DA EYSTER is using his office to pursue personal vendettas. He has brandished his position as Mendocino County’s top law enforcement officer to threaten to run for judge against Clay Brennan of Ten Mile Court, a threat issued out of personal pique with Brennan. But misusing the authority of his office to file actual charges against Auditor-Controller Chamise Cubbison, Eyster seems to have become unhinged, given that the see-through falsity of the charges against Cubbison also stem from Eyster's personal anger that Cubbison had challenged Eyster's obvious misuse of his travel budget, which Eyster has obviously done many times during his years in office. (cf jaunts to San Diego for his entire investigative team under the guise of training or some such pretext; annual dinners at the Broiler Steak House on the taxpayer’s dime; and even the attempt to write off personal gift items as a legitimate charge against the public purse. Eyster's gone way too far by commencing legal fire against a woman who has faithfully tried to do her job in very difficult circumstances, complicated by an incompetent Board of Supervisors and now the filing of false charges against her by the District Attorney of Mendocino County.
POUR on the humiliations, DA Eyster, but why not set bail at a mil each considering the magnitude of the non-crime. If there were a way of knowing for sure, but it's obvious that Eyster and Supervisor Williams colluded on this one, maybe even bringing Supervisor McGourty along for comic relief. Truly one of the more shameful episodes in Mendocino County's unfailingly sordid history. The two falsely accused County workers might be consoled by public opinion, as measured on Mendo comment lines, is running heavily in their favor, and they should have a monster pay day in compensation when they sue for false arrest when Andrian slam-dunks Eyster before a jury.
LONG TIME READERS will recall that when the Mendocino County Grand Jury charged then-sitting elected official Supervisor Kendall Smith with misappropriation of over $3,000 of travel reimbursements (starting in 2007, then three additional repeat charges in following years), Smith simply stonewalled the Grand Jury, claiming (demonstrably falsely) that that the County’s reimbursement policies allowed her bogus travel claim. (Smith claimed reimbursement for her commute from Fort Bragg to Ukiah and back that she didn’t travel and for room rental in Ukiah that she got for free from a friend.) Then District Attorney Meredith Lintott, a personal friend of Smith, refused to take any action. Soon after David Eyster was elected District Attorney in 2010 he sent Smith a demand letter saying that if Smith didn’t return the funds (she’d kept it for over four years) he’d charge her with felony misappropriation. Smith quickly abandoned her position and wrote a check to the County for $3,087 dollars. No charges were filed. Eyster was rightly proud of this outcome.
Now, more than 12 years later, with no comparable evidence or charges from the Grand Jury, instead of sending a demand letter for a specific amount of money to County Auditor/Tax Collector Chamise Cubbison, DA Eyster summarily charges Ms. Cubbison with felony misappropriation without offering Cubbison an opportunity to explain or respond or return any supposedly misappropriated funds.
What’s the difference? With Cubbison it’s personal. She gets slapped with a formal felony charge with no opportunity to respond or repay.
(Mark Scaramella)
CARRIE SHATTUCK: If we lose Chamise Cubbison from this office, our County will be in serious financial reporting trouble. With the exodus of decades of knowledge that occurred with the unplanned merging of these offices, losing her knowledge will be catastrophic.
Where are we going to get someone to replace her? She ran unopposed in the election, probably due to the “culture” that is our County. The current discussions about creating a Department of Finance, consolidating more power under the CEO’s office, has only helped to further erode the relationship of the Aud/Con/Treas/Tax office and the Board of Supervisors. There is no replacement for her!
The fact that the DA has waited all this time to file these charges seems like a fishing expedition. Why were these not filed BEFORE the election? Why wasn’t Weer held accountable? Why was she allowed to run for election with felony charges looming? Wasn’t the County doling out millions of dollars during Covid of “free” money to keep the County running?
This just might be the BOS trying to merge their way out of their consolidation mess. What better way to get Chamise out of office so they can create their Department of Finance?
