JIM SHIELDS of the Mendocino County Observer out of Laytonville is at ground zero. He described the ugly July 8th episode this way:
A large crowd (25-30 people) of Laytonville residents were responsible for capturing and holding a man believed to have sexually assaulted a young girl until law enforcement officers arrived on the scene this past Saturday night, July 8th.
While the accused man was roughed up a bit by a few people in the crowd at the Laytonville Elementary School, he didn’t appear to be seriously injured. Most of those assembled at the school arrived there in response to information sent out on social media.
According the Mendocino County Sheriff’s Office, Trevor Wilson, 19, of Laytonville, was arrested and booked into the County Jail on charges of kidnapping for robbery and rape, contact with intent to commit lewd act with a minor, and lewd/lascivious acts with child under 14 with force. Bail was set $250,000.
Sheriff’s detectives are actively continuing their investigation and gathering evidence. It’s known that detectives have reviewed security camera footage at locations other than the elementary school where the incident ended shortly after 11 p.m. with Wilson’s arrest.
There are additional details regarding this incident that we are not publishing at this time due to the ongoing investigation."
FIRST A DISCLAIMER: The following derives from two persons not associated with my long-time Laytonville colleague, which I want to make clear so Jim Shields doesn't get hostile treatment for what I say about the episode he describes above.
A QUARTER OF A MILLION DOLLARS BAIL? For an apparently non-coerced relationship between an 18-year-old male and a 13-year-old female? Of course Trevor Wilson should have known better, and he has no excuse for intercourse, if there was intercourse, with a lightly supervised 13-year-old who, as persons close to the matter say, is experienced way beyond her years, a common occurrence in our debauched society that forces young people into knowledge and experiences they're too young to emotionally absorb.
I'LL BE INTERESTED in how DA Eyster handles this one, but it seems obvious — to me anyway — that justice wouldn't be served by packing the kid off to state prison. And I wonder at the high bail. Capitulation to the mob? Wilson was punched a few times just before the police arrived, and fortunately they did arrive promptly or the mob undoubtedly would have harmed him.
WILSON'S VICTIM, the 13-year-old, is apparently saying she was assaulted, taken advantage of, perhaps out of fear of her parents, but people close to the case say the relationship between the two was ongoing, consensual, if a 13-year-old can be said to be consenting.
KEEPING UP WITH THE DOOMERS:
(1) Rural areas will not fare any better as the starving gangs of hungry people will fan out to the rural areas and destroy them. If there is no food in the City they will go where the food is and that will be large multitudes. If an imminent hammer comes down it will affect us all. There is no safe place to hide or sit out the calamity.
(2) Keep the last round in your chamber reserved for yourself. There are many things far worse than death.
(3) I can see communities banding together and sharing resources. I can see churches bringing in their people to protect food, medicines and resources. Everything is about to become more and more localized. God help all of us.
(4) None of what you say will happen because when the grid goes down the rule of 3 takes over. The elements can kill a person in 3 hours. You will freeze to death if it is cold and you will suffer heat stroke if in the Sun for too long. People trying to walk their way out of the cities and suburbs will just die tired. Lack of clean drinking water will kill a person in about 3 days. Someone making their way out of their safe suburb into the wilds better be able to pack plenty of clean water for the trip because they wont find any along the way. Lack of food will put someone out of commission after about 3 weeks. Having to road march yourself around in the wilderness looking for people to sneak up on is hungry work. Good luck with that.
5) I’ll say it again, if you live in a city or suburb then there is no point in prepping. Just party like it is 1999.
