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STEPHEN DUNLAP (Fort Bragg): Our 100% chance of rain & thunder for yesterday yielded sunny skies & .04" from 1 afternoon shower (see new girlfriend below). A partly cloudy 42F this Christmas Day morning on the coast with dry skies forecast for today (sure looks cloudy offshore). Rain returns tonight then continues thru the weekend. Next week is looking dry currently, we'll see.
SERIES OF ATMOSPHERIC RIVER STORMS will continue to bring periods of heavy rain, possible flooding, strong winds and dangerous surf through the weekend. (NWS)
POINT ARENA IS THE NEXT CALIFORNIA FOREVER? THAT’S NOT WHAT’S HAPPENING THERE.
To the Editor (of the SF Chronicle)
Regarding “Someone is buying up a historic coastal city. Is it the next California Forever?” (Soleil Ho, SFChronicle.com, Dec. 14): I read Opinion columnist Soleil Ho’s hit piece with dismay. Point Arena, population 450, can hardly be compared with the grandiose plans for a city of tens of thousands in the Sacramento Delta.
Jeff Hansen came to Point Arena about 10 years ago with his life savings intending to pursue his love of building restoration and developing distressed properties.
Over the next decade, Hansen bought a number of run-down properties and successfully rehabbed many of them, including a motel/restaurant and about a dozen small apartments.
Full disclosure: I have worked for Hansen, mostly as a carpenter. I also owned the apartment when Olivia, a source for this opinion piece, was a tenant for about a year. Olivia is also Hansen’s ex-tenant and one of his detractors.
Hansen, and his family of investors, deserve an apology. Sadly, that is unlikely.
Richey Wasserman
Point Arena
NAVARRO RIVER AT THE GREENWOOD BRIDGE TUESDAY MORNING
ERIN COOK
Update pharmacy issue: The pharmacist is named Fanny Tan. (I only know that because another lady wrote it down for me) When I asked her directly, she refused to tell me her name, said she didn’t need to. She did in fact confirm that she hates living here and is leaving. When I pointed out that there are elderly people and people with sick kids waiting on their meds they need she said she didn’t care.
I highly recommend anyone who has had a similar experience to please report her. She has no business working with the public, let alone medicine. I also should clarify, this was an urgent care issue, that was called in from urgent care yesterday. So it is urgent. That’s why I didn’t use Fort Bragg.
MENDOCINO SHERIFF MATT KENDALL
Here we are at Christmas. This is the time of year we receive cards, letters and visits at the office from many folks in the public who stop by and thank our deputies and dispatchers for their service.
As you settle in for time with family and friends our personnel will be patrolling the County and working to keep all of us safe. These folks don’t get the holidays off, however there are no complaints. This is because of the support all of our residents have poured out to the Sheriff’s Office. It truly means a lot to our first responders. For this I wanted to thank all of our personnel and our community members who take the time to thank them for their service.
Our partners in fire, EMS and the Department of Transportation will also be out serving our communities during the holidays. Let’s thank all of them for their service as well.
During this holiday season let’s all work to be kind and helpful to our fellow residents. Please drive careful during the inclement weather we are experiencing. Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays to everyone in our county.
ED NOTES
ONE MORNING of a particularly fraught Saturday, coming down off the Boonville Road near Ukiah, and coming down off Boonville come to think of it, and heading south for Frisco, I hadn't fastened my seatbelt. I, already ancient, preceded seatbelts, and never quite got used to buckling up.
OFFICER Hawkeye Babcock of the CHP, a man whose false testimony in a court case we'd recently noted, did a u-turn to round me up. Then, at Santa Rosa, in the teeth of the rush hour, as drunks and speeders weaved and hurtled past me, I was stopped again, this time because I didn't have a current tag on my rear license plate. I hadn't gotten around to pasting it on. The city cop who fixed the fixing ticket for me asked, “This humbug thing is all they got to do up there?”
THEN IT WAS OFF TO THE BANK on Clement with my daughter, a married woman. Walking up the sidewalk we couldn't help but see a portly young man with a blood red mohawk pasted onto his helmet do a wheelie on his motorcycle on the sidewalk at the bank door. Inside, this maniac asks my daughter, with me standing not ten feet away, “Waiting for me, baby?”
AT 6TH and Clement, I'm standing amidst a cluster of Chinese women, maybe ten of them, most of them older women, immigrants I supposed from their dress and the Cantonese they were speaking. We're waiting for the light to go green. Directly across from us a young black guy in a city worker jumpsuit is bleeding a hydrant when suddenly a stream of water, more mist than moisture, shoots out at us. “Haiiyahh!” the Chinese women shout as if they'd been hosed clear down the street, victims of a municipal terrorist attack. As we pass by the hydrant, the young guy apologizes. “I'm sorry, excuse me,” he says, clearly meaning it. The Chinese women, unpersuaded, grumble and glare at him as they walk by. He says to me, “You could see it was an accident, right?”
AT THE ALEMANY Farmer's Market I visit the Filipino guy I buy dried figs from. “The pucking Health Department says I can't pucking sell figs any pucking more,” he tells me, simultaneously reaching under the table to hand me five packages of them. “Puck the Health Department,” he adds.
LATER IN THE DAY, on the 1 California heading west, a kid's got his feet up on the seat opposite him. He's maybe 13. He's deep into some techno toy. His father, or the chronological adult of some kind who's with the kid, occasionally leans over to chuckle at whatever idiocy is on the kid”s tiny screen. The bus is standing room only. A middle-aged woman says to the kid, “Please move your feet so I can sit down.” Father and son look back at her as if they don't understand the request. The kid doesn't move his feet. A crazy-looking old guy, backpack stuffed with what seems to be shredded newspaper, yells, “Move your fucking feet, punk, before I break your fucking leg off at the knee.” The kid’s in immediate compliance, the woman seats herself, the kid’s father and the rest of us all look away as if nothing at all had happened.
DISCLAIMER. Some pot people, and some people hostile to pot, think we've become the primary local print propagandist for marijuana. We haven't and we aren't. We don't smoke it, don't recommend its use. We think it makes people dumber and slower, and we think it's an obvious menace to young people, sapping them of their energy and optimism at the only time in their lives they're likely to have any. Like most non-pot people we think it's laughable that so many stoners hide behind medical pot. “Dude, it's my medicine.” Yeah, right. We think, though, that the substance ought to be fully decriminalized if for no other reason than it sucks up too much public time and money chasing it. But it's here, and the Northcoast remains economically dependent on pot production, in large part, and for us not to cover the weed industry in all its splendid green multitudinousness would be to ignore much of Mendocino County's human activity.
MARSHALL NEWMAN: Another ebay postcard, Cloverdale, circa 1910
THAT WAS COOL - MY FAVORITE CHRISTMAS EVE?
by Justine Frederiksen
My favorite Christmas started out as one of the worst, because we had been snowed in for days without power, thinking for sure we would be spending the holiday in a freezing house without a hot meal. But that Christmas Eve when my husband walked home from work though eight miles of snow — yes, with hills in both directions! — to find the house full of warmth, lights and even a chicken roasting in the oven, he said “it truly felt like a Christmas miracle.”
That was cool.
But even cooler was how I got to the store to buy that chicken, then got it home — where the power came on just in time for me to cook it.
