Mendocino County Today: Wednesday 1/1/2025

LIGHT to locally moderate rainfall spreads east and south through the day today. Rain chances is expected to persist through Friday for areas to the north of Cape Mendocino, while Mendocino and Lake counties may see a brief respite Thursday. Drier weather is possible late this weekend and early next week. (NWS)

STEPHEN DUNLAP (Fort Bragg): Happy New Year weather fans! 2025 starts off with a cloudy 43F on the coast. Rain today, maybe a little rain Thursday, then more rain Friday. Then our weather pattern changes starting Saturday as high pressure builds in for the west coast & moves weather systems into the plains bringing a lot of cold air with it. We are forecast to get quite a much needed dry spell next week while areas east of the Rockies will be getting all the action.

2024: Oct 1.26" / Nov 14.53” / Dec 12.05” / YTD 27.84”

APPRECIATING 2024; ANTICIPATING 2025

by Terry Sites

The New Year that was about to happen has now arrived. Worldwide communication fills the air with dire predictions, warnings and laments. It is hard to remember a world in which you had to wait for the nightly news to find out what was happening. We are bombarded with a continual stream of “news.” The more dramatic items draw the most attention. News reporters and news creators lean toward high drama in every instance to gain ears, eyes and most important revenue. Because of this the old adage to take things “with a grain of salt” is as useful now as it ever was.

As an avid reader of accounts of years gone by with a particular emphasis on pioneers and immigrants (two groups that overlap and have much in common) there is a lot to ponder when comparing then to now. The struggles earlier generations had (in the United States) were generally more physical than the ones we wrestle with today. Now when some of us talk about how perilous and awful things are, often it is from a position of physical comfort and relative security.

There is a chance to find a new perspective by looking at the challenges our ancestors faced. Many of them experienced real hunger with dangerous work and domestic conditions. The safety nets we take for granted were not there. If you were a mother bearing as many children as God gave you, it was “natural” to lose some of them before they reached adulthood. If you were crossing the country in a covered wagon there were lots of chances to have an accident that could suddenly kill or debilitate a member of the family. There was no option other than moving on with your life. In no way was this “fair” but based on their experience an expectation that life would be fair wasn’t strong.

When we talk about how hard the current times are it usually isn’t a matter of life and death. Extreme inconvenience and living with policies we don’t support are unhappy realities, but far from what our ancestors endured. Having this perspective seems important as we move into a tumultuous 2025.

Contemplate some of these differences. A city tenement dweller often had to haul every drop of water needed in the household for cooking, bathing and laundry up three or four flights of stairs and climb up and down those same stairs to use the outhouse. Temperatures in the summer forced people to sleep on the tenement roof as rooms inside equipped with coal burning cooking stoves were beyond stifling all summer long. A local example of struggle would be living in Fort Bragg before cars and paved roads where the wet winters meant walking anywhere you wanted or needed to go as wagon wheels sank hopelessly in the mud.

If we could time travel peeking in on the “lifestyles” of those who went before we would probably be dumbfounded by the hardships they endured just getting through a normal day of living. I can remember my great-grandmother who came from a large family in Wales admonishing me not to peel the carrots because it wasted too much good food.

So as we who are privileged enough to be comfortable go forward into 2025 maybe we can think about how it used to be and be grateful for what we do have. Some may say that being comfortable isn’t all that important, but it is probably someone who is comfortable that would believe that. A baseline of comfort and normality in our everyday lives gives us an important foundation.

Today there are millions still living in conditions just as hard as in earlier days — or worse. The reflections in this article are based around a group of people who are lucky. I have utmost respect for those whose lives are still strongly limited by their physical circumstances. All the more reason to value our good fortune, if we are fortunate. So Happy New Year and may 2025 be a year in which we all continually strive to make things better for all.

MENDOCINO THEATRE COMPANY ANNOUNCES 2025 SEASON GENERAL AUDITIONS

Monday January 6th 6 p.m. - 9 p.m.
Tuesday January 7th 6 p.m. - 9 p.m.

Please prepare a 1 to 2 minute monologue.

All the Directors for the 2025 Season will be in attendance. Check out the season at the theatre website. There will be 5 season plays plus one Youth theatre production. Show them your talents.

HAPPY NEW YEAR

Parenting tip: kids love balloons

Get some balloons. Adults like them, too. There’s something wrong with you if you don’t like balloons.

Balloons for all.

Happy new year everyone

Kirk Vodopals

Navarro

HARD FINDING THE TRUTH IF YOU DON’T LOOK

by Jim Shields

Last week I wrote about how our elected representatives and their staff down in the county seat far too often flummox themselves and disrupt the orderliness of the governing process by creating problems seemingly out of thin air.

It’s a fact that most people are happy if elected officials and their support staff of bureaucrats practice the physicians’ oath of “Do no harm.”

It’s impossible not to recognize the seemingly institutional dysfunction in the governing process of this county. Too many elected officials and “public servants” who are classified as department heads, middle management, and “staff,” go out of their way to create problems when their main goal and purpose is to provide basic services to the public and solve problems when they arise.

I also recommended that the Board of Supervisors take action on a short list of unsolved problems that need to be resolved ASAP.

I identified three of the most pressing issues that should be top priorities for the Supes to resolve.

At the top of the list was:

Settle the civil litigation over the illegal removal of elected Treasurer-Tax Collector/Auditor- Controller Chemise Cubbison.

I then explained the legal and statutory reasons why the Cubbison case should be settled immediately.

The most important reason being the County doesn’t have legal leg to stand on.

The Supervisors, with the exception of John Haschak, allowed District Attorney David Eyster to turn the local governing process upside down over a petty bureaucratic dispute about his expenditure of public funds for annual DA staff and “guests” banquets at a local steakhouse and also some separate travel-related expenses. When the DA’s requests for reimbursement were rejected by Cubbison in her then-role as Acting Assistant County Auditor, the you-know-what hit the fan, and here we are several years later looking at another mess — potentially a very, very expensive mess — due solely to the Supervisors not doing their jobs.

Let’s take a quick look at the financial departments consolidation issue.

With the exception of John Haschak, the rest of the Board voted in December of 2021 to consolidate the formerly independent, elected offices of Treasurer-Tax Collector and Auditor-Controller into a single office, thus eliminating vital internal controls over finances. Without a doubt, the numero uno principle of fiscal matters, whether your books are kept in either the private or public sector, is you never, ever eliminate internal financial controls. The more eyes you have on the numbers, the better off you are.

At the time of this consolidation incident, I said the impetus for it was a 2021 trivial expense report squabble instigated by DA David Eyster over his office’s travel reimbursements being (correctly) rejected by then Acting Auditor-Controller Chemise Cubbison because he refused to follow county reimbursement guidelines. It should be noted that Eyster has tangled with other Auditors, namely Meredith Ford and Lloyd Weer, over his refusal to comply with established reimbursement policies and asset forfeiture claims. Note likewise that Eyster was a vociferous supporter of the financial consolidation plan, and also vehemently opposed the appointment of Cubbison to fill out the unfinished term of Weer’s office when he retired early.

Just because the DA, or the County Counsel’s Office, or an outside, high-priced, third party law firm (paid for with taxpayer money), is advising/demanding that the Supes cave-in and take action that clearly violates existing Government Code statutes, doesn’t mean you do what they want you to do.

As a supervisor, you are in charge of keeping the local ship of state on a steady, orderly and legal course.

When the Supervisors suspended Cubbison from her elected office a year ago last October, they clearly violated the law(s).

She was suspended without even a fleeting glance at due process or her substantive rights.

I pointed out that Government Code Section 1770, addresses at least one aspect of the Cubbison affair:

“Division 4. Public Officers And Employees [1000 - 3599]; (Division 4 enacted by Stats. 1943, Ch. 134. )l Gov. Code Section 1770. An office becomes vacant on the happening of any of the following events before the expiration of the term:

(h) His or her conviction of a felony or of any offense involving a violation of his or her official duties. An officer shall be deemed to have been convicted under this subdivision when trial court judgment is entered. For purposes of this subdivision, ‘trial court judgment’ means a judgment by the trial court either sentencing the officer or otherwise upholding and implementing the plea, verdict, or finding.”

Not a single one of those statutory requirements were ever met, yet the Supes blindly and blandly suspended Cubbison anyway.

The liability and damages clock has been ticking away since October of 2023. And taxpayers are on the hook for all of it.

Anyway, my long-time colleague and work friend, Mark Scaramella of the AVA, and I had an email exchange over the issue which I will share with you, with the exception of a couple speculative comments by us that are not germane to the discussion at hand.

