Off the Record 2/3/2025

WE CAN'T SAY we weren't warned. The orange monarch is doing what he said he would do — establish America as Backwardsville.

WORLD HEALTH ORGANIZATION? Who needs it? Global Warming? No such thing, as a foot of snow falls on New Orleans. People born in the United States? Color coded, and they gotta go. Fascist assault on the national capitol? “These people are great patriots.”

HOW CAN TRUMP cancel birthright citizenship? But, but, but… isn't that illegal? Not if you own the courts, and Trump owns the one that makes the final decisions.

IN THE FLURRY of retro edicts flying out of the White House, the one issuing blanket pardons to the Jan 6 rioters will establish them as Orange Man's on-call street militia. They will soon be visible as they're deployed with a wink and a nod to break up the opposition's rallies and demonstrations. The Jan 6 yobbos, with their “patriotism” sanctioned by Trump, will likely be reinforced by thousands of new recruits.

THE SO-CALLED Proud Boys have already been unleashed on the libs in Portland, but the libs seem to have toughened up since the sixties when demonstrators were mostly book readers. (At least in my street fightin' circles.) The Portland street battles saw the libs give the Proud Boys all they could handle, and then some.

CURIOUS about the Peltier case? The AVA recommends “In the Spirit of Crazy Horse” by Peter Mathiessen, a comprehensive investigation of Peltier's alleged shooting of two FBI agents as well as the psycho-social context of the rez where it occurred.

ADD to my infinitely long list of irritations — the Press Democrat's two-tier obituaries, one for locals called “legacy” obits, one for celebs called “newsmaker” obits. Since we're all equal, presumably, on The Other Side, why not just one obituary column called Deaths?

CHUCK ARTIGUES wrote in to say that Dave Chappelle's recent SNL appearance was very, very funny and available on YouTube. I second Chuck's review. Funniest stuff on SNL in years, not that I would know really since I'm never up that late, and the clips I see of the late night comics don't inspire me to delay my 9pm beddy bye.

AS A KID, I read the sports page of the Chronicle with such avidity I can still recite whole rosters of ball clubs from the Old Pacific Coast League. I followed the Seals, USF basketball and 49er football. I got to a couple of Niner games at old Kezar, and until recent old age afflictions, I'd pop into the old Kezar Pavilion on an occasional summer's night to watch a few minutes of what I think is called the Pro-Am Basketball League. Like most people, I keep to the perimeter of the park after dark to avoid the wild things lurking inside, but beginning with the gauntlet of dope dealers at the Stanyan gate.

AMERICA isn't the country I grew up in, which isn't entirely a bad thing but isn't exactly a good thing either. There's a passage in Phillip Roth's novel, ‘Exit Ghost,’ where a young person asks an old person, “What's it like to be old?” And the old person answers, “Try to imagine the year 4000. That's what it's like.”

NOT LONG after we posted the abbreviated report about Sacramento lawyer Kelli Johnson’s lawsuit against the Mendocino County Sheriff’s office, we received a copy of the County’s “response” to Johnson’s lawsuit. In an interesting coincidence, the County Counsel’s office hired a Sacramento lawyer named John R. Whitefleet to prepare a pro-forma boilerplate response in which most of the “answers” were versions of “Defendants generally and specifically deny the allegation…” In a few cases they said, “Defendants lack sufficient knowledge that enables them to answer the allegtion.” And in a couple of cases they answer by saying that the allegations “contain conclusions of law, argument or misapplication of law and not averments of fact.”

ONE OF MS. JOHNSON’S ALLEGATIONS is that she was denied free speech rights by the Mendocino deputy who arrested her and a corrections officer because, Ms. Johnson says, her bad treatment stemmed from some provocative remarks she made during the incident on the Mendocino Headlands.

According to Ms. Johnson’s complaint at one point she told the arresting deputy that “his mustache was hideous and she didn’t understand how he could look at himself in the mirror every morning and not shave it,” alleging that the mustache comment was the reason she was arrested on the spot. When Ms. Johnson asked the deputy why she was being arrested he allegedly replied, “Public intoxication.” To which, Ms. Johnson alleges, “Plaintiff was clearly no longer intoxicated.”

This statement appears to be in conflict with an earlier claim by Ms. Johnson where she says that her mother called law enforcement after she refused to leave her parents’ rented house when asked by her mother because “she could not drive because she had been drinking and smoking marijuana that she had legally purchased at the dispensary in town and that there were no Lyfts or Ubers available. Plaintiff explained that [after being kicked out of her parents house for a “panic attack”] she had nowhere else to go and needed to take a nap so that she could safely drive to Napa, California, for a date that evening on her way to Sacramento. Plaintiff said she would wait until the evening before driving to ensure that she was sober.”

