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NORTHERLIES are forecast to diminish today and then strengthen on Tuesday. Robust northeasterlies are expected for southeastern interior Tuesday night and Wednesday. Dry weather is expected to prevail through the week. (NWS)
STEPHEN DUNLAP (Fort Bragg): On the coast this Monday morning I have 44F under clear skies. We will likely see some high clouds today. We also have high surf advisory today for waves 20' - 24'. Clear, dry & windy at times this week then we start looking for rain next weekend.
DRIVE BY OR EAT IN DINNER
Anderson Valley Grange Fundraiser
Join us for a delicious meal at the Anderson Valley Grange, Monday, November 4th, 5:00 PM - 7:30 PM
Enjoy a full meal of Smoked Chicken, Coleslaw and Baked Bean, with drink for only $20!
Choose to drive by and take your meal to go, or eat in and enjoy the community atmosphere.
Don't miss this tasty event!
MENDOCINO COUNTY GETS STATE GUIDELINES TO PROCESS CANNABIS APPLICATIONS
Cannabis growers have long contended with compliance with California’s environmental impact report process, leaving hundreds in Mendocino County waiting to get their annual licenses. Sacramento’s approval of EIR standards is expected to help with that effort.
by Susan Wood
California has provided the green light for hundreds of Mendocino County growers in the heart of the Emerald Triangle.
The state announced Oct. 17 it has certified an environmental impact report that serves as cannabis growing guidelines to help about 460 cultivators with provisional licenses get their annual permits. Provisional permits allow the growers to operate while addressing compliance setbacks until they receive their permanent licenses. They make up 69% of the county’s total cannabis licenses.
“This is a huge win for both the state and the cultivators,” Mendocino County cannabis Senior Program Manager Sara McBurney said.
Many growers and county cannabis officials have long clamored for streamlined regulations that spell out the environmental review process under the California Environmental Quality Act. CEQA dictates rules pertaining to cultivation areas where, for example, sensitive watershed issues arise.
Final EIR for Licensing of Commercial Cannabis Cultivation in Mendocino County (PDF)
“There wasn’t a clear path before,” McBurney explained, adding that with the approval she expects dozens of applications to be processed at a time.
Hannah Nelson, cannabis law and policy adviser of the Origins Council, the group representing Northern California legacy growers, called it “a historic, important step” for the cannabis community.
“I think many people will benefit from this,” Nelson said.
But she’d like to see more detail on how the timing will work out for many hoping to get their permanent licenses before the provisional permits expire.
The county has been flooded with hundreds of applications, among the more than 6,600 provisional permits issued in the state as of July.
When Proposition 64 made adult recreational cannabis legal in 2016 within certain local government boundaries, the passage resulted in the state establishing a system to manage the industry.
The state will continue to review individual annual license applications and prepare addendums to support the transition of licenses in the county.
“Our goal has always been clear — to support those who helped build California’s cannabis industry through a licensing program that is environmentally conscious and legally sound,” Department of Cannabis Control Director Nicole Elliott said in a statement.
(northbaybusinessjournal.com)
MENDO EXTENDS AMNESTY PERIOD
An amnesty program waiving “all Violation/Penalty fees related to building permits submitted after work has already commenced or been completed, which are not associated with a confirmed code enforcement case,” has been extended, Mendocino County officials announced.
In a press release, county officials explained that “the program originally was planned to expire on Nov.1, 2024 but has been extended to Dec. 31, 2024. All complete amnesty building permit applications must be submitted on or before Dec. 31, 2024 in order to be eligible for this program. Incomplete applications will not be accepted.
The amnesty program applies to all residential and commercial building permits, subject to the following limitations:
The permits are not associated with a confirmed code enforcement case.
The permits are not already under review with the Department.
The program does not apply to zoning violations.
Amnesty building permits will be subject to meeting the building code standards for the year in which we can verify the construction occurred. If no construction date can be verified, they will be subject to current building code standards.
Once a permit application has been submitted, no additional construction may be performed on the structure subject to the application until said permit application is approved and issued.
Amnesty building permits must meet all standards for the zoning district in which they are located.
All members of the public are invited to self-report any unpermitted structures and legalize improvements during this Amnesty Program.
If you have specific questions regarding the process, contact the Mendocino County Department of Planning and Building Services at (707) 234-6650 or email pbs@mendocinocounty.gov.
(Ukiah Daily Journal)
STOP INVESTMENT IN FOSSIL FUELS, MENDO
To: Board of Supervisors
Re: Local Action for Divestment This Week
My name is Dobie Dolphin. I'm a long time resident of Mendocino County, a volunteer at the Noyo Center and a supporter of the Blue Economy. Thank you Supervisor Williams for putting this item on the agenda. I wholeheartedly support the county divesting from investments in fossil fuels and weapons not used in national defense and I urge the Board to change the wording in the county investment policy from “discouraging” to “prohibiting” these investments. I encourage the county to move away from supporting fossil fuels by divesting from its holdings in the Royal Bank of Canada, the world's largest funder of fossil fuels in 2022, having invested $263 billion in fossil fuel companies. It's feels overwhelming to try to affect change on a federal and even a state level, but along with many Mendocino County residents I'd like to see the Board of Supervisors take a stand and be a positive force for change, as opposed to continuing to contribute to climate change by investing in companies that promote fossil fuels and weapons. Investing locally can have a positive effect on the economy and the well being of the residents of Mendocino County. Thank you, Dobie Dolphin, Albion
From Mendocino County for Ethical Investing*
We are alerting you about a very important item coming up this Tuesday Nov 5th on the Board of Supervisors meeting agenda item 4d. We have an approximate time of around 12pm. But it could be earlier or later. Please save the date and show up, ecomment, or call in (more details and instructions are provided below). Briefly, here are a few suggested talking points:
Suggested Talking Points for BoS Meeting 11/5
Tell our county that we do not support our tax dollars funding the continual abuse of our planet and humanity.
Royal Bank of Canada is among MCEI’s targeted investments because it reaches maturity in January of 2025 and for the following reasons:
It is the 7th largest financier of the fossil fuel industry globally, providing over $42 billion US in funding.
It helped to make possible the Coastal GasLink fracked gas pipeline, stamping on indigenous rights.
It is a large financier of Palantir, a surveillance company whose AI products are used to target civilians across the world, along with financing other large weapons companies Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, and Boeing.
County investment policy already “discourages” investments in fossil fuels and weapons not used in national defense. So why are we still invested in Royal Bank of Canada? Our investment policy needs to be reconsidered to ensure our investments align with our values.
Mendocino County should join other CA counties and stop investing in fossil fuels and weapons of war that kill civilians and add to the climate crisis.
How to Comment on Item 4D:
Written eComment can be made here NOW until Tues morning. https://mendodivest.us22.list-manage.com/track/click?u=ab3a15a4791481ed0490abe02&id=1890375369&e=9b21bd33dd
You will need to sign into the website.
Join the meeting in person at 501 Low Gap Road, Room 1070, Ukiah, (Board Chambers) *Meeting starts at 9am, we expect 4D to come up around 12pm. *
Or Join on Zoom. Link: https://mendocinocounty.zoom.us/j/84653918191
Zoom Phone Number (if joining via telephone): 1 669 900 9128
Zoom Webinar ID: 846 5391 8191
Suggestions for forming a written or spoken comment
Here is a useful format for developing your comment (from Dr. Marshall Ganz. 2009. What Is Public Narrative?; Harvard):
- Say you are a constituent and what city/district you live in. 2. Give a personal reason why you care about and/or are impacted by this issue. Personal stories and anecdotes are powerful ways to grab attention.
- Can be identity-based: I am… a medical provider, young person, mother, teacher, grandmother, etc…
- Can be values-based: Having systemic issues violating one’s values. For instance, not wanting tax dollars to go towards contributing to the climate crisis emergency. Important point to make: All of us must do everything we can to put the brakes on the climate crisis. One of the only tools at our disposal for taking climate action is choosing where to invest our money.
- Give a few key arguments about why your elected officials should support removing our tax dollars from supporting fossil fuels and weapons of war. Use facts to bolster your statement.
- Close your statement with your clear, concise, and specific ask. In a written comment, include your first and last name, city, and zip code
ARENA THEATER SHORT FILM FESTIVAL - Friday, Nov. 8 - Sunday, Nov. 10
Order by tomorrow, Monday, 11/4 midnight and get a $15 discount on all festival passes - enter code “Shorts24”
Here’s the link to order tickets: https://atshortfilmfestival24.eventive.org/schedule
Place your order by Monday, Nov. 4, and get a $50 pass (regular price $65) for three days of award-winning short films or a $70 pass (regular price $85) for three days of short films plus our closing reception, featuring pizzas from Point Arena Pizza and clam chowder from Pier Place.
The regular ticket prices:
- $12 tickets for one program except Experimental Shorts
- $20 for Experimental Shorts Program
- $65 Festival Pass for all six programs
- $85 Festival Pass with Closing Reception (includes food and drink)
The festival schedule is as follows:
Friday, November 8
- 7 pm - Close to Home (local shorts program)
Saturday, November 9
- 2 pm - Shorts from Afar (International shorts program)
- 4pm - LOL (comedy shorts program)
- 7pm - New Visions: Live Media & Experimental Shorts (featuring two in-person live media performances. Still from “More Than One.”
Sunday, November 10
- 11am - Creatures Featured (Animal shorts program).
- 1pm - Community Action shorts program.
- 3pm - Closing Reception Pizza Party with pizza from Point Arena Pizza and Clam Chowder from Pier Place - Mingle with filmmakers and attending film enthusiasts, while enjoying pizzas from Point Arena Pizza and clam chowder from Pier Place.
TIME PIECE: A Play on Time' at the Anderson Valley Grange in Philo, on November 8, 9, 15, and 16 at 7pm, doors at 6.
'Time Piece' is a dialogue-less play set to music, with a story and score by local playwrights Jainned Boon and Daniel McDonnell, and visual direction by local artist Katie Williams.
Accompanied by a live band, the characters explore, through pantomime, the arrival of a new clock in their small town and the ways in which it impacts their lives.
