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WARM AND DRY conditions expected to increase today and into the upcoming week, with highs nearing 100 possible across the interior by midweek. (NWS)
STEPHEN DUNLAP (Fort Bragg): A bit cooler 53F with clear skies this Sunday morning on the coast. Mostly clear skies & moderate temps make up the bulk of our forecast for this week.
CARS PARKED on both sides of Highway 128, lines out the door, as the new Jumbo’s Win-Win classic American-themed Restaurant in Philo gets off to a locally unprecedented opening week.
PANTHER VARSITY VOLLEYBALL HOLDS THEIR OWN AT COUGAR INVITATIONAL
Our Varsity Volleyball team put up a strong fight at the Cougar Invitational in Upper Lake, going up against much larger schools. They earned big wins against Clear Lake and Lower Lake. While they dropped two matches to tough teams from St. Vincent and St. Helena, it was a solid performance overall. Our team represented our school and league well. Make sure to catch these girls in action. The team schedule can be found on this page, or on the Anderson Valley district website.
Let’s Go Panthers!
ANDERSON VALLEY VILLAGE List of Events
PETER LIT:
This afternoon, Saturday, the sun shone and, once again it was a Great Day in Elk. Once again, the bakers created some spectacular cakes, including an authentic Estonian offering by a visiting baker. Special thanks to all the folks from Boonville, led by Captain Rainbow, for making the cake auction successful and entertaining. And, it was such a pleasure to hear Pilar Duran play. We are a most fortunate community.
MENDO’S ENTITLED TOURISM PROMOTERS CONJURE ANOTHER SCHEME TO FINANCE THEMSELVES
by Mark Scaramella
In 2006, the County worked with local lodging and restaurant representatives to form the Mendocino County Lodging Business Improvement District (MCBID) where the County imposes a 1% “assessment” on tourism revenues and then added a 50% match out of the County’s 10% Transient Occupancy (aka “Bed”) Tax. They then turned around and handed it all to the industry’s marketing arm, Visit Mendocino which proceeded to spend it on themselves — at last count they had twelve staffers who allegedly marketed the County to tourists, mostly from the Bay Area and Sacramento.
Not long after the Board of Supervisors reluctantly cut that “matching” funding from “Visit Mendocino” earlier this year due to budget restrictions, the local tourism promoters got to work figuring out a way to replace that funding – and then some. Hey, let’s double it! And expand it!
Accordingly, they now propose to double the 1% assessment, not by simply upping the BID assessment, but by forming a separate, entirely new “district.” In their words, “The Mendocino County Tourism Marketing District (MCTMD) has been developed by local lodging businesses in collaboration with the Mendocino County Tourism Commission, operating as Visit Mendocino County.”
The current “BID” assessment only applies to the unincorporated areas of the County. This new district, the MCTMD, would include the cities as well and would more than double the revenue for Visit Mendocino County by imposing a 2% assessment on every lodging business in the County, raising an estimated $2.3 million a year for the next five years starting in January of 2025. The percentage would increase to 2.5% in the third year bringing in even more.
“Visit Mendocino County will serve as the MCTMD’s Owners’ Association, responsible for managing funds, implementing programs and providing annual reports to the Board of Supervisors.”
If that “managing funds” part is the case, why are they even bothering to ask the County to be involved? Why does the County have to involve itself in yet another “district”?
The County already manages the Business Improvement District for the Tourism promoters. Soon the Supervisors are expected to approve another “district” to siphon off more funds from Medi-Cal for the local Adventist Hospitals. And now they are likely to approve this third “district” as a separate add-on to the BID assessment, simply to route the money back to the tourism industry to sell themselves.
This would put the County’s already overburdened finance staffers smack dab in the middle of three separate complicated collection, tracking and disbursement arrangements for no other reason than to funnel money the businesses collect back to an association of those same businesses.
Mendo already has trouble tracking the many complicated accounts that fund County operations. Why does the County have to be a collection agent for the convenience of the Tourism industry?
Yes, yes. We know the “district” won’t involve general fund dollars (theoretically) and that will certainly be among the arguments that Visit Mendocino will make. They will also claim that their marketing spending will bring more money into the County. Therefore the Supervisors are likely to go along with the idea as a way to replace the funding that Visit Mendocino “lost” when the County’s 50% match was cut.
But putting the County in the middle of these basically private financial arrangements is an unnecessary risk. In time, if the intended recipients of the collected funds dispute the calculations — and they well might; think about the complicated relationship between the City of Ukiah and the Ukiah Valley Sanitation District which blew up into a legal dispute costing both entities millions of dollars in legal costs — untangling the web of who took in how much from whom and what happened to it and who got how much when could put the County in the midst of a costly and long-drawn out legal dispute.
Is the tourism industry incapable of handing their own finances? Can’t they simply organize themselves to finance their own marketing efforts? Is the only way to get everybody to pay to put the County into the middle of it all?
And what the hell is Visit Mendocino going to do with $2 or $3 million dollars a year? Buy more slick ads for Giants games? Bring more food and wine writers up for free wining and dining? Hire more staff? All they can prove is that they spend a lot of money; they can’t prove that their marketing even results in increased tourism revenue. (Tourism is much more a reflection of the northern California economy than it is fancy marketing.)
The prudent thing to do would be to tell the Adventists and the Tourism industry to handle their own marketing finances and not insert the County into a de facto taxation scheme that benefits one business sector while putting the County on the hook for seeing that all the complicated bookkeeping works out as the industry wants it to.
The Visit Mendocino folks know, however, that they can count on this Board of Supervisors to bend over backwards to “help” the tourism industry in their hour of reduced funding, and totally ignore the financial and accounting risks the County will have to assume.
DAOTOWN UKIAH
Spiritual Unity Destroying the Demonic Going Back to Godhead
Warmest Spiritual Greetings,
Sitting here at the Mendocino County Library on computer #5 on a cloudy afternoon in Ukiah, California, the days turning into nights turning into days, watching the mind and identifying with that which is "prior to consciousness", letting the Dao work through the body-mind instrument without interference; one last routine medical check up on the 27th, and then check out from the motel is September 1st @ 11 a.m.
I am free to go wherever I need to go and do whatever I need to do.
If you wish to do anything anywhere with me, please make contact soon.
Thank you very much,
Craig Louis Stehr
Royal Motel
750 South State Street, Ukiah, CA 95482
Telephone: (707) 462-7536, Room 206
Email: craiglouisstehr@gmail.com
UKIAH SHELTER PET OF THE WEEK
Bubba is a super happy, bowling-ball-in-a-china-shop kinda guy! He loves to meet new people and was very excited when introduced to a fellow shelter dog. Bubba is strong and energetic. He knows sit but will need leash work and basic obedience training. Bubba has a bit of a prey drive, so no small animals or pets in his new home! A canine roommate/friend would be awesome! Bubba is a 2 year old Pittie mix, weighing in at 90 cheerful pounds.
To see all of our canine and feline guests, and for information about our services, programs, and events, visit: mendoanimalshelter.com.
Join us every first Saturday of the month for our Meet The Dogs Adoption Event at the shelter.
We're on Facebook at: https://www.facebook.com/mendoanimalshelter
For information about adoptions please call 707-467-6453.
FOOTNOTE IT
Editor:
This woke thing is going too far. Stop erasing history. The best thing to do is to leave the name Kelseyville and add a footnote to the monument. History, both good and bad, is there to serve as a lesson. Removing history because it offends you is a disservice to future generations. If something about that history embarrasses you, so much the better. Then you will not repeat it.
Roger A. Fernwood
Petaluma
ED NOTES
TRUE HISTORY. The all-time local Dumpster Dive turned up a perfectly preserved, meticulously wrapped, complete set of Playboy magazines at the Boonville Dump. A certain pair of middle-aged women, fearing someone would discover that their late father collected Playboys, hustled them up to the dump and tossed them over the side, assuming no one would notice exactly what they were off-loading. How much is a complete set worth? You can buy one on E-Bay for about $7,000 which is a very good price. A good bookstore friend tells me that very first 1953 edition featuring Marilyn Monroe all by itself typically fetches “several thousand dollars,” and a complete set can go for “somewhere between $15,000 and $25,000.”
FROM DEBBIE HOLMER’S column “Glance at the Past” in the Fort Bragg Advocate: “100 years ago, December 11, 1923. Friday afternoon Deputy Sheriff Ward Ries arrested two Indians, Darwin and Richard Knight, near Mountain View on the Greenwood Road, who were making a get-away, after having stolen an automobile and wrecked it near Boonville.”
I KNEW I was old the day I went to see my long-time friend Jesse Mejia in that maze of a medical center at the vertex (?) of the Duboce Triangle in San Francisco. Jesse was on the third floor of the South Tower. I’d footed it over there the couple of miles from where I was staying. My glasses fogged up as I entered the sprawling structure, and my brain was still fogged from the usual psychic overload presented by Frisco's human parade I'd passed as I made my way. It took me a while to find the right elevator, having failed to find the stairs. I’ve lived in the country for a long time so I’m way out of the big building habit, and The City seems bigger and faster every time I visit, which isn’t often because I prefer Anderson Valley's small and slow vibe. I finally got to the right wing of an endless maze of long corridors where a nurse pointed me towards a large room where five patients were partially hidden behind curtains. One of them, I was certain, was my man, whom I hadn’t seen for a while. It was after dark and the lights were low. Jesse was 81 but he looked better than most 60-year-olds. Not wanting to startle my friend by waking him, I sat down in the chair by his bed and waited for him to rouse himself. I’d been sitting in silent vigil by my friend for a good 15 minutes when a Mexican gent about my age approached. Eyeing me suspiciously, he asked, “Do you know my brother?” Yes, I said, I’ve known Jesse for many years. We’re old friends. I’ve come a long way to see him. “My brother’s name is Pablo,” the man said. “Mr. Mejia is in the bed over there.”
THERE IT WAS, page D-4 travel section, Sunday’s San Francisco Chronicle. The “Ten Perfect Adventure Lodges." Argentina! Ontario! Utah! Virgin Islands! The Boonville Hotel! Malta! Tanzania!
JODY MARTINEZ’S always informative “This Was News” column in Sunday’s Ukiah Daily Journal, recalls the following two dispatches from the Friday, December 25th editions of the 1903 Ukiah Dispatch-Democrat:
“PLANT SHADE TREES. While the people are agitating the propositions of beautifying and improving the town, why not try to induce every property owner to plant shade trees along the sidewalks in front of his premises? What a beautiful town this would be with nice shade trees along the sidewalks! In five years’ time the trees would be large enough to give good shade in summer time. The cost would be very little and in a short time the trees would add much to the value of the property. This is something that the citizens should think about. This is a good thing for the Ladies’ Improvement Club to take hold of. This is a good time to begin. Let this be one of the New Year’s resolutions. Suppose the improvement club works up a big tree-planting, with appropriate exercises, for Arbor Day. It will be worth many dollars to the town, to say nothing of the pleasure and satisfaction to be derived therefrom in the future.
