Off the Record 7/27/2024

CALLING ALL CANDIDATES

Candidate nominations are open for school, municipal and special district offices up for election in November.

Registered voters in Mendocino County who are interested in running for any of the available seats must file nomination papers between July 15 and Aug. 9 in order to have their names placed on the Nov. 5 ballot. If nomination papers for an incumbent elective officer are not filed by close of business on Aug. 9, candidates other than the incumbent shall have until Aug. 14 to file for that office.

Candidates for school and special district offices, must obtain and file their nomination papers with the Mendocino County Registrar of Voters Office located at 501 Low Gap Road, Ukiah, Ca. More information about filing for school and special district offices is available by going to https://www.mendocinocounty.gov/government/assessor-county-clerk-recorder-elections/elections/election-candidate-information

AN UNDERSTANDABLY APPALLED Facebook friend of mine posted the above, one of many thousands like it wafting every which way down out of cyberspace.. No idea if Linda Peterson is a real person, but prior to the internet people only thought vicious thoughts, or shared them with like minded friends. But now…

A THOUSAND fact checkers would have a hard time sorting out truth from untruth at Tuesday night's iteration of the Trump Cult extravaganza.

HOW MANY TIMES did we hear “Joe Biden's open border”? As if poor old Joe, that international symbol of elder abuse, is aware of any borders beyond his office door, and only dimly aware of that one.

THE BORDER has always been porous. It's 2,000 miles long with vast, wild stretches between San Diego and the Gulf of Mexico that can't be walled off from the displaced desperate trying to find some hope in the rich country that seems increasingly hostile to them. One way or another, they'll get in.

BEFORE WORLD WAR ONE you could pretty much go anywhere in the world with the simplest ID, if that. Until the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, the U.S. border was wide open. And still is to those who have the means to simply fly in and stay, and will always be open to anybody desperate to find a way in.

AS THE POET intuited, 'mere anarchy' has overtaken the world, the great beast of the apocalypse is awake and running straight at US, as millions of the frightened turn to Trump to somehow put it all right. But it can't be put right. It's too big, and too fractured. The last time this country was unified was World War Two. From here on it's a violent chaos. Get your survival bag at CostCo while they're still on sale.

THE CONSPIRACY speculations about the assassination attempt on Trump are much more varied than those arising from the Kennedy assassination, which were and are versions of “the government did it,” which is probably true, which is why documents on the Kennedy assassination are still sequestered. (And yet another windy unfulfilled promise by Trump to release the rest of those docs.)

BUT the attempt on Trump ranges from Trump himself staged it to varieties of speculation that “the government did it,” the liberal elements of government, that is.

I THINK it was an accident. That is, I think the Secret Service and all the police agencies saw this dweebish kid wandering the site for a full three hours before Orange Man arrived and simply couldn't believe the kid was a threat to anybody, even when he was up on the roof with the rifle he produced from its ready-to-assemble pieces in his backpack, taken up a prone firing position and had commenced shooting. The government snipers couldn't be sure the little psycho was what he appeared to be, an assassin, until he opened fire.

YOUNG MR. CROOKS will turn out to be the most improbable and the most psychologically impenetrable assassin in the history of assassins. Not even a hint that he was planning something this big.

I FEEL for his parents and his sister. To turn on the news and there's your 20-year-old son and brother dead on a roof because he tried to kill Trump?

CROOKS SENIOR is a gun guy and a registered Libertarian, therefore probably at least a few degrees off. Mom we know nothing about. Sis is your basic blue collar young person, hardworking and pleasant, from all accounts. Crooks Junior is already much more interesting than Oswald.

FROM the February 19th, 1903 edition of the Advocate-News, culled by Debbie Holmer: “Carrie Nation, the famous Kansas saloon smasher, is in the southern part of the state with her little hatchet. After she gets through with that section, it is expected Carrie will visit Fort Bragg.”

