A FRIEND SAYS, “This is the best JFK assassination documentary ever made. It’s meticulously researched, full of details and leaves no doubt whatsoever as to who did the shooting.” Here's the link to the video: youtube.com/watch?v=5u7euN1HTuU
I WATCHED IT, and came away convinced that Oswald acted alone. Prior, I was influenced by whatever I'd just read on the case, and thoroughly enjoyed Oliver Stone's movie simply because it implicates all the right people. I suppose the reason why some documents related to the assassination are still sequestered from the pesky public is because both the CIA and the FBI were fully aware, and probably involved with Oswald on a non-assassination level. Oswald was, after all, an unusual person — doubly unusual for those times. He went from the Marine Corps to Russia and came back with a Russian bride, the daughter of a KGB colonel. Exactly the kind of person who would have drawn federal attention. I was in the Marines at the same time as Oswald, and probably in the same place — Camp Pendleton — as Oswald. I can't even imagine any of my Corps peers defecting to the Soviet Union, not that there weren't plenty of boys who'd grown up hard, and maybe even a few like Oswald who were proto-Marxists, which Oswald said he was. Yet when I see the old film of the assassin claiming, "I'm only a patsy," I can't help but wonder if he wasn't a pawn in a larger game. After all, the same malignant forces of the sixties, which have now segued into the maga movement, existed then, and we live in the country where the implausible is a daily occurrence.
THE GREAT DEBATE. Here are two possible dates for the Change Our Name debate: Tuesday, August 22 and Tuesday, August 29. Please choose the date you prefer, and the Change Our Name group will try to secure the community room at the Fort Bragg Library, 499 E. Laurel St., for 7:30 p.m. on the date you choose. This room seats 60. We plan to record the debate if you have no objections.
Regards,
Jane Person
ED NOTE: I told Ms. Person that the 22nd at the library was fine with me although given the level of interest a larger site might be preferable.
DID YOU KNOW that Duke Snider, the great Dodger outfielder from the days when ballplayers ran out routine groundballs and weren't instant millionaires, maintained a summer place at Ten Mile north of Fort Bragg? Or that Vince DiMaggio, brother of Dominic and Joe, and a pretty fair ballplayer himself, is buried in the Fort Bragg cemetery?
SUSAN LARSEN: Duke Snider was an avid golfer and played regularly at Little River with Jim Larsen, chef-owner of The Restaurant. They were pals in the best sense – laughing at each other’s foibles and mistakes, and considerate of each other as gentlemen. Duke loved it that Jim didn’t treat him like a sports celebrity, but teased him as a regular guy, just as he did everyone. They were a dynamic duo on the course. They had a really great friendship with mutual respect and admiration.
CHARLES ARTIGUES: BTW when Mike White ran Shooters Poolroom in Fort Bragg Duke Snider would stop by and sign baseball cards when he was in town.
HERE IN MENDOCINO COUNTY, we will recall, the sexual abuse of children — fairly rare in real life — took the form of Satanism, as in “Satanist child abuse.” Small children, you see, were being lent to devil-worshipping perverts who needed the little ones for their Beelzebub rituals north of Fort Bragg. Only a true perv could believe this stuff, but an array of official persons, who one would think would know better, included screwballs somehow employed by Mendocino County’s Welfare Department’s CPS and its laughably defective Mental Health bureaucracy, clambered aboard the non-existent Satanist phenomenon, the point being that drop-fall credulity isn’t confined to Trump voters. Great harm was done to at least a dozen women, and even worse crimes were committed against the children of these women by tax-funded Satanist “experts” like Mr. and Mrs. Robert Horton of Ukiah, none of whom were fired or even reprimanded.
PATRICK HICKEY (County Employees Union SEIU Local 1021):
There is one group working for Mendocino County that is paid above the market average...
You guessed it. The Board of Supervisors.If you use the “comparators” the county uses to determine market rate, the Supervisors are paid over 20% above market average. This while the average classification for County workers is 10-15% below market. Even if you take out the outliers (Sonoma and Sutter counties), the Supervisors are still 8% above market.