A HUNDRED YEARS LATER there are no shade trees in Ukiah’s commercial district and the town is unbearable in the summer months. Ugly, too, because Ukiah obviously regards trees as nuisances east and south of town where the proles dwell, unless they're on the Westside, where trees are appreciated unto mandatory.
AMERICA'S LAST RADIO SHACK, Fort Bragg (via Fred Gardner)
ALEXANDER COCKBURN, For Sale Ad, January 2004:
For sale: Rare 1985 Ford Escort diesel station wagon, which of course you won't have to smog. Acquired by Alex Cockburn in South Carolina two years ago. Driven reliably hither and yon, until fuel feed problems developed from broken off sending unit in the tank. Tank was cleaned out, new sending unit installed, but there's still a feed glitch. This is the car's only problem so far as Cockburn knows, but now he's got other fish (62 Belvedere SW, 60 Valiant, 67 300 convertible etc.) to fry. New clutch assembly; new rotors and pads on front brakes; new battery; nice upscale paint job. Newish tires. Does about 40 miles to the gallon. Odo probably accurate at about 68,500 miles. $1,800. Car's in Boonville. If interested call the AVA.
CATCH OF THE DAY, Saturday, August 24, 2024
CORY HARLAND, Garden Grove/Ukiah. Domestic abuse, false imprisonment, criminal threats.
MONICA MCDONALD, Ukiah. Disorderly conduct-alcohol.
CHRISTOPHER SCHNABEL, Willits. Burglary, failure to appear, bringing controlled substances into jail.
ANDREA SCROGGINS, Willits. Under influence, contempt of court.
RFK JR.'S EXIT
by Fred Gardner
Why did Kamala Harris refuse Bobby Kennedy Jr.’s request for a meeting? He was hoping for a role in her administration. Why didn't she grant him the courtesy of a meeting? Her disrespect was felt by everyone who had taken him seriously – especially the volunteers who collected signatures to get him on the ballot(s). What was she thinking?
Apparently Kamala left the thinking about RFK Jr. up to the Democratic Party masterminds. As explained in the NY Times August 14, “Public and private polling has found that as he spent the summer attacking President Biden, he began to draw more support from voters otherwise predisposed to back former President Donald J. Trump. Now Ms. Harris does better in some surveys when Mr. Kennedy is included than when she is tested in a head-to-head matchup with Mr. Trump.” (Emphasis added by your correspondent.)
And so the Democrat masterminds, in thrall to Big Pharma citing their polling data and focus groups and consultants in the great tradition of Dick Morris and Mark Penn and John Podesta and James Carville, decided that RFK Jr. should be marginalized as a nut. Meeting with him would imply that Kamala took him seriously. So the answer had to be nix.
Her opponent met with him and offered him a job. So on August 23 RFK Jr. announced he was withdrawing from the race in 10 battleground states, and supporting Donald Trump for President.
I caught his withdrawal speech on Fox and was impressed by most of what I heard. (What a shame that his voice is shot.) D. came by and I started to paraphrase Bobby's line on Ukraine. D., a progressive, interrupted with a comment about “the worm in his brain.” On the TV set in the kitchen, pundettes were giggling about “the worm in his brain.” They were designating RFK Jr. as “weird” on behalf of the DNC.
Dismissing people as weird is almost like putting them in a basket of deplorables. And y'all know how well that worked for y'all in 2016.
I myself happen to be a weirdo (though I try to pass for straight). And I wouldn't be surprised if other voters identify as weird in some respect.
This year's presidential campaign has weird overtones of 1968, and not just because Bobby's kid is involved. Norman Solomon has insightfully compared Kamala Harris's support for the Zionist war on Gaza with VP Hubert Humphrey's support for the US intervention in Vietnam. Not distancing himself from Lyndon Johnson cost Humphrey the Presidency.
There are also strong overtones of 2000, when the Democrat masterminds excluded Ralph Nader from the one presidential debate. Nader would have looked like the brainiac on the left, Bush the doofus on the right, and Gore would have been the sensible man in the center. Without Nader, Gore was the snob who used big words and sighed disdainfully, while Bush was the guy you supposedly could have a beer with (although he supposedly gave up booze when he supposedly found Jesus).
Also in Y2K, Assistant District Attorney Kamala Harris was gratuitously dissed by San Francisco DA Terence Hallinan, and resigned. Hallinan would have benefited from their ongoing connection (even if Kamala's Ambition led to conflict two years hence). Heeding the advice of a political mastermind instead of his own heart, he drove her out.
Flash forward to Early August, 2024. If Kamala had asked my advice, as once upon a time she did, I would have said By all means meet with RFK, Jr. and figure out an appropriate position for him.
Add weird quotes:
RFK Jr. began his withdrawal speech by over-glorifying his father, his uncles, and the Democratic Party of yore. He had quit the party, he said, because “It had become the party of war, censorship, corruption, big pharma, big tech, big Ag, and big money.” How weird is that?
“Conventional wisdom said that it would be impossible even to get on the ballot as an independent, because each state imposes an insurmountable tangle of arbitrary rules for collecting signatures. I would need over a million signatures: something no presidential candidate in history had ever achieved. And then I’d need a team of attorneys and millions of dollars to handle all the legal challenges from the DNC…
“More than a hundred thousand volunteers sprang into action… Our 50-state organization collected those million signatures and more. No presidential campaign in American political history has ever done that. And so I want to thank all of those dedicated volunteers and congratulate the campaign staff who coordinated this enormous logistical feat… I will not allow your efforts to go to waste.
“Each time that our volunteers turned in those towering boxes of the signatures needed to get on the ballot the DNC dragged us into court, state after state, attempting to erase their work, and to subvert the will of the voters who had signed those petitions….
“Over the course of more than a year in a campaign where my poll numbers reached at times in the high twenties, the DNC-allied mainstream media networks maintained a near-perfect embargo on interviews with me. During his ten month presidential campaign in 1992, Ross Perot gave 34 interviews on mainstream networks. In contrast, during the sixteen months since I declared ABC, NBC, CBS, MSNBC and CNN, combined, gave only two live interviews from me. Those networks instead, they ran a continuous deluge, hit pieces with inaccurate, often vile pejoratives and defamatory smears. Some of those same networks then colluded with the DNC to keep me off the debate stage…
“The Democratic Party censorship of social media was even more of a naked exercise of executive power… Just 37 hours after he took the oath of office swearing to uphold the Constitution, President Biden and his White House opened up a portal, and invited the CIA, the FBI, CISA, which is a censorship agency, the center of the censorship industrial complex, DHS, the IRS and other agencies to censor me and other political dissidents on social media.
Even today, users who try to post my campaign videos to Facebook, YouTube get messages that this content violates community standards…
“Three great causes drove me to enter this race in the first place, primarily. And these are the principal causes that persuaded me to leave the Democratic Party and run as an independent, and now to throw my support to President Trump. The causes were free speech, the war in Ukraine, and the war on our children.
“I’ve already described some of my personal experiences and struggles with the government censorship industrial complex. I want to say a word about the Ukraine war. The military-industrial-complex has provided us with that familiar comic book justification like they do on every war. And this one is a noble effort to stop a super villain, Vladimir Putin, invading the Ukraine and to thwart his Hitler-like march across Europe.
“In fact, tiny Ukraine is a proxy in a geopolitical struggle initiated by the ambitions of the US neocons for American global hegemony. I’m not excusing Putin for invading Ukraine. He had other options, but the war is Russia’s predictable response. The reckless neocon project of extending NATO to encircle Russia is a hostile act. The credulous media rarely explain to Americans that we unilaterally walked away from two intermediate nuclear weapons treaties with Russia and then put nuclear missile systems in Romania and Poland.
“This is a hostile, hostile act, and the Biden White House repeatedly spurned Russia’s offer to settle this war peacefully. The Ukraine war began in 2014, when U.S. agencies overthrew the democratically elected government of Ukraine and installed a handpicked pro-Western government. They launched a deadly civil war against ethnic Russians in Ukraine. In 2019, America walked away from a peace treaty, the Minsk agreement, that had been negotiated between Russia and Ukraine by European nations. And then in April of 2022, we wanted the war. In April 2022, President Biden sent Boris Johnson to Ukraine to force President Zelenskyy to tear up a peace agreement that he and the Russians had already signed. The Russians were withdrawing troops from Kiev, Donbas, and Luhansk. And that peace agreement would have brought peace to the region and would have allowed Donbas and Luhansk to remain part of Ukraine.
“President Biden stated that month that his objective in the war was regime change in Russia. His defense secretary, Lloyd Austin, simultaneously explained that America’s purpose in the war was to exhaust the Russian army and to degrade its capacity to fight anywhere else in the world. These objectives, of course, had nothing to do with what they were telling Americans about protecting Ukraine’s sovereignty.
“Ukraine is a victim in this war, and it's a victim of the West… both Russia and the West. Since then, we have forced Zelenskyy to tear up the agreement, we’ve squandered the flower of Ukrainian youth. As many as 600,000 Ukrainian kids and over 100,000 Russian kids, all of whom we should be mourning, have died. And Ukraine’s infrastructure is destroyed.
“War has been a disaster for our country, as well. We have squandered nearly $200 billion already. And these are badly needed dollars in our communities suffering all over our country. The Nord Stream pipeline sabotage and the sanctions have destroyed Europe’s industrial base, which form the bulwark of U.S. national security. A strong Germany with a strong industry is a much, much stronger deterrent to Russia than a Germany that is de-industrialized and turned into just an extension of a U.S. military base.
“We’ve pushed Russia into a disastrous alliance with China and Iran. We are closer to the brink of nuclear exchange than at any time since 1962. And the neocons in the White House don’t seem to care at all. Our moral authority and our economy are in shambles, and the war gave rise to the emergence of BRICS, which now threatens to replace the dollar as a global reserve currency.
“This is a first class calamity for our country. Judging by the bellicose, belligerent speech last night in Chicago, we can assume that President Harris will be an enthusiastic advocate for this and other neocon military adventures. President Trump says he will reopen negotiations with President Putin and end the war overnight as soon as he becomes President. This alone would justify my support for his campaign.
“Last summer, it looked like no candidate was willing to negotiate a quick end to the Ukraine war, to tackle the chronic disease epidemic, to protect free speech and our constitutional freedoms, clean corporate influence out of our government, or defy the neocons and their agenda of endless military adventurism. But now one of the two candidates has adopted these issues as his own, to the point where he has asked to enlist me in his administration. I’m speaking, of course, of Donald Trump.
