Mendocino County Today: Tuesday 11/5/2024

By AVA News Service on November 5, 2024

WINDS will increase today and Wednesday, bringing hazardous fire weather conditions to Lake and interior Mendocino counties. Rain possibly returns this weekend. (NWS)

STEPHEN DUNLAP (Fort Bragg): 46F under partly cloudy skies Election Day 2024. Forecast remains the same with clear & dry thru Friday with rain chances starting on Saturday. Veterans Day Monday is looking wet.

SUPERVISOR TED WILLIAMS on the Big Wind a' comin': Mendocino County is currently in scope for a PG&E public safety power shutoff, with a total of thirteen customers impacted. These are the same 13 residential customers that were impacted during the PSPS in mid-October. The affected area is south eastern Mendocino County along the Sonoma County border.

MENDOCINO COUNTY ELECTIONS UPDATE: More than 20,000 ballots received by Monday morning

by Justine Frederiksen

As of Monday morning, more than 20,000 ballots had already been received by the Mendocino County Elections Office, Assessor-County Clerk-Recorder Katrina Bartolomie reported.

“As of this morning (Nov. 4), we have received approximately 21,000 ballots, and we are checking signatures on the ballots we received in our ballot box now (located at the county Administration Center on Low Gap Road) and will be continuing this process as we receive the mail and ballots from the drop boxes around the county,” said Bartolomie in an email, noting that “about 11,000 ballots” had been counted as of 9 a.m. Monday.

The first results for the Nov. 5 Presidential Election will be posted on the county’s website “at around 8 p.m. Tuesday,” Bartolomie continued, adding that “we will publish results every two hours until all of our polling places have checked in.”

Also on Monday, Bartolomie said that “if any voter has received a letter from our office due to a mismatched signature or no signature, please follow the directions on the letter or call our office (at 707-234-6819) so we can help.”

For those who are planning on voting in person Tuesday, Bartolomie announced that residents in Redwood Valley will have a new polling place, explaining in a previous press release that “due to a mix up with scheduling events, we have had to change our Redwood Valley area Polling Location to the REDWOOD VALLEY FIRE DEPARTMENT, 8481 East Road, for this election. The polling location is open on Election Day only, Nov. 5, 2024, from 7 a.m. to 8 p.m., and we will have signs up throughout Redwood Valley letting voters know of this change.”

After problems with all of the Mendocino County ballots printed last March, including having every registered voter receiving a Republican ballot, Bartolomie said that her office is now “working with a new ballot/sample ballot print vendor” for the Nov. 5 Presidential Election.

(ukiahdailyjournal.com)

GIELOW’S DRUGMOBILE

On November 2, 2024 at approximately 5:25AM, Fort Bragg Police Officers conducted a traffic stop on a motor vehicle in the 32000 block of SR-20 for a vehicle code violation. During the traffic stop, a records check confirmed the driver, Charles Gielow, 48 of Albion, had two outstanding felony arrest warrants and was on active PRCS (Post Release Community Supervision) out of Mendocino County.

During a search of Gielow, Officers discovered $1500 in cash in his wallet. A search of Gielow’s vehicle revealed brass knuckles, narcotic packaging materials, a digital scale, approximately 50 tablets of Buprenorphine, and 9 Buprenorphine Sublingual Films. As Officers looked further into the vehicle, they discovered a magnetic box affixed to the frame in the engine compartment. Inside the magnetic case officers located 45.01 grams of methamphetamine, 13.40 grams of fentanyl, 6.96 grams of heroin, and 2 oxycodone tablets.

Gielow was questioned, arrested, and booked into the Mendocino County Jail with no bail set for the following charges: Utilizing a false compartment/container to store narcotics (felony), Possession of methamphetamine for sale (felony), Transportation of methamphetamine for sale (felony), Possession of fentanyl for sale (felony), Transportation of fentanyl for sale, Possession of drug paraphernalia (misdemeanor), Possession of brass knuckles (felony), Violation of PRCS (felony), as well as his warrants.

The Fort Bragg Police Department can assist those with substance use disorders into treatment.

Please call the Care Response Unit at (707) 961-2800 and choose option 6.

Anyone with information regarding this incident is encouraged to contact Acting Sergeant Frank with the Fort Bragg Police Department at (707)961-2800 ext 223 or email at jfrank@fortbragg.com

This information is being released by Acting Sergeant Frank. For media inquiries, please reach out to him directly at jfrank@fortbragg.com.

ED NOTES

WITH CIVIL WAR commencing Wednesday I regret being too old and decrepit to participate, but I invite one or more of you many partisans from the correct side to heave my carcass onto the barricades, one more sandbag in the cause of righteousness!

EXCITED TALK of ultra-vi from the Magas aside, we still seem pretty far from shooting at each other. In lieu of street battles we're more likely to get several months of electoral purgatory as Trump disputes Harris's narrower win in the swing states to claim the vote was rigged. Of course if he wins by some cosmic sadism visited on US by the sky gods, Trump will claim he won despite Democrat dirty tricks.

WHATEVER TURMOIL occurs, I remain astounded that this incoherent buffoon has singlehandedly subverted whatever imaginary unity we'd clung to as Americans.

I'VE HEARD lots of people say that Trump is the fault of public education, that too many of us don't learn to tell truth from untruth, that we can't read well enough to know when we're being lied to. Deficient as the schools are in many ways, Trump isn't their fault. The most fervent Nazis were highly educated, with teachers and university faculties being the most fervent among millions of German fascists.

GOING DEEP HERE, I'd say it's obvious that Trumpian fascism, same as Hitler's, arises from economic insecurity combined with revulsion at what millions of people see as the anything goes decadence encouraged by Democrats, just as millions of Germans were economically insecure and unhappy with Weimar social hijinks. We should remember that Bernie was running strong until the Democrats shafted him, and he was running strong because his economic arguments resonated with Magas, latent and overt.

RECOMMENDED VIEWING: The Martha Stewart documentary on Netflix. The remarkable woman who parlayed housekeeping into a billion dollar fortune, the first woman to manage that dubious feat, Martha's candor in this riveting doc is highly affecting, at least my febrile emotions were twanging. Martha is on record as being unhappy with the film because she thinks she comes across as “a pathetic old lady.” She came across to me as brilliant and brave, very brave, especially given that the jive FBI sent her to jail for no real reason other than director Comey enjoyed the media spotlight. “Hey! Look at me. I put this powerful person in jail. Lights, camera, action!”

WHAT actually happened? The media put it out that Martha was guilty of "insider trading," an unprosecuted crime engaged in by lots of elected officials including Nancy Pelosi. During the FBI's initial interview with the hostess with the mostest, an FBI agent asked Martha why she had sold her shares. She replied, truthfully, that she had a prior agreement with her broker to sell certain stock if the share price dropped below a certain point, and the price had dropped.

BUT BASED on that statement to that federal sleuth, a statement made with Martha's attorney present, the FBI concluded that she had broken federal law by lying to an FBI officer. Specifically, the accusation was that she had lied about why she had done something that happens to be legal. But the FBI concluded that Martha had obstructed their investigation by giving false information that protected her broker! And it was off to federal prison for five months, a post release ankle bracelet and probation.

THE MOST DEPRESSING segment of Martha's tell-all, was her appearance on Saturday Night Live, the relentlessly unfunny television show faithfully viewed by millions of howler monkeys. But there she is yukking it up with Snoop Dog, Justin Bieber and several other repellent figures. Why, Martha, why?

ANNE FASHAUER: Excited to represent this beautiful old home in Navarro.

14840 Wendling Soda Creek Rd, Navarro. $895,000.

(North Country Real Estate, Boonville)

CHANGE OUR NAME - FORT BRAGG

Our next teach-in will be Tuesday November 12 at 6 p.m at Harbor Lite Lodge, 120 North Harbor Drive, FB. (Not Thursday)

Envisioned as a program to educate attendees about the issues involved in the name change and to hear neighbors’ ideas, the teach-in will last about one hour and will feature two speakers and a question and answer/discussion period.

Speakers will be:

Holly Tannen who sings traditional English and Scottish ballads and writes satirical songs about Mendocino and the Internet. She holds a master’s degree in Folklore from U.C. Berkeley, where she studied neo-Pagan music, the folklore of the AIDS epidemic, and the singing of Scotland’s Traveling People. She also wrote and performs The Braxton Bragg song which can be found on our website here.

Troyle Tognoli.

What was once intended as a two week visit, quickly turned into 47 years of Troyle living, working and raising a son in Mendocino County. Troyle formed and spearheaded Black Lives Matter Mendocino County chapter and currently serves on the City of Ukiah Equity and Diversity committee. Troyle rallied the Mendocino County Board of Supervisors to support the Mendocino County (PSAB) Public Safety Advisory Board. She served as the youngest member of the Mendocino County Grand Jury, She also served as President of SEIU local 1021. Recently retired, Troyle now enjoys an array of political, social and practical endeavors.

This month’s Change Our Name Business Meeting will be Saturday, November 16, at 2 p.m. Please let us know if you would like to attend at changeournamefortbragg@gmail.com

FEELING NOSTALGIC: Telephones were originally installed in boxes that looked like mailboxes and mounted along with the mailboxes at the end of McNab Ranch Road where it connects with U.S. Highway 101 (south of Ukiah), in Mendocino County. At that time, phone lines weren't run out to the many remote ranches out on the McNab Ranch. With today's cell phones, phones installed in boxes that look like mailboxes are no longer needed.

VOTER FRAUD

Editor:

I find myself fascinated with Republican concerns about voter fraud and their call for paper ballots, now we ALL know T-rump will say anything at any time, but this tracks very closely with concerns that were raised while I was on the County Council of our local Green Party which still had the toxic One True Green (i.e., Richard Johnson) and a variety of posers, who liked to mouth pieties, but were generally uninterested in building an actual political structure, but around that time Califonria became interested in voting machines and ending paper ballots. Well, we figured out that these machines could be easily hacked, and with no paper trail, the true results could be easily masked, so we filed our concerns with the state, Eventually, out of frustration I left the position to become Els Cooperrider’s 2006 campaign manager for the 5th District Supervisor seat as she tried to unseat the corrupt David Colfax. Although we came close, we were unsuccessful at getting into a fall runoff with him (what is it with the 5th District and their proclivity to vote in lazy and or corrupt Supes? Colfax, Hamburg, now Williams?) But back to the voting machines, Trump’s concerns track very closely to the Greens, I leave readers to make of that what they will.

