RECOMMENDED READING: Alcatraz, the Gangster Years by David Ward with Gene Kassebaum. There are a lot of books about Alcatraz around, but this one is in a class by itself. The authors seem to be the first writers to go to the archive and to make full use of it. The Rock's archive seems to be wholly intact, right down to daily incident reports and critical assessments of prison guards and administrators written by outside agencies.
THERE ARE ALSO complete social and criminal histories of many inmates, famous and unknown alike. What emerges in the final product is a book that gives us not only an informal history of American penology as it culminated in Alcatraz, but the very words of infamous outlaws like Al Capone and Machine Gun Kelly, whose letters to family the authors have also found.
ALL THIS and a compendium of reports on how a number of prisoners did on the outside, including one who paroled to the Ukiah home of a policeman in the early 1950s . The Ukiah graduate of Alcatraz, by the way, did fine on the outside, as did most of the men who did time there.
NOT THAT inmate success outside incarceration could be attributed to the rigorous conditions of the prison itself, which included lengthy no talking edicts and plenty of isolation of the old fashioned bread and water type, the isolation generously seasoned with much hands-on brutality for dessert. Post prison success seemed (and still seems) to be more attributable to the slow realization that prison of any kind is not the place to spend your life if there are other options which, increasingly, there aren't.
ABOUT HERE it's appropriate, as the libs say, to inform those who don't know that the Ukiah-based “legal community” is a giant welfare system presided over by more judges than any county its size in the state. Beneath this apparat, you've got the nicely compensated attorneys of the public defender's and DA's offices, plus their supporting apparatuses, and a large number of under-employed lawyers who depend for their Schats coffee and pastries on invisible conflicts of interest, most of which are simply declared and signed off on by the judge whether or not they exist.
A LOT of cases are sub-leased this way to a gaggle of under-employed lawyers lurking in the Courthouse halls looking for one of these conflict handouts. Thirty years ago two judges heard all the cases and they never even heard a lawyer trying to conflict out of a case simply so a buddy could get some easy work pretending to defend a doomed prole, and here we are today with three times the number of judges, who knows how many more lawyers but, excluding pot farmers, roughly the same number of full-time crooks of the type who need to be put away.
THE NEO-CROOKS UNTIL RECENTLY were dope people, most of whom, except for the Mexican cartels, are not criminally oriented in the traditional sense of guns and ultra-vi. They shouldn't even be in the court system, but so long as they are, conflict and appointed lawyering in this county will continue as a growth industry.
A FEW YEARS AGO, a local public defender sent us a list of criminal cases which he said indicated that the District Attorney’s office had “lost” — trials with either not-guilty verdicts or guilty of lesser charges. The implication was that the DA was overcharging, at least in the cases listed. The list included a brief description of about 20 cases, including case number, charges, date, and verdict. The list’s preparer suggested that we look into the cases to independently verify the “losses.” There obviously wasn’t enough time to check them all, so I picked the five cases which appeared to be the easiest to check. After several painfully long wait-in-line experiences at the court clerk’s window, we found that of the five cases, only one was available to even review. The other four were either “under judicial review,” or in Fort Bragg or in Willits, not Ukiah. I was told it would take up to two weeks to see them. I decided to ask for the one that was available (the next day), a domestic abuse case involving a Mexican couple in Ukiah where the man was charged with hitting his wife in the couple’s backyard when they were both drinking. The file included photos of the “crime scene,” including a rundown barbecue area outside a small trailer with empty beer cans lying around. The defendant said his wife had started the argument and was coming at him when he hit her causing moderate injuries, most of which were the result of the woman’s fall following whatever encounter had occurred. It wasn’t a clearcut case and the evidence was weak. Neither the defendant’s nor the victim’s memory were very good and their English was poor. Verdict: Not guilty.