It was 2008, the year we left Seattle for the “countryside” of Kitsap County. We didn’t want to leave the city, but did want to save up money for our wedding, so we decided to rent a small granny unit from someone we knew on Bainbridge Island for the next year.
Which is how us certified “city folk” — who moved to Washington from California completely unprepared for the cold — came to be living on a private rural road while completely unprepared to either drive in the snow or live without electricity.
Because while Seattle had taught us to put on plenty of fleece and long underwear before heading outside, it only snowed there enough to convince me to put a couple of cinder blocks in the back of our pick-up to keep it from fish-tailing — certainly not enough to inspire us to get a vehicle that could drive through more than a dusting of snow.
And we learned even less about preparing for power outages in Seattle, as our lights had barely flickered even once in eight years. But on Bainbridge Island, our power seemed to go out with every breeze, and it snowed there, no joke, the day we moved — in April! But those flakes were spring “sprinkles,” both easily managed and forgotten by the time winter arrived.
And boy, did it! On Dec. 21, the first official day of winter, all of the Puget Sound Region was covered in several inches of snow, the most that Seattle had gotten in a decade. And the snowstorm was then followed by days of well-below-freezing temperatures that kept the thick blanket of frozen water firmly in place.
Since the first day of the snow was a Sunday, it was actually pretty magical, and we marveled at the lovely sight of the world outside covered in white. Even hiking about a quarter of a mile in the snow to get our mail was kinda fun — the first time.
But when the snow hadn’t budged by the time we had to figure out how to get to work with our truck still completely snowed in, all the fun and magic was wrung out of our Winter Wonderland.
And though our jobs were on opposite sides of the Puget Sound, we both started our journeys to work by walking three miles to the ferry building and taking a 35-minute boat ride to Seattle. Then as my husband walked another mile to his work near the baseball and football stadiums, I waited for the next ferry that could take me right back across the water to Bremerton, a 55-minute sailing. From there I had to take a foot ferry to Port Orchard, another 15-minute sailing, all to get to a town that literally felt like a stone’s toss away from where I had started more than four hours earlier.
So luckily after we put out the newspaper that day, my co-worker Denise saved me from making another four-hour ferry trek that night by offering me a bed in her home. Then she and her husband, Raul, drove me to the grocery store that night to buy food for a holiday meal I still hoped to have, though I had no way to cook it yet.
I remember feeling so grateful as we drove to the store, their truck and its driver moving us safely down streets that my truck and me slid down as helplessly as I had slid down even the slightest incline the first — and last — time I tried to ski. And I felt even more grateful walking down the aisles of the store, marveling at all the technology like lights and refrigeration that I usually took for granted.
And the next morning I was grateful for yet another prepared person, my boss Rich. Who, when I asked for a ride to the foot ferry, offered instead to save me another long ferry mission by driving me all the way home, as his GMC Suburban could easily handle the snowy highway. In fact, it even drove us all the way up the still-snow-covered road to my house that our poor little truck, still stuck in our driveway, had no hope of climbing. Though the power was still out when I got home, I started preparing dinner in the hopes that our electricity would be restored on Christmas Eve. And, about an hour before my husband arrived, it was, allowing me to finally put the chicken in the oven and make us that hot holiday meal we craved.
That was very cool.
But coolest of all was how that first Christmas in Kitsap County made me feel part of a village — a village that drove me to the store, gave me a place to stay, then drove me home. And, yes, a village I had never found while living in the city.
(Ukiah Daily Journal)
MENDOCINO COUNTY WAY BACK WHEN (Ron Parker)
MITCH CLOGG
How To Survive The New Dark Age
My son would be sixty-four. My daughters are in their sixties. I don’t celebrate Christmas anymore. I don’t celebrate Hannukah, Ramadan, Kwanza or Boxer Day. I celebrate the yuletide. So if this article is not seasonal, that’s why.
I’ve committed to writing here about the Constitution. I have a rich story to tell about my confinement in a nursing home in Pacifica last spring (not involuntary)—and I can’t remember what-all. Stuff’s piling up.
So I’ll make one thing brief:
My Personal Plan For Surviving The Loss Of American DemocracY, and particularly the next four years of Trump misadministration—and I write it here so you can consider it—is basically to ignore them. Since I can’t do much about them I will limit my exposure. I will severely limit my time reading, watching, listening to and discussing “the news.” It’s depressing and predictable. It is awful. I’m too old for this. My system is not as flexible as it once was; I still can’t believe what we’ve done.
Therefore: I will attend to those things I can. I will make our little domain as cheerful and agreeable as I can—fix what’s broken, put fresh paint on what’s not, attend to what I’ve been neglecting and, to the extent I’m able: live it up! I will seek, find and exploit what makes me feel good. I will have another go at being a successful gardener. There are several variations on the saying “living well is the best revenge”. I will practice all of them that I can.
If this sounds selfish, “our little domain” includes the rest of Wheeler Street, Mendocino and the greater world I’m in contact with. I will not seek to see or hear the grinding of human lives under the heels of creatures who exchange “Homo sapiens” for “Homo horribilis”. I will not watch TV ads that feature neglected and abused people or animals. I will not gouge out my eyes or discard my hearing aids. I will try to make my home and hood places of refuge and cheer.
The things I write about our Founders and our Constitution will not be especially upbeat, but having scales removed from my eyes is always a plus, regardless of any minor discomfort. If you plan to use any of these strategems too, I wish you the best!
Happy Xmas eve eve!
CATCH OF THE DAY, Tuesday, December 24, 2024
ROBIN BUXTON, 49, Ukiah. DUI, Assault with deadly weapon with great bodily injury, suspended license for DUI, probation revocation.
JACK CLARK-MURPHY, 28, Chicago/Ukiah. Domestic battery.
MATTHEW FAUST, 50, Ukiah. Disorderly conduct-alcohol&drugs, resisting. (Frequent flyer.)
ENOCH GUTIERREZ, 25, Santa Rosa/Ukiah. Assault with firearm.
DANIEL LONG, 38, Ukiah. Failure to appear, probation revocation.
CODY MENDEZ, 21, Ukiah. Paraphernalia.
JOSHAU NEESE, 26, Ukiah. Public nuisance, county parole violation, resisting.
JUAN ROCHA-PEREZ, 26, Ukiah. Domestic battery, marijuana sales, criminal threats.
SANTIAGO SANCHEZ-PATRICIO, 42, Lakeport/Ukiah. Disorderly conduct-alcohol.
‘BIGGEST MAVS EVER!’: Epic Calif. swell delivers historic surfing conditions
by Lester Black
The massive swell that pummeled California’s coast Monday brought destruction and death, but it also created one of the best surf days in the history of Mavericks, the most famous big-wave surf spot in Northern California.
Frank Quirarte, a member of Mavericks Rescue with 30 years of experience at the legendary surf spot, told SFGate it was one of the best days he has ever seen at Mavericks and estimated the waves reached over 60 feet at times.
“Today was the day of days,” said Quirarte. “It was raw, gnarly, just crazy Mavericks. It’s everything you would expect Mavericks to feel: Not sunny, not inviting.”
Monday’s swell attracted professional surfers from around the world along with local big-wave talent such as Luca Padua and Alo Slebir, who caught a barreling wave so massive, it left longtime Mavericks surfer Peter Mel commenting on Instagram that it was “the biggest mavs ever!”