Come early to enjoy live music before the show, and take the opportunity to visit one of Anderson Valley’s many excellent restaurants.
We look forward to seeing you there!
The GOAT HOUSE players on facebook
ALL SOULS DAY
by John Sakowicz
Now that the landscape is disassembling in the fields
at the end of Gobbi Road down by the Russian River --
leaves piled high by the outfield fence
at the Little League Field,
acorns on the ground under the oaks
scattered according to the classic randomness
of a diophantine equation (all but finitely
many rational solutions arise from ways
that we know how to make them),
and milkweed follicles, ripe and split open,
their seeds, each carried by its coma,
blown by the wind --
I see that Cow Mountain is darkening
and that my dead mother is extending her hand
from the mountain and across the barrenness.
It's as if she is leaning out of a window,
and I, as stupid as I have ever been (my father
once called me a dumb ox), reach back to her.
A LIGHTNING STRIKE BROKE A TINY CALIF. TOWN. One man brought it back.
The tiny town of Leggett was reeling from damage caused by a winter storm, until one man arrived with a chain saw in tow
by Matt LaFever
On March 1, 2024, a fierce winter storm tore into Mendocino County, delivering high winds, rain and lightning. Major routes became impassable. Thousands lost power. By the storm’s end, the tiny mountain town of Leggett would never be the same.
At 5:45 p.m., lightning struck a redwood tree towering above the Leggett Post Office, bringing its splinters down onto a power line and igniting the roof. By sundown, the post office — Leggett’s community hub — lay “devastated,” said Kristina Uppal, a spokeswoman for the United States Postal Service. Now, the town’s few dozen residents face a 50-mile round trip to pick up their mail in Garberville, across the Humboldt County line.
Eight months later, despite efforts by the United States Postal Service and the New York-based building owner, Postal Realty Trust, the rebuild is nowhere near completion. In the aftermath, the empty lot and scarred redwood tree stood as a stark reminder of what the community had lost.
In a town as small and close-knit as Leggett, quick pleasantries between residents while they grab their mail are a big deal. For John Stephenson, owner of Leggett’s renowned drive-through tree and a Leggett native, the post office isn’t just another building; it’s the core of the community.
“Sure, we’ve got a store and a gas station, but the post office is kind of the hub,” he said. “It’s the heart of our little town — where everyone sees everybody, like them or not.”
Inspired to reclaim the charred tree as a beacon of his hometown’s resilience, Stephenson hired a chain saw artist to transform it into a piece of lasting art, and a tribute to the storm that altered Leggett’s story.
Soon after the fire, Stephenson gathered a crew to start clearing debris from the post office site. He noticed that the towering redwood beside the mailroom was now just a charred, splintered trunk standing 50 feet in the air. He thought, “We should probably do something.”
Fortunately, chain saw artist Dayton Scoggins was due in town soon, visiting from Mississippi. Stephenson has known Scoggins for more than a decade, since they met at a chain saw competition in Reedsport, Oregon. Since then, Scoggins has made regular trips to Mendocino County, where he’s crafted unique sculptures for Stephenson from the stumps of trees at Drive-Thru Tree Park.
Stephenson had planned to have Scoggins carve some more pieces for his business on this trip, but he pivoted, commissioning Scoggins to make something for the whole town instead. His assignment was specific: Scoggins was to carve a California bear, the powerful symbol of the state, into the front of the tree. And he wanted the sculpture to have the town’s name and ZIP code embedded in it.
When Scoggins arrived in Leggett a few weeks after the March storm, he examined the trunk and realized the lightning had done far more than just scar the surface.
“The tree was busted up so bad,” Scoggins explained, in his thick Mississippi accent. “The lightning must’ve gone right down the center and blew it apart in chunks — like a big wedge had split it in four.”
There were only sections of the trunk that were still workable.
So, Scoggins modified his approach.
“We couldn’t get the bear in the front like planned, so we had to adjust,” he told SFGATE. Over the course of three days, he carved carefully around the tree’s shattered edges, coaxing out the form of a bear on all fours.
In September, he returned to finish the second phase of the project, carving a big-bellied bear seated upright, its profile extending proudly from the tree. Scoggins also finished texturing the upper reaches of what remained of the once mighty redwood.
Isaac Richter, executive vice president of Postal Realty Trust, has spent over two decades working with communities across America, from remote mountain towns to major cities. His company owns and operates thousands of properties leased by the U.S. Postal Service.
“A lot of people are surprised to learn that two-thirds of post offices are privately owned and leased to the government,” he told SFGATE. Of the 32,000 post office locations nationwide, about 25,000 are owned by private entities, Richter explained.
Within weeks of the Leggett Post Office fire, Richter joined the local community Facebook group. “I wanted to make myself available to the community,” he said. He added that he understands the town’s frustration surrounding the rebuilding process. From what he has seen, rebuilding a post office after a disaster takes 18 to 24 months and his company is “working to expedite that.” Richter described the project as “convoluted” and requiring coordination among several agencies.
On Sept. 28, the Leggett Valley School library filled with community members eager to hear about the post office rebuild. Tonie Traina, clerk of the Leggett Valley Unified School District Board, brewed coffee, set out pastries and arranged chairs for the residents who’d gathered to meet Rick Wise, a contractor from Laytonville leading the rebuild. Before the event began, Traina told SFGATE the night of the storm as the “scariest night of my life.”
Wise laid out blueprints across a library table and shared his vision for the new post office, describing it as “a standard building, a small standard building for a post office.” The design would be “generic, similar to what it was,” he said, and clad in fire-resistant Hardie board.
One community member chimed in, suggesting that the structure’s design incorporate features like battens or roof parapets to echo the style of the Leggett Valley Mercantile, the town’s only market, which is located right next door to the former post office. Many feared it too might go up in flames in the March storm. Wise nodded, agreeing to work these elements into the plan if feasible.
For Traina, just like for all the residents of Leggett, the rebuild project is personal. Having to make a 50-mile round trip to Garberville just to send her mail is taking a toll. “My bills are normally late now because driving a 50-mile round trip is just something I don’t have the time and energy (and for others, the money) to do as often as necessary,” she said. “I hope it hasn’t impacted my credit score.”
For now, she said, the beauty of Scoggins’ carving in the tree helps soften the blow. It was “a very generous gift from John Stephenson of the drive-through tree to our community,” she said, adding that she’s “only heard compliments from our community.” Tourists frequently stop to take photos in front of the sculpture, she added.
But a tourist attraction, however beautiful, does not deter her from the overall goal. The chain saw-sculpted tree, Traina said, “will look fabulous in front of the new post office.”
(sfgate.com)
RON PARKER:
A SHORT HISTORY OF EARLY MENDOCINO COUNTY
by Bruce Anderson
Feliz Creek at Hopland is a parched summertime expanse of dry streambed barely discernible as a water course. Only when it comes alive in the winter as it runs off from its headwaters in the west hills into the Russian River can you get some idea of how crucial it once was to the Indians traveling from Clearlake to the Pacific as they walked west up the seam of the Feliz into the hills separating Hopland from the Anderson Valley, pausing at the Feliz headwaters at the western tip of what is now the McNab Ranch before resuming their trek over the ridge and into the Anderson Valley near Yorkville, and from Yorkville over the last hurdle of the Coast Range to the Pacific.
Indians made that annual trek for thousands of years.
How do we know this was the ancient path?
By the spirit rock at the Feliz Creek headwaters, a huge boulder covered with laboriously encrypted symbols carved into it over the millennia, thousands of years of directions, fertility prayers, perhaps statements of gratitude for the easy abundance enjoyed at the edenic meadow the spirit rock sits in at the very end of the very western-most road of the McNab Ranch subdivision.
The Feliz Creek spirit rock stopped functioning as a pre-historic message board about the time of the Gold Rush when the Indians were suddenly ripped out of their ancient homes and began to die in large numbers. But on still nights, a mere five miles from interminable 101, it’s easy to imagine this paradise as the Indians found it — thick with Feliz Creek’s annual migrations of steelhead and salmon, and an unending amplitude of nourishing flora and fauna.
And now, below the spirit rock at Hopland, a garish tourist interlude on Highway 101, an enterprise called Real Goods sells unresourceful rich people the expensive technology they think they need to live like the Indians of the Spirit Rock.
In two hundred years California went from Junipero Serra to California Cuisine and the computer. The ad-sals, as Mendocino County Indians called the white invaders, started slow but were soon everywhere, the first of them arriving in Mendocino County to stay in 1848.
The Indians predicted in their ghost dance prayers of the 1880s and 1920s that the ad-sals would eventually be swallowed up in great cataclysms and they, the true people, the Indians, would resume living the old way they’d lived for millennia before the arrival of the grasping, destructive invaders.
The Spanish missions established in California late in the 18th century were the work of father Serra, a garrulous fanatic who talked constantly about slipping “the gentle yoke of Christ” over the heads of neophytes, as unyoked Indians were called by the Franciscan fathers, all of whom had been born in Spain. The Indians resisted as best they could, killing babies born of rapes by the Spanish soldiers who accompanied the missionaries up and down Spanish California from San Diego to San Rafael and Sonoma.
The saving of Indian souls and the training of their bodies in the organized labor that would make the missions prosper was the goal of the missionary effort. Dangling an irresistible amalgam of regular meals and eternal life, with Spanish soldiers standing by to make sure the Indians stayed with the padres when hospitality hour was over, the Franciscans had their first free labor. The religion the Indians already had, complete with one god and an after life whose rewards were based on one’s earthly behavior, was very similar to the one imposed on them by the padres and their bodyguards.
Men separated from women, men and women separated from their tribes, many of the Indians of California south of what became the Sonoma-Mendocino county line were soon highly trained serfs whose skilled labor made the missions rich. The missionized Indians spoke Spanish, and had quickly become the fabled vaqueros essential to the success of the cattle-dependent land grant rancheros that had been established in the vastnesses surrounding the missions. Indian women were just as essential to the patrician comforts of the land grant estanzas as skilled household workers.
