Off the Record (February 15, 2024)

THE OTHER DAY a commenter said he didn't think Carrie Shattuck would be a “team player” if she were elected 1st District supervisor. Which, by itself, is a good reason to vote for her, especially in the monochromed, muzak context of Mendo politics, a dispiriting mix of Bidenism and opportunism that leaves most locals unrepresented at any level of government.

OUR SPECTACULARLY WRONGED former Auditor-Controller, Chamise Cubbison, was a “team player” until the DA kicked her off the team for daring to challenge his chiseling reimbursement chits. 

HER CRIME? Protecting public money, which was her job until DA Eyster engineered her dismissal via our spine-free board of supervisors. And Ms. Cubbison was elected to office! So what we had was one power-crazed, vengeful elected official arbitrarily removing another elected official. If Eyster had swooped down on Cubbison with the armed perp-walk that seems to be a Mendo specialty, we'd have had the full Guatemala. 

TEAM PLAYERS did this. Which is what happens when team play becomes the supreme value, that public dissent from someone on the team goes rogue and actually ventures an honest, independent opinion. One would have thought someone in Mendo's ruling public apparatus would have said, “Hey! I don't think we should do this to our elected Auditor-Controller just because the DA wants her out. She's worked for us for many blameless years, and she's always been a team player.” 

DON'T WEEP for Chamise. She'll emerge from her humiliating ordeal a multi-millionaire in damages when she gets her job back, assuming she'd even want it back in the context of the viper's nest which is public employment in Mendocino County.

CUBBISON UPDATE: I'm doing ok. Things just take so long! I'm at least a little more mobile with my broken foot. Still have to wear the "boot", but it's healing well. Next court date is Feb 14th is at 9am. Thanks for your continued support! — Chamise Cubbison

STEPHEN CRANE put it perfectly, “it” being all of us sharing the great mystery: “A man said to the Universe, ‘Sir, I exist!’ ‘However,’ replied the universe, ‘The fact has not created in me A sense of obligation’.”

RECEIVED this intriguing note, a heads up that's just about forty years too late: “Every year the legal community has a party on private property north of Ukiah. Judges, lawyers and legal secretaries. It is a closely guarded secret. Grass, coke and booze, lap dancing and all manner of deviltry. If you can find it you could shut down the legal system in Mendoland. The biggest telephoto lens is necessary.”

I THINK, though, that the annual legal debauch was moved to Emmendel east of Willits, a more private site. The horror! A grislier scene couldn't be imagined than this county’s legal establishment at play. Older old timers will recall that the legal eagles used to shake out their feathers at Lake Mendocino, but so many appalled citizens witnessed their depraved hijinks, and so many of the depraved officers of the court got nailed for drunk driving and other crimes against nature, that the annual party was moved out of sight to Emmendel.

OMAR FIGUEROA is running for a judge slot in Sonoma County. Good lawyer, nice guy. Smart. He always reminded me of the late, great Karl Shapiro in that Figueroa habitually took cases nobody else would touch, including our former writer Will Parrish when Caltrans charged him with a $1 million trespassing charge for protesting the Willits bypass. I remember when he defended a character called Kevin Keating, an ava regular back in the day, who bombarded us under various pseudonyms. Keating got his 15 minutes of fame when he took on Frisco gentrification as the one-man “Yuppie Eradication Project.” Couldn't fault the guy for not thinking big. Anyway, the great yuppie eradicator made all the local media when he was busted flying first class from Paris to San Francisco when he got drunk on Air France wine, subsequently claiming that the booze was so inferior it caused him to flip out 35,000 feet above the Atlantic. Frisco’s arch foe of the bourgeoisie had to be subdued by the plane’s crew. When he landed at SFO, Keating was arrested on charges of drunk in public. Keating’s lawyer, Omar Figueroa, told the media, “I do not think his conduct was a violation of the law. I think there are serious crimes out there that should be investigated. This is not one of them.” Maybe, judge. But how about the crime of an anarchist flying first class? The price of a first class ticket from Paris to SFO? About $4,000 one-way, probably more now.