ON THE SUBJECT of dope, a subject perennially up front for fifty years now in Mendo county, I was startled by a couple of episodes on COPS — excellent cinema verite — the other night. A Kansas City law officer rolled on a call where he had to deal with a guy who’d been smoking marijuana dipped in formaldehyde, the effects of which seem to be something like PCP-induced berserk. In a second segment filmed in Las Vegas, a posse of cops arrested a van load of hats-backward remedial readers and their debbies who had been driving around “partying” by sniffing gold spray paint, smoking pot and drinking beer. What’ll those darn kids think of next? Smoking pot and drinking beer is, of course, a widespread method of annhilating time, but sniffing spray paint? Formaldehyde? Nostalgics may recall that wonderful mescaline that came and went in a couple of months back in 1968. But now, altered states of consciousness are harsh, often lethal, but consistent with the harsh, lethal times, I guess.
A FRIEND mentioned that he was a “double cousin.” I asked him if he was the functioning product of incest. “Nope,” he said, “double cousins happen when sisters marry brothers — brothers unrelated to the sisters.” (Whew)!
INTERNET TRAFFIC, according to the usual unreliable sources, is doubling every 100 days. I know it isn’t reasonable to deduce much of anything from the random hour or so I spent on the Net the other afternoon, but I didn’t see a single thing worth reading, a single conversation I felt any impulse to join, didn’t learn a single thing I didn’t know, wasn’t moved to get in touch with anyone in the global village. Besides which, the cyber-journey screen was stuffed with advertising and so many frenetic visuals while the thing buzzed and beeped and sang at me that I felt slightly exhausted just looking at it. And now, with millions living in their telephones, small wonder people have a hard time focusing on anything that isn’t gone in a second and a half. I feel fortunate to be book and magazine-dependent.
WHATEVER HAPPENED to the “95/5 bill”? Prop 223 back in 1997 was aimed at the decapitation of redundant school administrators, especially in places like the Mendocino County Office of Education where a slug of lemur-like paper shufflers draw fancy pay for performing tasks of no discernible educational value. Prop 223 limited school administration to 5% of a school district budget. MCOE, a relic of the 19th century when one county superintendent of schools and one secretary functioned as a county hiring hall, then dispatching teachers by horseback to all areas of far flung Mendocino County. MCOE these days is all administrative, but not performing a single task that couldn’t be done cheaper and more efficiently by the individual school districts of the county. (Ukiah Unified has become a mini-MCOE, with roughly 60 people in-servicing and swapping unintelligible memos, all paid at least twice the average private Mendo wage, all allegedly supervised by chummy school boards who regard themselves as part of “the administrative team.)
The long overdue 223 initiative was brought to us by the teachers’ unions to break up the cozy relationships that school boards and school administrators have built up over the years to the great detriment of public ed. What happened? The admin blob and their stooge school boards crushed 223.
THE ARTICLE BEGINS: “Change Our Name Fort Bragg went public this weekend with its intention to petition California’s Advisory Committee on Geographic Names to change the Mendocino coastal town’s name, which they decry for its evocation of ‘genocide, extreme violence, and structural racism of white supremacy’.”
IT EVOKES no such thing, and can't evoke this rote catechism of the show biz righteous because no one in Fort Bragg or Mendocino County even knew who Braxton Bragg was until the green hairs brought him up.
AS IT HAPPENS, I enjoyed a lunch with Ukiah friends this very afternoon, and Name Change Fort Bragg came up. Everyone groaned. It's a fake issue brought by fake liberals who are also lazy and without faith in their own posturing, self-alleged principles which, if they believed in their own advertised principles they would do the work of signature gathering and put Name Change on the ballot. They don't do that because of their aforementioned sloth and because they know the overwhelming majority of Fort Bragg people, recognizing phonies when they move into town, would slam dunk the Name Changers. “Look at us. We're against racism and genocide.” Maestro, if you please, a quick chorus of ‘Love Me, I'm A Liberal.’
FORT BRAGG got its name when a junior officer in the pre-Civil War hoped to score some brownie points with Braxton Bragg, an officer a rung or two above the brown noser in the Army's command structure.
BRAGG, a Southern slave owner, was not yet a traitor, which he became when he later fought with the Confederate army as a general, by some accounts the least competent Confederate commander of all and widely disliked by his fellow soldiers and regarded by the great Ulysses S. Grant as highly irritating even before his Civil War treachery.