DID SHE, Ms. Holmer? Did she chop her way up and down the Mendocino Coast? O wouldn’t some of us welcome her now! Just the thought of the old girl going at a winery tasting room with an ax in one hand and a Bible in the other was wonderful to contemplate.

BORN in Kentucky in 1846, Carry Moore (not Carrie), already a militant abolitionist and temperance advocate at age 21, somehow married a drunk named Gloyd with whom she had a daughter. Carry left Gloyd to his bottle and supported herself and her child by teaching before she married David Nation in 1877. Nation then divorced Carry on the grounds that she’d deserted him. Which she had, moving on from hearth and home to the much grander life’s mission as the national terror of happy hour. Convinced that God had instructed her to personally halt the consumption of alcohol, Carry, by now a formidably hefty six-footer, organized a direct-action crew of like-minded teetotalers who’d pour into crowded saloons and, as Carry went to work with her trademark hatchet converting the bar to kindling, her comrades would belt out temperance tunes. Carry Nation’s frontal assaults on drinking establishments were not infrequently met by furious physical counter-attacks from the boys at the bar who’d slug it out with the invaders, gender inequities be damned. Carry would pay her fines and her medical bills by selling souvenir hatchets. One wonders how she was received in Fort Bragg, a hard drinking town famous for its saloon-to-citizen ratio.

ADAM SCHIFF. Corruption squared, but he sails on even though he had to have known that he was lying during his ubiquitous tv presence about Trump being a tool, even an agent, of Vlad Putin. Nope, there he is on all the lib media putting one of the final lib shivs in Poor Old Joe's undefended back. Schiff, in an open convention, probably has a good shot at the Demo nomination.

GOSH, an open convention where any old body might get the nod? The Democrats’ billionaire donors and super-delegates must indeed be desperate. When was the last time they allowed people who weren't multi-millionaires in on the fun? McGovern? Carter?

MY OLD FRIEND, and resolutely committed middle-of-the-road extremist, Lee Edmundson of soma-serene Mendocino, was the guy famously on top of the horse statue during the '68 police riot in Chicago at the Democratic convention.

THIS YEAR'S DEMO gathering will be a lot more violent, so violent I hope Lee doesn't risk a nostalgic visit back to the scene of his turbulent youth.

MAYBE because they're over-exposed. Maybe they are soooooo annoying because we see so much of them. Trump, of course, but the aforementioned Schiff, and even minor irritants like “the second gentleman.” It's like we're force fed all these objectively repellant characters. Unappealing public people are doubly unappealing when they're trying to be cute.

KAMALA isn't exactly repellant, but you'd think one of these “media experts” would tell her how silly she comes off as, giggling her way through serious announcements like the other day when she announced student debt forgiveness. She seems perpetually out of sync. Maybe that gay dog “the second gentleman” — mother of god save us all! — was tickling her.

THE VICE-PRESIDENT should take a lesson from her co-religionist, Hillary, who consistently comes off as what she is — a mean, unhappy person. But at least Hillary is never out of character.

WHAT A CREW! Trump, Kamala, long-gone Biden, Schiff, Putin, Netanyahu… Everywhere you look, a lunatic. It's as if all the bringers-of-the-apocalypse have been carefully selected by a cosmically malign force to bring down the Final Curtain.

RECOMMENDED READING: ‘A Dangerous Place — California's Unsettling Fate’ by the late Marc Reisner. If war, economic free fall, pestilence, and the Republican Convention haven't already driven you to search for calming medications, the late Mr. Reisner's posthumous book on what the next big earthquake will do to California's most heavily populated areas when the overdue Big One hits is likely to at least get you thinking about a 72-hour supply of potable water. Reisner brings the same meticulous research to his earthquake book that he brought to his famously ominous and irrefuted book on water and the West, ‘Cadillac Desert.’ I haven't read 181 pages this fast in years as this great little earthquake book, such is Reisner's ability to predict the specifics of the apocalyptic, inevitable event he's extrapolated from the known facts.