A READER WRITES: A prevalent rumor around Ukiah is that an undercover FBI agent is working in the Assessor's office for a time. Besides what Cubbison and Kennedy have been charged with, it has been found that two big name county families have been overcharged on their taxes. The two families are the Schatts and the McNabs. I gathered that to make up for the shortfall due to undercharging some property owners the difference, in part, was being made up by overcharging others.
ED REPLY: I'd be surprised if the G-Men were at work on the small potatoes of Mendocino County. Anyway, they don't have a very good local record given their failures to nail the criminal businessmen behind the Fort Bragg Fires, and their even more preposterously suspicious performance in waiving the ex-husband from primary consideration in the Bari Bombing case. I don't know enough about the Schats and McNabs to venture a guess why they would be chosen to be over-assessed, but Schats Bakery is certainly a viable and prosperous business, while McNab is an old family who sold off the vast McNab Ranch in Hopland. But their only business I know of these days is their venerable clothing store across the street from the Courthouse. There are lots of land rich, cash poor families in Mendo, but overall Mendo does not have a lush tax base. We're a poor county. I still think the root of the current prob with assessments and tax collection lies with our incompetent supervisors, whose consolidation of two different functions, in-come and out-go, has multiplied whatever probs the two agencies had prior to consolidation. And then there's the DA bringing a bogus criminal case because Ms. Cubbison challenged his blithe appropriation of his County-funded travel and conference budget as his own personal slush fund.
SAD that Ms. Cubbison is forced to hire an expensive Santa Rosa attorney to defend herself against the bogus charges conjured by the DA, who gets to go into court free of charge. As a County official herself, I wonder if Ms. Cubbison can get her legal expenses reimbursed when the Santa Rosa guy slam dunks Eyster.
TREVOR MOCKEL: We had a great turnout yesterday for our 1st Annual Deputy Sheriffs Association Community Luncheon. Thank you to everyone who stopped by and a huge thank you to Big Earl with Big Earl’s BBQ for preparing all the food. We hope to see you all at the next one!
ADAM GASKA:
I had a good time at the 1st Annual Deputy Sheriffs Association Community Luncheon this Saturday. It was a good opportunity to meet our local deputies and hear first-hand about the job they do.
Law enforcement is a fundamental component of public safety. The officers that work keeping our community are doing a very hard, sometimes thankless, job and deserve our appreciation and support.
I had a good follow up conversation this morning with Sheriff Matt Kendall about the challenges his deputies, and all law enforcement, are facing. We are asking officers to handle more than what has traditionally been expected of them and in many cases, to do jobs they are not trained to do. Police officers are not social workers, they are not mental health workers but they are increasingly seeing these issues be put on their plate while often facing unfair criticism over how these situations are handled.
One of the number one jobs of the County Board of Supervisors is public safety. Most of the Sheriff's Department funding comes from the County General Fund. As a supervisor, I commit to supporting the Sheriff's Department with the funding they need as well as work to find funding for programs such as the Crisis Response Unit in Ft Bragg.
It's the BOS responsibility to act in the best interest of our community. When they have the ear of our representatives at the state and federal level, they need to remind them of what our priorities are, especially when they are not being sufficiently funded. Sometimes special grants or programs come out at the state or federal level with funding available. This money is not “free money,” this is our tax dollars. Our tax dollars should be first used to support priorities, such as public safety. Until those needs are fully met, we shouldn't take this “free money,” we should say “I appreciate the offer but have to respectfully decline. My community has priorities that are not being met. Please come back with the funding we need and we will gladly accept it.”
A County Supervisor's job is to be frugal with the taxpayers’ money and make sure our basic priorities are met before spending money on frivolities.
PITY TREVOR MOCKEL, a young man who probably thought he'd won a ticket to ride when he briefly went to work at nebulous tasks for State Senator Mike McGuire, himself tapped by anonymous Democratic Party shot callers to run for state office out of Healdsburg.
