Mendocino County Today: Tuesday 12/24/2024

By AVA News Service on December 24, 2024

RAINFALL (past 24 hours): Laytonville 1.93" - Covelo 1.80" - Boonville 1.31" - Hopland 1.10" - Ukiah 0.76"

FLOOD ADVISORY in effect until 8am this morning.

SERIES OF ATMOSPHERIC RIVER STORMS will bring a risk for flooding, strong winds and dangerous surf through the weekend. (NWS)

STEPHEN DUNLAP (Fort Bragg): An as advertised 1.96" in the last 24 hours, 8.20" for the month. Rain & maybe some thunder today then gradual clearing into Christmas Day. Rain returns Thursday thru Sunday.

BODY RECOVERED UNDER NOYO BRIDGE ASSUMED TO BE THAT OF MISSING FORT BRAGG TEENAGER

On Monday, December 23, 2024 at approximately 8:15 AM, a witness called Dispatch reporting human remains were on the shore under the south side of the Noyo Bridge. Officers quickly responded to the shore and located human remains, which were unidentifiable.

Officers examined the remains and noted the clothing and jewelry were the same of Roy Mora, 15, who has been missing since December 7, 2024 and last seen on surveillance video crossing the Noyo Bridge on December 7, 2024 at approximately 8:00 PM.

Also, Roy’s cell phone was located on the Noyo Bridge the evening of December 7, 2024. Positive identification will require DNA confirmation and may take several weeks.

The review of surveillance footage confirmed Roy was walking alone when he left the view of surveillance cameras. The individual who found the phone entered the bridge from the north over two hours after Roy last appeared on video walking across the bridge. This was confirmed with video surveillance. Investigators also confirmed no one else was on the east side of the Noyo Bridge where Roy was last seen for over 30 minutes.

Roy’s mother identified jewelry found on the remains as the same as what Roy was wearing the night of his disappearance.

Until positive identification has been made by the medical examiner through DNA, FBPD will continue to follow leads regarding Roy Mora. Based on all evidence to date, there is no sign of foul play.

Chief Neil Cervenka said, “The entire police department is devastated and is grieving with our community. Our entire staff has been working continuously to find Roy, and through that, have come to know him. Our thoughts are with Roy’s family and friends.”

Fort Bragg PD would like to thank Fort Bragg Fire Department and the US Coast Guard for their assistance.

Anyone with information regarding this incident is encouraged to contact FBPD Dispatch with the Fort Bragg Police Department at (707)964-0200 or email room-299199@room.veoci.com. If you have photo or video surveillance of Roy from the evening of December 7, 2024 or after, you can direct upload at https://fortbraggpd.ca.evidence.com/axon/community-request/public/findroy.

This information is being released by Chief Neil Cervenka. For media inquiries, please reach out to him directly at ncervenka@fortbragg.com.

THOMAS TETZLAFF:

You may have seen or heard some of the large 18-20 foot waves that have rolled in over the last couple of days. Those big waves arrived with energy levels under 20,000 kilo-joules.

Monday the coast experienced some of the most powerful waves we have seen in a quite awhile. Waves over 20 feet are expected to roll in again except that this time the energy levels are predicted to be over 35,000 kilo-joules. That is a LOT of energy. Some wave forecasts suggest 25 foot wave heights.

These monsters were predicted to smash into the coast beginning around 10 am tapering off after 1 Monday afternoon.

If you have the opportunity, find your favorite viewing spot to watch them crash in. At those energy levels they can shake the ground so you may even feel the awesome power of the ocean in your feet.

These waves should be spectacular and fill you with awe! Grab your camera and enjoy the show!

'DON’T GO TO THE BEACH': One dead as massive waves up to 50 feet pound Calif. coast

by Lester Black

A massive swell is pounding California’s coastline, with officials warning people to stay away from beaches, as wave heights could reach 50 feet at some locations. As of Monday evening, at least one person is dead due to the high surf.

In Watsonville along the Monterey Bay, first responders were called to Sunset State Beach, a state park, around 11:30 a.m. Monday for a report of a man trapped under debris. The Santa Cruz County Sheriff's Office believes a large wave pinned him there. The man was pronounced dead at a hospital. Other details were not immediately available and his name has not been released.

The storm’s high surf also likely pulled another man into the Pacific Ocean around noon Monday at Marina State Beach, nearly 13 miles south of Watsonville, authorities said. Strong currents and high waves forced searchers to abandon their efforts roughly two hours later as conditions worsened. The man remained missing Monday evening.

In Santa Cruz, the municipal wharf under construction partially collapsed and fell into the ocean around 12:45 p.m., taking three people with it. Two people were rescued by lifeguards and a third swam to safety. “It’s a catastrophe for those down at the end of the wharf," said David Johnston, owner of Venture Quest Kayaking, who was allowed onto the pier to check on his business.

This is the largest swell of the year and is expected to peak late Monday, with waves as high as 50 feet, according to Cindy Palmer, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service. She said the large waves could crash into areas farther from the waterline than usual and could catch people by surprise.

“At this point in time, we’re encouraging people: Don’t go to the beach. We don’t want to have anyone swept in and have to have a rescue,” Palmer said.

High surf warnings have been issued for nearly the entire Central and Northern California coastline, with warnings from Santa Barbara all the way to the Oregon border. The Ventura Pier was preemptively closed out of fear the waves could snap its supporting beams.

The waves were already causing numerous water rescues Monday near Santa Cruz and Capitola, according to the National Weather Service.

Powerful waves hit Cayucos Pier on Monday morning. (Andrew Pridgen/SFGATE)

While officials warn onlookers to avoid California beaches, the massive swell is attracting some of the best big-wave surfers in the world to California’s coast. Surfers have been catching enormous waves at the Mavericks surf spot in Half Moon Bay over the past two days, with many surfers in the water Monday as well.

Patrick Mulholland, a lifelong resident of Cayucos, had just finished surfing Cayucos Pier on Monday morning when he told SFGATE that he went into the water despite the high-surf warnings because he felt that he could manage the conditions.

“I kind of knew I’d be OK — that it wouldn’t be too big or too crazy, and I just know the forecast. Swell’s going to be going all day but won’t get really big till the end of the day,” Mulholland told SFGATE.

The swells generated by that storm are now breaking on California’s coast. Swells are measured by both their height and the period, or time between each peak, and Monday’s swells have extremely long periods. These longer periods create more powerful waves, which could catch people by surprise, according to Palmer.

“I don’t think everybody understands the power of the ocean, never turn your back on the ocean if you’re out there,” Palmer said.

(sfgate.com)

LADIES NIGHT IN UKIAH

A routine traffic stop in the early hours of Friday, Dec. 20, 2024, led to the arrests of two Fort Bragg residents on drug and firearm charges, according to the Ukiah Police Department (UPD).

At approximately 1:30 a.m., an officer patrolling South State Street pulled over a dark-colored SUV for vehicle code violations. The car was occupied by Katelyn Walker, 30, and Elaina Underhill, 59, both of Fort Bragg.

A record check revealed that Walker had a felony warrant out of Burbank for possession of a loaded firearm and a controlled substance. Burbank police confirmed they would extradite Walker, who was taken into custody without incident.

During the stop, the officer observed drug paraphernalia inside the vehicle, prompting a search. The search uncovered an ounce of methamphetamine, ammunition, and a short-barreled shotgun.

UPD's investigation determined that the contraband belonged to Underhill, who is a convicted felon prohibited from possessing firearms or ammunition. Additionally, Underhill has multiple prior drug convictions, which elevated the current charges.

Both women were transported to the Mendocino County Jail. Walker was booked on her felony warrant, while Underhill faced multiple charges related to firearms, ammunition, and drug possession.

The Ukiah Police Department emphasized their commitment to keeping dangerous substances and illegal firearms off the streets.

THE HEARING on Chamise Cubbison’s attorney’s motion to dismiss the criminal case against her and former county payroll manager PJ Kennedy is currently scheduled for January 6 in the Ukiah Courthouse. Cubbison’s attorney Chris Andrian has requested the judge dismiss the case because of a slew of missing emails that Andrian says were lost by the investigator and/or the County computer staff. Deputy CEO Tony Rakes (who also runs the County’s IT department), DA investigator Andrew Porter, and former County Auditor Lloyd Weer (and their attorneys) are scheduled to be in court for the January 6 hearing on Andrian’s motion. If the case is not dismissed at that time, the long delayed Preliminary Hearing is currently scheduled to take two days, January 22 and 23, at 10 AM in Department E of the County Courthouse, Judge Ann Moorman presiding. Of course, one must take these court dates with a large salt shaker since the farcical case has dragged on now for more than a year with delay after delay after delay. If the Preliminary Hearing results in charges being approved by Judge Moorman, we’re probably looking at months if not years more of drawn out legal proceedings. And then there’s Cubbison’s wrongful termination civil case…

(Mark Scaramella)

ERIN COOK: Who the hell is running the pharmacy in Gualala? The Asian lady came out rude as shit and locked the door in the faces of over 10 people who have been standing in the cold for an hour to pick up our prescriptions that they told us to go and pick up. Sent us home with not so much as an apology. Now we all have to go back on Xmas eve to stand in line again and maybe she’ll let us in?!

ALLIE BARNES: Just so everyone is aware - she is the pharmacist and is the only reason we have a pharmacy at all. Don’t get me wrong: there are problems and attitude. But, she is the one in charge. Also, since her ethnicity doesn’t play a role in this story I don’t think it needed to be mentioned.

RANDY BURKE:

In Gualala, you are kidding, right?

SOME SERIOUS PUSHBACK appears in last week’s Independent Cost Observer about the Chronicle article (which ran here at the time) entitled “Someone Is Buying Up A Historic Coastal City. Is It The Next California Forever?” (A reference to a grandiose plan to build a privately-owned city being undertaken by an “anonymous” developer in Solano County.)