Mark Scaramella Replies:

With all due respect to Mendocino County Observer Editor Jim Shields’ sound legal advice, which I agree with, the likelihood of any legal advice being heeded at this point, however valid, is zero. The board that “suspended” Ms. Cubbison obviously was never going to let any pesky legal advice get in the way of their “Get Cubbison” agenda which culminated successfully in October of 2023. That was a patently political effort to blame Cubbison for the board’s own failure to properly administer the County budget and had nothing to do with legal issues. Besides, trying to put all the toothpaste that has come out of this particular tube now is clearly impossible. We do have two new Supervisors taking their seats next month. One of them, Ms. Cline, told KZYZ during her campaign that she would not have suspended Cubbison without pay if she had been Supervisor at the time. (The implication was that she agreed with the suspension, but not with pay.) The other new Supervisor, Mr. Norvell, has been mute on the subject. Supervisor John Haschak, who was the lone vote against suspending Cubbison and who was the lone vote against consolidating the Auditor’s office with the Treasurer’s, theoretically could harbor misgivings about Cubbison’s abrupt 2023 suspension. But nothing in Haschak’s performance as a Supervisor indicates that he would take the initiative to undo any of the prior board’s decisions. We doubt that Supervisors Mulheren or Williams have had any misgivings about Cubbison’s suspension. So it would take an odd coalition of Cline, Norvell and Haschak to initiate any kind of retrospective review of the Cubbison suspension. Given the momentum the case now has, along with the inexperience of the newcomers and the passiveness of Haschak, we doubt that any reconsideration will occur. But who knows? A Supervisor could start by proposing that newly appointed County Counsel Charlotte Scott offer her opinion on the subject. But the odds of that happening or that Ms. Scott would take a position against what her predecessors have done also seem remote.

Hi Mark,

I agree with your observations and comments on my Cubbison piece.

For a number of reasons, I doubt whether any conciliatory proffer will prove successful, but I always try to solve problems anyway.

I’ve thought from the beginning that the criminal case will rise or fall on what little merits there are, and that Cubbison has little, if anything to be concerned about. Kennedy’s fate is another matter since it boils down to a game of evidentiary liar’s dice between her and Weer.

The civil case is where all the high-stakes action will be occurring. Once that proceeding gets underway, the DA is going to be spending a lot of time being deposed pre-trial, and then in cross-examination at trial. Cubbison’s attorney will have lots of fun with the DA. Among other things, I’m sure her attorney will introduce a video exhibit of the DA’s various appearances at public meetings, highlighting his bullying conduct and petty personal attacks on Cubbison. Just that exhibit alone should keep him under cross-examination for half a day.

This whole affair is just another “only in Mendocino County” type of happening.

Jim

Jim,

I understand. If the County had any brains, they'd settle this before it gets into the areas you mention. But since Cubbison and the county are in this deep now (and the County has never shown any brains on these kinds of cases) I'm afraid settlement is not very likely. And the case will drag out for years. The County may hope that Cubbison simply gives up or runs out of money to continue. But she’s consistently shown persistance and moxie so far.

Mark Scaramella

Boonville, 1966 (What is now called the Ricard Building is the drugstore on the right in this picture.)

SOME THINGS NEVER CHANGE

To the KZYX Community,

2024 has been a challenging year on many levels, and our KZYX community has not been exempt. From the reactions to a significant personnel decision to anticipation of the move to a new facility, our community has ridden a wave of both disappointment and hope.

We want you to know that your Board of Directors has heard your concerns, and we’re working to develop ways to improve transparency and communication with you, our valued KZYX community members. In the coming weeks and beyond, please watch your email, The KZYX Connector, and kzyx.org for substantive information about board meetings and members, the search for the next General Manager, evolving personnel policies and procedures, equipment upgrades, and more.

With gratitude and best wishes for the new year,

Susan Baird, KZYX Board President

(Board meetings are held through Zoom on the 3rd Tuesday of the month at 5 pm. For more info on the Board of Directors meetings, minutes, and more go here.)

2025 HOMELESS POINT IN TIME (PIT) COUNT

Volunteers Needed to Inflate, er, Complete Surveys

The Mendocino County Homeless Services Continuum of Care (MCHSCoC) will be conducting its annual unsheltered Point-In-Time (PIT) Count which will be held on the morning of Wednesday, January 29, 2025. The PIT Count is mandated by the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) and is used by the State of California and multiple Federal Departments to calculate allocations of homeless services funding [to us]. The data received through the PIT Count will help our local community to identify needs and develop planning to engage and support those persons experiencing homelessness throughout Mendocino County [but not for actual housing].

The Continuum of Care is a group of [more than 30] agencies that consist of service providers, Tribal Governments, non-profits, faith-based organizations, concerned community members, and Mendocino County staff. These individuals and agencies come together to help address the needs [whatever that may mean] of those who are experiencing homelessness or are at risk of homelessness. This undertaking requires a lot of individuals performing a lot of different tasks in preparation for this event, as well as surveying individuals and families experiencing homelessness throughout Mendocino County. We need volunteers to count along the Coast as well as the Southern and Northern Inland portions of Mendocino County.

If you would like to volunteer, please sign up online HERE. If you have questions or would like further information, please contact Alex Werner with [our homeless consulting outfit] Applied Survey Research at alex@appliedsurveyresearch.org or (877) 728-4545.

ED NOTES

THAT WAS A STARTLING piece in a recent New York Times about the John Birch Society. Called “Holding firm against plots by evildoers” via which we learn that the Birchers, who I thought were as extinct as the commies whose futile and mostly non-existent machinations the Birchers were on perpetual red alert against.

NOPE, according to the NYT the Society is alive and thriving with headquarters in Appleton, Wisconsin, valiantly warning us inattentive fools that just because the commies are gone there's still plenty of conspirators out there putting in a lot of OT to destroy the American Way of Life.

THERE ARE STILL the Rockefellers and the Trilateral Commission to name two evildoers intent upon establishing The New World Order, not to mention George Soros.

UKIAH used to have a John Birch Society but it seemed to consist only of Mr. and Mrs. Walter Heady. They'd show up at liberal demos and at inland Earth First! events where they were politely regarded as comic relief, an elderly couple with quaint placards and leaflets railing against groups and conspiracies of positively museum quality.

THE HEADYS have passed on to their reward which, for their sakes, I hope doesn't involve mandatory contributions to the United Nations. The Headys erected and maintained those big billboards at each end of Ukiah, the north one urging the U.S. to get out of the U.N., the one to the south boasting that the Headys' 20-acre farm was free of government subsidies.

I WENT to the Bircher's website where I tried to find “like minded people in your area,” but the nearest Bircher was in Santa Rosa. Not a one in all of Mendocino County. They must be secretly rejoicing, though, what with everything coming apart, and them telling us, “We warned you.”

FROM 1992 through 2002, fly ash from the powerhouse boilers at the G-P plant in Fort Bragg was hauled to the McGuire Ranch northeast of town at Bald Hills. It was long rumored that all sorts of unhealthy stuff was used to stoke G-P's boilers under the cover of foggy nights, with hypochondriacs for miles around claiming the mill was poisoning them.

BUT THE CONFIRMED TOXICS in the form of construction site wood wastes were permitted by the Regional Water Quality Control Board for use as a soil amendment at the McGuire site, and was only belatedly discovered to be a contaminant requiring its removal from 2.5 acres of the 256-acre ranch. The clean-up took about a month. People far from the cleanup site were notified of the remediation effort in an expensive brochure that cost $1.05 per envelope, prompting at least one recipient to wonder, “Why they sent it to me 17 miles away, I dunno.”

CATCH OF THE DAY, Tuesday, December 31, 2024

ROBERT HAYES JR., 44, Fort Bragg. Failure to appear, probation revocation.

JOHN KEARNEY, 38, Fort Lauderdale, Florida/Piercy. DUI.

JACOB NEUER, 21, Willits. Elder abuse resulting in great bodily injury or death, vandalism, witness intimidation.

FRED GARDNER:

The AVA ran one of Magrite’s paintings recently, which got me searching for an old Scientific American cover…

Amazing that he found time to paint after doing all that detective work Simenon reported on.

2024: WHAT HAPPENED?

by Paul Modic

I took more saunas this year (128) than all the previous years combined, the river went bank-to-bank eleven times, finally got an electric weed whacker and used it forty times, pulled out a lot of scotch broom, knocked over a section of the fence with my truck (fixed with baling wire), built a bridge at the park on Easter which got washed away in the big November storm, and made a new one yesterday.

I dumped a friend (young woman) who was annoying and got dumped by another friend (old man) for being annoying. It was the same issue each time: I like to ask questions and they don’t want to answer them.

I put together two copies of my Anderson Valley Advertiser compilation project, containing a hundred essays, and my highlight of the year was the book opening at Stevo’s back yard in June where I took the stage, talked about the process, and told some stories. (In May the AVA finally gave up the hard copy publication after forty years and is online-only now after editor Bruce Anderson got throat cancer and can’t talk, and is recovering and looking good.)

I got a weekly column in the Independent in February which lasted for seven months until that paper also folded. (That was probably the highlight of my writing career/hobby, and I loved it.)

