Chilly | 128 Flooded | Water Rescue | Jake Waggoner | Boonville Hotel | Corolla Found | Robert Lorentzen | Was Rich | Vigil Notice | New Year Celebrations | Ed Notes | Like Chicken | Don't Understand | Cauliflower Fungus | Beacon Power | Way Back | Yesterday's Catch | Fib King | 911 Again | Squirrel Love | Tunnel Vote | Blizzard Warning | 30 Minutes | Education Dilemma | Socialist NFL | Wha? | Likes Bernie | Fats Domino | Lead Stories | Jimmy Carter | Harvey Kurtz | National Hoax | Ideal Subjects | My God | Bat Signal | Sleeping Women | Deux Filles | Separation Illusion | Broken Mirror
DRY CONDITIONS with cold overnight temperatures are expected today into Tuesday. Temperatures will warm Tuesday night into Wednesday as rain chances return and persist through Friday.…Cold Weather Advisory in effect from 3am to 8am Tuesday. (NWS)
STEPHEN DUNLAP (Fort Bragg): A brisk 38F with clear skies this Monday morning on the coast, a bit more rain yesterday morning gave us .18". Cool & dry thru New Years Day then rain returns Wednesday evening. Rain for the end the week then next week is looking dry. So far. We can only hope.
RICHARD YATES: Vehicles stranded on Highway 128? Per scanner 128 is closed. Multiple parties stranded due to flooding.
ANDERSON VALLEY FIRE CHIEF ANDRES AVILA CONFIRMS: Yes, we were dispatched on Sunday morning for a water rescue at MM 9.5 (Navarro area). CHP arrived to find three stranded vehicles, none with injuries. A CHP SUV was able to successfully push one vehicle out, one was able to drive out with water induced engine problems, and the other was towed out. With the rapid rise of the North Fork of the Navarro, CalTrans closed the Hwy at Flynn Creek Rd and Hwy 1 (roughly 10 miles of the highway) around 11:00am.
CALTRANS UPDATE [today, Monday 3:41am]: Route 128 is OPEN from the Route 1 junction to just west of Navarro (PM 0-12.6) in Mendocino County.
NORCAL JESS: As many of you may be aware, my brother Jake Waggoner passed away on December 23, surrounded by family. I wanted to inform everyone that we will be holding a Celebration of Life in January, although the exact date has yet to be determined. I will ensure that everyone is notified as soon as the details are finalized, so that you can all join us in honoring his memory. I would also like to express my gratitude for the kind messages and condolences that have been extended to our family.
BILL KIMBERLIN: The Boonville Hotel looking cheery.
FRANK VAINE’S CAR FOUND & RETURNED
Update on our stolen car: WE GOT IT BACK! It was found abandoned in Covelo early this morning, and it was actually in pretty good shape. There was documented evidence that they tried to sell it, and they actually had it pretty clean inside and out. Feeling wonderful. So two things: 1.Buyer please beware if you are interested in a car that they claim the Title was “lost.” Feeling wonderful. And Thank You for all that were so support from your positve facebook reactions and comments and help! Feeling wonderful.
ROBERT SCOTT LORENTZEN
Robert Scott Lorentzen, also known as Bob or Bobby Scott, passed away at home in Fort Bragg, California, on January 15, 2022 of complications from acute myeloid leukemia. He was 72 years old.
Bob is survived by his beloved child Crow Lorentzen, his cherished dog companion, Bowie, and many longtime friends, including a core group from U.C. Santa Cruz, who shared delightful reminiscences with him during his final months.
Bob was born January 25, 1949 in Salt Lake City, UT, to Carolyn Harman and E. Karl Lorentzen. He graduated from Clearfield High School and moved to Orinda, CA to join his father. He attended U.C. Santa Cruz, where he graduated in 1972 from Crown College with a B.A. in Community Studies.
Following graduation, Bob joined the VISTA program where he served in Visalia, CA. From there, he made his way to Lake County, CA and in 1976 was hired to work in Mendocino County’s Nutrition Program in Anderson Valley. He became the program’s director, moving to the Mendocino coast where he was instrumental in founding Fort Bragg’s Food Bank in 1979.
He then went into business as a timber cruiser, spending time among the coastal redwood forests. As an avid hiker and backpacker, in 1986 Bob founded Bored Feet Press by publishing “The Hiker’s hip pocket Guide to the Mendocino Coast.” From that tiny seed, Bob authored eight more guidebooks, becoming a well-respected publisher and reseller of guidebooks and maps for the west that endured for 35 years. His “Hiker’s hip pocket Guide to Sonoma County” was published in 1990.
Bob was instrumental in raising awareness of the need for continuous access along the California Coast. In the mid-1990s, he hiked the length of the California coast, publishing two guidebooks with co-author Richard Nichols of Coastwalk, detailing the California Coastal Trail while highlighting areas where access was non-existent. These books were instrumental in leading the initiative for improved signage, trail mapping, and grants for increased access to the California Coastal Trail.
Bob had a deep love of and respect for nature. He camped, hiked, and backpacked throughout northern California and the Sierra Nevadas.
He enjoyed foraging for mushrooms in his neighborhood, loved music and attending concerts, and he was a huge San Francisco Giants fan.
Bob will be greatly missed by his family of friends. To honor his memory, please consider donations to Coastwalk/California Coastal Trail Association or to the Humane Society of the Mendocino Coast.
MY 9TH ANNUAL NEW YEAR VIGIL
Holiday Greetings!
Tuesday I’ll be back in Mendoland for a day, for my annual New Years Vigil.
This will be the ninth year that I’ll be sitting in my xmas lighted chair in Fort Bragg, to bring in the New Year.
I’ll set up my festive chair in the empty lotby 11:30 PM, on the North East corner of Redwood and Franklin (across from Lees Chinese).
I started this celebration because cannabis was decriminalized in California on that date (2016), and as I don’t imbibe spirits and such, I wanted to join in on the Downtown New Year celebrations with a toke or two, and the empty lot was the perfect location.
If it’s not raining there will be a parade of happy, friendly people walking between the bars downtown, and occasionally, an unauthorized fireworks “show” in the middle of the intersection after Midnight.
Of course, it will be COLD as usual, so I dress very warmly, and I often bring a thermos with hot tea in it.
I’ll be there rain or not, since I own an umbrella.
This isn’t a call to action, it’s just something I like to do, and maybe some others will feel inclined to do so as well.
Over the years, more than several hardy individuals have come by and celebrated there too.
Derek (helios@saber.net)
Coast Chatline
NEW YEAR'S EVE CELEBRATIONS
ED NOTES
THE MAGAS talk a lot about a permanent federal “blob” blocking their famously idealistic plans to fire most of it while they send weeping women and children back to Mexico. I’m happy that the blob owns and manages Frisco’s vast Presidio. If the City and County of San Francisco had gotten its fumbling mitts on the Presidio its gracious old buildings would now be teeming with drunks and dope heads much as Golden Gate Park is presently overrun with criminals and the deranged, forcing semi-respectable part-time residents like myself to run a gauntlet of nose-ringed pot salesmen and pit bulls every time I visit that sector of the city.
