Off the Record (August 2, 2023)

PROMINENT COAST REALTOR, PAM HUDSON, lost big recently in the superior courtroom of Judge Nadel. Not a complicated case but confirmed in the usual mound of legal paperwork confirming that Ms. Hudson looted the family trust in both senses as its trustee, signing over mom's house to herself and also routing a big slug of mom's assets to herself. “Respondent (Pam Hudson) intentionally and in bad faith breached her fiduciary duties as trustee of the trust…” etc. and so on to the tune of a little over a cool mil, which she has now been ordered to pay her two ripped-off siblings.

KATHY WYLIE: Re: Real Estate Broker Pamela Hudson: The public should refer to the appeal filed by attorney Brian Momsen which showed that the entire judgement was improper and no wrongdoing was ever committed. Court of Appeal Case No: A161811. Superior Court No: SCUK CVPB 2016-26644

SO A READER ASKS ME: “Why bother with those on-line Ukraine blurbs every day?” Because, taken together, they represent a slow march to catastrophe for all of us, already so large a catastrophe for Ukraine that all the money in the world won't be able to build it back, not to mention all the young men on both sides fed into the machinery of slaughter. There should be a negotiated settlement, but when I watch the State Department lightweights on our side coughing up stuttering cliches on tv news blips, I know in my bones they're not up to it. Almost makes a guy nostalgic for Kissinger. Biden, insofar as some people seem to believe he's functioning on any cognitive level, is dispatching long range missiles to Ukraine, meaning they'll inevitably be launched at Russia, and then Vlad will break out the “tactical” nukes, and on some soft summer evening as we watch the setting sun turn Mendo's summer hills a rich, priceless gold, there will be a flash and… Cormac McCarthy's ‘The Road’ spells out the last consequences of all this.

PERHAPS the only two encouraging developments over the past fifty years in our doomed country have been the radical improvement in race relations and the onset at all age levels, women's sports. Oh, and a third — bread. Real bread has been available now for many years. People of my vintage spent our formative years on a diet of milk and Wonder Bread chokers (peanut butter and jelly sandwiches), women didn't play sports, and every area of the country was rigidly ghetto-ized.

I READ an on-line blurb the other day from a Bay Area journalist talking about crime in Oakland. The responses fell into one of three categories:

1: There is no crime in Oakland!

2: There has always been crime in Oakland. 

3: You're a racist for reporting about crime in Oakland. 

Everyone who gave one of the above three responses seemed to be a white “progressive” who have the luxury of not caring about crime because they will rarely be affected directly. It doesn't seem to bother them what happens to crime victims, who are primarily poor people of color. The virtue signaling claim of “I am so progressive, I live in Oakland and don't worry about crime” is more important to them than reducing crime itself.

THEN there was this comment: “I live in a white middle-class neighborhood in Oakland. Moved here 30 years ago. Most of us want to stay here, we love our neighborhoods. Oakland is a great neighborhood city. We hunker down and hope we won't be shot when we go out to eat or shop or exercise. We have little faith in the police because, well-staffed or not, they've done little to protect us when we travel outside the neighborhood. The city council seems to have few resources and the mayors suck up to the police as often as not. So we hunker down.”

A READER WRITES:

I found a place in Santa Rosa just off the Santa Rosa Ave. near the Napa auto store you take the stoplight that goes East Drive down the block and on the north side of the road with a little shopping mall is there's a place called chef’s supply, have bulk amounts of everything way cheaper than going to Cisco foods, or even Costco's virtual warehouse products for restaurants and bars, here's the address

CHEF'STORE® - SANTA ROSA

565 Barham Avenue Santa Rosa, CA 95404

707-543-5844

They are open every day, most days 6 AM to 7 PM except on Sunday, 8 AM to 5 PM, they have a local online ad and link up to other stores throughout the state.

You will be pleasantly surprised; they have bulk meat, and other products, produce, dry goods, and so very much more.