SOCIAL SERVICES (via CEO Report)

“The Mendocino County Veterans Services Ukiah office has moved to 405 Observatory Ave. as of July 2nd, 2024. Staff worked quickly minimizing the disruption to services and organizing the space to best meet the needs of this office. In addition to the move, we are thrilled to have welcomed our newest Veteran’s Services Representative, Macy Waddington! Macy began her career with our department on July 7th and we are looking forward to have two full time VSR’s to serve our Veterans.”

Mark Scaramella notes: “Staff worked quickly minimizing the disruption to services”? Oh yes, it only took six months of service disruption to move the VSO back to 405 Observatory. Very quickly — for Mendo. PS. From what we’ve heard from local vets, Ms. Waddington is a welcome addition to the VSO staff, especially with some new federal veterans programs which have kicked in recently.

HOW ABOUT THIS AD from the Ukiah Daily Journal of February 27th?: “Movie producer seeks real-life victims of alien abduction. Looking to talk to victims of alien abduction and/or conspiracy theorists and other intelligent people ‘in the know’ on topics such as secret societies, reptilian aliens, The Illuminati, disinformation, alien mythology, the matrix, and the New World Order, for documentary film. Some pay. Call toll free…”

DOES BIDEN know he has resigned? And thus comes an end to four years of lies from the Democratic cabal that's been running the country for four years, that very big lie being that Biden wasn't as impaired as he obviously was from the beginning of his fake reign. And these people say Trump is a threat to democracy?

TRUMP SAYS Kamala will be easier to beat than Biden would have been. Maybe, but she won't be a pushover so long as she can get her affect in sync with her speech. To me, and millions of others, she comes off as wacky. And four years of the First Gentleman? The horror, the horror!

THE OVERALL PROB for the Democrats, says the sage of Boonville, is that at least half the country sees the Democrats as representing everything that has gone wrong, everything gone crazy, every indefensible thing that the Democrats have defended. Anyway, the only real difference between Democrats and Republicans at this point is that Republicans will make everything worse, faster.

BOTH PARTIES, as we know, are fully committed to the ongoing mass murders in Gaza, and watch Netanyahu get a bipartisan standing O when he visits Congress. Vote for either Jill Stein or Cornel West for president. They're the only decent options to the criminal assault on Gaza, and the ongoing assault on everyday Americans.

ALL MEDIA get this one over and over: “Why is no one in the media reporting that…” Everything is being reported and then some. Who can plausibly complain they're being kept uninformed when, at least in my experience, the real prob is a combination of the complainer not reading well, or reading much at all, or is often unable to distinguish the plausible from the implausible in what little they do read or is spending far too much time sifting obvious nut material and being seduced by a lot of it. Trump really was shot at. The Secret Service screwed up. No conspiracy. The kid acted alone.

IF I GET ONE MORE COMPLAINT about “the corporate media,” I think I'll just flip all the way out. Can we have a little sophistication, please? The corporate media are owned by wealthy individuals or groups of wealthy individuals. Wealthy people or syndicates of wealthy people are pleased with the present social-political arrangements. The owners of the media use their media to promote and defend these social-political interests. Get it? Is this basic, obvious fact of American life so difficult to grasp?

THERE AREN'T MANY MEDIA independent of the personal interests of their ownership, but there are some, and if I can think of one you'll be the first to know. But the corporate papers often employ good reporters. And there are scads of good reporters around who manage to do honest work despite their employers.

IF you don't trust American media other than Amy Goodman and Democracy Now, go to the British media at BBC Television or, say, The Guardian or The Independent on the internet.

MENDO’S “RISK MANAGEMENT DIVISION” is one of your smaller Mendo divisions at six persons. It's part of the County Counsel's office. The risk managers, in theory, evaluate and then reduce county liability. It's not possible to know the functioning of the County Counsel's office or the performance of the Risk Manager without subpoenas because of the county's legal in-breeding. The Risk Managers, in my experience, tend to increase County liability because they don't alert the decision makers to potential risks, not that they don't see them but because they're politically afraid to.

