FUNGI FOR FUN GUYS & GALS
For those of you on the fence about making it to the Fungi Festival this weekend I'd say nudge nudge it's time! Porcini are poppin' and timing will be even better this weekend, this shot taken yesterday, not just a random attention getter, join our 2 morning forays sat and sun and have fun at the fest with Your People! 15 vendors and loads of fun and cool things to watch and partake in!
Enjoy a bomb mushroom dinner on Sunday at Caspar Bones!
Do It! We've been working hard on this folks, we've made it all as affordable as possible! Bring cash for the vendors, The MCMC welcomes you
THE CALIFORNIA DEPARTMENT OF TOXIC SUBSTANCES CONTROL “has reviewed the available documents and information in the context of these factors, and determined the information provided does not warrant adding the City [of Fort Bragg] as a respondent to the Order at this time.”
The Skunk Train had asked the state pollution control agency which has been heavily involved in the remediation of pollutants on the old Georgia Pacific Mill site to include the City to share in the site clean up responsibility. The agency rejected the Skunk’s request to off-load some of the liability on to the City, saying that the Skunk had not demonstrated that Fort Bragg contributed to the pollution and therefore the Skunk Train which acquired the property via eminent domain for a very low price is on the hook for whatever remediation is required.
LEW CHICHESTER (Covelo)
Bruce Anderson’s story regarding Hastings, Eden Valley, the Eel River Rangers and killing all the Indians has been tough to absorb, even though I knew the story already. I have been dwelling in the killing fields out here for over 50 years now and the living memory held by lots of people still resonates, informs attitudes, cripples all of us. People in Round Valley remember the story, have it told to them by their grandparents, we live with it every day. Usually not consciously, but it doesn’t go away. Fifty years ago, a hundred years after the killing, some people here still knew bits and pieces of the language, a few of the songs, most likely taught by grandparents who were lucky survivors.
My family was from the Deep South, didn’t come to California until JFK was president, but my grandparents certainly made sure I knew about which houses Sherman burned, where the Confederate money was stashed, which Yankees came later and stole everything. The history of Round Valley, and the rest of Mendocino County by the way for those of you who don’t know any better, is even way worse than the American Civil War and we all know how that memory still motivates too many people. “Make America Great Again,” and exactly when was that?
THE HITS just keep on coming. Trump has announced that he's tapped Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, an appointment akin to replacing your doctor with an astrologer. Trump's employment standard seems to be, “Is he crazy enough to be in my government?”
ON THE SUBJECT of The Last Days, there's a confirming article in the current New Yorker called, “The Home Front — Some Americans are preparing for a second civil war… According to an analysis of FEMA data, some 20 million Americans are actively preparing for cataclysm — roughly twice as many as in 2017.”
“FOR YEARS I've had an idea to develop a dog into a superthief who'd go into these guys' rooms and take dollars out of their pockets. I'd train him to take nothing but green money; I'd make him smell it all day long. If there was any humanly possible way, I'd train him to take only twenties." — Jack Kerouac, ‘On The Road’
THE US INSTITUTE of Medicine confirms our experience with pot smokers: “Most people smoke marijuana to get ‘high.’ This high provides a sense of well-being or euphoria and increased talkativeness and laughter alternating with periods of introspective dreaminess followed by lethargy and sleepiness. A characteristic feature of a marijuana 'high' is a distortion in the sense of time associated with deficits in short-term memory and learning. A marijuana smoker typically has a sense of enhanced physical and emotional sensitivity, including a feeling of greater interpersonal closeness. The most obvious behavioral abnormality displayed by someone under the influence of marijuana is difficulty in carrying on an intelligible conversation, perhaps because of an inability to remember what was just said even a few words earlier.”
