book by an interesting and brave man and roboticized Williams’ prose with a lot of bludgeon-like Marxist phraseology that wasn’t nearly as vivid as Williams’ own writing. 

CASUAL REFERENCES to this and that liberal as “leftist” always irritates hell out of me. We get leftist, left-leaning, leftish, left-liberal, radical, activist, and even environmentalist — all deployed interchangeably. 

HOW ABOUT THESE DEFINITIONS? Leftist: A person hostile to competition, greed and pointless accumulation as the basis for social organization, i.e. a socialist of whichever tribe. Progressive: a person who has been to Cuba but is afraid to call him or herself a socialist and who votes mainstream Demo Party liberal at home as he or she cheers for socialist revolutionaries far away, the farther the better. Liberal: a person who believes capitalism as a form of social organization can be tamed to make it work for all the people living in the world. Environmentalist: Typically, a financially secure person alarmed at the physical destruction of the natural world but who, like liberals, manages to delude him or herself that natural resources can be preserved without fundamental political change of a leftist character. Anarchist: Historically ignorant persons who dress in leather jackets and drive pieces of metal through their tongues, ears, eyelids, noses, belly buttons, and peenies as if fashion statements and bold talk are political activity. Activist: Any person who takes a public stance on the gamut of contemporary affairs, and who devotes anywhere from ten seconds to 20 hours a week making the world a better place. Church people who anonymously succor the poor and the defeated don’t count as activists nor do kindly cops who coach youth sports on their own time, and many other varieties of volunteers who do much good without desire for public praise.

RECOMMENDED READING, and darned if I can find my copy: Greenfield Ranch, 25th Anniversary 1972-1997: A Celebration of a Quarter Century of Living in Community. This is an informal but nicely put together miscellany and photo collection describing Mendocino County’s largest experiment in cooperative living and, by extension, the hippie period of County history. Greenfield is the large chunk of rolling hills running north and west of Calpella which was settled in the early 70s by back-to-the-land idealists. I got my copy for $20 from the legendary Greenfielder, Troll Brandon. I hope Greenfielders donated copies of this crucial Mendo document to the County Library and/or the County’s historical society.

A SECOND (KINDA) RECOMMENDED BOOK is a mystery by Ruth Rendel called Road Rage based on an English environmental group roughly similar to Earth First! (but smarter and more creative than EF!) called Sacred Globe. They kidnap random citizens as hostages against a proposed freeway. It’s interesting, to me anyway, for its enviro setting but the mystery in the mystery is gone by page 115. Also, the main characters, a police inspector and his wife, were a little too nice to be completely believable.

AND A THIRD, Night Train by Martin Amis, a very interesting cop mystery of a literary high order. The only other Amis I’ve read is the wonderful novel Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis, Martin’s father. Martin Amis is a writer better known for all kinds of reasons unrelated to his work, but this big-little book, told by the woman cop who is its primary character, only misses a couple of times, it seems to me, when Amis has his very tough female protagonist lapse into brief reveries of the cliched heart-of-gold type. There’s a lot of very good writing on the contemporary big city cop experience, suicide, race relations, love, and even the nature of the universe. 

AS IT HAPPENED, as I was reading Ruth Rendel’s Road Rage, I was also plowing my way through my old Bummer Box when I read a paragraph from a ’97 Bay Guardian about how the FBI and some other overfunded, underworked federal agencies were holding maneuvers in San Francisco based on a fantasy scenario that has an American band of enviros kidnapping officials in their outrage at environmental atrocity. Alicia Bales, aka Alicia Little Tree, was quoted in the item as saying that the maneuvers were just another tax-supported slander of the environmental movement which, as we’re reminded practically on an hourly basis, is “committed to Gandhian non-violence.” Miss Bales implied that Judi Bari had been bombed by the FBI because they’d held a “bomb school” on L-P property in Humboldt County just before the bombing itself, which accounted for the FBI’s failure to find out who did it. 

HALF RIGHT. The FBI never conducted a real investigation of the 1990 attack on Judi Bari and Darryl Cherney. But for years the FBI had held classes on explosives at College of the Redwoods for NorCal cops. Why? Cops deal with bombs all the time. And for some time the cop trainees have played with explosives on L-P land as the field work part of these classes, which may be a sinister coincidence or, as is more likely, simply the usual confluence of corporate and cop. According to COR, a number of NorCal cops attended the 1990 bomb class on L-P property which would broaden a conspiracy to bomb Earth First! to include somewhere around thirty small-town police officers. In this country, conspiracies involving more than two persons seldom go undetected. In my opinion, the reasons the FBI never investigated the Bari bombing are (1) it has never been bothered by attacks on radicals, and they knew who did it (2) a real investigation would have revealed FBI informants working Earth First! at the time, (3) Judi Bari’s ex-husband was an FBI informant all the way back to the 1960s when he belonged to a Maoist cult at Stanford, and the FBI gave their old pal to whack his wife rather than reveal all the federal highjinks in Ukiah in the 1990 period. The Bari Cult’s preferred suspects specifically excluded her ex-husband but included a crank-ridden Humboldt County gyppo family with Old Testament pretensions and criminal associations, and certain creeps within the environmental movement itself who crept in and out of the lunatic parts of the 60s fake left. But the Bari-ites favorite villain, and the one that the Bari-ites converted to lots of cash, was always the FBI.