THE FIRST ITEM in a press release from Senator Mike McGuire’s office listing some of his “achievements”: “Last year, Senator McGuire authored legislation that ensures that aviation fuel used by firefighting aircraft can be transported beyond standard hours during a declared state of emergency…”

BRUCE BRODERICK: While people who suggest that chemtrails and the like are real, those individuals are considered by many to be conspiracy theorists who are just imagining things. I would like you to closely examine this image I took yesterday just north of Pudding Creek Rd. The first thing to consider when looking at the image is that passenger flights don't normally fly in regular circles and they don't repeat themselves in a consistent pattern. Secondly they don't produce what is obvious from the image, an expanding cloud cover. While I don't profess that such things are real or unreal, I would suggest that you just look up.

ED NOTE: No evidence whatsoever that ‘chemtrails’ are anything more than persistent contrails that occur in certain atmospheric conditions. These contrails are claimed to be ‘chemtrails’ because they ‘look different.' You don't think our own government could be aerially bombarding us with harmful chemicals with Joe Biden looking out for us? I'll take my answer off the air.

I LISTENED to the Supreme Court arguments Thursday morning, and I predict an 8-0 win for Trump. Or maybe 8-1 with Sotomayor the one. Boiled down, the nut of the case is, Can individual states keep a national candidate off the ballot? No, and think of the precedent set if Colorado got away with keeping Trump off as Republican states retaliated against Democrats.

SECOND, despite Colorado's Civil War-era based arguments that kept Confederate insurrectionists off federal ballots, January 6 was not an insurrection, it was merely a riot incited by Trump, he and his yobbo magas being too dumb and too lazy to even attempt to pull of an actual coup.

THE JUSTICES seemed reconciled to the basic Jan 6 distinction that the event was a riot, not an insurrection. If they decide that the Democrats can keep the Orange Monster off ballots, we could well see the magas attempt real insurrections in areas of the country where they have majorities.

NONE OF THIS ballot rigging lawfare would have happened if the Democrats had a plausible candidate, but all visible evidence notwithstanding, Biden is so extremely ga-ga that his handlers can't trust him to even do a teleprompter appearance. That Biden is plausible is simply more evidence of the corruption of the mainstream media, who go on pretending the old boy is viable. Biden vs. Trump, the final absurdity.

THE ACCUMULATING catastrophes that comprise late-stage America would defy the best novelists to even begin to describe. I think Nathanael West's ‘The Day of the Locust’ captures the apocalyptic hysteria that was the prevailing vibe in 1939, when America was positively serene compared to what's in store for US in 2024 with twice as many people, millions of them unprepared for tumultuous, unpredictable living. (‘The Day of the Locust’ and ‘Miss Lonelyhearts’ should be required reading by every citizen.)

THE 56th California International Antiquarian Book Fair kicked off Friday on Pier 27 and runs through Sunday. Sponsored by the Antiquarian Booksellers’ Association of America, the three-day event is interesting not only to bibliophiles, but to anyone interested in collecting stuff, and most of us collect stuff.

I HAVEN'T attended for years, but the last time I did I always vowed to come back because it's a fascinating event. Everything on display was, and still is, way, way out of my financial league, and frustrating as hell because I see books I once owned, and you probably did, too, now going for $300 to $500. I did manage to persuade the missus to cough up $20 for a mint condition, February 1950 copy of Horizon magazine devoted entirely to Mary McCarthy’s novella, ’The Oasis.’ It was the only Horizon the guy had and, never having seen another actual Horizon, and being a big fan of editor Cyril Connolly, and a big admirer of Mary McCarthy’s essays but less big on her fiction, I forked over, as the little lady wondered out loud, “You wanted twenty dollars for that?”

IT'S a huge show. Five long aisles worth. I spotted many books I once owned — sold for a pittance in times of desperation — and here they were 60 years later going for hundreds of dollars. The most ordinary lit is priced extortionately high. First edition Salman Rushdie for $75. Already? Impossible. Ridiculous. And there must have been 50 booths selling first editions of ‘Catcher In The Rye’ for $3,500. Probably half the senior citizens in Mendo owned first editions of that one.