THE OTHER FOUR CASES I had picked were drug cases where the verdict was guilty of lesser crimes than what was charged. It seemed to me that the alleged “losses” were more like judgment calls. It did not appear that second-guessing the DA’s original charges would prove much other than they may have been overcharged either because the DA was supporting whatever the cops initially filed the case as or to get a plea bargain, both of which are common charging practices. Typically, not all the information and witnesses are available when charges are filed. Police reports can have errors and gaps. Witnesses and victims can “go south” (disappear or provide contradictory testimony when deposed or put on the stand), or “go sideways” — i.e., change their story, decline to confirm their story, or be shown to be lying or mistaken. Cases change as they proceed through the system and “ripen,” as the lawyers like to say. I eventually looked at two more of the case files with similar conclusions. None of the case files included the trial transcripts or the probation/sentencing reports. (Probation reports are only public for 60 days after a plea or verdict, then they’re sealed and require a court order to be accessed. Even though they are a public record of a public trial, trial transcripts are copyrighted by the court reporter and are very expensive, especially if they’re long.) Several of the cases I chose not to look at involved juveniles, which meant that even more of the case files would not be part of the public record. After three trips to the courthouse and access to very limited parts of the cases, the only conclusion that could be reached about the original allegation of overcharging was “not guilty” since the jury (me) couldn’t get enough evidence to prove the allegations.
SINCE THEN, it’s become even more clear that second guessing individual case results, much less drawing larger conclusions about the criminal justice system, is fruitless unless you’re involved from day one and can get ahold of most of the relevant documents, a time-consuming process, and, even then, a hit or miss undertaking. Not to mention, somewhat subjective. As one cop told me, “If the system’s working right, everybody’s guilty.” By which he meant, if someone is properly arrested and the DA files proper charges backed up by sufficient evidence, the jury will conclude that the person is guilty of the charges. But of course, the system is far from perfect, and, by a combination of legal secrecy, procedural limitations, non-cooperation, ignorance, overwork, false leads, delay, turnover, expediency, incompetence, occasional malfeasance, and bureaucracy (did we leave any out?) — versions of which can occur to some degree in every department in Mendocino County — it’s very hard to fairly and objectively examine a case from the outside. That’s why 1. It’s very hard for the public to know if it’s getting its money’s worth from the criminal justice system (other than it’s too big and has too many lawyers and judges), and 2. The death penalty should never be an option.
(Mark Scaramella)
A READER WRITES: “I was at a deck party awhile back, and the bugs were having a ball biting everyone. A man at the party sprayed the lawn and deck floor with Listerine, and the little demons disappeared. The next year I filled a 4-ounce spray bottle and used it around my seat whenever I saw mosquitoes. And voila! That worked as well. It worked at a picnic where we sprayed the area around the food table, the children's swing area, and the standing water nearby. During the summer, I don't leave home without it. Pass it on.”
MENTION THE ZODIAC KILLER and the media come running. In what has to be the least plausible Zodiac theory ever, right up there with the one that links Big Z with Charles Manson, a recovered memory case turned up in The City recently with a disbarred lawyer to claim that her father was Zodiac. Not only was Dad a homicidal maniac, but when his unfortunate daughter was only 8 years old, Dad took her along on a couple of kill runs to the SF Bay Area from their home in LA. And Dad even had her write one of Zodiac's singular muder celebrations to the San Francisco Chronicle! Dad's other daughter immediately convened a press conference to denounce her sister as a nut case. But the mere mention of Zodiac the media come running.
SERIOUS STUDENTS of the Zodiac murders, me among them, mostly think that Robert Graysmith has done the definitive book on the case in which Graysmith, supported by police investigators from the several jurisdictions Zodiac killed in, makes what seems to me to be an irrefutable case that a fellow named Arthur Leigh Allen of Vallejo was Zodiac. Allen died just ahead of an indictment naming him as the famous killer.