WHENEVER I VISIT Fort Bragg — Fort Bragg and Covelo being my fave in-county destinations — I always make time for a brisk outing on the old mill’s Haul Road, of which the trestle over Pudding Creek used to be the bridge over which log trucks reached the mill itself. The old haul road, now elevated to Coastal Trail Status, is easily the most accessible, and certainly among the most beautiful coast walks in all of California, the others being either too short for real exercise or too crowded for one to fully enjoy the splendors of the sea crashing against lonely bluffs. (The coast trail in Santa Cruz is nice but an absolute mob scene.) The irony is that Fort Bragg was once so completely a mill town, and Mendocino County so completely timber country, that the owners of the Fort Bragg mill could build their own road in a virtual straight line down the coast from their major timber sources ten miles to the north. The idea was to spare log trucks the tortuously winding ordeal of Coast Highway One, which was then the only link from Rockport south to Fort Bragg. The haul road was constructed, I believe, in the 1920s. It’s turned out to be a major boon to Fort Bragg, and easily that beguiling, relatively unspoiled town’s lead attraction.
USED TO BE MUCH FRETTING about toxics on the old mill site. They once had dangerous toxics in a part of the mill in pcb-laden capacitors, a fact revealed by the AVA’s Mike Koepf when the capacitors burst one memorable day on top of a couple of millworkers who were told that the fluids were not only not harmful, but as healthy as olive oil.
OF COURSE there are people around who think that the GP mill is some kind of Northcoast Chernobyl, but most retired GP workers have lived out their days free of chemical poisoning, and the Pacific Coast Trail is complete from Noyo to about a mile past MacKerricher. The haul road north of MacKerricher, however, has been reclaimed by the Pacific. I’m sure lots of people think they can set off over the trestle and hoof it all the way up to Ten Mile River on perfectly flat, only partially eroded pavement as one does from the trestle to MacKerricher, but you can’t. The pavement, and the road beneath it, ends less than a mile north of the heavily visited state park.
THE TRESTLE portion of Fort Bragg’s Ten Mile Trail has long been open to pedestrians, meaning the long-time dream of Coast nature lovers, walkers, joggers, hikers, and bicyclists of a path beginning at Noyo harbor and culminating at Ten Mile is that much closer to reality. Before the trestle was rehabbed, one commenced walking from either the parking lot just north of Fort Bragg or, typically for me, from the parking lot at MacKerricher State Park, farther north of town.
MODERN LIFE comes with greater irritations of course than this, but certain forms of graffiti never fail to irritate me. I’m not talking about the big, unintelligible spray-canned smears you see everywhere, the contemporary equivalent of Kilroy Was Here, which are certainly bad in the way they wipe out whole vistas of otherwise pleasing views. No, I mean the messages the “cool people” put around, neatly stenciled sidewalk questions like, “How Honest Are U?” (Who wants to know? And what are your qualifications for asking?) But the ones that really, really annoy me are the decal-sized ones at eye level, especially the one on a tree I have to pass all the time. It says, “Venom is more important than you.”
OF COURSE IT IS, but so’s the Golden Gate Bridge and a jar of peanut butter, and certainly the coyote the neighborhood people are warning people about on strategically placed placards, inspiring in one young mommy I know visions of the cunning little beast trotting off with her toddler.
AND SO'S EVERYTHING ELSE more important or not important in the great whirligig of whatever it is we’re all spinning around in. If the point of these inane statements and impertinent questions is simply to annoy random passersby, they’ve effectively annoyed one passerby to where he feels like he has to say something about them.
A READER WRITES: “Several years ago, while living in Oakland, I was standing in line at my bank one afternoon and struck up a conversation with a middle-aged Chinese woman who was behind me. After several minutes of talk we got onto the topic of our respective family histories in the state. Since mine was zilch, she did most of the talking. I forget most of what she told me, but one part of her story was remarkable. She said her great-grandparents owned a large farm on the coast near Monterey, but in the late 1800s — during the anti-Chinese hysteria — the land was confiscated and they fled the area in fear for their lives, never to return. “That's awful,” I said. “What's there now?” She answered with a grim sigh: “Pebble Beach…” Chinese were also driven out of Humboldt and Mendocino counties in periodic yellow peril hysterias, their property seized by neighbors envious of their prosperity.