Chris Skyhawk

Fort Bragg

HARRIS LEADS IN IOWA [Coast Chatline]

Del Potter:

One reason pollsters might be failing to pick up what Seltzer picked up in Iowa, is a lot of women are afraid to say they are voting for Harris.

My friend who is canvassing in the Philadelphia suburbs shared stories yesterday after knocking doors. He said he couldn’t believe the number of canvassers who had wives standing in the background while speaking to the husband and having them mouth something to the effect that they were voting for Harris. Or if they answered the door, they pretended to not say who they were voting for out loud and then whispered they were voting for Harris. It's kind of heartbreaking actually.

This poll is almost certainly accurate, and it tells us what to expect in the other midwest states, and maybe nationwide: Kamala Harris is surging. We see the same thing in the Ohio and Kansas polls. Why don't we see it in most of the battleground polls? Read Nate Cohen's confession this week: pollsters and pundits are scared to death about being wrong again about Trump, so they are just keep telling us the race is tied.

Then you have all the red wave and other junk polls out there misleading people. I think Ann Selzer just pulled the curtain back and showed us what is really going on out there.

Ann Selzer might be wrong. But that is not what the FACTS are saying right now.

Frank Hartzell:

As a person with a master's degree in communications who took advanced courses in polling, it all confirmed what I had observed, its a farce at its heart. Extrapolating 300 people to 300,000 through random selection and the “scientific” methodology we are so proud of is farcical, although it usually is correct. Why? Because in stable times, we do think alike. Part of this is for a non-scientific reason, the harmony of the soul that somehow connects us. Tesla thought interconnectedness was real and somehow connected to cellar electricity. We can see it in dogs, but if somebody says it exists in humans, we are laughed at. The whole business of fungi connecting the forest still hasn't brought this to the forefront. A more important reason is that we all have a stake in a stable system, regardless of its evils. That was the reason corps and the wealthy created 401ks, so that ordinary people would have a stake in the evils of Wall Street and be unable to do the right thing and fix those and relocalize their economies. Our connections are broken when the dark side of hate and fear breaks through. The polls can't tell us anything but we are likely to do the worst in these circumstances. We are about to commit societal suicide. Historians will look back at our booming economy and how nothing really threatens us and wonder how we could go so wrong as it seems to me we are about to. Even in the best-case scenario, we get someone miles to the right of Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan on many issues, like blaming the immigrants poor and criminals, not the system. The other factor is that newspapers are dead and propaganda is carrying the day. People believe in notions more absurd than has ever been the case in American history. The GOP blocked John McCain's fine plan for immigration reform that would have prevented the border crisis and continues to do so, on behalf of Fox News, which makes money when we are at each other's throats. Remember when Trump tried to do the right thing ONE time on immigration and Fox defeated him. Only time it happened. Ann Colter led the way. Our local elections have also been poisoned by culture wars. There is a local candidate really doesn't think the public has the right to know anything and that grant money is free money and not public money But the left has gone off the deep end, along with the right, to fight culture wars, not for our community or for true progressive values and for needed community resilience. People resent objective media and side with the most mean-spirited propagandaists who speak their language, here and everywhere in the USA right now. Humanity has zero value and robotics are loved and beloved. While polling is usually right, although founded in modern alchemy, the AI summary of my search results is pretty much always wrong. AI represents something way more dangerous than mutant robots killing humans. It is the end of creativity, originality, disorganization and dehumanization as bad as any of histories horrors.

MAJESTIC EQUALITY

Hey Dudes, listen up!
We don’t have to tell our wives
Which way we voted!

— Jim Luther

CATCH OF THE DAY, Monday, November 4, 2024

ARMANDO GONZALES, 24, Ukiah. Attempt to keep stolen property, vehicle registration tampering.

JOHN HUNTER JR., 41, Ukiah. Failure to appear.

RHONDA MOTTS, 53, Fort Bragg. Probation revocation.

JOHN POTE, 45, Willits. Under influence.

DON WILTSE JR., 37, Willits. Probation revocation.

TERRELL ZAVORAL, 18, Redway/Ukiah. DUI-alcohol&drugs, false ID, no license.

NEVER HAD IT THIS GOOD

Editor:

America has never been better. Do you want to chop wood to burn, cook and keep warm, to depend on animals for transportation, candles so you can see when it’s dark, live in a log cabin with dirt floors?

Wake up, look around at what we have now. We eat fresh food that was grown 1,000 miles away, electricity, electric cars that don’t pollute, computers that have spell check and printers that type, furnaces, air conditioners, airplanes and trains that relocate us miles away in minutes, swimming pools, golf courses, television, hospitals, 40 hour workweeks, some stay at home and work, public schools and Social Security, plus Obamacare, thanks to the Democrats. We are living better now than kings did years ago. Help us stop polluting so we don’t lose what we have now.

As far as inflation is concerned, it does not matter which political party wins the election, because inflation is here to stay, when inflation is 2%, it means it’s 2% more than it was last year, it doesn’t mean prices are going to get lower.

Leonard Riepenhoff

Santa Rosa

STATINS

by Paul Modic

When it came time to turn back into the woods on my walk at the park, I continued on instead toward the Kimtu parking lot, as I’d been getting bored with my usual trails and wanted to switch it up and maybe run into some people, which I rarely did during my woodsy hikes up to the top of the mountain.

I came upon a couple guys I knew standing around the wide path and I said, “What are you talking about?”

“Cholesterol!” one of them said.

“Shit, I was just thinking about that a while back, my doctor wants me to take statins,” I said.

“Not for me,” he said.

“Yeah, my old doctors got used to me saying that,” I said, “but this new one is really trying and wants me to make an appointment to come in and talk to him about it, but I only go to a doctor when I need some treatment for something. Besides, it would be a waste of time and energy, we’d disagree and it would be an uncomfortable situation, Medicare would get another $500, and so what’s the point?”

I dunno, maybe I should take statins to reduce my borderline bad cholesterol (LDL) but I just don’t want to, if I wanted to then I would. I was out in the park walking, that and practically everything else I do is about lowering my fat and sugar numbers, trying to get my Healthy Trinity: Food, Exercise, and Sleep, humming in harmony.

When my new doctor “strongly recommended” statins last March I had anxiety, then insomnia, fretting about the (life or death?) decision, and only felt relaxed again when I decided no, I’m not going to take them. When I first met him last February I said I wasn’t taking medications, hence I am by definition healthy, so I don’t want to take statins because then I wouldn’t be healthy anymore.

“That’s magical thinking!” he said, which was usually my line when responding to woo woo people.

“Well, that was kind of a one-liner,” I said.

I had a cook for a while a few years ago, traded her my cabin in the hills for food prep and light housekeeping once a week, and she made the most boring horse food: massive salads, huge piles of sauteed veggies, and a healthy green drink. I sat there chewing like an animal for hours, drinking the massive green drinks until they started to go bad, and my cholesterol and sugar (AIC) tested lower than ever before.

(After that season I was feeling so celebratory that I made copies of the new number graphs into placemats, invited the cook and a couple others to “The Lost Frenchman,” and marked the occasion with a pizza party. Toward the end of the dinner, a young person I invited had one of her emotional breakdowns, which may be my next story.)

When my doctor looked over my amazingly low numbers he still recommended taking statins, what? My best, totally good numbers and no congratulations for my good work, just still “consider taking statins”? (Though I’m not a conspiracy wacko, that did make me wonder if doctors and/or clinics do get some kind of financial kickback from the pharmaceutical companies. The companies could eat three months, six months, or a year of income, knowing that on the back end they would have another lifelong customer, si?)

I’m not going to bother to explain my outlook to the doctor, tell about all the healthy things I do, although this summer I switched from boring low fat yogurt to delicious whole fat, I eat a lot of it, and am not sure if that was a good move. I guess I might find out when I get my next test but I’ve been delaying it because since I went lame in June I haven’t been on a good exercise program, until October when I got back to the park regularly. (I’m not going to say, hey, you don’t know me, my healthy routines etc, I’m just going to ignore his requests for an office visit.)

It’s very possible that out of my stubbornness and ignorance I’m making a big mistake and being self-destructive by not getting on the “statin train,” but I’m stuck with free will: I only do what I want to do, like taking the parade of medications during my hip replacement adventure last August which I didn’t question, the way I question preventative drugs.

(I just found out about the oyster mushrooms which contain “natural statins,” bought a bag of them from Mushroom Mike yesterday at the farmer’s market, and am going to eat the whole pile before my blood draw next week, woo woo!)

ELECTION WORKERS QUIT IN SHASTA COUNTY AS SELF-APPOINTED OBSERVERS ROAM OFFICE

Shasta County supervisors hired an elections chief without experience just months before the election. He’s already falling out of favor.

by Sergio Olmos

On Wednesday, as the workers of the Shasta County Registrar of Voters office busily sifted through the ballots that have already been cast, they had company.

A group of nine people, holding clipboards and taking notes, stood in a hallway peering through wired glass as workers took ballots out of envelopes. Across the hallway another group of observers hovered over computer screens, watching a live video feed of workers in a room verifying signatures. These self-appointed election observers spent their day looking for proof of tomfoolery.

One woman wasn’t satisfied with watching the election administration through the buttressed window. She wanted to be in the room while they sifted through ballots.

“It isn’t transparent,” said a woman named Elizabeth who wouldn’t give her last name. “To be transparent we have to be able to hear them.”

So far, while these observers don’t appear to have unearthed any evidence of fraud, they are having an impact. The assistant clerk put up a rope to stop the observers from following workers into their breakroom to ask questions. They’ve also had to put locks on the offices, after observers tried to open doors and see what was happening inside each office. This comes as election officials across the nation received death threats following the 2020 and 2022 elections, fomented by former President Donald Trump’s false claims that the election was stolen.

People gather in a hallway near a bulletin board labeled 'Meet our Envelopes' as they review documents related to ballot processing at a county elections office.