Among the statements disputed in the ICO article by Chelsea Randall and Anthony Cuesta are:

The palm tree, which the Chronicle reporter alleged was chopped down by Mr. Jeff Hansen (the primary subject of the piece) has NOT been chopped down and is clearly visible in a photo taken by one of the reporters.
Mr. Hansen insisted to the ICO that contrary to the Chronicle reporter’s claim, he DID respond to the article writer, Soleil Ho, via email, as well as to the Chronicle’s Editor in Chief Emilio Garcia.
Hansen says he’s buying up dilapidated properties to restore them as he did with the old Seaside Motel that he bought some 10 years ago and restored and there is nothing nefarious about his varioius real estate dealings.
Hansen also disputes the reasons Ms. Ho gave for a restaurant that he rented to close. Hansen said that Amber’s Diner was “bleeding money” when it closed.
For her part Point Arena City Manager Peggy Ducey (formerly Fort Bragg City Manager) called the Chronicle article a “hit piece,” adding that the reporter’s slant on the subject — that Hansen was secretly buying up the city for some mysterious personal reason — was not appreciated.

There was no indication in the ICO article about whether or not Mr. Hansen or Ms. Ducey have written letters of complaint to the Chronicle since the article appeared.

(Mark Scaramella)

MENDOCINO FIRE SAFE COUNCIL WEBSITE GETS USER-FRIENDLY OVERHAUL

by Sarah Reith

The Mendocino County Fire Safe Council website has gotten a major renovation, thanks to Torrey Douglass, of Lemon Fresh Design in Boonville. As a professional editor and graphic designer, Torrey knows when to cut and how to organize. “The Fire Safe Council does an awful lot of stuff,” she observed, reflecting on the copious amounts of material that has found its way onto the vast online archive that is the organization’s internet presence. But, she conceded, “The website had become a little bloated and disorganized as more and more things were added on.”

So she took an inventory of the material: what to keep, cut or update. One thing that became clear is that Fire Safe Council people have an appetite for science and policy that is not entirely universal. “A lot of the people involved are scientists or academics, and they use lots of words,” Torrey noted. “And then I come in with my machete, and I’m like, let’s use six instead of twenty.” It can make the difference between visitors deciding to avail themselves of a microgrant for a community project, or getting bogged down in the policy and scientific details that are only delicious to a small minority of people. “The words pack more punch when you use fewer of them,” she concluded.

Like any defensible space project, clearing the overgrowth created visibility and eased navigation. The new website features three categories, right at the top: Get Ready. Get Help. Get Informed. Under the first category, visitors can select from a variety of resources to make their homes and neighborhoods as defensible as possible. They can learn how to become a Firewise community, or order a reflective sign so firefighters can find them in the dark. The Get Help tab offers information about free home assessments, financial assistance for defensible space, those microgrants, or community work parties, where the Fire Safe Council’s work crew will come out and help neighbors with fuel reduction efforts. Visitors who want to get informed can browse the county’s Community Wildfire Protection Plan, peruse the newsletter archive, or watch videos about home hardening.

Torrey has also implemented Search Engine Optimization (SEO), to make the site as user-friendly as possible. “People aren’t in a quiet library with an hour of free time and no other worries on their mind, absorbing your content,” she pointed out, invoking a typical user who may be trying to find information while cooking or soothing a child.

The site also makes use of already existing information from government agencies. In the top right corner, users can link to CalFire to find out about current incidents, or AirNow, an air quality index from the Environmental Protection Agency and the U.S Forest Service. It’s all part of the effort to make crucial information more accessible.

Torrey thinks the website and the newsletter are an ideal combination for people who want to stay up to date on how to adapt to wildfire. “This is a very active organization that is constantly looking for new ways to help make our county more fire safe,” she said. To stay informed about things like opportunities to get help with labor-intensive safety efforts, download maps, or what’s going on in a neighborhood near you, she advises, “Signing up for the newsletter would be a great way to stay in touch with what this organization is doing, because there’s always new stuff happening, and it can directly benefit the people who live here.”

For more information, please check out our new website at firesafemendocino.org.

THE MYTH OF SCHOOL BOARD EFFICACY

by Mark Scaramella

Norm Thurston: “…With regards to public education, anyone who is unhappy with it should run for the school board.”

Have you looked at local school board agendas lately? They’re monopolized by non-academic subjects put before the school board by the board’s alleged subordinate, the Superintendent. School boards and their members are pre-occupied with budgets and funding shortfalls, pay scales, personnel, food, site safety and security, vendors and contracts, student behavior, closures, cut-backs, accreditation, non-academic classroom controversies, testing, trips, truancy, lawsuits, facilities and maintenance, activities, discipline, sports, projects, bus schedules, the Board itself and their personalities, grading systems (but not grades), and the occasional rubber-stamping of some new curriculum imposed by the state. You’ll never see a report from a board member having visited a classroom and assessing what they saw. You’ll seldom see academic achivement tracked year by year and what’s being done to improve student achievement or if particular teachers are falling short of academic goals and objectives. (Not that some of them don’t try.)

For example take a look at what the Ukiah Unified school board has discussed this year:

https://simbli.eboardsolutions.com/SB_Meetings/SB_MeetingListing.aspx?S=36030479

The last time a local school principal tried to track teacher performance (the excellent Matt Murray, a former Harvard English prof, at Point Arena Elementary) his teachers complained about Murray’s tracking system which he had employed successfully in SoCal to Superintendent Mark Iacuaniello, a very stupid person, like his boss County Superintendent Paul Tichinin. Instead of backing his Principal as he had promised to do, Iacuaniello had Murray fired for holding teachers accountable. And Iacuaniello’s board blindly supported Iacuaniello.

And then there’s the California Educational Code, a grotesquely jargonized (“educratese” is more impenetrable than “bureaucratese” or “legalese”) conglomeration of rules and regs that make the California Penal Code look like Reader’s Digest. I have never heard of a Board member disputing the Superintendent or the District’s lawyer regarding compliance with the Ed Code in this County. In fact, I’ve never seen any evidence of a school board member even reading the Ed Code, unless its presented to them by the Superintendent for the Superintendent’s purposes.

Anyone who thinks that being a school board member is in any way connected to student academic performance or test scores has never been a school board member.

And don’t get me started on school budgets. They make the County’s byzantine accounting system look like a third-grade primer.

I won’t even go into the school system’s resistance to new concepts like community schools, such as the one County Superintendent Candidate Matt Glavatch proposed a few years back. School authorities ruled that Glavatch was ineligible to even run on an irrelevant residential technicality.

Sorry for the rant, but the idea that running for a school board position will do anything to improve student academic achievement is like running for political office in the hope of changing the electoral college.or the campaign finance system. Outsiders and serious critics need not apply.

PS. Here’s a generally positive article about school boards and their function:

https://xqsuperschool.org/high-school-community/what-does-a-school-board-do-frequently-asked-questions/

But even they admit that school boards have very little to do with actual education:

“School boards address a wide array of issues, from the daily logistics of running a district to broader goals for the education of a community’s young people. On a practical, day-to-day level, school boards:

Hire and evaluate the superintendent [in secret closed session meetings]
Approve budgets [but not understand them]
Set spending priorities [but not set funding levels]
Approve textbooks and other curriculum materials [from the limited options offered]
Adopt the annual school calendar [a big deal, apparently]
Make decisions regarding opening and closing schools [very seldom]
Work closely with school and district leaders on school schedules, supplies, safety, discipline, classroom resources, facilities, and other issues. [but not on academics and not independently]”

MENDOCINO WAY BACK WHEN (Ron Parker)

ED NOTES

A CALLER that day long ago wanted to know, “Did you know that they were putting condoms on cucumbers at the high school today?” I hadn't known and wondered if the event was, uh, educationally sanctioned.

When I called the school for explanations and clarifications, Jan Pallazola filled me in. She said cucumbers and condoms were no laughing matter as might at first be assumed by a skeptical or startled public. Ms. Pallazola explained that two years ago there had been ten unintended pregnancies among The Valley's high school girls, and not too long ago a 7th grader had reported pregnant for fall classes. Boonville had not only become a hot spot on Mendocino County's teen preggers map, Anderson Valley threatened to become a full conflagration of teenage moms, hence a prophylactic course, so to speak, on prevention.

Ms. Pallazola explained that in fact teenage boys did tend to be a little hazy on how condoms are unrolled over the reproductive tumescence, hence the condom and cuke demo. I wondered to myself if a banana might offer slightly more verisimilitude, and I also wondered if the cuke had finally come to rest in the cafeteria salad bar, but I was reluctant to get into the relative merits of classroom props, and I certainly didn't want my informant to hang up on me.

When I'd asked Ms. Pallazola, “Was this a coed class?” she'd replied with a detectable snap, “Isn’t sex generally a coed activity? Should you be having sex with somebody you can’t talk to?” As a former teenage boy I can’t recall caring one way or the other, but of course I was a teenager when sports and cold showers were the prevalent sexual antidotes.

Mrs. Pallazola said there was always “some giggling” when the condom and cucumber were produced, but letters had been sent out to parents advising them that the demonstration was on and they were welcome to review the sex ed curriculum. Mrs. Pallazola pointed out that condom dispensers have long been an integral part of the high school’s restroom facilities. (25 cents per). She also said that professional filmmaker Heidi Knott of Philo and Mitch Mendoza, a teacher at the Anderson Valley Elementary School, had produced an effective film on teen pregnancies called, “Mommy, Daddy. Wait For Me” in which 13 young parents were interviewed as cautionary tales of the familial-social devastation wrought by children having children.

CUCUMBERS & CONDOMS, in my ever dimmer memory of my formative years, had not yet been thought of in tandem. Condoms were an under-the-counter item whose purchase would immediately be reported to one's parents or one's priest. You had to pay the neighborhood degenerate to buy them on the off chance you had occasion. Cool guys always carried a condom in their wallets, where the unwrapped device lingered unwrapped throughout their adolescence.

Our high school sex ed instruction, circa 1955, consisted entirely of an hour's lecture confined to abstractions all about zygotes and long-shot fallopian journeys at the end of which a tiny Mr. Peanut-like figure called the fetus might appear. There was never any mention of the sweaty grapples and pounding lunges which initiated the reproductive process as it occurs in real life.