McGUIRE'S bona fides? None. He'd served on the local school board, but he had day-glo teeth, an eager manner, a vaporous, see-through personality commonly found in sociopaths, and he could be depended on to be on board for whatever schemes his Democrat installers told him to ratify. McGuire even came up with a scam on his own — The Great Redwood Trail — presently and forever a couple of miles of redwood-free pavement running through Ukiah's industrial backyard, planned to someday culminate in the town's sewage treatment plant.
PREDICTABLY, the Mendocino County Board of Supervisors, all five of them enthusiastic Democrats, have promoted The Great Redwood Trail, and metaphorically and, literally in some cases, swoon whenever McGuire, or his twin from cipherdom, State Assemblyman Jim Wood, another gift of Healdsburg, visit Ukiah to offload vague platitudes about how our Supervisors are steadfastly marching into a future of.... Well, Joe Biden.
McGUIRE'S been term-limited out of his State Senate sinecure, but don't worry about the little fella. Like our resonant reps of yesterday — please stand — Wes Chesbro, Dan Hauser, Patti Berg — McGuire will land on some nebulous state board that pays a couple hundred thou a year for attending a meeting every month or so, time off for the Christmas holidays.
AS A PARTING gift to Mendocino County, McGuire had hoped to give us Trevor Mockel as 1st District Supervisor. Mockel's bona fides? None, but then the resumes of the five Mendo supervisors are similarly thin other than being local Democrats who faithfully attend the Labor Day Picnic in Ukiah notable for its absence of laboring people.
SO, McGuire called 5th District supervisor Ted Williams to direct Williams to endorse Mockel for the 1st District seat. Mockel would succeed one-termer Glenn McGourty of the Wine Industry and the Potter Valley Diversion. Prob was Mockel hadn't even signed up to run for the seat, but Williams, eager to run an important errand for a State Democrat, directed his four lockstep colleagues to a joint announcement that they were four-square behind Trev, nevermind that he wasn't yet a candidate, and nevermind the Board of Supervisors is supposed to be free of partisan taint.
WILLIAMS' GAFFE was useful, though, in revealing how taken-for-granted Mendocino County is by the Democrats as their little fiefdom, on board for whoever and whatever the state party cares to shove down Mendo's inattentive gullet.
THE 5TH DISTRICT supervisor has done us a favor. Maybe. 1st District voters are now aware that the Democrats, contemptuous of all democratic processes, tried to foist off McGuire's guy on Mendocino County simply because he was McGuire's guy.
THE FORT BRAGG FIRES. The silence has always been deafening. Even though by now almost everyone in town has read the AVA series on the 1987 arson spree that destroyed three community landmarks — the Piedmont Hotel; the Fort Bragg library; and the adjacent Ten Mile Court in one grand combustible night, nobody involved has ever talked, other than to say things like, “Please don’t mention me. Please.”
AND NOBODY was arrested, indicted or charged, although there was probably a murder involved, that of young Kenneth ‘Kenny’ Ricks who died of an alleged suicide the day before he was scheduled to testify before a federal grand jury in San Francisco. How’d the kid do it? By placing a shotgun between his legs and pulling the trigger with his toe. Not impossible, but with at least one handgun in his house?
THE TOPPER for me, though, was when, years later, long after the statute of limitations had expired on the arsons, I visited the DA’s office to ask for a look at the twenty (count ‘em) boxes of accumulated case evidence. “Not here. Gone.” DA Eyster has speculated that his nemesis, DA Susan Massini, had taken the boxes with her when she left office and moved to Oregon. (Massini once fired Eyster when he was an assistant DA, marching him out of the office on a Friday afternoon at the point of an investigator’s gun.)
DISAPPEARING EVIDENCE would be a crime if the evidence left town with Massini, because the evidence belongs to history not a private former DA, and this evidence trove undoubtedly contains the names of the people who hired the young men like Kenny Ricks to set the fires that infamous night in 1987. After all, both the FBI and the ATF worked the case, and Massini’s deputy, Myron Sawicki, and many cops and local investigators accumulated the twenty boxes of the case that was never brought. And there may have been a murder involved. Or Kenny Ricks did kill himself because if he’d talked to a federal grand jury the arsonists would have killed him anyway. It was an amazing event, doubly amazing that criminals got away with a series of major arsons.