I didn’t go anywhere except to Willits to get a new hip, started printing lyrics of rock classics and singing them (fifteen yesterday) in the park on my hikes (147), started listening to books on CD every night after turning off all screens by 7:00pm, started reading two books at a time, got Netflix providing lots of laughs from standup comedy specials, listening to them while prepping food in the kitchen, and then when cleaning up the mess. (The series “Sex Education” was very entertaining.)

The only faux-pas I’m aware of was when I stopped in a bar to put up some SSI-info flyers when I was doing my volunteer outreach worker routine last spring. Our sexy goddess postmaster (mistress?) was sitting there, flashed her friendly smile, and asked if I were going to have a drink. No, I’m just here on some business, I said. Not even one she asked? No, I said, and left to keep to my schedule of early dinner and early to bed. (God, what a fool, I could have made multiple faux-pas if I’d stayed. Maybe someday I’ll really live again.)

I had a woke bully harassed me three times on facebook over the course of the year, and usually when someone comments only negatively I’ll unfriend them. This time I’m keeping this guy around, he’s very creative, probably means well, and later surprised me with an apology. He’s an example of the “thought police,” who issue their politically correct tribal instructions which of course I disobey, preferring to think for myself. (I just want to express my opinions, not argue about them or get baited into defending myself from personal attacks. If someone disagrees that’s fine, but I want to avoid ridiculous and enervating arguments.)

A few weeks ago, because of insomnia issues (35), I started drinking just one cup of coffee instead of the usual two, cut Netflix down to less than an hour a day and turned off by 1:00pm, and last week had my first insomnia-free week since July.

I grew just two small weed plants and have enough for a year’s supply, a joint lasts about a month, smoked (100) about two evenings a week as an aphrodisiac (61), and still have enough for gifts.

Southern Humboldt icon ED Denson (84) died in April, and I wrote a eulogy a couple months later which turned out to be the only one. (I was too shy or lazy or clueless and didn’t read it at his memorial in September.)

On to 2025, Happy New Year!

Yesterday’s Park Song List:

Proud Mary
I’ve Got A Name
Colors
Everybody’s Talking At Me
Ruby Tuesday
My Lady d’Arbanville
Light My Fire
I’m Free
Break On Through To The Other Side
Take It Easy
You Can’t Always Get What You Want To
People Are Strange
Tales Of Brave Ulysses
It’s Only Love
I Once Had A Girl

A FEW PREDICTIONS for 2025

Resistance to Trump will be so fierce and so sustained, beginning with a massive counter-rally to his inauguration, that much of his blustery, cruel agenda won't be realized, but he'll be succeeded by a much smarter, far more dangerous, J.D. Vance, nihilist and fascist opportunist.

Trump, despite his windy claims, has no "mandate" to do anything. Half the people eligible to vote didn't bother, and he only squeaked past the eternally bankrupt Democrats, who haven't stood for anything since McGovern in '72 and, before him, Roosevelt.

Trump's first weeks in office will see a ceasefire in what's left of Gaza worked out with that paragon of bipartisan love, Bibi Netanyahu, as Trump simultaneously bludgeons Ukraine into a grossly unfair settlement with Putin.

The FBI will be revealed as active provocateurs at the infamous Jan 6 riot, political provocation and subversion being the agency's traditional function since their founding by the cross-dressing blackmailer and all-round nutcase, J. Edgar Hoover. The G-Men's historic mission has been the destruction of anything viewed by the owning class as inimical to their interests, and liberal rich people clustered in and around the Democratic party, view Trump and his Magas as the most inimical ever.

Trump will pardon many of the camo-doofuses he manipulated into conducting the Jan 6 riot, many of whom were overcharged by the Democrats' weaponized Justice Department. (Trump isn't wrong about everything!)

The threatened mass deportations will begin and end with the deportations of already incarcerated criminals because they're already rounded up. The worst of the Magas hoped-for mass deportations of weeping women and children is too expensive to conduct on the scale hopeful sadists yearn for.

Democrats will remain fascism-lite as co-sponsor of the annihilation of Gaza.

None of the major rolling catastrophes will be addressed because Trump and Magas deny they exist — global warming, the great out-migrations of desperate people, environmental destruction, and on and on.

Locally, our supervisors' functioning will be enhanced by the additions of Bernie Norvel and, perhaps, the kid from Potter Valley, Madeline Cline.

BOWLED OVER

Checking to see what time the Rose Bowl would be on today (Oregon vs Ohio State), I was amazed by the proliferation of bowl games.

I obviously haven't been paying attention. Since December 14, 2024, college students have played in the Cricket Celebration Bowl at Mercedes-Benz stadium in Atlanta, the IS4S Salute to Veterans Bowl at the Cramton Bowl (sic) in Atlanta, the Scooter's Coffee Frisco Bowl in Frisco, Texas, the AOS LA Bowl hosted by Gronk at SoFi Stadium in Inglewood, CA, the Boca Raton Bowl at FAU Stadium in Boca Raton, the R+L Carriers New Orleans Bowl at Caesars Superdome in NOLA, the StaffDNA Cure Bowl at Camping World Stadium in Orlando, the Union Home Mortgage Gasparilla Bowl (sic) at Raymond James Stadium in Tampa, the Myrtle Beach Bowl at Brooks Stadium in Conway South Carolina, the Famous Idaho Potato Bowl at Albertson's Stadium in Boise Idaho, the Hawai'i Bowl at the Ching Complex in Honolulu, the GameAbove Sports Bowl (sic) at Ford Field in Detroit, the Rate Bowl at Chase Field in Phoenix, the 68 Ventures Bowl at Hancock Whitney stadium in Mobile, the Lockheed Martin Armed Forces Bowl at Jamen G Carter Stadium in Fort Worth, the Birmingham bowl at Protective Stadium in Birmingham, the Charmin Toilet Bowl in Flushing], NY, the AutoZone Liberty Bowl at Simmons Bank Liberty Stadium in Memphis, the SRS distribution Las Vegas Bowl at Allegiant Stadium in Vegas, the Wasabi Fenway Bowl at Fenway Park in Boston, the Bad Boy Mowers Pinstripe Bowl at Yankee Stadium in Bronx, NY, the Isleta New Mexico Bowl in Albuquerque, the Pop-Tarts Bowl at Camping World Stadium (Brock Purdy's alma mater won big), the Snoop Dogg Arizona Bowl in Tucson, the Go Bowling Military Bowl at the Navy-Marine Corps Memorial Stadium in Annapolis, the Valero Alamo Bowl at the Alamodome in San Antonio, the Radiance Tech Independence Bowl at Independence Stadium in Shreveport, the TransPerfect Music City Bowl at Nissan Stadium in Atlanta, the ReliaQuest Bowl at Raymond James Stadium (encore), the Tony the Tiger Sun Bowl in El Paso, the Cheez-It Citrus Bowl at Camping World Stadium, the Kinder's Texas Bowl at NRG Stadium in Houston, and the Vrb Fiesta Bowl at State Farm Stadium im Glendale, AZ. Today undergraduates will face off in the Chick-fil-A Peach Bowl at Mercedes-Benz Stadium in Atlanta, the Allstate Sugar Bowl at Caesars Superdome in New Orleans, and the good old Rose Bowl in Pasadena at 5 p.m. (Only one of the contests listed above was invented by your correspondent.)

In the days ahead, fans can get down on the TaxSlayer Gator Bowl at EverBank Stadium in Jacksonville, the SERVPRO First Responder Bowl at Gerald Ford Stadium in Dallas, the Duke's Mayo Bowl at Bank of America Stadium in Charlotte, NC, the Capital One Orange Bowl at HardRock Stadium in Miami, and the Goodyear Cotton Bowl at AT&T Stadium in Arlington, Texas.

Happy Product Placement New Year.

— Fred Gardner

CALIFORNIA TEEN BROTHERS WHO WENT MISSING AT TREACHEROUS LAKE BELIEVED DEAD

An older brother tried to save his sibling. Both are now presumed dead.

by Matt LaFever

Two weeks ago, two brothers vanished while duck hunting in rural Northern California. Despite an exhaustive search involving hundreds of rescuers, sonar, divers and drones, the young men remain lost in Butte County’s Thermalito Afterbay — a vast, murky reservoir below the Oroville Dam, where 17 miles of shoreline are tangled in dense vegetation beneath the water’s surface. Officials have since transitioned their efforts from search and rescue to search and recovery.

Megan McMann, spokesperson for the Butte County Sheriff’s Office, told SFGate that the agency had “shifted to a continuous limited search for Andruw and Wesley Cornett on December 23, 2024. This involves surface search methods, including aircraft, drones, boats, on-shore vehicles, and K9s.”

On the morning of Dec. 14, 19-year-old Andruw and his 17-year-old brother Wesley were duck hunting at the Thermalito Afterbay using kayaks. This method lets hunters get closer to the birds and away from crowds, but it comes with inherent risks, including sudden weather changes and the potential for capsizing.