There were certainly never classroom demonstrations pegged to cucumbers and condoms although I, for one, would have welcomed the pandemonium they certainly would have inspired. Only months out of high school in the Marines I remember a cautionary hour consisting of photos of grotesquely diseased penises and a similarly discouraging short film on the perils of promiscuity.

The film showed two babes in a convertible pulling up to a pair of rubes in Marine green. “Hop in boys,” one of the women beckons. The boys hop in and, apparently, on, and the next shot is of a Third World National hauling his gigantically swollen testicles in a wheelbarrow, the message being that sexual intercourse was a form of syphilitic roulette we were sure to lose.

We got another training film of a Castro-like figure lounging in palatial circumstances as bikini-clad tootsies flitted around in the background. The Castro figure periodically roused himself to shoot cringing peasants for no discernible reason as the girls laughed and did delighted dance steps. Our mission, as it seemed to us strict constructionists, was to shoot bearded palace dwellers but talk the bikini girls into associating with nicer people.

The Marines didn't have a very high opinion of our intelligence, and every weekend the lean, mean killing machines, as we laughingly referred to ourselves, headed straight for the forbidden fleshpots of Tijuana.

DOPE, THE GLORY YEARS, an on-line comment:

The best years of Humboldt and Mendocino County were in the 1980s to 2000 when COMMET (County of Mendocino Marijuana Eradication Team) and CAMP (the State’s Campaign Against Marijuana Planting) was implemented and going strong. Being an outlaw was fun and good for the counties. Especially Eureka Ford and Fortuna Ford. You could work and make a good living growing under ten pounds. I actually did two years time in 2002. Made the front page of the Press Democrat. Well worth being an outlaw and more fun when we listened to KMUD and the C.B. to see if CAMP was coming through Whitethorn and past the store. We would jump in our rigs and head to the Shelter Cove store for a beer. What dickhead thought legalization was a good idea?!

MARSHALL NEWMAN: An interesting old ‘wanted’ postcard from e-bay, Mendocino Sheriff's Office

THE THIRD MENDOCINO MILL was a prominent feature of the town’s lumber industry. Built in 1865, the two-story structure housed saws on its upper floor and a planing mill below. It operated for decades, enduring periodic shutdowns, but could not survive the economic downturn of the Great Depression. The mill experienced a major closure from 1931 to 1934, reopening briefly for intermittent operations from 1934 to 1936 before being shuttered again. Its final operation came in 1938 when it processed logs salvaged from a broken log raft off the Mendocino coast, ceasing operations permanently on November 30.

In January 1945, Harrah Brothers Machine Works of Willits purchased the site, intending to dismantle the mill for parts. Tragically, a fire destroyed the structure while it was being taken apart, consuming much of the remaining machinery and equipment.

Burned Mendocino Mill on Big River, 1946. View looking eastward at the remains of the Mendocino Mill after the building caught fire during its dismantling. The main steam engine has yet to be scrapped.

Note the large tanks on the hill in the background of the photo, which were there to supply water for fire suppression when the mill was operating. According to the 1929 Sanborn Fire Insurance Map, there were four tanks on the bluff, 1000' northeast of the Mill, with a combined capacity of 62,000 gallons and filled by gravity from an inexhaustible creek supply conveyed to the mill through 5-inch and 2-inch mains.

— Carol Dominy (Kelley House Museum)

CATCH OF THE DAY, Monday, December 23, 2024

DARRELL CARADINE, 56, Ukiah. Controlled substance, paraphernalia, failure to appear.

MAURICIO DELGADO-GARCIA, 27, Fort Bragg. Domestic battery, criminal threats.

DYLAN DIXON, 18, Fort Bragg. Shooting at inhabited dwelling, violation of restraining order by purchasing a firearm, contempt of court, loaded firearm, vandalism, contempt of court, contributing to delinquency of minor, offenses while on bail.

WES FELIZ, 22, Redwood Valley. Probation revocation.

JOHN HOAGLEN, 30, Covelo. Parole violation, failure to appear.

DEREK JOHNSON, 58, Willits. Disobeying court order.

PATRICK LILLO, 35, Ukiah. Elder abuse, resisting.

PABLO MARTINEZ II, 31, Covelo. Probation revocation.

GEORGE MENDOZA, 52, Ukiah. Under influence, paraphernalia, probation revocation.

TASHA ORNELAS, 38, Ukiah. Disorderly conduct-alcohol.

SESARIO RIOS, 18, Redwood Valley. Domestic battery, child neglect.

BILL KIMBERLIN WRITES: Every year we go into the City to see the Christmas trees at the hotels. We like to hit the Palace Hotel first then Nob Hill. Usually, the Palace is so packed you can't even squeeze in. However, this year with the hotel strike we couldn't even do that. But then the Union settled and off we went. Almost no one was there, just a few Japanese tourists. The Pied Piper bar welcomed us. What!!! You can't get into the Pied Piper Bar on Christmas week, are you crazy? But we did.

Then came the exciting part. We wanted to go to Scoma's restaurant on the Wharf. The real wharf, not the fake tourist one. So we hired a Waymo self-driving car. I sat in the front seat beside the driverless driver and watched the steering wheel turn left and right and the ladies sat in the rear passenger seats. This damn thing took off and blasted through the streets, even running a red light in North Beach. That is what the ladies claimed, but I thought it was a squeaker that only turned red at the last second. I don't care if it kills me, I am doing that again.

’TWAS THE NIGHT BEFORE…

by Herb Caen

I like Christmas but I don’t want to get involved. When I hear the hypocrisy and read the Little White Lies, my reaction is “Don’t kid a kidder.” We’ve heard that tune before and it’s getting tinnier every year. A couple of decades ago, my dear departed friend Howard Gossage started to address Christmas cards and then suddenly swept the whole pile into the wastebasket, announcing, “ Dammitt, I’m not going to let Christmas ruin my Christmas this year.” If you succumb to the pressure, Christmas is almost as much trouble as going skiing, a sport with no redeeming features unless you’re a masochist. Make lists of gifts for people you barely know, read the ads, watch the commercials, walk the streets, scan the windows, shake your head and try to hang on till January 2, always the best day of the year. it’s all over and you survived another one. This year, of course, there won’t be any post Christmas clearance sales. This year they had them before Christmas.

It’s the only holiday that’s a season, which is another problem. Thanksgiving comes and goes in a few hours and, except for the leftovers and the dyspepsia, can be forgotten till next year. But Christmas is a Megillah, the whole enchilada. it starts just after Labor Day and by Thanksgiving the tinsel is already beginning to look tired. Lug the decorations out of the basement, find a tree that costs much more than a mink, string the lights, have another drink. Christmas here lasts for months and ends in a hangover, followed by a stack of bills for items your friends and relatives have already returned. It you can get through the season without hearing ‘The Little Drummer Boy’ once, you’ve won the game. ‘Jingle bells’ holds up because it can be jazzed and swung and played every which way. ‘Joy To The World’ has the proper exultant tone. We need that end ‘Come All Ye Faithful’ to remind us that there is something to be celebrated that has lasted 2,000 years against all odds and oddballs.

The real trouble with Christmas is that it is altogether wonderful. If we didn’t have it we’d have to invent it, which is actually what we did for various good reasons. It’s good for the church business. It’s good for the business business, which is also sanctified. It is a delightful mishmash of fables, legends, traditions and geographical conundrums, with a jolly German Santa Claus plodding through the snow to honor the desert child on the burning sands. This year the star shining in the East casts its glow over hundreds of thousands of American troops, ready to do battle for oil that is holy. Hold the myrrh and frankincense. O three wise men, but the gold we can use. The armed forces of this constitutionally secular country are there to fight for those who consider us infidels but nobody ever pretended that organized religion makes sense. To be kind and generous is enough and there is no reason not to worship a tree.

The two Christmases, the sacred and the profane. Well, we’ve been through that waltz a number of times, restating the obvious in various ways that fill the space with portentous emptiness. Yeah, Xmas is about department store grosses and about the infant Jesus and about sincere and spurious sentiments and about our hopes and anxieties. No wonder it’s a whole season, a third of a year. We couldn’t go through all these traumatic delights in a single day. In the first place, we have to revert to childishness, in the best sense of the word. We search for the eternal simplicities and evil, sad and glad, beautiful and beastly. We try to unclutter our minds and psyches and return to innocence, when we thought we could make a difference and even shed light in dark corners.

If Christmas can do all that, and it can, it is worth the bother which it is. I marvel at the trouble people go to, the energy and money expended in the name of spreading holiday cheer. Colored lights strung in the window of somebody’s tiny and maybe even awful room in the Tenderloin hotel—a touch that makes you choke up a little. The unbounded generosity of anonymous people who feed the helpless and clothe the homeless and lug turkeys to the free food places and work in the soup kitchens—all without the recognition they don’t want or need. Tonight they can turn out their lights and read the newspaper by the light of their halos. You have to believe that somebody is keeping score and putting high marks next to their names. If you don’t believe that, the game is up and the party’s over. He knows when you’ve been naughty, he knows when you’ve been nice. Is it not so, Sire?

The rich city of San Francisco at Christmas. From a vantage point on Telegraph Hill it’s a magnificent sight—the Bay Bridge a mammoth Meccano set, the Ferry Building tower a beloved toy, the reasonably mundane buildings of Embarcadero Center transformed into dreams by thousands of lights that out-twinkle the stars. Ah, the magic of oil-driven energy! There are carols in the streets, trees in the windows, enticing packages festooned with bows. The gift of wrapping gifts is not a minor one, and it is with a pang that one rips off the artistry. But there is the everlasting guilt among the gilt, the most egregious conflict of the blessed and damned season: the haves and the have-nots, the winners and the losers, the Scrooges and the Scrooged. The charities have done their best and millions have been raised but it is still not enough, it is never enough, it never will be, and that is the shame of the richest country.

Merry Christmas to the beautiful city and its people. The air is crisp, the vistas endless and hope eternal.

December 24, 1990

MARK TWAIN DID IT ALONE

by Paul Modic

When you read a recently written book these days, in the acknowledgements section at the end the author usually thanks up to thirty people who helped with the book by reading drafts, doing research, and other forms of support, including attending the Iowa Writers Workshop, or some other similar body.