A READER WRITES: “I was enjoying my morning AVA hit while also thinking about the audio version of Moby Dick I'm listening to narrated by Frank Muller. At first I thought that he went just a trifle too fast but then I realized it was just a matter of me wanting more time to let it sink in. So I started reading it too, going back and forth. I am now close to the end, but slowing down because I don’t want to leave Melville’s world. What I notice this time around is how much Melville is enjoying himself…”
I READ Moby Dick every few years, and I’ve also enjoyed a very good audio rendition by an actor named Norman Deitz, and like my friend Reader Writes, I never want the story to end, book or audio. I always keep the book handy to make sure I heard right. Some books on tape are good, some very bad. The bad ones tend to be those read by movie stars who mispronounce words and read like they’ve never seen the material before, which they probably haven’t. I guess the producers figure that with the star doing the reading the star struck will buy it, neither reader nor producer aware or caring that the movie star is ruining the book.
I'VE TRIED listening to British actors read War and Peace but I was immediately lost because, I think, they were over-acting, making their diction indistinct. Of course the problem might have been with my failing audio receptors, but some of these recordings are terrible, very carelessly done or simply weirdly done like Debra Winger rushing through a flat-affect performance of the Brothers K. If the listener didn’t know the story there’s no way he could decipher Deb’s sprint through it. I do know the story and I lost interest in following it after about ten minutes because of the uninflected, disinterested way the actress read it. I also warn you about a lugubrious reading of Ulysses by a guy who doesn’t seem to know the book is often funny as hell.
NOT LONG AGO, I listened to an excellent reading of Babbitt with Ed Asner as Babbitt. But the very best book-on-tape I’ve ever heard was Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man read by Joe Morton. Morton performs all the parts (including the women), and is so good I realized I’d missed most of the book when I’d first read it. It’s almost as if Ellison wrote it to be acted, and Morton’s rendition was definitely the kind of performance that reminds us that in the beginning was the word.
ALSO RECOMMENDED is Jeremy Irons’ rendition of ‘Lolita.’ These mentioned books are internal monologues which are perfect vehicles for a good reader. I'm sure your local library can track 'em all down.
THERE ISN'T MUCH contemporary fiction that holds my interest, and I’ve pretty much given up trying unless it’s pegged to an area of history I’m interested in, although I highly recommend Edward P. Jones’ fiction, the only contemporary fiction I’ve read lately that I really, really liked. I am interested, though, in the political-cultural history of California as depicted in fictional form, as I’m sure many of you are.
ONE EXCELLENT HISTORICALLY-BASED golden state novel is by Eddie Muller, and is called ‘The Distance,’ a murder mystery set in the boxing milieu of San Francisco in the 1930s. (Eddie M also produces the annual noir film festival at the Castro Theater in SF.) Muller’s dad was the boxing writer for the old Examiner, when boxing and baseball were the dominant spectator sports, and the only boxing writer in the country to predict Cassius Clay’s victory over Sonny Liston. But what’s most interesting about Muller’s book is his faithful reproduction of the old tough guy slang, and how people dressed and how they talked to each other and what the city looked like then.
’GOLD’ BY BLAISE CENDARS is fiction centered loosely on John Sutter but faithfully reproduces California prior to the Gold Rush, the cataclysm that ruined Sutter.
BEING Amer-centric in my literature preferences, I’ve always got Dreiser, Lewis, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Steinbeck, and Edmund Wilson close by. Who needs furriners when we’ve got most of the best ones right here? Anyway, most of us read these books in college or when we’re too young to understand a lot of it, not that there’s anything particularly inaccessible about Steinbeck or Dreiser.
I PLOWED through Proust when I was maybe 25, emerging from the experience with a single memory of the experience, “This guy was a French aesthete who didn’t miss a thing and was so sensitive to noise he cork-lined his bedroom.”