AMONG the first wave settlers were a disproportionate number of dissolute single men, many of them criminals on the lam from other areas of the United States. These walking syphilis sticks preyed on the native people and were generally a disruptive presence on the freshly established and, initially, prospering rez. Everyone complained about them, hence that first platoon-size military presence.
BRAXTON BRAGG never visited his namesake fort, lightly manned — personed, Name Changers? — by an initial consignment of twenty soldiers assigned to crack down on the predatory white lowlifes who were disrupting life on the rez. There was no other civil authority on the Mendocino Coast than this minor military presence.
AND Fort Bragg, apart from a modest and barely visible plaque on Main Street, has never otherwise acknowledged or recognized Braxton Bragg, let alone celebrated him.
AT NO TIME on the Mendocino Coast were soldiers involved in wholesale murders of the native people. Those atrocities occurred in the Eel River Basin where a year-long assault on native people was funded by the State of California at the urging of Serranus Hastings, chief justice of California’s first supreme court after whom the famous Bay Area law school is named. White vigilantes, and at least one black tough guy employed by “The King of Round Valley,” George E. White, also slaughtered Indians who, it should be said, fought back as best they could without guns and horses and continued to fight back through the first decade of the twentieth century.
WHAT'S MOST ANNOYING about the Name Changers is their totalitarian view of American history. To hear them, the country was poisoned by the founding atrocities of slavery and extermination of many native peoples. Call me Mr. Pollyanna, but with the Name Changers it’s as if America hasn't seen eight years of a popularly elected black president and there aren't literally millions of genuinely affectionate, loyal, inter-racial relationships where, in 1950, there were virtually none. Name Change Fort Bragg is a non-issue brought by fake liberals.
WHATEVER HAPPENED TO THE MEC? Which translates as the Mendocino Environment Center, Ukiah, where in its salad days, employed three paid staffers whose pay came from mysterious sources. There was also an environment center in Willits, the WEC, funded primarily by David and Ellen Drell, and a second MEC briefly in the village of Mendocino.
THE MEC was located just across the street from the County Courthouse’s north side at 106 West Standley. It was the first environment center in the county and it was organized by Gary and Betty Ball who blew in here from Colorado about the same time as the late Judi Bari appeared with her then-husband, Mike Sweeney, and blew outtahere shortly after Judi Bari's death in '97. Sweeney and Bari made their headquarters at the MEC, from where, in my opinion, Sweeney placed that car bomb beneath the driver's seat of his ex-wife's Subaru.
THE BUILDING housing the MEC was and is owned by John McCowen, who donated use of the space. Perhaps. I think McCowen was well compensated by a federal source but he's always been vague on subjects involving him and money. The scion of an old Ukiah Valley family, a Ukiah planning commissioner and finally a Supervisor where he was non-personed and libeled by his treacherous colleagues and County CEO Mommy Dearest, McCowen these days devotes huge amounts of his time to cleaning up homeless camps along inland waterways, for which unsung labor, risky labor at that, he deserves the highest of high marks.
THE MEC too often confirmed timber industry propaganda that environmentalists were marginal people heavy on nut cases. Bari's genius, and the pure force of her formidable will, was to get the whole enviro mob, including the outpatients, marching against the cut and run corporate timber companies. Major demonstrations at Samoa (HumCo) and Fort Bragg, and finally, Fortuna, “the friendly city,” drew several thousand enviros and seemed to frighten the ruthless boys in the big timber suites, but those demos pretty much brought down the curtain on the movement.
AT THE PEAK of the timber wars period, circa 1990, the powerful San Francisco ad agency, Hill and Knowlton, was hired by the timber industry to create the Yellow Ribbon campaign, pegged to the fanciful propaganda that timber families were honest working people while the environmentalists demonstrating against them were feckless dope heads who didn't even get out of bed until noon.