Three individuals review and discuss information displayed on monitors in an office, with one person pointing at the screen while another sits in front of the monitors, focusing on election-related data.First: Election observers discuss with each other as they watch workers process ballots at the Shasta County Clerk Registrar of Voters office in Redding on Oct. 30, 2024. Last: Election observers look over signatures at the Shasta County Clerk Registrar of Voters office in Redding on Oct. 30, 2024. Photos by Miguel Gutierrez Jr., CalMatters

Workers in Shasta are quitting. Tanner Johnson signed up to be an account clerk because he wanted to help protect democracy. “I felt called to do this job,” he said. But, after a little more than a year in the registrar’s office, he quit on Wednesday.

While elections may be the outrage du jour, officials and longtime residents in Shasta and beyond are concerned the damage to civic life will be permanent.

Voters are legally allowed to enter the office and observe the election process. Johnson said a lot of them, however, are on edge and “very angry.” “They want to catch us in a lie, so they’ll try to trick you into saying something,” he said. “A lot of times they’ll be secretly videotaping you or recording you.”

Ten of the registrar’s 21 employees have left, he said. Many of the people who remain are working their first election. “A lot of people who have left just because it’s not worth it,” he said. “I make $19.64 an hour. I’m not going to be a martyr for $19.60 an hour.”

While the most high-profile election conspiracies emanate from swing states like Michigan and Georgia, the battle over democracy continues to rage across California. Most California Republicans in Congress won’t commit to certifying the results of the presidential election. And in Shasta County, the epicenter of the state’s election denial movement since 2020, a fight over what was once a mundane bureaucracy – the registrar of voters office – threatens to tear the community apart.

With tensions mounting, the longtime registrar of voters, Cathy Darling Allen, retired early in May after being diagnosed with heart failure. To replace her, the county Board of Supervisors passed over Darling Allen’s longtime No. 2, Joanna Francescut, and hired a prosecutor with no election administration experience in June, with just months to go before the presidential election.

The new registrar, Tom Toller, impressed Republicans on the board with his stated willingness to stand up to the California Secretary of State’s Office. But just three months into his tenure, one of those supervisors, Patrick Jones, has already turned on him, according to the Redding Record Searchlight.

Jones said at a recent supervisors meeting that he met with Toller to see tests of the voting system, and alleged seeing election law violations and mistakes.

Toller originally agreed to meet with CalMatters on Tuesday, but when a reporter arrived, he was out sick.

Johnson said Francescut, who stayed on as deputy, handles much of the day-to-day work at the office. “He’s really busy dealing with the political aspect of it,” Johnson said. “People aren’t happy with him. County supervisors show up all the time.”

Francescut said the staff departures just compound the pressure. “This is a high stress job when things are going well, when things are going smooth, when we have staff trained,” she said.

“Nobody goes to school and says, ‘Hey, I wanna be an elections official.’ There isn’t official training on that. It’s a lot of on-the-job training, on-the-job experience,” Francescut said.

The departures worried Darling Allen. “I’m just very distressed that we have people at this time in the calendar so upset and so concerned about their own safety that they’re going to walk out,” she said. “But it’s not worth anyone’s life. And you know, no election official was hired as a first responder, and they certainly aren’t trained as first responders, nor are they paid as first responders.”

Darling Allen said they had to begin keeping narcan – a medication that reverses drug overdoses – in the office after other election offices, including Yuba County, received mail containing fentanyl.

She called Shasta a microcosm of what’s happening nationally. “You know, this is happening all over the place,” she said.

(CalMatters.org)

Barbara Borghesi by Helmut Newton for the Lavazza Calendar, 1993

BIG OIL SPENT $16.9 MILLION LOBBYING CALIFORNIA OFFICIALS IN SECOND QUARTER OF 2024

In 2023, the second-highest industry spending year on record after 2017, Big Oil spent around $25.4 million.

by Dan Bacher

Despite California’s “green” image, Big Oil continues to spend millions of dollars in lobbying California officials to thwart climate bills and other environmental legislation opposed by the oil industry, as well as leaning on state regulators to issue more oil drilling permits.

The oil and gas industry spent a total of $16,942,877 lobbying California officials in the third quarter of 2024. That's a record for one quarter by the industry, as far as I know.

The $15.3 million spent in the first two quarters — and the record spending of $16.9 in the third quarter — means that Big Oil has already surpassed its $26.2 million record set in 2017 for one year with $32.2 million spent in the first three quarters of 2024.

In 2023, the second-highest industry spending year on record after 2017, Big Oil spent around $25.4 million.

As usual, the Western States Petroleum Association, the trade organization for the oil and gas industry, and Chevron spent the bulk of oil lobbying money.

The Western States Petroleum Association spent $10,121,571, an amazing amount of money for just one quarter. Chevron spent $4,712,555 during the quarter, while Aera Energy spent $302,093, according to the raw data on the California Secretary of State’s website: cal-access.sos.ca.gov/

Since Governor Newson came to office in January 2019, a total of 16,719 total oil and gas drilling permits of all types have been approved by state regulators.

In the third quarter of 2024, zero California permits to drill conventional oil and gas wells were approved, but 33 out of 34 permits were issued to drill wells using extreme enhanced oil recovery techniques (EOR) in the notorious Cymric Oilfield in Kern County, Consumer Watchdog and FracTracker Alliance reported.

The 34 approvals by CalGEM, the state’s oil and gas regulator, represent a rise of 580% over the third quarter of 2023. Sentinel Peak Resources California received the 33 approvals.

Those approvals were among the 930 oil drilling permits approved in the first nine months of the year that include 69 new well permits and 861 oil well rework permits.

In the second quarter of 2024, The oil industry spent around $8.3 million on lobbying in published disclosures. Aera Energy and California Resources Corporation, Chevron, and the Western States Petroleum Association (WSPA) spent a combined $6.8 million alone.

Chevron topped the oil industry spending with $4,070,286 pumped into lobbying, followed by the Western States Petroleum Association with $1,782,919 and Aera Energy with $784,852.

The remaining top ten oil industry spenders were: Philipps 66 with $221,107; Marathon Petroleum with $202,215; California Resources Corporation with $190,398; Synergy Oil and Gas with $140,250; California Independent Petroleum Association with $118,065; Exxon Mobil with $110,605 and BP with $84,025.

WSPA and Big Oil wield their power in 8 major ways: through (1) lobbying; (2) campaign spending; (3) serving on and putting shills on regulatory panels; (4) creating Astroturf groups; (5) working in collaboration with media; (6) creating alliances with labor unions; (7) contributing to non profit organizations; and (8) sponsoring awards ceremonies, including those for legislators and journalists.

WSPA and Big Oil have for years worked closely with media outlets and more recently have sponsored awards for legislators and journalists. For example, the Western States Petroleum Association was one of the “lede sponsors” of the Sacramento Press Club’s Annual Journalism Awards for the past two years: sacpressclub.org/…

ON-LINE COMMENT OF THE DAY

America stands for decay, imbecility, and tastelessness. And it’s not all on “the Party of Chaos” either. The “official” pretend-opposition party pachyderms is part of the awful gaming and hoaxing of America, too. It’s all pretense: theater (of the absurd). “Saving Democracy” … “Make America Great Again” … “Drain the Swamp”—a sick joke; all of it.

In the words of Col. Douglas Machregor, “We need to understand how we got where we are today. [And] I don’t see anybody talking about that.” The country is schizophrenic, hopelessly broken, and can’t go on any longer. Soon, the big banks that resell government IOUs (the “primary dealers” of government notes) will not be able to sell any of it, and then the music will stop.

THE WHOLE THING IS A JOKE, really. All the body armor these guys wear at the plate these days. Even if you hit them, it doesn’t hurt.

— Goose Gossage

MUCH WILL BE MADE of Kamala Harris’ race and gender. Much will be made of the fact that she is not Donald Trump. Much emotion will surround her campaign. And then, whether she wins or loses, nothing much will change. You won’t be able to tell by looking at the machinery of the empire who took office in January. Its behavior will remain the same.

— Caitlin Johnstone

GATSBY/TRUMP, A CENTURY APART

by Steve Heilig

I recently reread, for the third time, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s totemic novel “The Great Gatsby,” originally published in 1926. He wrote most of it in 1924, one century ago. In recent years it has begun to seem all too relevant.

The first time I read it was back in my high school days, when it was assigned reading, but I have no real recollection of it striking me in the way that, say, Jack Kerouac, Kurt Vonnegut, Ken Kesey or Richard Brautigan books did at that point. Fitzgerald was writing about stuffy wealthy East Coast yachting types during the 1920s fabled Jazz Age, not the counterculture figures I was fascinated by and looked up to and even hoped to emulate at that point. A very boring film version of Gatsby arrived to only confirm my suspicion that Fitzgerald was for nerds. After all, hadn’t none other than Bob Dylan mocked him, or rather his devoted readers, as squares, in “Ballad of A Thin Man”: “You’ve read all of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s books / you’re very well-read, it’s well known…”? And Hemingway made mean mincemeat of his supposed friend and mentor Scotty in “A Moveable Feast” as well.

A couple decades later I came across a copy of Gatsby in my piles of books, started reading, and got sucked right in, finishing it in a day. This time I was enthralled and impressed by the skilled writing itself, and saw why many have called it The Great American Novel. So I sought out some of Fitzgerald’s other novels and short stories and was duly impressed again by the evocative writing. The posthumously published collection of non-fiction “The Crack Up” revealed yet more of his brilliance but especially his tragedy as an alcoholic seemingly doomed to an early demise. The unfinished final novel “The Last Tycoon” was considered by some his greatest work, but he was dead, after an attempt to revive his career and finances in the Hollywood “industry,” in 1940 at just 44 years old.

Perhaps most striking to me was this brief bit of dialogue which appears near the start of the novel, as the central characters are casually prepping to party in a waterfront mansion:

“Civilization’s going to pieces,” broke out Tom violently. “I’ve gotten to be a terrible pessimist about things. Have you read ‘The Rise of the Colored Empires’ by this man Goddard?”

“Why, no,” I answered, rather surprised by his tone.