Heavy handed imperialists that they were, Spain, the monks, and the Mexicans who came after Spain and the monks, at least regarded Indians as human beings with souls worth saving; the Yankees saw the Indians as so many sub-human pests, and would wipe them out in the two murderous decades beginning with the Gold Rush.
The first Americanos to arrive in California in force, the gold seekers of ‘49, considered Indians as vermin, Mexicans as greasers, blacks as slaves, Chinese as yellow peril, and each other as snakes, but only Indians were killed recreationally. As a government report put it, “Never before in history has a people been swept away with such terrible swiftness.”
The missions absorbed Indians, Christianized them, Spanish soldiers and Mexican settlers married them, trained them as ranch hands and domestics, and preferred not to murder them so long as they remained docile and productive. Which they didn’t. Early California history is replete with large-scale Indian uprisings and counter-attacks on the missions and the Mexican rancheros and then the Yankee settlers.
Early on, European, Mexican and Yankee visitors would make the inevitable naked savage observation and then, in the same paragraph, marvel at how well the Indians seemed to do in all sorts of weather, how finely made and attractive Indian basketry was, how beautifully functional the cold weather clothing was. But the civilized men never took the next logical step in recognizing the genius of a people so perfectly at home in the abundance of the world as they found it that they didn’t need anything the new world brought with it. One of the more thoughtful European observers did, however, come close to perceiving the root of Indian resistance. “You often hear of civilized men going native and never wanting to return to their former lives, but the desire among primitive people for civilization is non-existent.”
Once the Indians south of Mendocino County were thoroughly missionized — or dead — and the padres were confident that these “neophytes” believed that the mission life was superior to life back home with the tribe, the Christianized Indians would be sent out into the outback to bring in their wild brothers and sisters as replacement labor for Indian labor lost to white man disease. By the time Mexico realized that the mission formula — armed proselytization — had created a string of highly prosperous outposts from San Diego to San Rafael and Sonoma, Mexico was inspired to declare independence and the missions privatized.
That was it for the missions, a mere fifty years. California would belong to independent Mexico until the Gold Rush, less than thirty years after the last mission was privatized.
History was picking up speed.
The first mission at San Diego was established in 1769.
Spain and the Franciscan monks ruled California from their headquarters in Mexico City until Mexico declared independence from Spain in 1821.
Mexico loosely presided over California from 1821 until 1850.
In 1834, some eight million more acres of California had become the vast ranches of roughly 800 grantees, reaching as far north as Hopland. A typical land grant was ten square miles. These economically independent, self-sustaining ranchos were empires unto themselves. They grazed thousands of cattle, sheep and horses, and employed hundreds of missionized, Spanish-speaking Indians who made them as prosperous as fairy tale kingdoms.
The Gold Rush began in 1848, and California was a state by 1850 with uncharted Mendocino among its founding counties.
By the time of the Gold Rush, with Mexico exerting what government it could over a Yankee-dominated, restive California, Mexican land grants had been established everywhere in the state as far north as what is now Mendocino County.
There were two undeveloped land grants in the Ukiah Valley, but only the one based in Hopland — Feliz — was a working ranchero.
Two Mexican grandees were given land in the Ukiah valley but they never established ranches on it. Hopland was as close as the outside world got to Mendocino County before 1850, apart from slave taking expeditions into the Ukiah and Anderson valleys by Spaniards, then Mexicans, then Yankees, which the Spanish soldiers, acting for the missions, had mounted in the late 1700s.
The Gold Rush finished the Indians. The world rushed in so fast that the Indians of Northern California were engulfed, the Mendocino County Indians with them. By 1850, a 150-ton steamer, the Jack Hays, was hauling gold prospectors from San Francisco up the Sacramento River to Red Bluff, and Red Bluff was just over the Mayacama Mountains from what was inland Mendocino County in the new state of California.
While all the Spanish missionizing and Mexican land granting had gone on in the greater Bay Area, Mendocino County slept on, ancient ways unmodified by the missions, and only occasionally affected by missionized Indians. The only reason Spaniards and then Mexicans had come north to Mendocino before the Gold Rush was to capture Indians for slave labor either on the missions or the rancheros spread around the great bay.
But when Redick McKee made his long, post-Gold Rush slog from Sonoma to Humboldt Bay in 1851 — nine days from Laytonville to Fortuna alone — to convince the inland Indians to assemble themselves in area reservations, the Indians listened to “the little white father’s” pitch then rejected it. As McKee himself put it, “They had seen a few white men from time to time, and the encounters had impressed them with a strong desire to see no more, except with the advantage of manifest superiority on their own part.”
McKee was the first Indian agent appointed for Northwestern California. (In an irony of local history it was a man named McKee who played a huge role in the back-to-the-land movement of the 1960s and 70s. The latter-day McKee sold thousands of acres of logged-over Mendocino and Humboldt county land to “hippies” on very easy terms.)
The first McKee’s instructions were to protect Indians by establishing reservations from Lake County north to the Klamath and Trinity rivers because Indians, wherever white miners and homesteaders had appeared, were being murdered in very large numbers. McKee’s mission failed, and the Indians were finished as coherent tribal entities in another decade.
Little White Father McKee, incidentally, on his slog northwest from Clearlake, stopped by the cabin of the Ukiah Valley’s first settler, George Parker Armstrong. A member of the McKee expedition, George Gibbs, would write, “We found a small building of logs, or rather poles filled in with clay, and thatched with tule. Its furniture was somewhat incongruous; for upon the earthen floor and beside a bull’s hide partition, stood huge china jars, camphor trunks, and lacquered ware in abundance, the relics of some vessel that had been wrecked on the coast during last spring.”
George Parker Armstrong! Mendoland’s first aesthete!
North of the Feliz land grant estate based at Sanel, as Hopland was then known, the Indians lived as they had for ages, mostly untouched but fully aware, and already wary, of the white civilization metastasizing south of them. The Northcoast Indians weren’t “living naked in a state of innocence and ignorance,” as an early visitor to Northern California put it; they were merely unaware of the murderous imperialism about to overwhelm them, a people without guile, defenseless against people who were all guile.
No one among the early ad-sals admired the Indians as they found them — perfectly, ingeniously adapted to their world. The newcomers simply wanted what they saw as virgin land for their cattle, horses, hogs, and homesteads; the Indians were in the way. Literally. Their traditional food sources immediately destroyed and disrupted by the settlers’ cattle and horses, the Indians tried to live on as best they could, begging or stealing from the homesteaders, but there was barely enough food for the settlers let alone whole colonies of disoriented brown people, and the homesteaders, struggling for survival themselves, murdered their desperate neighbors as simply one more obstacle to their success in the new land.
The Yorkville Indians tattooed their young women’s chins because the Indians said the tattoos repulsed Catholic slave traders. Descendants of pioneer Anderson Valley families nevertheless wrote that the Spaniards were benign explorers who only wanted to extend European civilization into southern Mendocino, hence dewy-eyed statements like this one: “The visits of these Bueno Hombres with their religion, not greatly unlike that of the Indians, had a lasting impression on the Ma-cum-maks as they lived side by side with their kindly Spanish settlers.”
Also in the first quarter of the 19th century, parties of trappers, Russians with their Aleut-Pomo bodyguards, and French, English and American trappers and mountain men passed through even the remotest areas of inland Mendocino, some of them with their Indian wives and children in contingents of a hundred or so, the children suspended from horses and mules in the woven willow traveling cages that were the car seats of the time. And long before these ghostly parties passed through Sonoma and Mendocino counties, Sir Francis Drake had put in at Marin County where he marveled that a single Indian could easily carry burdens it took two or three of his sailors to lift, let alone move.
By 1840 the Russians had exhausted the sea otters that their outpost at Fort Ross depended on for cash flow and had sold Fort Ross and much of Bodega to John Sutter, the freebooting Swiss who, you might say, was California’s first credit card entrepreneur, parlaying his mere signature with Honolulu merchants into an astounding 48,000-acre agricultural community just north of today’s Sacramento that Sutter called New Helvetia. Sutter also bought and sold Indians, as did most of the early, pre-Gold Rush settlers the Mexican government gave land and citizenship to.
When the Russians sold out to Sutter and sailed out of Fort Ross just before the Gold Rush, Sutter dismantled the settlement, hauling everything he could use over to his Sacramento estates, first by sea down the coast to San Francisco Bay then up the Sacramento River to New Helvetia and Sutter’s experimental farm and retreat, the Hock Farm on the Feather River not far from the Sutter Buttes you see to the east off 1-5. General Vallejo gave Sutter permission to drive the Russians’ surplus cattle and sheep through Sonoma east on into the Sacramento Valley. Sutter outfitted his small army of the biggest Indians he could find in the uniforms of Czarist Russia. They were said to be an impressive sight galloping through the Sacramento Valley and, as a fighting force, greatly intimidated the under-manned Mexican garrisons of the Bay Area.
Sutter had fully absorbed the successful formulas for prosperous colonization he’d seen at frontier forts east of the Rockies, which also ran on Indian serfs, and he’d seen the Russians’ thriving militarized outposts at Bodega and Fort Ross, all of which were also dependent on Indian labor recompensed by free room and board, chits for purchases at the company store, and the coarse cotton Mexican manta shirts the Indians prized. Some Indians liked these arrangements, most didn’t.
There were constant Indian rebellions throughout the mission and Mexican occupations, all of them foiled by the genius of General Vallejo who’d made the 6’7” Solano, chief of all the tribes of the North Bay, his enforcer. The giant, and giantly gifted, Solano learned to speak a perfect Spanish and English superior to many Spanish and English-speakers. Vallejo and Solano negotiated with dissident tribes when they could, ruthlessly suppressed those tribes with whom there was no negotiating.
By the time of the Gold Rush, enormous and enormously prosperous land grant cattle and sheep ranches checkered the state all the way north to Rancho Feliz at Hopland. The politically nimble General Vallejo served as regional administrator of the vast missionized land grant areas between San Francisco and Mendocino and Lake counties. He called his domain the Northern Frontier.