“Less than two hours after President Trump narrowly escaped assassination, Calley Means called me on my cell phone. I was in Las Vegas. Calley is arguably the leading advocate for food safety, for soil regeneration, and for ending the chronic disease epidemic that is destroying America’s health and ruining our economy. Calley has exposed the insidious corruption at the FDA, the NIH, the HHS, and the USDA that has caused the epidemic.
“Calley had been working on and off for my campaign and advising me on subjects since the beginning. Those subjects have been my primary focus for the last 20 years. I was delighted when Calley told me that he had also been advising President Trump. He told me that President Trump was anxious to talk to me about chronic disease and other subjects and to explore avenues of cooperation. Then he asked if I would take a call from the president.
“President Trump telephoned me a few minutes later, and I met with him the following day. A few weeks later, I met again with President Trump and his family members and close advisers in Florida. And in a series of long, intense discussions, I was surprised to discover that we are aligned on many key issues. And in those meetings he suggested that we join forces as a unity party.
“We talked about Abraham Lincoln’s team of rivals. That arrangement would allow us to disagree publicly and privately and fiercely, if need be, on issues over which we differ, and also work together on the existential issues upon which we are in concordance. I was a ferocious critic of many of the policies during his first administration, and there are still issues and approaches upon which we continue to have very serious differences.
“But we are aligned with each other on other key issues, like the ending of forever wars, ending the childhood disease epidemics, securing the border, protecting freedom of speech, unraveling the corporate capture of our regulatory agencies, and getting the U.S. intelligence agencies out of the business of propagandizing and censoring and surveilling Americans and interfering with our elections. Following my first discussion with President Trump, I tried unsuccessfully to open similar discussions with Vice President Harris. Vice President Harris declined to meet or even to speak with me.
“Suspending my candidacy is a heart-rending decision for me. But I am convinced that it is the best hope for ending the Ukraine war, for ending the chronic disease epidemic that is eroding our nation’s vitality from the inside, and for finally protecting free speech. I feel a moral obligation to use this opportunity to save millions of American children, above all things…
“Today we spend more on healthcare than any country on Earth, twice what they pay in Europe. And yet we have the worst health outcomes of any nation in the world. We’re about 79th in health outcomes, behind Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Mongolia and other countries. Nobody has a chronic disease burden like we have. During the COVID epidemic, we had the highest body count of any country in the world. We had 16% of the COVID deaths even though we only have 4.2% of the world’s population.
“The CDC says that’s because we are the sickest people on earth. We have the highest chronic disease rate on earth, and the average American who died from COVID had on average 3.8 chronic diseases. So these were people who had immune system collapse, who had mitochondrial dysfunction. And no other country has anything like this. Two-thirds of American adults and children suffer from chronic health issues. Fifty years ago that number was less than 1%. So we’ve gone from 1% to 66%. In America, 74% of Americans are now overweight or obese, including 50% of our children. 120 years ago, when somebody was obese, they were sent to the circus. There were case reports about them. Obesity was almost unknown. In Japan the childhood obesity rate is 3% compared to our 50%.
“Here, half of Americans have prediabetes or type 2 diabetes. When my uncle was president, when I was a boy, juvenile diabetes was effectively nonexistent. A typical pediatrician would see one case of diabetes during his entire 40 or 50-year career. Today, one out of every three kids who walks into his office is diabetic or prediabetic, and the mitochondrial disorder that causes diabetes is also causing Alzheimer’s, which is now classified as diabetes. And it’s costing this country more than our military budget every year. There’s been an explosion of neurological illnesses that I never saw as a kid. ADD, ADHD, speech delay, language delay, Tourette’s syndrome, narcolepsy, ASD, Asperger’s, autism… In the year 2000, the autism rate was 1 in 15. Now autism rates in kids are 1 in 36, according to the CDC. Nobody’s talking about how 1 in every 22 kids in California has autism, and this is a crisis that 77% of our kids are too disabled to serve in the United States military.
“What is happening to our country, and why isn’t this in the headlines every single day? There’s nobody else in the world who is experiencing it. This is only happening in America. And by the way, there has been no change in diagnosis, which the industry sometimes likes to say to say there has been no change in screening. This is a change in incidence. In my generation, 70-year old men, the odds are about 1 in 10,000. And in my kids generation, 1 in 34… I repeat, in California, 1 in 22. Why are we letting this happen? Why are we allowing this to happen to our children? These are the most precious assets that we have in this country. How can we let this happen to them?
“About 18% of American teens have fatty liver disease. That’s like one out of every five. That disease, when I was a kid, only affected late-stage alcoholics who were elderly. Cancer rates are skyrocketing in the young and the old. Young adult cancers are up 79%, and one in four American women is on antidepressant medication, 40% of teens have a mental health diagnosis, 15% of high schoolers are on Adderall, and half a million children are on SSRIs.
“So what’s causing this suffering? I’ll name two culprits. First and the the worst is ultra processed foods. 70% of American children’s diet is ultra-processed, which means industrially manufactured in a factory. These foods consist primarily of processed sugar, ultra-processed grains and seed oils. Laboratory scientists, many of whom formerly worked for the cigarette industry, which purchased all the big food companies in the 1970s and ‘80s. They deployed thousands of scientists to invent new chemicals to make the food more addictive. And these ingredients didn’t exist a hundred years ago, humans aren’t biologically adapted to eat them. Hundreds of these chemicals are now banned in Europe. But they are ubiquitous in American processed foods.
“The second culprit is toxic chemicals in our food, our medicine and our environment. Pesticides, food additives, pharmaceutical drugs and toxic waste permeate every cell of our bodies. These assaults on our children’s cells and hormones are unrelenting. And to name just one problem: many of these chemicals increase estrogen. Because young children are ingesting so many of these hormone disruptors, America’s puberty rate is now occurring at age 10 to 13, which is six years earlier than girls were reaching puberty in 1900. Our country has the earliest puberty rates of any continent on the earth. And no, this isn’t because of better nutrition. This is not normal. Breast cancer is also estrogen-driven and now strikes 1 in 8 women. We are mass poisoning all of our children and our adults.
“Considering the grievous human cause of this tragic epidemic of chronic disease, it seems almost crass to mention the damage it does to our economy; but I’ll say it is crippling the nation’s finances. When my uncle was president, our country spent zero on chronic disease. Today, government healthcare spending is almost all for chronic disease, and it’s double the military budget, and it is the fastest growing budget item in the federal budget. Chronic disease costs more to the economy as a whole – costs at least $4 trillion, five times our military budget. And that’s a 20% drag on everything we do, and everything we aspire to. Poor and minority communities suffer disproportionately.
“People worry about DEI or about bigotry of any kind. This dwarfs anything. We are poisoning the poor, we are systematically poisoning minorities across this country. Industry lobbyists have made sure that most of the food stamp lunch program, about 70% of food stamps, and 70 or 77% of school lunches are processed foods. There’s no vegetables. There’s nothing that you would want to eat. We are just poisoning the poor citizens. And that’s why they have the highest chronic disease burden of any demographic in our country and the highest in the world. The same food industry lobbied to make sure that nearly all agricultural subsidies go to commodity crops that are the feed stock of processed food industry. These policies are destroying small farms and they’re destroying our soils.
“We give about eight times as much in subsidies to tobacco than we do to fruits and vegetables. It makes no sense if we want a healthy country. The good news is that we can change all this and we can change it very, very quickly. America can get healthy again. To do that, we need to do three things: first we need to root out the corruption in our health agencies. Second, we need to change the incentives in our health care system. And third, we need to inspire Americans to get healthy again. 80% of NIH grants go to people who have conflicts of interest. Virtually everybody who Joe Biden just appointed to a new panel at the NIH to decide food recommendations, they’re all people who are from the industry or all people who are from the processed-food companies… The recommendations on the food pyramid, what goes to our school lunch programs, which goes to the the food stamp programs, they’re all corrupted and conflicted individuals.
“These agencies, the FDA, the USDA, CDC, all of them are controlled by giant for-profit corporations. 75% of the FDA funding doesn’t come from taxpayers. It comes from pharma. And pharma executives and consultants and lobbyists cycle in and out of these agencies. With President Trump’s backing, I’m going to change that. We’re going to staff these agencies with honest scientists and doctors who are free from industry funding. We’re going to make sure the decisions of consumers, doctors and patients are informed by unbiased science. A sick child is the best thing for the pharmaceutical industry. When American children are sick with a chronic condition, they’re put on medication for their entire life.
“Imagine what happens when Medicare starts paying, for example, which costs $1,500 a month. That’s being recommended for children as young as six over a condition, obesity, that is completely preventable and barely even existed a hundred years ago. 74% of Americans are obese. The cost if all of them are put on prescriptions is $3 trillion a year. This is a drug that has made Novo Nordisk the biggest company in Europe – it’s a Danish company. The Danish government does not recommend it. Instead, it recommends a change in diet to treat obesity, that and exercise. In our country the recommendation now is for children as young as age six. Novo Nordisk is the biggest company in Europe, and virtually its entire value is based upon its projections of the Ozempic it’s going to sell to America.
“And we have the food lobby. We have a bill in front of Congress today that is backed by the White House, backed by Vice President Harris and President Biden, to allow this to happen. This $3 trillion cost is going to bankrupt our country. For a fraction of that amount we could buy organic food for every American family, three meals a day and eliminate diabetes altogether.
“We’re going to bring healthy food back to school lunches. We’re going to stop subsidizing the worst foods with our agricultural subsidies. We’re going to get toxic chemicals out of our food. We’re going to reform the entire food system. And for that, we need new leadership in Washington, because unfortunately, both the Democrats and the Republican parties are in cahoots with the big food producers, Big Pharma and Big AG, which are among the DNC major donors.
“Vice President Harris has expressed no interest in addressing this issue. Four more years of Democratic rule will complete the consolidation of corporate and union power, and our children will be the ones who suffer most. I got involved with chronic disease 20 years ago, not because I chose or wanted to. It was essentially thrust upon me; it was an issue that should have been central to the environmental movement. I was an essential leader at the time. But it was widely ignored by all the institutions including the NGOs who should have been protecting our kids against toxins. It was an orphan issue, and I have a weakness for orphans. I watched generations of children get sicker and sicker. I had 11 siblings and 7 kids myself. I was conscious of what was happening in their classrooms and to their friends. I watched sick kids, these damaged kids in that generation, almost all of them were damaged and nobody in power seemed to care or to even notice…
“If I’m given the chance to fix the chronic disease crisis and reform our food production, I promise that within two years we will watch the chronic-disease burden lift dramatically. We will make Americans healthy again. Within four years America will be a healthy country. We will be stronger, more resilient, more optimistic and happier. I won’t fail in doing this…
“I’m 70 years old. I may have a decade to be effective. I can’t imagine that a President Harris would allow me or anyone to solve these dire problems… President Trump has told me that he wants this to be his legacy. I’m choosing to believe that this time he will follow through. His son, his biggest donors, his closest friends, all support this objective.”