I’VE CAUGHT GLIMPSES of attorney Sawicki shuffling in and out of the Ukiah Safeway in his bathrobe and slippers, and was tempted to flag him down, but I didn’t because I thought maybe he’d wigged out, nutted up, as the cops say. Of course these days people go out in public in all kinds of garb that used to be considered questionable if not a misdemeanor. Sawicki knows I want to talk to him about the night the heart and soul of historic Fort Bragg was burned out of the venerable, proud community.
FORT BRAGG, in ’87, had a population of about 6,000 and included some rough characters, the kind of low down people who have since been priced out. (Where do they go, Redding? Medford?) Cocaine was everywhere in Fort Bragg in ’87, and the young guys who set a series of arsons prior to that grand night when they torched the old hotel, the library and the justice court, were rewarded for their late night work with copious amounts of the popular white powder.
AND GET THIS. The library and the Ten Mile court were burned as a diversion, the target being the Piedmont Hotel, a business rival of the crime’s mastermind. Diversion? All the firefighters had to do was look down the street to see the Piedmont going up, but by the time they drove the three short blocks the popular restaurant, bar and ancient rooms upstairs were fully engulfed. I guess the diversion worked, but what kind of nihilist burns a town library, let alone its court house, and is permitted to get away with it?
WE SOLD a lot of papers in Fort Bragg over the month our Fire series appeared. No story we’ve done has inspired the kind of pure fear that one did. When even the justice apparatus is worried about retaliation, it means that criminals have inserted themselves so thoroughly into the warp and woof of the community that instead of a concentrated effort to root them out, everyone even remotely involved, if they would talk at all, either spoke in whispers, applied for a concealed weapons permit, or begged not to be involved.
THE WHOLESALE dope dealing, insurance fraud, arsons-for-profit saga occurred because the Fort Bragg-based crooks knew they had nothing to fear from either the DA’s office or from the in-county judicial apparatus. It’s pertinent to point out here that business people whose start-up capital came from the drug trade remain prominent members of Fort Bragg’s free enterprise community. The crooks of ‘86-’90 were confident that they had nothing to fear from authority at higher levels of the justice system. They were right.
SAD THING is the tiny Fort Bragg Police Department knew who did what, and so did the FBI, the ATF, Myron Sawicki, and the DA at the time, Susan Massini. But the twenty boxes of research, the case files, are gone, and there’s no evidence that crimes had ever been committed.
THE LATE HARRY MERLO, former CEO of Louisiana-Pacific, owned several thousand forested acres west of Cloverdale. Merlo, who’d flown to Icarian heights as he plundered Mendocino County’s forests, so high he hired Pavarotti to sing for L-P’s shareholders, ended rather ignominiously when he was summarily dumped by L-P’s board of directors when the directors discovered they were personally liable for Harry’s failed glue board product. In Cloverdale, Merlo got himself a conservation easement having nothing to do with conservation, but what else is new with conservation easements? if you came in late, these things are tax dodges for the well-to-do. In exchange for not cutting down the trees on their property they got a nice break on their property taxes. The public benefit? The pure joy of knowing that our fiscal betters maintain their own trees in the upright position.
THE DAILY CRUSH of events, never so crushing as lately, what with Armageddon kicking off in the Middle East, local affairs tend to get lost in the global din, and local history simply gets lost. Period.
A CALLED ASKED, “Are you familiar with the North Cliff Hotel in Fort Bragg?” Yes, intimately. Its owner, Dominic Affinito, got away with an extra ocean-blocking floor by keeping broke-ass Fort Bragg in endless litigation until Fort Bragg had to give up because legal fees were threatening to bankrupt the town. Why the Coastal Commission let Affinito get away with an extra floor is not known, but as we can see from the numerous dentist complexes fouling the Coastal bluffs, it’s seem obvious that money talks louder than ever. Used to be the great Mark Massera of the Surf Riders was a lone voice on the Coastal Commission to stop these architectural excrescences fouling the ocean bluffs but he’s gone.