According to the Butte County Sheriff’s Office, Andruw called 911 at 8:33 a.m., reporting that his brother’s kayak had overturned and he was seen swimming north from it. Just a minute later, Andruw told the dispatcher he was going to swim to and save Wesley, adding that neither of them was wearing a life jacket. The dispatcher repeatedly warned him not to enter the water.

Butte County Sheriff’s Search and Rescue sprang into action as deputies and fire crews raced to the scene, sirens blaring. Just 14 minutes after Andruw’s 911 call, the first deputy arrived, and by 8:55 a.m., Cal Fire’s water rescue unit was on site. At 9:02 a.m., a deputy spotted a kayak and possibly a victim. Seven minutes later, the first responders deployed rescue boats and began to comb the area where the boys were last seen.

Eleven minutes later, they found a kayak, paddle and a pair of waders, waterproof garments typically worn by hunters and fishers to wade through water.

In the days that followed, officials used a range of search strategies to locate Andruw and Wesley. They carried out a “structured grid search,” employing side-scan sonar to detect anomalies in the water. Once identified, these anomalies were checked using remotely operated vehicles or dive teams. Divers, towed by slow-moving boats, searched 5-foot swaths along the afterbay’s 4,300 surface acres of water. K9s were deployed to search both the water and the shore, while drones and helicopters scanned from above.

Three days after the brothers were last seen, a diver found Andruw’s pants. Six days later, Wesley’s wallet was discovered, and one week after the brothers went missing, Wesley’s jacket was found with his phone inside.

The Thermalito Afterbay has proven a challenging environment for searchers, with depths ranging from 3 to 30 feet and vegetation reaching 10 feet tall. This dense vegetation poses a significant risk of diver entanglement. As divers navigate through it, they stir up silt, drastically reducing visibility — at times to just inches. Divers also face the threat of hypothermia, limiting their dive time due to the cold water temperature.

Waves up to half a foot high further hinder side-scan sonar accuracy. Five boats and two remotely operated vehicles have broken down during the search. As of Dec. 23, over 280 personnel have been involved in the effort to find Andruw and Wesley, the sheriff’s office said.

A vigil for the missing brothers was held Saturday evening, drawing hundreds to light candles, share memories and reflect on the ongoing search.

Andruw and Wesley’s mother, April Clark, has started a GoFundMe. “The Sheriff is saying this is now a search and recovery so i will have to also plan to lay my two boys to rest,” she wrote. In the GoFundMe description, Clark wrote of Andruw’s decision to save Wesley, “[He’s] a hero in my eyes.”

(SFGate)

THE DRUNKEST NIGHT IN S.F. HISTORY

by Peter Hartlaub

Imagine your wildest night in the Mission District or North Beach. Multiply it by about 20. Then imagine a scarcity of liquor so extreme that saloon owners are passing off embalming fluid as whiskey.

That’s the foundation for the scene on Dec. 31, 1919, the last wet holiday in San Francisco before nearly 13 years of Prohibition started in the following weeks. The night, mostly forgotten in time, stands as perhaps the greatest evening of partying in the city’s history.

The Chronicle’s front page report the next day was so filled with rambling superlatives, it’s easy to imagine the unidentified journalist who authored the piece was still a little buzzed himself:

“There has been many a wild night in San Francisco since the Forty-Niners — hardy men who took their whiskey straight — lighted the first candle and drew the first cork in revelry, but last night outshone them all.

“This year the desire to take part in the last ‘wet’ New Year’s Eve brought out everybody in the city able to walk, and some who had to be carried.”

There were many reasons for San Franciscans to want to get hammered on the last day of 1919:

It was 13 months after the end of World War I, and the first New Year’s Eve that many soldiers were home and families back together. Locals had endured two years of the so-called Spanish Flu, putting a damper on previous end-of-year celebrations. It was the dawn of the Roaring Twenties.

But the biggest reason by far was Prohibition, when the U.S. from 1920 to late 1933 prohibited the manufacturing, importation and sale of alcoholic beverages.

The rules came in waves for San Franciscans. First, hard liquor was banned for manufacture and sale in July 1919, forcing saloons to dispense beer and wine with 2.5% alcohol by volume or less. Then, in late 1919, San Franciscans learned that their biggest alcohol consumption loophole — permission to bring alcohol squirreled away before the ban into hotels and restaurants — would end on Jan. 16, 1920.

That made New Year’s Eve 1919 seem like the time to drink every drop of booze left in the city.

“New Year’s Eve in San Francisco promises to be one of the most hilarious in the city’s history,” the Chronicle reported days before the festivities. “And everyone will bring his own ‘fuel’ to the bonfire.”

San Francisco was still a city of just over 500,000 citizens, and seemingly all of them had a reservation for dinner, drinking and dancing at a downtown hotel. The Palace Hotel opened its entire bottom floor, including the bar and lobby, to fit 3,000 guests (with 500 more on a waiting list). With no hard beverage service allowed, each guest had their BYO alcohol tagged like a coat check, resulting in tables overflowing with whiskey and wine.

“True, the state had been dry for six months,” the Chronicle reported on Jan. 1, 2020. “But out of the cellars, club lockers, bank vaults, safety deposit boxes and other hiding places came an array of beautiful sunshine and heirlooms that brought back ‘the good old times’ when stacked upon the tables in the cafes and restaurants.”

While the Chronicle reported New Year’s Eve parties continued to 5 a.m. then spilled out into the streets, there were few incidents or arrests among the revelers.

The saloonkeepers were another story. Authorities reported some of the most posh bars illegally serving alcohol from dubious sources, “including crude oil, denatured alcohol, formaldehyde, peppermint and embalming fluid.”

“Camouflaged as whiskey, it was really a nauseating conglomeration of alcohol, coloring matter and refuse,” U.S. government investigator H.M. Roberts told the Chronicle on Jan. 1, 1920. “Bootleggers are using anything that will put a ‘kick’ in their stuff, and the man that will take chances on drinking it is a first-prize candidate for the asylum.”

After an alarmist first few weeks of 1920, Prohibition was a bit of an anticlimax in the city.

San Francisco’s reputation as the resistance to federal decree held firm. Much like our 1980s sanctuary city designation, 2004 marriage licenses to gay couples and early 21st century look-the-other-way approach to marijuana use, regulating liquor consumption became the absolute last priority of the San Francisco Police Department.

In 1921, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors reprimanded two police captains for enforcing anti-drinking laws. Most hotels, including the St. Francis and Palace, became well-known speakeasies, hiding hard alcohol in the crawl spaces between floors.

As historian Gary Kamiya wrote: “Eliminating alcohol in hard-drinking San Francisco had about the same chance of success as persuading the Forty-Niners to abandon the diggings because greed was a sin.”

On Dec. 5, 1933, when the 18th Amendment that codified Prohibition was lifted, a parade of wine trucks lined up outside City Hall to furnish Mayor Angelo Rossi with a drink.

The change in laws allowed local beers, including Wieland’s and Anchor Steam, to resume production, and the Chronicle reported on celebrating winegrowers in Napa and Sonoma counties.

“Prohibition Has Ended,” a Chronicle headline read. “And Viniculture is Again an Honorable Calling.”

On Dec. 6, 1933, the Chronicle printed President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s entire proclamation on the front page:

“I trust in the good sense of the American people that they will not bring upon themselves the curse of excessive use of intoxicating liquors, to the detriment of health, morals and social integrity.”

In a city that had been getting wasted pretty much the entire time, it was hard not to read it ironically.

(SF Chronicle)

THE ABANDONED WATERPARK

by David Bacon

Won't you get hip to this timely tip?
When you make that California trip
Get your kicks on Route 66
— Bobby Troup and the King Cole Trio

Cars heading west on the old Route 66, now I-15, fly out of the high Mojave Desert at breakneck speed toward Barstow. For miles the desert's palette has ranged from brown and yellow to a dull green of far-off mountains. Suddenly, across the hardpan to the north, unusual structures appear - a not-quite-mirage in the distance. For a brief moment, iridescent colors encrust strange concrete shapes, as though they'd landed from an alternate universe. They flash by, and then they're gone in the rear view mirror.

They're a photographer's dream, if you can slow down enough to get off the highway and retrace your path along a pitted frontage road. That takes you to an abandoned waterpark. We Californians have a quixotic streak - who else would think of building a waterpark in the middle of the Mojave Desert?

Bob Byers apparently did. Taking advantage of the Mojave River's intermittent and mostly underground aquifer, he created a lagoon with swings for his family in the early 1950s. It became a popular campground, and then over five decades expanded and morphed into a series of amusement parks - Lake Dolores, Rock-a-Houla and finally Discovery Park. The last one closed twenty years ago, perhaps victim to the magnetic attraction of Las Vegas, 150 miles east - the origin or destination of I-15's high speed river of cars and trucks.