BACK when school shootings hadn't yet become an assumed part of the American psycho-scape, two junior high boys in Jonesboro, Arkansas, gunned down several of their female classmates. A letter by Marie DeSantis soon appeared in the Press Democrat. It began, “The targeted mass shooting of school girls in Arkansas, like so many other massacres and mass mayhem of the last decade, was driven by sexism.” 

MY FIRST reaction was that I thought the two pre-teen shooters were a little young for lethal misogyny, and I wondered at the uncharacteristically blunt prose of DeSantis, a very good writer unlikely to resort to bludgeon-prose. Her book “California Currents” is the best thing I’ve read about fishing on the Northcoast. DeSantis was the first full-time fisher lady to work her own boat out of Noyo. But given the requirements of the PD’s letters page, the letter writer must be brief and direct; any and all nuance will be excised by the editorial offices. Don't even try irony.

DeSANTIS went from trolling salmon to trolling the grim waters of rape as the Community Services Coordinator for Sonoma County’s Women Against Rape. It was her job to show up in the emergency room when a woman had been sexually assaulted and steer the victim and her family through the justice labyrinth while sorting out atrocity stories, evaluating them, and trying to make things as right as they can be after the worst violation short of death has been suffered by the victim.

THIS LADY was exactly the right person for the job. She had a fully operational bullshit detector and she’s tough. And very smart and refreshingly articulate, never lapsing into the all-men-are-rapists rhetoric of the professional gender warriors.

DeSANTIS — no relation to the Florida ape — told me that the incidence of assault isn't encouraging, ranging from oafish disrespect of the “Hey, baby” type to overt violence, especially against young women.

SHE SAID that in one recent month her agency had recorded 80 new cases of sexual assault, 65 of them felony quality. She said the stats were “nothing new” and that only two of the cases were attacks by strangers, and included 15 new cases of school-age girls forcibly raped via beatings, screwdrivers, ropes, guns, knives, drugs, instruments of torture, handcuffs and, almost always, threats to kill. About a third of these rapes were done by school-age boys who were angry with their girlfriends.

AS A MAN nearing the very top of mortality's actuarial table, a single episode involving any of these assaults would have been front page news in my formative years, and mistreatment of women of all ages, in the rare episodes I was aware of, was often met by direct retaliation by the woman's male relatives. These days, however, criminal violence is celebrated in film and song, and we're so used to atrocity stories on the evening’s television calamity reports that as shocking as the horror stories are — the Long Island killer has been front and center for a month now — we know a fresh batch is coming right up.

“THERE’S A BIG PROBLEM,” DeSantis said, “with the schools’ handling of post-rape victims. Young girls are being raped, and schools tend to be insensitive to both its high incidence and its aftermaths. Rape is a high voltage charge.”

“WHAT HAPPENS is that a suspect, usually in the same social circle as his victim 99% of the time, defends himself like a criminal. He gathers a gang and pressures the victim via his and her social circle via social media. The intensity of the pressure often drives girls right out of school, and the school typically tries to cover it all up, hoping the episode and its aftermath will somehow go away.”

“USUALLY, it’s Mom who goes to bat for her kid, but the cops are typically very hard on a mother who pressures the police to investigate an assault on her daughter.” DeSantis says a lot of cops imply to parents of young rape victims that a lack of parental supervision has gotten their child attacked, as if the parent’s absence during the event somehow made it possible if not justified. “The pure violence of rape is downplayed as understandable because the young woman is staying out late with the wrong people. She ought to live in a society where she wouldn’t be raped no matter where or who she happened to be with,” DeSantis emphasizes.

SHE TALKED FAST, smart, and funny about how uncomfortable the cops become when they have to talk about the mechanics of sexual assault in the presence of a young victim. I can’t think of any men I know who’d feel comfortable interviewing a rape victim, but then I feel increasingly like a stranger in a very strange land.

“IT’S KINDA FUNNY,” DeSantis says, “watching these big dudes stuttering as they rack their puritanical minds for a euphemism for ‘ejaculate.’ That one drove one guy right out of the room he was so embarrassed. They’re the most fortressed white male mentality left in the nation,” DeSantis said. “But,” she hastened to add, “it’s getting better. There are individual rape units around the country that are very good.”