AS A BLOB-RUN federal park, the Presidio has not only been preserved and restored for a variety of uses in ways most of us probably didn’t think possible, the feds have beaten back the Fisher Family’s monstrously out of place modern art museum, a hideous neo-Safeway structure they wanted to house Andy Warhol’s renditions of Campbell Soup cans in an otherwise architecturally proportionate area at the south end of the parade grounds.
AND THE FEDS have kept the bums out, a federal cop even accosting me one night just after dark as I pushed my bike uphill to Arguello. “Do you have a destination?” the federale asked. “If I didn’t have a destination young man,” I said, “would I be striding energetically and purposefully up this hill?” He looked at me long enough to see that I didn’t seem dangerously 5150 and drove off.
WHEN THAT YOUNG mother and her daughter were pulled into the ocean and drowned at Montara recently, it was one more terrible instance of people not being able to tell the difference between the beach and the surf line. Here in Mendocino County you see toddlers playing in the surf all the time at dangerous places like the little beach at Mackerricher, to name one particularly perilous ocean venue. And we all remember the sleeper wave that reached out to pull the visiting Italian scholar off the rocks at the Mendocino bluffs, his frantic wife and two weeping sons watching as the doomed man drifted farther and farther out to sea until he finally disappeared.
AT OCEAN BEACH in San Francisco I’ve seen the cops forced into compelling people out of the water for their own safety during high surfs, and we read regularly of the unwary being carried off from Sonoma and Humboldt County beaches. Without making a total agoraphobe out of your kid, at a minimum he ought to know that life hangs by a thread, and that the thread often looks benign, like a sunny day at the seaside.
LOCAL SPORTS fans will remember Jim Mastin who coached basketball at Mendocino High School in the early 1970s during the Dan Doubiago days. Mrs. Mastin, a renowned chef, founded the Ledford House Restaurant near Little River. Jim died some twenty years ago in Seattle at age 73. He’d coached basketball for many years at Whitman College in Walla Walla, Washington where he landed after Mendocino where, to put it mildly, he’d been a controversial figure, mostly because he, an old school guy, took a bunch of hippie kids and made them into a local small school powerhouse, kids unaccustomed to having a strong male authority figure in their lives, especially one who got right in their organic faces with blunt assessments of their work ethics.
ON ONE MEMORABLE occasion when his Doubiago-led team finished second in a tournament they should have won, Mastin, seizing the second place trophy and hurling it against the locker room wall, shattering it into a thousand pieces, shouted, “Here’s what I think of second place.” A third place trophy might have gone through the wall. And a couple of times Jim got kicked clear out of the gym by irate refs. (Mendocino County’s refs were spectacularly incompetent in that era; I remember one guy calling out to the scorer’s table, “That’s a fragrant foul on number 11.”)
MASTIN looked and talked like the tough guy actor, Lee Marvin. Jim also was a tough guy and a very good athlete. He’d played on the legendary USF national champ teams of Bill Russell, and he played in Boonville on my softy-wofty men’s league team where he more than held his own. Jim’s son Randy went on to play in the NFL with the San Diego Chargers as a linebacker, and his other son, Dave, became a state legislator in Washington.
AFTER HIS COLLEGE DAYS at USF, Jim became a high school coach at Paso Robles High School, which is where I first met him through my brother, Ken, who was then a student teacher under Mastin. This was maybe ‘62, ‘63. Mastin mentioned to me that he was trying to get a huge kid confined at the nearby Atascadero State Hospital released to his custody so the huge kid could play on Mastin’s Paso Robles high school basketball team. Even that far back, Mastin’s teams were known for their hustle and their intensity. He’d often beat teams with better talent by simply out coaching them. Mastin liked to win, needed to win. Which is where the big kid in the looney bin, Edmund Kemper, came in. Kemper, a 7-footer, had gotten himself a berth in the state hospital by murdering his grandparents. “Hell, he’s only a kid,” I still remember Mastin saying, “I can handle him.” Mastin’s efforts to become the lad’s foster parent were unsuccessful, and Kemper went on to become an All Star American adult serial killer with his base of operations in Santa Cruz. He’d pick up hitchhiking coeds and, well, they never hitchhiked again.
KEMPER’S own mother described her son as “a real weirdo,” a remark which may have caused Kemper to decapitate the old girl as his last act before being returned to Atascadero forever. Mom’s head was left on her kitchen table for the arriving police who’d belatedly figured out that Kemper was the guy responsible for the sudden reduction in the area’s hitchhiking population.
JIM MASTIN probably could have handled Kemper, he was that determined, that passionate. Born in Oklahoma to parents driven to Salinas by The Great Depression, Mastin knew the only way up was work and more work. He made himself into a superior athlete, got himself a college basketball scholarship, and went on from there to a successful coaching career at the college level. He was a great guy, the kind of guy schools need more than ever in these flabby times. Just thinking about him after all these years still makes me smile.
MY MICHAEL JACKSON story? Stop me if you’ve heard it before. It isn’t my story anyway. It’s a nurse’s story. I know the nurse. She told me that she and the rest of the staff directly responsible for Jackson’s care whenever he checked into Mount Zion Hospital in LA, he brought his chimp with him. The chimp shared Jackson’s hospital bed. The big secret was that the chimp wet the bed. Jackson told the nurses that it wasn’t him wetting the bed, it was his monkey, and the nurses weren’t to think otherwise, and they certainly weren’t to breathe a word of Jackson’s anthropomorphic sleeping habits. These special nurses were to whisk Jackson’s sheets from his bed as soon as he and the chimp arose with not a word to anyone. My friend said Jackson was not difficult and he always left the nurses extravagant tips for keeping this particular confidence.
THIS? I DO NOT UNDERSTAND THESE
by Tommy Wayne Kramer
Things I’m unable to comprehend:
Greeting Cards
I’ve never understood why greeting cards are so expensive. It’s a folded piece of cardboard with flowers or kittens on the front and inside something deeply deep, like “Happy Birthday” or “Thinking of You.”
Wife Trophy recently bought two such samples of sentimental rubbish, pink envelopes included.
Total cost: $9.58.
I went to the Ukiah post office to mail the cards, one to Israel and one to Italy, stood in line a short while, and the ever-cheerful Steve took out a red rubber stamp that said “International Mail” and sold me two stamps.
Two envelopes that will travel around the world?
Total cost: $3.60.
Maybe this is A) Why the post office is forced to raise the price of domestic stamps twice a month, or else B) suggests congressional hearings on why rapacious CEOs of Big Card are overdue. (Reverse A&B)
Medical Care Ratings
We read and hear that our medical care system ranks last on this list, worst on another list, and 69th on a list I just consulted. The chart says the USA is far behind such health care utopias as Cuba (27th), Uruguay (35) and Uzbekistan (49). I don’t understand this.