I KNEW one of Zodiac's victims. I met Paul Stine when we both drove cab for Big Yellow in 1967. Stine was a graduate student, married, father of two little girls. This quiet, pleasant fellow was shot to death by Zodiac at Washington and Cherry on the sedate, wealthy perimeter of Pacific Heights. The killer then strolled off north towards Julius Kahn Playground. Some kids old enough to use a phone were looking down at the street when they saw Zodiac reach over from the back seat of the cab to grab the unsuspecting Stine in a chokehold while he simultaneously shot Stine behind the ear. The police dispatcher, probably out of habit, alerted nearby patrols that the killer was a black male, and not the stocky white male with a crewcut and a peculiar rolling gait like he'd been crippled as a kid, which fit the aforementioned Allen to the proverbial T. A patrol car had stopped the white Zodiac and asked him if he'd seen a black male with a gun. Zodiac said he hadn't and walked on. A few days later Zodiac, counting coup, mailed a piece of Stine's bloody shirt to the Chronicle. The piece of shirt was accompanied by one of Z's patented nut letters. Zodiac liked the publicity, and he got plenty of it. He's still getting it, and I still got the sads at the intersection of Washington and Cherry when I lived at 7th Avenue, and often walked past the infamous site.
THE CITY seemed to be teeming with maniacs when Zodiac was doing his thing, but these days The City (apart from the living dead downtown) seems so rich and freshly painted and peopled with much more wholesome young people than the Zodiac days that I sometimes have to look for the Golden Gate Bridge to remind myself where I am.
BACK THEN, early in the Love Generation, Zodiac had everyone scared. He sent out communiques threatening to take out whole school buses of children while an inspired group of alienated black men, the Zebra killers, stalked and shot white devils, including the future mayor of the city Art Agnos, as other terminally estranged citizens shot at cab top lights while commie cults bombed government commodes and doorways, and in between these revolutionary acts stomped around in black leather jackets that just happened to fall open to display handguns when the girls were around.
BUT THE LEVEL OF VIOLENCE in the Bay Area was shocking even by American standards, and so prevalent right down to a fog-like miasma of bad street vibes, so bad that thousands of hippies and hip-symps lit out for the territories of Sonoma, Mendocino and Humboldt counties, the least energetic settling into the Russian River basin west of Santa Rosa, the medium energetic in Mendocino County, the heartiest hips in Humboldt and even on into Trinity County where the most serious dropouts of all made their new homes. If you haven't read Graysmith's book on Zodiac, I recommend it. The recent Netflix doc is good, too, faithful to events and chock fulla new Zodiac revelations.
ONE AFTERNOON a Frisco lawyer was riding home from work in his limo when he saw two men eating grass in Golden Gate Park. Disturbed, the lawyer ordered his driver to stop. The lawyer asked the men, “Why are you eating grass?” “We don't have any money for food,” one replied. “We have to eat grass.” “You come with me to my house and I'll feed you,” the lawyer said. “But sir, I have a wife and two children with me. They're over there, under that tree.” “Bring them along,” the lawyer replied with a magnanimous wave. Turning to the second grass eating man the lawyer said, “You come with us too.” The second man, in a pitiful voice, said, “But sir, I also have a wife and six children with me!” “Bring them all, as well,” the lawyer answered. “No problem.” They all climbed into the limo, one on top of the other. As the limo headed out of the park, one of the poor fellows turned to the lawyer and said, “Sir, you are too kind. Thank you for taking all of us with you.” The lawyer replied, “Glad to do it. You'll really love my place. It's been a fine year. The grass is almost a foot high.”
WE USED TO CALL our answering machine, “the nut screener.” One of the most abusive but funniest messages? “Pick it up, you bastards. I know you're there doing something queer or un-American or both.”
AND THIS ONE: “You know why this country is broke? Because the government is bringing in Mexicans and buying them Escalades!”
ALWAYS CERTAIN to irritate is the grandiose claim by deluded liberals that they're “speaking truth to power.” This boast is as dumb as blaming Mexicans for everything gone wrong. Power knows the truth and could care less what you — especially you — say to it. Power only cares when you do something to it, like take power away from it which, given the givens of political opposition in this country, is unlikely to happen until ordinary Americans stop whining and placing blame everywhere but where it belongs.