AN ADDITIONAL PROBLEM faced by the victim and her family is often the District Attorney. “They tend to treat the criminal code like a menu,” DeSantis claims, often knocking rape off the dinner list in favor of lesser charges. “For the epidemic to be brought under control, cops, prosecutors, victims, and advocates all have to work together. It doesn’t happen often,” the counselor laments, her voice trailing off.

“RAPE runs the spectrum of the population,” DeSantis tells me, “just like domestic violence. Generally, the men who rape still cling to old stereotypes about women. Beyond that unifying factor, they come from the proverbial all walks of life.” She calls assaults on women “crimes of entitlement. They’re not like crimes coming out of deprivation. Men raised to think that women belong to them, feel they can do whatever they want to their wives and girlfriends.”

WITH a sort of smiling through the apocalypse sign-off, the former fisher lady told me that overall she thought “the situation” — women in a berserk society — “was better. A lot of the horrible stuff is in reaction to the real advances women have made. It’s like the Reconstruction in a way. Lots of people couldn’t adjust to equality for blacks. Lots of men can’t adjust to women as equals.”

I DUNNO. I think men beat or rape women because they can get away with it, just like men used to be able to murder black people and get away with it. Maybe the boys will adjust, maybe they won’t. The entertainment industry seems to be betting on more of the same, and sexual assault is more common now than when I last talked with Marie almost 30 years ago.

JEFF BLANKFORT

Another experience in Amman in 1970 is worth retelling and may help to explain my feelings about Israel and Israelis. I was invited to stay overnight at Schneller Camp, which housed refugees from 1967, by a young guard at the PLO HQ who shared a small metal hut there with a few other young refugees. There was no room for furniture, just for the stack of their thin mattresses which they stretched out on the floor at night before going to sleep.

Before turning in, they would get into pajamas and have a smoke, squatting outside in the night. When my host took off his shirt to put on his pajama top I noticed that his upper body, back and chest, was covered with small scars. When I asked what they were he explained that when he was 17, the Israelis had arrested him, and believing that he was fedayeen, a resistance, fighter, they wanted him to inform on his comrades.

Since he was not fedayeen, he had nothing to tell them which they finally came to believe, but not before they had repeatedly pressed burning cigarettes against his chest and back and broken both of his arms by pressing them backwards at his elbows. He then became a fedayeen.

That was 44 years ago, but I knew then that there was little difference between Nazi Germany and Zionist Israel, a feeling that would only be re-enforced by later experiences in Lebanon, the West Bank, and Gaza.

There is, however, one significant difference. There was a civilized Germany both before and after WW2. Naziism was an aberration. Israel and Zionism are inseparable. There can be no Israel without Zionism, thus, to be an anti-Zionist, one MUST be anti-Israel. That's a point that needs to made over and over.

RECOMMENDED READING. MAYBE: ‘Notorious B.I.G.’ by Jake Brown. If you ever wonder why so many black kids are shooting each other these days, this bio of the late rapper, Biggie Smalls, is a learning experience for mystified white people. As a perfectly contra-indicated role model, Smalls' brief life — he was shot to death in '97 at the age of 24 — is instructive. He was indeed a kind of creative genius as a composer of the rhythmic doggerel that reflects ghetto street life, but it’s a life of romanticized drugs and violence that's not overtly recommended in this man’s rap but, to millions of young people, it's seductive, I guess, because the doomed life it describes seems more exciting than the old 9-5. 

A FRIEND sends along a story on Orr Hot Springs from the travel section of a Seattle paper. How many times over the years have the corporate media dispatched one of their voyeurs to write up the nude hot tubbers at Orr? Annually, it seems. A reader put the experience this way: “The no-clothes part doesn’t come easily for me, either, but if that’s what it takes to sit in a tub of greasy, luke-warm water with a nude grandmother, I’ll waddle pink-butted and shrunk-balled through five miles of snow drifts before I do it!” 

A READER WRITES: Took this pic a few years ago, while traveling. 