Average Supervisor Salary
Mendocino $95,302
El Dorado $82,904
Humboldt $97,023
Lake $63,708
Napa $112,403
Nevada $71,392
Sonoma $172,786
Sutter $34,471
Yolo 92,477
OFF THE CUFF, and what else is new with Mr Him/His/He Editor? Democrats went way wrong first with Carter and then majorly wrong with the Clintons as the Democrats abandoned working people and the traditional FDR constituency. Teddy Kennedy, and a little later, Bernie Sanders, were and are in the Rooseveltian tradition in trying to represent the little guy against the low rent aristocracy that has always dominated the American economy but used to be a little more low profile about it. Also known as the oligarchy, both parties serve its interests, hence the increasing struggle of millions of people to afford food and shelter. With Democrats abandoning working people and insulting them along the way with loads of “woke” bullshit, millions of everyday people, understandably contemptuous of Democrats, are deluding themselves that Trump, an oligarch, somehow has their back. The '24 presidential election will pit the obviously incapacitated Biden against the blustering bully boy, both of them unthinkable only a few years ago.
TAKE THIS, Fort Bragg Name Changers. Younger old timers will remember Michael Berenz's Braxton's coffee shop on Laurel Street prior to the upgrade of the Laurel Street neighborhood. Berenz was an absolute hoot, gliding around behind the counter to classical music. His Braxton's was not celebratory. Berenz was a man of the left whose sly naming of his shop after the loathed general's given name seemed to go unnoticed in the pre-precious days of the town, but today? The Purple Posse would be on his case big time.
NEXT DOOR was Doug Roycroft's book store, Fiddler's Green, stacks of unshelved tomes haphazardly arrayed on sagging shelves, as many on the floor as up off it. Coffee from Braxton's, conversation with the erudite Big Doug.
DENIS ROUSE WRITES: “I liked the story of your recent Las Vegas visit. Wish I had a video of my times there as a kid in the Fifties with my parents and grandparents when the mob ran the place. The hotels were luxuriant, sanely scaled oases in the desert that stretched vast and beautiful, the entertainment, including popular Broadway dinner shows, was great, and it didn't cost a fortune assuming one's sensibility reigned in the casinos. You could make a case that contempo Las Vegas is a microcosm of pretty much everything that's gone haywire here in the land we love.”
GHASTLIEST goddam place I've ever been, with Phoenix running a close second. For some time now I've walked around with a kind of low intensity anxiety, a kind of non-specific dread that a deluge of bad can engulf us whole at any time. Vegas and Phoenix serve nicely as metaphorical manifestations of what I feel. I think a lot of people feel the same way, that something beyond the usual, predictable bad has snapped, that round the clock mass crazy is happening that didn't used to happen, or happened only rarely. The whole show has been precarious for a while now but it seems headed, crescendo-like, to an explosive breakdown kinda like in Nathaniel West's prescient novel, "The Day of the Locust." Biden vs. Trump just might bring down the curtain. Of course I'm older than I thought I'd ever be and maybe what I'm feeling is just old guy pessimism, but if I never had to leave Boonville, I might be a little more optimistic.
THERE SEEMED to be lots of Trump today. Oh, yes, he was indicted again, this time for trying to overthrow “our democracy,” which is only a democracy at the school board-supervisor-city council level. Elections at the state and federal level are funded by large blocs of money operating only occasionally in the public interest. Really, did you or anybody you know have a vote in the selection of Congressman Huffman, State Senator McGuire, Assemblyman Wood? You Democrats out there, was Biden your guy? Trump? His genius was to foist himself on US by appealing to the latent cruelty that's always been burbling away beneath America's roiling surface. He said today before his pre-perp walk, “I'm being arrested for you.” Pure delusion, but half the country believes him.
BOILED DOWN, Trump obviously leaned on officials to declare him re-elected. Just as obviously he incited the January 6th riot, which was a riot not an insurrection. An insurrection would have featured armed people with a plan. This was a mob with no plan, not even a plan to march on the capitol before the orange demagogue gave the mob the idea of marching on a suspiciously under-defended Congress, from which the corporate bag ladies and gentlemen hauled ass as the mob broke in. (I understand why someone like Schiff and the rest of the Democrats would make a run for cover, but why did the Trumpers run? Afraid of their own people? Would the mob have dared string up Pence?)
RECOMMENDED READING: ‘Damascus Gate’ by Robert Stone, a novel set in Israel where fanatic forces converge with apocalyptic results. Wonderful portraits of unhinged American mystics, the most fanatic and dangerous of the individual lunatics loose in the stolen land of Israel presently run by Old Testament zealots and modern-day racists.
SUPERVISOR WILLIAMS: “$27M aggregate of public money should require performance review. Why hasn’t there been one?”