Mavericks is world famous for the massive waves that pound the offshore reef near Half Moon Bay in the winter. The surf spot was pioneered by Jeff Clark, a local who first surfed the break in 1975 and helped establish the location as one of the premier big-wave surf spots in the world. He told SFGate on Tuesday morning that Monday was one of the three biggest surf days he has ever seen in 50 years of watching and riding Mavericks.
“There’s only been maybe a handful of days… equal to the size and power and just voracity of what yesterday was,” Clark said.
Quirarte said Monday’s waves were so powerful that you can “feel it in your chest, it just reverberates up your body” and created some of the “biggest barrels ever,” a term for when a wave falls over itself and creates a wall of water that a surfer can ride.
Monday’s swell was created last Friday morning, when an abnormally intense storm raged thousands of miles away from Half Moon Bay in the northwestern part of the Pacific Ocean. Those hurricane-force winds created ocean disturbances that radiated swells across the Pacific, eventually making their way to the California coast and picking up energy along the way.
This long journey creates swells that have extremely long periods, which is the measurement of time between each swell, and deliver the types of waves that surfers salivate for.
“The period got up to 25 seconds. It’s just out of a dream, it’s something you don’t see,” said videographer Jack Sandler, who spent Monday capturing surfers riding these giant waves.
Monday’s swell was so powerful that surfers could only get into the waves by being pulled in by a Jet Ski, according to Quirarte. An average surfer will struggle to ride a wave face that is a head high, but the big-wave surfers are comfortable surfing waves more than 10 times taller than them. These waves offer incredible rides but also are inherently dangerous. Falling off one of these monsters can pummel a surfer with incredible force and hold them underwater for excruciating amounts of time. At least two people have died surfing Mavericks.
There were no major injuries Monday but still some “huge wipeouts,” with surfers getting dragged underwater 200 yards, the length of two football fields, before they resurfaced, according to Quirarte. Big-wave surfers train all year to hold their breath and maintain composure when they’re getting pummeled and dragged by big waves.
Quirarte compared being out there with the massive waves to hanging out with giant dinosaurs.
“It’s like ‘Jurassic Park,’” Quirarte said. “You’re out there with these monsters all day long. And the whole goal is to tickle the monster, chase the dragon and survive the day.”
(SFGate.com)
MISTLETOE
by Fred Gardner
Why does the presence of mistletoe – a parasitic plant that roots in oaks and other host trees – confer the right to kiss whoever you're with?
The answer occurred to John Lee, MD, a family practitioner in Mill Valley, back in 1967. Lee was then editing the Marin Medical Society Bulletin and on the look-out for topics for his monthly column. He came across an article in a Harvard alumni publication describing the pagan rituals of the Celts who lived in the British Isles in the millennium before Christ. For their winter solstice celebration, the Celtic priests -Druids- would collect berries from trees bearing mistletoe.
Coincidentally, Lee had just read an item in the Journal of the American Medical Association stating that mistletoe contains a compound very similar to progesterone. He had an insight: “The berries were life in the middle of that cold European winter, when everything else was bleak and apparently lifeless. The Druids called mistletoe 'a gift from the gods.' They would take these berries and mix them with hot mead [an alcohol drink made from fermented honey] and they would all have a weeklong party where gifts were exchanged and they would celebrate that the sun was going to return and winter would not mean the end of the world.
“When a woman takes progesterone and then quits, a period is induced. I realized the mead laced with mistletoe would decrease everyone's inhibitions and increase everyone's libido for their four- or five-day party. It was free sex! And after four or five days of celebration they would quit. All the women would have their periods, and no babies would occur. No wonder they called it 'a gift from the Gods!”
Lee compares the discovery that mistletoe prevented pregnancy to the discovery that limes prevented scurvy -a major advance in the annals of medicine. “The sailors didn't know it was Vitamin C. The Celts didn't know it was progesterone. They just knew it worked.” Lee hypothesized that kissing under the mistletoe is a form of “symbolic sexual promiscuity” going back to the days when the berries served as a birth-control device during pagan winter solstice parties (the persecuted Christians having scheduled their own holidays to coincide with existing celebrations).
Lee's editorial evoked no response from the readers of the Marin Medical Society Bulletin - maybe they were disturbed by the juxtaposition of Christmas and sex - and never made it into the general lore. But have you ever heard a more plausible explanation of the tradition?
Lee's Rx: Natural Progesterone
In his Mill Valley practice Dr. Lee occasionally would see women who were hormone-deficient and had osteoporosis. He couldn't recommend estrogen, which the pharmaceutical companies marketed in synthetic form, because he knew it had serious detrimental effects (promotion of endometrial cancer among them). Lee thought, “What if I recommend progesterone, which is made from plants?” At his suggestion a few women tried it, “And lo and behold it helped their osteoporosis,” he says.
Lee retired in 1989, after practicing medicine for 34 years, to write up and disseminate his ideas, which constitute a wide-ranging critique of how medicine is practiced in this country. He moved to an old farmhouse in Sebastopol. His first book, “Natural Progesterone: The Multiple Roles of a Remarkable Hormone,” was written with doctors in mind and brought out in 1993 by Ajalon Press, a small local publisher. It soon built up an underground reputation among women seeking to educate themselves on menopause and hormone balance; the edition of 5,000 copies sold out.
In May, 1996, Warners published a version for the lay reader (written with Virginia Hopkins), “What Your Doctor May Not Tell You About Menopause.” When I interviewed Lee that October the book was in its third or fourth printing (without the stimulus of advertising), and he was getting phone calls and faxes every day, many from doctors whose patients had turned them on to the book. The ob/gyn establishment, however, continued to insist that the unwanted consequences of menopause are best treated by estrogen supplements.
Lee tried to tell the world that progesterone, which is produced by the body in connection with ovulation and serves to modulate the effects of estrogen, is the hormone most significantly lacking in menopausal women (as a result of poisons, including unnatural estrogens, in the food, air and water, plus the sedentary lifestyle forced on most of us in the name of progress).
Lee emphasized the distinction between natural progesterone and the various synthetic progestins (such as Wyeth's Premarin) given to millions of women who opt for hormone replacement therapy. As a result of systematic miseducation by the pharmaceutical companies, he said, “Most doctors think the synthetics are actual progesterone… Doctors should recall that 'synthetic' means that it's not found in nature -there's no plant, no tree, no animal that makes it, it's a compound foreign to the body- whereas real progesterone is a natural compound that's synthesized in the body from cholesterol.”
Natural progesterone can also be obtained from Mexican yams in a form identical to the molecule found in the body; the pharmaceutical companies produce large supplies to use as the base material to make their synthetics. “The pharmaceutical companies prefer the synthetic versions for the simple and obvious reason that they are patentable,” Lee said. Natural progesterone has been on the market as a cream sold over-the-counter since 1936. Most doctors don't advocate its use because, according to Lee, “It would diminish their control over their patients: no prescription is required.”
Post Script
In 2002 the National Institutes of Health terminated a study of 16,000 women who had been taking an estrogen-progestin combination for “menopausal symptoms” because the drug(s) increased the incidence of breast cancer, heart attacks, strokes, and blood clots. On July 10, 2002, the New York Times ran a front-page story by Gina Kolata headlined: “Hormone Replacement Study A Shock to the Medical System” - as if Dr. Lee had never issued his well-documented warning and published a book read by hundreds of thousands of women. The head of the North American Menopause Society, a male doctor named Wulf Utian, called the study results “a bombshell” - which is like Claude Rains in Casablanca claiming to be “shocked, shocked that there's gambling going on here!”