LATER, after her alleged mistreatment during the arrest and on the way to Ukiah, Johnson says that at the jail a “heavy deputy with.a mustache” told her, “You don’t get to talk now.” To which she says she replied, “Actually, I get to say whatever the fuck I want whenever the fuck I want, and there is nothing you can do about it bitch.” (If she really was sober by this point, that doesn’t seem like a lawyerly way to handle the situation.)

AFTER BEING ROUGHLY put into a holding cell, according to Ms. Johnson, “a jail attendee” (?) brought her a glass of water asking, “You’re not from around here, are you?” To which, Ms. Johnson says she replied, “Oh, I get it. your small town police force thinks they are above the law! Well guess what! The Constitution is the Supreme Law of the Land, and it applies everywhere in this country, including your small town police force.”

MS. JOHNSON may have a beef about the way she was handled (we still await the videos). But it will be interesting to see how she plans to prove her allegaion that she was arrested for insulting the cops, cops who are regularly subjected to various drunk and sober insults, in violation of her free speech rights.

(Mark Scaramella)

FRED GARDNER

The New Yorker cover by Barry Blitt shows Elon Musk beaming as he gets sworn in alongside an eclipsed Donald Trump. The artist flatters Musk, smoothing out those deep, ugly notches that flank his lower lip (the result of too much snarling and botched plastic surgery).

Musk has tweeted “My pronouns are Prosecute/Fauci." Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), head of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, has said that Dr. Anthony Fauci could be charged with perjury based on his testimony to Congress about the origins of the Covid virus and the National Institutes of Health’s handling of infectious disease research.

Fauci was given a preemptive pardon before Joe Biden shuffled off. Whoever wrote the accompanying statement explained an aspect of how things really work: "Baseless and politically motivated investigations wreak havoc on the lives, safety, and financial security of targeted individuals and their families. Even when individuals have done nothing wrong—and in fact have done the right thing—and will ultimately be exonerated, the mere fact of being investigated or prosecuted can irreparably damage reputations and finances." (This point was driven home to pot partisans when the Medical Board of California investigated eight of the first nine MDs to join the group now known as the Society of Cannabis Clinicians.)

Fauci retired in 2022. Because of ongoing death threats, he and his family remain under federal protection. Beth Mole summarized his career on the Ars Tehnica site: "For nearly four decades, Fauci directed the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. He advised seven presidents, beginning with Ronald Reagan and, among his many accomplishments, played a crucial role in the response to the HIV/AIDS epidemic. Fauci was a leading architect of PEPFAR, the global AIDS response program begun by President George W. Bush that is estimated to have saved 25 million lives. Fauci served as Biden's medical advisor until his retirement."

Blowing a Lay-up

Stephen Rosenthal is missed. How could he kick the AVA habit? Who else might dispute my observation that Julius Randle, who loved playing in the Big Apple, sulking in Minneapolis… The over/under on the Bills-Ravens game was fifty-one and a half. The Bills won 27-25. How do the bookies do that? And how many millions of dollars were riding on the game-tying pass that Mark Andrews let slip through his hands?

Blowing a lay-up

is a moment in hell

it's a blow to the soul

cause you can't get the roll

You’re ahead of the field

in apparent control

just don’t blow the lay up…

Saturday mornin on

the neighborhood court

you don’t have to be great

I am proud to report

You don’t have to be black

you can even be short

just you don’t blow the lay up…

Once I had cut for

a beautiful pass

and faked “Doctor Meat”

right down on his ass

Displaying my handle

Rising in class

Just don’t blow the lay-up…

Blowing a lay-up

is a moment in hell

A blow to the soul

The loss of a goal

Geometry’s simple

Watch out for the pole…

Put back the rebound.

I WAS ON a Muni bus, the 1 California, almost always a sedate, mostly Asian commute line running from the Richmond District to Chinatown, a line seldom in need of the cops. I've been on other east-west buses a couple of blocks to the south, the Geary buses, where the cops often have to remove someone drunk and crazy-acting, menacing other passengers or trying to rob them, all of which used to be unthinkable but is now prevalent public behavior.

THIS DAY the 1 California was as sedate as usual, but a street nut did come in through the back door at Fillmore, trailing feathers and sticks and magpie bits of colored glass from his backpack and talking to himself. “There's eighty thousand of us and we're all going in the wrong direction.”