IF you’ve never been, go, but it's frustrating, walking around beating back acquisitive desires, and my aim with books these days is less not more. But it’s always been a terrible struggle to resist more. I probably have about a thousand books left in my collection after selling thousands more over the years. Most of mine are on California history, the most valuable is probably the Mendo classic, ‘Genocide and Vendetta’ whose title neatly encapsulates the entire early history of Mendocino County. Last time I checked, it was going for upwards of $1,000, if you can find a copy.

AT A MEMORABLE garage sale in San Francisco on Page just off Fillmore I bought almost an entire set of old Horizons for 25¢ each! Remember Horizon, the expensively rendered, eclectic quarterly? Things of beauty, my friends, and prized relics of that long-gone time when there was a market for artful words presented in artfully-wrought packages. No more, no more. It’s all gone, and soon even the few people who remember literature’s last gasp will be gone, vanished into hand held telephones.

ANYBODY ELSE AGREE that the late Phil Baldwin was the first and last genuinely, consistently progressive person to hold elective office in Mendocino County? As a Ukiah City Councilman, Baldwin, proposed to ban cell phones from public buildings, theaters, restaurants, supermarkets, and classrooms. And he wanted to ban jet skis from Lake Mendocino, which are merely commonsense measures turned down by his elected colleagues, but Phil was always good on the big issues, too, like war and peace, like equal pay for equal work, like justice everywhere and comprehensively.

HAS IT BEEN that long ago that I debated Measure G, the Green Party’s advisory pot initiative? Yep, about a quarter century ago at the Ukiah Civic Center. I represented the No On G position along with the Superintendent of the Ukiah Schools, Gary Brawley, against Cowboy John Pinches and Doc Keegan who argued the Yes position. (Keegan turned out not to be a good advertisement for marijuana. A few years later he bludgeoned his wife Susan to death.)

I WASN'T USED to finding myself aligned with a public school person on much of anything in those days, let alone a Ukiah school superintendent. I thought school administrators of the day should have been required to smoke pot to save them from the embalming fluid they seemed to be addicted to. But I agreed with Brawley and everyone else who said that marijuana is not good for young people because it’s an insidiously stupefying energy drain that can permanently derail young people if they smoke it young and often.

SUPERINTENDENT BRAWLEY didn't see Measure G like I did beyond agreeing it was bad for the young. I saw it this way: Considering the grim facts of life in Mendocino County for an ever-larger number of our fellow citizens, what on Gaia’s Green Earth did progressive people think they were doing to make the world a better place by investing a lot of time and effort into a purely advisory measure about any issue, let alone one as frivolously self-indulgent as cop-free pot for them?

ESPECIALLY in county where seasonal vineyard workers camped out because several hundred of them had no shelter; where private-sector working people pay about half their annual incomes for the leaky roofs over their heads (when they can find them); where an estimated 25% of the children live in conditions of poverty; where public money is invested in distant money markets rather than here in the county in such amenities as affordable housing; where the county had to be sued because it doesn’t have so much as an elementary grading ordinance to protect itself against the environmental rampages of the wine industry; whose mentally ill people are mostly confined to the County Jail because there’s no other place to keep the vulnerable safe from themselves and the battalion of real predators out there; and on and on.

SO WHAT DID the county's “progressives” do? Worked a half year on an inane advisory measure that resulted in the depiction of Mendocino County in the national media as some kind of officially-sanctioned doper’s paradise. Obviously the pot laws then were unjust to the persons who ran afoul of them, but as a priority social prob the absurdities of the pot laws should not be anywhere near even the top ten of any self-respecting progressive person’s list of social/political priorities.

MEASURE G was being yukked up all over the national media. An AP Wire story appeared in papers all over the country featuring 82-year-old Ann Dierup, a Mendocino woman who was washed down the stairs of SF's City Hall by fire hoses protesting the McCarthy hearings in 1960. Ann, fully recovered from her valiant stand against McCarthy, appeared in a living color photo, saying, “I’m not into the thing. I don’t grow it. I don’t smoke it. But I don’t think it’s as dangerous as alcohol.”