PONTIFICATIONS. EXIT NOW OR…
BEYOND citizenship and being old enough to vote there are zero requirements to run for local office, and given the prevalent no-questions-asked local info context even those two basic qualifications could be waived without anybody knowing if the candidate was a ten-year-old big for his age or a serial killer who'd swerved in off 101.
YOU are probably aware that Mendocino County is also unique in its collective amnesia; where else does history start all over again every morning and people are whatever they say they are? Political life in this odd jurisdiction is kind of like living in a mass witness protection program, few elected people are ever held responsible for anything because nobody can remember who did or said what — case in point, freshly retired Supervisor Dan Gjerde.
IN THEORY, the supervisors establish policy, but the various department heads, most of whom are quite capable, simply work around the supervisors as if the supervisors were five errant children who occasionally have to be told to stay out of the way while the adults run the store. If the supervisors disappeared tomorrow we’d save about three-quarters of a million tax dollars a year and nobody outside their families would notice they were missing.
MENDOCINO COUNTY has been run by its department heads and its superior court for many years, while the elected people come and go and the career bureaucrats and the judges stay. And stay. And stay some more. I’d say the present board is the worst board of supervisors we’ve ever had, and we’ve had some doozies as people who remember Al Barbero, Marilyn Butcher, Patti Campbell, Tom Lucier, Kendall Smith, and Nelson Redding will testify to.
BUT AS LAUGHABLY derelict as the great boards of yesteryear were, nobody could say they sought the position to get themselves fat pay days and sweet retirements. The Supervisors making themselves first priority commenced with the libs assuming dominance, circa middle 1980s, ever since steering the county inexorably toward the fiscal rocks while fattening their own pay and perks.
STATE and federal governments are also largely occupied by hustlers like our supervisors — Huffman, McGuire, Wood et al — the diff being that the state and federal people occasionally are forced to appear on television shows like Lob Ball to yap back at The Barking Dogs. But in Mendocino County the media pooches at KZYX, to name the most egregious medium, with built-in muzzles, nuzzle right up to the officeholder to ask, “Tell us what a great job you’re doing, and if there’s any time left tell us what a wonderful person you are. Take all the time and space you need. We’re here to serve.”
THERE'S a supervisor’s “mission statement” on the county’s website. It says, among the clutter of its unfulfilled assurances, that one of their goals is to “treat all people with dignity and respect,” which they do not do as anyone appearing before them can attest, most not even getting a simple thank you. When the late Supervisor David Colfax told several constituents to go fuck themselves he only expressed his colleagues’ unspoken attitudes.
THE UPSHOT of fifty years of bad government is Trump, and why is anyone surprised?
A CORRESPONDENT creates a third conspiracy to go with the Kennedy assassination and 9-11. He says if I think Oswald acted alone to shoot JFK, and if I don’t see Bush-Cheney up to their shifty eyeballs in 9-11, I'm an “agent” of disinformation, a conspirator working for the conspirators.
THAT'S THE THING with conspiracy people; if you’re not with them you’re part of the conspiracy. They all have this terrible need to see complicated plots everywhere. I think most bad things happen right out front if you have the eyes to see, the ears to hear, the perceptive apparatuses to process the whole of it.
TWO ENTIRE literatures have grown up around the Kennedy murder and September 11th. You’d need to devote your every waking moment to sort out the evidence, the charges and counter-charges. And a whole computer archive and a working wife to support you while you studied up on all of it.
I’VE READ a dozen or so books on the Kennedy assassination, but only a couple of them made sense to me, and one of them was a novel, ‘Libra,’ by Don Delillo. If there was a conspiracy to kill Kennedy it probably would have been pulled off something like Delillo described in Libra. But given the number of people who would have had to have been involved at various levels, and the fact that none of these alleged conspirators have ever talked, argues against conspiracy. The most incriminating files on the Kennedy case are still sequestered. Orange Man, in his first term, promised to unsequester them, but…
DITTO for September 11th, and I haven’t read one thing about that catastrophe that convinced me it was anything but a group of medieval fanatics, funded by other medieval fanatics, who got lucky. And the upshot of that one has been an eviscerated constitution, an endless war in the Middle East, a crumbling economy. If it took a conspiracy to shove the whole show over the side, governments since Bush-Cheney are allied with Osama bin Laden.