I don't know who began tagging and painting the structures. As I took photographs of the strange buildings and skeletal remains of what must have been the supports for waterslides, I met four young Chicanas. They'd grown up in nearby Newberry Springs, but didn't know the artists, or perhaps they didn't want to say. They'd never known the park as a waterpark - "It was before my time," one laughed. It's a place to take your friends or novios, to wander through and wonder what it must have been like - so much water then, and so dry now.

Another photographer from Norway had heard about it somehow. We'd see each other at a distance, each trying to incorporate surreal colors and shapes into a visual language of images. Conversation was unnecessary beyond a brief acknowledgement, each of us pointing lens and camera at a new moment's discovery. I could have stayed for hours.

My partner exercised great and unusual patience, eventually falling asleep in the car as I wandered through the brilliant December light. But the new espresso cafe in Barstow, created by Italian/Chicana visionaries Yvonne and Elfrida Butticci, was calling out its caffeine song to me, and we left.

It was like a dream. These photographs are its fragments…

https://davidbaconrealitycheck.blogspot.com/2024/12/photos-from-edge-08-abandoned-waterpark.html

ON-LINE COMMENT OF THE DAY

The thing I remember most about Jimmy Carter is how he was a breath of fresh air. The Nixon administration was a sleazy assortment of creeps. His V.P. Agnew was a tax evader and his Attorney General went to prison. ” I am not a crook” …tricky Dick at his best. Carter was the antithesis of that bunch and the fact that Ford had pardoned Nixon probably swayed what turned out to be a close election.

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HAPPY NEW YEAR. Our Society Is Every Bit As Diseased As You Suspect It Is.

by Caitlin Johnstone

Everyone kind of knows that our society is profoundly sick. You can sense it. There are raging disagreements about what exactly it is that’s wrong, but everyone can feel that something freakish and unnatural is happening here.

The source of this sickness isn’t clear at first glance, so you’ll hear countless explanations for what specifically is giving rise to this sense of dis-ease within us. Some say it’s because we don’t have enough religion in our lives. Others say it’s because we have too much. Some say it’s because half the country has the wrong political ideology. Others say it’s because there are too many trans people or immigrants. Some say it’s because humanity itself is innately rotten. Others say it’s because our society is enslaved in a sinister conspiracy by Jews or Freemasons or neo-Marxist technocrats.

Everyone disagrees on the nature of our dilemma, but we can pretty much all agree that something is very wrong.

The reason it’s so hard to nail down the source of our problem is because every part of it is designed to be hidden. We are ruled by unelected plutocrats and empire managers who actively avoid being recognized as our rulers. These oligarchs work continuously to manipulate our minds using propaganda that’s disguised to look like news and trustworthy sources of information. This propaganda places ideas in our heads which we are tricked into believing we came up with on our own. These tricks work because they hook onto egoic tendencies within our psyches whose nature we are largely unconscious of.

This all works together to manufacture consent for a system which does not serve the interests of ordinary human beings, and most of it is hidden from immediate view. We find ourselves in a mind-controlled dystopia where we think, speak, vote, work, shop, spend and behave in more or less exactly the ways the rich and powerful want us to, all while believing we are free — because the mechanisms of control are hidden from us.

As soon as we are old enough to think and understand, our thoughts and understanding are shaped by the powerful using the most sophisticated system of mass-scale psychological manipulation that has ever been devised. We live our whole lives marinating in power-serving narratives about the world and our place in it. It’s all we’ve ever known, so we think it’s normal. It almost never occurs to anyone to question how their worldview got into their heads in the first place; to most of us it just looks like truth and common sense.

But because we live under a system that’s designed to benefit the rich and powerful at the expense of ordinary people, we’re all acutely aware that the way things are isn’t really working. As the abuses and injustices inherent in capitalism become more and more egregious, this sense that something is wrong gets more and more widespread and acute. This discontentment is currently being funneled by the powerful into faux populist movements designed to herd the public into supporting the status quo while allowing them to feel as though they are waging a brave revolution against the establishment.

The public is becoming more and more restless and agitated because they can sense that something’s wrong but can’t say what it is, like a dementia patient with a urinary tract infection. This agitation is erupting in ways which range from the crazy to the very lucid, from hate crimes and racist movements to mass protests against genocide and an expanding awareness that a better world is possible.

Our job at this point in history is to try to steer this growing restlessness toward health and clarity. To help people understand where the real bad guys are, to highlight the manipulations and abusive systems at play here, to assure everyone that their growing sense that something is very wrong is absolutely correct, and to help them see exactly what’s causing it.

As we move into a new year, that’s what we should all be working on to help humanity find its way into a better future.

(caitlinjohnstone.com.au)

DIGGING

Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests; snug as a gun.

Under my window, a clean rasping sound
When the spade sinks into gravelly ground:
My father, digging. I look down

Till his straining rump among the flowerbeds
Bends low, comes up twenty years away
Stooping in rhythm through potato drills
Where he was digging.

The coarse boot nestled on the lug, the shaft
Against the inside knee was levered firmly.
He rooted out tall tops, buried the bright edge deep
To scatter new potatoes that we picked,
Loving their cool hardness in our hands.

By God, the old man could handle a spade.
Just like his old man.

My grandfather cut more turf in a day
Than any other man on Toner’s bog.
Once I carried him milk in a bottle
Corked sloppily with paper. He straightened up
To drink it, then fell to right away
Nicking and slicing neatly, heaving sods
Over his shoulder, going down and down
For the good turf. Digging.

The cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and slap
Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge
Through living roots awaken in my head.
But I’ve no spade to follow men like them.

Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests.
I’ll dig with it.

— Seamus Heaney (1966)

GOODBYE TO 2024, AMERICA'S CRAZIEST YEAR

A decades-long mission to fill a spiritual void with politics finally collapsed this year. Will America finally get a life?

by Matt Taibbi

From the Washington Post editorial board’s year-end letter this morning:

Millions of Americans have stopped following the news, many because they’re so certain it will be bad news that they’re tuning out. They’re missing out. It’s easy to lose sight of the reality that it’s never been a better time to be alive. The poorest Americans have access to better medical care than the richest royals did a century ago…

How different will the world look on Jan. 1, 2050? Or 2075? Or 2100? A new guard of leaders will emerge at home. But Russia will also almost certainly be without Mr. Putin, now 72. Will what follows be better for the Russian people and for global stability? We hope so, but no one can say for sure. Rather than assume the worst, let’s resolve to do everything we can to help engineer the best possible outcome for the world.

Yes, people have begun tuning out the news, but they shouldn’t, because an American homeless person can walk into any emergency room and get better care than Frederick the Great. Also, Vladimir Putin probably won’t live to 148, and while we can’t be sure what follows him will be good, we can certainly plan for the best.

A million years ago, when I edited a joke newspaper called the eXile, I was responsible for the house editorial. The running gag was no matter what we argued, the essay’s last line had to be, “One thing’s for sure: time will tell.” We were spoofing the format of the old “objective” era’s editorial pronouncements, which boomed stentorian gibberish before dismounting to versions of Who the fuck knows?, but something something. Seeing the Post return to that old saw today brought a tear to the eye.

When historians look back on 2024 they’ll doubtless have a lot to say about this year’s furious partisan divide, but this was really the year in which a national spiritual crisis broke into the open. It was the year in which loony religious crazies that paralyzed educated America for a decade were finally undone by failure and doubt…

https://www.racket.news/p/goodbye-to-2024-americas-craziest

IT'S NOT EASY to grow old.
you have to get used to it
to walk more slowly,
to say goodbye to who you were
and salute who you've become.
It's hard this to fulfil years,
You have to know how to accept your new face
and walk with pride in your new body
And to be put off shame,
of prejudice and fear that the years give,
and let it happen what has to happen,
and let go whoever has to go,
and let whoever wants to stay stay.
No, this is not easy getting old,
you have to learn not to expect anything from anyone,
walk alone, wake up alone
and not to catch you every morning
the guy you see in the mirror,
and accept that everything is over
and life too,
and know how to say goodbye to those who leave
and remember those who have left,
and cry until it's empty
until it dries inside,
to grow new smiles,
other desires and new desires.

— Alexander Jodorowsky

FAREWELL JIMMY CARTER

by Susan Block

After 100 years among us, Jimmy Carter is gone. Like a lot of people, I’m playing Ramblin’ Man in his memory tonight.

Saying good-bye to Jimmy Carter is complicated as Dickey Bett’s guitar. All complications considered, Jimmy was my favorite U.S. President during my lifetime. Nobody’s perfect, and a U.S. President’s imperfections are bound to cause immense death and destruction, as did Carter’s. Nevertheless, among modern American War Criminals-in-Chiefs, JC was relatively benign.

By the time Jimmy Carter took office, I’d spent a good portion of my youth protesting a crooked President (it’s all relative among Presidential criminals, but at the time, Dick Nixon was considered to be almost as ridiculous, nefarious and felonious as… Trump?), a horrific war (Vietnam) and the imperialist, capitalist system in general. I must confess I did this mainly because I longed to make out on a motorcycle with Che Guevara (or some facsimile, since he was dead), but also because I was vaguely aware the “system” sucked.