AT WHICH POINT the caller shrieked, “Too much information!” and hung up. Well, goddamit, ask an old coot a question don’t expect a tweet in response, you, you, you…. cyber ninny!
RECEIVED this single line inquiry in Tuesday’s mail: “If you were arrested and charged with being a Christian, would there be enough evidence to convict you?”
Well, let me begin by saying that in my callow youth, and never has a more callow youth lived, and deep into the novels of Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy, and having worked for a couple of weeks toting lumber at New Camaldoli where a Catholic order of hermit monks was digging in to pray for humanity, I was quite drawn to Christianity.
TWO OF US were hitchhiking up Highway One from San Luis Obispo, circa maybe 1962, when we got a ride from a youngish man who said he was a monk from Italy. He would give us meals and an austere room if we would help carry lumber around a building project high on a Big Sur ridge where his order of Italian monks was building a “retreat.” Our job was to muscle lumber to the various sites where monk’s cells were under construction.
COUNT ME IN. The monks were all young guys who spent their days in their “cells,” one room cabins, praying for the salvation of humanity, a very large task as even this callow youth understood. I was beguiled by the serenity of the place, the silent non-verbal services rung in by bells, who wouldn’t be? A ridge top in Big Sur before… Well, before even hermit monks realized the world was permanently off the rails, the monastic, spiritual life, spiritually demanding, disciplined — not the jive bullshit spirituality common these days, appealed to me in the literary agape of ignorant youth.
The monks were all young men who had taken vows of silence. My job was to leave meals on the monks' doorstep. Never saw any of them other than the services late in the afternoon.
I KNOW that AVA readers are a highly literate, mucho sophisticated readers, alone in Mendocino County as an intellectual elite, so forgive me the following prescient poem by the great Yeats, already familiar to all of you, but given events, here it is again:
THE SECOND COMING
by William Butler Yeats
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
THE ONGOING PACIFICA HASSLE. Once upon a time way back when people read books and, like, you know, could talk to one another without musical accompaniment, KPFA was the one stop on the FM radio dial where one’s intelligence was not under continuous assault. Whether you agreed with much of the political opinion or not, you could hear articulate leftwingers of all kinds (the Protestant sects have nothing on us, folks!) and erudite literary elucidations from people like Kenneth Rexroth.
WHATEVER ELSE you might say about early KPFA, it was smart and the people who dominated the station were serious people who put principle first. When the Great Slide commenced around 1968, and with a lot of money floating around the country for people who knew how to get “paradigm” into every third sentence, dissident radio programming grew less and less oppositional and dumber and dumber, until it finally went all the way into an audio version of Public Television where Yani, Gary Null and Dr. Hugs had carried out successful coups. (KQED TV is so bad these days you almost think it’s some kind of sophisticated parody of itself. It’s hard to believe it used to offer a full hour of intelligent discussion of Bay Area events every week night and lots of locally-produced documentaries.)
THE DWARVES won at public television, the midgets took over public radio and now, the little people having joined forces, are mopping up Pacifica which, on its good days, is indistinguishable from NPR.
THE LATE NICOLE SAWAYA, a long-time resident of Spy Rock, was station manager here at KZYX, Philo, before she apologetically went off to Washington to work for NPR. From NPR she went to KPFA in Berkeley. She did a good job at KZYX insofar as it’s possible for a smart, capable person to do a good job in a political context you don’t respect and in a social milieu where you’ve got to hold your nose, watch your back and kiss donor ass to keep your minimum wage job. Nicole didn’t go out on any political limbs at KZYX, a station so secretive the identity of its primary local donors is a closely guarded secret and its talk shows are tailored to avoid any and all discussion of subjects painful to its secret money people.