“Well, it’s a fine book, and everybody ought to read it. The idea is if we don’t look out the white race will be — will be utterly submerged. It’s all scientific stuff; it’s been proved.”…

“Tom’s getting very profound,” said Daisy, with an expression of unthoughtful sadness…

What this brief passage presents is an early depiction of “replacement theory.” The book by “this man Goddard” was a real one, titled “The Rising Tide of Color Against White World Supremacy” that received much notice at the time. The Irish and Italians had already been the subject of “immigrant panic” and as that settled down some darker threats to “the white race” were coming into the crosshairs of the elite - unless of course they were reliable and non-threatening gardeners, cooks, chauffeurs, or more distant food producers and other laborers - the very people they relied upon to make their lives so cushy, not to mention keeping the costs of food, construction and maintenance, and so much more much less expensive than would otherwise be the case.

Sound familiar? There should be no need to go into all the current parallels, other than to note that using the threat of foreign invasion via immigration, legal or not, has a long and ignominious history as a political tactic. Crime is the most viscerally effective specter utilized. But as violent crime has been steadily decreasing, with blips, for decades while ethnic diversity increases, one might just as or more accurately argue that the more immigrants, the safer we all are. Not to mention all that very tasty food. But it’s been shown that fear of crime increases the further one is isolated from it, and thus the heavily-armed folks behind multiple gates and guards. Ineffective alarm systems have made a few entrepreneurs very wealthy. Still, the “scary immigrant” trope too often works, for as President Lyndon B. Johnson, a very skilled strategist until he wasn’t, advised in the 1960s, “If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’ve been picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.”

I grew up among the coastal wealthy. I heard the same type of arguments mocked in Gatsby in some yes, waterfront mansions, with nice boats docked out front. Most of the yachting set knew nobody, or very few, people who weren’t white. Our lovely Southern California town was like the Deep South in that nonwhites walking or driving through town would often get pulled over and questioned, as I witnessed more than once. Racist comments were casually common. With the rise of Trump they became moreso. And thus the “build a wall” slogan was oft-uttered. In discussion, if one pointed out that such walls rarely if ever worked in any appreciable manner, caused human suffering and environmental disruption, and that soon enough Trump’s wall-building was exposed as a corrupt grift as his chosen contractors were convicted, the discussion went silent. No minds were changed. Trump’s subsequent sabotage of a bipartisan immigration reform deal for his own political purposes was also a conversation killer. One couldn’t even joke about it; when I challenged one old pal’s assertion that “our culture is being erased” by pointing out that I’d lived in an extremely diverse city for decades and loved it, and asked “What are you afraid of, burritos?” that seemed the end of that friendship.

One of Fitzgerald’s most famed passages is found in his story “The Rich Boy” published the same year as The Great Gatsby: “Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me. They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft where we are hard, and cynical where we are trustful, in a way that, unless you are born rich, is very difficult to understand. They think, deep in their hearts, that they are better than we are…”.

Of course this is not universally true. Some of my best friends are very rich and don’t feel that way, and are some of the best people I’ve known. They don’t want to show off, do good work in the world, and live their lives outside of any limelight. And they don’t look down on those of different skin color or culture. But when I read the history of wealth in our nation and beyond, and witness what, say, our newer tech would-be overlords say and do and prioritize, Fitzgerald’s fictionalized observations and generalizations are undeniably true to a considerable degree.

I’m typing this just before the national election, which could go either way. But the attitudes Fitzgerald lampooned in his Great American Novel, alas, will be with us regardless. If, in worst case, that results in huge disruption to lives and the economy, if not outright civil warfare, nobody can say we weren’t warned. Like Daisy, maybe the most many of us will be able to come up with in response is some form of “unthoughtful sadness.”

READING J.D. VANCE

by Deborah Friedell

In the first pages of ‘Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis’ (2016), J.D. Vance admits that he’s “especially skilful” at charming older men. His mother has had many boyfriends, as well as five husbands, and Vance spent his childhood “navigating various father figures.” He flattered them, “pretended to like them,” and would pretend to like whatever it was that they liked:

“With Steve, a midlife-crisis sufferer with an earring to prove it, I pretended earrings were cool – so much so that he thought it appropriate to pierce my ear, too. With Chip, an alcoholic police officer who saw my earring as a sign of ‘girliness,’ I had thick skin and loved police cars. With Ken, an odd man who proposed to Mom three days into their relationship, I was a kind brother to his two children. But none of these things was really true. I hated earrings. I hated police cars and I knew that Ken’s children would be out of my life by the next year.”

Vance’s parents, Beverly and Donald Bowman, separated “around the time I started walking,” and he went years without seeing his father. “He became kind of a phantom.” His mother wanted to “erase any memory of his existence” and so changed her son’s name from James Donald Bowman to James David Hamel: “Hamel” was the name of her next husband; she wanted to preserve the “J.D.,” but the Donald had to go. He’s only been known as “J.D. Vance” – sometimes with dots, sometimes without – since 2014, when he changed his name to honor his maternal grandparents.

Really, he wishes that he could have just stayed a Bowman. He’s been told that his father was a heavy drinker who hit his mother, but that doesn’t faze him – “I suspect that they were physically abusive to each other in the way that Mom and most of her men were: a bit of pushing, some plate throwing, but nothing more.” In 2021, he told pupils at a Christian high school that

“…recognition that marriage was sacred, I think, was a really powerful thing that held a lot of families together, and when it disappeared, unfortunately, a lot of kids suffered. And this is one of the great tricks that I think the sexual revolution pulled on the American populace, which is this idea that, OK, these marriages were fundamentally, you know, they were maybe even violent, but certainly they were unhappy. And so getting rid of them, and making it easier for people to shift spouses like they change their underwear, that’s going to make people happier in the long term. And maybe it worked out for the moms and dads, though I’m sceptical. But it really didn’t work out for the kids of those marriages. And I think that’s what all of us should be honest about. We’ve run this experiment in real time and what we have is a lot of very, very real family dysfunction that’s making our kids unhappy.”

Donald Bowman died last year, and his obituary remembers him as a “family man” and “spiritual father and mentor to many.” After his divorce from Vance’s mother, he stopped drinking, became an evangelical Christian and started his own construction business, “building beautiful custom homes.” His second marriage, to Cheryl Bowman, “the love of his life,” lasted for 35 years, until his death – Vance remembers seeing them together, and was struck by their “almost jarring serenity,” the way they “rarely raised their voices at each other and never resorted to the brutal insults that were commonplace in Mom’s house.” Why couldn’t Vance’s mother have hung in there? Why had the law made it easy for her to dissolve not just a contractual obligation, but a covenant before God? (Vance converted to Catholicism in 2019.)

Instead she became “increasingly erratic,” which Vance sometimes seems to suggest is the plight of all single parents. Once, in the car with her, “she sped up to what seemed like a hundred miles per hour and told me that she was going to crash the car and kill us both.” She lost a nursing job after she rollerbladed through the hospital emergency room, high on painkillers. Vance likes to connect his mother’s drug problem to US immigration policy, claiming in one campaign ad that he “nearly lost my mother to the poison coming across our border,” though it seems that she mostly stole opiates from her patients. To pass a drug test to keep her nursing license, she made Vance give her a sample of his urine. But “of all the things that I hated about my childhood, nothing compared to the revolving door of father figures.” His mother seems to have fought with all of them, and Vance was sometimes drawn in. He was nine years old when he punched one of his stepfathers in the face: “My intervention somehow ended the fight.” He remembers “always walking on eggshells … a stepdad or a boyfriend could come home from work in a bad mood, and it would be like a battle royal for the next four or five hours.” It has left him easily triggered: “The fight-or-flight response is a destructive constant companion … the part of the brain that deals with stress and conflict is always activated – the switch flipped indefinitely.” He worries that he’s “hard-wired for conflict” – that any “perceived slight” might set him off. He thinks his own marriage would be a “radioactive situation” if his wife, Usha, hadn’t “learned how to manage me”: “The sad fact is that I couldn’t do it without Usha. Even at my best, I’m a delayed explosion – I can be defused, but only with skill and precision.” He once considered trying therapy but couldn’t face it: “Talking to some stranger about my feelings made me want to vomit.”

In ‘Hillbilly Elegy,’ Vance is still trying to work it out – what was his mother’s fault? What was America’s? He started writing the memoir while he was a student at Yale Law School, where he studied with Amy Chua, author of ‘Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother’ (2011), which explores the reason “Chinese parents raise such stereotypically successful kids.” His book, which Chua helped him to get published, is a kind of counterpart: why does the American white working class produce so many losers? Particularly dysfunctional, he argues, are his own people – the “Scots-Irish hillbillies” who settled in Eastern Kentucky. He thinks that it wasn’t only his mother who “lacked even a modicum of temper control,” but nearly all the adults he grew up around – “seeing people insult, scream, and sometimes physically fight was just a part of our life.”

These days Vance refers to his hillbilly brethren as “very hardworking people, and they’re very good people,” and he blames Kamala Harris for shipping their jobs to China and Mexico, and illegal immigrants for seizing on what little is left (when not too busy fricasseeing their cats). But in his memoir he argues that perfectly decent jobs are in abundance, but “too many young men immune to hard work” are making “good jobs impossible to fill for any length of time.” One summer he worked in a tile warehouse and saw first-hand a “young man with every reason to work – a wife-to-be to support and a baby on the way – carelessly tossing aside a good job with excellent health insurance.” He often didn’t bother to turn up, and when he did, took too many bathroom breaks. “You can walk through a town where 30 per cent of the young men work fewer than twenty hours a week and find not a single person aware of his own laziness.” In his grandparents’ hometown in Kentucky, there’s “at least one man who can find the time to make eight children but can’t find the time to support them.” And it wasn’t just that they had no work ethic: “Our homes are a chaotic mess.” “Our eating and exercise habits seem designed to send us to an early grave, and it’s working.” “We scream and yell at each other like we’re spectators at a football game.” “We don’t study as children, and we don’t make our kids study when we’re parents.” “At least one member of the family uses drugs – sometimes the father, sometimes the mother, sometimes both. At especially stressful times, we’ll hit and punch each other, all in front of the rest of the family, including young children.” “We talk to our children about responsibility, but we never walk the walk.”

The white working class needed to admit that its culture was defective and to emulate people who were doing better. Chinese immigrants didn’t have more money than they did, but, unlike his mother, they knew not to put Pepsi in baby bottles. He noted that girls were doing better than boys and seemed to sympathize with cat ladies: “The reason many young working-class women aren’t getting married isn’t that the tax code gives them incentives to stay single. It’s that too many of their male counterparts aren’t worth marrying.”