Media critic Alexander Cockburn has noted that a story doesn't have real impact in this country until it appears prominently in the New York Times. When it comes to science, the valve effect is similar, with the NIH being the official arbiter of truth and importance. Findings by the most observant and humane doctors are dismissed as mere anecdotal evidence - and of course the drug companies don't invite and pay them to conduct studies that would generate data leading to publication in “the literature” and the NIH stamp of approval. In reporting the cancellation of the HRT study, Gina Kolata was able to overlook the warnings issued by John Lee, MD; his book may have been read by large numbers of women, but it didn't rate as “scientific literature.” Thus the scientific and journalistic establishments re-enforce one another.
When the NIH pulled the plug on the Women's Health Initiative study, the drug companies and the ob/gyn establishment fought hard to retain their six million HRT customers. They publicized a small decrease in hip fractures and colorectal cancer among the study subjects, and warned doctors and patients that cessation of HRT could cause unknown problems. In November '02 Kolata weighed in with a story headed “Study Suggests Long-Term Hormone Therapy May Reduce Alzheimer's For Women” - but this turned out to be untrue, and subsequent \data established a link between HRT and dementia! By the spring of this year, analysis of the WHI data had refuted all the vague claims made for HRT - that it improved mood, energy level, sleep, sex, memory, ability to concentrate… Now Wyeth et al are claiming that the 16,000 women in the WHI study were too old to benefit, and that doctors should prescribe HRT to women in their early 40s! And more than 1.5 million women are still getting 'scripts for it.
The good doctor Lee died of a heart attack in October of 2003. His loved ones and co-workers wrote an obit that concludes, “Dr. Lee was gratified by the thousands of women who wrote and called to tell him how dramatically their health had improved when they followed his recommendations, and by the hundreds of clinicians and researchers he corresponded with who had integrated his work into their practices and research with great success. Dr. Lee was thankful that his analysis of the problems with conventional HRT were finally validated by the medical establishment during his lifetime… The most meaningful way to remember John R. Lee, M.D. and carry on his work is to educate others, one-to-one, and give them the gift of optimal health, as he gave us.”
DOES ANYONE REMEMBER 'CHILLING OUT' AT CANDLESTICK PARK?
NORTHWEST PASSAGE
by J.B. Reynolds
We found Eugene to be a charming place. Most of the town seems like some kind of symbiotic (or even parasitic) growth from the University — which itself was lovely, by the way. Certainly quite the symphony in brick. I was taken to the University's art museum on Friday evening for a free (!) tea & snacks reception, and toured their surprisingly fine collection. Too bad, I thought, that my poor son had that 'D' in French one semester and the U of O turned him down! Thank goodness Humboldt State was more understanding about that kind of thing. Must be the fog.
Eugene's downtown district is pleasantly small and funky, and the public art is agreeably eclectic (though the statue of Ken Kesey isn't fat enough) but for all that, there are way too many shuttered businesses to inspire confidence. The bookstores were rather a disappointment, too — outright snobs in one place, very dispiriting; the very mention of Mr. Harry Potter drew nothing but disdainful scowls. The biggest publishing phenomenon in 20 years — so why should a bookseller be interested?
The damp weather made walking a bit of a trial, but we did tour the two historic cemeteries and met quite a few energetic, intelligent seniors walking their various hounds. The mist let up, however, for Saturday's “farmer's market” which was a lively and delicious gathering, not to mention entertaining; on one corner the young, tattooed and freaky were thumping drums and doin' the boogie-woogie as well as their herbally addled senses would allow, and across the road was a carefully groomed gathering of obese white folks bellerin' their love for the J-Man, even more horribly and permanently addled but without the aid of psychoactive materials (or so I assumed, anyway; hard to tell if that gleam in their glazed eyes is The Spirit, or Prozac). Equal opportunity for mental decomposition is about the best that America can offer these days, it seems.
But they have a nice train station in Eugene, so I'll give 'em that. We went on to Portland for a few days, staying downtown (a stone's throw from Powell's, actually) and an easy walk from their grand old Union Station. Portland is a much more thoroughly urban scene, and as such the mendicants, bums, wackos, castoffs, police, power-walking pin-stripe suits (always on the 'phone, I noted), stoopit tattoos and hideous facial piercings are legion.
Ordinary folks, it seems, have fled to the 'burbs. In fact Powell's was about the only place a fellow can get a bit of peace and quiet in that town. I simply cannot tolerate being deafened by music while I eat either, so trendy food joints were impossible for me, but a “gourmet” (read: expensive) pizzeria proved very tasty and so we ate there.
I had my 14 y/o daughter and her best friend in tow, so I was consistently out-voted in just about everything else. Except Powell's. Finally, Seattle, the ostensible reason for this vacation — to look up a couple of old college buddies I haven't seen since 1980. Again we were downtown, mostly because the hotel was an easy walk from the train station, and again we were obliged to run the gauntlet of contemporary life's urine-soaked career losers, though I must say they were much better behaved than in Portland, much less aggressive or presumptuous.
In fact I think Seattle's downtown has a lot going for it, Free Metro Bus Service being a part of that. Too, I really liked the Pike Place Market, pricey as it was; excellent fish, great neon, and it reminded me strongly of my old dad, now long departed. Of course the era-specific Space Needle makes the PPM look like a bargain.
But hey, we were on vacation, and everybody wanted to eat in the goofy revolving restaurant up top, although lunch+tip pretty much guaranteed my little girl won't be going to an ivy league college without a major scholarship. $26 for a cheeseburger! I exaggerate not! When I was a kid it seemed to be understood that every city in the US would soon have its Jetsons-style revolving restaurant; 1 circuit per hour was the standard. But the Needle (appropriately named, when you see the check) took only 45 minutes. Quizzing our waiter, I learned that a few years ago they actually cranked up the motors 25%! Faster. ahem, turnaround, was the idea. Another Yankee marketing triumph.
I will, however, sing the praises of Seattle's second-hand bookshops which range the full gamut from tiny bomb-flinging-anarchist cubbyholes flogging crude pamphlets and bent paperbacks, to immense, way-too-clean establishments bulging with shiny Taschen 55-pound art tomes destined for leisure-class coffee tables.
The trip home was most pleasant indeed — and really, what's not to like when one is tooling along on the rails in one's private 1st class bedroom with one's own private bathroom and a private shower? (We were on vacation, so I threw frugality to the winds.) Even more shocking, coming and going we were entirely on time! For many years Amtrak has enjoyed a richly deserved reputation of pre-Mussolini punctuality, but this appears to be a thing of the past.
The “Coast Starlight” arrived and departed everywhere smack on the minute, timetablewise, making me wonder if they haven't been hiring Swiss consultants. And listening to them. Except for the tiresome inevitability of the stations being in the “unfashionable” districts of each and every metrop, rail travel has only improved in this benighted country over the last few years.
Our southerly journey through Oregon was particularly highlighted by, first, the postcard scenery flowing past our private window (snowy meadows, craggy peaks, lush evergreens, glistening waterfalls splashing fetchingly o'er the boulders, etc.) and second, an impromptu night-time stop at a remote crossing where the train was met by two sets of stern Oregon State Troopers, there to escort from the rails a particularly foolish reefer-sucking passenger with about eleven sloppy parcels. Obliviously lighting up was, apparently, not stupid enough for this fellow: he'd also chosen to smuggle two cats aboard with him! What with every passenger pressing their nose against the starboard glass to watch the ensuing drama, it was surprising the whole train didn't tilt.