THAT BIG LIE was effective. Yellow ribbons were everywhere up and down the Northcoast.
THE COUNTY'S environmental community, such as it was at the time, has been pretty much in remission ever since. Rather than a MEC, it would have been more effective to simply assess itself to pay a couple of smart, full-time attorneys to challenge the most egregious timber harvest plans.
THE MEC was never radical in any recognizable political sense except briefly during the pre-bombing period of the Bari meteor. Post bombing, it became a Bari fundraising cum Bari media center, and from there, on into ineffective this, and pointless that.
UNDER THE BALLS, the MEC functioned primarily as an Earth First! clearinghouse. A major prob with the MEC in its Earth First! incarnation was that it was an insider’s game that most environmentally-concerned people chose not to play, which is why, I’m sure, the much more efficient, better informed WEC was established.
IN THE MEC’s march to pre-eminent “activist” headquarters, old-line environmentalists like Ron Guenther and Helen Libeu were shoved aside, or simply ignored, in favor of the show biz antics of Earth First! whose local membership had no roots in the communities EF! claimed to be saving from themselves, and no ability or willingness to engage in the bureaucratic-legal slog which is still the only way to stop the destruction of what's left of the natural world. Although the MEC occasionally paid lip service to other issues, it wasn't missed when it faded away entirely.
I'M LOOKING BACK like this, explained the garrulous old coot, in the hope that if a serious study of the MEC interlude is ever written, it won't be the romantic fantasy some of its principals seem to think it was.
ANDREW LUTSKY: Re Ed Notes … “At no time on the Mendocino Coast were soldiers involved in wholesale murders of the native people. Those atrocities occurred in the Eel River Basin where a year-long assault on native people was funded by the State of California at the urging of Serranus Hastings, chief justice of California’s first supreme court after whom the famous Bay Area law school is named.” I assume Bruce Anderson is referring to the school that was renamed UC Law SF and formerly known as UC Hastings College of the Law. It seems noteworthy that today the school’s ‘Our Mission & History’ web page (https://www.usfca.edu/law) makes absolutely no mention of the school’s founder just one year after the name change went into effect and after 144 years operating under the founder’s name. From what I have read Hastings was a sociopath to whom we and future generations owe absolutely nothing. I support dropping his name, and I also believe we owe it to the future generation to tell his story, not attempt to redact his existence from history in the manner this UC appears to favor.”
I AGREE. I almost regret the obliteration of Hastings. I would have preferred an asterisk comment on Hastings' letterhead denoting his crimes. But considering the performances of many law school graduates, having the name of a killer and thief on their diplomas is probably appropriate.
A READER WRITES: “You are skipping the part where many of the Native people incarcerated on the ‘rez’ were force marched…by white invaders… over the hills from the Ukiah Valley, with what little of their former lives they could carry. Many died along the way. After the ‘rez’ on the Coast was closed and the land parceled off to white ‘settlers,’ what Native people who had not already escaped were again force marched all the way to Round Valley. That history is ugly and needs to be spoken out loud. As for the name change, when and if a broad consensus of the citizens of Fort Bragg (I am a recent arrival) decide that the name needs to be changed, it will. Until then, ego driven agitation only creates backlash.”
NOBODY familiar with the facts would deny that early Mendocino County was a scene of unrelieved atrocity, the worst and most shocking crimes occurring inland where Jarboe's Ranger's were paid per murder by the State of California. Ahem, Boonville's beloved weekly has drawn much attention to these horrors over the years, early on seeming to be one of the few persons who'd read the seminal document, “Genocide and Vendetta,’ never a truer title for a rare book confirming what had previously only been whispered, that the native peoples of inland Mendocino County had been systematically hunted down and killed, many of the atrocities being carried out on the reservations on the Mendocino coast and, later, in Covelo. Defective as he was as a human being, Braxton Bragg had nothing to do with these crimes. As for systemic racism, how about taking on systemic capitalism, the indiscriminate, steadily intensifying, multi-cultural boot-on-the-neck of millions of people of all ethnicities? That's the root of the racism the Name Changers claim to be fighting by their trivial, irrelevant, fundamentally unserious effort to re-write American history, along with the name of Fort Bragg.