Do you know anyone who would prefer cardio treatment in Armenia (68) to UCSF, or Mayo Clinic? Or hip and knee replacement surgery anywhere but Willits, CA? These lists are nonsense unless we consider the corollary, which everyone always does:
The United States is Number One in medical costs. Highest anywhere! Most expensive in the world! Can it be true?
Let’s put on our tinfoil thinking caps, dim the lights and figure it out. Why does health care cost so much in America?
ANSWER: Because we’re wealthy. We have big lots of much more money and we spend it on fancier cars than people in Qatar (#38) and buy more expensive vacations, houses and liquor than lucky people living on Mars.
And we spend lots of our vast wealth on health care, much of it optional or cosmetic. Also, thanks to the pure genius of the Affordable Care Act, we have coverage (and we pay dearly for this coverage) for free transgender surgeries, all OBGYN needs, including for men, and lots of other medical services the primitive health systems in Singapore (No. 1) have yet to adopt.
Our death rates are too high? Why not allow fentanyl smugglers to invade other countries with open borders and watch their suicide rates skyrocket? Plus, because we’re wealthy, many people die in car wrecks. This is rare in Cambodia. (Go sue Big Vehicle.)
Americans eat enormous amounts of food, much of which isn’t very healthy, so they get obese and they die. Rarely a problem in Bangladesh.
Bottom Line: In the USA if you break your leg, you carefully consider your options, and ultimately decide to go to the ER and have it fixed.
In Venezuela if you break your leg, you carefully consider your options, and ultimately decide to spend the rest of your life limping.
Joy And Cheer At A Murder
Leftists are in full chortle mode since the CEO of a major health care organization was shot to death on a Manhattan sidewalk.
Ho ho, and whoop-ti-doo!
From Elizabeth Warren and campus clowns down to Mendo’s proudest progressives the tone has been festive, marinated in a dank stew of class envy soaked in hatred and violence. Oh how jolly, (Less so for his surviving children, brothers, wife during the Christmas season.)
But he deserved it, you say. He (was) rich and our health care stinks and to slay the man is to strike a blow for freedom and fire a warning shot to all who would trample upon the oppressed. Is that your argument? Well then.
If a lawyer gets a Not Guilty verdict for someone who obviously did the crime (think O.J.) would you cheer on a lynch mob to hang Johnny Cochrane?
Suppose Governor Jerry Brown promises a high speed ‘Bullet Train” to LA, counts the votes, collects the money, cancels the project and hurries back to his Sacramento mansion. What would be more fun: Quick execution or slow grisly torture? Live on CNN or full-length film by Martin Scorsese?
Haven’t we been through this before? Learn anything? JFK, RFK, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, George Wallace, Weather Underground, John Lennon?
Mr. Dylan: “And here I sit so patiently / Trying to find what price / You have to pay to get out of / Going through all these things twice.”
Don’t ask the price. We can’t afford it.
R.D. BEACON
Among the rumors, in the business world, this when I find the most bizarre, probably close to the truth, as our governor pushes for all electric vehicles, as well as all appliances and new construction, of homes, and even large buildings where sacral he used to be, as simple as a gas furnace, our out-of-control governor, fails to realize, pushing all electric, you have to have some way to generate enough power, to satisfy, California’s needs, yes we have wind generation, but the windows and always blow, and over many years, people pushed for solar remember, a sunny day is the only way it really works, well, it will work in cloudy conditions, but you don’t get the maximum amount of power, we have used nuclear before, but the bleeding heart environmentalists, don’t want that, hydroelectric works very well, creating power out of moving water, below a law to the older dams, like the one at Lake Pillsbury, PG&E wants to teardown, and drains upon, rather than repairing it, but probably the most scary things, our governor is got in bed, with PG&E, along with the California Public Utilities Commission, that keep raising the rates, for power, to the point that people, fixed income can’t afford it, some individuals, over the years, put solar panels on the residence, with selling, power back to the power companies, although now, how are companies, one for free, I heard, the other day somebody mentioned Gavin, might be the new CEO, of PG&E when he terms out of the governor’s office, maybe my friend knew more than I did, he said more than likely the new Board of Directors, would be made up of many of the old, PUC board, the governor and his strange bedfellows, so what is PG&E going to do, with all the natural gas, they have, if they can’t sell it to the public, more than likely they’ll build large generating plants, and they’ll be gas-fired, but isn’t that defeating, the purpose of putting omissions in the air, it seems to be the old shell game, those of you that don’t know what that’s about, you have 3 cups on a table, one of them has a little ball underneath, people bet on where the ball will end up, as the person running the game, move things around fast, you win if you figure out where the ball is, you lose when you can’t figure it out, the crackpot scientists that figure out, that the hydrocarbons in the air, do a lot of damage, where plant life live off bad air, destroy all the junk in the air, and eventually the trees will die, along with everything else, give us enough time, we so-called smart, humankind, we will place our planet, down the toilet, and end up looking like Mars, and more than likely like in the movie, the Time Machine, we will all have to live underground, remember, a great author, named Jules Vern, he predicted the Nautilus, nuclear power, he predicted going to the moon, in the many writings, he looked into the future, much like nostra dominance, who predicted all the things that have already happened, but he was alive long before, America even existed, simple fact, we are the authors, creators of our own destruction, and we need to turn it around, the reason there were big trees, is the air was so bad it polluted, from volcanoes the photosynthesis, creating from bad air, too good oxygen, is simple part of creation, and the benefits, the humankind has received, over the centuries, have given us great things, like fossil fuels, harvested from the ground, precious metals, and great amounts of Timberland, to be harvested, but at the rate, were going, we have lost sight, what our purpose, it should be about, certainly not about making some electric company, richer than the government itself, and the fact that PG&E, is so big, and California, we have no choice, and where we buy our power, and when we find a way, as individuals, the government wants to add taxes against his, it is an action that the power companies, Linda Stiefel, good ideas, so citizens can have their own power, development process, we have been taught over the centuries, that we would have choices, but if you live in Russia, there is no choice, just like Northern California, there is no choice, by the way, last week Pres. Biden, gave PG&E of big bunch of money, so they could fix the aging power lines, the right thing for the company should be to return some of the money they squeeze out of us, but it won’t happen our power bill will not go down, only, why is it, in California electricity, is so expensive, go to any other state, it’s cheaper, is the governor trying to, drive everybody out of town,? He’s doing a good job of longtime families leaving California, when will the people of the state, take back what we’ve lost, or does anyone care?
MENDOCINO COUNTY WAY BACK WHEN (Ron Parker)
Lane’s Redwood Flat
Hop picking crew, Mendocino Co.
1868 Presbyterian Church, Mendocino, c 1940
CATCH OF THE DAY, Sunday, December 29, 2024
MICHAEL ALPERS, 58, Ukiah. Disorderly conduct-alcohol, paraphernalia.