PLEASE, ANN, I begged, invidious comparisons of fundamentally different hazardous substances is hardly an argument for one over the other. “I am not into the thing,” she said. I wasn't either, but I loved the other thing — booze.

THE MEDIA were again fastened on Mendo big time. Then-supervisor Michael Delbar popped up on national television talking about how pot has led to perdition in Potter Valley. The New York Times featured Mendo’s Measure G. Then-Sheriff Tony Craver told me that CNN had just interviewed him although AP had already “made me out to be Sheriff Bob Marley!”

ALTHOUGH it was already way, way too late, Craver had never even come close to saying he was pro-marijuana. DA Norm Vroman, made it clear that whatever the outcome of Measure G, state and federal dope law superseded whatever Mendo’s pot brigades might come up with in the way of advisory initiatives. Those were the days when illegal marijuana brought lots of money into the county, and right here in Boonville, at harvest time, little kids had to be sent home from school to change clothes because they reeked of the love drug.

THE DEMOCRATS now have the perfect excuse for Biden betraying nearly every promise he made during his 2020 campaign, unfortunately for them it will prove fatal to his reelection: he doesn’t remember making them. According to the Special Counsel’s report on Biden’s mishandling of classified documents, Biden is “an elderly man with a poor memory.” And the “significant” problems with his memory got “worse” over the course of the investigation to the point where Biden “did not remember when he was vice president” or “even within several years, when his son Beau died.” “In his interview with our office, Mr. Biden’s memory was worse. He did not remember when he was vice president, forgetting on the first day of the interview when his term ended (“If it was 2013 — when did I stop being Vice President?”), and forgetting on the second day of the interview when his term began (“In 2009, am I still Vice President?”). He did not remember, even within several years, when his son Beau died. And his memory appeared hazy when describing the Afghanistan debate that was once so important to him. Among other things, he mistakenly said he “had a real difference” of opinion with General Karl Eikenberry, when, in fact, Eikenberry was an ally whom Mr. Biden cited approvingly in his Thanksgiving memo to President Obama.” + The reasons set forth by the Special Counsel’s report for declining to prosecute Biden for illegally retaining classified documents on Afghanistan (i.e., “diminished faculties”) are far more devastating to him–and the Democrats who continue to support him–than an indictment would have been. (Still, it’s worth noting that few other people are granted this kind of leniency when they have been caught with stolen material and over the course of his own political career, much of it spent writing punitive crime laws, Biden himself has rarely shown any.) + Even in his “diminished” condition, Biden still may have more political (if not mental) “faculties” than Harris, who spreads confusion wherever she goes, which may be why they haven’t tried to invoke the 25th Amendment… + Biden is learning that it’s never a good thing politically when people begin to speak of you in the past tense while you’re still alive. But fortunately for him he’ll have forgotten this morbid lesson by tomorrow morning. + Ginsburg, Feinstein, Pelosi, Clyburn, Biden…the most selfish generation in American politics? They clung to power longer than the segregationist Democrats Biden so admired. + Ladies and gentlemen, the President of the United States…. (Jeffrey St. Clair)

MAUREEN CALLAHAN: It's no longer up for debate: Joe Biden has got to go. In a hastily called press conference Thursday night, President Biden was, for the first time, questioned relentlessly by the White House press pool about his age, cognition, and fitness to serve. Finally! The ostensible headline was meant to be that the Department of Justice report had cleared Biden of mishandling classified documents. But the real headline was contained in the special counsel Robert Hur's reasoning. He wrote that a jury would be unlikely to convict because Biden, 81, is 'a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory' suffering 'diminished faculties in advancing age'. Biden told investigators that he could not recall when his term as vice president ended. 'If it was 2013 - when did I stop being vice president?' he asked. Oh dear.