Indian women married into Spanish and Mexican families, and missionized Indian-Mexican men married unmissionized Indian women, and the new European-American ways of living radiated outward into southern Mendocino, mostly from the land grant Rancho Feliz in the present-day Hopland valley.
Rancho Feliz Indians had, since the founding of the vast rancho at Hopland, been related to Mendocino County Indian families in the coastal areas of the county. Ad-sal surnames like Azbill and Lincoln became prevalent in eastern Mendocino County while Indians descended from the Spanish, then the Mexican periods of California, were named Cruz and Feliz and Lopez and Oropeza and Ortiz, families who still thrive in contemporary Mendocino County.
Steve Knight was one of the founders of the California Indian Brotherhood whose first meeting was convened in Ukiah in the winter of 1926. His was among the most articulate voices in summarizing the transition from Mexican to American rule as it affected Mendocino County Indians:
“Mexican people built no missions up here, so the Indians were allowed to live pretty much as they had been before and after the Mexicans came, and the Indians were given certain areas of land to use to grow things for themselves. They built brush fences around them, had their homes there, planted gardens, had corn and everything they needed to eat on these places. When the Americans superseded the Mexicans the Indians were aware of the change — they seem to have known there was a change — they didn’t resent the Americans coming in where there was just a few came in, but finally then the miners came in by the hundreds and by the thousands, then trouble arose between the Indians and the whites. Then the American government sent agents among the Indians to make treaties with them in order to get the Indians on reservations where they might be protected, but mostly to forestall Indian uprisings. These agents came out, made treaties with the Indians, promising them certain reservations. The Indians signed these treaties in good faith. They thought these treaties were final when they signed their name to them — they did not know it had to have the approval of the Senate of the United States, so the Indians were expecting to be moved onto the new reservations, but these new promised reservations were being filled up by white settlers. Then those Indians realized that they had been fooled. But the old people up to very recent times (the 1920s) believed that the government would make some other settlement with them. These treaties were pigeon-holed in the archives of the United States Senate for 50 years. No one ever saw them until after the 50 year term had expired. Someone then dug them up and made a few copies of some of the treaties. When these old Indians were told about the treaties having been recovered from the archives they became very much interested and told the younger Indians about how these treaties were made, by whom signed.”
In January of 1848, before his Indian, Hawaiian and Mormon workers deserted him for the gold fields, and before the mobs of gold seekers overran Sutter’s thriving estates, Sutter’s California was estimated to be home to 7,500 Spanish Californians; 6,500 foreigners; 3-4,000 former mission Indians living near towns or on ranchos. “Wild” Indians were not counted in this rough census; no one had any idea how many of them there were in the great unknown between Sonoma and the Oregon territory.
By 1850, the criminal drifters who had not struck it rich in the gold fields began wandering through Mendocino County’s untouched magnitudes, much of it perfect country for the raising of sheep and cattle. Mendocino County’s vast solitude surprised these first ad-sals; the rest of the state was already mostly claimed. The white pioneers, as they would be romanticized, couldn’t believe their good fortune, and they weren’t about to share it with the people who’d lived there for 12,000 years or more.
The first permanent white residents of the remote mountains and canyons of the Northcoast were killers and outlaws, many of them on the run from the settled areas of the country. The law was a late arrival to Northern California and never has fully prevailed.
As the relentless sons of Missouri staked out Mendocino County’s myriad, well-watered little valleys, they shot Indian men where they found them, helped themselves to Indian women, sold Indian children into slavery, rez-ed the Indians they hadn’t managed to kill, indentured them, and segregated them for the next one hundred years.
Ukiah’s schools were only integrated in 1924. Aggressively opposed by a majority of white residents; the Ukiah schools were finally pried open by court order in 1923 with Steve Knight leading the charge. The rest of the town remained segregated up through the 1950s with a nastiness as mean and low-down as the segregated American South. Indian women could not get their hair done in the town’s beauty parlors, Indians were not allowed to try on clothes, let alone purchase them, in the shops of the county seat, Indians could eat only in one Chinese-owned restaurant, and Indians were allowed in one Indian-only section of the Ukiah Theater. Two decorated Indian veterans of World War Two were denied breakfast at the Blue Bird Cafe when they got off a northbound Greyhound. Ukiah wouldn’t get all the way color blind until deep into the 1960s.
CATCH OF THE DAY, Sunday, November 3, 2024
HECTOR DIAZ, 55, Oroville/Fort Bragg. Disorderly conduct-alcohol.
NATHAN DUBRIEL, 26, Lincoln/Ukiah. DUI-alcohol&drugs.
BELINDA HALS, 57, Fort Bragg. Domestic abuse, elder abuse resulting in great bodily harm or death.
SCOTT HAYWARD, 65, Redwood Valley. Assault, resisting.
OSCAR MARTINZ-MARTINEZ, 21, Covelo. DUI.
ERNESTO MENDOZA, 31, Potter Valley. Domestic battery.
ROBERT MORENO, 44, Ukiah. Domestic violence court order violation, paraphernalia.
EVAN NELSON, 26, Ukiah. Domestic violence court order violation.
MICHAEL OWEN, 36, Ukiah. DUI, taking vehicle without owner’s consent, resisting.
JOHNNY SHIELDS, 55, Ukiah. Probation revocation.
MARVIN DENSON:
The safety net used during the construction of the Golden Gate Bridge. While the net did save the lives of 19 men who became known as the “Halfway-to-Hell Club,” eleven men did die during construction.
The first fatality was Kermit Moore on October 21, 1936. Then, on February 17, sadly ten men – O.A. Anderson, Chris Andersen, William Bass, Orrill Desper, Fred Dümmatzen, Terence Hallinan, Eldridge Hillen, Charles Lindros, Jack Norman, and Louis Russell – lost their lives when a section of scaffold fell through the safety net. The men are honored on a plaque located at the south side entrance to the west sidewalk.
MARIN COUNTY CONFIDENTIAL
There's no shortage of news but only limited space in one article. Today’s three items:
Part I. Marin City's recent wins and its ongoing support for District 2 candidate Heather Sridharan despite lack of coverage from the Marin Independent-Journal;
Part II. Previously undisclosed active support from the Marin chapter of Democratic Socialists of America for former AIPAC director Yoav Schlesinger;
Part III. A stunning email from Fairfield Mayor Cat Moy to Novato Mayor Mark Milberg, retrieved from a recent public records act.…
https://marincountyconfidential.substack.com/p/why-was-pro-palestine-marin-dsa-flyering
MAGA MAN
Editor:
How refreshing to read Bret Stephens’ Oct. 24 column a recent PD issue: ‘If Trump Wins, What Will Liberals Blame?’ Having already stated that he would vote for Kamala Harris, Stephens lists all the reasons why so many independents and disaffected Republicans like me will vote for Donald Trump: liberals’ condescension, name-calling, gaslighting, high-handedness, politics of Pollyanna and selective fidelity to traditional norms (the desire to pack the court, end the filibuster, do away with the Electoral College, the politics of identity, etc.). He also cited another reason — saying that they’ll govern from the middle and then governing from the left as both Barack Obama and Joe Biden did. In 2020, I bought that lie and voted for myself rather than cast a vote for Trump or Biden. Never again. So, as much as I loathe Trump, the Democrats have so completely alienated me that I’ll vote for Trump this time.
Denny Olmsted
Napa
MY ADVICE TO KAMALA
Keep calm-ala
And carry on-ala.
You’re doing just fine-ala.
— Jim Luther
DEMOCRATS, PARTY OF LONG NOSES
by Tommy Wayne Kramer
It’s hard work being a Democrat these days. If it isn’t the lies and deceptions, it’s the dishonesty and denials.
And that’s just the stuff they tell their own party members. Sadly, the average Democrat person pretends not to notice and never demands an apology or explanation no matter what the bosses tell them.
Such as: Inflation hasn’t gone up, it’s that the other guys who are holding the graph upside down. And our borders weren’t technically breached because we had those millions of guests from Haiti flown in. They never even saw a border.
Yes, Kamala was Border Czar, but we meant the border between Ohio and Indiana. And crime rates fell until the FBI was told to release the real figures, just in time for news outlets to ignore them.
Tomorrow continues with more stories and lies the poor old Democrat is required to believe. It’s cubic yards of bullpoop the party members are forced to consume, with a smile. Lies are then amplified by our friends at CNN and MSNBC and CBS, the New York Times, ABC, NBC, and a few score other media outlets.
The stories are later revealed to be lies, but as a proud Democrat you’re not allowed to care, or even notice.
NOTE: We pause to point out that Donald Trump tells lies of industrial strength, grandiose lies with alarming gusto. He is an army of lies, but here’s the difference: when he speaks, a wolfpack of journalists pounces, “fact checks” them, and says he’s lying before he finishes his sentence.
An hour later, comedians wear each other out with jokes about Trump’s latest lies, some of which he actually said. Tomorrow’s editorial pages will expound on The Many Lies of Trump in solemn, somber gravity, and remind us that he stole a bunch of democracy stuff last term, and now wants to take your gold fillings and next born child.
Meanwhile, back at White House press briefings, the lies grew more and more gaudy and implausible. The “wolfpack” of journalists melts back into a polite, loyal harem: Joe Biden is mentally alert they all said, sharp as a tack they all said, smartest guy in the room, full of vim, vigor, vinegar and maybe vodka and valium. Joe runs daily marathons, and does Sunday crossword puzzles in 30 seconds flat.
(But no fair asking him to count backwards from 10.)
Loyal Democrats were required to believe these and other fabrications. And they did. All of them.
Why? Because media outlets at CNN, LA Times, the Press-Democrat and Politico told them to. Videos of a befuddled, helpless Joe Biden were fake they said, disinformation and propaganda. (“OK,” sighed old line Democrats.)
Until The Debate.
That’s when everyone had to pretend they hadn’t lied or been lied to. Accustomed to such dishonesty, and worse, Democrats never expect an apology or explanation from politicians and “journalists” who spread the lies. To average Dems it’s kinda like “Been Wrong So Long it Looks Like Right to Me.”
