A READER WRITES: I mourn the end of your newspaper in my life, but I also rejoice at its presence in my life for the more than 40 years I lived in Anderson Valley with my beloved husband. Farewell print warriors.
THE AVA ASKED Matt LaFever of MendoFever.com why he didn’t post the Ukiah Police Presser about the gang incident at Ukiah High.
LaFever replied: “The named student was in my class. My primary role in the community is a teacher. I didn’t want to compromise other students’ trust by publishing. Sorry for the late reply. I just came down from Mount Shasta.
UKIAH'S ENDLESS bungling of the Palace Hotel is not surprising given that the town elects pom-pom girls, male and female, to city and county positions, persons unequipped to run anything more complicated than a homecoming celebration. What other town anywhere of 16,000 people would fail to ensure that a young woman of means, a young woman with specific plans drawn up by first-rate architects and engineers and builders to not only restore the long abandoned Palace but expand it? Minal Shankar, the young woman of means, is probably still shaking her head that Ukiah somehow allowed a small group of windy Ukiah hustlers to sabotage what would have been the greatest gift to the town since Grace Hudson?
I WAS HAPPY that the Chronicle gave Kate Coleman the honorable send-off she deserved for her long life of brave reporting. She was maligned by all the right people, from the criminal thugs who came to dominate the Black Panther Party — “The Party's Over” — to the cash and carry figures dominant at Earth First! during the years it was dominated by Judi Bari.
KATE'S journalo-exposures of these figures earned her constant denunciations on the pseudo-left audio outpost at KPFA, which then and now bills itself as “free speech radio,” which, I suppose, it is so long as that speech doesn't contradict the cultish political catechism the station is synonymous with. (I hasten to say there's still lots of good stuff on KPFA, but when it came to the Panthers and the rolling Bari scam, KPFA lost its way.)
THE CHRON'S piece by Sam Whiting was titled, “Kate Coleman 1942-2024. Free Speech Veteran Wrote Courageous Exposes.” She sure did. Her break-through reporting on the Panthers could have gotten her killed, and as tough and fearless as Kate was she had to put up bars on her windows and keep a gun handy, but she never left her Berkeley home.
KATE'S second big sin was her book on Judi Bari of Earth First! — “The Secret Wars of Judi Bari” — written from a skeptical perspective, which is inevitable to anybody who looks at the known facts of Bari's Mendo-based tenure and her slow death from the car bomb attack on her. Kate thought, and wrote, the obvious — that the attack on Bari was an inside job almost certainly mounted by her ex-husband, Mike Sweeney, himself a graduate of the violent cult left of the late 1960s.
WHEN KATE APPEARED at the Gallery Bookshop in Mendocino, she was beset by a gaggle of screeching hags who tried, unsuccessfully, to shout her down. Her low opinion of Bari's cult status, pretty much confined to Mendo, was only confirmed. As a veteran of the Berkeley left, Kate was angry, but not surprised by her Mendo experience.
IRV SUTLEY has died. Like Coleman, Irv was also a victim of the Bari cult's vilification because as a leftist and a gun guy, Irv made the mistake of posing Bari and her dim male doppelganger, Darryl Cherney — at their request — with an Uzi. They wanted to use the photo as the cover for their music called “They Sure Don't Make Hippies Like They Used To.” Irv thus became the bomber, or a facsimile thereof convenient to Bari. Anybody, anything to divert attention from her ex. After the car bomb that nearly killed her and Cherney, Bari claimed she had always been committed to non-violence.
ANY DISCUSSION of the Bari interlude from a skeptical perspective is, of course, and always has been forbidden at free speech KPFA, KMUD, KZYX.