I bet that when Mark Twain wrote a book, he just wrote it himself and had few or no similar acknowledgements of collaborators.

I’m not knocking it, many new books I read are excellent, and bring me much pleasure and amusement. Hey, if it takes thirty people to create that much enjoyment and distraction for me, have at it!

CHRIS SKYHAWK: The maddening truth: Feeding crows and jays harms other birds

CALIFORNIA FIRE MARSHALL GRANTS WAIVER THAT COULD HELP RESTART DANGEROUS REFUGIO OIL SPILL PIPELINE

by Dan Bacher

Sable Offshore Corporation, a Houston-based independent company that claims it is “focused on responsibly developing” offshore oil, is one step closer to restarting oil production in the Santa Ynez Unit in federal waters off the Santa Barbara County Coast.…

https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2024/12/22/2293181/-CA-Fire-Marshall-grants-waiver-that-could-help-restart-dangerous-Refugio-Oil-Spill-pipeline

IMMIGRANT WORKERS - AN IMPEDIMENT TO MASS DEPORTATION: A Q&Q WITH DAVID BACON

President-elect Donald Trump says he will enact a mass-deportation operation starting his first week in office. But according to photojournalist, author, and organizer David Bacon, there are serious limitations on what he can do, because big business in the United States depends so heavily on migrant labor.

What follows in this interview is an analysis, from a worker's perspective, of Trump's promise to ramp up immigration enforcement. Bacon's analysis is informed by his history as a union organizer, decades of research and writing through multiple administrations, including Trump's first term, as well as knowledge of the global economic system. Bacon offers several examples of how undocumented workers organized, mobilized, and prepared for potential raids in the past, and notes that corporate bosses are not necessarily keen on mass deportations.…

https://davidbaconrealitycheck.blogspot.com/2024/12/migrant-workers-as-impediment-to-mass.html

FOREVER WARS

Editor:

The Washington Post estimates that 4.5 million people have been killed in the “forever wars” since 9/11, many of them women and children. Today there are 117 million war refugees.

Those figures, however, do not describe the horrific deaths, the extermination of families, the deaths and crippling wounds of children and the agony and suffering of survivors. Living in camps or collapsed buildings, they have no idea where their next meal will come from, where they will sleep or when it will end.

Have we achieved anything through this loss of human life and destruction, paid for by our taxes and the lives of American soldiers? Think what the money spent on these useless wars could do if it were spent on health care, infrastructure, education, housing and climate change.

The real beneficiaries of perpetual war are the weapons manufacturers and the major investment firms that profit from their earnings. Since members of Congress can also own stock, they can fatten their portfolios by increasing “defense” spending.

Even after the bombs stop dropping, billions will be allocated in no-bid contracts to rebuild the cities our weapons destroyed, while at home, our cities deteriorate.

Tony White

Santa Rosa

ASSASSINATION MENTALITY

Editor:

The assassination of Brian Thompson, CEO of UnitedHealthcare, quickly opened up many discussions on the greed of health insurance companies, just like the alleged assassin wanted. This only serves to fuel an “assassination mentality” by focusing on grievances against insurance companies, utility companies, airlines, etc. Let’s honor Brian Thompson’s life and his family’s grief by focusing on him right now, not on who allegedly killed him to publicize his own grievances. Assassins are violent narcissists, not heroes.

Shayna Billings

Santa Rosa

ON-LINE COMMENT OF THE DAY

We truly live in an upside down world when a cold blooded murderer who guns a man down on a NYC street is raised up as a hero, and worse — a sex symbol?? — while a veteran who acted to protect his fellow citizens from a violent, deranged individual on a subway is acquitted by a NYC jury of criminal wrongdoing, then finds himself howled down as a villain? As a New Yorker, I’m disgusted today.

MY CONVERSATIONS WITH LUIGI MANGIONE

He told me that once we surrendered our agency, we’d surrender everything else.

by Gurwinder Bhogal

After the suspected assassin of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson was revealed as Luigi Mangione, a bright young man from a well-to-do family, thousands of pundits rushed to tell us why he did it. I, however, held back. Because, unlike them, I’d actually met Mangione, and I knew all was not what it seemed.

For days after the revelation, my phone buzzed incessantly from journalists asking me for comment. I found it hard to say anything coherent, because my mind was a storm, constantly replaying memories of my interactions with the suspect, trying to find meaning in even our most banal exchanges.

In the days since, I’ve developed some detachment from the situation, and now I feel clearheaded enough to offer my full opinion. Here it is.

Mangione first reached out to me via email on April 6. He said he was a longtime fan of my work, and had just purchased a $200 founding membership to my blog, The Prism, which entitled him to a two-hour video call with me. A month later, on May 5, we had our chat.

He was warm and gregarious from the outset, praising my writing and telling me how excited he was to speak with me. Mangione said he was on holiday in Japan, and I asked him about it. He said that while he loved many aspects of Japanese culture, such as its sense of honor, he believed Japan was full of “NPCs,” or non-player characters—which is internet slang for people who don’t think for themselves. He then told me a story he’d first mentioned in an email: One morning in Japan, he saw a man having a seizure in the street, so he ran to the nearest police station for help. They followed him back to the man, but refused to cross any street if the stoplight was red—even if the road was empty—as the man was seizing on the ground. Mangione lamented what he called “a lack of free will” in Japan, by which he meant a lack of agency.

I quickly realized that agency was a major concern of Mangione’s. He identified three of my articles that particularly resonated with him, all of which describe threats to human autonomy.

Mangione went on to explain why he felt Japan was the future dystopia I’d warned about in some of my writings. He spoke of the hikikomori, Japanese men who lived their lives alone in their bedrooms, sedating themselves with video games, porn, and other shallow entertainments. For Mangione, such people had lost control over their lives, becoming mindless slaves to stimuli much like the cops who stopped at red lights even when it made no sense.

But it wasn’t just Japan. Mangione believed people everywhere were becoming NPCs, increasingly living their lives as a series of reflex reactions rather than consciously choosing their behaviors. Japan was merely the canary in the coal mine; the West was following closely behind, driven by tech companies intent on mesmerizing us into being servile consumers. Mangione feared that once we’d surrendered our agency, we’d surrender everything else.

Unlike most people who decry others as “NPCs,” Mangione showed enough awareness to identify that he, too, lived much of his life on autopilot, confessing that he sometimes wasted whole afternoons doomscrolling social media. He said he wanted to regain some of the agency he felt he’d lost to online distractions, so we spent much of the chat discussing ways he could become more active.

I told him about my favorite philosophy, Stoicism, and how it could teach him to ignore distractions and focus his mind on living more deliberately. Mangione listened intently, and showed much curiosity, gently stopping me to ask me to explain terms he didn’t know.

I also suggested to Mangione that he should avoid automating the tasks he wanted to improve at, and should instead seek to make these tasks fun, by turning them into games. This led us to discuss my essay about gamification, “Why Everything is Becoming a Game.”

Mangione had much to say about this essay, not least because it involves the story of the Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski, who shared Mangione’s belief that modern life is destroying our agency. Kaczynski was a terrorist whose bombs killed and maimed innocent people, and I made it clear that, while I agreed with some of what he’d written in his manifesto, I found his actions abhorrent. Mangione agreed, saying something like, “He deserved to be taken seriously, but he also deserved to be in jail.”

Besides Kaczynski, Mangione’s intellectual tastes were relatively normal. Writers he spoke fondly of included Tim Urban, Sam Harris, Yuval Noah Harari, Jonathan Haidt, and Aldous Huxley. His political views were less conventional; when I asked him if he was voting in the presidential election, he scrunched his nose and said he wasn’t crazy about Donald Trump or Joe Biden, but liked some of the things Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was saying. I regard RFK Jr. as a crank who regularly pushes harmful pseudoscience, but I didn’t mention it so as not to derail the conversation.

Somehow, from there we ended up talking about intergenerational trauma, and it was here that we had our only significant disagreement. Mangione implied that he believed trauma could be directly inherited, and that it accumulated in families much like generational wealth. He claimed to have based this view partly on his own personal experiences. (I can’t elaborate.) It sounded to me like he was describing a pseudoscientific misinterpretation of epigenetics, popularized by activist-academics and books like The Body Keeps the Score.

The idea that trauma is passed down epigenetically is not only unscientific, it’s also un-agentic; if you believe your trauma is hardwired into your DNA, you’re prone to passively accept it rather than actively trying to overcome it. And so, in a bid to increase Mangione’s agency, I pointed out, as politely as I could, why he was wrong.

After we exchanged pleasantries and ended our chat, I sent Mangione an article debunking epigenetic trauma. Mangione replied shortly after, thanking me for the article, and explaining what it had taught him. He also told me he’d bought me a six-month subscription to the app Readwise Reader, because he knew my job required extensive research, and believed the app would help.

I have Asperger’s syndrome, so I’m a poor judge of social cues. Further, I’ve liked every subscriber I’ve had a video-call with (and I’ve had many), so I’m probably not very discerning in that regard. But, to me, Mangione seemed like a particularly nice guy.

It wasn’t just that he’d bought me a subscription to an app that he thought might help me. It was that he showed a desire to help even people he didn’t know, frequently expressing concerns about humanity generally, and wishing to find ways to improve everyone’s lives. He viewed most people as NPCs who needed to be awakened, but he never came off as arrogant, regarding himself as equally zombielike in many of his thoughts and behaviors. His view of society was somewhat pessimistic, but he tempered it with a sense of humor and a focus on finding solutions rather than merely complaining. And although he seemed to have some unscientific views, he was always open to other viewpoints, and was willing to update his beliefs if corrected.

We interacted on social media several times afterward, and each time he seemed as polite and thoughtful as he’d been in our chat. As the summer ended, I largely withdrew from social media, so I didn’t notice Mangione had vanished.

And then, a few months later, Brian Thompson was shot dead.