Previously they’d been ordered to insist grown men share public bathrooms with little girls, and they did. Men competing in girl’s sports? A shrug of the shoulders. Young boys having private parts maimed via surgery and taking drugs to become a girl (and vice-versa)? We guess so. Maybe.
For more than a year party leaders crowed that Trump did very bad Russian Collusion things. Very bad. Regular Dems waited and waited for Adam Schiff to deliver the very bad (good!!) news, the smoking gun, the knockout punch, the incontrovertible proof deemed true at MSNBC, CBS, etc. And they cheered! Until it all turned into another big lie.
Next? Very true and honest news that more than 5000 genders exist (and twice that many pronouns, or else zero) and that gender itself is assigned at birth. Weeks of rioting and burning down cities is acceptable if conducted in a “mostly peaceful” manner. Defacing statues and tearing down monuments is cool, or at least not criticized.
Also from Democrat leaders: Free speech is permissible for leftists but not conservatives, and some lives matter but others don’t.
Then Joe (“Sharp as a Tack”) Biden yelled that only one thing was worse than terrorists exploding nuclear bombs in America: temperatures rising 1.5 degrees Celsius in 20 years. Dems swapped gas stoves and Craftsman lawn mowers for solar and goats. Very smart much intelligent doing thing of. Earth.
The FBI, CIA, NY Times and CNN privately decided Hunter’s laptop was a bunch of lies, even the child pornography stuff and the payoffs from Ukrainian Oil Companies. Just in time for the 2020 election they hid it so it wouldn’t distract voters from breaking news on Stormy Daniels and the Steele Dossier which, by the way, never existed.
Now comes Our Big Festival of Lies. Now comes Election Season in which all Democrats running for office pretend to be Republicans. Suddenly Democrats are foursquare behind secure borders, have no interest in de-funding the police, love guns and the Second Amendment. Homeless? I don’t see no stinking homeless.
Every four years they hang up American flags to pretend they’re patriotic.
Also suddenly: Not a peep about free transgender surgery services and nothing about forcing plumbers and construction workers to pay off student loan debt for graduating lawyers and social workers. Reparations are off the table.
Unless Democrats win.
Tom Hine sends dispatches from North Carolina but will soon return to the land of harmony, community and other pleasant lies. TWK’s friend emailed an old photo of a lovely babe draped over Donald Trump’s piano, so he sent back an old photo of Kamala draped over Willie Brown’s organ.
LEAD STORIES, MONDAY'S NYT
Harris and Trump Battle to the Wire in Swing States, Times/Siena Polls Find
A Vivid Trump-Harris Contrast in the Campaign’s Grueling Final Days
On Telegram, a Violent Preview of What May Unfold on Election Day and After
Fleeing Northern Gaza Risked His Life. Staying Destroyed His Family
Quincy Jones, Giant of American Music, Dies at 91
THE MACHINE, this globalised, digitised, commercialised system of uniformity and control, has been built to reorder the world into a more rational, profitable and technological shape. And the way it's reordering us is causing more and more discomfort.
Would we have the virulent culture war we have today? Or the increasingly decadent sexual culture if the algorithm wasn't stoking it? No, we wouldn't. Because it's profitable. Would we be so isolated and angry without smartphones? Would we have forgotten in so short a time how to actually communicate? In cafes and in schools and even in homes? To be together as people?
How many times have you sat in a cafe and seen everybody on their phone? No conversation at all. I see it all the time. It's astonishing. I think that this one technology, this little black mirror in your pocket, is probably the most culturally and spiritually destructive technology in history.
And it's barely got started yet. The AIs are really only just firing up. Within the next few years, artificial intelligence will be a force that completely destroys our understanding of reality. An AI only needs to hear three seconds of your voice to make a perfect imitation of it. And that's just now. Give it another five years and see where it takes us.
Another interesting fact about our friends in Silicon Valley, by the way, half of them send their children to Steiner schools and they do not let them have screens. They do not let them have screens. No tablets, no smartphones. They know what these things do. Good enough for your kids, but not theirs.
— Paul Kingsnorth
VOTING EXPERTS FEAR POST-ELECTION CHAOS BUT TOUT RESILIENCE OF ELECTORAL SYSTEM
Trump is expected to declare victory regardless of the results and blame the system if he loses.
by Mike Ludwig
After months of fending off last minute challenges to electoral procedures and voter eligibility in key swing states filed by an array of right-wing forces, voting rights groups say the election system remains resilient ahead of Election Day as people vote early in record numbers. Experts say they’re confident in the guardrails put in place to prevent the losing presidential candidate from overthrowing the results, as former President Donald Trump attempted to do in disastrous fashion after losing in 2020.
However, the Electoral Count Reform Act of 2022 and other protections for election certification established since the Trump-fueled uproar over the last presidential vote can’t prevent the losing candidate from filing frivolous lawsuits against the 2024 results, or angry supporters from swarm voting precincts targeted by online conspiracy theorists. Election watchdogs are warning about “credible” threats of violence and disruption in the potentially stormy period of time after voting ends on November 5 and before the results are tallied and reported on cable news.
David Becker, executive director of the Center for Election Innovation and Research, said voters should not expect final results by midnight on November 5. Ballots in the U.S. cover a range of races and initiatives that take time to process, and new laws in Wisconsin and other swing states prohibit the counting of mail-in ballots until Election Day, which could further delay the process.
On election night in 2020, Rudy Giuliani reportedly urged Trump to preemptively declare victory while votes were still being counted. A White House aide told Congress that Giuliani was drunk at the time, a claim the former attorney denied in social media posts that were later deleted.
“I don’t think it’s out of the question that the losing candidate will try to make a different impression and will try desperately to take power; that will fail, but could escalate to violence,” Becker said during a press conference on Wednesday.
Becker and other experts expect Trump to declare victory regardless of what is reported by the media and election officials, just as he did in 2020. Disinformation targeting voters heading to the polls is already rampant online, and the vast “election denial” movement inspired by Trump has only become better funded and more organized since the former president and his supporters unleashed deadly violence at the Capitol on January 6, 2021.
Despite polls showing an extremely tight presidential race, Becker said Trump and his acolytes are broadcasting to supporters that victory is inevitable, setting the stage for another wave of anger and denial if Vice President Kamala Harris wins the election. With attacks derided as racist and misogynist, Trump has consistently painted Harris as “low IQ” and incompetent while leaning on baseless conspiracy theories about voter fraud to suggest that she cannot win a fair election.
“If [Trump] loses, or perceives that he is losing, you can imagine the shock that will be felt by his supporters, and how that will be leveraged by grifters to anger them and incite them to violence — and more importantly, incite them to donate,” Becker said, referring to election denial groups that fundraise off of baseless conspiracy theories.
Trump supporters have already been blamed for isolated incidents of violence during the early voting period, including a 18-year-old man who was arrested on Tuesday after threatening two elderly Harris supporters with a machete outside of an early polling place near Jacksonville, Florida. However, voting rights groups caution that record numbers of people are voting early, and the process is otherwise going smoothly.
“Most election voting related violence is very isolated and episodic,” Becker said.
After years of litigation over racial gerrymandering and other voter suppression efforts by the GOP, Democrats and leftist voters may also be troubled if election results appear tainted by voter suppression or reports of partisan intimidation at the polls.
Damon Hewitt, president of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, said voting rights have eroded over the past decade (especially in the South) under a conservative Supreme Court that greenlit racial gerrymandering and gutted the Voting Rights Act.
“We are facing a unique set of cumulative impacts,” Hewitt said on Wednesday.
For months now, Republicans and a vast array of right-wing groups have filed dozens of lawsuits against election procedures, as well as complaints with election boards challenging thousands of voter registrations in crucial swing states, often putting access to the ballot for legitimate voters in the crosshairs.
Most challenges were thrown out by judges and election boards but created mountains of paperwork ahead of the election and put individual citizens at risk of losing their right to vote. However, the conservative justices on the Supreme Court allowed a purge of 1,600 voters from the rolls in Virginia one week before the vote. Under state law, the targeted voters can reregister at the polls on Election Day.
Republicans say they want to ensure election “integrity,” but voting rights groups say their rhetoric is all part of a broader strategy to cast doubt on any election results that do not go their way.
“We are seeing litigation designed to set the stage for claims that the election was stolen,” Becker said.
Reflecting the Trump campaign’s racist fearmongering about immigrants, right-wing groups and activists are particularly focused on the idea that noncitizen immigrants are voting for president in large numbers, when in fact noncitizen voting in federal elections is illegal and extremely rare.
In North Carolina, the leader of a pro-Trump “election integrity” group instructed volunteers reviewing voter registrations to flag “Hispanic-sounding last names” as suspicious. The group is part of a larger network led by Cleta Mitchell, the GOP attorney who was on the phone in 2020 when Trump infamously asked Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find” 11,000 votes and reverse Biden’s victory in the state.
Amir Badat is a voting rights attorney at the Legal Defense Fund who, like Becker, frequently engages with election officials in multiple states. Badat said dozens of the lawsuits filed by Republican politicians and Trump-aligned groups over allegedly bloated voter rolls and noncitizen registrants were mostly frivolous and dismissed by the courts. However, such lawfare is designed to conjure the false narrative that large numbers of ineligible people are voting, providing fodder for further challenges after Election Day.
“I share the same fear that these narratives and the flurry of frivolous litigation will also embolden people to engage in violent acts,” Badat told Truthout in an interview.
However, pro-democracy groups say that the election system and the officials running it remain resilient despite right-wing efforts to gum up the works. Susannah Goodman, director of election security at the nonpartisan watchdog group Common Cause, said election administrators across the country have been preparing for months and working with federal law enforcement to identify potential threats from election deniers and other extremists.
“The level of preparedness and resilience among our election officials is terrific,” Goodman told reporters on Tuesday.
Part of that preparation on the part of election officials includes beefing up security at the election offices. Next week, snipers will be posted on the roof as votes are counted at the tabulation center in Arizona’s Maricopa County, where outrage and disbelief over Trump’s 2020 loss in the state created a hotbed of conspiracy theories and violent threats.