FROM WIKIPEDIA, ANNOTATED BY ME WHO KNEW ALL THE PLAYERS BETTER THAN HE WISHES NOW HE HAD KNOWN THEM:
“In l990, a car bomb in Oakland almost killed radical Earth First! leader Judi Bari and her passenger, a co-leader and onetime lover, Darryl Cherney. The FBI accused the pair of transporting the explosive device knowingly as part of a violent campaign of "ecotage." [The feds and the Oakland Police Department ignored the obvious physical evidence of the bomb blast that proved the bomb was hidden beneath the seat of Bari's Subaru, not in plain view from behind as these half-assed sleuths claimed.] From her hospital bed, Bari charged that the timber interests of Northern California and the FBI had tried to kill her. [If the federal government and corporate timber are going to try to kill you, you are going to be killed.] The car bomb and the competing conspiracy theories about who was responsible made Bari a national figure; but she had long been a legendary figure among California activists. A veteran of the Vietnam War protests of the 1960s who moved to militant feminism and environmentalism after the war ended, Bari was involved in the radical eco-organization Earth First! by the mid-1980s and leading the fight against the logging companies on the Northern California coast. [Actually, Bari hijacked Earth First! from founder Dave Foreman. Foreman wanted EF! to remain an eco-based movement not, as he said, “an umbrella social movement.” As it happens, I was present in Sebastopol when Bari met Foreman and had to apologize to him for accusing him of male chauvinism etc.] Not long before the attempt on her life, she had summoned young people from all over the country to join her in a crusade to save the remaining redwood forests of the Pacific Coast in a ‘Redwood Summer’ based on the Mississippi Summer of the civil rights movement a quarter-century earlier. ‘The Secret Wars of Judi Bari’ traces Bari's rise from college activist to a would-be Mother Jones of the Redwoods. Drawing on extensive interviews with Bari's friends, comrades and critics, Kate Coleman describes Bari's long struggle for selfhood against her communist parents [respectable, prosperous people who once belonged to the CPUSA] and her husband, himself a former member of violent political groups; against those in her movement who felt that she was not radical enough; and ultimately against the FBI and the State of California. [“Not radical enough?” Never heard that one. Sweeney belonged to a Stanford-based Maoist group led by an English professor. This group, called Venceremos, killed a police officer and planted bombs in public buildings all over the Bay Area.] Judi Bari's wars continued until her death from cancer seven years after the explosion that changed her life forever. [The bomb killed her in slow motion.] In creating a dramatic portrait of a unique American life, Coleman takes the reader inside the radical politics that outlived the 1960s, and into the Earth First! movement and the back-to-nature counterculture of the North Coast of California. This is a world that Coleman has lived in herself and spent her career documenting as a writer. In ‘The Secret Wars of Judi Bari’ she has produced a book that is at once a crime story, a social history, and a compelling biography of a woman at war with her world.”
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS neatly summed up the difference between them and us. Unfortunately, in Mendo, them includes a slug of people who think they're us but are, by their behavior, them:
“I have drawn a line between everything I hated versus everything I loved. In the hate column: dictatorship, religion, stupidity, demagogy, censorship, bullying, and intimidation. In the love column: literature, irony, humor, the individual and the defense of free expression.”
RANDOM MEMORIES: When I bought the AVA in January of 1984, I assessed my prospects as iffy. How to publish an honest newspaper? By honest I mean a newspaper that reflected the Mendo reality as it reflected itself and as I perceived it, a newspaper that possessed an integrity of opinion. “This is what I think. You're welcome to argue with it but there it is.” I wanted a newspaper I myself could read without cringing, a newspaper as free of bullshit as possible in a county and a country that runs on bullshit.
THE FIRST ADVERTISER to flee was Mendo Mill. By Spring, almost all advertisers had fled, which I had anticipated. I knew to survive I would have to depend on subscriptions and stand sales, and to do that I would have to produce a paper that appealed to a much wider demographic than a few old beatniks tucked away in the Mendo vastness. The idea was to go both hyper-local — school board meetings and whatever else in the way of interest had occurred that week in the Anderson Valley — and stories and opinion from wherever by whomever, and the talent came rushing in, often in hilarious letters to the editor and riveting articles from non-professional writers liberated by a prose venue offering them safe harbor.
OF COURSE more people than not didn't like the combativeness on weekly display, but according to the experts, the AVA quickly enjoyed “total market penetration” in the Anderson Valley, a statistic reached by concluding one paper sold for every mailbox. And very soon we had established outlets from Arcata to San Francisco, some of our most lucrative outlets being liquor stores.
BACK TO MENDO MILL. Not to single them out, but whoever it was who called me back in the winter of '84 has irritated me ever since because of the smug implications of the caller, a manager, I suppose, that he could enjoy his imagined power as a fifty dollar a week advertiser by enjoying my pain at losing his business.