So they say. And Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. has chosen to believe them.
ERNIE PARDINI:
I am completely disheartened by the state of our once great country. A while back I watched as much of the republican national convention as I could stomach and in the last couple of days watched nauseating speeches coming from the democrats. It looks as though we are going to forever be cursed by more of the same from both parties. The speeches I heard sounded rehearsed and delivered in the manner of a preacher at an old time revival meeting. None of them telling us how they were going to help the working class of America, but rather paying lip service to the forgotten notions of freedom and prosperity once enjoyed by American citizens. None of them specifically identified the issues facing the American public, much less propose any real time solutions to our problems. Most of their time was spent making accusations and pointing fingers at their opponents, further feeding the divisiveness that exists in this country these days, ensuring that by doing so they make it impossible for us to unite in an effort to bring about change. The saddest thing of all is that in both of the last two elections there were candidates running who were sincere in their desire to bring unity in this country through compromise, and taking power away from the corrupt corporate powers who have enslaved the middle class and give that power back to the people. Both were shut out of any possibility of being elected by the corporate owned mainstream press and the DNC. First it was Bernie Sanders and now RFK Jr. RFK Jr., as a result of being non existent in the eyes of the press, was unable to get his message out to enough Americans, relying on social media to reach as many as possible and refusing to sell out to corporate America to receive their financial backing is out of money and forced to end his bid for the presidency. And I say this to the citizenry of this once great country, in both of the last two presidential elections, you have squandered the chance to have an honest president, one who would fight to give you back the rights and prosperity that you have willingly given up as a result of the fear mongering by our public officials and all I can say in the way of a consoling gesture, is you get what you ask for and when your lives end up in the sewer, don't look for any sympathy from me.
JOHN TOOHEY
Do not dare compare a man with the integrity of Bernie with a self serving ignoramus like RFK who is trying to sell his endorsement to both parties.
Bernie has been in full and total support of Harris and Walz, and while I think Bernie was the superior choice in the last two elections, his influence is trending America in the right way - the pick of Walz and the message of the democrats is proof positive that the direction has improved. Political change in this county moves incredibly slow for good reason, it limits volatility, it was designed that way, and with the dissolution of the GOP and the progressive nudge to the exceedingly popular Democratic Party, I am super optimistic about America and humanity for the first time in a long time.
Now, when it comes to specific policies reference during conventions, the Republicans offered none and were not judged for or called out but the Democrats are held to a higher standard than Republicans and so they are expected to detail policy, which is then this characterized and dishonestly framed for the sake of political argument so the Democrats really have no choice, but to be a little more vague and they were. That said, they did specifically talk about controlling corporate fixed price gouging for food. They talked about building 3 million new homes to reduced the housing shortage. They talked about $25,000 down payment credit for first time homebuyers. They talked about a tax cut for the middle class. They talked about straightening their ties with NATO, and yeah, they spent a decent amount of time standing on the achievements of Biden over the last four years which have been many and powerful and return this nation to the top of the food chain on planet earth. The selection of Tim Walz shows the progressive trend of the party. He has secured free school lunches and breakfasts for the children in his state. He’s instituted family and medical leave. He’s banished conversion therapy and then so many other great things. You should check his record because when Kamala was faced with the decision between corporate friendly Shapiro and redneck Tim Walz, she chose Coach Walz.
MEMO OF THE AIR: Hiya, Dollface.
Here's the recording of last night's (Friday 2024-08-23) 8-hour Memo of the Air: Good Night Radio show on 107.7fm KNYO-LP Fort Bragg (CA) and KNYO.org (and, for the first hour, also 89.3fm KAKX Mendocino): https://tinyurl.com/KNYO-MOTA-0606
Coming shows can feature your story or dream or poem or essay or kvetch or announcement or whatever. Just email it to me. Or include it in a reply to this post. Or send me a link to your writing project and I'll take it from there and read it on the air. That's what I'm here for.
Besides all that, at https://MemoOfTheAir.wordpress.com you'll find a fresh batch of dozens of links to worthwhile items I set aside for you while gathering the show together, such as:
I tried it. I followed the instructions. I kept at it and kept at it, went away, came back, tried again. I can't do it. I just start coughing. Maybe you can do it. I'll bet you can make that Scottish/Spanish rolling-R sound too. That's another thing I don't have the gene for. I can do lots of things, just not those. There's a trick I can do with my toes that I'll bet you can't do. I can open and shut my nostrils without touching them. That should be enough, but somehow I want more. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WDvfUAFKQHQ
An infernal boombox the size of an office building, powered by diesel generators, to mess with people fifteen miles away, way too far away for Spock to reach over from, put them to sleep by pinching their neck, and switch it off, to the cheers and applause of everyone on the bus. The Asian geopolitical bus.
https://www.amusingplanet.com/2019/06/taiwans-giant-wall-of-propaganda.html
A beautiful photo of an experiment calling down real lightning, to study it. This is another majestic giant real-world science thing that any motivated high school kid can do. Look up /make your own solid fuel rocket motors/. Figure out how to deploy the wire without snapping it. The power of Thor is within your grasp. https://nagonthelake.blogspot.com/2024/08/when-lightning-strikes-river.html
This interests me because the photo near the top of the stack where she's got like a cocker spaniel haircut, that's dedicated "To George. Best of Luck," made me hear a kind of Nathan Lane/Bugs Bunny voice in my head saying, "Hiya, Dollface." The last time that happened to me, Jill Taylor had sent me a picture of her and Mervin Gilbert, but it was Mervin's voice that I heard then: "Hiya, Dollface". https://www.vintag.es/2024/08/nan-wynn.html
And this reminds me of the part in /Stand Up Guys/ when the heart-of-gold elderly gangsters hand the abused girl the baseball bat and take their leave, leaving her alone with the now-tied-up-and-hanging-by-their-wrists men they’d just rescued her from, who are not so big and tough now, are they. “Oh, honey, we were just foolin’. Can’t we talk this over?” No. https://boingboing.net/2024/08/17/small-child-whacks-robber-in-nuts-with-large-bat.html
Marco McClean, memo@mcn.org, https://MemoOfTheAir.wordpress.com
I AM VISITED BY AN EDITOR AND A POET
by Charles Bukowski
I had just won $115 from the headshakers and
was naked upon my bed
listening to an opera by one of the Italians
and had just gotten rid of a very loose lady
when there was a knock upon the wood,
and since the cops had just raided a month or so ago,
I screamed out rather on edge—
who the hell is it? what you want, man?
I’m your publisher! somebody screamed back,
and I hollered, I don’t have a publisher,
try the place next door, and he screamed back,
you’re Charles Bukowski, aren’t you? and I got up and
peeked through the iron grill to make sure it wasn’t a cop,
and I placed a robe upon my nakedness,
kicked a beercan out of the way and bade them enter,
an editor and a poet.
only one would drink a beer (the editor)
so I drank two for the poet and one for myself
and they sat there sweating and watching me
and I sat there trying to explain
that I wasn’t really a poet in the ordinary sense,
I told them about the stockyards and the slaughterhouse
and the racetracks and the conditions of some of our jails,
and the editor suddenly pulled five magazines out of a portfolio
and tossed them in between the beercans
and we talked about Flowers of Evil, Rimbaud, Villon,
and what some of the modern poets looked like:
J.B. May and Wolf the Hedley are very immaculate, clean fingernails, etc.;
I apologized for the beercans, my beard, and everything on the floor
and pretty soon everybody was yawning
and the editor suddenly stood up and I said,
are you leaving?
and then the editor and the poet were walking out the door,
and then I thought well hell they might not have liked
what they saw
but I’m not selling beercans and Italian opera and
torn stockings under the bed and dirty fingernails,
I’m selling rhyme and life and line,
and I walked over and cracked a new can of beer
and I looked at the five magazines with my name on the cover
and wondered what it meant,
wondered if we are writing poetry or all huddling in
one big tent
clasping assholes.
ON-LINE COMMENT OF THE DAY
My biggest complaint in all of this is I don’t know what to do other than just try my best to be the best person I know how to be. I am just one dude living in a modest home in a modest town in the Rocky Mountains. Who am I to bring about change?
So, I tackle what can control and that is myself. I strive to live a honest existence, treat my fellow man with the respect I would like to have, be a person of faith, commune with God and love my wife and children. I reject evil in all of its forms (television, porn, drugs, perversion) and I endorse and uphold righteous institutions when I can find them.
I also try to be prepared for what may come. I stay out of debt by living in a simple home and drive simple vehicles (2007 Tacoma). I refuse to play keep up with the Joneses. I live a simple life on as little income as I can. I store food so that I can feed my family as well as the hungry children that will come begging. I will never turn away a starving child because their parents didn’t prepare.
Other than that, I don’t know what else to do. I truly believe that righteous people would not tolerate a wicked government. Our government has become a house of lies and deception because the American people, by and large have become that way. If we all would right ourselves inwardly and make restitution with our God, things would change. But alas, they do not. They revel in their sin and their perversion. They mock God and all that is good, righteous and decent. They press down in their sins. And so they will be punished.
SIP, RETURN, REPEAT: US city tackles throwaway cup culture with first-of-its-kind system
From Starbucks to local cafes, Petaluma’s reusable cup project aims to cut down on rampant plastic waste
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/article/2024/aug/24/petaluma-reusable-cup-project-california
CALIFORNIA JUDGE ISSUES FIRST-OF-ITS-KIND RULING TO REIN IN GROUNDWATER PUMPING
by Kurtis Alexander
As Californians pump increasing amounts of water from the ground, sometimes siphoning flows from the rivers above and hurting fish, wildlife and other water users, an old state law is proving to be a new and successful means of reining in excessive pumping.
A Superior Court judge ruled this week that Sonoma County must do more to ensure responsible groundwater pumping under the state’s Public Trust Doctrine. The historical doctrine holds that rivers, creeks and other waterways must be protected for the public.
Groundwater has only recently been considered part of the Public Trust Doctrine, as the hydrological connection between waterways and below-ground water supplies has become clear. The new court decision is likely the first to enforce this.