Vance thinks that the “trials of my youth instilled a debilitating self-doubt.” He’s often unsure that he’s doing the right thing, or that he really believes what he believes. One of the more remarkable sentences in Hillbilly Elegy is “I’ll never forget the time I convinced myself that I was gay.” Before becoming a Catholic, he’d been both a “devoted convert” to Young Earth Creationism (“I learned about millennialist prophecy and convinced myself that the world would end in 2007”) and an atheist who revered Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens, and was certain (until he wasn’t) that only “dumb people were Christians.”

Vance knows he’s good at appearing confident, even cocky, but suggests that it’s really “bitterness masquerading as arrogance.” He copes by latching on to the most powerful person in the room. For most of his childhood, that was his maternal grandmother, Mamaw Vance, the “pistol-packing lunatic” who was the head of his family.

In speeches, and in the Netflix movie of his life, Vance credits her with saving him from the “grim future” that otherwise awaited him, one in which he never leaves Ohio or tells off Taylor Swift. She made him do his homework and kept him away from the local kids who smoked marijuana, threatening that “if she saw me in the presence of any person on the banned list, she would run him over with her car.” He believed that she would do it: as a child she’d shot a man in the leg to stop him from stealing her family’s cow; as a young woman, unhappy in her marriage, she once “calmly retrieved a gasoline canister from the garage, poured it all over her husband, lit a match and dropped it on his chest.” Vance’s mother, then eleven, “jumped into action to put out the fire and save his life.”

He comes close to acknowledging that his grandparents’ “violent marriage” damaged his mother, but ultimately decides that he’s proud of them for honoring their wedding vows. They sometimes lived in separate houses, but never divorced.

At Yale, where Vance felt like a “cultural alien,” he learned that he could entertain his classmates with Mamaw and Papaw stories. He’s still doing it: at the Republican National Convention he spoke of clearing out his grandmother’s house after her death and finding nineteen loaded handguns. He gave this a patriotic spin:

“Now, the thing is, they were stashed all over her house. Under her bed, in her closet. In the silverware drawer. And we wondered what was going on, and it occurred to us that towards the end of her life, Mamaw couldn’t get around very well. And so this frail old woman made sure that no matter where she was, she was within arm’s length of whatever she needed to protect her family. That’s who we fight for. That’s American spirit.”

In ‘Hillbilly Elegy,’ Vance watches TV and plays a “nerdy collectible card game called Magic” but otherwise seems to have few hobbies or interests. “I never found a passion,” he says. “I’m just not the sort of person that is ever going to feel like that.” He wasn’t interested in politics, though sometimes says that his first inkling that he might lean conservative came when he worked part-time at a grocery store as a teenager. He resented the way customers “gamed the welfare system,” as he saw it: “Our drug-addict neighbor would buy T-bone steaks, which I was too poor to buy for myself but was forced by Uncle Sam to buy for someone else.” His grades in high school weren’t impressive – he says that he nearly dropped out – and when he wasn’t sure what to do afterwards, a cousin in the Marines persuaded him to enlist. “I knew that, most of all, I had no other choice. There was college, or nothing, or the Marines, and I didn’t like either of the first two options.” He credits the military for teaching him what his family should have – “the Marine Corps assumes maximum ignorance from its enlisted folks. It assumes that no one has taught you anything about physical fitness, personal hygiene or personal finance” – all true in his case, and he’s grateful. He was assigned to public affairs – they taught him how to speak with “TV cameras shoved in my face.” (He never saw combat.) The GI Bill paid for him to go to Ohio State, and he decided that he wanted to do well enough to get into law school – not because he had any real interest in the law, he says, but he wanted to make money, and he didn’t have a better idea of how to go about it. Growing up, “the ‘rich kids’ were born to either doctors or lawyers, and I didn’t want to work with blood.” There weren’t many Republicans in his Yale class, but his classmates thought of him as a nice one.

He wrote in the New York Times about his admiration for Barack Obama, and a classmate, Sofia Nelson, remembers that whatever Vance’s qualms about abortion, “what he relayed to me is what his grandmother had taught him, which is that you can never know what situation a woman is in when she’s making that difficult decision. And it’s not the government’s business, essentially.”

The narrator of ‘Hillbilly Elegy’ doesn’t sound like someone who’s intending to run for office – otherwise, presumably, Vance would have cut all those sentences about the laziness of poor white people and added some about being called to public service. He was still working on the book after he finished law school, uncertain about his next steps.

The billionaire investor Peter Thiel – who once answered a question about his interest in anti-ageing blood transfusions with the words “I am not a vampire” – doesn’t appear in the book, though he’s listed in the acknowledgments. But Vance now says that hearing Thiel speak on campus in 2011 “remains the most significant moment of my time at Yale Law School” – he met his wife there too. Vance sent Thiel a mash note afterwards (one of Vance’s former friends remembers him spending hours googling variations of “PeterThiel@” until he found his email address), which led to a meeting, then a job in Silicon Valley at Thiel’s firm Mithril Capital. In ‘The Contrarian: Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley’s Pursuit of Power’ (2021), Max Chafkin argues that Thiel treats “life like a chess game” with ‘his friends, his business partners and his portfolio companies as means to an end.” His political philosophy is complicated and not entirely coherent – but, in the main, according to Chafkin, it “combines an obsession with technological progress with nationalist politics” that are sometimes indistinguishable from white supremacy. He’s often described as an ultra-libertarian, but he argues that the US should spend much more money on the military, especially via a tech company he co-owns. He’s also a Christian, and Vance has said that Thiel brought him to Christ – listening to Thiel speak and wondering “where his religious belief came from” was the first step, he claims, on an intellectual journey that led to the Roman Catholic Church, and also, eventually, to Donald Trump.

Hillbilly Elegy was published in the summer of 2016, just as Trump was being confirmed as the Republican nominee for president. While still working for Thiel, Vance put himself forward as the man who could explain to liberal America why rural conservatives were backing a decadent New Yorker who was pledging to cut taxes for billionaires. Vance said that he didn’t expect Trump to beat Hillary Clinton, and wrote – many times, in many places – that he thought Trump was unfit for office and that his “actual policy proposals, such as they are, range from immoral to absurd.” But he also acknowledged that “parts of his candidacy really … spoke to me” – Trump’s chief Republican challenger, Jeb Bush, wouldn’t admit how much his family had screwed up in Iraq and Afghanistan, and Vance said that his relatives enjoyed seeing Trump “raising the proverbial middle finger to a lot of the people that they wish they could have raised their middle finger to but they didn’t have the platform to do it.” The New York Times gave Vance a column. In the New Republic, he was called “the man of the hour, maybe the year,” appearing on almost every news channel as a “kind of Rosetta Stone for blue America to interpret that most mysterious of species: the economically precarious white voter.” When Vance announced that he was moving to Ohio, the rumor was that he was eyeing a run for office, probably a senate seat. Then Trump won – surprise! There was no path for a Never Trumper to win a Republican primary, even with Thiel’s gazillions behind him.

Vance stopped writing for the New York Times, deleted dozens of social media posts and started appearing on right-wing podcasts. With backing from Thiel, he launched his own venture capital fund, and spent the Trump years getting rich, becoming Catholic and reckoning with the failures of liberalism. He announced that American institutions (all of them) were so corrupted by “garbage liberal elite culture” that it was necessary for conservatives “of incredible courage” to “seize the institutions of the left and turn them against the left.” The media, universities, corporations – all of them were opposed to Christian virtue, but they didn’t have to be. Vance had been inspired by “Viktor Orbán’s approach in Hungary,” and decided that “his way has to be the model for us.” It was obvious, he argued, that the “universities in our country are fundamentally corrupt and dedicated to deceit and lies, not to the truth” – so why not take them over, as Orbán had done? Or use tax policy to incentivize people to have more children (and punish those who don’t), because “we want more babies because children are good, and we believe children are good because we’re not sociopaths”? At the National Conservatism Conference in 2019, he said that “if you think people not having families, not getting married, feeling more isolated, are problems, then you need to be willing to use political power when it’s appropriate to actually solve those problems.” He knew that what he was proposing might sound “pretty wild, pretty far out there,” but ‘if you’re not recognizing in this moment how crazy things have gotten, then I think you’re ultimately not serious about taking back the country.”

In 2021, Thiel arranged a meeting for Vance with Trump at Mar-a-Lago. It was less than a month since Trump had left the White House, and much of the Republican Party leadership thought that he was finished. They were embarrassed by the January 6 insurrection (whatever they would say later) and there wasn’t a modern example of a president losing an election only to win again four years later. Trump felt so abandoned by the GOP that he told the chairwoman of the Republican National Committee that he was going to start his own party. In 2022, when he announced his third presidential bid, not even Donald Jr or Ivanka turned up. The White House reporter Jonathan Karl was struck by the “strikingly lame excuses” of the many no-shows, such as Sean Spicer, Trump’s first press secretary, who claimed he hadn’t “adjusted to daylight savings time yet,” nine days after the clocks had gone back. According to Karl, in his book ‘Tired of Winning’:

“By all accounts, Trump had a very difficult time transitioning back to life as a private citizen. People who interacted with him at Mar-a-Lago during those first few weeks universally described him as being in a dark and foul mood, and most of his friends and advisers simply avoided him. Mar-a-Lago members would give the dejected former president a round of applause when he showed up for dinner on the patio, but on at least one occasion, he got up from the table in the middle of his meal and left without explanation. The man who’d played hundreds of rounds of golf as president found it difficult all of a sudden to make it through eighteen holes, picking up his ball in the middle of one round and going home.”

Vance made a bet that while the Republican leadership might have wanted to move on from Trump, Republican voters were going to stick by him. Supposedly Trump’s first words to Vance at their Mar-a-Lago meeting were “You said some nasty shit about me.” Vance apologized and spent the next three years making it up to him. He wasn’t in the Senate long enough to sponsor any legislation, but by the time Trump picked him as his running mate, he’d become known as the man who “defends Trumpism better than Trump,” the most loyal of all the would-be vice presidents. And so he is, for now.

"Gray and Gold", 1942. John Rogers Cox (American, 1915–1990). Oil on Canvas, 91.5 × 151.8 cm. Cleveland Museum of Art.