DEBORAH ANDERSON, 52, Lakeport/Ukiah. Disorderly conduct-alcohol.
VINCENT BERTAIN, 76, Ukiah. Domestic battery, domestic violence court order violation.
TRACY ESLINGER, 64, Fort Bragg. Disorderly conduct-alcohol&drugs.
LEANNA HENDERSON, 40, Ukiah. Domestic battery.
JOHN IMUS JR., 62, Ukiah. Parole violation.
ANGELA KAMMOUN, 39, Rio Dell/Ukiah. Stolen vehicle.
IESHA MALAGON, 25, Disorderly conduct-alcohol&drugs.
JUAN MARTINEZ-MOSQUERA, Milpitas/Laytonville. DUI.
WILLIAM OWENS, 36, Ukiah. Parole violation.
SIMEON PARKER JR., 25, Redwood Valley. Disorderly conduct-alcohol&drugs.
JESSE SANCHEZ JR., 30, Los Banos/Ukiah. Domestic battery.
SHAUN WAY, 45, Potter Valley. Mandatory supervision violation.
DO NOT GO GENTLE
24/7. She can’t remember that she can’t walk, so she slides off the bed and immediately pitches head forward into the dresser, caroms off to the nightstand, twists into a heap on the floor, her head stuck between the nightstand and the bedframe.
She can’t remember that this has happened before, several times, only this time there is a massive bruise on her hip and her ribs scream in pain when she gasps for air.
You didn’t catch her quickly enough from the other side of the bed, jump out and leap around as the craaaaack of the bedframe fades under the scream pursing between her lips and the smell of hot urine wafts from the nightie bunched between her legs.
Wrestling aside the mess of spilled glassware, pill bottles, reading glasses, nail clippers, pencils and puzzle books to unbury her, you pull your rotor cuff out again, but your focus is so intense on unbending her weakened knees and flailed elbows you barely notice, until you try to use that arm to lift her out of the origami wedge as her scream turns to howl and you cannot raise your voice enough to penetrate the din. There, there.
Next the hobble to the water closet, settle on the shower bench to undress, bathe, and redress this crumpled form now with drool and blood glossing her chin (bit lip, no tongue control), pleading for time, to fetch a towel or warm up the water for a cursory sponge-off, accidental contact with bruise convulsing in her throat a gagging heaving chuffing gasping shriek in your ear (the one that still “works”), leading her hand to the laundry basket to stay upright, even for seconds.
Clean gown, more pleading for patience while you hunt for the phone not in your pocket, so help her to lie down on the floor panting to run back to the bedroom. 9-1-1 again.
Three days in the ICU, opiated out of agony and mind amiss, tests and probes and procedures to relieve the pierced lung, xrays, scans, and a new epidermal mass appearing overnight on her shin evincing new tormentous crying rage.
Two months later she comes home again with bowed back and uncertain gait, unable to overcome the obstinance of unwilling limbs and all all all ability to manage continence, staring blankly at the room instead of you, while you minister to linens and supporating wound care, thirst and hunger, unable to hold onto the ebb and wane of her cognition, answer the door apprehensively, eyes on her every second, it’s meals-on-wheels.
Every day for as long as she lives, after years of debilitating seizures, heart failure, bladder and lung infections, medication side effects rage, depression, nightmares, “combativeness,” fevers, and always the pain.
Finally crashing at dawn, sleep until noon, start all over, answer the door, meals-on-wheels or the EMTs, take your pick.
(Betsy Cawn)
FRED GARDNER: in Alameda. (Move over, Attenboro.)
CENTRAL VALLEY WATER DISTRICT WILL VOTE ON ADDITIONAL $9.69 MILLION FOR DELTA TUNNEL PROJECT ON JAN. 14
by Dan Bacher
San Jose — On Jan. 14, 2025, the Valley Water District — formerly the Santa Clara County Water District — will decide whether to continue funding an additional $9.69 million for planning and design work for the controversial Delta Conveyance Project (DCP).
The vote follows the vote by the Metropolitan Water District’s Board of Directors on Dec. 11 to fund an additional $141.6 million for planning and design work for the Delta Tunnel. Valley Water District is one of 18 agencies participating in the proposed Delta Conveyance Project.
The project is opposed by a large coalition of Tribes, fishing groups, conservation organizations, Delta residents, Delta counties and water districts, scientists and water ratepayers.
Opponents say the tunnel, by diverting Sacramento River water before it reaches the Delta, will drive already imperiled Delta smelt, longfin smelt, Sacramento winter-run and spring-run Chinook salmon, Central Valley steelhead, green sturgeon and other fish species to extinction and have a devastating impact on Tribal, fishing, farming and environmental justice communities. …
HOW TO…
Editor,
I think there is an easy and logical solution to the very “obnoxious and inconvenient twice-a-year clock change.”
It would benefit all of us to shift the time earlier by 30 minutes and be done with it. Parents wouldn’t be sending their young ones off to school in the dark quite as much and it would be a little brighter in the evening during the summer months.
If U.S. officials could get organized and do this, I think the rest of the world would likely follow suit.
Diane Lynch
Tiburon
A READER WRITES:
There are more than a handful of really good football teams heading for the playoffs this year. One thing to like about the sport is that it doesn’t have the inequality problem between small- and large-market teams (as they do in baseball). Look at the cities bringing the best teams to the playoffs this year: Kansas City, Detroit, Minneapolis, Buffalo, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Green Bay. I got curious about NFL parity and found this explanation in a 2011 article by Michael Fitzpatrick:
Many years ago, the NFL realized that although a high volume of the population was located in major cities, there was still a massive market outside areas such as New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, etc. For that reason, the NFL decided that parity would be the best way to grow their sport on a large scale, and needless to say, they were right.
All television, advertising, apparel and sponsorship profits are pooled together and equally distributed amongst all teams.
Now, those Wall Street executives from New York and Tea Party supporters from Boston might immediately cry “SOCIALISM!!” and want to sew a large “S” onto Roger Goodell’s suit.
But here’s a little secret for you—when it comes to professional sports, socialism is far more successful than capitalism. One needs to look no further than the NFL vs. MLB.
MLB is capitalism in its purest form, and its decline when compared to the NFL over the past two decades has been nothing short of epic.
Residents of New York, Chicago, Boston and Los Angeles probably think that baseball is the best-run league in the country, and the fact that the Yankees are ALWAYS going to be contenders is just capitalism separating the strong from the weak.
But the fact of the matter is that when it comes to professional sports, if unregulated, the size of the market directly impact’s a team’s chances at success.
The Yankees are able to earn far more money from advertising, sponsorship, apparel and television than teams like the Royals not because the Yankees have managed to come up with a new and ingenious business plan, but because New York is eight times the size of Kansas City.
This allows the Yankees to charge significantly more for advertising, sponsorship and television rights because their customers (corporations, television networks, etc.) can reach a much larger audience working with the Yankees than with the Royals.