KENNEDY: Undeniable evidence of Joe Biden 's startling mental decline is accumulating faster than naked selfies in Hunter's laptop. The Special Counsel investigating Biden's mishandling of classified documents found he 'willfully retained and disclosed classified materials after his vice presidency when he was a private citizen.' But - get this hot load of malarkey - Joe won't be charged. Why? Because his own Justice Department has concluded that a jury would find him to be 'a well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.' Translation: No juror would throw their poor old grandpa in the clink, so the DOJ is not going to bother prosecuting. And it gets worse. Call the cops! It's official. America's top law enforcement department thinks Biden's brains have turned to mashed potatoes.

RECURRING bumper stickers: “There’s No Excuse For Domestic Violence.” O yeah? There are lots of excuses for it, not that a gentleman should ever succumb. “Security Provided By Smith & Wesson.” Thank you for the warning. I’ll shoot you first.

COUNTY SCHOOL SUPERINTENDENT NICOLE GLENTZER'S endorsement of Trevor Mockel for 1st District supervisor is the zen equivalent of “If a tree falls in the forest and no one hears it, did it fall?” Ms. Glentzer heads up MCOE, inspiring a second zen koan: If a public agency spends millions a year but nobody knows what it does, does it exist?

THEY'VE already started, the professional Democrats, putting it out there that if voters don't support Biden we'll get another round of Trump. In other words, if we don't get behind a guy who barely knows where he is or what he's doing, we'll get the guy who will finish US off forever.

2024 is shaping up as a pivotal year in lots of ways pegged to the looming election, but how long have the professional Democrats been telling us that we'll get catastrophe if we don't vote for their defective presidential candidate? And whose fault is it that out of desperation millions of working people have turned to an orange billionaire because the Democrats stopped being Democrats?

BIDEN WAS ALREADY hugely diminished when Obama and the DNC foisted him off on US, and here we are about to get him foisted off on us again even more debilitated than he was four years ago. The Democrats have been essentially the same as Republicans on key issues for a long time now.

THE ANTI-DEMOCRATIC reality of the Democrats is confirmed when one considers how their candidates are selected on the Northcoast from among existing officeholders, or from among the staffs of former officeholders. In Mendocino County there are no more than 25 active Democrats as remote from the political realities on the Northcoast as the plutocrats who fund both parties.

NORTHCOAST Republicans don’t bother to give their volunteer candidates any money because they’re pleased with the Democrats, in our case a series of career officeholders of the bland opportunists of the Jared Huffman, McGuire, Wood type.

WHEN Democrats and Republicans have to convene their anointing sessions at conventions ringed by thousands of police, and then sell those candidates via public appearances by Cher and Snoop Dog, what kind of democracy do we have here?

RECOMMENDED READING: ‘The Cliff Walk, A Memoir of a Job Lost and a Life Found’ by Don J. Snyder. I bought it in hard bound form at a garage sale in San Francisco. It was one of three books almost hidden beneath exactly six old tin cheese graters in a cardboard box that looked like it had been kicked into the corner of the ancient seller's garage for many years. I'd caught a glimpse of the white cover of Cliff Walk buried under the tin.

THE OTHER TWO BOOKS were a paperback of Dreiser miscellany, introduction by James T. Farrell, and a New American paperback called ‘My Turn’ by John O’Hara, a collection of O’Hara opinions. The old guy sold me all three books for 75 cents. “To anyone but you they’d be 74,” he said with a chuckle.

I WAS very pleased with the Dreiser and the O’Hara but I hadn’t heard of ‘Cliff Walk’ or its author, Don Snyder. I know I should know better by now, but the cover of Snyder’s book almost caused me to pass on it. It’s repulsively done in motel grays and whites upon which are superimposed a pair of work boots. I had to take a close look at the cover, and read some of the book to figure out the work boots were the author's after he lost his job as a college professor and finally found work as a carpenter's helper, toting building materials around on a construction site.

THE AUTHOR, despite rave reviews from his students, lost his professorship at Colgate when that college and most others began hiring strictly along race and gender lines. Didn't matter how good he taught, he was a white male, by definition historically responsible for all the evil in the world.