I love road side attractions and it was on the list. The plaque honored the ladies of the night during the gold rush. However, it disappeared and was returned in 2021 due to a town controversy. I guess way back in the gold rush days they trafficked women. Some say the town flourished with every brothel that opened. Anyway, the ladies of the night have been honored in Ukiah, Ca

WHATEVER HAPPENED TO GERALD ‘GERRY’ HANNEMAN? 

By far the most interesting person ever to call the bland precincts of Gualala his home, Hanneman flamed out live on KWAN, the radio station he owned on Mendo's remote South Coast, issuing daily denunciations of his many enemies every afternoon, by far the most interesting audio in the history of the county which, otherwise, and ever after, has been a steady aural diet of cowboy yodels, adolescent love yarps, banjo plucks, and KZYX, the county’s pseudo-public radio station, which supplements its hundreds of hours of music with the White House press releases called NPR and maybe three hours a week of local talk consisting of puff ball exchanges with local bureaucrats.

BUT Hanneman broke the mold when he was arrested back in April of '98 in a show biz chopper raid on his Sea Ranch home complete with a platoon of camo buddies armed with automatic rifles.

Hanneman then used his radio station to denounce the raid and the raiders and their informants, which he said was based on the wishful thinking of former employees of his. 

NOT LONG BEFORE the raid on Hanneman, Sheriff Tim Shea's commandos carried out a chopper raid south of Point Arena that cost county taxpayers several million dollars. On information provided by a jailed drug addict, the camo buddies swooped down on Point Arena’s Bill Hay, holding Hay, his wife, and the then-little Hays at gunpoint, screaming the obligatory “Get on the ground, motherfuckers” at the innocent and terrified Hay family before the raid team realized they’d raided the wrong address. That little exercise in gross incompetence made Hay a multi-millionaire and Mendocino County the laughingstock of the land for fifteen minutes or so. 

Hanneman’s experience with local law enforcement’s airborne motherfucker special was a kind of reprise of the Hay affair. It, too, was based entirely on rumor.

HANNEMAN owned the cable tv franchise for a hunk of south Mendoland running east into Anderson Valley. He was in bankruptcy proceedings here and in Arizona where he owned another cable franchise. Hanneman also founded KWAN. He ran his mini-media empire out of Gualala but lived in Sea Ranch where the big raid took place, which supposedly discovered property stolen from South Coast construction sites, and also was aimed at stanching the South Coast’s crank flow, and was even more vaguely in search of pornographic films starring underage actresses. Nothing more than a couple hundred bucks worth of disputed construction equipment could be tied to the South Coast media man, hence Hanneman’s “I'm Mad As Hell” afternoon presentations every work day from 4 to 6pm. Hanneman was later convicted of drug crimes.

HANNEMAN LIVES! Mendo's memorable media man alive and living in Pacific Grove

It looks like Jerry Hanneman is now living in Pacific Grove.

Facebook Page: facebook.com/gerhard.hanneman.1

(via Deb Silva)

THE SUPERVISORS might want to invest in a copy of Miss Manners. Cutting citizens and County staff off at the stroke of the 180th second as they address their majesties is beyond rude and even more alienating of citizens and staff than citizens and staff are now. It's almost as if the supervisors are trying to create ill will. When Mo cut off long-time assessor and clerk, Katrina Bartolomie, as she tried to explain the present difficulties in her office, the supervisors reached a new low in public relations.

LINDA BAILEY summed up nut of the prob: "I watched the first portion of Tuesday’s BOS meeting and was astounded at the contempt shown to employees, elected and appointed county officials, the public, the voters and the spirit of the Brown Act. All blamed on the very long agenda.

If the BOS met four times a month, as it traditionally did, such long agendas would not be necessary.

The stated purpose of the Brown Act is to enable the public to see and hear its officials conduct public business.

Gov. Sec. 54950. In enacting this chapter, the Legislature finds and declares that the public commissions, boards and councils and the other public agencies in this State exist to aid in the conduct of the people’s business. It is the intent of the law that their actions be taken openly and that their deliberations be conducted openly.