Folks, that’s a result of nothing more than location.
George Steinbrenner, although intelligent and revolutionary in many ways, was not the Bill Gates or Steve Jobs of Major League Baseball—his team simply happened to be located in the largest market in the country, where even a minor level of business acumen would have created the revenue monster that the Yankees have become.
The NFL has eliminated any advantage gained solely by location. If your front office is intelligent and makes the right moves, your team will be successful, whether you are located in New York or Green Bay.
The result?
As of 2009, 19 NFL teams were worth more than $1 billion, and the Oakland Raiders were the lowest valued team at $797 million.
In MLB the New York Yankees are the only team worth more than $1 billion, and the Oakland Raiders would be the fourth most valuable MLB team.
Some may squawk at this type of socialism applied to anything in America.
But while those squawk, the NFL will continue laughing all the way to the bank.
ON-LINE COMMENT OF THE DAY
Bernie Sanders Op-Ed on Fox News…Say what you want about Bernie being a communist or whatever but I have always appreciated his brashness in calling out the wealth disparity in our country and his criticisms of the political power wielded by that wealth - even in his DEM party! Neither party likes him and that’s because they are BOTH controlled by the uber-wealthy. So I like Bernie! I may not agree with him on everything but I do agree with him on his outspoken points on the widening wealth gap and 3rd world appearance of America. He says we are headed to “oligarchy”. I disagree - I think we are already there. Jimmy Carter called it an oligarchy back in 2015 when the Citizens United ruling went down.
LOUISIANA GIANT: “Fats” Domino - New Orleans, LA
Fats Domino grew up in New Orleans and was born to a French/Creole family. He went on to pioneer the Rock & Roll genre and sold more than 65 million records during his career. The Legend built his family home, in the lower 9th ward, which is where it stands to this day. The mansion sits on the left of this building, Fats publishing company. FD
LEAD STORIES, MONDAY'S NYT
Jimmy Carter, Peacemaking President Amid Crises, Dies at 100
In the Presidents’ Club, Carter Was the Odd Man Out
When Jimmy Carter Turned TV Into a Pulpit
Jimmy Carter, on Death: In a culture where death as a subject is often taboo, Mr. Carter left behind a compilation of observations about the end. Here is a selection of those writings.
JIMMY CARTER, LONGEST-LIVED US PRESIDENT, DIES AGED 100
Former president faced series of economic and foreign policy crises, including Iran hostage affair and Soviet invasion of Afghanistan
Jimmy Carter, the 39th president of the United States, a broker of peace in the Middle East in his time, and a tireless advocate for global health and human rights, has died, it was announced on Sunday. He was 100 years old.
“My father was a hero, not only to me but to everyone who believes in peace, human rights, and unselfish love,” said Chip Carter, the former president’s son, in a statement.
“My brothers, sister, and I shared him with the rest of the world through these common beliefs. The world is our family because of the way he brought people together, and we thank you for honoring his memory by continuing to live these shared beliefs.”
A Georgia Democrat, Carter was the longest-lived president in US history. He only served one term in the White House and was soundly beaten by Ronald Reagan in 1980. But Carter spent the decades afterward focused on international relations and human rights, efforts that won him the Nobel peace prize in 2002.
Carter had undergone a series of hospital stays before and his family said on 18 February last year that he had chosen to “spend his remaining time at home”, in hospice care and with loved ones. The decision had “the full support of his family and his medical team”, a family statement said.
Carter’s wife, Rosalynn Carter, died last November, two days after her own transition to hospice care. The former first lady was 96. The pair married in 1946 and the former president attended her memorial service, traveling from the couple’s longtime home in Plains, Georgia, to the Glenn Memorial church in Atlanta.
The Carters’ eldest grandchild, Jason Carter, had said in a media interview in June this year that the former president was not awake every day but was “experiencing the world as best he can” as his days were coming to an end.
Carter took office in 1977 as “Jimmy Who?”, a one-term Georgia governor and devout Christian whose unfamiliarity with Washington was seen as a virtue after the Watergate and Vietnam war years.
Hopes for the Carter presidency were dashed, however, by economic and foreign policy crises, starting with high unemployment and double-digit inflation and culminating in the Iran hostage crisis and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. A rolling energy crisis saw the price of oil triple from 1978 to 1980, leading to lines at US gas stations.
Such struggles belied early promise. In 1977, Carter completed a treaty that had eluded his predecessors to return control of the Panama canal to its host country. At Camp David in 1978, Carter brought together the Israeli prime minister, Menachem Begin, and the Egyptian president, Anwar Sadat, for a deal that would produce peace that endures today.
Carter’s fruitless attempts to halt the economic slide led Republicans to label him “Jimmy Hoover”, after the Depression-era president. But as Carter prepared to run for re-election in 1980, it was the Iran hostage crisis that weighed most visibly on Americans’ minds, the TV anchor Ted Koppel devoting his broadcast five days a week to the plight of 52 Americans held in Tehran. A botched rescue attempt left eight US servicemen dead and fed doubts about Carter’s leadership.
Reagan, a former California governor, won 44 states. The hostages were released on 20 January 1981, hours after Carter left office, prompting speculation that Republicans had made a deal with Iran.
Broadly unpopular then, Carter went on to become not just the longest-lived president but also to have one of the most distinguished post-presidential careers. He was awarded the Nobel peace prize for “decades of untiring effort” for human rights and peacemaking. His humanitarian work was conducted under the Atlanta-based Carter Center, which he founded in the early 1980s, with Rosalynn.
Carter traveled the world as a peace emissary, election observer and public health advocate. He made visits to North Korea in 1994 and Cuba in 2002. The Carter Center is credited with helping to cure river blindness, trachoma and Guinea worm disease, which went from millions of cases in Africa and Asia in 1986 to a handful today.
Carter was a critic of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, drone warfare, warrantless government surveillance and the prison at Guantánamo Bay. He won admiration, and loathing, for his involvement in efforts for Middle East peace, urging a two-state solution in speeches and books including Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid.
He met Shimon Peres, then president of Israel, on a 2012 trip to Jerusalem, but top Israeli leaders generally shunned Carter after publication of the book. As recently as 2015, requests to meet the prime minister and president were rebuffed.
Carter played a central role in promoting Habitat for Humanity, which provides housing for the needy, and was an alternative energy pioneer, installing solar panels on the White House. (Reagan removed them.)
The Carters had four children and 11 grandchildren, among them James Carter IV, credited with playing a pivotal role in the 2012 election when he unearthed a video of Mitt Romney casting aspersions on 47% of Americans.
James Earl Carter Jr grew up in Plains, Georgia, a town of fewer than 1,000 and about 150 miles south of Atlanta. A graduate of the US Naval Academy, he rose to the rank of lieutenant and worked on the nascent nuclear submarine program. After his father’s death in 1953, he took up peanut farming. He was elected to the Georgia senate then won the governorship in 1970, calling for the state to move beyond racial segregation.