But in Jimmy Carter’s victory, I felt a surge of hope for America’s future, my future. I was just graduating from Yale, which had devolved from a progressive, antiwar academic haven personified by the Reverend William Sloane Coffininto a hotbed of Young Republicans creaming in their chinos over a cowboy California Governor whose gleaming Hollywood smile made me want to toss my scones all over my typewriter (yep, those were ancient times). So, I was grateful to see a Democrat in the White House who wasn’t LBJ. Would the future be bright with Jimmy?

With one foot still in the hippie “living-off-the-land” life (while the other was kicking through the big oak doors of the Ivy League), I liked that our new Prez was a peanut farmer. As I was dating an engineering student, I thought it was cool this farmer was also an engineer, albeit nuclear. Nuclear? Yikes! I was just starting to join the “No Nukes!” protests, and hoped (against hope) that his scientific expertise—not to mention his experience “saving” a Canadian nuclear reactor from a meltdown—would make him less pro-nuke than other politicians.

Nukes aside, I figured JC couldn’t be much worse than Tricky Dick or LBJ, and nothing was bringing back the glory of JFK, which really wasn’t all that glorious for Marilyn Monroe, among others. I saw Gerald Ford merely as a transitional figure, though I later learned he was actually one of our best Presidents, mainly because he didn’t do much besides fall down a few times and try to heal the nation from Tricky Dick’s violation. Oh, and then there was that semi-secret endorsement of Indonesia’s genocidal invasion of East Timor.

I thought it was a good sign when in 1977 on his first day in office, Jimmy Carter granted amnesty to any draft resister (or dodger).

The fact that Carter was a devout “Christian” (JC loves JC) didn’t bother me because, at the time, I associated Christianity with the Reverend Coffin, the Berrigan Brothers and other antiwar Christians. Aside from a squawk or two from Anita Bryant and a young Jerry Falwell, Sr. (who was old even when he was young), the Church hadn’t quite turned hard Right… yet.

I appreciated this devout Christian President admitting in Playboy that he had committed “adultery in his heart.” Even before I studied sexology, I knew most people fantasized about all kinds of things, and I applauded a politician who was honest about it. That’s another thing: Jimmy didn’t seem like “a politician.” He certainly was one, but he had an aura of sincerity that is rare in politics, and it stayed with him until the end.

Being somewhat open about his sexual fantasies—even in Playboy magazine—must have been good for Jimmy’s sex life. Indeed, he was very happily married to Rosalyn Carter (1927-2023), his beloved Steel Magnolia, for 77 years, the longest marriage of any U.S. president.

When asked if winning a Nobel Peace Prize or becoming President was the most exciting thing that happened to him, Jimmy replied, “When Rosalynn said she’d marry me—I think that was the most exciting thing… Rosalynn was my equal partner in everything.” Gotta love a hubby like that.

Jimmy’s final farewell to his Rosalyn, read by their daughter Amy as Jimmy lay in a suit and tie on his hospital bed, had me—and countless other hopeful romantics sharing in this remarkable expression of intimacy from our devices—in tears. That scene, now a memory, moves me even more today, as I caretake my own beloved husband Max after his stroke.

However, I must admit, my affection for Jimmy Carter stems from the fact he gave me a job, and was a pretty good boss, as bosses go.

Getting a government job was never on my professional wish list. Actually, I wasn’t eager to go into any profession, partly because I was too lazy to get up and put on my jeans and tie-dyed T shirt for a 10am class, so how was I going to force myself into a power suit for a 7am power breakfast?

Nevertheless, there I was, six months into the Carter administration, graduating Yale with (almost worthless) honors, watching my classmates go off to Wall Street, law school, med school, other higher education or expensive parent-paid years abroad, and I just didn’t know what to do with myself (confession: I still don’t). I was pretty good at playing the game known as “school,” and I liked it well enough. However, I was starting to get (to use a much-maligned term) “woke” to the fact that I was not just learning, but also being subtly yet firmly indoctrinated into the same war-making system I was protesting. So, I decided to take a few years “off” before submitting (yes, higher education is like BDSM submission with all the restraints, punishments, protocols and pain) to more schooling.

Also, I was broke. And my voluminous student loans, on top of rent, on top of my fun-but-low-income lifestyle, was not putting money in my fledgling Bank of New Haven account.

So, I got a job working for Jimmy Carter, one of those government jobs I thought I’d despise, but it turned out to be one of my greatest jobs ever. Sometimes I even had to be at “work” by 7am(!), but never in a power suit. More likely tights, a leotard and maybe a mask. What kind of job did I have?

I was a New Haven City Mime.

Stop laughing! I’ve already heard all the stupid mime jokes you can muster, and I am the first to admit, mimes can range from mildly annoying to downright nauseating, even when they’re good, and I wasn’t that good. Let’s just say, I was no Marcel Marceau—who actually performed for a smiling Jimmy Carter and bemused Rosalyn and Amy—and Marcel was not as good as the master Jean-Louis Barrault (check out his moves in Children of Paradise). However, I was decent—I’d taken a few mime classes as a Theater major at Yale and mimed a bit in a Commedia Del’arte troupe of Yale grads and dropouts—or at least good enough to ace an audition for performing artists in the CETA(Comprehensive Employment & Training Act) program, which had been signed into law by Nixon (even the worst Presidents do some good), but ramped up to its highest levels under Carter. So, I was hired as a CETA City Mime.

Are you laughing even harder now? Many people (especially Reagan Republicans) found my job as a CETA City Mime to be the epitome of frivolous government, but not the sad citizens I made smile as they trudged across the New Haven Green, nor the tunnel-visioned commuters that broadened their perspectives through my silliness, nor the sick, the disabled and the seniors I distracted from their pain, nor the “inner city” students I taught to dramatize their feelings and ideas, some of whom went on to make movies, music and other forms of art, some of it great art.

I never met Jimmy, but I did a little goofy miming for his Veep’s wife, the Second Lady, Joan Mondale, at the Wisconsin Mime Festival, which she graciously tolerated as the cameras clicked away, splashing our cheer all over the papers.

Moreover, I was no longer broke.

So, Jimmy Carter gave me a job—a pretty damn wonderful, fun, sexy, creative, meaningful and (I think) helpful-to-the-community job… with health benefits! And I thank him for that. It was my first job as an artist, and I held onto it until Rhinestone Cowboy Reagan rode in and shot CETA dead as he shot dead or crippled many government programs, like Welfare, Social Security, Medicaid, Food Stamps, and federal education, while beefing up the U.S. military and cutting taxes for the rich.

Carter presided over an ostensibly peaceful time when Americans were in the grip of the “Vietnam Syndrome.” It was a good grip; at least, it felt pretty good to a peacenik like me (though it enraged the war profiteers), since this reluctance seemed to keep us out of war. I say “seemed” because, little did I know that, while I was pretending to climb through imaginary windows as a CETA City Mime on the New Haven Green, assuming my country was truly “at peace,” my boss President Jimmy Carter’s militantly anti-Communist National Security Advisor, Zbignew Brzezinski (“Morning Joe” Mika’s dad), was laying the military groundwork for 9/11.

9/11? If I’d known what was happening, it would have made my head spin (which would have been a neat mime trick). Quite honestly, it still does. In an effort to “undermine” the Soviet Union, President Carter, under Dr. Brzezinski’s earnest Trilateral guidance, armed and trained the ultra-religious Afghan Mujahideen against the Soviet-backed Democratic Republic of Afghanistan and ultimately, Soviet occupation troops during the Soviet-Afghan war. One of the leaders of these Mujahideen, who later devolved into the religo-fascist Taliban, was a young Saudi millionaire named Osama bin Laden.

I observed the news with some interest, since I had just come back from a hippie trip through Afghanistan and fallen in love with the people and the roughly beautiful land. Years later, I was crushed to see the great Bamian Buddhasof Afghanistan—one of which I had climbed to the top—demolished by the Taliban. Then we got 9/11 and Bush’s War on Terrah… a Neocon nightmare, the seeds of which were planted by that seed-planting peanut farmer, my CETA GodFather, Jimmy Carter.

At least, he tried to make peace in the Middle East (sort of), bringing Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin to Camp David for a handshake. I was never a Zionist; I’d even made out (on a motorcycle!) with a handsome Palestinian (who looked a little like Che Guevara) on my Jewish youth group’s trip to Israel, for which I got into big trouble. But I appreciated Carter’s efforts, which miraculously stood the test of time, though Israel’s current genocide is fraying them.

But this farewell is not an analysis or overview of Carter’s policies. I was too busy miming to pay serious attention to them.