POLITICAL ECONOMY CONTRADICTIONS AS WE LURCH INTO 2025

Richard D. Wolff

The Republicans (GOP), traditionally the U.S.’s anti-tax party, now promise to use tariffs to wage trade wars, to massively deport immigrants, and to stop drug traffic. But tariffs are simply the name of one kind of tax (on imported goods and services). So the GOP becomes both anti-tax and pro-tax. Likewise, the traditional party of minimal government, today’s GOP now favors massive subsidies to industries that big government will select as well as economic sanctions and bans on enterprises and whole countries that big government will select. Beyond the right-wing ideology and financial self-serving, Trump reflects deeper contradictions in the GOP’s evolution.

The GOP, traditionally the laissez-faire party of private enterprise, now favors increased government control of what private enterprises can and cannot offer in markets for reproductive healthcare, control medications and devices, and also for vaccines and drugs. The GOP, traditionally supporting “freedom,” now insists on blocking the free movement of people across borders and favors protectionist economic policy over a commitment to “free trade.” Some of Trump’s cabinet nominees voice traditional GOP views while others pronounce the new anti-traditional positions. Some nominees do both. Trump does not resolve the deep contradictions in the GOP’s message, thereby confusing both its messengers and its public audiences. In the moment, those contradictions give Trump some power. Amid the confusion, he decides. But soon conflicts among U.S. policies will expose the incoherence of Trump’s project and thereby sap his power.

The Democratic party was, at least since the Great Depression of the 1930s, the “progressive” party of working people, unions, and oppressed minorities. Yet the rise of the “centrists” across recent decades shifted the Democrats rightward. As they became grateful recipients of corporate and billionaires’ donations, the Democrats increasingly supported the donor class by fielding “moderate” candidates, moderating their policies and programs, and publicly marginalizing the party’s remaining progressive wing. Privately, the Democrats’ centrist leaders pleaded and maneuvered to retain the traditional support of labor unions, oppressed minorities, and educated professionals. Moderation rendered the Democrats’ pursuit of gains for their traditional supporters ever less effective. So too did Democrats’ hold on those constituencies’ electoral commitments and loyalties dissipate. Success with donors contradicted deepening failures with voters, most starkly exposed in the 2024 election.

Multiple, intense, and persistent contradictions within both parties suggest that some underlying, historic shifts may be underway. In my view, the first of those shifts is the peaking and subsequent decline in recent decades of the U.S. empire and its allies (especially the G7). This shift reflects and feeds the concurrent rise of the Global South, China, and the BRICS. A second shift is the accumulation of U.S. capitalism’s internal economic problems and difficulties. These are inadequately acknowledged, let alone solved. Chief among the problems are the long-term worsening of wealth and income inequalities and the persistent boom-bust or recession-inflation cycles for which no solution has been found.

In short, both the GOP and the Democrats have denied both shifts. Indeed, denial has so far been the parties’ shared response to the linked declines of global empire and domestic capitalism. Denial rarely solves problems. It usually enables or provokes them to worsen until they explode.

The key contradictions roiling political parties and their economic policies work parallel effects among professional economists. Unresolved, stale debates among economists react back upon policies, politicians, and public discourse to render them frustratingly powerless to fix what the public sees increasingly as a broken system. Starting with Adam Smith, David Ricardo, and the doctrine of laissez-faire and, especially since John Maynard Keynes, a huge portion of the profession has centered its work around an ongoing, seemingly endless debate. The question is whether our capitalist system is best served by minimal versus large, ongoing government interventions in its operation. Should we privilege pro-laissez-faire economics (the so-called neoclassical tradition) or governmental interventionist economics (the so-called Keynesian tradition) or some “synthesis” of both?

This debate figured prominently in U.S. university economics classes 20, 40, and 60 years ago much as it does in such classes today. The themes of that debate echoed prominently in the language of politics then and now. Occasionally, a few politicians recognized that the overdrawn oppositions, in theory, did not correspond all that well with actual practical politics. Nixon once said, “We are all Keynesian now.” Clinton boasted that he had “ended welfare as we know it.” Trump regularly excoriates Democrats as “radical left lunatics” and includes “fascists” among them. All three presidents were proved wrong, albeit quite self-assured, in making such confused and confusing statements.

Yet the centrality of the private-versus-government dispute in both economic theory and policy continues. Its social usefulness lies more in what it excludes rather than in anything positive it includes. Putting that debate at the core of economics has helped prevent alternative cores from emerging that would challenge both neoclassical and Keynesian economics. One such alternative core would question whether top-down hierarchical organizations of production (the employer-employee model) better serve societies than horizontally egalitarian, democratic organizations (the worker coop model). Debates might then focus on which organization of production better preserves the natural environment, reduces income and wealth inequalities, overcomes cyclical economic instability, or advances the physical and mental health of people.

The contradictions agitating discourses and practices these days may stem from the exhaustion of old economic and political traditions even as a new tradition is not yet clearly emerging. On the one hand, the U.S. and the UK now join Europe in turning clearly toward government-run protectionism instead of free trade. On the other, state-supervised China and India, among others, support free trade. The economic growth records of the USSR in the 20th century and of China in the 21st century undermine preferences for private over state-regulated capitalisms. The old debate yields no new light on such central economic issues these days as the rise of the BRICS bloc in the world economy relative to the declines of an already smaller G7 bloc and the U.S. dollar in world trade.

Of course, economists and politicians whose resumes mark them as leading proponents of neoclassical economics and privatization keep trying—like their Keynesian counterparts—to sustain the old debates that made them relevant. If they succeed, it will be because a still prevailing system prefers to rehash the old rather than welcome and explore what is emerging. In any case, however, relentless change will continue to work its ways on a passing U.S. empire and its capitalist system.

(This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute. Richard Wolff is the author of Capitalism Hits the Fan and Capitalism’s Crisis Deepens. He is founder of Democracy at Work. CounterPunch.org.)

THE TRUMPIAN ATTITUDE AT THE HEART OF THE GAETZ REPORT

by David Firestone

There is so much repellently sleazy behavior documented in the House Ethics Committee report about Matt Gaetz that a reader has to stop every few pages to look away and focus on what still seems astounding: This is the man that Donald Trump wanted to be the Attorney General of the United States, the highest-ranking law enforcement official in the land, the leader of the Department of Justice.

Trump wanted to give that position to a man who paid at least half a dozen women for sex, according to the report, which was made public on Monday. And the violation of Florida’s prostitution law isn’t even the real depravity; the committee took pains to detail the underlying implication of his actions: “Representative Gaetz took advantage of the economic vulnerability of young women to lure them into sexual activity for which they received an average of a few hundred dollars after each encounter.”

Trump wanted to give the Justice Department to a man the committee says committed the statutory rape of a 17-year-old girl. A man who is accused of setting up a phony email account at his office in the House to buy illegal drugs and who then used the drugs to facilitate sexual misconduct. A man who accepted impermissible gifts and plane trips, according to the report, and who used the power of his office to help a woman with whom he was having sex. A man whose conduct, according to his own colleagues of both parties, “reflects discreditably upon the House.”

And of course, on Trump himself.

Nonetheless, when you read through the details, you can see the commonality between the two men, and the reasons Trump held Gaetz in high esteem. It’s not just the contempt for women as disposable commodities for hire or plunder; it’s the contempt for the law.

Gaetz fought the committee’s investigation at every turn, and the report’s appendices are full of letters from him dripping with disdain at the process, completely indignant that he should even be asked to account for his actions. He blames his enemies in Washington for his plight, he blames the press, he says Democrats have done much worse, and he just lies and lies, denying allegations that are fully documented elsewhere in the text.

The report says Gaetz refused to supply the committee with the exculpatory evidence that he claimed he had and refused to respond to subpoenas. His assertions “were nothing more than attempts to delay the committee’s investigation,” the report said. And then there were his attempts to bully witnesses against him. “The committee had serious concerns that Representative Gaetz might retaliate against individuals who cooperated with the committee,” the report said.

Does that sound familiar? It’s a summary of the conduct we’ve seen from the president-elect for years, whenever the law tries to make him responsible for his conduct. In many ways, these two men think the same way about authority, and in that sense, Gaetz would have been an ideal Attorney General for the next administration.

(NY Times)

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A CHRISTMAS PRAYER

“If it's time for you to go, leave willingly, as you would to accomplish anything that can be done with grace and honor.” — Marcus Aurelius

by James Kunstler

The longest and coldest night of the year is upon us with its portents of endings, the death of things, of people like ourselves, and also bodies of thought, movements of culture and politics. And for all the cold and darkness, you feel the stirrings of things waiting to be born. Christmas is the lovely distraction for a brief spell, and after that, the difficult labor of the nation commences for-real in the long night of the year.

This moment in the cold and dark is also the climax of the Great Pretending. You knew it would come to this for “Joe Biden,” that he would be found-out. That in the waning days of his woebegone term in office, the people around him in the White House would betray him with the truth: that he was mentally unfit for the job from even before the get-go, from those drear days in the fall campaign of 2020 when he hid himself at home in Delaware while the FBI covered-up the massive bribery-and-treason story concealed in Hunter’s laptop. And that for four years since then those people around “Joe Biden” have pretended to the world that he was doing his job, that he was okay, when he was absolutely not okay, as they well knew.

It was only one big lie among the thousands of lies put over by the conspiracy between that gang in the White House and the perfidious organs of the news, especially The New York Times. If you want to see how stupendously dishonest the employees of that newspaper are, read this “roundtable” column of several Times pundits attempting to chew over the state of their patron, the Democratic party. Forgive me for quoting myself in the comment I posted there a half hour ago:

“You’re all quite remarkably clueless and dishonest. Your party is in ruins because your policies are intolerable and often insane: censorship, war, gender lunacy, flooding the country with illegal immigrants – no, not “undocumented” in your parlance, as if it was just some clerical error. And you: Democratic Party aligned journalists are even worse than the politicians, because you’re supposed to make an effort to determine the truth, and you deliberately gaslight the public instead. Shame on you and the Democratic Party. It’s that simple.”

It’s hard to know for sure, but it looks an awful lot as though these journalists — in fact, the whole elite intelligentsia across America — are gaslighting themselves, still pretending that they didn’t know what went on, a coup against their own country. Everything they have been saying and publishing is the opposite of reality. And now it is about to all spill out because other people are about to take over the levers of power.