FRANTICALLY running up and down the television channels a few years ago during the “Great Recession” looking for the Niners game, I paused at CNN where Anderson Cooper was talking about the housing crisis. The securely housed Cooper devoted maybe five full minutes to the ever-larger crisis. Of course Cooper was very, very concerned. You could tell. He furrowed his brow at least twice. CNN had arrayed a dozen or so LA suburbanites on a bleacher-like apparatus behind their glib host, among them a real estate agent who said business was pretty good selling repos to first-time home buyers, a woman who said she'd just snagged a repo house valued at a half mil a year ago for $155,000 and a 55-year-old electrician who was barely hanging on to his house because he'd been injured on the job and his wife was dying of cancer. The electrician's house, just a short time ago, had been appraised at more than $600,000. It was now appraised at about $150,000. He'd worked all his life, as had his wife before she was struck down. Using a doomed man's despair as ruthlessly as any bailed out banker, CNN's message was the old free enterprise bullshit about one man's misfortune being another's opportunity. Sure, Mr. Electrician, you and your dying wife are about to become homeless, but now a young couple just starting life's journey can afford to buy your house! There was no mention that a recent bill to prevent 1.7 million mortgage foreclosures by permitting homeowners to refi their mortgages was defeated on a bipartisan vote in the senate 51 - 45. Democrat bigwig Dick Durbin summed up, “Frankly, bankers own the place.”
INCOMING 4TH DISTRICT SUPERVISOR Bernie Norvell looks forward to working on countywide problems. … Norvell: “I am excited to help make the county government a well-oiled machine.” …
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.
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 an 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.
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.”
ON-LINE COMMENTS OF THE WEEK
[1] ON-LINE COMMENT OF THE DAY
At a minimum we have had a front row seat to man's malignant nature. History is filled with similar and far more vicious periods of slaughter and backstabbing. Good men will continue to rise up to stop evil men, and all men will strive to survive and thrive in a world of conflicting interests and limited resources. Often it's enough to do no harm, and do unto others as you would have them do unto you, but not always. Evil inevitably rises up to take the place of order and stability, and the battle goes on. Life is truly a mystery.
In 1659, the Puritans in Massachusetts enacted a law that declared that Christmas was sacrilege and exchanging of gifts, greetings, and wearing fine clothing on that day was Satanic. Anyone caught celebrating was fined 5 shillings. (About 5 days wages.)
[2] As a former therapist I have seen a condition called HPD, Histrionic Personality Disorder.
People with this condition often exhibit provocative, inappropriate behavior even when it leads to negative consequences.
This is an attention seeking play. Most clients I saw were unloved as a child and have been ignored their whole lives. This is the chance to get the attention they crave.
It is treatable. In the meantime offer a hug and let them know Jesus loves them.
[3] That tax money spent to “help the homeless”? There was no plan to track or audit it so we won’t truly know. I think it mostly got squandered on committees and organizations getting funding to “solve” the problem. They never figured out that to get people off the streets and into houses you actually had to create housing. Talk about a farce! I imagine a bunch got scandalled away possibly by big-timers but more likely distributed and squandered by a multitude of agencies…many of whom believed they were “helping”. It’s easy to blow tons of money when there is no oversight. Kind of like all that covid relief money disappearing into criminals’ pockets- Poof! All gone!! And nobody knows where…
[4] 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.
[5] First, and most important, starting in the 70s and 80s, and accelerating ever since, the American voter is simply more ignorant and less intelligent. While a higher percentage of Americans have college degrees, Robert Putnam, in Bowling Alone (2005) wrote that studies showed that the average 1948 US high school graduate was more proficient in math, science, history, and English than the average 1998 US College graduate. So, the public had more discernment and was smarter.
Next, TV, and then the internet, reduced the attention span of the masses. So sound bites became more popular, to the point that a lot of Americans get their news from Facebook, and consider themselves informed. Which also reflected the dumbing down of Americans mentioned above.
The media itself became more concentrated. As late as the 1980s/90s, there were hundreds of newspapers, even though many of their stories came from wire services. Now four or five companies own like 90% of the print papers. And who reads anyway?
As people stopped reading, and as cable, and later the internet, and smartphones, became more popular, the news media, to stay in business or make more money began catering to "customers", and tailoring the news accordingly, while still peddling the establishment message.
The one good thing is that the internet has spawned alternative media.
If one wants to have some idea of what is going on in the world beyond one’s neighborhood or small town, one needs to go to various alternative sites, and then try to discern the truth.
And that’s why Kamala Harris and Hillary Clinton want to set "standards" for the internet--to take that small crack of light away.
[6] 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. Cater 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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