THE RISK MANAGERS have been invisible, natch, during DA Eyster's manufactured vendetta against former County auditor, Chamise Cubbison. A true risk avoider would have advised Eyster that his case against Cubbison was so obviously personal that even if he wins, he loses. And a true risk avoider certainly would have advised the cringing incompetents comprising the Mendo Board of Supervisors to ignore the DA's obvious Cubbison vendetta and not fire her on the basis of a simple accusation, even if the accusation does come from the County's lawless lead law enforcement officer.

UNTIL I remind myself I'm in Mendocino County, I still can't believe the Supervisors fired Cubbison simply because DA Eyster claimed she'd committed a crime, that one of the five wouldn't have had the common sense to say, “Well, hell, don't we have the presumption of innocence in this country, and isn't our population of 90,000 people, including Ms. Cubbison, entitled to due process? Shouldn't we let the process process before we doom this woman?” Didn't happen.

HAD TO LAUGH when the “special prosecutor” said she was worried that this Eyster-inspired farce was going to be expensive? Going to be! It's already eaten up thousands of public dollars our broke-ass county doesn't have, and we haven't even got to the preliminary hearing! But we already have a “special prosecutor,” as if this bogus affair is the equivalent of the Watergate Hearings.

TO ME, this expensive, apparently endless farce, serves perfectly as a sad statement on the quality of persons we elect to the power positions these days at all levels of government. A transparently personal beef like Eyster vs. Cubbison would never have become the complicated farce it has become in the days before America Lost Its Way.

PREDICTION: The lost e-mails, now magically recovered, will reveal that former auditor Weer authorized the Covid-necessary payroll arrangements with Ms. Kennedy prior to Cubbison replacing him assuming, of course, that the crucial e-mails are among those magically retrieved.

JUDGE MOORMAN declared last week she was going to sort it all out this week when it lands in her court. She's smart and principled, but I doubt she'll toss it. But she owes The People one after her capitulation to DA Eyster in the Murray case. If you came in late, the rogue Ukiah cop was obviously guilty of major felonies, including rape, but Eyster busted all the charges down to misdemeanors, and Moorman signed off on it all.

CRAZY DAYS, what with the Trumpers demanding proof that Biden is still alive, and the Democrat's abrupt pivot to Kamala. For now. The long knives are out, and nobody does treachery better than these people. Kamala will not be the candidate. She can't beat Orange Man, and the Dems know that. I'm betting Michelle Obama will be the candidate with some de-balled white guy as vp. (Biden eventually sent a raspy-voiced message to Kamala saying he was “watching her,” benignly it is to be presumed. Conspiracy people will of course claim Biden is speaking from beyond the grave, but the Democrats haven't gone full Borgia. Yet.)

ONLY A LOW-INFORMATION person could say that Biden deserves all the superlatives being heaped on him by his fellow Democrats. Nothing honorable about his years of “service,” from which he emerged a multi-millionaire. Among his many crimes, count the usurious interest on your credit cards, for one. The CC giants are based in Delaware where Biden has always faithfully repped them.

AS PER the last fifty years, the Democrats are denouncing us third party people as essentially Trump voters. As per the last fifty years us third party voters say the problem isn't us, it's you Democrats who are the prob because your policies are in lockstep with the corporate oligarchy that funds both parties. Us third party people are what the Democrats used to be.

LOOKING BACK. Some of you may recall that competing left-right rally in Fort Bragg, almost twenty-five years ago. The peace people outdrew the war people about two-to-one — 400 or so peace people to 200 or so war people. Fort Bragg police stood between the two groups. The war people described the peace people as “the hippies”; the peace people referenced the war people as “the rednecks.” A peace person told me she felt “threatened” by the war people; a war person told me the peace people wouldn't let the war people talk into the peace peopl’s open mike. A peace person said the war people “were very violent.” A war person said the peace people “were the usual weirdos.” A good time was had by all.