MS. SAWAYA, try as she might to please everyone, lost her job at KPFA for, of all things, “not being a team player.” Naturally, the team players running KPFA decreed that Nicole’s departure was not to be discussed on the air. Several programmers promptly spoke the unspeakable, complaining about the arbitrariness of Nicole's firing. Someone even did a drive-by on KPFA’s Berkeley offices, squeezing off three rounds into the building’s windows.
THERE WAS EVEN a pro-Nicole demo in front of the station featuring, among others, eco-hustler Darryl Cherney of Me First! who was putting in lots of overtime leaning on Bay Area talk jocks and newspaper writers not to discuss from the skeptical position the latest speculations about the bombing attack on him and Judi Bari. Cherney is all for his free speech, but yours? Depends. Which has been the problem at the station for years now; the people dominating the place use it for them and theirs, but woe unto you if you’re not sitting in the junta’s lap. There hasn’t been anything resembling unfettered speech at KPFA for many years. The internal hassles have more to do with travel and conference money than it does anything resembling dissident radio.
A READER'S IMPRESSIONS of the recent First District supervisor candidate debate:
Caught the First District Supervisor debate last night. Here’s some unsolicited observations. Some are superficial, which is politics in the 21st-century.
Madeline Cline — voters don’t usually respond to being lectured. She had some interesting ideas but her delivery needs work.
Adam Gaska — seems really knowledgeable about water, but it didn’t seem like much else. Also, a better fitting shirt would do wonders.
Trevor Mockel — what an embarrassment. Not ready for prime time. Obviously knows very little about County policy. Many answers were couched in asking the state and feds for help. Yeah right!! And he should stop putting his hands in his pocket when speaking.
Carrie Shattuck — hands-down, the winner of the debate. She was confident in her answers, obviously does her homework, and came across quite well.
If the election were today, I’d say Carrie Shattuck is well poised to be the First District Supervisor, but the election is a ways off.
A READER WRITES:
The north end of Orchard Ave there is large piece of property. The county could build a Government Center on this property. The courthouse, jail, sheriffs office, and juvenile hall. An on-ramp to 101 could be added at the end of Brush St. a tunnel or enclosed breezeway between the jail and courthouse would eliminate driving prisoners to court all day long. Everything would be in one place. I think the present location was picked without considering other locations
MARK SCARAMELLA NOTES: The only other courthouse location considered at the time was the block where the Ukiah Bench Library and the empty old Curry’s Furniture store was. It was ruled out early in the process. We suspect that the Train Depot property was picked by local insider Democrats associated with the North Coast Railroad Authority with Doug Bosco orchestrating things in the background. It was a toxic site/liability and the court administration office conveniently paid for the clean-up as part of the decision to “buy” it and put the new courthouse more than three blocks away from downtown Ukiah.
ED NOTE: Sheriff Allman, if memory serves, also thought the Brush Street location would have served nicely for a judicial complex, but I agree with The Major that the present location was a Democrat project from the get because they controlled the railroad and all its ancillary properties. The whole show, imo, is a huge swindle and ripe for a federal investigation.
THE MEDICAL MARIJUANA initiative, Proposition 215, passed in Mendocino County with 64% of the vote. Unlike many other jurisdictions in the state where voters also said it was fine with them if suffering people smoked the stuff, Mendocino County’s DA Norm Vroman and Sheriff Tony Craver quickly worked out sensible local enforcement rules that at least tried to meet voters’ expressed desire to call off the anti-pot hysterics. The only weakness of the Vro-Crave pot strategy was that it required doctors, if it should come to it, to put their stamp of approval on Mr. and Ms. Toke’s permission slip. With the zealots in the federal government’s thriving drug bureaucracies of a quarter century ago trying to stuff as many pot smokers into the prison system as they could to keep themselves in well-paid work, Mendo medicos worried that they might find themselves doing federal time for sanctioning the beneficent herb.