But after a few minutes we chugged on our merry way, leaving this reeking boob and his contraband menagerie to their fate. Durance vile might possibly be nicer in rural Oregon, but I don't intend to find out for myself. Nice to be home, even if it is flaming hot and my son forgot to water the tomato sprouts, or should I say former tomato sprouts? Well, he's 18, so what can you expect? Humboldt State, I suppose.
Painted in San Francisco during the artist’s first trip outside of Mexico. She accompanied her husband Diego Rivera who was painting in the United States and would, at the end of the year, be the subject of a retrospective at The Museum of Modern Art in New York. The banderole carried by the bird above the artist states: Here you see us, me, Frieda Kahlo, with my beloved husband Diego Rivera, I painted these portraits in the beautiful city of San Francisco, California, for our friend Mr. Albert Bender, and it was the month of April of the year 1931.
(SF Museum of Modern Art)
WILLIE MAYS: THE STRANGE, SAD PERIOD WHEN THE BELOVED HALL OF FAMER WAS EXILED FROM BASEBALL.
by Devin Gordon
In November 1979, less than four months after he was inducted into the Hall of Fame, Willie Mays was banned from Major League Baseball. He was 48, six years into retirement, but he was still one of the most recognizable athletes on the planet. He still appeared on talk shows and network sitcoms. He still got mobbed in restaurants. Kids who weren’t alive to watch him play still practiced his basket catch in the backyard and memorized his iconic numbers: the 660 career home runs; the .301 lifetime batting average; the 12 Gold Gloves in center field; the 24 All-Star game appearances (a feat possible only because M.L.B. hosted two All-Star games per year from 1959 to 1962, and Mays played in all of them).
But he was also deep in debt, which was nothing new for Mays, except now he was no longer being paid like a superstar. For much of the 1960s, Mays was baseball’s highest-paid player; in 1970, his salary was $135,000, or about $1.1 million today. And he always parted easily with his money. He gave it away to kids in his neighborhood after stickball games in the street. He lent it to friends he knew would never pay him back. He paid his housekeeper’s income taxes on top of her salary, even as he was in arrears to the I.R.S. himself. He also liked nice things: cars, clothes, furniture, houses. After his first marriage ended in (costly) divorce, he bought a multilevel home built into the side of a steep slope overlooking the Golden Gate Bridge, then added a spiral staircase running from the living room to the garage level so he could get to his convertible without going outside.
In the fall of 1979, Mays was making $50,000 a year as a good-will ambassador for the New York Mets, the last team he played for, when the Bally’s Park Place Casino Hotel in Atlantic City offered him a 10-year contract for $100,000 per year to spend 10 days a month at the casino as a celebrity greeter. Sign autographs, take pictures, tell stories, play golf with the high rollers. Be Willie Mays. Mays didn’t gamble, or drink, and even in retirement being Willie Mays depleted him, but he was always good at it, and he needed the money.
Today Major League Baseball has a lucrative partnership deal with FanDuel, the sports-betting platform, but in 1979, the baseball commissioner Bowie Kuhn insisted that the entire sport would be tarnished by any kind of paid arrangement between a gambling operation and a baseball legend. Kuhn forced Mays to choose between Bally’s and the Mets, and if he chose Bally’s, he would have to accept banishment from M.L.B. — no employment of any kind, no appearances on the field at Giants games, or the World Series, or the Hall of Fame. If he wanted to attend a game, he’d have to buy a ticket. Choosing Bally’s was a rare act of defiance for Mays, a peacemaker by temperament who hated causing a fuss. But he felt disrespected by Kuhn. “They had no cause to go and dump me like that,” he told a Washington Post reporter who visited him at Bally's in 1980, a year into the job. “Baseball needs people like me.”
Bally’s put Mays’s picture on its poker chips — along with his jersey number, 24, but no mention of the Giants or any other trademarked imagery — and his casino handlers packed his schedule, making sure to get their money’s worth out of him. Invariably patrons would bring up “the Catch“ — Mays’s game-saving over-the-shoulder grab at the Polo Grounds during Game 1 of the 1954 World Series — and he always said the same thing: that he had made several better catches before TV cameras were commonplace, that he knew he had it all the way (notice how he taps his thigh with his glove as he’s sprinting back for the ball) and that the best part of the Catch wasn’t the catch itself but how fast he spun around and fired the ball back to the infield, preventing the tiebreaking run from advancing past third base.
Mays played so hard on the field and heaped so much pressure on himself to perform like a god that his body sometimes had to remind him he was just a man. At least twice in the middle of his career, he collapsed during games from exhaustion and spent the next few days recovering in a hospital bed. It happened again while he was working for Bally’s, onstage in front of 400 kids at a junior high school near Atlantic City. The school principal later told reporters that Mays “just collapsed like a Slinky toy.” This time he was unconscious for 15 minutes before being revived. Everyone thought he was dead. He was rushed to a hospital but was then discharged just two hours later, and by the weekend, he was back to posing for photos and regaling gamblers.
Mays got some company in exile in 1983, when the Yankee legend Mickey Mantle accepted a similar job at Claridge Hotel and Casino, prompting Kuhn to ban him too. Twice Mays petitioned Kuhn to reconsider his banishment, but the commissioner didn’t budge. When Kuhn stepped down in 1984, though, his successor, Peter Ueberroth, moved quickly to end what had become an embarrassment for M.L.B., lifting the ban during spring training in 1985. Mays and Mantle, the new commissioner declared, were “exceptions to the current guidelines.” They were, he said, “more a part of baseball than perhaps anyone else.” The time had come to resume treating them like it.
(Devin Gordon is a writer based in Massachusetts. He is the author of ‘‘So Many Ways to Lose: The Amazin’ True Story of the New York Mets, the Best Worst Team in Sports.’’)
NEWSOM SET A MAJOR HOUSING GOAL FOR 2025. HERE'S HOW FAR SHORT THE STATE HAS FALLEN
by Sophia Bollag
While running for governor in 2017, Gavin Newsom laid out an ambitious goal: He would “lead the effort to develop the 3.5 million new housing units we need by 2025 because our solutions must be as bold as the problem is big.”
With Newsom’s self-imposed deadline looming, the state remains mired in a housing crisis despite intense focus on the issue from the governor and state and local lawmakers.
Since taking office, Newsom has signed dozens of laws that aim to streamline the construction of new housing, approved billions of dollars for affordable housing through the state budget and created a new enforcement unit within his housing agency to crack down on cities that stonewall new housing.
But for all of his efforts, permitting and construction have not been turbocharged. About 650,000 new homes were permitted between 2019 when he took office and 2023, according to numbers reported to the state by local governments. That averages out to about 110,000 newly approved units per year. Cities and counties have reported even fewer units were actually built during that time, though the numbers have increased steadily since Newsom took office, up to 115,000 units last year from about 70,000 in 2018.
The data shows the state is far short of the roughly 500,000 that would need to be approved each year to meet Newsom’s initial goal.