Carter’s blend of moral authority and folksy charisma produced moments of unusually frank national dialogue. In a 1979 speech, he spoke semi-spontaneously for half an hour about a “crisis of confidence” – “a fundamental threat to American democracy … nearly invisible in ordinary ways”. Americans had fallen into a worship of “self-indulgence and consumption”, he said, only to learn “that piling up material goods cannot fill the emptiness of lives which have no confidence or purpose”.
The address struck a chord: Carter’s popularity surged 11 points. But after Reagan and others recast it as a self-indulgent exploration of personal malaise, the speech became a liability.
James Fallows, a former Carter speechwriter, wrote in 1979 that the president suffered from an inability to generate excitement but “would surely outshine most other leaders in the judgment of the Lord”.
Carter outlived the two presidents who followed him, Reagan and George HW Bush.
There will be public observances in Atlanta and Washington DC, followed by a private interment in Plains, Georgia. Carter’s state funeral, including all public events and motorcade routes, is still pending.
(Guardian.com)
A GUIDE TO UNDERSTANDING THE HOAX OF THE CENTURY
by Jacob Siegel [March, 2023]
In 1950, Sen. Joseph McCarthy claimed that he had proof of a communist spy ring operating inside the government. Overnight, the explosive accusations blew up in the national press, but the details kept changing. Initially, McCarthy said he had a list with the names of 205 communists in the State Department; the next day he revised it to 57. Since he kept the list a secret, the inconsistencies were beside the point. The point was the power of the accusation, which made McCarthy’s name synonymous with the politics of the era.
For more than half a century, McCarthyism stood as a defining chapter in the worldview of American liberals: a warning about the dangerous allure of blacklists, witch hunts, and demagogues.
Until 2017, that is, when another list of alleged Russian agents roiled the American press and political class. A new outfit called Hamilton 68 claimed to have discovered hundreds of Russian-affiliated accounts that had infiltrated Twitter to sow chaos and help Donald Trump win the election. Russia stood accused of hacking social media platforms, the new centers of power, and using them to covertly direct events inside the United States.
None of it was true. After reviewing Hamilton 68’s secret list, Twitter’s safety officer, Yoel Roth, privately admitted that his company was allowing “real people” to be “unilaterally labeled Russian stooges without evidence or recourse.”
The Hamilton 68 episode played out as a nearly shot-for-shot remake of the McCarthy affair, with one important difference: McCarthy faced some resistance from leading journalists as well as from the U.S. intelligence agencies and his fellow members of Congress. In our time, those same groups lined up to support the new secret lists and attack anyone who questioned them.
When proof emerged earlier this year that Hamilton 68 was a high-level hoax perpetrated against the American people, it was met with a great wall of silence in the national press. The disinterest was so profound, it suggested a matter of principle rather than convenience for the standard-bearers of American liberalism who had lost faith in the promise of freedom and embraced a new ideal.…
German-American historian/philosopher Hannah Arendt wrote in her 1951 ‘The Origins of Totalitarianism’ that “The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction…and the distinction between true and false no longer exist.”
“MY GOD, MY GOD, thou art a direct God, may I not say a literal God, a God that wouldst be understood literally and according to the plain sense of all thou sayest, but thou art also (Lord, I intend it to thy glory, and let no profane misinterpreter abuse it to thy dimunition), thou art a figurative, a metaphorical God too, a God in whose words there is such a height of figures, such voyages, such peregrinations to fetch remote and precious metaphors, such extensions, such spreadings, such curtains of allegories, such third heavens of hyperboles, so harmonious elocutions, so retired and so reserved expressions, so commanding persuasions, so persuading commandments, such sinews even in thy milk, and such things in thy words, as all profane authors seem of the seed of the serpent that creeps, thou art the Dove that flies.”
(Donne, Devotions 1624, as quoted in Fish, ‘How to Write a Sentence,’ p 142. via Bruce McEwen)
SLEEPING WOMEN
by Sophie Smith
What are we taught not to see? What do we see and are taught not to talk about? If we want to understand the logics of a “rape culture” that produces the “Monster of Avignon,” the scores of men he convinced to join him, the website on which they all met, the terms in which they made their excuses, the porn they and millions of others consume, the desire that this porn both writes and represents, the desire of men to get from women what they know they don’t want to give, the getting it because they can, the fantasy that the women they took it from wanted it anyway, the women who are taught to stay quiet, who are kept quiet, and the ones who are ignored, defamed or humiliated when they do not — if we want to understand this “culture” (or rather, this way that we distribute power) might we need to think not about the “monsters,” but about the gruff, decent guys, the guys we love and forgive, the guys who are “not like that,” for whom we silence small anxieties about coercion and hurt and trust precisely because we are so relieved they are not monsters? And perhaps also because we are worried that if we do speak up they might leave us, exclude us, react with the infantile fury we are taught so carefully to contain? Are we not, when we look closely, surrounded by these small acts of accommodation, denial, repression, evasion?
But speaking up isn’t easy and the hard distinction between the “good guys” and the “bad guys,” makes these conversations even more difficult. Patriarchy does not mean that men cannot act decently, and kindly, indeed that the men in our lives may not sometimes be better and more reliable than the women. But it does mean that there are no men, no people, who can ever claim to be entirely beyond its reach. It is always there in the background, incentivizing, rewarding and giving cover to good men who decide, however briefly, not to be.
The point here is not that all men are rapists-in-waiting, nor that all women who put their trust in men are at risk. The point is that patriarchy puts women in a skeptical scenario, making the distinction between the men you can and can’t trust difficult to draw. (It is not just women who suffer here: consider the man who really does just want to read to his daughter.) How many women have wondered whether a behavior should be interpreted as a warning or instead as something they can safely ignore – perhaps even participate in and enjoy? Women in this situation are not helped by the tendency of men to get defensive, to use their comparative “goodness” (“I’m not that guy”) to shut down these conversations. (Many French men have expressed fury at the attempt to use Dominique Pelicot to start a national conversation about sexism.)
It is certainly possible that the man who gets off on “sleeping girl” porn or who sleeps with much younger women is not a creep. But if he is not to be, then might he need to be the guy who takes this skeptical scenario seriously, who is open to a conversation about where these desires might come from and what they might mean? If the price of a relationship is silence, is that not a sign that something isn’t right?
The other side of a culture of silence and silencing is one of not listening. Because, of course, many women do speak up, have always spoken up, and it is not only “bad” men who ignore them.
A group of researchers at the University of Cambridge recently reported on a study in Northern India where remotely operated drones were meant to be used to monitor wildlife. They found that the technology was used instead by local government and male villagers to surveil and humiliate women. Some women who worked together in the forest felt so intimidated that they softened the singing they used to deter attacks from predators. One was subsequently killed by a tiger. The lead researcher, who I have no reason to think is anything other than a very good guy, commented: “Nobody could have realized that camera traps put in the Indian forest to monitor mammals actually have a profoundly negative impact on the mental health of local women who use these spaces.” Really? Nobody?