THERE ARE PLENTY of anti-war books around that could make a pacifist out of anyone. ‘Johnny Got His Gun’ by Dalton Trumbo is a genuinely subversive novel and thus highly recommended by this newspaper as must reading for your war-age kid. The movie version is unfaithful to the book and badly done besides, but if I'd read the novel before I went into the Marines, I think I would have become permanently 4-F the way a friend of mine accomplished it in the Vietnam years by climbing up on the roof of a downtown San Francisco building, stuck one leg over the side and yelled down at passersby, “I can't stand anymore of this and I'm going to jump!” He was hauled off to the psycho ward at SF General and held a few hours for “observation.” He told the on-duty shrink that the thought of killing anyone made him suicidally depressed. In his real life, the guy was a recreational bar fighter, meaning he enjoyed getting in fights with strangers. He only wanted to avoid a military-type fight. And he did by simply staging his rooftop psycho drama because the shrink thought it was real.

‘JOHNNY GOT HIS GUN’ is a compellingly graphic story told from a war wounded young man's hard earned perspective that war — any war — isn't worth a young person's life. Trumbo’s horribly maimed young man fleshes out his story with long passages about the cynical profiteering of the old men who bamboozle the young into soldiering for them.

ANOTHER good anti-war book is ‘All Quiet on the Western Front’ about the front line troops of World War One by Erich Remarque. (Remarque had to flee the Nazi takeover of Germany.) He fought in the trenches for Germany and knew first hand what he was writing about. This one may be even more dated than Tolstoy's ‘Sebastopol,’ another great war book about Russia's Crimean campaigns of the mid-19th century. ‘Dispatches’ by Michael Herr seems to me the very best book about combat Vietnam, while the best books I've read about both World War Two and Korea were both unadorned first hand accounts by combatants, both of them Marines.

THE CDC (Community Development Corporation) manages the county's low-cost housing stock, some of it county-owned, some of it privately owned but subsidized by the federal government through the fed’s Department of Housing and Urban Development. The feds give the private landlord the difference between what low-income people can afford to pay for shelter and prevailing, private sector rents.

THE AGENCY'S BOSSES are drawn from the county's seemingly inexhaustible supply of rotating public agency directors and sub-directors, all of whom have had long experience sitting around in pointless meetings paradigming and interfacing with other of the county's well-paid, smiley-faced doers of good.

(DO-GOODING in Mendocino County would be left to a few church-based charities if the county's helping bureaucracies were suddenly unfunded by the feds. Their propaganda notwithstanding, and in my direct experience, the folks staffing the big pay slots at the helping professional offices, all the school bureaucracies, entities like North Coast Opportunities, and so on are more mercenary than merciful and, to be sure, fervent Democrats.) But several get-government-off-our-backs Ukiah families also appreciate all those HUD checks flowing their way.

WHAT DO I KNOW about food? Nothing. Seldom eat out, and when I do I avoid places where the basic fueling process is delayed by a lot of ritualistic back and forth with the waitperson, the wineperson, the cook, fellow patrons, and other gastro-obsessives. If I have to spend more than an hour in a restaurant I consider every minute beyond 60 minutes, down time. But I can honestly say you cannot get bad food in the Anderson Valley. All our restaurants are unpretentious and very good.

RE: WAR BOOKS. I really liked Nigel Hamilton’s FD- at-war trilogy: ‘The Mantle of Command,’ ‘Commander in Chief’ and ‘War and Peace.’ Of all the principals of World War II, FDR was the only one who didn’t live long enough to write his own account. Hamilton’s recent account, based heavily on the detailed notes of FDR’s confidant during much of the war, Canadian Prime Minister McKenzie King, is the best substitute and makes today’s leaders look like third graders, if that’s not an insult to third graders. I also liked David Halberstam’s ‘The Forgotten War: America in Korea,’ an unstinting account of what really is the forgotten war — but not to the vets who were there. (Mark Scaramella)