The ruling will not only require Sonoma County to revisit and perhaps rewrite its ordinance for permitting groundwater wells, but it could set the stage for other counties to similarly step up regulation for groundwater pumping. With aquifers being overdrawn across the state as above-ground supplies get squeezed, environmentalists are optimistic that this will be the case.
“This ruling is particularly welcome given steadily growing groundwater pumping, declining natural resources and a changing climate that is making droughts deeper and longer,” said Barry Nelson, founder of the consulting company Western Water Strategies. “We hope this decision will be followed by counties statewide so that they start considering impacts on surface flows more seriously when permitting groundwater pumping.”
The case was brought to Sonoma County Superior Court last year by the environmental groups California Coastkeeper Alliance and Russian Riverkeeper.
The organizations claimed that Sonoma County’s well ordinance did not adequately consider the impacts of new wells on rivers and creeks, which were running low and threatening salmon and steelhead runs, according to the groups. Their lawsuit said the county had a public trust obligation to protect the waterways.
The challenge followed litigation two years earlier, which prompted the county to establish its well ordinance. The environmental groups, however, said the ordinance fell short.
The main concern has been the Russian River basin. Wells on vineyards that drive the county’s booming wine industry pull water not just from the ground but sometimes from adjacent rivers and creeks, where water seeps into the soil.
“Pumpers could just pump as much as they wanted,” said Sean Bothwell, executive director of California Coastkeeper Alliance. “There was nothing to make sure they were pumping sustainably. We felt like this (lawsuit) was a way to bring things into balance.”
A statewide groundwater law, called the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act, was passed in 2014 to help shore up diminishing aquifers across California, but the law doesn’t fully take effect until the early 2040s. Bothwell said this was too long to wait.
“We hope counties will heed this decision, and proactively do the right – and legally required – step of evaluating groundwater pumping to ensure pumpers are not taking excessive water to the detriment of our rivers and the aquatic life,” he said.
While Sonoma County, and potentially other counties, will have to better evaluate and mitigate the impacts of new wells per the new ruling, the Public Trust Doctrine does not detail when a county must approve or deny a well proposal. This remains subject to local discretion.
The Sonoma County Administrator’s Office said Friday it was still reviewing the court decision and wasn’t prepared to comment.
But County Supervisor David Rabbitt, who was involved in the adoption of the well ordinance, criticized the ruling, saying the county’s current rules were sufficient to protect waterways. Asking more of the county, he said, was burdensome and would likely prevent needed wells from being put in.
“Are we going to require conditional use permits and environmental impact reports for every well that is drilled?” he said.
The county is likely to put a moratorium on new wells until it addresses the ruling, Rabbitt said.
(SF Chronicle)
NOTE TO PHILIP BUMP
The Washington Post columnist speaks on CNN; a brief reply
by Matt Taibbi
The thing about censorship, which is total nonsense — he’s referring to this Twitter Files stuff, which has been debunked a thousand times over…
— Philip Bump, Washington Post columnist, commenting on Robert F. Kennedy’s endorsement of Donald Trump
Dear Philip,
On February 13, 2018, you wrote an article called “When we talk about Russian meddling, what do we actually mean?” It cited a website called Hamilton 68 as a source highlighting “Russian” efforts to “influence U.S. politics.”
The piece became one of eight Washington Post articles to which corrections would be added because of the Twitter Files.
Twitter internal correspondence showed the Hamilton 68 was a fraud, a “dashboard” of 600+ accounts that were “neither strongly Russian nor strongly bots” but “real people” who’d been falsely “labeled Russian stooges.” This was, Twitter executives say, part of a scheme “to assert that any right-leaning content is propagated by Russian bots.” Twitter Trust and Safety chief Yoel Roth concluded: “We need to call this out on the bullshit it is.”
Your own editors agreed, which is why there’s now a correction notice at the bottom of your article.
The accounts you identified as pushing “Russian influence operations” actually belonged to people like Consortium editor Joe Lauria, Chicago-based lawyer Dave Shestokas, and a onetime refugee from Lebanon named Sonia Monsour. None had any connection to Russia.
DAFFY DONALD, TURNING PEA GREEN WITH ENVY
by Maureen Dowd
I have a crow in my backyard in D.C. that has been cawing for three weeks. It has been driving me crazy, so I was happy to get out of town and back on the trail.
But now comes Donald Trump cawing and cawing even louder than the damn crow.
If you need more evidence that Trump is flummoxed about how to counter Kamala Harris, just check out his daffy reaction to her dynamite convention.
Friday morning, Trump crowed on Truth Social: “My Administration will be great for women and their reproductive rights.”
Friday evening, Trump crowed, “The Republican Party is charging forward on many fronts, and I am very proud that we are a LEADER on I.V.F.”
Yeah, a leader in trying to get rid of it.
At first, I thought there must have been an Iranian hack. These posts were too ridiculous even for Trump. His modus vivendi is projection, but the posts seemed intended to back up Kamala’s line in her big speech that, when it comes to women’s reproductive rights, Trump and JD Vance are simply “out of their minds.”
Trump is usually crowing, after all, about the three conservative justices he put on the Supreme Court who would overturn Roe. If he gets back in the Oval, he’ll probably put yet another religious fanatic onto the court who will try to foist some other horrible legal restriction on the country.
And the worst part about it is that Trump is not even a true believer. He was pro-choice long before he decided to run for president as a Republican. The amoral man who was once a famously promiscuous New York playboy wrecked the Supreme Court simply because it helped him with his Christian right disciples.
Kamala ridiculed Trump in her speech, dismissing him as “an unserious man,” but the real dagger in his heart was that she trumped him in the ratings. That set off a meshuga meltdown on Truth Social, with Trump maniacally capitalizing any piffle that entered his head.
When Kamala came out onstage, looking strong and elegant in a Chloé navy pantsuit, Trump demanded: “WHERE’S HUNTER?”
Then he accused Tim Walz of résumé enhancement for his role on a high school football team. “Walz was an ASSISTANT Coach, not a COACH.”
Ripping defensive coordinators is not a good strategy for running up the vote in “Friday Night Lights” territory.
He followed up the posts with a scream-of-consciousness call to Fox News, filibustering Bret Baier and Martha McCallum for 10 minutes until Baier abruptly cut him off to throw to the Greg Gutfeld comedy show.
“At several points during the call, a familiar beeping sound interrupted Mr. Trump’s remarks,” wrote The Times’s Michael Grynbaum and Michael Gold. “It appeared that the former president was accidentally pressing buttons on the keypad of his phone.”
Trump conceded that the Democrats had “a nice-looking room” for their convention.
Friday was another day of lunacy, as R.F.K. Jr. — the anti-vaxxer — dropped out and endorsed Trump, who once proclaimed himself “father of the vaccine” for Covid. In Phoenix, R.F.K. Jr. gave an incoherent speech that went from contaminated food to media collusion and censorship to Democrats being the party of “big money.” (That last, even though he chose a billionaire as a running mate, got millions from a billionaire, and is endorsing a billionaire.)
Among other delusional statements, R.F.K. Jr. said he could still somehow win and end up in the White House. He said his former party “abandoned democracy” by swapping Joe Biden for Harris, even as he gave his backing to a man who tried to overthrow the democracy he was running.
At an evening rally with Trump in Glendale, Ariz., Kennedy said, without irony, that Trump would protect us from totalitarianism. The fast-food champion praised Kennedy, saying he wanted to clean up the food supply.
Trump loves being embraced by a Kennedy — even an off-kilter one. But the former president’s motto is more like, “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for me.”
Kennedy brought up his father and uncle during his announcement, and his other relatives must have been mortified.
R.F.K.’s cousin and J.F.K.’s grandson, Jack Schlossberg, a convention speaker, commented on X: “Never been less surprised in my life. Been saying it for over a year — RFK Jr. is for sale, works for Trump. Bedfellows and loving it.”
At an event in Las Vegas on Friday to tout his no-tax-on-tips policy, Trump continued his obsessive critique of Kamala’s performance while still mispronouncing her name, and saying that she had mentioned his name 21 times in her speech. (Trump’s name actually appeared 16 times, but everyone knows he can’t help inflating numbers.)
“She lied,” he said. “But that’s OK because a lot of people lie. They’ll do anything to get elected.”
Well, he should know.
“She’s a copycat,” he said. “She’s a flip-flopper.”
Well, he should know.
Now we begin what is going to be a very ugly slugfest between the Unserious Man and the Untested Woman.
Top Democrats warn that Trump could still be formidable if he stops unraveling.
Kamala came across as tough talking about the military and foreign policy in her speech. But there are many tests yet to come — including vicious Trump attack lines, eventually a difficult interview and next month’s debate. She has to show she has what it takes once she steps away from the teleprompter. Can she manage to get through a minimum of policy stuff with no viral blunders?
Kamala holds the hopes of a lot of people in this country who are praying that she doesn’t fall on her face in the next 72 days.
She can take heart that she’s driving Trump crazy. He is jealous of her looks, her crowd sizes, her star power and her vivacious, bodacious vibes. That’s a good start.
(nytimes.com)
IN ‘CUTTHROAT’ TRUMP COUNTRY, RELUCTANT HARRIS SUPPORTER FEELS CUT OFF FROM COMMUNITY
by Marya Hornbacher
PETOSKEY, Mich. — Colin Germaine clocked out late on the fifth day of another seven-day workweek and drove home, winding down a narrow two-lane that leads through rolling orchards and stands of pine where cell coverage is scant.
Here in Emmet County, near the notch on Lower Michigan’s northwest side, armies of Donald Trump lawn signs march up embankments, guard mile-long fences, and stand sentry on every corner of four-way stops. Colin — looking equal parts scarecrow, Gen X grunge band drummer and part-time bum — rumbled down the dirt drive and threw the F250 into park as the sun dipped below the tree line and the temperature started to fall.
Colin emerged from the truck cab — leg, arm, crooked grin, one squinting eye, a battered porkpie hat — as if he weren’t fully assembled. He crossed a field, sat at the very end of a picnic table, and folded himself into a narrow origami bird. “I was dusting a Han Dynasty horse today,” he said, “when I realized it was original.”
The recent national surge of support for Vice President Kamala Harris that might feel, especially to voters in California, like a complete reversal of fortune in the U.S. presidential race — it has not reached Emmet County. Colin, an adamant “never Trumper” who said he will definitely vote for Harris, is a window into why. He agrees with other Democrats here who say the party has lost sight of what matters most to blue-collar families in Michigan. Like them, he supports Harris but blames her party for not easing the pains of globalization that led to manufacturing jobs moving overseas.
“I despise Trump,” Colin says, “and I do not trust Kamala one bit.”