PS, a second ahem: Years ago a young man called who identified himself as a Native American. He said he was a law student at Hastings. He asked me if the story in the mighty ava about Hastings was true? I cited chapter and verse. I may be flattering myself, but I think that man's inquiry was the beginning of the end for a UC school of law named after the man who'd set in motion Jarboe's Raiders. In short, Hastings, the chief justice of California's first State Supreme Court, moved in on the Indians at Hidden Valley to establish a horse ranch. (Hidden Valley is tucked away south of Laytonville and a little east of Willits.) Hastings hired a 6'6" psychopath called Texan Boy Hall as his foreman. Hall, predictably, proceeded to wildly mistreat the people who'd lived in the valley since time immemorial and, in retaliation, the Indians killed Hastings' prized brood stallion, which prompted Hastings, on his authority as the state's leading legal man, arranged for Jarboe — later Ukiah's first lawman — to murder all the Indians he and his rangers could find in the entire Eel River Basin. The killing went on for a year.
THE REDWOOD FAIR honoring Jitu Ishwar at its annual “VIP” dinner last weekend for community service overlooked the grim fact that Ishwar sabbed a stunningly beautiful plan by Minal Shankar to re-create the Palace Hotel in a form that would have been a major gift to the people of Ukiah and Mendocino County.
With Ishwar now driving the Palace bus, if we get anything at all on the Palace site, we're likely to see a Motel Six with a McDonald's franchise in the basement. Ms. Shankar's plans, which I was fortunate to see, were imaginative and doable because she had the resources and the staff to bring them off. She was all set to begin work at the beginning of this summer when this Ishwar guy stepped in to try to shake down Ms. Shankar for a lot more money than his share was worth, causing her to withdraw.
ADAM GASKA, CANDIDATE FOR 1ST DISTRICT SUPERVISOR
Friday night at the Redwood Valley Community Water District meeting we rescinded resolution 2021-01 which put domestic users on water rationing on May 4th, 2021.
Not to say that we should waste water or not be conservation minded. We had been in drought for 3 years and have had one good year. The next drought is right around the corner. We still don't have much in the way of water security but we are working on it.
You don't have to feel guilty using more than 55 gallons per person per day but please still be conservation minded. If and when necessary, we may have to reimpose rationing.
If you are thinking of planting a drought hardy landscape or trees, this would be a good year. Fall is a good time to plant. You could water them well to get better established especially if we have a dry fall. The better root system they put down in fall, the stronger they will be going into the following summer.
Picture is of my home garden, mulched well and on drip.
STEVE HEILIG: RFK Jr.’s nutty views and the fact that his own family is ashamed and embarrassed by him aren’t the main issue now. He’s mainly funded by yes, right-wing GOP/Trump donors who are all too happy to use him to con naive folks into electing Trump, or someone like him. They know what they’re doing. People who feel he’s somehow progressive don’t. The realpolitik here is some rough stuff.
I THINK JR. is a mixed bag, better on lots of issues than the Democrat's shot callers, hopeless on sensible policies in Israel that might protect the Palestinians and, of course, dangerously wrong on the medical opinions he doles out to the credulous. But who needs MAGA sabs when you have the DNC's unhinged harridans going nuts on Jr. on national tv and attempting to censor him at, of all things, a committee hearing on censorship! Jr. got a huge boost from that DNC freakout and came off as much more intelligent and articulate and saner than any of them.
THE DEMOCRATS have a huge dilemma; they've got to somehow plausibly dump Biden while Jr. comes on stronger and stronger, especially with black and brown voters.