In 2022, when he was running for reelection, Newsom walked back the 3.5 million number when his administration set a new, less ambitious target: Cities would need to plan for 2.5 million new homes by 2030. So far, cities and counties have planned for 1.1 million new homes through their housing plans during Newsom’s tenure, said Tara Gallegos, a spokesperson for the governor’s office.
In the meantime, housing costs have continued to rise. When he wrote his blog post laying out his housing goals in 2017, California’s median home price was about $546,430, according to the state’s Department of Finance, which adjusted for inflation would be about $698,908 in today’s dollars. That number has increased to $868,150 in the most recent data available.
During his campaign, Newsom also promised to tackle homelessness, though he didn’t set a specific goal for how many people he wanted to get off the street. Since he took office, however, homelessness has trended upward.
Point-in-time count data, which estimates the number of homeless people on the streets on a single night in a jurisdiction, suggests California’s population of homeless people has grown from roughly 150,000 in 2019, the year Newsom took office, to roughly 180,000 last year.
While California’s homeless population has continued to increase, the numbers suggest that the funding he’s steered to counties for homeless aid is getting people into shelter, Gallegos said. She noted that the administration’s Roomkey program sheltered more than 62,000 people while the Homekey program has housed another 20,000. Homeless Housing Assistance and Prevention grants have provided 40,000 people with supportive housing and 53,000 with emergency shelter. Gallegos also pointed out that the growth in unsheltered homeless people has slowed, from a roughly 50% increase in the five years before Newsom took office to a 14% increase since.
Even so, people continue to cite homelessness as a major issue facing the state. Recent polling by the Public Policy Institute of California found roughly two-thirds of Californians say homelessness is a big problem where they live.
Earlier this year, the Supreme Court removed what Newsom has previously said is a barrier to getting people off the streets. The justices granted cities broad power to evict people from street encampments and confiscate their property in June in their ruling on Grants Pass v. Johnson, a decision Newsom had advocated for in an amicus brief. Previously, lower courts had blocked cities, including San Francisco, from forcing homeless people to leave encampments unless there was housing available for them. Homeless counts, which are conducted in January of each year, don’t yet reflect the impact of that decision.
Chris Elmendorf, a UC Davis law professor who specializes in housing policy, said that despite all the steps Newsom has taken to increase housing construction, they have done little to bring down the overall cost of building in California.
Laws Newsom approved to make it easier to build accessory dwelling units, his Homekey program to streamline housing for homeless people and his new housing accountability unit have all shown significant success, Elmendorf said. But he noted that the governor has mostly worked with lawmakers to enact their desired housing policies, rather than putting forward his own comprehensive plan. And he said Newsom has not taken aggressive steps to streamline his administration’s environmental rules for new projects.
One recent step he said could make a difference is Newsom’s executive order, issued last year, to direct his housing agency to propose reforms to the building code that would lower the cost of building.
“We’ll see what comes of it, but that’s exactly the sort of thing we need,” Elmendorf said. “We need to change the rules so that housing can be built at a lower price.”
Elmendorf pointed to Newsom’s Housing Accountability Unit, a new enforcement team within his housing agency, as a rare example of a state housing policy that cost little but has produced significant results.
Since it was established in 2021 with a $4.3 million appropriation in the state budget, the unit has sued several Southern California cities, including Huntington Beach (Orange County), Coronado (San Diego County), Malibu and Fullerton (Orange County), arguing they violated state law by not planning for enough housing. The state settled with Coronado, Malibu and Fullerton, which agreed to update their housing plans, and won a victory in court against Huntington Beach, which is now required to plan for more units.
The unit has also sent more than 600 letters to local governments providing guidance or warning that they may have illegally blocked or not planned for enough housing. The Newsom administration has pointed to more than 7,800 housing units that local governments have green-lit after state housing officials intervened.
Ben Metcalf, director of the Terner Center for Housing Innovation at UC Berkeley, said that the housing market in California has faced economic headwinds that could have meant even lower housing production numbers if not for Newsom’s policies. Those include high federal interest rates that drive up costs for developers, as well as higher prices for construction materials, labor and insurance.
He pointed to the boom in people getting permits to build additional units on existing properties and increased state funding for subsidized apartment buildings for low-income families as successes Newsom can take credit for. He also noted that Newsom’s successful efforts to force cities to plan for more housing will take years to actually drive up the housing supply, but that they do seem to be working, if slowly.
In a statement, Gallegos defended Newsom’s record on housing and homelessness.
“Affordable housing and homelessness are enormous and complex policy challenges that were decades in the making, but we are already seeing the impacts of the Governor’s meaningful work,” she wrote. “Long-term change doesn’t happen overnight, but we are seeing incredible progress.”
(SF Chronicle)
“I know we're not saints or virgins or lunatics; we know all the lust and lavatory jokes, and most of the dirty people; we can catch buses and count our change and cross the roads and talk real sentences. But our innocence goes awfully deep, and our discreditable secret is that we don't know anything at all, and our horrid inner secret is that we don't care that we don't.”
— Dylan Thomas
ON CHRISTMAS EVE my father would tell us, “He’s on his way now, coming round Slieve Gallon, if you listen hard maybe you’ll hear the sleigh bells.” I remember climbing the beech tree at the end of our lane, listening through the frosty air.
— Seamus Heaney
MORE THAN 6,000 SALMON RETURN TO KLAMATH RIVER ABOVE FORMER IRON GATE DAM SITE!
by Dan Bacher
More than 6,000 fall-run Chinook salmon have returned to the Klamath River and tributaries above the former Iron Gate Dam site since dam removal was completed this October, according to preliminary SONAR camera data released by conservation organization California Trout…
WITHOUT YOU CHRISTMAS
by Fred Gardner
A colossal wreck
All hands on deck
Who'll be our reality check?
On a plain old broken-down
Without you Christmas
And Sammy's friend
The magician
shall not disappear again
on a plain old broken-down
Without you Christmas
Lionel trains
chuggin round our brains
from Sonoma to White Plains
on a plain old broken-down
Without you Christmas
My uncle Max
knew all the facts
raced the crossword to relax
on a plain old broken-down
Without you Christmas
And my loving aunt
wouldn't use the plant
There's things we try to do but can't
on a plain old broken-down
Without you Christmas
The neighbors leave
their neighbors grieve
Santa knows how to deceive
on a plain old broken-down
Without you Christmas
No peace on earth
no savior birth
Labor don't get what it's worth
on a plain old broken-down
Without you Christmas
So ends the year
I feign good cheer
But how I wish y'all were here
on a plain old broken-down
Without you Christmas
HAPPY HANUKKAH, MONICA
You did a thing and you let it slip
to a friend name of Linda Tripp
And with a friend like that you don't need an enemy
Happy Hanukkah, Monica Lewinsky
Potato latkes, chicken soup
Far away from the weirdo snoop
In the warmth of the menorah's golden glow
With your family out in 90210
Girl, who'd've thought when you raised your dress
You'd be raising so much consciousness
Exposing the madmen's “War on Sin?”
Girl, you really made their dreidels spin!
Entrapment schemes from Kenneth Starr
“Don't count the votes” says Robert Barr
McCollum's got a plan to poison all the sacred plants
Soon as they get through pulling down the President's pants
When they needed light to defend the temple
Judah found that oil of hemp'll
Burn with a steady mellow blaze
Eight desperate nights in the olden days.