For instance: can the CDC and other agencies of public health continue to lie about disastrous Covid-19 vaccines, about the deaths and disabilities they have caused in millions of people? Under “Joe Biden,” there was no other way for the likes of Rochelle Walensky and Mandy Cohen except to lie. And get this: women were chosen to front for the CDC because you’re not supposed to believe that “Mommy” would lie to you, especially in matters of life and death. There was no other way because the crime was so great and they were all in it so deep — not just Rochelle and Mandy but the hundreds of high-ranking bureaucrats in CDC, FDA, and NIH who went along with all this.

Of course, it’s hard to know whether the Covid-19 affair was just a venal and insane project by Anthony Fauci and his colleagues to play “hero” while making a ton of money. . . or whether it was actually a deliberate effort by the Intel Blob to queer the 2020 election by forcing a change in the voting procedure that would allow for wholesale fraud, in the service of cancelling Donald Trump. Possibly, it was a mash-up of both.

The truth about all this, and a lot more, is going to come out, whether or not Bobby Kennedy, Kash Patel, and other nominees get confirmed in their jobs, because there are many other figures just as capable behind them who would be nominated and eventually confirmed to run these departments. Those New York Times journalists are gaslighting themselves further if they think that blocking a few nominations is going to save their reputations. This populist revolution is bigger than that. It’s about overturning a paradigm of lies.

We really don’t know if our country is too far gone. The wreckage accomplished under the fakery of “Joe Biden” is prodigious. The financial quandaries alone are enough to sink the Republic in penury, and it will be hard to dodge the truth about that, too, because individual citizens and households know when they are hurting. When they hurt enough, they move to action, visibly, loudly, and you will not miss it.

This ought to be a sobering Christmas then. This is the pause at the end of things when we might consider how important it is to tell ourselves the truth. Chew on that with the sugarplums of the season while we wait for that something that is busy being born.

Early this year, my friend Kathie Breault, a nurse-midwife, got in trouble with the law over the Covid-19 vaccines and treatments, and you readers helped her raise money for her legal defense. This is her note of thanks to you:

“I'm grateful to Jim for sponsoring and sharing my GiveSendGo campaign on his blog. Jim was the person I ran to when the FBI left their calling card on my door — a terrifying experience.

It's Christmastime. I'm delighted to report that last week I was sentenced to three years’ probation for giving out vaccine cards without administering the shots — no jail time. This was good news because there were others convicted of similar crimes in the Eastern District of NY who were incarcerated for several months.

I initially pleaded not guilty. I admitted giving out the cards from the beginning, and my attorney was planning a civil disobedience / necessity defense. I'd been contacting and lining up experts who would testify for me and we planned to go to trial. After many months, and for a variety of reasons, my attorney and I decided it was wiser to accept a plea bargain. Had I gone to trial and lost, I would have faced significant jail time.

You were extremely generous — I received enough donations ($41,000+) to cover the fees of both of my attorneys. The ivermectin case is still not settled — I suspect that the NY State Office of Professional Discipline (OPD) was waiting to see what the outcome of the federal case was before they make a decision about my purported ivermectin misdeeds. Although it's just been a little over a week since I was sentenced, I've already heard from an OPD attorney regarding my nursing licenses: “Being convicted of a crime under federal law is considered professional misconduct under the Education Law.” I will have to attend a hearing in the near future, and it's likely that I will lose my licenses to practice because of the “misconduct.” I have an excellent attorney and I do have recourse, but retirement seems to be in the cards.

I wish I could thank each of you personally. Your generosity meant everything to me — it made a difficult, frightening situation much easier to bear. I had no idea how I'd raise the attorney fees and was afraid this would put a major dent in my retirement savings. I can't thank you enough.

Much love, Kathie”

FRANCIS FORD COPPOLA REFLECTS ON ‘HORROR’ OF POLIO BATTLE, SLAMS VACCINE SKEPTICS

by Aidin Vaziri

Francis Ford Coppola, the Oscar-winning Bay Area filmmaker and polio survivor, is sounding the alarm over the growing wave of vaccine skepticism in the United States, particularly regarding polio.

In a new interview, Coppola recounted his harrowing experience with the disease at age 9, warning that the push could undo decades of progress in preventing catastrophic health outcomes.

“People don’t understand that polio is a fever that just hits you for one night. You only are sick for one night,” the 85-year-old “Megalopolis“ director told Deadline in an interview published Sunday. “The terrible effects of polio, like being unable to breathe so you have to be in an iron lung, or not being able to walk or be totally paralyzed, is the result of the damage of that one night of the infection.”

Contracting polio left him partially paralyzed for part of his childhood.

“I remember that night. I was feverish and they took me to a hospital ward,” he said. “It was so crammed with kids that there were gurneys piled up three and four high in the hallways because there were so many more kids than there were beds in the hospital. I remember the kids in the iron lungs who you could see their faces on mirrors, and they were all crying for their parents. They didn’t understand why they were suddenly in these steel cabinets.

“I was looking around, and then when I tried to get out of bed, I fell on the floor and I realized I couldn’t walk,” he added.

His comments come amid reports that Aaron Siri, a key ally of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., has filed a petition with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to revoke approval for the polio vaccine in children. Siri, who is advising Kennedy on health policy for the incoming Trump administration, submitted the petition in 2022 on behalf of the Informed Consent Action Network, a group that has repeatedly raised concerns about vaccine safety.

Coppola spent 10 days in the polio ward, where doctors told his family that while he would survive, he would likely be confined to a wheelchair for the rest of his life.

His father, Carmine Coppola, the composer known for “The Godfather” scores, rejected that prognosis.

“It didn’t sound logical to him,” Coppola said.

Carmine sought alternative treatments and discovered the work of Australian nurse Elizabeth Kenny, who pioneered a new approach involving gentle exercise for polio patients, in stark contrast to the common practice of enforced bed rest. Coppola credits this treatment for his eventual recovery.

“But the horror is what I saw a hospital just filled with screaming kids, and that was finally all over, because of the wonderful Salk vaccine that happened just two or three years later,” he said.

The petition to revoke the polio vaccine has drawn sharp rebukes from public health officials, including Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, who emphasized the critical importance of maintaining trust in vaccines, particularly the polio vaccine, which has saved millions of lives.

“The polio vaccine has been a critical tool in the fight against a deadly disease,” McConnell stated.

Siri, who has also campaigned against COVID-19 vaccine mandates, is part of a growing movement that questions the safety and efficacy of vaccines, led by figures like Kennedy, who has long cast doubt on vaccine safety.

For Coppola, there is no debate.

“Dr. Jonas Salk and Albert Sabin, they donated the patents of their vaccines to the public as opposed to what happens today where the companies own them,” he said. “To see (polio) go away, there’s so many stories about the vaccine, how many lives it saved in an epidemic that was only becoming a bigger epidemic … It makes it so absurd, the idea that they would consider reversing course on vaccines now.”

Earlier this month, Coppola was honored alongside the Grateful Dead, Bonnie Raitt, Arturo Sandoval, and the Apollo Theater at the 47th Annual Kennedy Center Honors in Washington, D.C. for their enduring impact on American culture through the performing arts.

(SF Chronicle)

HOW FASCISM CAME

America’s democracy was destroyed by the two ruling parties who sold us out to corporations, militarists and billionaires. Now we pay the price.

by Chris Hedges

For over two decades, I and a handful of others — Sheldon Wolin, Noam Chomsky, Chalmers Johnson, Barbara Ehrenreich and Ralph Nader — warned that the expanding social inequality and steady erosion of our democratic institutions, including the media, the Congress, organized labor, academia and the courts, would inevitably lead to an authoritarian or Christian fascist state. My books — “American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America” (2007), “Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle” (2009), “Death of the Liberal Class” (2010), “Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt” (2012), written with Joe Sacco, “Wages of Rebellion” (2015) and “America: The Farewell Tour” (2018) were a succession of impassioned pleas to take the decay seriously. I take no joy in being correct.

“The rage of those abandoned by the economy, the fears and concerns of a beleaguered and insecure middle class, and the numbing isolation that comes with the loss of community, would be the kindling for a dangerous mass movement,” I wrote in “American Fascists” in 2007. “If these dispossessed were not reincorporated into mainstream society, if they eventually lost all hope of finding good, stable jobs and opportunities for themselves and their children — in short, the promise of a brighter future — the specter of American fascism would beset the nation. This despair, this loss of hope, this denial of a future, led the desperate into the arms of those who promised miracles and dreams of apocalyptic glory.”

President-elect Donald Trump does not herald the advent of fascism. He heralds the collapse of the veneer that masked the corruption within the ruling class and their pretense of democracy. He is the symptom, not the disease. The loss of basic democratic norms began long before Trump, which paved the road to an American totalitarianism. Deindustrialization, deregulation, austerity, unchecked predatory corporations, including the health-care industry, wholesale surveillance of every American, social inequality, an electoral system that is plagued by legalized bribery, endless and futile wars, the largest prison population in the world, but most of all feelings of betrayal, stagnation and despair, are a toxic brew that culminate in an inchoate hatred of the ruling class and the institutions they have deformed to exclusively serve the rich and the powerful. The Democrats are as guilty as the Republicans.

“Trump and his coterie of billionaires, generals, half-wits, Christian fascists, criminals, racists, and moral deviants play the role of the Snopes clan in some of William Faulkner’s novels,” I wrote in “America: The Farewell Tour.” “The Snopeses filled the power vacuum of the decayed South and ruthlessly seized control from the degenerated, former slaveholding aristocratic elites. Flem Snopes and his extended family — which includes a killer, a pedophile, a bigamist, an arsonist, a mentally disabled man who copulates with a cow, and a relative who sells tickets to witness the bestiality — are fictional representations of the scum now elevated to the highest level of the federal government. They embody the moral rot unleashed by unfettered capitalism.”

“The usual reference to ‘amorality,’ while accurate, is not sufficiently distinctive and by itself does not allow us to place them, as they should be placed, in a historical moment,” the critic Irving Howe wrote of the Snopeses. “Perhaps the most important thing to be said is that they are what comes afterwards: the creatures that emerge from the devastation, with the slime still upon their lips.”