I did notice that Jimmy had some intriguing relatives. Sometimes my mime job involved roller-skating, so I thought it was cool that his daughter Amy Carter essentially roller-skated through the White House, and then I thought she was super-cool when I learned she became an anti-apartheid, anti-imperialism activist with my Yippie hero, Abbie Hoffman, post-Presidency. Jimmy Carter’s brother, Billy, liked beer (some might say too much), but he actually handled his Billy Beer better than Washington’s current most prominent beer-lover Brett Kavanaugh. Jimmy’s sister, Ruth Carter Stapleton ministered to Larry Flynt when my old buddy Paul Krassner was editor of Hustler. Good times.

Though Nixon signed the Environmental Protection Act (score one more for Tricky Dick), Jimmy Carter established the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act, tripling the size of the nation’s Wilderness Preservation System and doubling the size of the National Park System. He also had solar panels installed in the White House in 1979. Ronald Reagan removed them in 1986. Apparently, undermining Carter in both major and minor ways was a Reagan obsession.

The White House solar panels were essentially reinstalled in the early 2000s. What does that say about the two Presidents?

Unlike most high-level politicians of the 1970s, Jimmy seemed to genuinely enjoy the music of the times, and being a Georgian, he especially liked the Allman Brothers. In fact, he was friends with the band, and even said they “helped him win the White House,” because they played several concerts for him on the campaign trail.

Carter loved the blues, so of course, he’d have a little malaise. I remember his “Malaise” speech, how everybody—especially the Skull and Boners and other young Republicans that seemed to surround me—declared it just awful. I remember feeling a little self-conscious because I’d actually connected with that speech. I remember thinking that I understood the creeping “crisis of confidence in America,” because I was feeling it, and I was glad to have a President who dare to speak about it, even if he sounded like a depressed patient in one of those encounter group therapy sessions so popular back then.

Unsurprisingly, most Americans went along with my Young Republican colleagues, and declared the speech to be “politically tone-deaf,” sending Jimmy Carter into freefall. Then Iran fell to the Ayatollahs, Brzezinski’s preposterous hostage rescue attempt failed disastrously (for which Carter took responsibility), and Cowboy Reagan made a dirty deal on the down-low for the Iranians to hold onto the American hostages until he won the Presidency.

Then soon enough, both Jimmy Carter and I were out of our jobs.

What a stark contrast between Jimmy Carter, the relatively honest, slightly depressed, seemingly sincere Democrat who took responsibility for his mistakes and worked selflessly into his 90s, and Ronald Reagan, the fake sunshine cowboy Republican who spouted apple pie platitudes, never took responsibility for anything and slipped into senility before the end of his presidency.

Was Jimmy Carter a good president? It’s complicated. What’s certain is that he was a great former president.

He has gone on many post-presidential peace missions, supported Civil Rights and picked up a hammer to build homes for the poor through Habitat for Humanity in 1984, and kept doing it until he was 95. He received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002, but then so have many war criminals. Though Carter’s award “for his decades of untiring effort to find peaceful solutions to international conflicts, to advance democracy and human rights, and to promote economic and social development” somehow seems more sincere than most.

Over this past year and a half, I’ve often wondered what Jimmy Carter would have said about Israel’s current genocide. I can’t help but believe that he would have injected a dose of compassion for Palestine that we just don’t see these days from high-level American politicians, let alone Presidents, current or former.

So after a century of JC on Earth, like a lot of people, I’m listen to those Ramblin’ Man lyrics that so fit the occasion:

When it’s time for leavin’ I hope you understand that I was born a Ramblin’ Man

Whether he’s with Rosalyn, Jesus, or becoming one with that rich Georgia peanut-growing soil, farewell Jimmy Carter.

(Susan Block, Ph.D., a.k.a. “Dr. Suzy,” is a world renowned LA sex therapist, author of The Bonobo Way: The Evolution of Peace through Pleasure and horny housewife, occasionally seen on HBO and other channels. For information and speaking engagements, call 626-461-5950. Email her at drsusanblock@gmail.com. CounterPunch.org.)

INCOMING

by Eliot Weinberger

They came from Florida, from Fox News and Fox Business, square-jawed men and women with big hair and collagen lips.

They came from professional football and World Wrestling Entertainment.

They came from daytime talk shows and reality television.

They were “straight out of central casting,” as the future president said.

Some of the women resembled his daughter and some of the women resembled his wife. None of the men resembled him.

A squad of them came with the future president to Madison Square Garden to watch Ultimate Fighting matches.

The future secretary of defense is adorned with the white supremacist tattoos of a Jerusalem cross, the Crusader rallying cry “Deus vult” and an AR-15 assault rifle flanking an American flag.

The future secretary of homeland security once shot her hunting dog, Cricket, in a gravel pit because it couldn’t hunt, then shot her pet goat because it was getting old and “nasty.”

The future secretary of health and human services once cut off the head of a beached whale with a chainsaw, put it on the roof of his car and drove home. He brags that he has a freezer full of roadkill.

Less than half of all voters voted for the future president, but his team declared it a “landslide,” a “mandate” to “drain the swamp” and shake up the capital.

The future White House communications director calls the opposition “snowflakes” whose “sad, miserable existence will be crushed” when the future president returns to power.

The future director of the FBI promises a “government gangsters manhunt” and revenge against disloyal journalists.

The future director of the Federal Communications Commission threatens to penalize television networks that criticise the future president.

They vow mass firings and the deportation of millions.

They vow to cut $2 trillion from the federal budget – five times the combined annual salaries of all federal employees.

They vow an end to “wokeness” in all its imagined forms and the return of American greatness.

But they have no connection to the work they will manage, or no experience in the work they will manage, or no experience managing large bureaucracies like the bureaucracies they will manage.

The future secretary of commerce is a billionaire.

The future secretary of the treasury is a billionaire.

The future secretary of the interior is a billionaire.

The future secretary of education is a billionaire.

The future special envoy to the Middle East is a billionaire.

The future director of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) is a billionaire.

The future surgeon general, a Fox News regular, and the future administrator of Medicare and Medicaid, a daytime television host, sell dubious health and weight loss supplements online.

The future director of the FBI promotes a supplement to reverse the effects of the Covid vaccine.

The future deputy assistant to the president and senior director for counterterrorism is the spokesman for a fish oil supplement.

The future secretary of homeland security stars in an infomercial for a cosmetic dentistry business, in which she exclaims: “I love my new family at Smile Texas!”

The future secretary of education is opposed to the Department of Education. The co-founder of World Wrestling Entertainment, she donated $21 million to the future president’s campaign. She is currently being sued for enabling the sexual abuse of children recruited to be “ring boys” at wrestling events.

The future administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency opposes clean air and clean water legislation and does not believe the climate of the world is changing.

The future secretary of energy, the head of a fracking company, insists that “there is no climate crisis and we’re not in the midst of an energy transition either.”

The future secretary of health and human services and the future director of the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention believe that vaccines cause autism.

The future commissioner of the Federal Drug Administration, a Fox News regular, and the future director of the National Institutes of Health do not believe that vaccinations cause autism, but opposed mass vaccinations for Covid.

The future secretary of health and human services has promised to fire 600 employees at the National Institutes of Health to shift its focus from infectious diseases to healthy diets. He is opposed to the fluoridation of water and the pasteurization of milk and believes that horse deworming pills are more effective against Covid than vaccination.

The future attorney general, a Fox News regular, was part of the future president’s legal team in his first impeachment trial. As attorney general of Florida, she defended the banning of same-sex marriage and sued to overturn the Affordable Care Act’s prohibition against denying insurance to people with pre-existing conditions. She dropped a fraud case against the future president’s online university after receiving a donation from him, and once persuaded the governor of Florida to delay an execution because it conflicted with her fundraising event. She was active in the denial of the 2020 election results and was a registered lobbyist for Qatar.

The future deputy attorney general, the future US solicitor general and the future principal associate deputy attorney general were all part of the future president’s legal team in his recent court cases. The team will now continue as the Department of Justice.

The future US solicitor general, defending the future president before the Supreme Court, stated that there are cases where it would be legal for a president to assassinate a domestic political rival.

The future director of the CIA is best known for promoting conspiracy theories and releasing false information in defense of the future president in his various scandals. He said that there is a “secret society” within the Department of Justice and the FBI “working against” the future president.

The future director of the FBI wants to turn its Washington headquarters into a museum of the horrors of the deep state.

The future director of national intelligence, a Fox News regular, is known as “our girlfriend” when she appears on Russian television expressing support for Putin and Bashar al-Assad and condemning NATO. She was raised in, and is still connected to, the Science of Identity Foundation, a Hinduism-derived cult, known for its Islamophobia and homophobia, whose leader lives in a house covered in tin foil.

The future deputy assistant to the president and senior director for counterterrorism is a former Fox News regular and is banned from YouTube. He believes that violence is intrinsic to Islam. He wears the medal of the neo-Nazi Hungarian Order of Vitéz and was a supporter of the Magyar Gárda, a paramilitary group.