THERE WASN’T a huge policy shift after Kennedy’s death unless you assume Kennedy was poised to pull out of Vietnam and was about to seek some kind of live and let live accommodation with Castro. If you believe that then you can proceed to believe that anti-communist hysterics in our government arranged to have Kennedy killed. A lot of the Kennedy books go into technical discussions of trajectories of fire and so much hard-to-check stuff that they all seem plausible as you read them, at least until the next book comes along.
I'M TOLD by people who have been to Dealey Plaza that from Oswald’s perch in the Texas School Book Depository it was an easy shot to hit Kennedy driving by in the street below. No more than 150 feet. Oswald could easily have done a low-tech job like that himself with the scoped rifle he had, and probably did do it by himself. If Oswald were a lone nut today he’d probably get himself twenty automatic weapons and go to war on a Burger King. Even our lone nuts seem to have deteriorated. And this is the country that gave us some great ones — Lee Harvey, Zodiac and the Unabomber!
NORMAN MAILER’S book on Oswald — ‘Oswald’s Tale, An American Mystery’ — confirms that Oswald was indeed one very weird guy. As it happens, and as the world turned prior to The Summer of Love when the world spun off its axis, I was in the Marines at Camp Pendleton the same time Oswald was there, although I didn’t know him. I can tell you, though, that in the late 1950s, Oswald might have been the only person his age in the entire country, let alone in the Marine Corps, who secretly wanted to go live in Russia. The place had zero appeal, even to American communists who liked the theory but not the practice.
BUT IF YOU were like Oswald, if you’d grown up hard with a crazy mother like he had, if you spent a lot of time as a kid in libraries trying to understand your experience like he had, you too might have become a crypto-commie. At a minimum, some kind of radical. At the max, you may have become a real communist as, it seems, Oswald did, an unaffiliated and confused communist unable to distinguish Trotskyists from Stalinists.
OSWALD'S lumpen-Marxist worldview would account for his attempt to kill General Walker, a fascist neighbor of his, and for his subsequent successful attack on Kennedy who was a center-right enemy of communism. Factor in Oswald’s apparent desire for fame however he might achieve it, and you’ve got a uniquely improbable lone nut, but a lone nut nevertheless.
MENDOCINO COUNTY has more judges for its population, 8 plus a commissioner, than any county in the state. Our county is also home base for innumerable “retired” judges who, having gotten themselves elected or appointed to one of Mendocino County’s defunct justice court slots, retire out of Ukiah then sweeten their fat retirement pay by sitting in as substitute judges around the state, thus pulling in more annual money than they made working full-time on top of their pension. This extravagant jobs program for lawyers came about nearly 50 years ago when the county's justice courts became superior courts by state mandate. The state legislature, mostly lawyers, did the mandating.
PRIOR to the eight judges and the commissioner we now have, two judges did it all — Tim O'Brien and ‘Bev’ Broaddus, and they did it without whining about being overworked. This dyspeptic pair of old-school boys were occasionally opposed at election time because both were, ah, serenely, obliviously, reactionary and, personally, ah, highly irritable. I was in Broaddus’s' courtroom one afternoon when Broaddus fired what seemed like ten consecutive guys off to the state pen. As the cries and sobs of the women and children of the defendants filled the courtroom Broaddus would snarl, “Next!” It was so unnerving I felt like heading for the door before he packed me off, and I was only there to watch.
THE MENDOCINO COMMUNITY NETWORK, aka MCN, has been for sale before right now. Twenty-five years or so ago Mitch Sprague and a busy little fellow called Rennie Innis tried to cash in the school-subsidized internet service they had hustled into life.