THE SUPERVISOR was referring to Redwood Community Services, aka Redwood Quality Management Company, aka Anchor Health, an ever-expanding social services network presided over by Camille Schraeder, who distributes an annual $27 million tax dollars filtered through Mendocino County to a variety of services allegedly of help to dependent children and adults. Ms. Schraeder has threatened her critics to return her entire apparatus to the County if the County is unhappy with her management.
HOW EFFECTIVE is her management? How effective are her shape-shifting programs? Nobody knows because the County doesn't ask.
IN DEFENSE of Schraeder, kind of. She’s a resident of Potter Valley who worked her way up to her present eminence from the late Trinity School of Ukiah, having arrived in the County with the Back to the Land wave of counterculture settlers. But there are, dependent persons everywhere in our crumbling country, not just shuffling up and down State Street and living in river view bushes along the Russian River. The walking wounded present both a huge pot of money for the helping pros who resist all reform, but simultaneously present an irresolvable presence short of institutional care, which barely exists and is unlikely to be expanded given all the present day givens.
BUT SUPERVISOR WILLIAMS is correct. Even by the loosest civic standards $27 unexamined million to the Schraeder combine is a lotta public dough to sail out the annual fiscal door on the assurance of one person that it funds the major good allegedly being done.
MOST OF THE MONEY, natch, is paid out to the helping professionals, who help themselves to a nice income while doing good. How much good is the question.
MR. MARBUT was paid $60 thou by the Supervisors for advice on how to handle the homeless. His advice was to treat and house Mendo's home-grown intractables, give the transient mooches a sandwich or two then kick them in the ass outtahere.
THE HELPING PROS came roaring out in a mass meeting to denounce Marbut as heartlessly cruel, and his commonsense suggestions were shelved, (except in Fort Bragg, a model homeless strategy ignored by Seldom Seen Sangiacomo in Ukiah.
BILL KIMBERLIN: The original name of the town we all know as Mendocino, was Meiggsville. I know this because my great grandfather John Mason founded a brewery in San Francisco in 1854. If you look closely at the address on my lithograph advertising his enterprise you will note that it was on Chestnut Street "opposite Meiggs Wharf".
Who was Meiggs? Henry Meiggs was a San Francisco real estate baron who owned a lot of the City. He was also a lumber baron who sent his agents up to what is now the Mendocino North Coast to see if there was any timber up there around 1850. The report came back that yes there was timber, a hell of a lot of it. Since San Francisco was always burning down or expanding Meiggs built a massive lumber facility in the town with rigging to off load it to his ships below the cliffs. He also built Meiggs Wharf stretching over 2000 feet out into San Francisco Bay.
He did well until there was a fall in real estate prices and he had to borrow (steal) a bunch of money from the coffers of San Francisco. When he got caught he escaped with his family in one of his ocean going ships and landed in South America. Here he built railroads and recouped his fortunes.
If you look at the old maps at the history museum in the current town of Mendocino, you will see "Meiggsville" as the name of the current town we call "Mendocino".
A READER COMMENTS: I’d love to see some statistics about how many legal vs. illegal cannabis grows are dealt with by code enforcement. Otherwise it’s just more hot air blowing down supposed hoophouses. When I worked at the county, they had no problem rubber stamping 14 hoophouses at a time for anyone that wanted them. The county just seemed to want the permit fees. I would approve dozens per day, and mostly in Redwood Valley. Pretty bad practice to assume that all greenhouses and hoophouses are for cannabis. Wait? What ever happened to all the “Treat cannabis like all other agricultural crops” talk?
ADAM GASKA REPLIES: I looked into this a year ago when phase 1 people were complaining it was impossible to get permits for hoophouses/greenhouses. So I looked it up and found it to be untrue. There were a handful of people getting permits quickly and easily. What I also realized is that the county was handing out 1500 permits a year for the four years I looked at. I brought it up the supervisor McGourty and John Burkes at a RVMAC meeting when John was invited to give an update on what CE was doing about unpermitted cannabis grows. One of the issues was they were permitting people to put up hoophouses who weren’t trying to get permitted for cannabis. So if and when CE came, they actually had a permit for the hoops but not the weed inside, so they couldn’t slap a big fine on them. It seemed foolish the county was handing out the permits for $500 a pop just to lose one of the large hammers they had to deter people from growing cannabis without a permit. I brought it up to Glenn that by giving them a permit for the hoop now then to try and say they couldn’t use it down the road if they went for phase 3 permitting was setting the County up for litigation. So now we have thousands of hoops being abandoned. To take them down requires a $1500 demo permit. They should probably officially waive the fee and tell people to just clean them up.