“Is this Mr. Anderson?'”
Yup.
“THIS is Jim Bubba from Mendo Mill. I'm cancelling my ad.”
Ok.
“Well?”
Well what?
“I just said I'm cancelling my ad.”
I heard you the first time. You can go now.
“Are you going to cancel my ad?”
Why wouldn't I?
“You sound like you don't care.”
I don't. There was a long pause before he hung up.
ANOTHER OF UKIAH'S titans of free enterprise cancelled his ad by telegram, apparently not realizing that telegrams to Boonville were delivered by mail.
AND so it went as I consoled myself with that famous observation by George Orwell that
“Advertising is the rattling of a stick inside a swill bucket. ”
SOME OF YOU older old timers will remember the huge Bay Area demonstrations against the Vietnam War. There was always a small group brandishing NLF flags and chanting “Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh, Ho Chi Minh is gonna win.” Few of the marchers shared that desire; most people just wanted the war to end.
JUST BECAUSE a tiny minority of deluded Hamas supporters chant slogans that imply the destruction of Israel, doesn't mean that the large majority of college kids demonstrating against the monstrous attack on Gaza are anti-Semites.
I'M ENJOYING the irony of the Republican Party, traditional home of American anti-Semitism, denouncing the current campus demonstrations as anti-Semitic.
GIVEN THE GENERAL INCREASE in scumbaggery, high and low, it's only mildly surprising that a family of apparent tourists was beaten and robbed in Old Hopland last Sunday night.
THE SHERIFF'S recent presser on the episode was intriguing, raising more questions than not, which is the way of Sheriff pressers, but this particular crime is unusual for Mendo, a county whose criminal class is pretty much an under-the-influence smash and grab kinda crew. I can't remember a complex crime occurring here recently, unless it's the vengeful one initiated by the DA against Ms. Cubbison, the county's elected bean counter for the crime of challenging the DA's expense chits.
TWO ARMED MEN, “dressed in black” appeared in the immediate vicinity of the Sanel Market at 10:30pm — the market is advertised as closed at 10pm — to waylay four Marin tourists?
Adult Female (62-year-old from San Rafael, CA)
Adult Male (33-year-old from San Rafael, CA)
Adult Female (41-year-old from San Rafael, CA)
Adult Male (39-year-old from Pinole, CA)
AS A PART-TIME RESIDENT of Marin I don't automatically assign virtue to my fellow residents, but these four vics seem unlikely, a family apparently, who have presumably explained, perhaps plausibly, why they were in Old Hopland at that time of night.
THE MARIN PARTY'S story is that they'd stopped in the vicinity of the market when a pair of armed yobbos just happen to happen upon them, take all their stuff, smack them around so severely two of the Marin party are hauled off to Adventist Emergency for a go over? Serendipity? We're waiting for the rest of this story.
TRAIL TALK: Unveiling the Ambitious Plans and Controversies Surrounding the Great Redwood Trail
SUPERVISOR MULHEREN:
On Denim Day, we wear jeans to protest against the misconceptions that surround sexual violence. Every survivor deserves to be believed, supported, and empowered. Let’s break the silence and work towards a world free from sexual assault.
ON LINE RESPONSE:
Apparently, it’s “denim day” at the County of Mendocino. Lots of photos on Facebook of different departments wearing denim jeans. Seriously. I’m so glad there are no major issues that the county needs to deal with at this time!
PETIT TETON FARM
Petit Teton Farm is open Mon-Sat 9-4:30, Sun 12-4:30. Along with the large inventory of jams, pickles, soups, hot sauces, apple sauces, and drink mixers made from everything we grow, we sell frozen USDA beef and pork from our perfectly raised pigs and cows, and stewing hens and eggs. Squab is also available at times. Contact us for what's in stock at 707.684.4146 or farmer@petitteton.com.
Nikki and Steve
I LAUGHED at the description of the Oregon fugitive arrested in Yorkville as “armed and dangerous.” Strictly considered, that descriptive applies to a dozen or so residents at the south end of the Anderson Valley.