For Harris, a successful run for the White House probably depends on six swing states. Michigan is one of those, and the folks in Emmet County will play a much bigger role in deciding the election than any Bay Area voter. As of Aug. 21, Harris led Trump in Michigan by 2.9 percentage points, according to the 538 site’s average of polls; a month ago, before he bowed out of the race, President Joe Biden was trailing Trump by 5 points in some state polls.
Bounded on the north by the Straits of Mackinac and on the west by Lake Michigan, Emmet County is nearly 95% white and just over 3% Native American; all other races make up the remaining 2%. Its lakeshore location and affordable labor and land make it a haven for vacation homes and seasonal income.
Colin has just started helping his girlfriend with her cleaning business. Nearing 50, a skilled tradesman — he’s a welder and fabricator; there’s a bunch of steel sticking out of his truck — and single father of three, he waxes and wanes in his battle with substance abuse. His years in the addiction recovery community, especially a sober motorcycle club he helped found, have given him friendship, connection and support; they’ve also immersed him in the politics of people whose views he doesn’t share.
Bridging divides to put personal healing before anything else is central to many recovery programs. But in Emmet County, which has voted Republican in 19 of the past 20 national elections, those divides can make Colin, and other left and center-left locals, feel like they are surrounded on all sides.
“I don’t feel safe expressing my views and opinions hardly ever,” he said, opening a tin of tobacco. “People will cut you right out. It is really cutthroat up here.
“There was a time people were excited to talk and debate and discuss. That doesn’t exist anymore, at least not here. It’s disheartening.”
He patted the pockets of his work jacket and pulled out his pipe. Over his shoulder, a yellow moon began to rise.
A gifted sculptor, Colin went to high school at nearby Interlochen Arts Academy and won scholarships to three collegiate art schools, graduating from the Maryland Institute College of Art. But today, like 60% of Americans, he’s living paycheck to paycheck. Working seven days a week for a family-run metal shop doesn’t quite keep the bills paid.
“I have this rinky-dink little triplex. I don’t have any life savings. I didn’t expect to live this long. I’m always behind on the mortgage and everything else,” Colin said, then snorted at himself. “Yeah, justify that while you’re wearing $700 boots.” He stuck his foot out. “I got sick of paying $300 for mystery boots. The leather is crap, they weren’t made here, they fall apart in two months.”
He packed his pipe with dried-out tobacco. “I think I represent an average person that has really lost faith in our government as a whole,” he said. “I had this elaborate construct of what it was, what it was meant to be. That all fell apart in the last five years.”
As Colin lit his pipe, the tobacco crackled like tinder, then finally took. He said he knows “very little” about Harris. “I do view her as a very efficient chameleon, just like I view Trump, just like I view almost all these people. They do and say what they need to do. It’s inefficient and self-serving.” The political machine, he says, serves the people within it, not the people who voted them in. He shrugged. “It’s probably always been that way. There are those that will rise to the top by any means and will profit off the labor of others.”
The pipe went out. He didn’t seem to notice, just held it in his left hand, which, along with his wrist, was wrapped in white medical tape, dirty from days of work. There was no cast, no splint; he suspected a few tarsals or metatarsals were broken, but hadn’t had it seen. Several crooked fingers suggested that the home-wrapped wrist and hand were not a first. Colin had written a reminder to the body’s occupant — “Fragile!!” — in thin-tipped Sharpie pen.
“I have zero faith in any of it right now,” he said. “It’s the same scam.”
His alienation doesn’t point to a lack of political engagement or interest. He’s a dedicated and critical consumer of news and information from a wide range of sources, none of which he wholesale believes. His concerns — and the things he’d like to see local, state, and national politicians address — range from the way the local school district seems content to pass his kids even when he knows they need more academic support, to the cronyism at work in local and state business, politics and courts, to the sorrow he feels in watching the war rage on in Ukraine.
Irritably, Colin ran a hand over his face, leaving a black streak of something — soot, ash, oil — across his left cheek.
“This is the first time I’m going to vote feeling this pessimistic and not expecting anything,” he said. “And I’m coming from a place of fear because of what my kids are going to inherit.”
Neither the mother of Colin’s two youngest children, from whom he is divorced, nor the mother of his eldest son is in the picture due to struggles of their own.
While meth use is rampant in California, Michigan has the second-highest overall drug use in the country. Michigan is one of several Midwestern states known to produce a huge amount of meth, and a crackdown on labs there dampened the market and brought down meth-related fatalities for a few years. But a recent report shows that while state officials deliberate over how to use the $1.5 billion Michigan will receive in opioid settlements over the next 18 years, meth use has skyrocketed again, especially here in the northern part of the state.
Colin, who had various minor brushes with the law as a youth, has steered clear of meth for years, but used it long enough that the drug ruined his teeth. “I lost all my top ones,” he said, tapping the roof of his mouth with a thumb. “It’s great when you sneeze and they fly out.” He grins. “It’s really attractive, getting older. You don’t just have to worry about peeing your pants. You can worry about your teeth flying across the room.”
Substance abuse, and the amount of time he spent at work to make ends meet, cost him time and patience with his kids. “I swore I would never act like my father. But when my kids pushed me a few times, I lost it,” he said. “That holds me back from even trying to parent now. I feel like I don’t have any business doing it.
“I did try really hard,” he said. “But the past few years, it was just like dominoes. I was raising all three kids and doing a good job of it. I had a handful of people that were very important to me. Then one person in particular, a friend, she committed suicide. And that’s when I started drinking again.”
Colin’s youngest child, assigned female at birth and now navigating her gender identity, is 13; she currently lives with Colin’s mom. His middle child, a 16-year-old boy, is staying with his maternal grandparents, Colin’s former in-laws. His oldest son, born six months before Colin went to rehab in 2003, is serving a six-month sentence in Grand Traverse Jail.
“Not a year. Six months,” Colin murmured, as if to reassure himself.
He studied his hands, steel shavings visible in the nail beds and under the nails, in the prints of his fingers and the lines of his palms. Who knows how many layers deep the steel has burrowed in.
“I was trying so hard to raise those kids by myself,” he said.
Colin gave up on the pipe and went back to his truck to dig up a pack of cigarettes. The sound of the door’s slam bounced around the hills. This far north, this time of year, the last of the daylight hangs in the sky long after the sun’s gone down. He walked across the field, head tipped back, looking up at the lingering violet blue.
He perched on the very edge of the bench and neatly folded into himself.
“None of us plan on ending up where we end up,” he said, shaking an unfiltered Camel out of his pack. “And I’m the reason I ended up where I ended up.”
Born and raised nearby, Colin lives in a place that now feels radically different to him than the northern Michigan he knew growing up. Today, he said, “there are two definitive groups that cannot mesh in any way. People cling to their views at all costs, on both sides. You either accept them or you don’t, and if you don’t, you’re out.”
He traces the shift back to the 2016 election. The combined effect of the Trump administration, the pandemic and ongoing social and political fallout have damaged businesses and livelihoods, and torn communities and friendships apart.
“It’s baffling to me,” Colin said. “People bought into the whole Make America Great Again propaganda, as if there was this time when everything was just great for everyone.
“Dude,” he said, leaning forward. “That was ‘Leave It to Beaver.’ That was Hollywood. It never existed.”
But those on the left strike him as equally prone to accepting what they’re told without question. “I used to naively think my more educated friends would look more critically at the information,” he said. “But most of them are being spoon-fed what they believe, too. And if you don’t agree, you’re a hillbilly.”
Colin’s friend Anthony, who moved to Michigan from his native Northern California two decades ago. said he withholds or obscures his own views from neighbors, colleagues and most friends — not just to keep the peace, but to ensure his safety.
Over fried pickles on the back patio of a bar in a one-bar town west of Petoskey, Anthony said, “There is a lot of hate. Hate is a thing. ‘Fuck those queers. Fuck those’ … whatever, you know, racial slurs. There’s guns and hate and violence, and it’s part of their daily life. They genuinely think Trump’s, like, smart. He’s gonna change the country. But with Kamala, it’s all, ‘She’s a liar. You can’t trust her. She’s stupid.’ ” And about Trump’s recent slide in the polls? “People just say, ‘That’s fake news. I’m not worried about it. He’s gonna be fine.’”
Support for Trump, Anthony says, is driven more by emotion than reason. Supporters, he says, “don’t throw facts out, they don’t throw numbers out. They rant” — about taxes, the cost of living, mortgage rates, gas prices, student loans they don’t want forgiven, universal health care they see as a gateway to socialism. “Half of them are on Medicaid,” he says. “I feel like they really don’t understand.”
A few years back, another friend of Colin’s happened to call him moments after Colin had decided that because he was out of pain pills, heroin was next. The friend told him to stay put, he was on his way. An hour later, the friend took him to a 12-step meeting.
But now, “We don’t talk anymore,” Colin said. “He was convinced antifa was this highly coordinated, international movement. I’m like, dude, that’s not it. If you don’t dig fascism, you’re anti-fascist. It’s not this coordinated militia that’s coming to take everything away. I don’t even think people are intelligent enough to orchestrate anything as a manipulative tactic to control populations,” he added grimly. “They can’t even take care of potholes.”
Colin is estranged from most of his fellow members in the motorcycle club and misses the camaraderie, the community, and the men he still calls his brothers. But, he said, “We can’t agree on any issue, and he cannot leave it alone. He was hell-bent on convincing me that I needed to think like him. He’s an intelligent guy, but he drank all the Kool-Aid. Like, all of it.”
The tone of the rhetoric Colin hears worries him. “It’s not just the same old bitching. It’s more like, ‘They’re a threat to our way of life.’ ” The left, he pointed out, employs nearly identical language in claiming Trump voters pose an existential threat to theirs.
“There is this mentality up here that if it does come to civil war, ‘you liberals’ aren’t armed that well. That’s a common thing people throw around, to be funny, but they also believe it. There’s a prideful mentality that if it comes to that, they’re gonna overthrow it all anyway. And I’m like, ‘I don’t think the government would let that happen. We got drones now. Your AR is not such a big threat.’” Colin scoffed, leaned his elbows on the table, and tugged on the sides of his porkpie hat.
“I don’t even like my AR,” he said. “I like my M1.”
Another friend — a veteran who was wounded in Afghanistan — told Colin, “If it comes down to civil war and you’ve got what I need, I’m coming to take it. I’m sorry. That’s just how it is.”
Colin tried to laugh. “I’m like, ‘Really? Well, I guess I’ll be ready for it.’ We’re still friends, but I haven’t talked to him in a long time.”
It was coming on midnight and cold, save for the seeming warmth of a yellow moon. Out in the countryside, the dark was thick and dense, and seemed to swallow shapes: The road was gone, and the hills, and the edge of the table, and the surrounding woods. Colin’s face was sharply etched, the way the moon’s terrain is visible on nights dark and clear.