DOES THIS SOUND LIKE YOUR TOWN?
by K.C. Meadows
We’ll begin with a little exercise today, and we’re calling it “Does this sound like your town?”
Read along and nod if any of this sounds familiar:
“Downtown businesses had long complained about people sleeping in their doorways at night. Encampments within city limits sprouted and became sanitation hazards, and some homeowners reported finding people sleeping on their front porches who were unwilling to move on.”
“A shocking 56 percent of (homeless) respondents reported using meth three or more times weekly.”
“(The city) cleared its largest encampment of homeless people … and the outcome of the clearing has been repeated in other areas of the city, over and over again — some people take shelter that is offered, but many continue to scatter about to another place in the city.”
“Right now is ten times worse than 20 years ago. Twenty years ago (it was) much easier to handle the homeless, now it’s much much harder.”
“Beyond tent encampments, nearly half of those living without shelter in February’s count were sleeping in their vehicles.”
Nodding your head “yes” yet? Congratulations. You must live in any one of 200 or more towns in California.
For the third consecutive year, this newspaper has joined with nine sister publications around the north state for our “State of Homelessness” edition.
The idea is this: By publishing stories offering a bird’s-eye view of what’s happening on the homeless front elsewhere, maybe we’ll learn a little more about what’s happening locally — and even notice we’re probably ahead of the curve in some areas and behind it in a few others.
If there’s one thing that should be obvious by now, it’s this: No one city or town or county is ever going to “solve” homelessness. It’s a multi-layered, incredibly complex crisis that didn’t start because of any one town, and no one town is ever going to end it. Until there is a concentrated, and substantial, effort that covers factors as varied as mental health and housing and addiction and, yes, crime (just to name four) on a statewide and even national level, you are never going to see this problem “go away,” regardless of how badly you want to cling to some repeatedly disproven narratives:
“They’re all from somewhere else and they come here for the great benefits. If we kicked them out and made them go back to wherever they came from this wouldn’t be a problem. We need to stop enabling and the city needs to get serious about cracking down on the homeless.”
For every homeless person you see, your community probably has an equal number of people shouting this nonsense, blissfully ignorant of things like the law and restrictions on what cities are legally allowed to do. It’s stunning — especially considering the level of news coverage these issues have received.
One example: A statewide UCSF study showed 90 percent of unhomed Californians are from — wait for it — California. And 75 percent of them live in the same county where they became homeless.
In other words, while some homeless people go from town to town looking for a better deal, an overwhelming majority of them stay within 5 or 10 miles of where they originally became homeless. We’re guessing you haven’t seen that figure quoted in your favorite local quality-of-life Facebook group lately.
Every year, we get a lot of feedback to this series. We always expect (and receive) some “There you go, being part of the problem again”-type comments — but we also get a growing number of “Thank you for this. I learned it’s not just happening locally and that it’s more of a complex issue than I believed” responses.
We can never adequately address problems until we first acknowledge what the problem actually is, and learn to tell the difference between a fact and a narrative. For as much as our state spends on homelessness every year — nearly $10 billion in the past three years alone — it should be obvious that we’re not getting enough bang for our buck, and what we’re doing isn’t working.
Let’s be smarter. That starts with recognizing the facts.
And for the record? Those first five paragraphs described the scene in Fort Bragg, here in Ukiah, Chico, Eureka and Santa Cruz, respectively, and were taken directly from the overview stories you can read today.
Bet you thought it was your town.
(Ukiah Daily Journal)
THE LITTLE LIGHT HOUSE ON THE LOST COAST.
Two ways to hike, and I've done both — a straight slog down the surf line from Petrolia to Shelter Cove, and on the up and down inland trail. The surf line route, and don't forget to check the tides, is about 30 miles. We did it with one night out and the tide in-coming the first day because we hadn't consulted the tide charts, which made for some thrilling passages along the surfline rocks beneath sheer cliffs. “We” included Joe and Karen Pfaff and Alexander Cockburn. Over a fifth of Irish Whiskey that night we argued about George Orwell and the Spanish Civil War, conceding the discussion to Cockburn. When we woke up, the tracks of a large mountain lion were about 20 feet from where we slept. Among the memorable individual sights seen, were the several middens, huge collections of mounded shells amassed over thousands of years by the native peoples. We passed no other people except near Shelter Cove where a kid with a surfboard on his head was headed to what he said was a great surfing spot five miles up the beach. Cockburn and I did the inland trail also in one night out. I thought it was more difficult in its frequent climbs, but the views were unsurpassed, and this time we had the entire bottle to ourselves. At the Usal end of the trail we met a loudly complaining group of about a dozen junior high kids and a half dozen adult supervisors. They had just left Usal and it was already hot, and they were carrying enough gear for a month. The trail is not recommended for trekkers who've never trekked. I joked to Cockburn that if we did it again I'd hire a couple of high school jocks as porters. I'd like to do the hill route again some time with a leisurely three nights out rather than the one night out forced march we did both times.