The poet Muriel Rukeyser once asked: “What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life?” “The world,” her poem responds, “would split open.” Gisèle Pelicot also believes that her testimony — her body on the screen, her words in court — might be enough to change society. Do we believe it too? Her decision means that some women will realize, as she did not, that they have been the victim of drug-facilitated sexual assault. Some doctors will consider diagnoses and offer tests that they otherwise might not have. Recognition and the solidarity it can produce have always been central to feminism’s power.
But what of society more broadly? Will men see themselves as implicated in the culture that produced Dominique Pelicot and his accomplices, and seek to transform that culture, and themselves? And if not, will we at least create the conditions that allow women to leave abusive men with dignity and in safety, investing in specialist support services, public housing, childcare provision, adult education?
Or will we simply continue to ask underfunded justice systems (something France and Britain have in common) to prosecute bad men out of existence? In 1968, when Rukeyser wrote her poem, it was possible to think that the world might change if only women told the truth about their lives. But the last several decades, decades during which women around the world have challenged male power, have shown us otherwise. Even as we learn to talk, we find that talk alone won’t stop the world from turning much as it did before.
(London Review of Books)
HUMANITY MUST AWAKEN FROM THE DREAM OF SEPARATION
by Caitlin Johnstone
We suffer because we erroneously believe we are separate. It’s why humans suffer as individuals, and it’s why humanity creates so much suffering as a collective.
As individuals we suffer because we create a psychological self-construct at a young age comprised of memories and mental stories, and we imbue that psychological self with the power of belief by identifying with it. There is nothing in the raw data of our immediate sensory experience which tells us that we’re a separate “me” character standing apart from the rest of the world who must secure its own interests against those of others, but because we identify with the psychological self-construct, we believe its stories telling us that this is the case.
The believed experience of being a tiny “me” character moving through linear time in an ever-changing world is one of constant fear, insecurity, lack, deficiency, and discontentment. It’s a completely false dilemma because we’ve never actually experienced separateness except in our own imaginations, but it feels real because we believe our mental stories about it.
We generate suffering in much the same way as a collective. We imagine ourselves to be separate from other humans, so we compete against them, and can even be convinced to fight wars against other groups of them. We imagine ourselves to be separate from nature, so we work to dominate and enslave it even when doing so destroys the biosphere we ourselves depend on for survival.
All our systems for driving human behavior at mass scale are built around the premise of competition. Competing against each other for jobs and wealth. Competing against rival businesses and corporations for money. Competing against other nations for planetary dominance. Competing against the non-human organisms of this planet for profit and security.
These systems of competition give rise to inequality, exploitation, poverty, injustice, oligarchy, violence, war, tyranny, and ecocide. And it’s all based on fictional stories with no real existence outside our own skulls.
Humanity has the ability to awaken from the dream of separation. Humans have been writing about this for thousands of years — that’s all Buddha was ever talking about. This potential has been sleeping within us this entire time, just waiting for the right moment to become activated.
The fact that enlightenment is a real thing that humans are very capable of attaining has massive implications for our species and the existential hurdles it faces at this point in history. It’s like a Chekhov’s gun that’s been sitting there since the opening scene of this play we’ve been acting out for millennia, and it is not unreasonable to suspect that the mounting pressures of our time may cause it to go off before the final curtain.
If humanity can unlock this latent potential, every single one of the problems we now face can be very easily resolved. As soon as we are no longer transfixed by hallucinations of separation, we’ll have the ability to move from a competition-driven species to a collaboration-driven one, because we’ll no longer be ruled by fear and insecurity. The propaganda which tells us to compete and hate and toil and hoard will no longer find any egoic purchase within us, and we can shrug off the old systems of control like a heavy coat on a warm day.
I see a great many reasons to have hope for the future, but one of the biggest is the fact that there’s this potential sitting right there within each of us just waiting to be unlocked. As our very survival on this planet is becoming increasingly threatened by the illusion of separation, we may find ourselves at the point where, to quote Anais Nin, “the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.”
Nice tribute to Bob Lorentzen…his love of hiking, and coastal access, was never-ending…I worked with him at Gallery Bookshop in the early 90s…Katy Tahja
~Happy Year of the Snake~
Warmest spiritual greetings,
Please know that this body-mind complex is available for spiritually sourced activity. Having fulfilled a commitment to back up the Washington, D.C. Peace Vigil through the autumn season, today there is nothing to do, nowhere to go, absolutely free! Please make contact with all appropriate offers. Otherwise, am continuing to be at the homeless shelter in the northeast section of the District of Columbia, living on the social security, and maintaining general health. Awaiting the favour of your reply.
Craig Louis Stehr
Adam’s Place Homeless Shelter
2210 Adams Place NE #1
Washington, D.C. 20018
Telephone: (202) 832-8317
Email: craiglouisstehr@gmail.com
Money: Paypal.me/craiglouisstehr
December 30, 2024 Anno Domini
Ms. Johnstone today is triggering memories for undoubtedly many oldsters who in the late 60s read a slim volume entitled The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are. Alan Watts left the scene in 1973 but now his voice is undergoing a revival among people born after his departure.
Bruce McEwen (I predict) will be happy to see her words today, and I suspect we will see Amens from Craig also.
In line with what she expressed is the dethroning of Joe Rogan as #1 podcaster, replaced by Ky Dickens’ The Telepathy Tapes. For context, it should be pointed out that in the early 80s a experimental testing model called “ganzfeld” was developed by a collaboration of para psychological debunkers and advocates. Over time it was consistently shown that telepathy was occuring (hits significantly happening above chance). In the experiments (video soon freely available) involving autistic non speaking children, the hits approach 100%. Amazing!
For links to the Telepathy Tapes, and a paper examining ganzfeld experimental results, and more background:
https://www.et-cultures.com/post/the-slide-9-journal-processes-and-tools-enhancing-human-capabilities
It felt like that book changed my life, when I read it at about eighteen…
About same age here….our high school Civics teacher during my 68-69 senior year told the class about that book.
Sure, Mike. My ilk read it back in the early 70s and inspired us to go native and live in teepees and ride horses in the Canyonlands of Utah, but the Mormons soon drove us off. So we went to Montana and lived humbly with likeminded kith and kin until the rich found the place and the tax base rose over our means. We were all dispersed into the I Me Me Mine culture where we have gone to ground to wait out the impending calamity.
The back to the landers didn’t go back far enough, they got mired in the farmyard, instead going all the way back to Hunter/Gather. Farms require real estate ownership and sharecroppers—as we’ve all seen in the pot pharms locally—whereas H/G tribes are nomadic, like we were, and could move our teepees up into the forest during summer and back to the desert for winter—a 50-mile trip, two days on horseback. The fed law that restricts camping on BLM or USNF to two weeks was legislated specifically to get rid of us and prevent anyone in future from escaping the grim clutches of modern culture through that route.