ESCAPE FROM PSYCHOPATHOCRACY

by James Kunstler

You thought Halloween was over, but somehow the horror show won’t stop, and it’s not so much fun anymore. Those oversized ghouls, werewolves, and dead souls you erected in the front yard, like shrines to wickedness, represent something truly roiling and moiling around the zeitgeist of this troubled land: the ruling Party of Chaos. Look at what they have done to you and what they are still doing. Hoaxing you, sucking the life-blood out of you, and lying about everything. Wrecking the country.

Why does it seem that the Democratic Party is in it solely to remain in power? I will tell you: because it controls the money-flows to the vast cadres of a vicious parasitical bureaucracy and its support system of outside orgs that commit crimes and make war on the rest of us. It’s called “the blob” for a reason. It’s exactly like that monster out of the 1950s horror movies, a shape-shifting leviathan that devours everything in its path with only one purpose, to grow ever larger until it consumes… everything.

In my state of New York last week, the DEC authorities sent a swat team to seize a man and woman’s pet squirrel and raccoon and then killed the animals. Why? Because they could. How is that different from the DOJ swatting and seizing a grandmother for walking through the US capitol building and then stuffing her in prison for the rest of her natural life on misdemeanor charges? It’s not different. They are both demonstrations of deliberate cruelty — and that’s why the squirrel story resonated so widely around the country. You know exactly what it says: we can take whatever is dear to you… your pets… your livelihood… your freedom… your life.

Who failed to notice that candidate Kamala Harris was unable to articulate any coherent notion about how her government might manage its business beyond some empty nostrums about “joy,” and “turning the page?” Because the party’s actual purpose, which it hides and lies about, is just to push you around, tell you what to do and what to think, and to punish you if you don’t comply — in other words, to exercise despotic power. It can’t do anything else with that power.

It lacks the competence to manage an economy from the top down, and it certainly won’t allow the countless volitional transactions of people at liberty to produce and sell things of value on their own. It will go to war against anything to steal more money: some pitiful foreign kleptocracy of country… the liberty-minded people of our own country… against sound ideas, proven principles, standards of decency, and, not unusually, against reality itself.

And now you and I face the ordeal of an election that, by design, will be nearly impossible to audit, will remain inconclusive for weeks, and subject to endless dispute. Why, because it serves the purpose of the Party of Chaos, which is… chaos! The scheme was to introduce so many devices of uncertainty as to guarantee political paralysis. Why else would you use batteries of hugely expensive computerized vote-counting machines that can be easily hacked, untraceable mail-in ballots with no chains of custody, the automatic registration of non-citizens, and laws (as in California) to literally forbid the requirement of voter-ID?

This was the work of lawfare terrorist Marc Elias — with hundreds of millions of dollars at his disposal, some from the government itself, a bunch from the party, and some from rogue billionaires such as George Soros, Bill Gates, and Reid Hoffman, and then disbursed surreptitiously through hundreds of NGOs — to elect officials such as Secretaries of State and district attorneys who will ignore or bend the law, to pay off state legislators around the country to change voting rules, to hire brigades of ballot “harvesters,” and to file ruinous lawsuits against anyone who objects to these pranks. It is an enormous, dastardly machine designed to deprive you of your consent to be governed. It is the work of political psychopaths.

You’ve no doubt heard about one of the blob’s instrumental players, Rep. Jamie Raskin’s audacious plan to un-do the election, should Donald Trump happen to generate a landslide vote that overwhelms Marc Elias’s ballot-box-stuffing operation. The Raskin scheme is to disqualify Mr. Trump as an “insurrectionist” by an act of Congress before the January 6 certification ceremony. Of course, that would suppose a Democratic majority in Congress, which is unlikely to be the case.

But Mr. Raskin put his foot in his mouth so deeply that he nearly choked to death last week when, discussing election matters with entertainer Bill Maher on TV, Mr. Raskin stated that he would accept the results only of a free and fair election — with himself left to determine whether it was free and fair. This, you understand, is exactly what he accuses Donald Trump of doing in 2020: thinking-and-saying that the election might not have been free and fair.

The problem for Mr. Raskin is that this sort of “election denial” he exhibits is exactly the basis for accusing Mr. Trump of “insurrection” in the first place. Thus: Mr. Raskin has just made a potential “insurrectionist” of himself. What’s more, as if the Jack Smith Case in Judge Chutkan’s DC court was not already compromised enough by the SCOTUS decision on presidential immunity, Mr. Trump’s lawyers can now call Jamie Raskin as a witness in the case, play the video of his remarks to Bill Maher, and ask him how expressing doubt about the freeness or fairness of an election amounts to “insurrection.”

One way or another, looks like we’re in for a hard, anxious winter. Threats galore loom concerning possible blob / Party of Chaos mischief ahead, designed to disorder our national life: false flags prompting the imposition of martial law… aggressive censorship and cancellation of free-speaking regime opponents… deployment of Antifa mobs against civil order, with violence, looting, arson. This symbiotic enemy of the people is desperate to evade accountability for the crimes they’ve already committed as officials running institutions: abuse of power, conspiracy to deprive many citizens of their civil rights, perhaps even treason. They’re capable of anything. They must be defeated.

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Inside Five of America’s Strangest Polling Places

ISRAELI bombardment damaged an already crippled major hospital in the northern Gaza Strip on Monday, injuring medical staff and patients, local officials said, a week after Israeli forces withdrew from the complex and detained dozens of people, including medical workers.

The Israelis “continue to bomb and destroy Kamal Adwan Hospital” in Jabaliya, a densely populated city just north of Gaza City, the Gazan health ministry said on Monday, in a statement it titled “a distress call that may be the last.” The bombardment affected all the hospital facilities, caused “many” injuries among medical staff and patients and prevented medical staff from moving between departments to treat their injured colleagues, it said.

The director of Kamal Adwan, Dr. Hussam Abu Safiyeh, said in an interview with the Al Jazeera that the hospital had come under continuous shelling for at least three hours on Monday. “I can’t leave the floor I am in,” he said. “I was told a few of our medical teams have been injured on other floors but no one can reach them,” he added.

Both he and the health ministry said the hospital was targeted directly. It was not clear what kinds of munitions were used.

(NY Times)

SALVATION FANTASIES

by Pankaj Mishra

For decades now the prolonged theater of US presidential elections has attracted a global audience keen to be educated in the arcana of the electoral college and the psephology of the “swing” states. These millions of spectators have been markedly partisan, wistfully hoping for victory to the Democratic candidate and a foreign policy that at least acknowledges the decent opinions of mankind before proceeding to disregard them.

In the early 2000s official mendacity about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, boosted by a compliant American media, created a vast global reservoir of cynicism about democratic American institutions and propelled the United States itself into the post-truth age. The election of the first Black man as US president, after the catastrophic years of the “war on terror” and the financial crisis, briefly sparked hopes of a broad correction. Barack Obama, who had opposed the Iraq War, quickly became the “biggest celebrity in the world” (in the deprecating words of his hapless rival John McCain), and his elevation to the White House, accompanied by slogans of hope and change and partly enabled by the politicization of young Americans, seemed an opportunity to bring fresh energy and imagination to US politics and culture.

As it happened, Obama, safeguarding Wall Street and polishing his personal brand, bequeathed to the United States and the world a volatile demagogue. Some relief was inspired by Joe Biden's narrow win in 2020 and his early economic reconfigurations, but it could not survive his posture abroad, which was in crucial respects — confronting China, securing a “deal” between Israel and Saudi Arabia — a continuation of Trump’s. Events in the last year have now conclusively ended US elections' emotional and moral sway over the world.

A poll cited recently in ‘Foreign Affairs’ reveals cratering support for the US and an increased preference for China among prominent Asian countries as partner. But statistics alone won't register the depth and scale of the suspicion built over more than two decades — that, by intensifying misbegotten foreign entanglements in the midst of economic decline, the United States has damaged its own institutions and social fabric, in addition to undermining international law and squandering its prestige and authority. Further, a change of occupants in the White House is no longer sufficient even to temporize against the dark and uncontrollable forces unleashed by the world's most powerful society in severe polycrisis.

The most recent embodiment of a hectically flailing superpower for many outside the US is a Democratic president addicted to arming Israel, a reckless American protégé who pursues total war — the deliberate targeting of civilian lives and infrastructure as well as military enemies — on multiple fronts. Any great power, let alone a self-proclaimed upholder of a “rules-based liberal international order,” that cannot hold disorder within limits quickly loses legitimacy, and the implications for both American interests and image even in the present are stark.

But Israel, combining industrialized mass killing with cultural devastation, is bringing forth, with some help from Russia, another wounded nationalism seeking permanent security, a new “age of extremes.” As in the 20th century's seminal calamity, World War I, an extensive moral and legal arson is quickening decisive steps toward authoritarianism in several Western societies. Politicians and businessmen across the ideological spectrum openly violate long-established norms and protocols of public life, from a Tory home secretary in Britain egging on far-right mobs and the owner of X promoting the Great Replacement theory to Germany's foreign minister, of the progressive Green Party, claiming to have seen a video of a Hamas militant raping an Israeli woman (no such video is known to exist).

That Biden, an old-machine politician who has received more money from Israel lobby groups than anyone in Congress since 1990, should fail to perceive the insidious dynamic of nihilism is no great surprise. Those who noticed him bear-hugging Indian prime minister Narendra Modi, in his attempt to globally mobilize democracy against autocracy, had already written him off as a walking ideological delusion from the cold war who is unable to spot the world’s new constellation of forces (which make, among other things, “democratic” India underwrite autocratic Russia's war on Ukraine). Compulsively provisioning Israel's massacres while chanting “cease-fire” over several months, Biden and his secretary of state confirm the widespread feeling that, as the famous internal memo to Robert S. McNamara in 1967 put it, “the Establishment' is out of its mind.”

What's more unsettling (and clarifying) to a global audience is that mainstream journalistic cultures in the US offer no intelligent restraint on the collective lurch, under a Democratic president, toward modern history's best-signposted abyss. News outlets covering Israel's “self-defense” continue to amplify, even after a calamitous year, the delusions and fabrications of the White House and the State Department, in a grim repeat of the intellectual and moral fiascos of the “war on terror.” Deliberately turning away from US-assisted carnage abroad, many liberal intellectual elites stress the urgency of mobilizing against Trump's plan to extirpate democracy at home. But recoiling from Trump's frankly malevolent fantasies, they keep collapsing into fresh illusions.