The people of this State do not yield their sovereignty to the agencies which serve them. The people, in delegating authority, do not give their public servants the right to decide what is good for the people to know and what is not good for them to know. The people insist on remaining informed so that they may retain control over the instruments they have created.

N.B. “Deliberations* Cutting off officials, including a Supervisor, from participating in a policy discussion and then assigning to ad hoc committees, which aren’t open to the public, is a blatant violation of that purpose. Emailing the BOS the remainder of their comments is not an adequate substitution, particularly, as Ted Williams admits, the contents will not be available to the public for a month.

What happened to the practice of having staff, even if they are elected, sit at the table when BOS actions affecting their department are on the agenda?

Clearly, the goal of some supervisors is control. They don’t trust the voters to choose department heads. Have they forgotten they are elected by those voters. The BOS past performance does not inspire my confidence that this would result in improved service to the public.

I repeat my request that items on the Consent Calendar be written in plain and simple English, thereby enabling the public to easily determine if the issue is one they would like to discuss with their elected officials."

AS THE SUPES take the entire month of August off, and given their dismal collective performance, I expect them to kick back their August salaries to the general fund.

AND PERHAPS supervisor Williams can put his vaunted computer skills to use as a volunteer in the Assessor's office during his paid vacation.

TWO SUPERVISORS — Gjerde and McGourty are short timers. Gjerde tuned out a couple of years ago, only occasionally rousing himself to participate in County affairs. McGourty is bailing after finding himself responsible for an admin mess created by the former CEO that he and his four colleagues were too spineless to oppose as she made the decisions that undermined county functioning. Mo is simply in over her head; Haschak conscientiously tries to do the right thing but is out-voted on important matters. Williams has made himself the Board's voice and, I must admit, his wading in to argue on our comment line has provided useful insights to the Board's startling dysfunction. Which is getting worse.

INSULTING their own staffers just adds to the frustration everyone feels about the Board's functioning. I'd say it's up to Williams to get the show back on track because that capacity isn't otherwise available on this Board. He might begin by inviting smart people like Linda Bailey and Carrie Shattuck and Adam Gaska as advisors, or at least people to consult as to how to go about righting the SS Mendo. In a bad situation like this one adversarial stances just make everything worse. 

FOR CONCILIATORY STARTERS, the Board ought to dip into the $20 mil-plus reserve fund for a decent raise for line employees, locking in the raises on the assumption that property assessments will soon become current. (There's a Redwood Valley guy mentioned by Gaska who's deliberately way behind on his tax bills, plural, a guy whose sub-contractors demand cash up front before they'll deal with him. This guy's operating on what amounts to interest-free loans from the County. I wonder how many others like him are out there?) 

MIKE GENIELLA: We are so glad locally owned Myers Pharmacy is there for us. I fear for owner Tim Keffeler and the Myers crew every time I come across stories about Big Pharma and the so-called drug supply chain issues in this country. Please, Ukiah Valley folks, support these honest, hard-working people.

PS. I don't understand this ‘Barbie’ thing. I mean, for starters how can a pink-sloshed movie rake in $150 million in one day? So when Terese shared with me a New York Times essay on what our friend Susan Faludi thinks about Barbie, I decided to pause and read. Faludi is an author, feminist, and professor of all things cool. She sees and writes with clarity, taking complicated subjects apart for all to see. Except, of course, for all the blank pages she ended up with after researching the Judi Bari car bombing and radical environmental movement on the North Coast. Faludi regretfully tossed in the towel on that project, a testament to the baffling world we locals call ‘Mendoland.’ Maybe Barbie is among us.

ON LINE COMMENTS OF THE WEEK

[1] Speaking of a debauched news media, however much we may hate the NYT and by extension everyone who works there, it isn’t enough.

I’m referring to an op-ed and smear against RFK Jr. by one Sheryl Gay Stolberg, who actually said this:

“Despite the theater, the hearing raised thorny questions about free speech in a democratic society: Is misinformation protected by the First Amendment? When is it appropriate for the federal government to seek to tamp down the spread of falsehoods?”