MCN, began in the mid-90s when Innis and Sprague leveraged a NASA internet connection grant obtained by the Mendocino schools into a business opportunity for themselves, parlaying “the kids” into what amounted to a publicly-subsidized private business, complete with offices on the grounds of Mendocino High School.
FROM the outset MCN got a number of large direct and indirect subsidies from the school district, including a free building to operate in, free labor from techno-oriented Coast high school students, free teacher loans, and an array of overhead cost transfers to the school district.
ALTHOUGH MCN was spared a lot of overhead, they still charged the same monthly internet fees as their commercial competitors in the County. According to Sprague, MCN had contributed $730,000 to the Mendocino school district’s education programs since 2000.
DOUBT IT. The suspiciously generous $730,000 figure didn't cover the free stuff MCN got from the district because the district never could identify or separate out the cost of those generous subsidies. Meanwhile Sprague, and Innis before him, made out like bandits, setting their own $100k-plus salaries and padding their resumes.
BUT in 2007 even those subsidies weren’t enough. MCN had gotten around to (or was forced to) pay some of the teacher salaries that were attributable to MCN, leading Sprague to claim that “ever-increasing personnel costs related to benefits and collective bargaining agreements” couldn’t be carried by MCN any longer.”
PREVIOUSLY, Sprague had said his shortfall was due to increasing costs from AT&T for high-speed trunk-line access. Either way, MCN was put on the sales block for the highest bidder. But nobody bid. Next thing anyone knew Sprague had magically concluded, “We have determined that MCN's future looks brighter than it did,” adding, “it had been frustrating and time consuming trying to sell MCN.”
WE WERE NEVER TOLD why no one bid for MCN, but we suspect that prospective buyers took a look at the books and saw that the only way MCN could survive was with all its school subsidies intact. We were also never told what had changed at MCN to turn its future bright in a matter of days. Something told us the whole thing had to do with brinkmanship between the newly hired Mendocino School Superintendent Catherine Stone and Sprague. When Sprague’s sales ploy didn’t work, he probably negotiated a compromise with Stone who, from all accounts, was no dummy and certainly no pushover. We’ll never know for sure, of course, but don't be surprised if Fort Bragg is soon MCN's new owner.
BTW, a Comptche whiz klid named Ted Williams was very helpful in assisting the AVA with our MCN investigations although he'd probably now deny it given his present eminence as 5th District supervisor.
A READER NOTES: Newsom is a disaster in many ways. But “legalization” was always going to be the beginning of the end for local pot growers. The plant itself is too easy to grow, too hardy, and too adaptable to command five grand a pound, or even one 1/100 of that in any kind of truly open market. Criminal sanctions have now been replaced with a nightmare of bureaucratic regulations, but even that won’t ultimately do it, overblown marketing nonsense aside. The old days are gone forever. It’s probably time to find something else to do.
REMEMBER WHEN “Hardball” moderator Chris Matthews asked Barack Obama: “I know you’re a pretty good b-ball player. … What’s it like being a black kid with a white mom? … When did you have your last cigarette? … I want to ask you what you’re gonna be like at 3 o’clock in the morning. … Was that the last time you cried?” Then Matthews pushed it a little too far: “At any time in this campaign did you have a chuckle that you just couldn’t get rid of, something weird that happened that was so crazy that you just went to bed laughing about it?” Without missing a beat Obama replied, “Oh I think that happens once a day! … You know? … But then I stopped watching cable news.”
A READER WRITES: “Your line recently about the way American boys grow up, '…frozen between ages 14 and 18 in a kind of infantilized state within a spectacularly decadent culture they're forbidden to participate in, hence the 45-year-old American teenager, unique in world history,' certainly resonated with me. I think it is at the heart of much of the drastic decline and collapse of our culture.
“I helped raise a lad from zero to six when I lived in Berkeley, a child of my overly busy somewhat crazy neighbor friends. I was the official third parent, and among many things I was responsible for taking him to and from pre-school every day where I also volunteered three mornings a week.