BARI’S so-called friends never did her memory any good by diverting attention from the likely suspects to the FBI. The FBI may well have known that someone was trying to kill her and, as per its well-documented historical behavior, simply stepped aside and let the plot against JB proceed. The historical fact is, though, that the FBI has always gotten someone else to do its killing of unpopular persons. It’s also a fact that from 1989 on through Redwood Summer, the Northcoast was crawling with so-called “activists” who have since disappeared. I thought at the time and still think that several of these people were federal cops of one kind or another and several others were creeps associated with the “left.” 

ON THE SUBJECT of prose excess, in an ancient issue of Arts and Entertainment, a free publication produced by the Mendocino Art Center, Mendocino was described as, “The lovely village of Mendocino evolved (sic) back in 1852 because of the logging business right here on Big River — a business that continued on until the 1930s. After two decades of relative dormancy, our town’s renaissance began, largely because of Bill and Jennie Zacha starting the Mendocino Art Center in 1959. With their guidance and direction, over the ensuing years, it has become a very special educational, exhibition and resource center for the visual and performing arts, has gained a reputation that attracts an impressive selection of renowned faculty members, and has made Mendocino a haven for professional artists and all levels of art students from throughout the world.”

HMMM. Logging ended in the 1930s, Mendocino died, Zacha revived it and, thanks to him, the town is an international art center.

SO A NEUTRON goes into a bar and asks, “How much for a beer?” The bartender says, “For you, no charge.”

ALMOST THIRTY YEARS ago, then Fifth District supervisor Charles Peterson wanted his colleagues to appoint a “Blue Ribbon Panel” likely to double his pay because, he said, higher pay would attract “quality” candidates. The supes at the time got that $40,000 annually plus the full monte of benefits, double the average wage of most Mendo people at the time who likely as not, got no benefits unless they had a government job. Our supes now get 80-plus a year for two less meetings a month, and “quality” seems, uh, to have slipped a bit.

R. CRUMB, the great American artist whose brave work sends the pious reeling, has come up with one of the most intelligent defenses of irreverence I’ve seen in awhile: “Hey, in my own defense I am NOT a racist! But all of this stuff is deeply embedded in our culture and our collective subconscious, and you have to deal with it. It’s in me. It’s in everybody… Some people say that the way I play around with it is too rough. It hurts people’s feelings… A perverse part of me likes to take the heat for all that stuff. The people can hate me and feel righteously indignant about it, but meanwhile I’ve brought it out into the open.”

CRUMB is also quite reasonable in his defense against the knee-jerk accusations of sexism that his art has prompted over the years: “I’ve been trying to resolve the sex obsession with the art thing for my whole life, but my personal obsession for big women interferes with some people’s enjoyment of my work!”

MANY OF CANADA’S WILDFIRES were ignited by lightning. But in the US some 80% are thought to be caused not by an act of God but by the recklessness of humans. In an essay in the New York Times, Clare Frank, a former chief of fire protection in California, cites pyrotechnics at a gender-reveal party, the smoking out of wasp nests, and campers who decided to burn their excrement as precipitants of recent wildfires.

— Dhruv Khular (the New Yorker)

MS NOTES: Oddly, in that essay, Ms. Frank didn’t mention PG&E.

ON LINE COMMENTS OF THE WEEK

[1] The last Ukrainian flags in this town came down about three weeks ago … replaced by Pride flags. Those Pride Flags will be up at least until September when Hispanic Heritage Month kicks off. Then it will be Mexican & Puerto Rican flags hanging off front doors. A few weeks ago President Biden came to the University of Hartford for a “Gun Control Summit.” It was a major event with all the national gun control mavens in attendance, including our two US Senators. UofH is just a few miles from Hartford’s North End neighborhood, a notorious ghetto. Apparently the esteemed residents of the NE didn’t get the message because since the Summit there have been about five people shot in Hartford. I say “Apparently” because there have also been a few fatal stabbings and somebody run down with a car, so maybe the message is getting out, which is if you’re determined to murder your neighbor make sure the weapon you use is not a firearm.

[2] Only 18% of voters approve of Congress, but members of Congress seeking reelection have a 95% success rate. It takes real stupidity to blame anyone other than ourselves.