RE: THE BOGUS PRAISE being heaped on Biden. Don’t forget his huge errand for credit card companies and big banks, the misleadingly titled “Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act” of 2005 which made it nearly impossible for everyday Amercans facing oppressive medical bills, seniors, service members, union members who lost their pensions, students (who he now is trying to back away from; too late) and victims of deadbeat dads (et al) to file for Chapter 7 bankruptcy. (Mark Scaramella)

ACCORDING TO last week’s Independent Coast Observer, the tiny town of Point Arena is considering a sales tax increase of .875% to help close a budget deficit that the town faces due to increasing costs and flat revenue. Apparently, the town’s staff has already been cut to six people and their hours have been reduced to 25 hours per week cutting payroll by about 50%, but leading to significant service cuts. Without the estimated $90k from the small sales tax increment, there might be more cuts or even, as Ducey noted in a memo to the City Council, “consider dissolving as an independent city.” The ICO’s Anthony Cuesta notes that Point Arena’s Interim City Manager Peggy Ducey (former Fort Bragg City Manager) proposed the tax for the November ballot in the hopes that they can get it approved before Mendocino County proposes one which could put the countywide tax to the state maximum and eliminate the city’s sales tax option. Interestingly, there is no mention of whether Point Arena can take advantage of the County’s recently approved and very one-sided tax sharing agreement which could, theoretically, allow Point Arena (and other local incorporated towns) to annex taxable properties on the outskirts of the small coastal town. (At last report, Point Arena was sent the Tax Sharing agreement template and was supposed to be considering signing up.) At the same time, three City Council seats are up for election in November. For now no one knows if the incumbents, Jim Koogle, Jeff Hanson and Dan Doyle, will be up for re-election or if any new candidates are interested. Historically, there’s a pretty small population of registered voters in Point Arena who qualify to run.

TUESDAY’S AWARDS CEREMONY: Supervisor Williams for voting no on the Supe's raise, knowing full well he'll get it anyway. and Kamala Harris for deliberately not attending the Netanyahu congressional appearance, not that the Biden Administration will act to impose a cease fire.

FOR PURE HYPOCRISY, give the winner's cup to the Democratic big shots who knifed Poor Old Joe in the back, then said he is a “patriot” and a “hero.”

THE POINT ARENA cartoonist who identifies himself as “Oliff” once drew a vivid cartoon history of the town for the Independent Coast Observer that represents an important contribution to local history. The drawings are based on what is known of the first wave of settlers. For instance, below a drawing of J.C. Halliday, 1854-1924, father of the late Dorothy Halliday of Point Arena, “Arrived from Nova Scotia in 1875 as a blacksmith. He opened a hardware store, livery stable, creameries, started the Bank of Point Arena, built the High School and Alder Creek Bridge, raised the Gualala bridge after the 1906 quake, and ran the stage from Mendo to Cazadero.” That stage, as I recall from the memoirs of the late Joe Scaramella, announced its arrival by bugle, the man at the reins rising to belt out a few notes to let people know the mail had arrived.

A TRAGEDY in one paragraph from Jody Martinez's This Was News column in the Sunday Ukiah Daily Journal: “Friday, April 17th, 1903 — Mendocino Dispatch-Democrat. Murder and Suicide at Fort Bragg. Fort Bragg was the scene of a tragedy this week. A Japanese stranger arrived in town by the steamer, and on Wednesday he went to the house of a Japanese prostitute whose name we have not learned, and shot her twice, once in the face and once in the body. He then turned the revolver upon himself, pulled the trigger and fell dead. The physician in attendance thinks the woman will live.”

ON-LINE COMMENTS OF THE WEEK

[1] Denouncing someone as a conspiracy theorist has been one way the ruling class shuts down those who speak up and speak out against them. In fact, the “fact checkers” are now saying that the ruling class didn’t coin the term to force those with ideas and opinions that run counter to the masters to shut up.