PROFESSOR SNYDER had four little kids and a wife with about a year in savings. He sends out hundreds of resumes for a teaching job but got not even a single interview. All this time the savings dwindle as he comes to understand how his own disdain for his blue collar origins has biased him against sweat labor.

I'M GLAD I didn’t tell this book by its cover. But I still wonder about the old guy who had only three books for sale, all of them good books, buried in a box with six cheese graters. Representational art? Some kind of sidewalk gag?

CLIFF WALK, ugly dust jacket and New Agey title aside, is the best thing I’ve ever read about facing down the wolf at the door. It’s an explicit, absolutely honest account of a guy disencumbering himself of the acquisitive life — material and emotional, discovering as he goes that neither he nor his family need the lush life of the campus. This isn’t the story of some trust funder bopping around as a hippie for a few years before becoming a judge in Mendocino County, it’s the story by a lower-middleclass guy buying into the all-pervasive cultural assumptions that more is better when up escalator suddenly stops and thrown off, forcing him to question every fundamental assumption he’s ever made and plunging him back into the life of fear and humiliation he thought he’d escaped forever when he left lower-middle land.

THE HUGE RESPONSIBILITY of wife and kids make the author's downward trajectory all the more harrowing, what with the kids clamoring for The Mall and Mrs. Snyder worrying that her husband may be headed right on over the top into alcohol dependency and total abdication.

SNYDER'S ACCOUNT is honestly told totally without self-pity, probably a little too tough and too radical for the talk show babblers, but it’s the real deal. Is it available? Yep, last time I looked there two copies at the Mendocino Book Company in Ukiah.

Excerpt:

I don’t think I made a conscious decision to surrender this way. It just came on sometime in the winter when it became clear to me that I wasn’t going to find a decent job. I had received canned rejection letters from everywhere, including two community colleges in Idaho and California, which in better days I wouldn’t have tried for. Just before my final rejection my eyes were opened when I answered the distress signal of a former student who had been dumped from a graduate program in theater for missing too many classes. He asked me if I would intervene on his behalf and so I telephoned the dean and pleaded his case. The dean listened for a while before he told me that there were no conditions under which he would reverse his decision. “Listen,” he replied, “he may be a wonderful person and a great actor but we have a policy about class attendance and it’s very strict because, the point is, we don’t NEED any more actors, there are already too many great actors, there are hundreds of them in line for every part.” Those words — WE DON’T NEED ANY MORE ACTORS. I surrendered to those words, knowing that they were true, they were the words that would write the future of America. And they meant that we didn’t need any more college professors either. And no more doctors or lawyers. No more of anything that entitled one to a grand life. There were too many people, too many talented and driven people waiting at every slot for a way in. Some of these people had fought their way from a hopeless beginning to get there; they were resourceful and tough as nails. Some of them would fight viciously just for standing room outside the door. One of the last things I did before I collapsed was argue with Bradford about this. I told him what the businessman at the Little League field had said to me, that someday the downtrodden and the humiliated were going to come screaming into the yacht clubs and the country clubs and the tennis clubs and the prep schools and the Ivy League colleges and they were going to put a knife at the throats of our children and say, “Ante up, you motherfuckers. You’ve had it good for too long!” I told my friend that we were spoiled just because WE HAD THE CHANCE to work for the good things. “And these people who’ve had nothing,” I said, “are much tougher than we are. Once they decide to come and claim their chance, they’ll eat guys like you and me for breakfast. You remember struggling to get through medical school? But I’m telling you that was a piece of cake compared to what these people have been through. You always had a safety net beneath you. Hell, I remember your father’s credit card in the glove compartment of your old Buick. There was someone behind you to pick you up if things got rough.”