INTERSECTIONALITY, N. This new word and concept has popped up a lot lately in the context of university presidents frantically trying to hang on to their cush jobs as their student bodies ignore them and come to the defense of Palestinians. I'm surprised anybody can invoke the word in a non-ironic context, but higher learning these days is rife with dubious scholarship. I ask you: “Demarginalizing the countless intersections of structural oppression is a crucial step towards dismantling those systems of oppression and empowering individuals with intersectional marginalized identities.”
DISMANTLING this or any other system of oppression takes guns and people unafraid to die, not a bunch of fakes rattling their teacups in faculty lounges.
PALESTINIANS have been the wronged party since 1948. Shouldn't be any confusion about that. Screw over people long enough and you get Hamas or versions thereof. The last hope for a just two-state option was lost a couple of times, first in '79 under Carter when Sadat of Egypt talked peace, which got him assassinated by Hamas types, and then in '93 under Clinton, Arafat and Rabin, the latter the last rational, humane Israeli leader. That one in '93 blew up when the Hamas types sabbed the tentative agreement with a mass terrorist attack on Israeli civilians, which ushered in Israeli fascists as heads of state. And here we are. Not to be too pessimistic, but the current horrors in the Middle East seem long-term intractable..
ORANGE MAN appeared on the morning news on his way into court to defend himself in the sordid context of porn stars and the National Enquirer. In his usual monologic stream of consciousness, during which, as usual, there was no evidence of consciousness, he said that "Joe Biden is the worst president in the history of the United States." Biden's certainly up there among the worst, but a couple of inches ahead of Trump himself as one of the all-time presidential disasters. I'd say W. Bush was the absolute worst as the man who destabilized the entire Middle East with, natch, the usual bipartisan sign-off. Then there's Nixon, and going back some there was Andrew Johnson who succeeded Lincoln and unraveled Reconstruction, and before him the infamous Indian killer Andrew Jackson, and a hundred years later, Warren Harding. I didn't like Wilson much either. Overall, we had the gifted founding aristos, then Lincoln, Grant was pretty good, too, at least in intention, and Franklin Roosevelt. Since Roosevelt we've suffered a parade of mediocrities, straight-up imbeciles, and now, a cadaver. I'd say Kennedy showed enough promise to get himself assassinated. '24 is shaping up as the last presidential election as we slide into a kind of civil war and regional balkanization.
MARK SCARAMELLA ADDS: I’d add Bill Clinton to the list of the worst presidents. He ushered in the conversion of Democrats into neo-liberal Republicans-under-another-name via the DNC beginning the era which brought us the fake liberals who followed including Gore, Kerry Billary, Obama, and Biden, In the process he ended what was left of a marginally humane welfare system, normalized high-altitude bombing as a foreign policy, and brought us a bunch of awful legislation that the Republicans could never have pushed through on their own such as NAFTA (which brought on the immigration crisis), the Crime Bill, Option 9, and so many others.
SARA SONGBIRD: Jon Tyson and I will be busking in Golden Gate Park again this Saturday. You can catch us at the underpass across from the Conservatory Of Flowers from 11-1. We’ll be playing my original tunes and lots of fun sing-alongs. Come request a tune and enjoy the park with us.
THE BAIL SCHEDULE at the Mendocino County Jail is set by judges. Bail schedules are a pretty good indication of how seriously judges view crime. A person driving drunk who kills someone, as a Fort Bragg woman did when she drove into a kid on the other side of the road while she was drunk, can get out the next day on bail as low as ten thousand dollars, the bond for which can be had for a thousand. Bail for murder can be as low as $100,000. If you're guilty of murder there's certainly plenty of incentive to put up the ten and catch the next bus to Outtahere. There are counties in this state that require woman beaters to put up $250,000 bail, thus ensuring that macho man does at least a month or so in the sweat box while awaiting trial. High bail isn't prejudicial; it's really a clear message that the judges of the county are serious about epidemics of dangerous social behavior.
FROM THE AVA of 2001 when marijuana was king:
“AS MENDOCINO COUNTY'S number one ag export is trimmed, bagged and shipped south where it fetches an average of $4,500-$6000 per pound, Sgt. Rusty Noe of the County of Mendocino Marijuana Eradication Team, known informally as the Cannabis Price Support Unit, has released the final figures for this year's pot hunt: 136,478 plants weighing 95,951 pounds were uprooted from 387 sites. 53 persons were arrested, 54 weapons seized.”