Colin spoke of both his own sense of personal disorientation and a larger, more amorphous grief, the source of which he couldn’t pin down. But, he says, he can’t abandon all hope.
“I have not given up, but I’m struggling to see anything good anywhere, in any of it,” he said. “I’ll vote for Kamala because what I value and would like to see is far more likely to happen with her.”
Colin deconstructed the cigarette butts he’d saved in the lid of his pipe tobacco tin. Bits of tobacco scattered across the table, stuck to his fingers, clung to his jacket sleeve.
“I’ve always been pretty intense,” he said, “even when I was wrong. The things I believed, I believed firmly. Now I don’t know what I believe. I really don’t. I don’t know what’s truth and what isn’t. I don’t know what to fight for, I don’t know what to defend.”
Colin is aware that he’s far from alone in having lost a significant measure of hope. He, Anthony and other voters in Michigan voice a deep ambivalence about this election — about whether their vote will matter, about who they are to this country, and what this country is to them.
“I thought COVID would make it abundantly clear we’re a part of the world economy,” he said. “We’re dependent on other nations to survive. We got rid of all the railroads. Nobody’s bringing those back. We got rid of all our industry. Nobody’s bringing that back. Our steel industry will never come back. Generations of people died young for that industry. As a tradesperson in a trade that is so desperately needed, that’s essential — it’s dying. We gave it away. We gave away our future.”
He took off his hat and scratched the tufts of his salt and pepper hair. He’d cut it himself the other day.
“I just want a simple life, a simple place. And a few animals to take care of, because they take care of me, too. I’m going to aim for a small hobby farm, with a few animals. I just recently started volunteering at a ranch. I’m in love with this donkey named Deuce. I always have a bandana in my back pocket. If I’m grooming a horse, Deuce will come up and bite me in the ass, steal my bandana.” Right eye squinting, mouth bent in half a smile, Colin put his hat back on.
“And I play tapes in my head about my kids — not just what could potentially go wrong, or what has gone wrong, but what could go right. I think that’s what gives me hope.”
He burst into an unexpected, impish giggle. “You’re gonna laugh your ass off,” he said. “When I got out of rehab, I got this.” He held out his hands, knuckles facing outward. His long bony forearms stuck out of his shirt cuffs, revealing the faded lines of a 20-year-old tattoo.
“Know hope,” he said, reading the phrase inked into his knuckles. Two words, four letters each, one letter per knuckle, one word per hand. “I need to get those removed,” he said, smiling at his hands. “They’re so cheesy. It was a reminder to myself.”
Colin looked up, still a little laughter left in his gray-blue eyes, before they skated away.
‘ALL WE ARE LEFT WITH IS RUBBLE’
by Selma Dabbagh
There’s a woman, K, whom I find myself trying not to think about. She is a friend of my friend Marwa, who returned to Gaza to work for a humanitarian organization and lives in a tent in South Gaza. When I do think about K, I think about her in a way which is probably not the way she, or anyone, wants to be seen: she is holding a severed head in her arms. In a message she describes the killing of family members who stayed in Jabaliya:
“It was shocking and painful news for everyone, and the matter was made more difficult by the continuous bombing, so we were unable to get them out from under the rubble, and they remained there for three days. When the army finally withdrew, everyone went back to dig them out, and I did not know how I ended up in that place where I saw those who were dear to our hearts in a deplorable state. Their pure bodies were in pieces and burned, and I will never forget finding someone’s decapitated head and could not figure out who it belonged to.”
“Why, I do not know?’ she asks in the message. “Why does the spring of our lives coincide with the fall of our homeland? We had big dreams, but they all collapsed, and all we are left with is rubble. Why did our crops burn at harvest time? Why?”
I don’t know how many corpses K has had to see, touch or deal with in recent months. In a message she sent Marwa in June, she said the worst thing was seeing her children injured in front of her eyes, blood covering her son’s face. Her home was bombed on October 10. She says she tries to cry now but the tears don’t come. By June, she had been displaced more than seven times in eight months. Her husband’s siblings have been killed. She is now responsible for 11 children. She has watched shrapnel be removed from her children’s bodies without anaesthesia.
I find myself looking away. This comes with no small degree of self-loathing. According to one psychologist I spoke to, who has Palestinian patients from Gaza, the worst of conditions have been going on for so long that they are now being normalized; we are at risk of slipping into helplessness. “Fall into community, not despair!” advises a placard at a demo. Edward Said’s daughter Najla posts a quote by him: “Where cruelty and injustice are concerned, hopelessness is submission, which I believe is immoral.”
“If, in 1948, firing had not been coming in the direction from masnaa al-bira (the beer factory) my family would have headed south to Gaza, where they would, according to my father, have stayed. By the time they tried to leave Jaffa later, by boat, my father was badly wounded, following a grenade attack. If the sea had not been too rough on one attempt to lift him onto a boat on his stretcher, we could have ended up in Lebanon. If a man called Sir James Craig had not walked into the British Council in Damascus in 1952 and discovered my uncle Hussein’s gift for languages, we might not have come to England. My brother-in-law has lost at least 23 members of his family in Gaza, mainly children. A cousin of his, Sumaya, worked as a teacher. She was sheltering in a school when she and her three children Leen (aged six), Mariam (three) and Malik (two) were killed in an airstrike.
“Over the last eight months I’ve had to make very difficult choices,” K writes. “One was to move to the south of Gaza with my colleagues, or to stay with my family in the north.” She decided to stay in the north. I don’t know if she regrets this choice. I can only imagine how heavily the responsibility rests on her. She writes:
“I did not know what to do? Where to go? Where to get relief, a hundred questions in one moment, and everyone was asking me for help, I was their savior at that moment, then it started to rain and the rain fell heavily. I pulled myself together, helped my children and my relatives the best I could and we left the place.”
But the south, what is in the south? A far away zone on a tiny strip of land severed by tanks, soldiers and surveillance cameras. Atef Abu Saif describes crossing the Wadi checkpoint to the south with his son Yasser and his mother-in-law in Don’t Look Left:
“Many people are stopped, apparently just for the way they look … As we walk past, a soldier calls out: ‘The one wearing the dark pullover.’ Yasser is wearing a dark pullover. I whisper: ‘Don’t move. If they meant you, they would have said “the one pushing the wheelchair.” Insha’allah.’ I was right.
“For another two kilometers we struggle on, eventually reaching a stretch of road where the Israelis no longer flank us. My back hurts, my shoulders and my arms are sore, but we’re relieved to be walking on an ordinary road again.
“But this is the hardest part. Although we’re no longer being told where to look, I give Yasser my own strict orders. ‘Don’t look,’ I tell him. ‘Don’t look.’ Strewn around randomly, along both sides of the road, are scores and scores of dead bodies.”
“FYI,” the poet Mosab Abu Toha wrote on X on August 19, after 318 days without a ceasefire, “what’s called now a humanitarian area in south Gaza is just 36 square kilometres (14 square miles) and crammed in it are more than 1.8 million people, with no water, no electricity, no food, no clinics or pharmacies, and no shelters.”
“On the morning of 10 August, Israel bombed a school hall in Gaza City where more than a hundred displaced people were praying. They were blown to pieces. Their relatives could only bury bags of body parts that weighed roughly the same as a whole human being: seventy kilogrammes for an adult man, eighteen kilos for a six-year-old child.
“These killings are carried out in what is probably the most spied-on land on earth. In his diary on November 15, Abu Saif writes: ‘Every corner of the Strip seems to be watched by an array of different devices; optical, infra-red, radio, the full spectrum. Surveillance balloons hover over the border walls. Cameras hang on wires, staring out across the buffer zones along the border.”
“‘I am not ashamed to stand in front of the camera and say I am hungry due to the famine,’ the journalist Ismail al-Ghoul said last month. ‘Many children in Gaza ask me for something to eat, not knowing that I, like them, can’t sleep at night because of hunger.’ He and his colleague Rami al-Rifi were killed in an Israeli airstrike on their car on July 31. Al-Ghoul’s face was known to viewers of Al-Jazeera, who had watched him report from the north for nine months of heavy bombardment. His head was reported to have been severed from his body in the killing. On August 18, an Israeli tank fired on a group of journalists in press vests, killing Ibrahim Muhareb and wounding Salma al-Qaddoumi. Since last October, according to Reporters without Borders, the Israeli army has killed more than 130 journalists in Gaza.
More than 280 humanitarian aid workers have been killed, the UN says, while the total official death toll has surpassed 40,000. An article in the Lancet argued that the real toll could be much higher:
“Applying a conservative estimate of four indirect deaths per one direct death to the 37,396 deaths reported, it is not implausible to estimate that up to 186,000 or even more deaths could be attributable to the current conflict in Gaza.”
“They’re showing us what they are prepared to do to us,” Amber Lone, a Kashmiri-British writer, said to me. Others, too, see the mass starvation and slaughter in Gaza as a “warning” to the world’s non-Western majority.
At the end of June, Reuters reported that the United States has supplied Israel with at least 14,000 “highly destructive” two-thousand-pound bombs since last October, among countless other munitions. The Global Legal Action Network is suing the British government to try to stop them sending arms to Israel. They filed their case with the High Court last week, ahead of a hearing in the autumn. One of the GLAN’s senior lawyers said: “We thought we had seen everything but these witness statements” – from Palestinians detained and tortured by Israel – “reveal a new layer of depravity we never thought possible.”
On August 19, Mark Smith, a former British diplomat who resigned from the Foreign Office over arms sales to Israel, spoke to Mishal Husain on the BBC’s Today program.
“For everybody watching their TV screens now, what we can see are appalling acts of violence perpetrated on civilians, on civilian property and so on. Most people, I think, watching that would think this is absolutely horrendous and, me personally, my profession, or former profession, as of last week, was to advise the government on the legality of arms sales and when you look at what constitutes a war crime, it’s actually quite clear, even from what you see in open source on the TV that the State of Israel is perpetrating war crimes in plain sight … Anybody who has a kind of basic understanding of these things can see that there are more crimes being committed, not once, not twice, not a few times, but quite flagrantly and openly and regularly.”
When asked if he had raised his concerns internally, he confirmed that he had:
“I raised it with the new foreign secretary, and I raised it at pretty much every level in the organization. That’s my duty and that would be quite normal, I think, for public servants. We are very used to upholding the law and so we would normally raise things internally that we might have a question over, particularly if we have subject matter specialism, as I do.”
When asked what the response had been, he was not at liberty to divulge, but he invited listeners to draw their own conclusions from his resignation.