Despite the chaos sown by Trump and his followers in 2020, Becker said hundreds of thousands of election workers and volunteers successfully managed the highest voter turnout in U.S. history. That record is expected to be broken again this year, with more than half of votes cast during early voting periods.
“[Election workers] have been threatened and abused and harassed for over four years now, not because they did a bad job, but because they did an outstanding job” in 2020, Becker said. “They are exhausted, but yet they are still getting the job done.”
Becker remains confident the 2024 election will be properly conducted and tallied, even if poll worker face threats once again during the “perilous” period of time after polls close and before results are announced on TV. Attempts to undermine the vote counting process, which could be dragged out by lawsuits and audits, are “likely to happen or very possible,” Becker said.
“That doesn’t mean election officials won’t see vile things attempted, but these efforts are going to fail, and I can say that with absolute certainty,” Becker said.
Becker says Trump’s choice of words after Election Day will be telling. A candidate who is clearly winning has every incentive to say the process is legitimate; only a candidate who thinks he is losing would claim that an election is rife with fraud.
“Overall, I am optimistic about where we are headed at the end of all this, but it might be a trial by fire in the meantime,” Becker said.
(Truthout.org)
THE LAST LINOTYPE NEWSPAPER: OPERATING THE SAGUACHE CRESCENT
by Jon McMichael
In southern Colorado, Dean Coombs operates the last linotype newspaper, fighting with and fixing up the the century old typesetting machine everyday in order to put out his family's paper week after week and year after year.
The linotype is/was a hot lead typesetting machine that creates lines of type that are then stacked and properly arranged in order to form a sort of “metal stamp” which is then used to print a newspaper.
The linotype was invented in the late 1800s and quickly started seeing widespread usage among newspaper companies. The machine stayed situated as a prominent form of typesetting in the industry through the 1970's, before being supplanted by newer technology.
Now, linotype newspapers are gone in the United States, fully extinct except for the Saguache Crescent, a small publication in Southern Colorado that's operated by one man.
“Well,” commented Dean Coombs, owner and operator of the Crescent, “there's an emotional connection, it's a family business, I don't really like change, so you can see why the crescent has not changed.”
Dean runs the Crescent, working each day to keep his more-than-100-year-old machine operational so that he can keep publishing his weekly newspaper.
It's a daily struggle that comes with its own emotional journey.
“A 100-year-old linotype has problems. And when that problem occurs, you are dead in the water. You are done,” he explained, “so, you have to go from there to not utter despair but some real concern, and then you fix it and the clouds open up and sun shines, that's a real thing.”
It's been described as a grind and Dean is inclined most people would think of it as a drudge but he doesn't think of it that way.
“It would be hard for almost anybody else because it takes so much of your time. It just doesn't leave leftovers for your hobbies and everyone has something else they want to do besides work.”
The Crescent was purchased by Dean's grandparents in 1917; from that point forward they worked the paper, then his parents worked the paper, and now he works the paper.
He recalls never having missed an issue in the more than 40 years he's been publishing, even when his father passed in 1978, the family still put the paper out on time.
“The paper has to come out,” he commented, “it's just a requirement.”
It's an essential function of Saguache, according to Bill Hazard, a man whose family has lived in the town of about 500 since the late 1800s.
“A small town doesn't have a lot but it has the newspaper,” he commented, “there's a lot of people here that still don't have computers, still don't have internet, the only way they know something is happening or know something is going on is through the Crescent.”
Dean looks at the paper as an obligation but also it's just simply what he does, “You've got to be doing something,” he comments.
According to Dean, the old technology doesn't freak him out and he doesn't feel the need to change or upgrade; the machine still does what he needs it to do.
“The people's need for change, which is just natural [and] normal, I just don't have that really,” stated Dean, “so, I just go put out the next newspaper.”
The paper is largely filled with news on events, legal publications, obituaries, opinion pieces and the like, and whatever else folks bring into his business.
“Pretty much whatever people want in the paper,” he commented.
He explains that he relies on folks bringing him stories, his main job is the typing, printing, and upkeep portion of the Saguache Crescent.
Dean doesn't have kids and doesn't currently have any plans to bring on additional help or train up a successor; when we asked if someone will take over the Crescent once he finally retires, which he doesn't expect to happen any time soon, he said that he wouldn't recommend it.
“It's just all-consuming, nobody really wants to do that,” he commented, “well, a few people do; I don't feel like I'm all-consumed with it, but that's how I can do it.”
If you're looking to learn more about the Saguache Crescent, or maybe check it out for yourself, give them a call at 719-655-2620.
(Koaa.com)
OVER-ORGANIZATION
by Aldous Huxley (1958)
The shortest and broadest road to the nightmare of Brave New World leads, as I have pointed out, through over-population and the accelerating increase of human numbers—twenty-eight hundred millions today, fifty-five hundred millions by the turn of the century, with most of humanity facing the choice between anarchy and totalitarian control. But the increasing pressure of numbers upon available resources is not the only force propelling us in the direction of totalitarianism. This blind biological enemy of freedom is allied with immensely powerful forces generated by the very advances in technology of which we are most proud. Justifiably proud, it may be added; for these advances are the fruits of genius and persistent hard work, of logic, imagination and self-denial—in a word, of moral and intellectual virtues for which one can feel nothing but admiration.
But the Nature of Things is such that nobody in this world ever gets anything for nothing. These amazing and admirable advances have had to be paid for. Indeed, like last year’s washing machine, they are still being paid for — and each installment is higher than the last. Many historians, many sociologists and psychologists have written at length, and with a deep concern, about the price that Western man has had to pay and will go on paying for technological progress. They point out, for example, that democracy can hardly be expected to flourish in societies where political and economic power is being progressively concentrated and centralized. But the progress of technology has led and is still leading to just such a concentration and centralization of power. As the machinery of mass production is made more efficient it tends to become more complex and more expensive — and so less available to the enterpriser of limited means. Moreover, mass production cannot work without mass distribution; but mass distribution raises problems which only the largest producers can satisfactorily solve. In a world of mass production and mass distribution the Little Man, with his inadequate stock of working capital, is at a grave disadvantage. In competition with the Big Man, he loses his money and finally his very existence as an independent producer; the Big Man has gobbled him up. As the Little Men disappear, more and more economic power comes to be wielded by fewer and fewer people.
Under a dictatorship the Big Business, made possible by advancing technology and the consequent ruin of Little Business, is controlled by the State — that is to say, by a small group of party leaders and the soldiers, policemen and civil servants who carry out their orders. In a capitalist democracy, such as the United States, it is controlled by what Professor C. Wright Mills has called the Power Elite. This Power Elite directly employs several millions of the country’s working force in its factories, offices and stores, controls many millions more by lending them the money to buy its products, and, through its ownership of the media of mass communication, influences the thoughts, the feelings and the actions of virtually everybody.
To parody the words of Winston Churchill, never have so many been manipulated so much by so few. We are far indeed from Jefferson’s ideal of a genuinely free society composed of a hierarchy of self-governing units — “the elementary republics of the wards, the county republics, the State republics and the Republic of the Union, forming a gradation of authorities.”
We see, then, that modern technology has led to the concentration of economic and political power, and to the development of a society controlled (ruthlessly in the totalitarian states, politely and inconspicuously in the democracies) by Big Business and Big Government. But societies are composed of individuals and are good only insofar as they help individuals to realize their potentialities and to lead a happy and creative life. How have individuals been affected by the technological advances of recent years? Here is the answer to this question given by a philosopher-psychiatrist, Dr. Erich Fromm:
Our contemporary Western society, in spite of its material, intellectual and political progress, is increasingly less conducive to mental health, and tends to undermine the inner security, happiness, reason and the capacity for love in the individual; it tends to turn him into an automaton who pays for his human failure with increasing mental sickness, and with despair hidden under a frantic drive for work and so-called pleasure.
Our “increasing mental sickness” may find expression in neurotic symptoms. These symptoms are conspicuous and extremely distressing. But “let us beware,” says Dr. Fromm, “of defining mental hygiene as the prevention of symptoms. Symptoms as such are not our enemy, but our friend; where there are symptoms there is conflict, and conflict always indicates that the forces of life which strive for integration and happiness are still fighting.” The really hopeless victims of mental illness are to be found among those who appear to be most normal. “Many of them are normal because they are so well adjusted to our mode of existence, because their human voice has been silenced so early in their lives, that they do not even struggle or suffer or develop symptoms as the neurotic does.” They are normal not in what may be called the absolute sense of the word; they are normal only in relation to a profoundly abnormal society. Their perfect adjustment to that abnormal society is a measure of their mental sickness. These millions of abnormally normal people, living without fuss in a society to which, if they were fully human beings, they ought not to be adjusted, still cherish “the illusion of individuality,” but in fact they have been to a great extent deindividualized. Their conformity is developing into something like uniformity. But:
… uniformity and freedom are incompatible. Uniformity and mental health are incompatible too. Man is not made to be an automaton, and if he becomes one, the basis for mental health is destroyed.
In the course of evolution nature has gone to endless trouble to see that every individual is unlike every other individual. We reproduce our kind by bringing the father’s genes into contact with the mother’s. These hereditary factors may be combined in an almost infinite number of ways. Physically and mentally, each one of us is unique. Any culture which, in the interests of efficiency or in the name of some political or religious dogma, seeks to standardize the human individual, commits an outrage against man’s biological nature.
Science may be defined as the reduction of multiplicity to unity. It seeks to explain the endlessly diverse phenomena of nature by ignoring the uniqueness of particular events, concentrating on what they have in common and finally abstracting some kind of “law,” in terms of which they make sense and can be effectively dealt with. For examples, apples fall from the tree and the moon moves across the sky. People had been observing these facts from time immemorial. With Gertrude Stein they were convinced that an apple is an apple is an apple, whereas the moon is the moon is the moon. It remained for Isaac Newton to perceive what these very dissimilar phenomena had in common, and to formulate a theory of gravitation in terms of which certain aspects of the behavior of apples, of the heavenly bodies and indeed of everything else in the physical universe could be explained and dealt with in terms of a single system of ideas.