I ALMOST DROPPED my coffee cup this morning when I heard a guy on KZYX say he was going to talk about “McCarthyism and the Media.” Come again? KZYX is a public radio station where dissenting opinion on a whole range of local subjects is not permitted, but local libs come roaring out to boldly kick around events far, far away, and, of course, faithfully vote for reactionary national Democrats presently in support of the Gazan genocide.
YEARS AGO, I underwent what the Marines then called “Cold Weather Training” at a place called Pickle Meadows in the Eastern Sierra near Bridgeport, a stunningly beautiful area I'd always hoped to re-visit but never did. I saw a newspaper piece the other day describing how Marines had trained up there for Afghanistan. Way back, “Cold Weather Training” was more oriented to surviving in winter mountains than it was fighting in them. The cold weather training at Pickle Meadows was interesting and lots of fun. All Marine training was quite good, at least I thought it was; I can remember how to do lots of stuff I learned as a lean, mean fighting machine, some of it, I fantasized, relevant if Americans took to fighting each other. Then I got old, too old for Mitty-ish fantasies.
A READER COMMENTS: “Yesterday, when a woman on national radio was asked what she thinks about Taliban, she said, 'I don't use deodorant’.”
YEARS AGO a pollster asked me, “Do you support President Bush's war on terrorism?” I said I didn't want strangers hitting my two sisters with sticks in the streets of America. My sister's discipline is my responsibility, I said. Long pause on the other end of the phone. “Shall I put you down as Yes or No?”
I READ SOMEWHERE that Islam's “divine law” says a wife does not have the right to refuse her husband's sexual demands. And he can have four wives, too, if he can support them. Moreover, in some interpretations of Islam — and men do all the interpreting — a man can enter into “temporary” marriage contracts ranging from one hour to ninety-nine years. Hmmm. Not a bad idea, especially given American divorce rates.
THE LATE MAURICE TINDALL, a Boonville sheepman and former Anderson Valley Justice Court judge, told me once that he was hunting bear up on Signal Ridge the morning in 1906 when the Big One hit Northern California, wiping out much of San Francisco, Santa Rosa, Point Arena, and Fort Bragg. He said he looked out over Anderson Valley as the great swathes of giant redwood still prevalent swayed back and forth as if it were a vast undersea forest.
NOT THAT ANYBODY can quantify the reasons why the fish-free Navarro River is dying, but it seems obvious that upstream diversions make the river much sicker in late summer than it need be. And the same upstream diversions into the wine industry’s explosion of lake-size ponds certainly divert winter runoff that might otherwise blast much of the silt accumulated in the lower Navarro. Old timers recall the Navarro drying up, but old timers don’t recall the levels of silt in the river that there is now. That silt has largely been deposited by the hillside developments, road building, and heedless vineyard plantings of the last 25 years. Logging? Not even in it in relation to the cumulative impact of these other factors. But without the pre-diversion, pre-development winter flush the Navarro used to get, the battered Navarro is going to continue to deteriorate.
LEW CHICHESTER
I certainly don’t know how the county keeps track of all the various sources of income and expense, with lots of departments, etc., but I do imagine there must be some parallels with the “budget to actuals” exercise our local school district goes through a few times a year, tracking what seems to be really happening compared with the projection from a previous period. Our school district has multiple budget categories and funding comes from all kinds of places, some of it not showing up with any regularity, but the process of “budget to actuals” is not a cash flow report. It is keeping the trustees and the administration informed as to trends and what to expect in both the short term (rest of the year) and longer term (next year, and the year after that). It is useful exercise, and I don’t know how we could keep the money trip together without these reports. How does the county plan for anything without regular financial updates, reporting on consistently the same categories of income and expenses, tracking departments, etc?
BERNIE NORVELL:
One trip through rehab is optimistic. A few years ago I would have agreed, one trip then jail. Today, I have the understanding that relapse happens and has to be considered as part of the process. The idea is supposed to be to bring people up so they can function in and contribute to society, Thus getting them off the books. That is not to say that some people based on their crime do need to go to jail. Hopefully with the new jail wing those folks will get the help they need while incarcerated. The other truth is some will forever be in the system.