THE DNC'S policies and candidate (Biden? Really?) will get Trump re-elected, not Jr's insurgent campaign or the usual third party of Democrat dissidents who can't stomach what the Democrats have become. And count me as a third party voter as I have been for the past fifty years. The last Democrat I voted for was McGovern.
WHAT WE'RE GETTING is what we always get from the DNC. Support our candidate or the country gets the unthinkable, nevermind that for the past two presidential elections the DNC has given us the only two candidates who could possibly lose to Trump — Hillary and Biden.
IT'S STILL EARLY, THOUGH. Trump may not be a done deal. Lots of the big reactionary money doesn't like him. DeSantis, much worse imo, could pull it out. But anybody the Republicans put up against Biden is likely to knock him off.
WHO DO THE DEMOCRATS have who can beat Trump? Newsom. Maybe. He's the Democrat’s only alternative, and hard to say how he'd do against the orange beast.
GIVEN the accumulating, unaddressed catastrophes coming at US, there is no one in either party who inspires even the slightest confidence.
JADE TIPPETT GIVES UP: I had a serious mental health crisis last Thursday night, behind the stress of being on the Mendocino Coast Health Care District Board.
I sent the following to the Board and the County Clerk Assessor Recorder:
Gentlepeople:
Unfortunately, for mental health reasons, I find it necessary to resign my position on the Board of the Mendocino Coast Health Care District, effective immediately.
I genuinely believe that I am leaving the District better than I found it. There is much more work to do, but at this time, I need to step back, regroup, heal and rediscover joy in living.
I apologize to the people of the District who voted for me and placed their faith in me. I ask for kindness and forgiveness, but this is something I must do to take care of myself.
A READER WRITES: Catching up on my AVA reading, I'm up to July 5. I was really sad to read Paul Dolan's obituary. He was truly an all-around nice guy. I went online to read his other obituaries. They were all extremely positive about him as a person, but nobody mentioned that he was a great teacher. I took his introductory winemaking course at Mendocino college in the early 80s. He was empathic in his teaching methods. He made sure that students understood what he was saying. I also learned from him that I really did not want to make wine! However, he was the inspiration for me planting 100 vines in front of my house on the top of Spyrock. I was young enough and dumb enough not to know that our frost free day was early June and that if I were lucky, I might have enough grapes to eat once every 10 years, but the leaves are always pretty in the fall. When the class ended, I think everyone was very sad to not have that one day a week with him. What a great guy. RIP Paul.
STEPHEN ROSENTHAL to Supervisor Ted Williams: “…I’ll give you one thing: you’re quite skilled at avoiding uncomfortable questions and making it appear that you are providing a detailed explanation.”
EGGSACTLY. I give Williams high marks for wading in to refute his critics on our comment line, the only supervisor, apart from John McCowen, to do so. Ever. But comrade Rosenthal is correct; Williams is indeed a master of seeming to provide knowledgeable refutations of this or that criticism without doing so. I'll read the Supervisor's response three or four times in fruitless searches for meaning, and come away, brow furrowed, as uninformed as I began. Maybe Williams is a secret comedian. Maybe he enjoys tossing out bafflegab to his mystified constituents, which would be very funny, at least to me, if that's what he's up to. But I've never gotten so much as a whiff of irony outta the dude sooooo… And like Mr. Rosenthal I would like an explanation of the uniquely premature, extremely weird endorsement of Trevor Mockel for Supervisor, naturally seconded by his four snoozing colleagues with no questions asked.
HERE'S PROBABLY how the Mockel endorsement went down: State Senator McGuire told Williams he wanted Mockel for a Supervisor's sinecure, 80-plus grand a year for two meetings a month and maybe five phone calls a week from duped constituents. Mockel, who seems to be more or less unemployable, is a former aide to McGuire, and the way the monarchical Democrats of the Northcoast operate, and Williams being one of their most loyal serfs, Williams snapped to, “Yes, sir, Senator. No prob getting the Mockel endorsement from the other four. Hell, they don't even read the agenda until they show up for meetings. They'll wave Mockel right on through. Er, who is he again?”