HE REPEATED the eighty thousand figure about ten times, each rendition louder. I wondered at his stats. San Francisco has a population of about 800,000 and there were maybe forty people on the bus. Eighty thousand didn't seem to apply anywhere I was aware of, but if he was referring to the number of free range nuts in the city 80,000 probably wasn't far off.

THE CRAZY GUY sat himself down in the middle of the very back seat, wedged between an elderly Chinese man and a young girl who looked to be about 15. I was on a seat looking straight at him, and why Muni buses are designed this way is another mystery because placing the seats so people have to stare straight at each other is often a prescription for unhappy transactions with the facing person.

SO, I have to look straight at Mr. Nutball for about fifteen westbound minutes because it's either him or the ceiling. Anyway, I was not concerned about the elderly Chinese man, but the welfare of the girl was immediate. If you will excuse the ethnic generalization, the Chinese are better than any people on earth at simply not seeing what they're seeing. They seem to have a genetic gift for Zen-ing out the unpleasant, the untoward, the outrageous, which they and all of us get a boat load of every day in our crumbling society. They're just better at disappearing it than we are, letting the outrageous roll over them as if it isn't happening.

THE OLD CHINESE GUY reacted not at all to the crazy man singing out numerical arias next to him, but the young woman was visibly uncomfortable.

I WAS TAKING mental notes, half expecting crazy man to go off on me since I had the full frontal for his unhinged presentation as he sang out a final eighty thou lyric, reaching simultaneously for what looked to me like the young girl's thigh.

TIME for civic duty! “Wait a minute! Wha….” I fairly shouted as the girl calmly explained, “He's just petting my dog, sir. It's ok.” I hadn't seen the dog, but there it was muzzled at her feet, looking up at the crazy man who said to the girl, “You're very lucky to have a dog. I wish I had a dog.”

THE CHINESE gentleman never stirred.

THE CRAZY GUY soon got off at Clay and Taylor, Nob Hill, the high rent district, smiling to himself.

I WAS HEADED that day to the Embarcadero Theater to see a Werner Herzog film, “The Bad Lieutenant, Port of Call New Orleans,” a great little movie. The Chron's uncomprehending reviewer didn't like it much but I suspect that's because, and despite its rep as a cool-o groove-o decadent venue, Frisco is really a pretty tame place whose daily newspaper wouldn't want to find itself recommending real art because it might be bad for a newspaper business that's already in the process of going glub, glub, glub. Readers might be offended. “You suggested we should go see that, Mick?”

BE ALL THAT as it may or may not be, I've never seen a Herzog movie that wasn't fascinating. I knew this one, despite the reviews, was going to be worth a lot more than the $6.50 “senior” price of admission. Which it was, and then some. Harvey Keitel’s brilliant as Bad Lieutenant squared, and Nicholas Cage, who I'd always assumed was basically a feeb of the Tom Cruise type, is beyond good in the role of the berserk cop, so good that in a just film world Cage should have been a shoo-in for Best Actor at the Academy Awards.

THE STORY LINE is not even close to plausible, but that's not the point. The point, I'd say, is that old Werner, as a furriner, and a highbrow furriner at that, is basically taking his perception of America as completely berserkers and making that undeniable point in a movie. This thing is just terrific all the way through and very, very funny, but definitely not a film for the whole family, or most members of most families who haven't quite heard the terrible news.

KC MEADOWS remains the editor of the diminished, hedge fund gutted Ukiah Daily Journal. Some thirty years ago she wrote the following editorial which still applies:

“At Schat's Bakery a couple of weeks ago I was met by several teachers and the principal of the Grace Hudson Elementary School who were outraged at my comments back in October about the school's dismal performance. As a letter to the editor which we recently ran from those teachers says, they feel they have a great school and that they are making significant improvements all the time. As we talked that morning at Schat's there were several points discussed which I think bear repeating here. First, they objected to my calling the school restrictive and exclusive. However, they acknowledge that no child who does not already speak Spanish can enter the school past first grade. So, if you move into the south Ukiah neighborhood with a second, third, fourth, fifth or sixth grader who doesn't speak Spanish, that child will have to go to Nokomis or some other elementary school. I call that restrictive. This is no longer a neighborhood school — which most voters thought they were getting when they approved the funds to build it. This is now a special Spanish language immersion program school for which, I am told by these teachers, there is a waiting list. In fact, parents who want their non-Hispanic, English-speaking children to learn Spanish, are flocking to this school. There are students from Willits and even Lake County I am told. The teachers also felt that it was unfair for me to pick on Grace Hudson since all the Ukiah Unified School District elementary schools are underperforming schools with low test scores. The point I made is that the children underperforming the most are the children who are being taught in their native language (in kindergarten and first grade at Grace Hudson, teaching is 90% in Spanish and the English-Spanish ratio adjusts with each grade so that hopefully, by the time all the kids are in fifth grade they are bilingual). The problem is, according to the teachers, that while the children are being taught in Spanish, the tests are in English and therefore unfair. Also, tests are generically unfair. Testing kids does not help teach them anything, these teachers asserted. Interestingly, the non-Hispanic kids being taught in Spanish (a language they don't know) do better on the tests. In fact, the teachers claim that the English-speaking youngsters pick up Spanish very quickly. Being taught Spanish in kindergarten and first grade, they pick it up in a snap, they say. So why, I asked, does “immersion” into Spanish work so well for the English-speaking kids, but somehow, the Hispanic kids need five years to learn English? It's because their parents are poor and uneducated, I'm told. These Spanish-speaking parents — who mostly have third grade educations, they tell me — are unable to help their children and have the kind of involvement in their child's education that the English-speaking kids' parents do. I find that an extremely condescending attitude. So I did a little more research on Grace Hudson School and found out that the English learners at the school do take their California STAR tests in Spanish (which no one mentioned) and lo and behold, they do no better than the Spanish speaking kids at Nokomis or other local elementary schools where they are being tested in a language they supposedly can't learn very easily. For instance, Spanish speaking students at Grace Hudson, being taught in Spanish for 90% of the day, who took the California second grade language arts tests in Spanish, overall scored 306.9 (on a scale of 600). The second graders at Nokomis School (with a 44% population of English learners, being taught in English) took the test in English and scored 332.6 overall on the same test. In math, the Grace Hudson Spanish speakers taking the math tests in Spanish scored 323.2 overall, while the Nokomis kids, almost half just learning English and taking the test in English, scored overall 360.6. The Grace Hudson Spanish-speaking kids also take the tests in English and so, adding in the English-speaking kids (about 45% of the total population) the scores are about the same: 306.6 in language arts and 330.2 in math. And these kinds of score results continue into third and fourth grades as well. As we saw this week, none of Ukiah Unified Schools have anything to crow about in the test score arena. In fact, it looks like the state will be stepping in to improve all these schools where the District has been unable to. Teachers complain constantly that tests do not reflect learning or education. I disagree. Yes, you want children to be ‘life learners’ and love education for its own sake. But you also want them to be able to write a clear sentence and decode a bank statement. Finding out if they have achieved some basic level of competence is not unreasonable in my view. When the school district is looking at closing schools and wondering how it can afford to keep going, is it really necessary to have a specialized language school that does not seem to be achieving anything special, taking over the only brand new school in the district in a neighborhood where being provided a brand new school would have sent a clear message about the importance of education to parents who would have understood it even with their third grade educations?”

WITH EGGS fast becoming as valuable as gold nuggets, local historians will be interested to know that the late Emil Rossi remembered when there were three chicken farms in The Valley just before he went off to fight in World War Two. One of them was a thousand-bird operation that Rossi himself ran at the family's Boonville home, another one near Philo was the largest with some three thousand hens, and a third at the O'Brien property near Navarro. “We all did pretty well, too,” Rossi recalled. “Mendoza's Market in Mendocino drove through every week to pick up the eggs for delivery down south.”

THE COUNTRY may be sliding into permanent poverty and chaos, but Mendocino County’s judges, more numerous in relation to the County’s sparse population than they are in any other county in the state, are going to get themselves a new Courthouse, complete with indoor parking to spare their majesties the indignity of sharing public sidewalks.

THE EXISTING COURTHOUSE works fine. There’s no need for a new one, but lawyers make the rules, and when the lawyers organized as judges go to the lawyers organized as a state legislature the lawyers are going to get their way. Which is why an “estimated $179.9 million” will be invested in a major eyesore off West Perkins Street where the abandoned train depot now rests in open fields of windblown trash opposite the Adventist Hospital complex.

THE NEW COUNTY COURTHOUSE will give us twin eyesores only a couple of long blocks from the present County Courthouse, also an eyesore but one we’re at least used to. And as we all know, whenever a public agency precedes a dollar amount with “estimated” you can double the estimate and still be a hundred mil short. This baby will cost a lot more than $179.9 million and serve only the judges and their gofers. The other county offices, including the DA, will stay in the present county courthouse.