There is in my opinion no doubt that the system in place does not produce any kind of real results. That is why we made the decision to go in a different direction. I’ m hopeful that with the board’s decision to look into reshaping the county’s way of doing things will move forward. The plan we are using will have to be modified some to be successful county wide. At this point there seems to be enough interest to at least get it done. It feels like the biggest hurdle will be to keep the conversation moving forward
A READER WRITES:
Isn’t it funny and sad that the guy living in the Building Bridges Facility has to tell us, it’s not working. Mr. Stehr is exactly right, throwing money at the problem doesn’t fix it.
It actually makes it worse, you see the when our government gets involved it creates a business out of homelessness. The Camille Schraeder’s of the world see opportunity. Camille’s group will never solve the issue, if they do, then the money goes away along with all the jobs. 17 million dollars per year and the problem is worse. And if you believe Photo-OP Mo, that it’s down, 23%. I’ve got an ocean front property in Arizona with a bridge to sell.
In order to solve it, you’re going to have ignore all your liberal instincts. Families first, if they need help we provide it. Mental Illness needs a facility and news flash, it’s not the streets. Addiction, one trip through rehab. After that jail. No frivolous handouts that are unaccounted for. If you’re not from this county, Greyhound bus ticket back home, no questions asked.
I believe Mr. Stehr is trying to do it right. He is not sleeping out on the streets and committing crimes that come with the unhoused. Our Judges need to wake up and sentenced habitual offenders.
UKIAH'S DENNY'S HAS CLOSED, and with its closing many fond memories, such as this one by Mike McPhee, a Boonville student in The 1970S:
“So many memories there. Our bus stopped there nearly every away game before heading over the hill to Boonville, all us kids would go to McDonald's, all the Adults across the street to Denny's.”
MOST MEDIA describes the college demonstrations as “pro Palestinian,” implying that the demonstrations are anti-Israel unto anti-Semitism. I daresay most of the young people demonstrating are simply shocked, as millions of Americans are shocked, at the Netanyahu government's deliberate slaughter of Gazans and, secondarily, shocked that our government is funding much of this mass murder.
WE GROW OLD and our human frame of reference begins to fade. Just in the past few months I've lost Gordon Black and Bill Bradd, two Coast poets who wrote better the older they got. Gordon, or Gordy as I called him, was an old sparring mate who never failed to come back for more, which he seemed to enjoy as much as I did. When his meticulously composed, Zen-like letters arrived denouncing us a great cheer went up in our office. “Another Gordy!” Thinking about him now and our many exchanges I still smile. And Rosie Radiator, aka Bess Bair, is gone. A wonderful dancer and all-round entertainer, Rosie was for years a fixture of nighttime Frisco's venues. Her roots, though, were on the Northcoast. Rosie grew up in Southern Humboldt at Richardson Grove, owned by her family, and for years maintained a summer cabin at Dos Rios.
INDUSTRIAL GRAPE GROWING has its downside, a downside so large it obscures whatever upside it may have, not that an upside comes to mind. Thirty years ago, Peggy Miniclier, then a nurse practitioner at the Anderson Valley Health Center, and a resident of the Holmes Ranch, said that she was treating an increasing number of farmworkers suffering from pesticide poisoning, and that the workers she was seeing were only a small fraction of the actual number of workers imperiled by unregulated vineyard applications of hazardous chemicals. Nurse Miniclier said she filled out state forms about the exposures but, she said, the reporting was only used for statistical exercises; no investigations or follow-ups were conducted. Miniclier said that most worker pesticide poisonings go unreported because workers are afraid they’ll lose their jobs or jeopardize their immigration status if they reported exposures. Thirty years later? Same-same.
ABOUT the same time as the nurse expressed her frustration, the wine industry was demanding state help to wipe out the glassy-winged sharpshooter, the much-maligned insect that destroys grapevines. The wine industry claimed it would be devastated if the half-inch long leaf hopper took hold north of the Golden Gate Bridge. Which it never did.
ON-LINE COMMENTS OF THE WEEK
[1] Dead serious. Have you heard a woman proclaim that men should lose the right to vote? Have you heard any woman proclaim anything should be denied men? Hell, I haven’t even heard a woman object to men deciding they are women. Of course, we are rather busy trying to hold the rest of the world together, starting with dishes and laundry.