SHARON DOUBIAGO, writer and poet based in San Francisco these days, is writing a memoir about her life in Mendocino with her star athlete son, Dan Doubiago, who dominated high school sports in this area before he went on to play football in college and then the NFL. Sharon writes: “I think I just finished Son! Only 40+years of work! Still have to go over the parts we haven't put together for his approval. That's always been the deal: nothing goes without his ok! So far, there have been only two parts he wants cut. I've done that to one high school part---the story of his loss of virginity. It's really surprising what he has okayed and the part he wants cut. I've done that, hard as it was to do. The other one, god, I'm going to try and talk him into it, but it too will go if he still demands it. It's a crucial place in the overall story and so shows his beautiful self, but it shows the crumminess of the other person who is now, after all these years, a friend. The story is sort of a central one in the book. And it shows Danny's beautiful self! I've made up a character for that part, the only thing I've ‘made up’ in the whole thing, and so we'll see if that works. If not, the delete button for sure!”
JON KENNEDY (Potter Valley):
Disclaimer: I've been a licensed Real Estate agent for over 18 years. Now to criticize real estate agents (not all of them) through a question.
Do you think it's mildly comical when you see/hear a Realtor discuss how she/he can get you multiple offers over asking price for your home, in an attempt to get your business, then in the next marketing piece, she/he claims it's a great time for buyers to get a great deal on a home, in an attempt to get your business?
There are plenty of honest and no nonsense successful Realtors in the business, and then there are the ones I mentioned above.
ON-LINE COMMENTS OF THE WEEK
[1] With the whole hustle for scrap metals, I know that manhole and drain covers are a frequently stolen item in the public works realm and cashed in for scrap. We frequently talk here about scrapping out the copper wires on those Tesla charging stations. I wonder why more fire hydrants are not disconnected from the curb and cashed in for scrap. I am sure those would bring a nice chunk of change! How about street signs and the poles they are on? There’s tons of free money for the taking out there!
[2] When I had a minor in English, my school dropped the requirement for a full semester of Chaucer. That must have been around 1997. I was gobsmacked. Glad I took it. And Donne, and Shakespeare. I had wanted to teach Spanish and English, but discovered how unrigorous the latter had become. I could not respect myself and teach how to deconstruct cereal boxes and condom wrappers as “found texts.”
[3] “Kesa, were you ever a hippie chick?”
No.
I’m 56 ,
So I remember when your typical male officer worker , in East Germany or the United States, wore a tie and a jacket.
I remember when nine out of ten women , blue collar or white collar, young or old, wore dresses or skirts.
Before dresses and skirts dropped out of use pretty much entirely, they got really, really, short as the norm.
This post – WW II era may be ending in raging Puritanism ,
with Jane Fonda and Hillary Clinton masquerading as Carrie Nation, which all just shows how dishonest it is.
Because the 1970’s certainly were not like that.
In any case, I remember that so acutely because I miss skirts and dresses, and jackets and ties, so acutely.
I can’t remember precisely when that ended , but it seemed pretty abrupt and universal the decision for everyone to start slumming it.
I remember when at least one out of four people smoked, and I barely remember shoeshine stands in both countries, and there were still public spittoons, same as public ashtrays, when I first came to the Southern United States in 1976.
But Hippies?
For whatever reason my recollection of them is about the same as a 20 year old of 2023.
I have seen pictures and movies with hippies.
You might think that because my mother is a Black Southerner , and my father a White Southerner , who got together when that was NOT cool in the South, and who went to live and work in East Germany for a decade, that they are progressive , or even Liberal ?
Not at all.
I would say that as Baby Boomers are as a general rule self-absorbed to a fault, my parents are merely more so.
Their world is very much their own world, and they are privileged enough to get away with that.