“Let a world collapse, in the South or Russia, and there appear figures of coarse ambition driving their way up from beneath the social bottom, men to whom moral claims are not so much absurd as incomprehensible, sons of bushwhackers or muzhiks drifting in from nowhere and taking over through the sheer outrageousness of their monolithic force,” Howe wrote. “They become presidents of local banks and chairmen of party regional committees, and later, a trifle slicked up, they muscle their way into Congress or the Politburo. Scavengers without inhibition, they need not believe in the crumbling official code of their society; they need only learn to mimic its sounds.”

The political philosopher Sheldon Wolin called our system of governance “inverted totalitarianism,” one that kept the old iconography, symbols and language, but had surrendered power to corporations and oligarchs. Now we will shift to totalitarianism’s more recognizable form, one dominated by a demagogue and an ideology grounded in the demonization of the other, hypermasculinity and magical thinking.

Fascism is always the bastard child of a bankrupt liberalism.

“We live in a two-tiered legal system, one where poor people are harassed, arrested and jailed for absurd infractions, such as selling loose cigarettes — which led to Eric Garner being choked to death by the New York City police in 2014 — while crimes of appalling magnitude by the oligarchs and corporations, from oil spills to bank fraud in the hundreds of billions of dollars, which wiped out 40 percent of the world’s wealth, are dealt with through tepid administrative controls, symbolic fines, and civil enforcement that give these wealthy perpetrators immunity from criminal prosecution,” I wrote in “America: The Farewell Tour.”

The utopian ideology of neoliberalism and global capitalism is a vast con. Global wealth, rather than being spread equitably, as neoliberal proponents promised, was funneled upward into the hands of a rapacious, oligarchic elite, fueling the worst economic inequality since the age of the robber barons. The working poor, whose unions and rights were stripped from them and whose wages have stagnated or declined over the past 40 years, have been thrust into chronic poverty and underemployment. Their lives, as Barbara Ehrenreich chronicled in “Nickel and Dimed,” are one long, stress-ridden emergency. The middle class is evaporating. Cities that once manufactured products and offered factory jobs are boarded up-wastelands. Prisons are overflowing. Corporations have orchestrated the destruction of trade barriers, allowing them to stash $1.42 trillion in profits in overseas banks to avoid paying taxes.

Neoliberalism, despite its promise to build and spread democracy, swiftly gutted regulations and hollowed out democratic systems to turn them into corporate leviathans. The labels “liberal” and “conservative” are meaningless in the neoliberal order, evidenced by a Democratic presidential candidate who bragged about an endorsement from Dick Cheney, a war criminal who left office with a 13 percent approval rating. The attraction of Trump is that, although vile and buffoonish, he mocks the bankruptcy of the political charade.

“The permanent lie is the apotheosis of totalitarianism,” I wrote in “America: The Farewell Tour”:

It no longer matters what is true. It matters only what is ‘correct.’ Federal courts are being stacked with imbecilic and incompetent judges who serve the ‘correct’ ideology of corporatism and the rigid social mores of the Chrtistian right. They hold reality, including science and the rule of law, in contempt. They seek to banish those who live in a reality-based world defined by intellectual and moral autonomy. Totalitarian rule always elevates the brutal and the stupid. These reigning idiots have no genuine political philosophy or goals. They use clichés and slogans, most of which are absurd and contradictory, to justify their greed and lust for power. This is as true for the Christian right as it is for the corporatists that preach the free market and globalization. The merger of the corporatists with the Christian right is the marrying of Godzilla to Frankenstein.

The illusions peddled on our screens — including the fictitious persona created for Trump on The Apprentice — have replaced reality. Politics is burlesque as Kamala Harris’ vapid, celebrity-filled campaign illustrated. It is smoke and mirrors created by the army of agents, publicists, marketing departments, promoters, script writers, television and movie producers, video technicians, photographers, bodyguards, wardrobe consultants, fitness trainers, pollsters, public announcers and television new personalities. We are a culture awash in lies.

“The cult of the self dominates our cultural landscape,” I wrote in “Empire of Illusion”:

This cult has within it the classic traits of psychopaths: superficial charm, grandiosity and self-importance; a need for constant stimulation, a penchant for lying, deception, and manipulation, and the inability to feel remorse or guilt. This is, of course, the ethic promoted by corporations. It is the ethic of unfettered capitalism. It is the misguided belief that personal style and personal advancement, mistaken for individualism, are the same as democratic equality. In fact, personal style, defined by the commodities we buy or consume, has become a compensation for our loss of democratic equality. We have a right, in the cult of the self, to get whatever we desire. We can do anything, even belittle and destroy those around us, including our friends, to make money, to be happy, and to become famous. Once fame and wealth are achieved, they become their own justification, their own morality. How one gets there is irrelevant. Once you get there, those questions are no longer asked.

My book “Empire of Illusion” begins in Madison Square Garden at a World Wrestling Entertainment tour. I understood that professional wrestling was the template for our social and political life, but did not know that it would produce a president.

“The bouts are stylized rituals,” I wrote, in what could have been a description of a Trump rally:

They are public expressions of pain and a fervent longing for revenge. The lurid and detailed sagas behind each bout, rather than the wrestling matches themselves, are what drive crowds to a frenzy. These ritualized battles give those packed in the arenas a temporary, heady release from mundane lives. The burden of real problems is transformed into fodder for a high-energy pantomime.

It is not going to get better. The tools to shut down dissent have been cemented into place. Our democracy cratered years ago. We are in the grip of what Søren Kierkegaard called “sickness unto death” — the numbing of the soul by despair that leads to moral and physical debasement. All Trump has to do to establish a naked police state is flip a switch. And he will.

“The worse reality becomes, the less a beleaguered population wants to hear about it,” I wrote at the conclusion of “Empire of Illusion,” “and the more it distracts itself with squalid pseudo-events of celebrity breakdowns, gossip and trivia. These are the debauched revels of a dying civilization.”

(chrishedges.substack.com)

POT PULP

by Fred Gardner

(The paperback cover of Marijuana Girl that ran in yesterday's AVA was provided by Michael R. Aldrich, PhD –one of two that accompanied a review of the book in O'Shaughnessy's. Dr. Aldrich wrote:

‘Marijuana Girl’ by the mysterious N.R. de Mexico is one of the first novels on the theme of the white teenage girl enslaved by dope, jazz, and prostitution —and in that sense one of the first “groupie” novels.

It is well written, with genuine characters and a feeling of empathy for Joyce Taylor, who gets turned on to marijuana by her boss, a newspaper editor who takes her into the City for cool jazz and warm sex. He’s married, and when they split up she seeks the jazz cellars, a lesbian girlfriend, and black musician lovers.

Marijuana leads to heroin and heroin leads to prostitution, the nice girl ruined. It’s the classic theme of the dope pulps, but written with sophistication. (One of Joyce’s lovers even quotes the LaGuardia Report of 1944 to the effect that marijuana is much less harmful than alcohol.)

The woman on the 1960 Beacon edition cover looks more ready for action. Her robe is off, one strap of her slip is slipping, her hands are on her crotch, smoke is rising from her open lips. The text is more lurid: “She traded her body for drugs —and kicks!”

But Marijuana Girl is not porn, it’s pot pulp, a subgenre all its own.

I’ve not been able to discover the real name of the author, but he was evidently very familiar with the New York jazz scene of the late 1940s, the scene of the Beat Generation writers soon to follow.

Marijuana Girl includes an extensive “Glossary of Jive,” in which marijuana and heroin terms of the era are defined. ”Jive” was meant to be unintelligible to the squares who might be listening in the subway. A slang to protect and identify, to separate the hip from the squares and the hustlers from the johns. And most of all, the drug users from the police.

Note that the mid-20th-century hipsters distinguished weed from “hard drugs.”

This is the Gone World of the beats— Dig it! Cool cats and chicks, charged on gauge. Give me five, man, you’ll flip your wig! Don’t be a drag, get hip to the jive!

Some publisher should consider bringing out a third edition. Till then, check your local used book store.

O'Shaughnessy's also ran the Glossary of Jive as compiled by scholarly “N.R. de Mexico.” Maybe all the A-words took the train to Harlem.

JiveGlossary

ball— To have a good time, to enjoy; as “to have a ball.”

beat— out of supply (of money or drugs).

beat for— lacking

beat loot— poor pay, small money

best, the— very nice, pleasant

big deal— the main transaction or thing; also, a large purchase of drugs or marijuana.

blow— to play an instrument (any instrument)

bug— to make crazy, to drive insane.

bugged— emotionally disturbed.

cap— capsule (of heroin)

carry a monkey— to be addicted; to require a heavy dosage of a narcotic.

cat— person, particularly a person who knows music or frequents musical circles.

charge— marijuana (in general), also, a single shot of heroin.

charged— high on marijuana or narcotics

chick— girl; woman

clean— with no supply (of marijuana or narcotics)

cold turkey— to be abruptly deprived of drugs; as “a cold turkey cure.”

connection— a person with a source of supply (of drugs).

contact— a source of supply (of drugs).

cool— relaxed, happy, safe, comfortable, good, pleasant.

cure— usually, gradual or progressive deprivation of a narcotic.

cut on out— leave, depart.

cut out— to leave.

deck— a measured quantity of narcotic.

dig— to understand, see, follow (as a conversation), like, enjoy; also, attitude; also, line of business.

drag— a discomfort; an unpleasantness; to make uncomfortable; to be an unpleasant person.

drug cat— an unpleasant person

end, the— wonderful! terrific!

fall in— fit in with the group.

fall out— to leave.

five, give me— shake hands

fix-man— a narcotics pusher.

fix— a supply of narcotics.

flip— to lose emotional control; a disturbed person

flipped— emotionally disturbed; more rarely, insane

flip your wig— go crazy.

gauge— marijuana

get off— to quit the use of drugs.

get on— to get high

get straight— secure a supply of marijuana, narcotics or money.

gold— money.

gold in front— payment in advance.

gone— powerful, as “This is real gone gauge.” Also, happy.

goofball— narcotic pill; also, an unbalanced person.