The future secretary of the navy has never been in the military, but he raised $12 million for the future president’s campaign at an event at his home in Aspen, where the future president warned that this “could be the last election we ever have” if the “radical left-wing lunatics” win.

The future ambassador to Israel is a Baptist minister and former Fox News host. He has said “there’s really no such thing as a Palestinian.”

The future senior adviser on Arab and Middle Eastern affairs is the father-in-law of the future president’s daughter.

The future special envoy to the Middle East is a frequent golf partner of the future president and has donated almost $2 million to his campaigns. He has close ties to Qatar.

The future ambassador to France, the father-in-law of another daughter of the future president, also donated $2 million to the campaign. He spent two years in prison for a number of offenses, including hiring a prostitute to seduce and videotape his brother-in-law, who was going to testify against him. He will live in the luxurious Hôtel de Pontalba in Paris.

The future ambassador to Greece is the presumably now former girlfriend of the son of the future president. On the day of her nomination, the tabloids revealed that the son had found a new companion.

The future national security adviser, a Fox News regular, opposes further aid to Ukraine, but supports sending troops into Mexico to fight the drug cartels.

The future special envoy to Ukraine and Russia, a Fox News regular, has warned against putting “the idealistic agendas of the global elite ahead of a working relationship with Russia.”

The future secretary of state is the author of ’Decades of Decadence: How Our Spoiled Elites Blew America’s Inheritance of Liberty, Security and Prosperity.’

The future secretary of homeland security, the governor of South Dakota, is prohibited by the state’s nine tribes from entering Native land. During the Covid epidemic, she was opposed to all forms of protection, including masks and vaccination mandates. She is opposed to abortion under any circumstances, IVF, stem cell research, the Affordable Care Act, Medicaid, high-speed rail, estate taxes, same-sex marriage and any form of gun control. During the last campaign, she presented the future president with a $1,100 bust of Mount Rushmore, with his face carved next to those of Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln and Roosevelt.

The future secretary of commerce personally donated $10 million to – and raised an additional $75 million for – the future president’s campaign. He believes we can “make America great again” by returning to 1900, when there were high tariffs and no income tax.

The future secretary of transportation, a Fox Business host and former reality TV star, supported the ban on Muslims, and as a congressman introduced legislation to end endangered species protections for grey wolves.

The future secretary of housing and urban development is a former professional football player, a former member of the Texas state legislature, the former chief inspiration officer of a software company, the former chief visionary officer of a property developer and the former owner of a men’s clothing business. He is the only Black person on the future president’s team.

The future secretary of agriculture promotes fossil fuels and campaigns against wind and solar energy. She does not believe in climate change. She is the CEO of the America First Policy Institute, the source of a dozen members of the future presidential team and its ideological foundation. AFPI has already drafted some three hundred executive orders for the future president to sign on his first day in office.

The future director of the Office of Management and Budget has written that “Muslims do not simply have a deficient theology. They do not know God because they have rejected Jesus Christ His Son, and they stand condemned.” He is the founder of the Center for Renewing America, which is largely devoted to combating “critical race theory” and “wokeness.” He wants to gut the FBI, eliminate the Environmental Protection Agency, fire tens of thousands of civil service employees for insufficient loyalty to the future president, deploy the military against protesters and institute a Christian-based “radical constitutionalism” that will give more power to the future president.

The future White House deputy chief of staff for policy and homeland security adviser is allied with various white supremacist groups and is the most rabidly anti-immigrant member of the team. He believes “America is for Americans and Americans only,” which means banning, among others, Muslims, refugees and university students from China, as well as deporting 11 million undocumented migrants. He was the architect of the policy of separating migrant children from their parents, and was seen gloating over photographs of children in cages. He has said that the Emma Lazarus poem (“Give me your tired, your poor,/Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free”) at the base of the Statue of Liberty was a later “woke” addition that has nothing to do with American liberty. He considers the future president “a political genius.”

The future border tsar, a Fox News regular, implemented the family separation policy during the future president’s previous administration. He has initiated a project called “Defend the Border and Save Lives” in collaboration with an anti-Muslim group, the United West. He has said: “I will run the biggest deportation force this country has ever seen. They ain’t seen shit yet. Wait until 2025.”

The future secretary of defense, a Fox News host, has called for an “American crusade,” “a holy war for the righteous cause of human freedom,” because the “irreconcilable differences between the left and the right in America … cannot be resolved through the political process.” He claims there is a “cultural Marxist revolution ripping through the Pentagon,” epitomized by the US military slogan “Our diversity is our strength,” which he says is the “dumbest phrase on planet Earth.” He warns that the invasion of Ukraine “pales in comparison” to the threat of “wokeness,” for “this unholy alliance of political ideologues and Pentagon pussies has left our warriors without real defenders in Washington.” “The next president of the United States needs to fire them all.” He is opposed to NATO and the United Nations. He is known for drunken displays in which he rants against Muslims. Accused of rape, he paid the victim to remain silent. His mother once sent him an email saying that he is “despicable and abusive” and asked: “Is there any sense of decency left in you?”

The future White House deputy chief of staff for policy and homeland security adviser wrote in a speech for the future president that “the fundamental question of our time is whether the West has the will to survive … Do we have the desire and the courage to preserve our civilization in the face of those who would subvert and destroy it?”

The future president is currently selling caps, wrapping paper, blankets, football jerseys, boat flags, pickleball paddles, necklaces, earrings, silk ties, chopping boards, Christmas decorations, slippers, tie clips, door mats, aprons, pyjamas, socks, Advent calendars, Christmas stockings, mugs, keychains, sweatshirts, note cards, bracelets, scented candles, beach bags, flip-flops, bathrobes, towels, sunglasses, corkscrews, water bottles, stickers, jogging pants, wine and champagne glasses, earbuds, hoodies, jelly beans, cookies, chocolates, honey, jewelery boxes, whiskey decanters, trays, wallets, flasks, wines, coasters, umbrellas, golf bags, plates, ashtrays, sports bras and dog leashes – all with his name on them.

Also available are a $100,000 gold watch, a $11,000 autographed guitar, digital trading card NFTs featuring the future president in heroic historic tableaux, God Bless the USA Bibles, Never Surrender High-Top Sneakers, Fight Fight Fight Cologne for Men (“For patriots who never back down”) and a celebratory Victory Cologne, which comes in a bottle in the shape of the future president’s head.

The future secretary of state had previously called the future president a “con artist,” a “Third World strongman,” “the most vulgar person to ever aspire to the presidency,” “a person that has no ideas of any substance” and a “guy with the worst spray tan in America” who wets his pants. He now says: “I didn’t know him as a person.”

(Eliot Weinberger’s first book of essays, Works on Paper, was published in 1986. Nineteen Ways of Looking at Wang Wei: How a Chinese Poem Is Translated came out the following year. He has translated the work of Octavio Paz, Jorge Luis Borges and others from Spanish. ‘What I Heard about Iraq’ was published in the LRB of 3 February 2005 and soon afterwards as a short book by Verso. Angels and Saints came out in 2020. His most recent book is The Life of Tu Fu, a fictional autobiography of the Tang Dynasty poet. London Review of Books.)

"NEW YEAR’S EVE we’re all in bed upstairs under the wall-papered eaves listening to the racket horns and rattlers below and out the window the dingdong bells and sad horizon hush of all Lowell and towards Kearney Square where we see the red glow embrowned and aura’d in the new sky and we think: “A new year” — A new year with a new number and a new little boy with candlelight and kitchimise standing radiant in the eternities, as the old, some old termagant with beard and scythe, goes wandering down the darkness field…"

— Jack Kerouac, Visions of Gerard

3 Comments

Lee Edmundson January 1, 2025

Great reportage. Jim Shields’ article should be reprinted every week.
Loved the CETA/Jimmy Carter story. I myself came back from England to take A CETA job with a local theatre company as their Technical Director. CETAs lasted only 18 months, alas. After CETAing with Birmingham Festival and Birmingham Childrens theatres, I ended up out here. But that’s another story from so long ago.
Also, INCOMING is a delightfully enlightening read. The circus is coming to town (Washington, D.C.). Not my circus. Not my monkeys.
The paraphrase an old Soviet maxim: New Year? Same as the Old Year.
Be well and enjoy it — life — as much and for as long as you can.

chuck dunbar January 1, 2025

Happy New Year to all, may we all do well. And may the AVA continue on in its mission–prospering, questioning, challenging, truth-telling.

Great Kerouac words for this one, the young and the old, going on in their lives…

Do Not Comment January 1, 2025

The John Birch Society actually opposed the Vietnam War on the grounds that it made the US more “communist.” I think they would have been well-served to use the term “collectivist” instead.

I had a teacher in middle school in the 70s who was a Bircher. He would tell us that one day you wouldn’t just watch TV, the TV would watch you too and then tell the government everything you were looking at, and that billionaire oligarchs were bad news…

…and here we are.

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