Awoke early at the Royal Motel in pleasant Ukiah, CA. Ambling off now to the laundromat on Talmage Road, avoiding the screamer outside. Looking forward to checking LOTTO tix and getting a cup of Columbian coffee at the Express Mart. One ally at the Washington, D.C. Peace Vigil across the street from the White House emailed to request a money donation. Am a tad tight at the moment to be able to contribute cash. Please contact Craig Thompson at cthsdp@gmail.com to find out how you may support the effort, ongoing continuously 24/7 365 since 1982.
regarding the Trump banner at Ocean Fresh : I guess the Princess Deli next door was getting complaints from their clients over the Trump sign so they now have many “Daisy for President” dog signs out front ( I think it’s Daisy, maybe another dog name ? )
Yeats Calls It Out
“And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches toward Bethlehem to be born.”
Has there ever been a darker poetic prophecy than these famous few words? While I’m sure they’d fit for many times throughout the history of this cruel world, they seem scarily apt for our country and indeed the entire the world right now.
Rejecting Kennedy…?
“Her disrespect was felt by everyone who had taken him seriously – especially the volunteers who collected signatures to get him on the ballot(s). What was she thinking?”
Fred Gardner
Clearly, she wasn’t. Remember, “And I haven’t been to Europe either.” ( Harris on NBC News) Kamala Harris is not a thinker, she just reacts, and as the days pass, that will become apparent in her campaign for President. That is, if she ever does live interviews…
Have a nice day,
Laz
Saw Boonfire at the Cloverdale Friday Night live concert this past Friday. Exciting to see local kids going for it. Loved the girl singers voice. Not exactly my kind of music, but I appreciated the talent. What really impressed me was how many community members of Anderson Valley came out to give moral support to the band. Very cool. Warmed my heart.
Kennedy sez: “ Two-thirds of American adults and children suffer from chronic health issues. Fifty years ago that number was less than 1%. ”. He’s talking about the year 1974 , the time when I began my medical career. Chronic disease rates were about the same as they are now. Probably worse since people smoked more and were far more sedentary. Only a delusional goofball or a liar would make such a specious claim.
” Chronic disease rates were about the same as they are now. ”
MT
Then why is America in an obesity crisis? Just look around…
Be Well,
Laz
Not my main point Laz. But yeah obesity is more prevalent. But to give you an idea how full of shit Kennedy is, the mortality rate from coronary artery disease is currently, approximately, one third of what it was in the 70s. You can look it up. So his assertion that 99% of Americans were free of chronic disease is risible.
The good doctor is 100% correct.
I’ll add that RFK Jr.’s politics live at the intersection of wishful thinking and credulousness.
For Kennedy “the most important issue,” he said was American health care. Kennedy shared statistics that nearly three-fourths of Americans are overweight or obese, with 50 percent of children classified as overweight or obese.
One hundred and 20 years ago, when somebody was obese, they were sent to the circus, Kennedy said. “There were literally case reports done about them. Obesity was almost unknown.”
Kennedy went on to blame ultra-processed food and toxic chemicals as the culprits behind the poor health plaguing so many Americans.
https://www.newsweek.com/rfk-jr-calls-out-obese-americans-sent-circus-1943788
“But to give you an idea how full of shit Kennedy is”
MT
I get it, you don’t like the guy or his stance on anything. I pick Biden, Harris, Trump, and others apart all the time. The fact is, that Harris or someone was too cool for school, and blew off a minimum of 5% of the voters which Trump might win with. That was stupid!
Harris and this Walz guy are proxies for whoever is really ruining the country. This is as bad as I’ve ever seen it…
Have a nice day and good luck.
Laz
Exactly
Running*? Either way you’re right
“Ruining”
Be well, Peter.
Laz
This is your bonus track, AVAistas >>> https://soundcloud.com/davidrovics/ministry-of-culture-on-wzrd
Thank you, Bobby for fighting for my f’n FREEDOM of choice, FREEDOM of Speech❗
Feel It by Cupidon
https://open.spotify.com/track/5qKEArG4jwMAYTAsuG4rpH?si=BY1aOL6PQXqB7Nn8Yan80Q&context=spotify%3Aplaylist%3A37i9dQZF1DX5Vy6DFOcx00
Yet Kennedy teams up with the guy who calls for suing the media, shutting down networks and jailing reporters who may write things he doesn’t like. Go figure….
REMIX ‘Feel It’ by Cupidon
…a little bit of ‘Party’…
Senior Moment (right)
REMIX ‘Feel It’ by Cupidon
…a little bit of ‘Party’…
Bvaltik & @Elchinsoul meet Cupidon & Milaa – Feel It (Afro Remix)” on YouTube
https://youtu.be/A1RJJ0u5KQA?feature=shared
CENSORSHIP is
the child of fear,
the father of ignorance,
and the weapon of tyrants.
By Laurie Anderson
https://twitter.com/
RFK Jr, fails to mention that some obesity or even being overweight is genetic. Diet is part of it, but blaming processed foods is not logical. That can be proven by looking at what kids ate in the 50’s when I was a kid: processed meats (bologna, hot dogs, and other sandwich fillers), processed cheese (Kraft “American cheese”), macaroni and cheese (packaged), Wonder Bread, potato chips, Kool Whip, and on and on. There were lots of unhealthy additives in these so-called foods, too, I remember feeling sick after eating too many slices of American Cheese (a commodity we never got at home, but which was introduced to me, like a drug, by a friend on the way home from school. I thought it was delicious, but regretted eating it when it made me nauseous). My mother was not much into these foods, but my friends all ate it regularly and were not fat. Kids were limited in the amount of sweets their mothers would allow, though, most of us had to climb on the counters and reach the highest cupboard to get an Oreo. Now kids get sweets whenever they want. especially soft drinks, shakes, and packaged cookies and crackers. Check the fat content on those. Kennedy apparently has not thought this through. “Chronic disease” as he calls it, is brought on more from fast food slop than processed foods from the grocery store, though I don’t endorse those either. Check out the lines at In n Out or Jack in the Box etc etc. These harbingers of ill health should not be allowed on every street corner. Yet one of Trump’s first stunts as President was to serve fast food burgers to a football team invited to dinner at the White House. It was not only an insult to the team, but an advertisement for the very diet that is making America unhealthy. What a ridiculous claim by RFK Jr. that Trump means to improve the diets of Americans!
Be wary when spreading truth. You may find your house surrounded by MAGAts riding hogs.
Sounds like you agree with Rfk but are trying your best to disagree.
Sorry I don’t understand either of these comments. But if you think I agree with RFK Jr. you are wrong because I am much more against what he is saying than I express here. But I think there is enough “black and white” thinking to go around already. I also doubt some of the stories that are going around about him, as they could be magnified and distorted. What I have heard is not at all flattering to him, but what else is new when it comes to political rhetoric? But thanks for the reminder that we are all prone to persuasion by doubtful sources. This is not a defense of his actions, just a “be wary of stories, check the facts, if you can” (which can be impossible).
—>. August 16, 2024
The drop in U.S. life span occurred as eating habits shifted away from minimally processed whole foods and toward ultraprocessed foods like sugary breakfast cereals and toaster pastries.
The consumption of ultraprocessed foods grew from 53.5% of calories in 2001 to about 57% of calories in 2018, according to an analysis of the eating habits of 41,000 adults in the U. S.
More recent research has linked higher consumption of processed foods to an increased risk of death from cancer and heart disease.
According to several reviews of movement patterns, people in the U.S. are becoming more sedentary. This isn’t only about spending less time at the gym. People also increasingly use vehicles rather than walk and spend more of their work and leisure time sitting.
Research has linked this increased sitting time with cardiovascular disease, obesity, high blood sugar and cancer…
A baby born in the United States in 1980, for example, would have been projected to live nearly 34 years longer than a baby born in 1880. That’s mainly because, back in the mid to late 1800s, diphtheria, tuberculosis and dozens of other infectious diseases stood between newborns and adulthood.
Throughout the 1900s, however, the development of vaccines and antibiotics allowed healthcare professionals to treat many of the infectious diseases that once cut so many young lives short. In addition, indoor plumbing allowed people to wash their hands and more safely dispose of feces, helping reduce the spread of disease. Life-extending treatments and medications — bypass surgery, statins, immunotherapy, among others — dramatically reduced the death toll of heart disease and cancer as well. As a result, throughout the 1900s and into the new millennium, U.S. infant mortality plummeted, and life expectancy climbed.
However, in 2014, U.S. life expectancy peaked at 78.8 years. During the next several years, it fell modestly before tumbling downward in 2020 and 2021.
https://mcpress.mayoclinic.org/healthy-aging/whats-behind-the-decline-in-american-life-expectancy/
A fact checker would go blind trying to verify the sources — and veracity — of the information RFK Jr. cites. The sources? RFK Jr. himself. Solely. He has lived in his own idiosyncratic information silo for so long that all he can do is repeat himself. Believing his own echo. His very own set of ‘facts’. As DJT would say, “Sad”.
Yes you are right. It all sounds plausible until you take a closer look. Shaky at best, downright confused is probably more like it. Sad for him but sad for Americans, too.
“America’s Last Radio Shack”? Kind of insulting to the Garberville’s Radio Shack. Still open and selling most of the electronic goodies, plus a U. S. Cellular store.
No need to print a retraction. I’m a good sport.
re: the last RadioShack. I was paraphrasing the AVA’ slogan. A sales clerk in Fort Bragg told me that RadioShack dealers were given the right to keep their signs and of course to sell out their inventory. But they’re not being re-supplied (even though there are still RadioShacks overseas)…
As for RFK Jr, we report you decide.
Bottom line…no one is talking about what’s most important, and that is food as medicine.
Oh no! Kamala – the subhuman Zionist criminal – refused to meet with RFK Jr – a subhuman Zionist criminal – so he turned around and endorsed Trump – a subhuman Zionist criminal! Oh me, oh my! What will we do!?
Yes, RFK Jr. said some good words. He said his dad wasn’t murdered by the Palestinian Sirhan Sirhan. He said big pharma doesn’t necessarily have our interests at heart. He said Fauci is a criminal. He said the health dangers of EMF exposure need more attention. All true things.
But then he turned around and expressed opinions that are 100% Likudnik and 100% pro-genocide. Then he turned around and endorsed a guy who literally has a place named after him by the “Israeli” filth.
Y’all go on and vote for one of the subhuman Zionist criminal scum. It’s what you do EVERY TIME. The blood’s on your hands, like always. Mine remain clean, and will continue to be so.
JOHN TOOHEY, I talked to a lady here in the Valley who had dated Bernie for awhile. She said he was such a disorganized slob, having visited his house, that she couldn’t imagine him running anything. All hat and no cattle.