Anybody who works for that rag has got to by now know they are working as a propagandist for a corrupt regime, or they are too stupid to even BE a reporter.

Is there nothing these people won’t do for money?

The slanted article also tried to give the impression that the hearings were about RFK Jr. being a racist.

https://twitter.com/SherylNYT/status/1682081481781379073?s=20

[2] Cyclists on Highway 128: I would just put pedal to the metal and mow them down. My defense: “Oops, my foot slipped!” Or: “I mistook the brake pedal for the gas.” Meanwhile, as they hold up traffic, the cars behind them are idling and burning more oil than they otherwise would, thereby releasing even more emissions into their precious atmosphere.

[3] This Board is not transparent, they are corrupt. You are right, the three minute rule was used to cut people off. This is by design. They want to limit employees from speaking during these contract issues. Remember BOS was given a raise because they tied themselves into receiving raises with department heads. Not one of them refused the raise during this difficult time of employees with no contract, instead they accepted their raise and sent the employees a pay cut.

Several times Haschak was cut off by Photo-Op Mo when he wanted to discuss “The Scam”, Item 4B The Contingency Plan for a Director of Finance Position. And they do not want the public chiming in on this issue. This is a plan to blame Chamise Cubbison for all budget issues orchestrated by ex CEO Angelo, Bowtie Ted, Basement Dan and Glenn” Forrest Gump” McGourty. They consolidated two offices with no plan after being warned this move would destroy County finances. It has, they don’t want to take the blame and McGourty along Gjerde show their true colors and will not run, COWARDS!

I have watched County politics for over 40 years, it is very apparent this Board is manipulating, corrupt and will lie at the drop of a hat to get what they want. Bowtie continues to say, “I have never seen budget reports or balance sheets since I took office.” Well Bowtie does this mean you have passed three budgets with no reports? This act alone would be considered stupid or is a lie. I don’t think you’re that stupid, but I could be wrong.

This next vote is huge, with the two Cowards not running, this forces change in two districts. We need to take control of District 2, which is currently Photo-Op Mo, she is not qualified and only cares about getting her picture taken for her Facebook page. Haschak needs help, he is a man on an island, he seems to be the only Supervisor there for the right reasons.

[4] In drug use and addiction running away from life number one it’s easy.

You don’t have to be educated to be a drug dealer. Street savvy is golden so there’s no need for education to make money. You don’t care about your customers if they’re dying off all you care about is making money.

If you’re a low educated drug dealer you have no idea of health, business logic or humanity. $ is $. Anyone have the pleasure of connection with these lovey souls ya know ya know whadda I mean. Ya know?

Next…no accountability all the $ pouring in.to treatment and services that are well…NOT TRULY TREATMENT OR SERVICES. When busted the first time for such deadly blind behaviors MAJOR jail time. OD right to Rehab no questions asked.

Rehab no accountability or sustainable outcomes with…30 days no. 90 days no. 120 bottom line maybe 1 year best. Would save a ton on OD deaths hospitalizations and community based fees this way.

More vocational education for future life earlier. Community mentoring.

Media standards for advertising pharma.

Drugs DO NOT FIX EVERYTHING.

Quit using Fentanyl in any manner. Black box drug. Quit manufacturing Fentanyl immediately. Fentanyl compounds for black market production treated like meth components and heavily regulated access/PENALTIES.

Normalizing addiction has destroyed Nor Cal.

The US.

40+ million families have members struggling with addiction WTF????

There are no winners in living like this.

Want to know why everything else is collapsing?

Spending our road and education funds on addiction.

Loosing entire generations to opioid addiction so there are NO workers.

Booking log photo in Mendo few days back… Almost at bottom. That guy Twisted all up. Wasn’t his first rodeo. How does winding up like this become okay to societies let alone anyone?

We gotta do better.