“And therein I witnessed the beginnings of that infantilization of which you speak (and which my spell check does not recognize as a word.) Much more noticeable with the boys 2-5 than with the girls, though they were experiencing the similar “you-are-and-will-always-be-the-god-of-the-universe” treatment that most of the boys were getting.
“My boy was a rough and tumble kid, we walked everywhere, he had chores, was not granted hegemony over all relevant adults, and he was so advanced in so many ways compared to most of his peers it was all I could do not to grab these pre-soccer moms and shake them and say, ‘Four is not one. Five is not two. Get a grip. Let the kid fall on his face a few times. Let him be!’”
UKIAH'S annual haiku festival has never come up with this winner by Sylvia Forges-Ryan of North Haven, Connecticut:
A soldier’s headstone —
between one date and another
so short a line
PAMPAS GRASS is largely regarded these days as a persistent weed, as stubbornly ineradicable as Scotch broom. It is particularly vexing to South Coast residents who’ve battled it for years. At one time, however, pampas grass was much in demand as a decorative, and may still be in a few retro households who find it for sale at a few Bay Area flower marts. But it certainly is no longer the cash crop it once was in California where walnut farmers, among other sons of the soil, often planted it between the trees of their orchards.
THE SEEMINGLY INERADICABLE, cabin-size plant’s foremost American proponent was not a son of the soil but one of its daughters, Harriet Strong. At the world’s Columbian expo of 1893 held in Chicago, according to California History, the formidable Strong, also well known for her innovative dam and reservoir designs, won top prize for her spectacular “Pampas Plume Palace,” which featured pampas grass on the exterior and interior details of a Moorish-style building.”
TIGHTLY woven pampas palms are apparently water repellent and an excellent insulator, perfectly suited to, say, Gualala if the South Coast can be persuaded that succumbing to it is better than fighting a plant that refuses to be defeated.
There should be more sincerity and heart in human relations, more silence and simplicity in our interactions. Be rude when you’re angry, laugh when something is funny, and answer when you’re asked. ~Anton Chekhov
ON-LINE COMMENTS OF THE WEEK
[1] We’re not nearing the bottom nationally, we’re about 13th in the world rankings, we’re just not as good as we should be. Some of that I think is because we are trying to push too much information and complexity at the K-12 level and not enough focus on the basics. An additional part of the problem is from too many parents thinking of school as simply a day-care center and not an educational pathway and a refusal in some cases to hold students truly accountable for their behaviors.
As for the Dept. of Education, that overwhelming majority of their funding goes for grants (e.g. Pell grants, pre-school programs, Special Education) that are implemented at the state and local level.
Frankly, we need to be putting far more money into education, not less, and demanding better outcomes.
ON-LINE COMMENT OF THE DAY
You bet he is going after offshore windmills off our coast. What kind of humans who love the environment and living beings would be for 900 foot tall Cuisinart shredders off our coast. Have you ever been out in the ocean? There are thousands of seabirds out there. Whales migrate and feed out there. Who wants to see birds shredded to pieces and whales beached because they are driven crazy by the undersea sonic noise created by these abominations. The windmill cement people are on the losing end of this scam, just like the people who insist all old growth redwood should be cut down and turned into decking. Choose wisely, because the rest of society says no way, no how, never. Fake man caused climate change is just that, a fake scheme utilized to control others by the Gollums who got crushed a week ago. Never again will society listen to fake bought off scientists who know better but got a taste of the Benjamins and became the Gollum.
ON-LINE COMMENT OF THE DAY
JFK was an immoral pig, but, I believe, he was the last President who actually tried to be President. He tried to eliminate the CIA. He tried to keep us on the gold standard for our money. He tried to keep us out of Vietnam. And yes, he wasn't controlled by the Israeli mafia. As a human being he was a pathetic wretch. As a President, at least he tried to do best by America and for that they shot him through the head.
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