[3] I've spent the past few days in San Francisco. A few observations that may not be popular with today's sensationalist media--and the online crowd who exploit unhoused folks and post videos/photos to claim a narrative of a "failed" "destroyed" "zombie apocalypse" city--ruined by "woke" values. Nothing could be further from the truth. I walked the Tenderloin and pretty much the entirety of its surrounding community (several times over). At night and in the sunshine. I did not feel unsafe. I did not feel like the world was collapsing around me. What I saw was heartbreaking, yes. People are unhoused. People are chaotically using drugs. People are in the streets when they should have a bed to sleep in. It's sad to experience in-person. But I can report back that this city is not ruined. In fact, it's not much that different than any other big city you'll visit in Anytown, USA. What I can say is this: I've been coming to San Francisco since I was young . And the divide between the "haves" and "have nots" has only grown wider over time. It was on full display during this trip. Right next to a family living out of a tent (where I observed a man sweeping the sidewalk outside of it where he had a version of a table with his dinner set atop), there were $200k cars and self-driving vehicles speeding by, with the type of car doors you'd more likely see on a spaceship. People were crowding in and out of the nearby Apple Store, Burberry, and Supreme retail shops--some picking up their $2k hand bags, white t-shirts that cost $150, and Apple gadgets--all while ignoring the person on the curb outside the shop asking for spare change for something to eat. The median price for a single-family home in San Francisco is $1.2 million. Hedge fund and tech CEOs, along with a small (but loud) band of angry online activists of a certain political tilt, take to Twitter and Facebook every day to scream that "leftist liberal" policies are ruining their city. That crime is up (which it's not, it's actually in a decline) and that harm reduction is "harm promotion." What these tech billionaires and keyboard warriors fail to tell you is that drug addiction doesn’t happen in a vacuum typically. Neither does mental illness. Catastrophic events, such as losing one’s stability and home can be driving factors. Approx. 9 out of 10 folks here lost their last housing as a result of economic hardship, not drugs. And as a result of the trauma of being unhoused, some will turn to drug use. At the same time, during this so-called decline in the City, many of these same angry activists decry harm reduction principles, urging their state and local officials to deploy the national guard and more police to clean up their streets. They don't want "those" people here--they want them off "their" streets. They forced the city to shut down the Tenderloin Center which was offering harm reduction & supportive services to thousands of people in the area--leaving them with nowhere else to go. There are many lessons from my trip here--too many to fit into a single email (I'll have more, much more, to say in time). But to sum it up: what's happening in San Francisco is a microcosm of a much larger problem in this country. Extreme wealth disparity, lack of common decency and humanity, and a race to politicize what shouldn't be political: taking care of our own. This city is leaving its most vulnerable out to dry. It's wrong. The cause--and the solution--are not simple. Displacing people will not solve the problem. It's not as simple as "treatment" and "recovery" as some will claim. The next time you visit San Francisco, instead of taking a video of someone on the streets and posting it online, maybe offer them your spare change or a kind word. Don't be a part of the problem. It's going to take an entire shift in what we think we know to dismantle the systems of social oppression that I believe are the root causes behind what I saw here.

[4] Somebody spotted a Confederate Flag attached to a paving truck on I-91 [Connecticut] & called it in. Needless to say the State Police was notified and the Capital Region Hate Crime Task Force was mobilized. Other agencies as well sprang into action. An investigation was conducted. Turns out the crew, 2/3 of whom are black, found the flag discarded on the side of the road and stuck it on one of their trucks … just for laughs apparently. The State Police did not find it funny and the flag was ordered removed. No arrests were made, but we are assured the investigation continues.

[5] I’m located in a rather unusual spot in this small town that gives me very easy bicycle access to the town’s greenbelt/bicycle trail areas. I ride on some residential back streets for maybe 5 minutes and I’m there. These bike trails running around in undeveloped flood plain areas give me access to the main shopping areas. I go off trail at various convenient spots and ride on sidewalks and grassy areas behind stores and strip malls and I can shop without needing a car. I’ve got one of those bicycle trailers people use for hauling toddlers around. It can also haul a small dog or bulky groceries like paper towels and sacks of taters, tater chips, or even cheese doodles. If our towns and cities had been designed for both car and safe bicycle access – we wouldn’t be talking about a future transportation crisis. But people are too lazy, too out of shape, or too upset about being uncomfortable that such an arrangement seems impossible to them.

Compare us to Europe. I first learned to ride a bicycle in Germany, not here. Europe’s infrastructure is far more bicycle friendly than ours. Our culture for some reason is utterly obsessed with automobiles and we’ve burned ALL of our transportation bridges behind us. Unlike Europe, we have no passenger train service or convenient bus lines. Amtrak is a joke and not worth mentioning. Europe could still halfway function without automobiles. America, on the other hand, will disintegrate. Loss of the automobile culture will also mean the loss of most of the USA’s suburban lifestyle. Countless numbers of homes will become obsolete and cut up for scrap building materials. If you have no way to travel back and forth to work from these homes then all of that real estate will be abandoned.