MY COLLEAGUE, The Major, USAF ret., a man with the powers of recall as formidable as the proverbial elephant, occasionally responds to Williams, citing chapter and verse. Williams either doesn't respond, a sure sign he's been caught jiving us again, or he launches anohter one of his bafflegab rockets. The guy's an interesting case, for sure.
THE ICO out of Gualala, or, as the weekly paper might prefer, “MendoNoma,” is a welcome read here at the ava mostly, I'll confess, for signs of unconsciously funny headlines of the plodding, off-putting type. How boring can they get? The ICO seldom disappoints. “Sonoma Supervisors approve long-awaited LCP,” and a metaphorical chloroform-soaked rag slaps the reader into an instant coma. “Mendocino County appraised valuation on the rise — more tax revenue on the horizon,” which is both untrue and boring. “Smart phones may fail in extreme heat waves,” good news for sure, but hardly worth five hundred words, or any words at all beyond the hed.
THESE SNORERS were from page 3. I counted 10 more throughout. But darned if the dauntless Southcoast weekly didn't knock it outta the park with this rare bit of headline wit: “Pier Pressure: Point Arena committee seeks solutions for cash-strapped cove.” Not bad, and intriguing enough to get me to read the story by Noah Leffler. Promote the kid to headline editor immediately!
ON LINE COMMENTS OF THE WEEK
[1] The air of unreality emanating from the Crack House at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave must have even the most indoctrinated of Dems going “WTF?” and “How do we dump this guy?” The baby-chomping Cannibal Joe video must have caused some anxiety for even some of the most hard cores.
I reckon the air of unreality surrounding our institutions is about chock full for how much bullshit the population can swallow without vomiting. I’ve never seen such an assault of nonsense on the senses as we’ve endured over the past going on 8 years now. Jebus H! Nearly a decade of utter codswallop spit at us incessantly as lying about everything has taken on an almost physical form, a miasmatic foul cloud of the worst-ever in my lifetime of experiences. Will it ever wash off?
[2] I managed to live decades without knowing that Fort Bragg was named for a Confederate general. I suspect many people in northern California did also, and now that they know they probably question whether it’s worth the bother and expense of changing the name to satisfy a bunch of culture warriors. This should be up to the residents of Fort Bragg and only them, but if they do change it it could be for someone also a bit roguish. Perhaps Black Bart City.
[3] The majority of Fort Bragg residents don’t want to change the name – bottom line.
Lt. Gibson named the town after Braxton Bragg, but Bragg never set foot in the area. Should have been called Ft. Gibson. I think Bragg was a fkn scumbag, but that is beside the point.
This is a superficial distraction, as usual. The institutionalized corruption from the Federal gov on down is plain to see, but no one wants to talk about that. PG&E literally gets away with murder, price-gouges its customers and causes home/fire insurance to skyrocket. The state won’t do anything to stop the insurance scalpers, or PG&E. It’s bipartisan – both factions of the Country Club (So-called republicans and democrats) support corporate extortion. They get “campaign contributions” (bribes) from the oligarchy. Political bribery is now legal (see Citizens United case) So, this BS about name changes is a giant superficial distraction from the rampant corruption and decline of our country. … The folks who think the most important issue we face is the town name need to stop acting like callous, ivory-tower hypocrites and acknowledge facts: that the entire US was founded on genocide, slavery, exploitation, imperialism, elitism and corruption. I don’t like the facts either but we can’t go back and change it. You can’t project today’s values onto the past, it is inaccurate and irrational.
If the hand-wringing (mostly upper middle class whites) so-called liberals are concerned about injustice: look at the skyrocketing houseless population, and the “too big to fail” above-the-law banksters who get bailed out after they commit financial fraud. The banks rip us off and the corrupt ass politricksters of both parties REWARD them. Honest working-class folks (including large numbers of non-white and whites alike) get ripped off, foreclosed on by the banksters. But the name-change crowd apparently don’t give a toss about the suffering of people NOW. No matter what color you are, what orientation, we are all getting shafted – don’t fall for the divide and rule BS.