goof off— blunder.

grass— marijuana

great— nice; okay.

greatest— very nice; pretty good.

groove—to enjoy oneself; also, solid, legitimate, as “He’s in the groove.” Also, spirit, mood, or style, as “that Dixieland groove.”

habit— addiction; also, degree of addiction, as “a three-cap habit, a five-cap habit,” etc.

hard stuff— any of the narcotic drugs, as distinguished from marijuana.

hassle— fight, argument.

have eyes— to want, desire, as “I got eyes for that chick.” Also, to be in love with.

hay— marijuana.

hemp— marijuana.

high— intoxicated.

high on lush— intoxicated on liquor.

hip— in the know.

hook— in a narcotics addict, the physiological requirement which compels him to return again and again to the drug.

horse— heroin.

hot— passionate, as to “play (music) hot”; compare Italian classical music terminology, con fuoco, i.e. with fire.

hung up— in a state of depression; unable to function.

hustler— harlot.

in the groove— exactly right (from the fitting of a needle into a phonograph record track).

in there— participating; meeting social or musical demands.

jam— to improvise. See: session

jive— music, marijuana, etc. etc

john— client of a hustler.

joy pop— injection of heroin beneath skin (rather than into vein).

junky— heroin addict.

kick— the emotional state accompanying being high; any strongly pleasurable emotional state.

kick a habit— to break a habit; specifically, the drug habit.

lay on— to give some of, as “I’m going to lay a stick on you.”

light up— to get high.

lift— sensation of being high.

loot— money.

mainline— injection of heroin into a vein.

make it— to achieve a goal; to get along in a given situation

Mexican grass— imported marijuana.

narcotics rap— jail sentence for possession of narcotics.

O— an ounce of marijuana.

ofey— Negro word for unliked white people.

on— high; also, addicted.

O-Z— an ounce of marijuana.

pad— home or apartment.

pot— marijuana

pro— hustler

pusher— drug or marijuana seller

put down— to reject or refuse.

riff— solo musical passage, often improvised.

set— group of musical numbers played by orchestra between rests.

sent— made happy.

session— a group gathering of musicians to play, particularly to improvise.

sharp— fashionable in a flashy manner; also, shrewd, clever

shoot— inject (heroin) with a hypodermic needle.

skin-pop— same as joy-pop; also, accidentally missing vein while injecting heroin.

sniff— to take heroin by inhalation.

solid— Understood!

square— bourgeois, conventional, provincial, stupid, ill-informed, not hip.

stash— concealed supply of drugs; to conceal.

stick— marijuana cigarette.

stick deal— sale of pre-manufactured marijuana cigarettes, as distinguished from sale of marijuana in bulk.

straight— supplied; stocked up.

stuff— marijuana, heroin, cocaine.

through the ceiling— very high.

turn off— to become sober; to come down from a “high.”

turn on— to smoke marijuana; to take narcotics.

uncool— dangerous, unpleasant, uncomfortable, unsatisfactory.

weed— marijuana.

white stuff— heroin; cocaine.

16 Comments

Rick Swanson December 24, 2024

The solution to the Mendocino water problem is in the article about the third mill on Big river.

Reply
Kimberlin December 24, 2024

“A reader writes…”
Please, if you are going to publish my writing, credit it with my name…bill kimberlin.
Thank you.

Reply
- Bruce Anderson December 24, 2024
  
  We did. Sorry for the error and the delayed attribution.
  
  Reply
Mazie Malone December 24, 2024

Merry Christmas everyone….. 🎅🎄💕

Ed Notes…… the condom and the zucchini I attended that class in the 80s!!! Hahaha !!!

Also has anyone heard from James Marmon? I sent him FB message and a phone text and nothing!

mm 💕

Reply
- Chuck Dunbar December 24, 2024
  
  In my innocent, unknowing teenage years, I could have used the condom-zucchini training. No such instruction was allowed at my high school in the early 60’s. So– I fumbled my way into knowing…tales not to be told here…
  
  Reply
  - Paul Modic December 24, 2024
    
    Tell it here anyway, Chuck, just to see how fast Mark swoops in to excise it.
    I posted a very off-color story here recently (actually a very funny one about old folks home solutions for sex) and it disappeared within minutes, if not seconds…ha…
    
    Reply
    - McEwen Bruce December 24, 2024
      
      Paul, you need to visit the Bay Area and cozy up to one of the gazillion rich widows around here to go on love boat cruises with. One or two of the golden gals sue me every week to go on cruises but I get seasick and homesick, not to mention the risk of being drowned or turned ashore in some foreign port, so I’d rather take an Irish holiday than go in a cruise… and they always ask, “what’s that?”
      
      “Two weeks in jail.”
      
      You can probably meet a few at the IMAX theater showing the new Dylan film tomorrow! But don’t condemn the Major for trying to suppress the soft porn and louche anecdotes. Someone has to maintain standards of decency.
      
      Reply
      - Paul Modic December 24, 2024
        
        I’m wondering about why we have spoken and written taboos.
        We hippies were nonconformists and didn’t have boundaries in speech, especially the hippie children. They would look at you weirdly if you hesitated or didn’t answer a question, be it personal or general, as if what’s YOUR problem? They were even more brutally direct to their friends. (Are they STILL, now that they’re in their forties and fifties?)
        Total openness was expected, even to the extreme that once when a neighboring woman was pregnant everyone knew she had herpes and probably had to have a cesarean birth. It was also considered odd if you wore a swim suit at the river (spoiler alert: nobody did) and almost unheard of if a guy and a girl were hanging out and not having sex.
        What made the hippie kids so open and inquisitive and why did hippies change when they got older? Why is there a taboo about having an adult conversation about sex or masturbation? Did people become prudes, or just more discrete, after they had children so as not to embarrass them?
        In movies and books it’s acceptable for the characters to talk about, or at least allude to, taboo subjects like cunnilingus, fellatio, anal sex, or any other forbidden topic, so why not in real life? Maybe the directors and producers realize people are afraid to talk about it so the movies give them the opportunity at least to watch others do so?
        Someone wrote recently that no man is going to get away with ANYTHING anymore because Trump got away with EVERYTHING, but that’s not fair, I was rude, crude, and lewd WAY before him.
        I don’t like censorship and everyone should feel free to talk about any topic and say any word, and I mean all of them, without being canceled by fake-outraged twitter mobs, or the politically correct pronoun brigade at Kmud, for that matter.
        (Oh forget all that, I need a wingman, and a cruise to nowhere…)
        
        Reply
Craig Stehr December 24, 2024

Looking out of the window of the MLK public library on the first floor, it is cold with a few rain drops. A parade of street people are dressed up in outlandish Christmas clothing, twinkling lights on the shirt, and of course the fella on the corner wrapped in a survival blanket with the message that Jesus will save us all. Next up, the Trump re-inauguration. News update at ten.

Reply
Betsy Cawn December 24, 2024

If you would like to join the Class Action suit against Congressmen Thompson and Huffman:

https://actionnetwork.org/forms/d01dc2d4856c290fd7c0c13220e1a7dc74d40075?source=direct_link

You must be a federal income tax payer, either by filing or having taxes deducted (regardless of whether you make enough to file).

classactionagainstgenocide@proton.me

Friends in Lake County, I’d love to hear from you — damned few of us as we are . . .

Reply
Paul Modic December 24, 2024

I won’t stand for this, therefore I am sitting down:
Every item I tried in MCT today clicks right to the story, cartoon, article, or meme,
EXCEPT MY hallowed contribution about writer acknowledgments.
I know it’s only a paragraph long, but hey, I’m petty as hell!!!

Reply
Lew Chichester December 24, 2024

I feel compelled to respond to Mark Scaramella’s article to day “The Myth of School Board Efficacy.” Most of his criticisms and reflections are reasonably accurate, but I think that his underlying assumption of the role and responsibilities of an elected public school district board are off base. Our job as a board, and I have ten years of service on the Round Valley Unified School District Board of Trustees, is to establish the policies of the district and to hire the Superintendent. We aren’t really supposed to meddle in the various dynamics of classroom management, supervise or track performance of particular employees, or even develop specific quantifiable achievement goals. The role of public education in our society and culture is complex with many competing influences. Standardized test scores reflect the the educational background and income level of the parents and the general community considerably more than providing any indication if the students are benefiting from being in school every day. We need to provide safe, interesting, challenging, even fun sometimes, opportunities for these young people who don’t have many options other than to go to school for at least twelve years. It seemed to me years ago that the primary function of the public school system was to teach children how to “follow directions and tolerate boredom.” Thankfully we are doing a lot better than that, at least right now, these days, out here in Round Valley. This is a tough place, with a history which won’t quit repeating itself. People are still killing each other. Our schools are actually doing a pretty good job in helping to create some options to the past patterns. We have a lot of programs, in school and extra-curricular, which are inspiring and seem to be reasonably effective in creating some positive alternatives in the imaginations of the young people. Test scores are still the lowest in the state. That may never change.

Reply
Doug Holland December 24, 2024

Dear Shayna,

There is nothing to ‘honor’ in Brian Thompson’s life.

Reply
- Ezekiel Krahlin December 24, 2024
  
  Maybe if Mr. Thompson were not guilty of “genocide for profit” he wouldn’t have become a target of “assassination mentality.” Hope you’re havin’ a nice day, Doug.
  
  Reply
  - Doug Holland December 26, 2024
    
    Zeke! Howdy and hope you had a happy Christmas. For the first time in almost 40 years, I spent 12/25 with family, and … it was exhausting, but surprisingly not awful.
    
    Reply
    - Ezekiel Krahlin December 26, 2024
      
      Gloomy, damp and cold…very much a typical Christmas day for me. Add to that a touch of harassment by a homeless speed freak as I walked my rescue dog in the evening, and you get the picture. Of course, him being the previous owner of this lovely pup that he abused, did not help any. I haven’t celebrated Exmass since leaving my family way, way back in ’72…and I’m not a holiday person overall. But thanks for the kind words, Doug. I always enjoy reading your works, they are a comfort.
      
      Reply

Mendocino County Today: Tuesday 12/24/2024

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