In the same spirit the artist takes the innumerable diversities and uniquenesses of the outer world and his own imagination and gives them meaning within an orderly system of plastic, literary or musical patterns. The wish to impose order upon confusion, to bring harmony out of dissonance and unity out of multiplicity is a kind of intellectual instinct, a primary and fundamental urge of the mind. Within the realms of science, art and philosophy the workings of what I may call this “Will to Order” are mainly beneficent. True, the Will to Order has produced many premature syntheses based upon insufficient evidence, many absurd systems of metaphysics and theology, much pedantic mistaking of notions for realities, of symbols and abstractions for the data of immediate experience. But these errors, however regrettable, do not do much harm, at any rate directly—though it sometimes happens that a bad philosophical system may do harm indirectly, by being used as a justification for senseless and inhuman actions. It is in the social sphere, in the realm of politics and economics, that the Will to Order becomes really dangerous.
Here the theoretical reduction of unmanageable multiplicity to comprehensible unity becomes the practical reduction of human diversity to subhuman uniformity, of freedom to servitude. In politics the equivalent of a fully developed scientific theory or philosophical system is a totalitarian dictatorship. In economics, the equivalent of a beautifully composed work of art is the smoothly running factory in which the workers are perfectly adjusted to the machines. The Will to Order can make tyrants out of those who merely aspire to clear up a mess. The beauty of tidiness is used as a justification for despotism.
Organization is indispensable; for liberty arises and has meaning only within a self-regulating community of freely co-operating individuals. But, though indispensable, organization can also be fatal. Too much organization transforms men and women into automata, suffocates the creative spirit and abolishes the very possibility of freedom. As usual, the only safe course is in the middle, between the extremes of laissez-faire at one end of the scale and of total control at the other.
During the past century the successive advances in technology have been accompanied by corresponding advances in organization. Complicated machinery has had to be matched by complicated social arrangements, designed to work as smoothly and efficiently as the new instruments of production. In order to fit into these organizations, individuals have had to deindividualize themselves, have had to deny their native diversity and conform to a standard pattern, have had to do their best to become automata.
The dehumanizing effects of over-organization are reinforced by the dehumanizing effects of over-population. Industry, as it expands, draws an ever greater proportion of humanity’s increasing numbers into large cities. But life in large cities is not conducive to mental health (the highest incidence of schizophrenia, we are told, occurs among the swarming inhabitants of industrial slums); nor does it foster the kind of responsible freedom within small self-governing groups, which is the first condition of a genuine democracy. City life is anonymous and, as it were, abstract. People are related to one another, not as total personalities, but as the embodiments of economic functions or, when they are not at work, as irresponsible seekers of entertainment. Subjected to this kind of life, individuals tend to feel lonely and insignificant. Their existence ceases to have any point or meaning.
Biologically speaking, man is a moderately gregarious, not a completely social animal—a creature more like a wolf, let us say, or an elephant, than like a bee or an ant. In their original form human societies bore no resemblance to the hive or the ant heap; they were merely packs. Civilization is, among other things, the process by which primitive packs are transformed into an analogue, crude and mechanical, of the social insects’ organic communities. At the present time the pressures of over-population and technological change are accelerating this process. The termitary has come to seem a realizable and even, in some eyes, a desirable ideal. Needless to say, the ideal will never in fact be realized. A great gulf separates the social insect from the not too gregarious, big-brained mammal; and even though the mammal should do his best to imitate the insect, the gulf would remain. However hard they try, men cannot create a social organism, they can only create an organization. In the process of trying to create an organism they will merely create a totalitarian despotism.
Brave New World presents a fanciful and somewhat ribald picture of a society, in which the attempt to re-create human beings in the likeness of termites has been pushed almost to the limits of the possible. That we are being propelled in the direction of Brave New World is obvious. But no less obvious is the fact that we can, if we so desire, refuse to co-operate with the blind forces that are propelling us. For the moment, however, the wish to resist does not seem to be very strong or very widespread. As Mr. William Whyte has shown in his remarkable book, The Organization Man, a new Social Ethic is replacing our traditional ethical system—the system in which the individual is primary. The key words in this Social Ethic are “adjustment,” “adaptation,” “socially orientated behavior,” “belongingness,” “acquisition of social skills,” “team work,” “group living,” “group loyalty,” “group dynamics,” “group thinking,” “group creativity.” Its basic assumption is that the social whole has greater worth and significance than its individual parts, that inborn biological differences should be sacrificed to cultural uniformity, that the rights of the collectivity take precedence over what the eighteenth century called the Rights of Man. According to the Social Ethic, Jesus was completely wrong in asserting that the Sabbath was made for man. On the contrary, man was made for the Sabbath, and must sacrifice his inherited idiosyncrasies and pretend to be the kind of standardized good mixer that organizers of group activity regard as ideal for their purposes. This ideal man is the man who displays “dynamic conformity” (delicious phrase!) and an intense loyalty to the group, an unflagging desire to subordinate himself, to belong. And the ideal man must have an ideal wife, highly gregarious, infinitely adaptable and not merely resigned to the fact that her husband’s first loyalty is to the Corporation, but actively loyal on her own account. “He for God only,” as Milton said of Adam and Eve, “she for God in him.” And in one important respect the wife of the ideal organization man is a good deal worse off than our First Mother. She and Adam were permitted by the Lord to be completely uninhibited in the matter of “youthful dalliance.”
Nor turned, I ween,
Adam from his fair spouse, nor Eve the rites
Mysterious of connubial love refused
Today, according to a writer in the Harvard Business Review, the wife of the man who is trying to live up to the ideal proposed by the Social Ethic, “must not demand too much of her husband’s time and interest. Because of his single-minded concentration on his job, even his sexual activity must be relegated to a secondary place.” The monk makes vows of poverty, obedience and chastity. The organization man is allowed to be rich, but promises obedience (“he accepts authority without resentment, he looks up to his superiors”—Mussolini ha sempre ragione) and he must be prepared, for the greater glory of the organization that employs him, to forswear even conjugal love.
It is worth remarking that, in 1984, the members of the Party are compelled to conform to a sexual ethic of more than Puritan severity. In Brave New World, on the other hand, all are permitted to indulge their sexual impulses without let or hindrance. The society described in Orwell’s fable is a society permanently at war, and the aim of its rulers is first, of course, to exercise power for its own delightful sake and, second, to keep their subjects in that state of constant tension which a state of constant war demands of those who wage it. By crusading against sexuality the bosses are able to maintain the required tension in their followers and at the same time can satisfy their lust for power in a most gratifying way. The society described in Brave New World is a world-state, in which war has been eliminated and where the first aim of the rulers is at all costs to keep their subjects from making trouble. This they achieve by (among other methods) legalizing a degree of sexual freedom (made possible by the abolition of the family) that practically guarantees the Brave New Worlders against any form of destructive (or creative) emotional tension. In 1984 the lust for power is satisfied by inflicting pain; in Brave New World, by inflicting a hardly less humiliating pleasure.
The current Social Ethic, it is obvious, is merely a justification after the fact of the less desirable consequences of over-organization. It represents a pathetic attempt to make a virtue of necessity, to extract a positive value from an unpleasant datum. It is a very unrealistic, and therefore very dangerous, system of morality. The social whole, whose value is assumed to be greater than that of its component parts, is not an organism in the sense that a hive or a termitary may be thought of as an organism. It is merely an organization, a piece of social machinery. There can be no value except in relation to life and awareness. An organization is neither conscious nor alive. Its value is instrumental and derivative. It is not good in itself; it is good only to the extent that it promotes the good of the individuals who are the parts of the collective whole. To give organizations precedence over persons is to subordinate ends to means. What happens when ends are subordinated to means was clearly demonstrated by Hitler and Stalin. Under their hideous rule personal ends were subordinated to organizational means by a mixture of violence and propaganda, systematic terror and the systematic manipulation of minds.
In the more efficient dictatorships of tomorrow there will probably be much less violence than under Hitler and Stalin. The future dictator’s subjects will be painlessly regimented by a corps of highly trained social engineers. “The challenge of social engineering in our time,” writes an enthusiastic advocate of this new science, “is like the challenge of technical engineering fifty years ago. If the first half of the twentieth century was the era of the technical engineers, the second half may well be the era of the social engineers”—and the twenty-first century, I suppose, will be the era of World Controllers, the scientific caste system and Brave New World. To the question quis cusodiet custodes?—Who will mount guard over our guardians, who will engineer the engineers?—the answer is a bland denial that they need any supervision. There seems to be a touching belief among certain Ph.D.’s in sociology that Ph.D.’s in sociology will never be corrupted by power. Like Sir Galahad’s, their strength is as the strength of ten because their heart is pure—and their heart is pure because they are scientists and have taken six thousand hours of social studies.
Alas, higher education is not necessarily a guarantee of higher virtue, or higher political wisdom. And to these misgivings on ethical and psychological grounds must be added misgivings of a purely scientific character. Can we accept the theories on which the social engineers base their practice, and in terms of which they justify their manipulations of human beings? For example, Professor Elton Mayo tells us categorically that “man’s desire to be continuously associated in work with his fellows is a strong, if not the strongest human characteristic.” This, I would say, is manifestly untrue. Some people have the kind of desire described by Mayo; others do not. It is a matter of temperament and inherited constitution. Any social organization based upon the assumption that “man” (whoever “man” may be) desires to be continuously associated with his fellows would be, for many individual men and women, a bed of Procrustes. Only by being amputated or stretched upon the rack could they be adjusted to it.