Humans are dependent on one another for survival. An individual can not be separate from their group. But an essential part of that dependence is specialization of specific economic functions by independent individuals. At one time this was referred to The Division Of Labor. That specialization by individuals is found in all cultures. There is also inherent economic competition between groups, and within groups as a result of new technologies developed by individuals. That competition drives human evolution. Humans can not escape being a part of a group, and the group’s survival is dependent on the separate, and independent efforts of individuals in the group.
There’s not a reader who would dispute the logic of your point, Sir George. But Allan Watts’ Book on the Taboo defies logic. Have you read it? How about Carlos Castaneda? Read any of that? Or Joseph Chilton Pierce? The crack in the cosmic egg? How about Ed Abbey *The Brave Cowboy? These books all defy logic— which our priceless Caitlin is trying to inspire you to try —doing just that. If you haven’t read Allan Watts, I recommend “Murder in the Kitchen,” an insight into the highly illogical practice of saying a prayer before dinner which I think even a staid stolid conservative like yourself will be able to “relate to’ (as we used to phrase the sense of familiar verisimilitude one gets when reading something mystical.)
*Randy Newman wrote a song about this book called “A Rider In The Rain.”
I think Murder in the Kitchen is an essay included in a volume called Does It Matter?
Another essay in there that’s good is Money vs Wealth.
There was wealth and power before there was money. Then, fundamentally, what is wealth, and power?
Wealth = concrete resources and technology
Money = an abstraction, measurement
Power = centralized control and management of resources, first in hands of high priests and kings (Sumerian)
Wealth is something held that has value to another. That could be resources, and technology, but also talent, knowledge, and skill.
Money is a necessary proxy, but as a proxy can be and is easily abused, and abusive.
Power is responsibility.
I briefly introduced myself to Watts, and Castaneda, but, for me, they quickly went off the deep end. If the others are like the first two, forget it. At some point life is too short, and other pursuits have more potential. I stay with basics. And let me add; religion, empathy and guilt, culture, marriage, social organization, independent intellectual thought (like above), slavery, trade, and war are all a part of the human species distinction of having intra-dependent social groups made up of specialists. Not everything, or idea that works survives, but everything that doesn’t work ends in the dustbin of history.
pity this busy monster, manunkind,
not. Progress is a comfortable disease:
your victim (death and life safely beyond)
plays with the bigness of his littleness
—- electrons deify one razorblade
into a mountainrange; lenses extend
unwish through curving wherewhen till unwish
returns on its unself.
A world of made
is not a world of born —- pity poor flesh
and trees, poor stars and stones, but never this
fine specimen of hypermagical
ultraomnipotence. We doctors know
a hopeless case if —- listen: there’s a hell
of a good universe next door; let’s go
e e cummings
Does that “go off the deep end” for you, too?
We need independent thought but it can be pointless. We live with effects of mind altering drugs, too.
The Mass Psychology of Fascism by Wilhelm Reich.
Wacko author, pertinent book.
Regarding the Presidio, MAGA will soon be in charge of “the blob,” and they have plans for the Presidio. They want to build a Freedom [sic] City there.
https://www.city-journal.org/article/building-freedom-cities
https://www.sfgate.com/local/article/trump-supporting-urban-planners-propose-19974443.php
https://www.sfchronicle.com/opinion/openforum/article/sf-presidio-freedom-city-housing-19986783.php
“Our favorite possibility is Presidio National Park. Though much smaller than Guantanamo Bay or Lowry Range, its location is ideal. San Francisco is the world’s tech capital, despite its many problems. The federal government can help San Francisco unleash its full potential by developing Presidio. With Paris-level density and six-story apartment buildings, a developed Presidio would add 120,000 residents, increasing San Francisco’s population by 15 percent. Further, given the city’s existing talent density, a Presidio featuring a liberalized biotechnology regime would quickly become a world innovation leader in this sector. America deserves a Bay Area that can compete; turning Presidio into a Freedom City could be an important step in that direction.”
Also, sending greeting cards to genocidal terrorists and then equating the mass murderer Brian Thompson with MLK, Malcolm X, and John Lennon? Tragicomedy.
As an older man, watching the young folks come along, often so sure of themselves, as if they are gods, I smile. We felt the same way back in the 60’s, our “new” ideas and thoughts about so many things, sure that we’d change the world for the better. Now, looking back about how it has all worked out, I grimace at what we thought and did, at least in part. Some good came of our ways back then, but some of it was not so good, led to problems we had no idea of. It takes time to see what will work and what does not. George is right that “everything that doesn’t work ends in the dustbin of history.” Mostly, I have come to view just about any far-ranging ideology as likely to be ridden with errors and problems not foreseeable at first, perhaps, but bound to come along and be bad news.
Much safer in the shallow end of the intellectual swimming pool, vicar, you’re right, for us old fogies, we lack the agility and vigor to tred water in those inky depths, let alone backstroke leisurely around idly communing with the mystery of it all. Much safer to have the solid floor of the pool under your feet, reason pervading the palaver, lifeguards on vigil, everything readily explained and dissected, huh.
A good description of human nature. I get a kick out of folks who believe in “intelligent design”. They should think about “intelligent” design next time they take a poop… Any god who would create such a thrown-together collection of cells is no god at all, except in the minds of its supposed “creations”, i.e., superstitious us.
Yes. When someone asks me how I am doing, my natural response is, “Better than I should be.” I have done a lot of stupid stuff, had many stupid thoughts, and almost got killed, more than once. But here I am, still capable of doing stupid things, but have learned some lessons along the way, and have much less ambition. I have also observed the misery created from mistakes made by others. That is a trait I have observed in many animals. Learn from survived mistakes made, and learn from observed mistakes made by others.
Yes to all you say here, George, the knowledge and some bit of wisdom that comes from having lived a long while, hard-earned and humbling, for sure…
I agree George. Our occupation is rated the most dangerous in the country. I look back at the stupid things I did and thank God I am still here.
archy had an excuse. if beacon can use capitals, he ought to learn periods. to start.
From my perspective, the USA and the world has been on a march to the right down into Hades since 1980. Nothing slows this downward progression. There were a few chances to create a working society. FDR got started on it but then had to win WWII and never got back to kind of broad New Deal we needed to survive the future. He advocated for slower growth, doing with less and not rushing the planet back into another World War. He was one of the last conservatives. The GOP of 2024 is the most anticonservative party ever. The opposites of conservative are radical, rude and anti-Democratic. Liberal is not the opposite of conservative, its a way of expressing conservatism, which always must be polite and work within the law until the point that it must be confronted without violence and terror.
There was another chance in the 60s and 70s but the battle was lost by 1979, probably forever. It was the year when the rise of America the Great started down into freefall ending in the fearmongering fedualism of Make America Great Again.