No other conclusion could be drawn by foreign observers as they witnessed an extraordinary recent spectacle: liberal American commentators vying with one another to hail Biden, visibly insentient and driven into retirement by ruthless party apparatchiks and donors, for his “sacrifice,” and to confect “joy” over Harris, an instantly forgettable presidential candidate in 2020 and subsequently confirmed during her tenure as vice-president as a political vacancy.

The global romance with Western political leaders of non-Western ancestry has already soured. Obama heralded a “post-racial” age, but after the demagogic flourishes of Suella Braverman, Kemi Badenoch, and Vivek Ramaswamy, politicians of diverse origins incite fear of a sinister regression rather than hope for social justice. Scribbling the words “FINISH THEM!” on an Israeli artillery shell. bound for Lebanon, Nikki Haley, the second Indian American to compete for the Republican Party's presidential nomination, helped outline what a “brown Nazi” might look like in the future. Whether crowing about her endorsement by Dick Cheney, a torch-bearer for torture; promising to shoot intruders in her home; or vowing to make the US military “the strongest, most lethal fighting force in the world,” the first Indian American presidential candidate from the Democratic Party shows few signs of defying the steadily dominant far-right ideals of violent hypermasculinity.

At the same time, Biden's last-minute replacement seems miserably unequal, as she hides from her own courtiers in the media, to the unprecedented demands arising from the threats of far-right tyranny in the US. And hardly any resources for a renewal seem to exist among an aging liberal American political and media class. Its global prominence, as is clear now, was earned with raw power, during decades of unimpeded American hegemony, rather than superior intelligence and creativity. Not even the challenge of China, long predicted and now formidable, compels policy — and opinion-makers to shake off complacency and articulate a novel political and cultural vision.

Desperate to avoid a second and potentially lethal Trump presidency, they frantically generate, for the second time in four years, some new fantasies of salvation. But the savior they offered in 2020, a candidate even then showing clear signs of decrepitude, has revealed himself before a stunned global audience to be an obsessive enabler of a mass murder spree across the Middle East. Having confirmed that there is no such thing as a lesser evil, the US presidential elections won't ever command the sentimental hopes of the world. Just as well: skepticism and stoicism would be better shields against the coming disorder.

(London Review of Books)

ISRAEL IS KILLING WHOLE FAMILIES IN GAZA—WITH WEAPONS MADE IN AMERICA

by James Bamford

With half the world between them, there seems little to connect the bucolic Iowa village of Middletown, nestled along the Mississippi River, with the macabre moonscape of bombed-out apartment buildings on top of rotting corpses in the densely populated Tel al-Hawa (“Hill of the Wind”) neighborhood in the southern part of Gaza City. But the two have long been intimately entwined, especially since the morning of January 29, 2024, though few have come to realize it.

That morning, after a night of bombings, the Israeli military was planning another deadly assault on Tel al-Hawa, and at 9:32 am it issued an order for the residents to evacuate immediately. Among those who heeded the order were Bashar Hamada and his family, who had evacuated to Tel al-Hawa from their home in another part of the city following an earlier attack. By then, according to the United Nations, 1.7 million people in Gaza—about 75 percent of its 2.2 million residents—had been internally displaced by the deadly assaults, with many displaced multiple times. On that cold and rainy Monday morning, Bashar, 44, and his wife Anam, 43, quickly packed into the family car their four children and their 6-year-old niece, Hind Rajab, who had dreams of becoming a dentist. Hind’s mother, Wissam Hamada, stayed behind and would follow later. “They were firing on anyone moving in the street,” she later told Al Jazeera.

Almost immediately, Bashar realized he was in trouble, as the Israeli military swarmed the area and began opening fire. Hoping to avoid the bullets, he pulled his black Kia Picanto into the nearby Fares gas station. It was to no avail. Wissam called Bashar to check on them, but it was her 15-year-old niece, Layan, who answered the phone. “Only Hind and I are alive,” she screamed through sobs. “Hind is injured. Hind is bleeding. I’m bleeding.” The family then called the Palestinian Red Crescent Society (PRCS), asking them to send an ambulance to the gas station. Omar Al-Qam, the PRCS dispatcher, quickly called the car and Layan answered. “They are shooting at us,” she screamed into the phone, according to a recording of the conversation. “They are shooting at us. The tank is next to me.” Seconds later, there were only screams, as the sound of rapid machine gun fire could clearly be heard. Layan was never heard from again. A later analysis determined that the phone captured the sound of 64 gunshots fired from a tank in just six seconds.

But before an ambulance could be dispatched, approval would first need to be obtained from Israeli authorities, a process that would take an inexcusable three hours. Inside the PRCS emergency center, where a sign reading “Targeting medical missions is a war crime” is affixed to a window, the dispatcher called back to the car. This time, it was Hind who answered the phone. Layan was dead, she told the dispatcher, then screamed, “The tank is next to me.… It’s moving in front of the car.” When asked if it was close, she replied, “Very, very… Come get me, come get me.… I’m so scared, please come!” Eventually, the dispatcher was able to patch Hind’s mother into the call. “I’ve been shot in my upper arm, my back, and my foot,” the 6-year-old told her.

Satellite imagery taken that day shows numerous Israeli tanks in close proximity to where the car was attacked. And a scientific investigation by Forensic Architecture concluded that the shooter would have had a clear view of the car and its passengers. In other words, they would have been aware of the presence of two children. “The shape of the depression of the windshield,” the report adds, “suggests that it was run over by a light vehicle such as an Israeli military bulldozer made by Caterpillar.”

Hours later the ambulance was nearby. “I’m coming up to the gas station,” the driver told Hind, “Oh, there it is.” But immediately, there was the sound of an explosion and the phone went dead. The family then called Hind, who said she was alive and had heard an explosion nearby. Her voice, however, was growing weaker and she said her mouth was bleeding. That was last they heard from their daughter.

Twelve days later, the Israeli military finally withdrew, and the seven decomposing bodies of the family, including Hind, were discovered. The investigation found a total of 335 bullet holes, from a tank-mounted machine gun, in the car. About 50 meters away was the twisted and demolished wreckage of the ambulance, along with the bodies of the two paramedics, also victims of an Israeli tank. The medical personnel in the ambulance had been killed by the tank’s powerful cannon—another in the long list of Israel’s war crimes. Among the debris was a fragment from a 120-mm artillery shell clearly labeled M830A1, along with a serial number. It’s a shell designed to destroy tanks, not ambulances.

That label and serial number traced back to the Iowa Army Ammunition Plant, located in Middletown, population 336. The area’s largest employer, the massive Ammunition Plant is housed on 19,011 acres and operated by the defense contractor American Ordnance, LLC, a subsidiary of Day & Zimmerman.

The plant is just one of numerous defense contractors across the country feeding Israel with its bombs, bullets, and shells to bring death and destruction to more than 41,000 Palestinians—mostly innocent women and children like Hind and her family—and medical workers like the ambulance paramedics. And they’re met with no pushback from Washington, despite overwhelming evidence of brutal war crimes—violations of the Biden administration’s own arms transfer policy, meant to ensure that American-made weapons are used in accordance with international law, as well as the Leahy Law, which prohibits assistance to foreign military units that commit abuses.

According to a study on the costs of war released last week by Brown University’s Watson Institute, the United States has spent at least $22.76 billion in taxpayer dollars on military aid to Israel and the region in the year since the war started on October 7, 2023. That includes numerous American-made critical parts for the tank that targeted Hind and her family; powerful American-made bombs like those dropped on her apartment block and on refugee camps, killing thousands in an instant; the American-made anti-tank shells like those that targeted the ambulance carrying the paramedics racing to her rescue; and American-made Caterpillar tractors like the one that crushed Bashar Hamada’s car in a final surreal attempt to obliterate the family inside.

By last March, according to Responsible Statecraft, the Biden administration had already greenlighted more than 100 separate American weapons deals for Israel, or about one every 36 hours. That meant boom times for “Bombville”—McAlester, Oklahoma, the small town where the mammoth McAlester Army Ammunition Plant is located, and where America’s biggest non-nuclear bombs are built, before being shipped off to Israel. Behind high fencing, the facility occupies a 70-square-mile site—bigger in area than Washington, DC. The idea was to construct buildings far apart from each other so an explosion in one won’t cause a chain reaction.

Among McAlester’s products is the 2,000-pound MK-84, manufactured by General Dynamics Ordnance and Tactical Systems. Since October 7, 2023, the Pentagon has shipped more than 14,000 of these behemoths to Israel for use in tiny, tightly packed Gaza. Enormously deadly and destructive, the MK-84 is four times heavier than the largest bombs the US let loose in Syria and Iraq in its war against ISIS. Its streamlined steel casing is loaded with 945 pounds of high explosive and can create a crater 50 feet wide and more than three stories deep. It can also penetrate up to 15 inches of metal or 11 feet of concrete, and causes lethal fragmentation to a radius of 400 feet. Nevertheless, Israel decided to drop them on overcrowded refugee camps in Gaza, where half the population is made up of children.

According to Responsible Statecraft, in the first month of its war on Gaza, Israeli forces dropped more than 500 MK-84s—more than 40 percent of which targeted Israeli-designated densely packed safe zones. By six weeks into the war, it had dropped 2,000-pound bombs more than 200 times. A UN investigation noted that heavy American-made bombs were also dropped on “residential buildings, a school, refugee camps and a market” on six occasions between October 9 and December 2, 2023, killing at least 218 people. “The number of fatalities could be much higher,” the UN noted. Amnesty International called the attack on the crowded Jabaliya refugee camp with one or two GBU-31s (modified MK-84s), “damning evidence of war crimes.” And an analysis by the UN Office of the High Commissioner on Human Rights determined that there was no military objective to justify the strike. But the bombs kept coming.

Such war crimes, conducted with massively destructive weapons stamped, in essence, “Made in the USA,” have now continued nonstop for more than a year, leaving over 41,000 people dead and nearly 100,000 injured, and clearly making the US a cobelligerent in the ongoing genocide. It’s as if someone is continually loading the gun as a serial killer routinely commits mass murder. In August, the Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor counted more than 2,750 families who had lost at least three members to Israeli attacks over the previous 11 months. Over 365 Gazan families have lost more than 10 members in the ongoing war.