CNN has a solution. And, you guessed it, it’s shorter leashes for the slave class, especially those who don’t particularly want to be slaves in the first place.

“The situation calls for more rigorous regulation of social media, said Laura Edelson, an assistant professor of computer science at Northeastern University and the co-director of Cybersecurity for Democracy, but it also offers a lesson for mainstream journalists: Don’t just report what we do know, but also report the outstanding unanswered questions so that the public won’t fill in the gaps with junk information.” – CNN

Just take over the narrative and make sure no one has the ability to question the official narrative and that all slaves are properly programmed to accept one message as the ultimate truth. The slaves are not to ask questions. They are to accept the narrative and obey.

[2] PROJECT 2025: Like there has never been any political manifestos in US history. You certainly have had such almost continuously. The Progressive wing has one. The Communist party always has one. Heck every political party has one, more or less in detail. The Institute for Policy Studies , the Center for American Progress, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, the Urban Institute. All with their lists of first things to do upon winning the election.

But the national media has not stoked the public for from them as it has for Plan 2025. In fact in any online search for similar things from the left, I had to go through nearly 10 pages of Plan 2025. And then dig into obscure links. Liberals are being sold a bill of goods by tech giants and they seemingly can't get enough of them.

Anti Trumpists are so fearful of Trump personally, they can’t see that their own fears leave out there’s a Congress, Courts and the public. How did Trump become the incarnation of every fear of the media driven left?

It’s a self driven deterioration of public sanity fueled by people trying to out hate each other. Stop creating ever more fear by outrageous rhetoric online and, poof, people will find more interest in reality as opposed to dystopian fictions. It’s so ugly.

[3] UKIAH, AN ON-LINE COMMENT:

I have spent a lot of time in Ukiah. To me it has always been a mysterious place. Pulling off of 101 between Talmage and Lake Mendocino Blvd is like pulling the lever on a slot machine. You might enjoy a movie night at Todd Park, or rub elbows with a County Supe at the Co-Op. Or you could get stabbed in the Safeway parking lot. A cop might even rape you scott-free. Ukiah, man. What a trip. I’d rather take my chances in Willits.

[4] As is par for the course in a major event such as the attempted assassination of Donald Trump, there are people on the Internet, and not just the Trump Derangement Syndrome crowd, saying that Trump’s injury was faked and everything we saw was stage-magic as Trump and the Deep State colluded with one another to contrive a hoax assassination attempt. What makes this theory appealing is that the lapses of the people who were responsible for security at that Trump rally were so glaring, that it makes cynical people such as myself wonder if the whole thing was just a show staged for the benefit of the gullible masses as the Deep State selects Donald Trump for its new front man.

The big hole in this theory is that Trump went to a hospital for that injury to his ear and had it treated there. A big part of this “alternative” theory I have laid out here rests on an assumption that Trump was sporting a fake injury. But for that to be the case, the hospital staff would have to be in on the conspiracy, and that is just too much of a stretch for me, and, I would hope, reasonable people in general.

[5] Just found out my Hunter Biden paintings have dropped in value.

[6] Whenever I consider Donald Trump in his entirety, my mind goes back to the Fall of 2020 when he did nothing to deal with the massive FRAUD, when he had the power to do so. Back then, there were quite a few folks who suggested that Trump exercise his prerogative to invoke an existing Executive Order declaring a State of Emergency, ironically under the Insurrection clause. Word was then that he feared the repercussions from such a radical act. Once again, the need to be loved, admired, thought well of, came forth (what will people think?). Also ironically, he got just what he wanted to avoid, i.e. having half the nation hate him. He should have just bit the bullet and done what needed to be done to protect the voting process in these United States as the Chief Executive. Donald Trump is a wussie. He has no backbone.

[7] If I were Biden, and still had half a functioning brain, I’d hire several food testers at high expense, add extra layers of locks on my bedroom door, stay away from swimming pools surveilled by strange men in dark suits, and get my meds from mail order accounts with a fake name and secret P.O. Box.