[2] I will still be voting for Trump and the Republicans this November because I believe that this regime needs to face consequences of some kind for what it has been promoting and trying to promote socially and politically. But now that Trump is on the Ukraine-train, and make no mistake, his influence was instrumental in getting this cataclysmic boondoggle of an “aid-package” passed, I’m more convinced than ever that our real problems don’t have political solutions, or at least none that our current clown-show of a political class would be willing or able to enact.
[3] Is it really a surprise that the budget is such a mess right now? They have people in place that have no idea what they are doing. You have Tony Rakes who wasn’t even qualified to be Director of IT so they promote him to the Executive Office to report on the budget. Again, people being put in places they have no business being in. Where was the ATTC savior Sara Pierce, why wasn’t she reporting? I have to agree with Mark on the pulling of the item regarding Ms. Antle’s roommate/partner. Do they hope it won’t be brought up again to sneak it in another meeting? To respond Michael Turner’s comment that they are more than qualified, no one is arguing that. It’s called optics. When you don’t disclose a relationship, it looks like you’re hiding something. If anyone else did that, they would be fired. Just address it, and I’m sure people would be ok with it. If you are willing to hide that, what else are you hiding or willing to hide? All of the supervisors have been on the board long enough that they “should” understand each department’s budget and how they’re funded, but they don’t. They want to take from one department to pay another. In Dan Gjerde’s words awhile back, “We are robbing Peter to pay Paul”. You guys can do better.
[4] American Culture? Fast food grubbin’, cell phone junkin’, gas guzzlin’ (oops, the nightlife bar hookups/marriages/spawn). That is really the extent of it – entitled, self-righteous narcissists in pursuit of the 7 deadly sins (Gluttony/Sloth really the worst of it, but Envy/Pride/Wrath seems to rule their hate/anger/rage/fear daytimes). That’s exactly what you get in a Capitalist Commercial Consumer Media Economy – Mil Ind Complex! No Bid Cost Plus! IMF funding usury rates for infrastructure rebuild!
Exponential consumption per capita that is 3 orders of magnitude higher than back in the 1920’s/40’s, when there were only 2 billion people. And now we are literally beyond Peak Everything. I still can’t believe we’ve used over half of the available Helium on this planet (Inert). I guess we could capture alpha particles? Oh, wait – Hydrogen cold fusion!
I believe I’ve heard something like the last 7 of 10 years (moarz?) were the hottest years ever recorded. And apparently, last year they can’t even explain why it was so much hotter (Aerosol Masking/Atmospheric Thinning?). Trust-you-me – this year won’t disappoint!
[5] My faith in the divine has waned of late. But then again, perhaps the divine have looked at us and said “to hell with them, they created this mess for themselves, let them deal with the consequences.”
Who knows. My point really is there is nobody there to resolve these problems. We have no leadership. There are no statesmen anymore. Judges are corrupt assholes with fake degrees. Lawyers are nothing more than money grubbers. Police are frightened. There are no leaders. The time has come to rely upon ourselves and prepare for the worst.
[6] Last night in the first round of the NFL draft I thought it was very odd that no one selected was named Jalen and no one had an apostrophe in their name. Well, we’re making up for that tonight in the second round.
Check this out:
36th pick: Jer’Zhan Newton
37th pick: Ja’Lynn Polk
38th pick: T’Vondre Sweat
and then we have a hyphenated name
41st pick: Kool-Aid McKinstry
And finally, from Rutgers, my alma mater, Max Melton was the 43rd pick.
[7] I have long believed that Americans have long had it too good for far too long. If they were more worried about the origins of their next meal or shelter they’d be less inclined to be worried about Palestinians or Ukrainians in awful nations they have never been to or didn’t even know where they were. If they had to worry about their next meal they’d be less inclined to worry so much about their gender of the day, their next orgasm or spend hundreds and thousands on tattoos and facial piercings.
We have had it good for far too long. We need a good economic collapse or war to shake things up again and remind people of what is important and what is not. I believe those times are coming and coming soon.
There’s a lot to mull over here. Thank you.