— Don J. Snyder, “The Cliff Walk”

ON-LINE COMMENTS OF THE WEEK

[1] Women and men are both necessary for achieving success, otherwise God would have made men capable of having children. Why have two sexes when one will do? Two is inefficient. When a man became pregnant, evolution could figure out how to deal with it. So God must have had some other reason for creating women. If you want to find out why, just ask Him. BTW, in the past, women weren’t necessarily considered the weaker sex or needing protecting because they were the child-bearing ones. Pregnant women often worked in the fields. When they were ready to deliver, they laid down, delivered their baby, and went back to work. The reason women stayed home and men went hunting was because men produced testosterone and were much more aggressive. They also tended to have more muscle, a major requirement in dealing with wild animals and other enemies. Human babies are kind of unique because they need much more time to mature than other animals, so women got nurturing hormones, and although capable of hunting, were less so than men. Imagine trying to hunt mammoths carrying around a baby.

[2] When the various local/state/federal governments and NGOS are paying people to come here illegally on refillable debit cards to be here and they then also don’t have to work they are slowly edging people out who were already living on the edge. There was already a housing shortage before they started adding millions of people to the market. Something has to break. 2 bedroom 1 bath apartment in a decent area is now going for $3500 to $4000 a month with yearly increases of almost $300. A shitbox condo is $750,000 and a house built in the 1950 with almost no upgrades is going for $1,500,000. People making $75,000 a year can’t keep up.

[3] The winner will be the Kansas City Chiefs. Why? Because Swift brings good money to the NFL. Can you imagine the post-game show when the Chiefs subdue the 49ers? They won’t show the players, the coaches or the staff, the cameras will be on Tay Tay and Trav. Gag. The poor 49ers. They are doomed to lose this one. It’s already been decided.

[4] Today we sat beside the pool, eating our ice cream cones and watching people walk by. Mon dieu! I’d say 40% were obese, 40% were overweight or chunky, 15% in decent shape and 5% looked good. Personally, I’m sick of watching thunder thighs. Also saw a lot of elderly shifting side to side while walking forward, an obvious sign of failing hips. Our ice cream serving was huge, too big to fit in the cone, so they put it in a cup and squished the cone in upside down with the ice cream. They no longer have single scoops. The weight of the ice cream was so heavy that we couldn’t straighten up the cone with any ice cream on it. Yech! I’m just going into detail here to show how ridiculous and gluttonous it is. When TSHTF, people are going to freak out. On the nice side, all the kids – and there are a lot of them – seemed to be having a ball, yelling and giggling. There’s nothing like watching kids happily playing.

[5] There’s a saying that goes if voting mattered, they wouldn’t let you do it. The only time voting matters is state to state. We get to pick who runs our state, but when it comes down to the whole country? Nope. So many people wanted Gavin Newsom gone, and millions voted against him. He still beat the recall by using manipulation tactics against a fragile liberal population. He did it by simply calling Larry Elder a Trump 2.0 because he was associated with Trump, and on top of it all he promised a whole lot of women that California will be an abortion paradise. In fact he got a bunch of votes from women. He said women are smarter and better than men at governing. Next thing you know, that slick hair bastard beat the recall. You can even find the videos of him giving the speech on youtube and he looked like he was about to cry. He was that scared of losing California to someone else that he lied, cheated, and manipulated to avoid getting recalled.

[6] Americans are not a righteous nor a sane group of people. Television and movies, in my opinion, have devastated our society. Causing people to have false belief in lies and fakery over truth and honesty. Just walk through the store and you’ll see what America has become. People are typically obese. Dressed in their pajamas. Covered in tattoos. Degeneracy abounds in all of its forms. Drug and alcohol use is out of control. Sexual perversion permeates society. Illiteracy, ignorance and intolerance are the norms now while time honored traditions of family and love are quashed. Women butcher and murder their own children and then have altars in their homes where they worship the remains of their children. How can we expect a people this lost to reclaim its government?

[7] But what’s next? The USA is rudderless, the Captain is out of his mind, the ship is crashing against the rocks.

[8] Biden is in no worse shape than Woodrow Wilson was in his last two years in office. Democrats should have thought twice before they went after Trump with their baseless, stupid impeachments & lawfare tactics. They showed the public how it's done; anything goes, and no mercy to your opponents. But they thought it would work only one way, against Trump. They’re finding out it works both ways, and payback is a bitch.