BUT THOSE DAYS of marijuana being a large part of what prosperity Mendocino County could muster, a weird economy pegged to the dual intoxicants of wine and dope, are long gone. Fast forward to 2023 and about the only growth enterprise remaining is decaf lattes.
THE BRIT GUARDIAN HAS SACKED ITS CARTOONIST OF FORTY YEARS FOR THIS CARTOON, CLAIMING IT'S ANTI-SEMITIC:
ON-LINE COMMENTS OF THE WEEK
[1] Novelist Margaret Atwood writes that when she asked a male friend why men feel threatened by women, he answered, “They are afraid women will laugh at them.” When she asked a group of women why they feel threatened by men, they said, “We’re afraid of being killed.”
Native American Proverb:
“A woman’s highest calling is to lead a man to his soul so as to unite him with Source. A man’s greatest calling is to protect woman so that she is free to walk the earth unharmed”.
[2] I was born in Humboldt (before the hippies showed up), and I have watched the dope scene my whole life. I have watched friends and family members living the grower life and chasing the dream. Sometimes they had a good year and wintered in Costa Rica. Mostly they didn’t. I have watched lifelong friends become mortal enemies, listened to endless tales of rip offs, snitches, arrests, addiction, violence and personally knew one person who was murdered over weed.
The dope business has always been a criminal enterprise, and there have always been criminals involved in it. If you think you are some sort of Robin Hood living in Sherwood Forest, you are high…
[3] A skunk is the very most powerfully armed creature on the planet – a skunk can easily make a wolf or a mountain lion back down. Back in the 70’s when I was a grubby backpacker I used to hike a lot in the Great Smokys up in the high country. There were a few shelters like Spence Field that had resident skunks who lived around the backpackers overnight shelters installed by the park service. These are open lean to’s built of logs or stone and with bunks and a fireplace. I’ve experienced cold wet nights around warm fires and a skunk comes in to shake down a bunch of hikers. We share peanuts, candy bars etc. with the obviously panhandling skunk. One very cold night I had the great fortune to actually sleep with a skunk curled up at the foot of my sleeping bag. I forgot about it, nothing I could do about it, and the animal was gone the next morning.
[4] “One woman actually claimed that the Jews in Israel brought this upon themselves, even the children.”
Is that a false statement? Cooping up 2M people in a 140 square mile open air prison for 80+ years, while just taking their property and land over that time period, does not justify their reaction, but DOES explain it.
It is not a Palestinian issue, it is a one of humanity. The Jews themselves did the same in Warsaw, after only being cooped up for years, not decades.
Israel has allowed this to fester for all these decades.
[5] Asymmetric war is also referred to as Total War, as it puts everything “on the table,” as the proud US Chicken Hawks love to say. But as governments now go to war with entire societies, life styles, and basic ways of life, Asymmetric does make a certain twisted sense. For all the hand wringing about governments’ attempt at genocide, who’s doing it and why, it’s quite often the underlying impulse in most, if not all, wars; so much so that it’s usually the civilian populations themselves calling for it the loudest.
We’re all barbarians at heart, it would seem.
[6] Watching video of the pro Palestinian rallies across the country. In big cities but on college campuses too. I notice Trannies & Hipster types are getting in on the action. But its Arabs with head wraps who have control of the bullhorns and are leading the chants.
“No peace on stolen land!”
“There is only one solution
Violent Intifada revolution!”
Stuff like that. Over & over.
Strange thing, at the Universities anyway, participants in the crowd appear to be mostly young, white overweight coeds, with purple or green hair, nose rings, weird eyeglasses, & dressed in black. At Clemson a few days ago there was a rather large rally because the Administration removed tampon dispensing machines from men’s restrooms and men’s locker rooms. The women (mostly) rallying for Palestine seem almost identical to the women pissed about the tampon machine removal policy. Indeed it may be the same group moving around to different events. This is where the LBGQT crowd intersects with violent Jihad lol.
Be First to Comment