[5] The people who remain unaware are not among that group, the people who remain unaware are college educated, comfortably paid, fluid-friendly, NIMBY compassionates with signs in their yards but no neighborhood diversity, multiple vaccinations in their bodies…you get the idea. They do not want to know. The MSM makes them feel good about that desire to not know. Just like the wife who doesn’t want to know her husband is molesting their child, it would mean they’d have to “do something” and it would affect their comfort bubble and way of life.

It’s WAY easier to misrepresent “religious Republican Christians”. Like, they’re all Westboro Baptist Church types. That is what Christians are all about right?

it’s not like churches are all rainbow-woke now with Lesbian pastors, and it’s not like Republican electeds are all pro-abortion. Nope. Still all Westboro.

How many vaxxes do you have Mr. Hero? You okay with me (a woman) deciding what to do with my body re: vax? Without any social repercussions and Scarlet Letters? Are there working class Libtards? Yes. But they’re not heroes.

You well may ask – why am I “at” you?

Because I’m rally f’in sick of smug know-nothings perpetuating BS about Christians. And that whole thing is just another cognitive dissonance.

Most so-called Christian churches have gone woke and preach Nice Jesus who was really trans and fabulous. They are populated by people who are hard left. But that same hard left group then goes online and makes misrepresentations about Christians being gay-hating racists who want to take away a woman’s right to make healthcare decisions. Which makes church leaders freak and run farther left to get bodies in the pews and keep the lights on.

As with all things, Christianity has been totally and successfully redefined in our culture today. Nothing is more important to the totalitarian project.

Any individual who participates to any degree in the-branding Jesus is in an indefensible position even if you think He was “just a guy”. It would still be wrong and evil. An abuse of the person, violating all his human rights and realities.

That’s not heroic.

[61] It’s a precarious balance to make girls leery of men who will use, hurt and discard them while not making them think all men are like that. And to try to do it while not making them angry and deaf by saying they are too young and dumb to know better when exactly saying that they are too young and dumb to know better. The public perception of a tolerant “boy will be boys” attitude gives men a pass. Especially when the only cut off age for that nonsense is when they suddenly are aged enough to be seen as dirty old men.

[7] Three realities of our time:

1) Infinite growth can’t go on forever in a finite world.

2) Humankind’s greatest shortcoming is its failure to understand the exponential function.

3) 1+1=3 (as soon as possible!).

[8] MUSIC, a few on-line comments:

a. 60-70 percent of the greatest songs you have ever heard were reworked in the studio by producers or were (re)written at least in part by guys paid to do nothing but write hit songs.

The music industry hasn’t been a place for musicians for many, many years.

b. I’ll listen to 2 hour interviews by producer Butch Vig discussing Nirvana and Smashing Pumpkins recording sessions, for instance.

Some artists are weaker and less independent than others. Sinead mostly excelled at covering others” songs. I don’t like the original stuff much. Elton John headlined his career without ever writing a word of lyrics.

Many talented artists write much of their own stuff and have a guiding hand in production also.

Someone like Bryan Ferry does a lot of covers but has a unique sound and is heavily involved in the production.

And, although I appreciate all the artistic possibilities of recorded music, the whole scene is probably pretty played out now. Good times, maybe. Would a return to exclusively live and acoustic music be unwelcome?

c. I’ve done a fair amount of studio work as a gitarrist in various bands over the past 20 years.

I generally know what goes into making a record.

At the top level (mainstream), I’d wager that less than 30% of artists even write their own material anymore. Then of course, everything is autotuned and refined to a point that the live performances also need a range of digital enhancements to produce an album-worthy performance.

Things are much better in the indie world, but producers, and the engineers involved in mastering still add quite a bit to the finished product.

d. I think the “singer-songwriter” thing was a relatively short-lived phenomenon.

Most great vocal artists/performers have sung songs written by others. But they put their own stamp on them. Their art is interpretation.

Carole King wrote You’ve Got a Friend. But a lot of people think James Taylor wrote it.

e. Most of the world’s great music has never been made into a record. It is played on small stages in dive bars, at local parks, and on the street.

It is not overproduced, not always perfectly in time, not autotuned, and not written using formulas developed to produce music that makes as much money as possible.