“These are not isolated incidents: Many families have seen several generations wiped out in a single strike,” Euro-Med chairman Ramy Abdu told Le Monde. “It’s as if entire families disappeared overnight.” Among those interviewed by Le Monde in the past few weeks was Youssef Salem, 34, who has thus far lost 270 members of his extended family. The oldest was 90, the youngest just a few months old. “These were my uncles, my cousins, my aunts, their children and grandchildren,” he explained. “In Gaza, we’re all very close. We grow up together. We marry each other and we support each other.”

Which is why Israel takes elaborate measures to hide from the world any bomb and shell fragments scattered among the bloody corpses—fragments that might be traced back to the United States and cause the American public to question its deadly involvement in the war. Such measures also include barring foreign journalists from entering Gaza, or attacking or killing them while doing their job. As of October 11, 2024, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists, at least 128 journalists and media workers have been killed in Gaza, the West Bank, and Lebanon since the war began, “making it the deadliest period for journalists since CPJ began gathering data in 1992,” the group said.

To slightly paraphrase Nietzsche, “He who fights along with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster.” For America, however, this warning might already be too late.

(thenation.com)

Little girl talking with her father, a train driver for Southern Railway's Southern Belle steam train, before he leaves on a trip to Brighton. London, England, 1931.

26 Comments

Cotdbigun November 5, 2024

Slogging my way through today’s propaganda/ echochamber, I realized that I miss TWK already, it’s only been a day,but how refreshing it would be to get a break from this new, dreary AVA.
Should I feel too cheerful or content in a few days, I’ll come back and tackle the second half of today’s indoctrination. Cheers

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- Bruce Anderson November 5, 2024
  
  Nobody ever said being a fascist was easy, Cot.
  
  Reply
  - Jurgen Stoll November 5, 2024
    
    LOL! Just spit my coffee.
    
    Reply
  - Steve Heilig November 5, 2024
    
    Not only that, but one too cowardly to even tell his own name.
    
    Reply
Craig Stehr November 5, 2024

Meanwhile in Washington, D.C., security fencing surrounds Lafayette Park in case there is a violent reaction one way or another to today’s voting outcome. Access to the D.C. Peace Vigil is unobstructed, entering from either end of the park. Saw one MAGA hatted passenger on the morning bus, and no Harris or Stein messages. Lots and lots of television messages urging everybody to vote. The MLK library is full of district residents voting, with everybody chatting and sipping coffee purchased from the new cafe on the first level. It’s all no big deal. Everybody has seen the spectacle before. Appreciation is for the sunny warm weather, (without discussion about global warming). Live in THIS moment is the instruction, and be cool. And have a good day for yourself. Next up: https://cherryblossomwatch.com/national-cherry-blossom-festival/

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- David Svehla November 5, 2024
  
  Thanks for this, Craig Stehr!
  
  Reply
Harvey Reading November 5, 2024

“THE MOST DEPRESSING segment of Martha’s tell-all, was her appearance on Saturday Night Live…”

Didn’t know SNL was still on the air, but then I canceled pay TV in 2011 and had quit watching the show by the early 80s, when it had ceased being funny. About all I watch now is “Democracy Now!” and some Native American programming, both via FNX (First Nations Experience), which comes in with the antenna. PBS had turned to crap around the end of the 90s, becoming pure propaganda and trash. Really enjoyed SNL in the second half of the 70s.

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- scott November 5, 2024
  
  Congratulations?
  
  Reply
- peter boudoures November 5, 2024
  
  https://scholarship.law.duke.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3980&context=dlj
  
  How about the tribes protecting big pharma. What’s your take?
  
  Reply
- Mark Scaramella November 5, 2024
  
  The only SNL regular who was funny most of the time was Eddie Murphy. John and Jim Belushi and Chris Farley were funny a few times. Of today’s cast, the only player who’s even occasionally funny is Heidi Gardner who does a great blonde bimbo/pratfall and a good send-up of the stereotypical ditzy NPR host.
  
  Reply
Eric Sunswheat November 5, 2024

RE: just still “consider taking statins”? (Though I’m not a conspiracy wacko, that did make me wonder if doctors and/or clinics do get some kind of financial kickback…

—> What doctors might get is a patient that needs lifetime testing of statin levels, as it’s a narrow tight rope when taking statins. I read an expose study earlier in the year that suggested that half of the statins were prescribed to patients who didn’t actually need them.

During the time my HMO family doctor was on vacation, another practitioner intercepted our correspondences on my daily home blood pressure testing, giving guidance that with supposed high blood pressure, to look for instances of lower testing results taken later in day as those could be more accurate.

Also I was informed the long term damage from taking unnecessary statins, in borderline high blood pressure cases which could be otherwise resolved, may exceed the benefits.

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Harvey Reading November 5, 2024

READING J.D. VANCE

Sorry, but he comes off as a phony POS to me. I’ve thought that since reading his book shortly after it came out. He mostly blames being poor on the poor, rather than on the wealthy, greedy, scumbag kaputalists whom we’re all supposed to worship.

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Chuck Dunbar November 5, 2024

Dear God of democratic and fair elections, dear God of mercy and justice–watch over us all in America today.

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- Marshall Newman November 5, 2024
  
  +1
  
  Reply
David Svehla November 5, 2024

The reason Kunstler believes Peanuts The Squirrel (and coon sibling) were murdered by the NY State Apparatus: “Because they could” – was the reason there were people living in self- generated. Trash fields near the local Trader Joe’s! No body ever told them No. Instead the City gave them personalized trash pick- ups…

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- Sarah Kennedy Owen November 5, 2024
  
  It’s funny though that you pick on homeless people when there are so many highly placed people who are doing way more damage, and they “do it because they can”. Such as attorneys, CEOs, politicians (Trump), billionaires, and so on. Lowering regulations a la Trump’s plan only makes them bolder. I think if any slogan defines our ruthless society (worldwide) it is “They do it because they can.” Why would the homeless be any different?
  
  Reply
Falcon November 5, 2024

After Being Convicted Of Voting

A speech by Susan B. Anthony

Delivered 1872

‘Friends and fellow citizens: I stand before you tonight under indictment for the alleged crime of having voted at the last presidential election, without having a lawful right to vote. It shall be my work this evening to prove to you that in thus voting, I not only committed no crime, but, instead, simply exercised my citizen’s rights, guaranteed to me and all United States citizens by the National Constitution, beyond the power of any state to deny.
The preamble of the Federal Constitution says: “We, the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquillity, provide for the common defence, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”
It was we, the people; not we, the white male citizens; nor yet we, the male citizens; but we, the whole people, who formed the Union. And we formed it, not to give the blessings of liberty, but to secure them; not to the half of ourselves and the half of our posterity, but to the whole people -women as well as men. And it is a downright mockery to talk to women of their enjoyment of the blessings of liberty while they are denied the use of the only means of securing them provided by this democratic-republican government – the ballot.
For any state to make sex a qualification that must ever result in the disfranchisement of one entire half of the people, is to pass a bill of attainder, or, an ex post facto law, and is therefore a violation of the supreme law of the land.
By it the blessings of liberty are forever withheld from women and their female posterity. To them this government has no just powers derived from the consent of the governed. To them this government is not a democracy. It is not a republic. It is an odious aristocracy; a hateful oligarchy of sex; the most hateful aristocracy ever established on the face of the globe; an oligarchy of wealth,
where the rich govern the poor. An oligarchy of learning, where the educated govern the ignorant, or even an oligarchy of race, where the Saxon rules the African, might be endured; but this oligarchy of sex, which makes father, brothers, husband, sons, the oligarchs over the mother and sisters, the wife and daughters, of every household – which ordains all men sovereigns, all women subjects, carries dissension, discord, and rebellion into every home of the nation. Webster, Worcester, and Bouvier all define a citizen to be a person in the United States, entitled to vote and hold office.
The only question left to be settled now is: Are women persons? And I hardly believe any of our opponents will have the hardihood to say they are not. Being persons, then, women are citizens; and no state has a right to make any law, or to enforce any old law, that shall abridge their privileges or immunities.
Hence, every discrimination against women in the constitutions and laws of the several states is today null and void, precisely as is every one against Negroes.’

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Call It As I See It November 5, 2024

Time to start crying, Libtards!!!! Trump, the big bad orangeman is the 47th President.

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- Bruce Anderson November 6, 2024
  
  This libtard is shocked but not surprised that the Orange Windbag has been elected president. The Democrats haven’t represented everyday Americans for at least half a century, and millions of everyday Americans are getting seriously squeezed. Trump is guaranteed to make their lives, and everything else worse, faster.
  
  Reply
- George Hollister November 6, 2024
  
  Name calling aside, it is difficult for many to accept, including many current history writers, that Donald Trump is an iconic, and significant political figure in American history, the most significant since FDR. An oversize ego, and undisciplined big mouth are a part of it. The country, and democracy will survive him.
  
  Reply
  - Harvey Reading November 6, 2024
    
    He’s just a second-rate con artist in a second-rate, pretend democracy, a nation of ignoramuses and second-rate con artists, a nation whose run is just about at an end. There may be no history for him to be part of. Comparing him with FDR is ignorance at its best.
    
    Reply
Falcon November 6, 2024

Doesn’t seem right, it is not fair coming that close Democrats will have to put up with Republicans for possibly eight more years.

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- Casey Hartlip November 6, 2024
  
  Time to start building those internment camps!
  
  Reply
- Chuck Wilcher November 6, 2024
  
  Eight years? It might be permanent.
  
  Reply
Craig Stehr November 6, 2024

Meanwhile in Washington, D.C., the weather is unseasonably warm, but there is no discussion about “global warming”. Everybody is outside talking about how stupid the American people are for having re-elected a wholly unsuitable individual to be the political leader of the nation. Next up is the Cherry Blossom Festival: https://cherryblossomwatch.com/national-cherry-blossom-festival/ Have a nice day. ;-))

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Ron43 November 7, 2024

Since tRump won I have not heard a peep about voter fraud. Wonder why everything is fine now?

Reply

Mendocino County Today: Tuesday 11/5/2024

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