Instead of superficial distractions, how about speaking out against the Supreme Court accepting bribes?, sending billions to Israel, Ukraine etc. in weapons to mass murder folks. If they want to mass murder people, why does the US taxpayer foot the bill, and why do the weapons companies get triple-digit profits on the contracts? (rhetorical question).
The gov. says they are “broke” and want to steal our SS/Medicare that we already paid for. (But they have plenty of 100s of billions for weapons etc.)
None of this is important to the privileged ivory-tower folks: they can afford the most expensive “health care” in the world (in the USA), they don’t get foreclosed on, they don’t have credit problems, they don’t become houseless. The most important issue they see is a name. No wonder our society is slowly collapsing.
[4] Well, right from the gitgo it was pretty clear, in order to meet the mandates of Paris Climate Accord, National Govts would need to crack down on their own populations. We see the results in Sri Lanka, Yellow Vests in France, farm closures in the Netherlands. Here in the US our National Power Grid is being dismantled. I can tell you right now when the brownouts & blackouts begin to happen, people aren’t going to be happy. Already utility bills are becoming unaffordable here, jacked up nearly 100% over two years ago to pay for the “Transition to Renewables.” But our big signature windfarm project — which was supposed to be fully operational by 2030 and replace the nuclear power plant, scheduled to be shutdown — is already mired in graft & corruption, with the director under indictment, with not one offshore Windturbine near completion. It’s a fiasco.
[5] Black bear 1, Human 0. I love black bears. The southern tip of the PNW is full of wildlife as they have thousands of acres of forest beyond the minimally developed, 1 mile inland coastal strip from Little River to points North. They are currently hungry as the salal berries, blackberry, and elderberries are not ripe yet. Hence, it’s time for the younger single bears with only semi viable habitat to venture out and raid the easy pickens (garbage from humans) or harder pickens (uninhabited trailers with kind tasty smells) to tear apart and raid. Cannot blame them, we occupy their space. It is one of the best examples of Natural Selection at work. Lots of those young adult bears will get hit on 101, starve, be shot, or the strongest will survive by moving to prime forest habitat by displacing older, weaker, mature adult bears. Amazingly simple, Natural Selection!
[6] Years ago, maybe a week after the new 100-dollar bills came out, someone broke into my house during the day and stole money off my dresser.
They emptied a bowl of change and took it, but left about $800 in new hundreds, laying on the dresser – not having seen the new hundreds and thinking they were some kind of Monopoly money.
That was of course when I was single and had lots of hundreds – now I’m down to a bowl of change – emptied by my wife on the regular.
[7] SAN FRANCISCO VS TOKYO, an on-line comment:
I have spent a bit of time in Tokyo, and it is really a cool city, so I appreciate this article. But the idea that San Francisco should be focusing on any of those things (even if we could) amounts to rearranging the deck chairs on the titanic. What Tokyo has, and what most successful cities have, is that they havent allowed their policy planning and execution to become captives of deeply ideological entities like our own homeless industrial complex here, that insists that the only compassionate thing to do is to allow people to commit slow suicide by Fentanyl in our streets. They arrest drug dealers (and street criminals in general) imprison some for significant periods to establish a deterrent. They treat policing as an honorable occupation, so that decent people will still sign on for the danger and stress the job entails. They are grownups and they govern that way. I wish we had some grown-ups here.
[8] We’ve got a church across the street where a guy goes out front at 8:00 AM sharp on Sundays and blows a big sheep’s horn. No fancy getup or ceremony or anything, just the horn, always on time and never misses. Kinda cool. “Gathering the flock” and all that. I give him a big old thumbs up when I’m out in the yard, even though I’m not part of their flock.
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