As insulated in their way, as the denizens of Versailles were before the shit hit the fan in 1789.
”Do your own thing,” indeed .
I sometimes wonder if the so common alienation, disaffection , and stark isolation , though in a crowd of people, of this time, has far less to do with technology, and far more to do with culture ?
Anyway, again, no, despite my age, I have no recollection of Hippies.
They are as historical to me as are Victorians.
[4] If you’ve ever talked to much older people who grew up on mostly self-sufficient farms, they tell a much different story. Back in the 1980s, my next-door neighbor was an elderly woman who was raised on a farm. When I talked about my little garden, she informed me with bubbly enthusiasm, “Oh, when I was a girl, we made a BIG garden!” She also told me about how, “Oh, we had such a good time in winter!”
Of course, people in the country had no refrigeration back then (unless they had an ice house), but they had a variety of canned goods: green beans, tomatoes, carrots, corn, pickled peppers, pickles, peaches, pears, apples, berries, jams and jellies, etc. Some fruits and vegetables will keep well into winter in a root cellar: apples, pears, onions, squash, carrots, beets, turnips. rutabagas, and cabbage. When my neighbor talked about “a good time in winter,” I always pictured the ladies pulling pies, bread, rolls, and cookies out of the oven. I recently learned that my in-law’s family always had pie for dessert, seven days a week. The way this was explained to me was that the family had fruit trees. When you have fruit trees, there is always WAY too much fruit for the family to consume in a year’s time, unless you get creative. So the grandmother of the family canned all the apples and peaches. Once a week she made seven pies, so she would have one for dessert every day. If company came over, she would always offer them a piece of pie. She was thus able to use all that fruit.
There is a short story by Mark Twain that I once ran across (and haven’t been able to find since) about the idyllic food situation on a Missouri farm in the 1800s.
You might also want to read James Whitcomb Riley’s poem, “Out to Old Aunt Mary’s.” Old Aunt Mary’s nephews had no complaints about the food.
[5] ADDICTION MENDO, an on-line comment:
If you never feel like you matter in the first place what’s it matter? You just keep sliding. A great portion of our Mendo addicts and homeless are homegrown. Children that aged out of Foster Care. Aged out without a high school diploma or any plans for adulthood. Systems without accountability. The laws as far as 5150 and mandated timeframes build the failed foundations. The results wandering the streets. The zombies gathered by the Building Bridges project near Talmage struggle, have for years. The use of the Obama phones when you think about that what does it do? it allows people to sell drugs, do drugs talk about all kinds of crazy stuff nobody’s going to track them. Then when you’re done with that phone you can just get a new one so no matter. No reason to take care of it who cares disposable. NEXT and a new number. Then no one can track you, no services, no other people you’re engaged with because your phone number changes with each Obama phone. This really adds to the issue. Adventist health is not healthy . Rather unhealthy, judgey, rude, deny care to medi-cal patients, dump homeless after the funding medicare runs out, no discharge planning that is effective for these populations. Mendo has a problem. Dumping money on it without plans or accountability for the long term is driving the issue.
[6] Trump has re-made the party into a right-wing populist party. it is Trump’s party now. Shedding the old party is ongoing. That process finished for the Democrats a while back … the ‘working man’s’ party, turned into the ‘wokeing man’s’ party. I supported Democrats for > 40 years, but in 2016, it was clear to me what had happened.
[7] I wish I had a personal valet to open and close (and keep track of) my umbrella for me. But then, I’m part of the unwashed, so I’ll never know what it’s like. At least my wardrobe consists of more than a red tie, starched white shirt, dark blue suit and perpetual scowl. What charisma!
[8] Last vignette: there’s an overabundance of (mostly Baptist) churches in my area. Most churches have just a couple dozen parishioners, others hundreds, others thousands.
It’s such a fantastic business that acres of forest are leveled to build parking lots around energy-intensive plane hangar sort of structures, without windows, requiring massive heating and AC.
The small pastors milk their flock by paying themselves and hiring all family members as church officials. They sell cheap editions of Bible commentary in many tomes that the faithful need to pay in installments – they’ll never read them, but in most cases they will be the only books at their home, covers looking good in their fake leather and gold lettering.
The bigger pastors are the entrepreneurial types, grifting on a much bigger scale. Learn it for a few years in an established pastor-businessman’s place of business, I mean church, then open their own brand.
So let’s burn more acres, debt and energy for this. Truly visionary, compassionate and wise guys, these Baptist pastors…
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