IN 1947, a woman was walking into a grocery store in Memphis, Tennessee, to deliver a roll of film to be developed. As soon as she entered, she realized that she had one last exposure left. She noticed a boy outside the shop and asked him to put down his new bicycle with her, so she could finish the roll of film and hand it over. She could not have imagined that this young man would become the greatest rock star and icon the world had ever known. In 2014, this photo was finally published in Vanity Fair magazine, showing the young Elvis Presley.
JAN MUDRON:
In January 2014, Vanity Fair magazine published an article showing a photo of Elvis presumably taken in downtown Tupelo, Mississippi, in 1947.
The article traces the origin of the photo to a woman who was walking into a drugstore to drop off some film that had one exposure left on the roll. According to the story, she noticed a young Elvis on his bike and asked him to pose, snapping her last frame of him. The woman later gave the photo to Presley family friend Janelle McComb of Tupelo, who passed along the photo and the story of how she obtained it to Elvis fan and memorabilia collector Wade Jones shortly before her death.
The story behind the photo may have been correct, but the city was wrong.
Tupelo lies in Lee County, which was a dry county in the 1940’s, meaning it was illegal to sell alcohol, yet the background of the photo shows a liquor store. Mississippi didn’t repeal Prohibition until 1966.
The bike in the photo is also familiar.
Elvis received a Firestone Pilot Classic bicycle, most likely for his 13th birthday. In 1993, a photo was found in Gladys’ closet at Graceland of Elvis on a new bike with “age 13” written on the back.
The bike is the same one in the Vanity Fair photo, except for the fenders, which were removed in the later photo.
The Presleys moved to Memphis in November 1948 and lived at 370 Washington before moving just around the corner to a large rooming house at 572 Poplar Avenue in June 1949. They briefly lived there until September, when they moved to Lauderdale Courts. Elvis’ grandmother, Minnie Mae Presley, continued living at the Poplar address, according to the 1950 Memphis City Directory. City directories list homes and businesses by street throughout the city.
The 1950 directory also shows the S&S Drug Store, Lando Marossi restaurant and Milo’s liquor store that appear in the Vanity Fair photo. John Sampietro, whose father operated the S&S Drug Store at the corner of Poplar and High Street, remembered his father talking about how a young Elvis would come into the store to play pinball.
Milo Solomito operated the liquor store just across the street from the drug store and his son, Milo Jr., identified the store in the photo as the one his father ran for many years. To the right of the liquor store was the Marossi restaurant, which was also located across the street from the drug store before moving to a nearby location in 1954, according to Jerry Marossi.
This was Elvis’ neighborhood for almost a year before moving to Lauderdale Courts in the fall of 1949.
Although not taken in Tupelo, the photo is one of the earliest photos of Elvis in Memphis, a city he would call home for the rest of his life.
THE CAT AND THE MOON
The cat went here and there
And the moon spun round like a top,
And the nearest kin of the moon,
The creeping cat, looked up.
Black Minnaloushe stared at the moon,
For, wander and wail as he would,
The pure cold light in the sky
Troubled his animal blood.
Minnaloushe runs in the grass
Lifting his delicate feet.
Do you dance, Minnaloushe, do you dance?
When two close kindred meet,
What better than call a dance?
Maybe the moon may learn,
Tired of that courtly fashion,
A new dance turn.
Minnaloushe creeps through the grass
From moonlit place to place,
The sacred moon overhead
Has taken a new phase.
Does Minnaloushe know that his pupils
Will pass from change to change,
And that from round to crescent,
From crescent to round they range?
Minnaloushe creeps through the grass
Alone, important and wise,
And lifts to the changing moon
His changing eyes.
— William Butler Yeats (1919)
ON-LINE COMMENT OF THE DAY
I am amazed that so many Americans know so little about how Social Security works. Social Security is limited in its investments to non-marketable US government securities and has been since the program was created. The trust fund does not send money to Ukraine, or Israel or anywhere else. It does not directly pay for tanks or drones or bullets sent to foreign governments. If the trust fund is on the brink of ruin (and it probably is), blame the fact that its mission has been expanded over the years to cover all sorts of programs that have nothing to do with retired employees.
LEAD STORIES, CHRISTMAS DAY, 2024
U.S. Enters a New Political Era, Defined by Donald Trump
Assist or Resist: Local Officials Debate Donald Trump’s Deportation Threat
A.I., the Electricians and the Boom Towns of Central Washington
Pope Calls for Cease-Fires in Christmas Day Message
KYLE RITTENHOUSE: Luigi Mangione shot and killed a man in cold blood and tried to get away with it. I, on the other hand, defended myself after being chased down and violently attacked. Luigi and I aren't even remotely similar. If you're comparing my case to his, you have some serious problems.
BIDEN’S COMMUTATIONS: a terrifying reason behind Biden's Christmas gift to child rapists and killers.
by Maureen Callahan
Remove him. Now.
It's been sold by Democrats as a mercy to allow disgraced President Joe Biden to ride out his term. How much harm can he do?, they ask.
A lot, it turns out. An ungodly amount.
Devastating, unjust, dangerous harms — all exacted by a president we now know, thanks to blockbuster exposés last week, has been cognitively impaired since before Day One.
If the Democratic Party has a shred of self-preservation left, if its leaders hold any hope for rebounding in 2028 as the self-appointed guardians of decency, moral uprightness, and democracy itself, they must remove this dishonorable president immediately.
Early Monday morning, Biden commuted the death sentences of nearly all forty men on federal death row, including child rapists and murderers.
That's Joe Biden's version, I guess, of wishing “Merry Christmas” to the grieving families of these murdered children.
Ever the coward, he dumped this news the day before Christmas Eve, hoping the bulk of mainstream media will ignore it. No White House pressers scheduled, nothing on Biden's public agenda, our president-in-name-only attempting to slink away like the snake he is.
No parents should be predeceased by their sons or daughters. I, unfortunately, have that experience too… And, you know, not all losses are equal,' Biden said in a self-serving speech to military families back in 2012.
Biden — having lost his first wife and 13-month-old daughter in a 1972 car accident, and then his 46-year-old son Beau, to brain cancer, in 2015 — should surely know better.
Lexis Roberts was just 12 years old when career criminal Thomas Sanders kidnapped her in 2012 and forced her to watch as he murdered her mother.
Sanders then drove this young girl across the country for days before taking her into the woods, shooting her four times, then slicing her throat so savagely that part of her spine was left exposed.
It took the jury an hour to return a guilty verdict, one that imposed the death penalty.
Yet Joe Biden has taken it upon himself to undo that hard-won justice. Sanders will get to live out his days in taxpayer-funded relief.
Eight-year-old Laura Hobbes and nine-year-old Krystal Tobias went missing on May 8, 2005 — Mother's Day. They were kidnapped, sexually assaulted and fatally stabbed to death, in their necks and faces, by Jorge Avila-Torres.
Before his eventual capture, Avila-Torres went on to strangle 20-year-old Navy intelligence specialist Amanda Jean Snell to death and, in 2010, kidnapped and bound two women in Northern Virginia. He raped one of them, strangled her, and left her for dead on a roadside.
She survived. Her bravery led to his arrest and subsequent convictions in those three murders. A fellow inmate, wearing a wiretap, later recorded the following exchange:
Avila-Torres: 'Does a lion feel remorse when it kills a hyena?'
Q: 'You don't feel bad?'
Avila-Torres: 'Nope.'
Q: 'At all?'