Again, how romantically misleading are the lyrical accounts of the Middle Ages with which many contemporary theorists of social relations adorn their works! “Membership in a guild, manorial estate or village protected medieval man throughout his life and gave him peace and serenity.” Protected him from what, we may ask. Certainly not from remorseless bullying at the hands of his superiors. And along with all that “peace and serenity” there was, throughout the Middle Ages, an enormous amount of chronic frustration, acute unhappiness and a passionate resentment against the rigid, hierarchical system that permitted no vertical movement up the social ladder and, for those who were bound to the land, very little horizontal movement in space. The impersonal forces of over-population and over-organization, and the social engineers who are trying to direct these forces, are pushing us in the direction of a new medieval system. This revival will be made more acceptable than the original by such Brave-New-Worldian amenities as infant conditioning, sleep-teaching and drug-induced euphoria; but, for the majority of men and women, it will still be a kind of servitude.
(third chapter of Brave New World Revisited)
how do I get in touch with Dayton Scroggins to do a carving for me ?
Tommy Wayne Kramer is spot on, and voters need to decide which brand of deception is most tolerable. Furthermore, it’s not necessary to fool all the people all the time, just a majority of the people will suffice.
Actually, with a non-democratic system like the US has, complete with an electoral college (and senate, where all the states get equal representation), one doesn’t need a majority of the “people” for much of anything. Trumples lost by about 3 million votes on his first try, but got elected nonetheless. The so-called founders, whom we are taught to worship with awe, would be proud of their handiwork.
Kramer’s piece is just hyperbole and innuendo, designed to reassure republicans and instill fear and loathing of democrats. I’ll stick to factual information, thank-you.
So the Steele Dossier is real ? Gotcha, you have a lovely day Norm, it’s all good.
If you have a case to make, I would love to hear it.
Oh,you actually believe what you said, like, dude!
For real? I’m not taking you serious, you can’t trick me, lol.
Have a nice day.
TWK is spot- on, as USUAL (always?).
Love the way fascists can’t wait to shit can democracy. Run to the voting booth and get it over with. The last present of the dying boomers to the next generations. Yup, you proved em all wrong, you took it with you. Good job!
Baby boomers are all fascists? I disagree.
Not all but enough to make me cringe. I’m 75 so I’m one too. Never imagined my generation would go out like this.
I don’t think all the problems can be laid at our feet. Every generation has good and bad. But we were largely responsible for civil rights, enviromental protections, women’s rights, consumer protections, the end of the Viet Nam war, and holding government responsible. The subsequent erosion of those gains was in spite of our efforts. And when we are all gone, will the country become a better place due to our absence? I do not thinks so. Let’s go out with our heads held high.
Like you Norm, I’m an optimist, and also proud of what we accomplished (past tense). I’m calling out the ones that are so easily swayed by the bullshitter who will make sure they don’t have to vote anymore because he will leave people in place that will make sure we have the same kind of sham elections that they have in Russia, and a government run by oligarchs for oligarchs like Musk. And scare the shit out of independent media so we have reicht wing religious group think on all channels. You have that now with Sinclaire on hundreds of local stations. People that wrap themselves in the flag and have no idea what a patriot is. The majority of those people are are not women or younger voters. They’re old white boomers who listened to Murdoch’s bullshit being pedalled by pretty blonde women to get their attention. I agree that the Dems don’t do a good enough job, but we can at least speak freely about how rotten they are and vote them out. We don’t need to leave a religious theocracy that we can’t vote out for those following.
But if you protest genocide in Gaza, you can be arrested, or kicked out of college, or get fired by Sonoma State College, (or is it University now?). So much for the dems’ support of free speech…and I expect Musk and his filthy like made billions under Biden. Sticking up for the corrupt, sold-out Democratic Party is a fool’s errand.
I’m not standing up for the Dems, I’m standing up for democracy, being able to have a legitimate election. The Dems don’t try to suppress the vote, they follow the law and don’t make bogus claims of stolen elections, and they cede power when they lose. That’s the way it’s supposed to work in a democracy.
This country has always been much more a plutocracy than a democracy, and, with all the payments the plutocrats pay to their wizards of propaganda, things aint likely to change in that regard…unless the whole thing comes crashing down around their (and our) ears, which seems more likely as time passes. Passing Democrats off as some wonder drug is naive.
No you weren’t. We stayed in Vietnam until we were CHASED out, a solid decade. The Boomerz great failing was this…
“The Boomerz great failing was this…”
The boomers were cannon fodder in VietNam, ask around. The Greatest Generation of WW2 ran the show into the ground for the MIC money.
Laz
Good lord. I actually agree with you! My senility must be getting worse!
Nice to see a level headed comment chocked full of accountability.
One thing I have to hand to the Trump Boomers is that they were wiling to blow up their own party. I can’t stand most of Trumps rhetoric and lame policies and would never vote for him, but the Dems haven’t made any similar transitions from the status quo. They screwed up when they torpedoed Bernie. He’s still the only politician with a shred of dignity.
That’s 100% true. Obama, with the help of Clyburn cut Bernie off at the knees when his campaign was gaining momentum. We could have had much different results if they had backed off and not tilted the scale in favor of Biden.
I’m convinced Liz Cheney lost Kamala this layup election.
Could be…
Laz
Bottom Line…
Gals NEED Harris
Dateline Washington, D.C. November 4th, ’24 @ 1:54 p.m. EST
Warmest spiritual greetings,
Just left the Washington, D.C. Peace Vigil, providing hydrating beverages and food. The social security has come in plus $198 in California food stamps. Continuing to sleep at the homeless shelter in the northeast section of the district, which charges nothing for anything. This makes it all financially doable! Simple as that. Now news yet about any presidential inauguration statements going to be made by the radical environmental/peace & justice groups. Am continuing to check in once monthly with the housing groups, there being an outside chance that a subsidized apartment could be moved into. But remember, this is America. Divine intervention will probably be necessary for all upcoming mundane needs. On the other hand, I could just drop the body-mind complex and go up. Contact me if you wish to do anything of importance.
Craig Louis Stehr
Adam’s Place Homeless Shelter
2210 Adams Place NE #1
Washington, D.C. 20018
Telephone: (202) 832-8317
Email: craiglouisstehr@gmail.com
In the face of thousands of Trump’s documented lies and distortions, Tommy Wayne Kramer’s diatribe about Democrat’s Long Noses is unbelievable. His comment about Harris and Willie Brown is revolting. You’ve lost your way, Tommy Wayne. You are becoming as absurd as Trump, Elon Musk, RFK Jr., and the rest of the self-serving MAGA Marchers.
Thank you. I usually enjoy reading TWK’s column, no matter how absurd the topic or his take, but this one gave me the ick.
+1
I warned my old drinking buddy Tom once before to check w/ George Shaw on the art of writing your political opinions as satirical columns, citing the way GBS kept his humane
Christian mask in place when preaching eugenics and white supremacy in his drama, but Mr Hine enjoys tilting with sharp jests and sometimes he gets carried away and his TWK mask slips revealing something he’d rather keep undisclosed… that’s why he was always a one-and-done beer drinker: WC Field’s celebrated warning “never trust a man who doesn’t drink’ referred directly to one like Tom who fears his loose tongue when drunk.
I found this one of TWK’s best and honest assessments of what’s happened over the past few years. Joe Biden was a walking dead stand in for the longest time and All the dems in the inner circle covered it up. Pelosi was so one of the leaders of ‘Joes Sharp as a tack’ club until she saw the poles after the debate. When she saw the possibility of losing power she was one of the pack to sharpen her knife and plunge it deep into the old boys back. Pretty shameful.
Can we hurry up and get to 11/07/2024 Please!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
You sound like that skydiver whose chute didn’t open and as he squealed in panic met a man all in blackface and tattered clothes— coming up!— and shouted in desperation, “hey, man, do you know anything about a parachute?” To which the other fellow replied, “hell no. Do you know anything about a Coleman stove!?!!?
Prediction:
Harris gets 302 or 308 (not sure about NV, Jon Ralston of Nevada Independent says Harris will win by a third of a percent).
Popular vote 51% Harris, 46% Trump, 3% others.
Basis is looking at early vote, gender gap, and seeing analysis talking about mitigating past underestimating Trump in polling by adding GOP registrants in survey.
Where’s Marmon to lead the Trump cheers? He’s been absent for awhile.
Eric Trump on stage in Philly, today, thanked WE THE PEOPLE for their support of the Trump family❗WHAT?
Who passed the bad mushrooms out to today’s posters?
TWK did with a boost from yours truly, and consent from God. Bad mushrooms can sell newspapers.
Since roe v. wade was overturned…
https://t.co/jI5q1T17se
https://youtu.be/xt9fgCqMfO0?si=-zKaGv9PHRwAnEET
And, men haven’t had to change, anything.
Thanks for the Mendoland history! I heard an item this evening from a bartender. His father had come over from Vietnam a few years after the war, sponsored by the Buddhist Temple in Ukiah! He estimated that the temple had helped about 1,000 Vietnamese emigrate to the US over the years! Thanks, also, for the Legget update and the Huxley chapter, y mucho mas, including Crumb of course. I miss the paper paper but Mendocino Today does not disappoint.
The list of men who died building the Golden Gate Bridge includes Terence Hallinan. Really?
A person with apparent credibility told me many decades ago that a ruthless Chinese business woman in Vietnam purchased the Talmage property with the intent of providing a place for Vietnamese refugees of Chinese decent to escape to, and merge into American society. This person had much to say on what happened in Vietnam based on his own personal experience as what came across as being a CIA operative. I don’t remember the man’s name, but I believe he grew up in Potter Valley, and maybe went to UC. He is likely long dead. We had an intriguing, to me, conversation. He knew how to answer prying personal questions without revealing anything.
When I was an undergrad at UC Santa Barbara, a fair number of Vietnamese refugees had been and were being relocated to the “student ghetto” of Isla Vista. Some of them even opened a small Asian market to make things at least a bit more like the home they’d had to leave. I enjoyed watching them launch small fishing boats just below our clifftop shack. But there were also wholly unfounded rumors that everyone should keep their dogs inside as the immigrants were eating them. Sound familiar?
As a community member of the Buddhist temple, the background I’ve heard is that the City of 10k Buddhas opened a Vietnamese refugee program because most of the other refugee programs in the United States were Christian. There are a few people (white, American men) who live locally or come to Ukiah regularly that were directly involved supporting the refugee program.