Avila-Torres: 'Nope.'
After his sentencing in the Illinois child murders, Krystal's mother, Marina Tobias, said, 'I just want to say we're glad it's over.'
But it's not over for Marina Tobias -- or any of these grieving parents. Joe Biden has seen to that.
All while he has given his reprobate, convict son Hunter a blanket pardon, despite publicly and repeatedly vowing never to do so.
Given this, we must ask: What is Biden's cabinet, what is the entire Democratic Party, waiting for? Or Congress?
Why have they failed to invoke the 25th amendment and remove this president, one revealed as barely there, sleeping the days away, unreachable by his top staffers, non compos mentis his entire term?
A president who is clearly hellbent on 'burning it all down' on his way out the door, making sure the American people — we poor saps — feel his rage at being pushed aside?
All class, that Joe Biden.
Truly: Has any outgoing president in American history done such grievous damage? How can the Dems point to January 6th offenders, with a straight face, and say they, compared to child killers, are unworthy of pardons?
Yet Dems wonder, still, how the Republicans have become the party of the common man. How MAGA is now the party of common sense.
Consider: Weeks after Donald Trump won the election, Biden allowed Ukraine, for the first time, to use US-made long-range missiles to strike inside Russia — a needless provocation to a war Americans no longer want.
President Clinton famously used to say, 'I feel your pain.' With Biden, it's the other way around. He is going to make America feel his pain.
He is having the mother of all temper tantrums, and it seems not even the Lord Almighty himself — you know, Barack Obama — can do anything about it.
Biden is literally selling off parts of Trump's border wall at fire-sale prices —auctioning fence building materials rather than retaining them for Trump's administration — doubtless because Americans ousted the Dems over the migrant crisis.
This isn't just petty. It's an attempt to thwart the will of the people. Make no mistake: Joe Biden is giving America the ultimate F-you.
In his first round of pardons last week, Biden commuted the sentence of 'Kids for Cash' judge Michael Conahan, who took millions in kickbacks to send children — some as young as 8 — to for-profit jails.
'President Biden got it absolutely wrong and created a lot of pain here in northeastern Pennsylvania,' the state's Dem governor Josh Shapiro said last week. 'Some children took their lives because of this. Families were torn apart.'
Too bad: It seems Joe Biden only cares for such tragedies when it's his family involved.
His appalling, hypocritical 11th-hour actions prove the desperate need for Congressional inquiry into who has been running this White House.
But in the immediate, Biden needs to go. That is indisputable.
The only question is: Who among the Dems has the spine to say so?
(Daily Mail)
THANKFULLY, SOME THINGS NEVER CHANGE
A few reflections on an extraordinary year, as we give thanks and burn the Yule log
by Matt Taibbi
There was a fascinating article in Tablet recently by David Samuels, the editor of County Highway (co-founded with America This Week’s Walter Kirn). The article traced the history of an effort beginning in the Obama years at “rewiring the machinery that produced what a brilliant young political theorist named Walter Lippmann once identified, in his 1921 book, as ‘public opinion’.”
Samuels posited a vast unreported story, in which “manufacturing consent” was re-imagined for the Internet age. A new machinery of leaks, lies, and content suppression let ruling powers generate “rapid-onset political enlightenment” on demand. Authorities used digital tools to move ideas about racism or Russiagate or “social distancing” from the fringe to the mainstream in an instant, creating “permission structures” that allowed mush-brained members of the donor class to embrace concepts they first heard minutes ago. Panics spread like viruses, with each thought-disease cresting and breaking at its own pace, forcing the uninfected to beat exhausting retreats to “parallel thought-worlds.”
The major difference between what we just experienced and previous periods of collective madness is that while, say, the Red Scare of the fifties froze America in a conservative delirium, punishing the slightest deviations from a patriotic norm, the recent merger of national security agencies with Madison Avenue and the press stressed instant conformity to radical change. It almost didn’t matter what the change was, it just had to be far out. The power to move people off long-held beliefs was the important proof of concept. Hence the weirdness of so much of what we’ve lived through, from “biological sex” or “natural immunity” becoming forbidden science to liberalism’s overnight rejection of the Bill of Rights.
I’ll buy what Samuels is selling. What’s more, I bet in twenty or even ten years, a canny cultural historian will give his thesis a catchy nickname that will stick to this just-concluded period (The Great Fever? The Orange Panic?). At least, I hope. If you subscribe to this site it’s likely because, like me, you felt the world slipping off its axis and were looking for someone to reassure you you weren’t crazy. We lived through a difficult time together, but the fever finally broke this fall, and the world is now allowed to remark on the Emperor’s lack of clothes. It feels like good news, but what now? Can we go back a normal life? Will it last?
I think so, for a time. Samuels credits a cast of characters like Donald Trump and Elon Musk and even Benjamin Netanyahu (!) with breaking the spell through sheer stubbornness, the real cause of the turnaround was probably more prosaic. A core reflex in these decades of postmodern insanity was constant rejection of things we thought we knew in favor of New, Improved Beliefs packaged from above. But some things don’t change. Until we do away with holidays, little kids will always have the same look on their faces I’ll see tomorrow morning, when mine unwrap their presents. Farts will always be funny, teenagers will always menace cars and have too much sex, NBA players will always travel, and parents bound by love for their children will always find peace growing old together. Fundamental things do apply, as time goes by.
Mad scientists who think they can redesign human experience are always undone by eternal truths that arrogance won’t allow them to grasp, one being that life isn’t so bad, another that there are some things people will never understand. But that’s the good news. Learning to embrace the unknown is what allows us to be happy, in our handful of turns on the planet. Heavy thoughts for Christmas, but I mean it in a good way. I don’t know what’s coming. I do know that first the first time in ages, the exhaustion of managing parallel truths has subsided. Now we just have one crazy world to worry about. Normal feels normal. Christmas feels like Christmas. We’ve won a panic reprieve. Happy holidays, everyone. I’m glad we all made it here together.
(racket.news)
Justine Frederiksen Thanks for sharing your memories of your favorite Christmas Eve. That article felt good while I was reading it to myself this morning..
Thank you, Matt! Merry Christmas. :)
I keep mistletoe in my back pocket this time of the year :-)
Didn’t Covid teach you anything?
“You’re right, I did lose a million dollars last year. I expect to lose a million dollars this year. I expect to lose a million dollars next year. You know, Mr. Thatcher, at the rate of a million dollars a year, I’ll have to close this place in… sixty years” Charles Foster Kane
That sounds like farming.
“Hansen, and his family of investors, deserve an apology. Sadly, that is unlikely.”
And unnecessary. As far as I am concerned, they are just a bunch of out-of-control kaputalists. I’ve seen what results when they invade a place… They generally call it “growth”, and I’ve seen the results far too often, in far too many places, in California, and elsewhere.
Moo🐮rry x-mas🎄,
from rural 🛻 usa🍒.
Free Luigi Mangione
Free Ross Ulbricht
Free Leonard Peltier
Put Michael Conahan back in jail… forever.
I second the motion. The real killers and crooks in general are politicians, their lackeys, and the billionaire kaputalist rats who fund them.
That Thomas Paine quote doesn’t pair well with the image of Mr Mangione.
Another person with a gun kills someone. It’s the American way. Politicians and pundits will cheer or decry these events, but no laws will change, justice will not be served and the system will march along unabated.
The American experiment is flailing.