BEFORE IT WAS slathered over with police state stone and one-way Argentine junta glass back in 1950, the year America went blind, the County Courthouse in Ukiah was a kind of architectural wonder, the County' seat's unique Gothic anchor was the largest building in town, but a graceful structure in its way and one everyone could be proud of.

Of course the old Courthouse was built in the 19th century when local moneybags took some pride in what their towns looked like, but it's been structural barbarism ever since. (Most of today's judges and lawyers live on Ukiah's 19th century west side or tucked away in gated aeries high in the hills.)

IF YOU’RE WONDERING what the new County Courthouse is going to look like, tour the nearest bank near you. Imagine that bank quadruple-size, imagine it squatting on West Perkins opposite the jumble of double-wide-like structures assembled by the medical Adventists on the other side of the street. Better yet, you don’t have to imagine it; look at the “bar code” plans.

THE CRUMBLING WILLITS COURTHOUSE still reaches right into your heart and squeezes it dead.

When that malignant concrete excrescence was plunked down in central Willits opposite what was once an attractive, gracious little town square erected, of course, in the 19th century, the legal community welcomed it as more evidence of their commitment to public convenience. No consideration was given to what the thing would look like, but North County people wouldn't have to drive all the way to Ukiah for legal business. They could do it in Willits. Not long after it was built the Willits courthouse had to be closed because it was falling apart.

THE ORIGINAL TRIUMPHANT press release announcing the new Ukiah Courthouse was signed by then- “Presiding Judge of the Superior Court Cindee Mayfield,” who I remember her pre-judge flouncing around the Courthouse in a mini-skirt as she and Jared Carter fended off the tree huggers while Louisiana-Pacific completed its Mendo mop-up ops, Carter and Mayfield facilitating the final destruction of the County’s timber industry. (If that won’t earn a girl a promotion what will?)

JUDGE MAYFIELD, with all the County’s boy judges peering expectantly out from behind her solemn robes, announced, “The Mendocino County Courthouse is inefficient, inaccessible and deteriorating. A new courthouse will greatly benefit the people of Mendocino County who come to court to do business or serve on juries.”

NO IT WON'T. The people of Mendocino County haven’ t judicially benefited in the slightest since the County’s far flung justice courts were “reorganized” out of existence beginning back in '75. Mendocino County's legal business used to be resolved where it occurred, not in a central structure presided over by self-selected people who make five times the American average salary.

THERE WERE ONCE murder trials in Boonville! Which is as it should be. The present arrangements are made with one consideration in mind — the comfort and convenience of the apparatus itself. And now the apparat is getting themselves a new courthouse, and Ukiah is getting another very big, very bad building to go with all its other very bad little buildings.

WHEN YOU CONSIDER that medieval Turks could erect the splendors of Istanbul, not to mention the architectural triumphs of the Romans and the Greeks, but the best us moderns can do is Willits and Ukiah? Is this what the professors mean when they talk about devolution? WTF?

NATURALLY, the new courthouse, projected to occupy 4.4 acres formerly owned by the defunct railroad magically become the property of the Northcoast Democratic Party, is touted as a huge economic boost for Ukiah. Back in 2009 Judge Mayfield promised us, “This project is…estimated to create nearly 3,000 direct and indirect jobs…and is scheduled for completion by spring 2015.”

IN FACT, it will be bid out, and some outfit from Sacramento will get the work because the local guys won't be, well, they won't be big enough and connected enough, and even that decision will be sloughed off to Sacramento where it will be designed to fit in with the nearby Holiday Inn and WalMart, and the splendors of the Adventist Hospital complex across the street.

WILL THE PEOPLE working and being “served” in the new Courthouse walk a quarter mile or more west to eat and shop in what's left of old Ukiah? Doubt it. More likely they'll shuffle across Perkins to sample the culinary delights available at the Pear Tree Shopping Center, or east to the big boxes straddling 101 for Applebee's and Taco Bell. What's left of old Ukiah will suffer another gut shot.

LINDY PETERS:

The vote for Vice Mayor in Fort Bragg was not 3-2 as mentioned in today’s AVA letter column. The vote for Vice Mayor was 4-1. I should know. Not only did I support the vote for Mayor and Vice-Mayor, I immediately shook both their hands and congratulated them both on their selections when we re-organized and re-seated. You can watch the video.

THE GERMAN NEWSPAPER Die Zeit covered Musk’s upraised arm for its article titled: “A Hitler Salute is a Hitler Salute is a Hitler Salute.” (Musk has endorsed the far-right German Party, AfD.)

— Jeffrey St. Clair

GRINGO, origins of. A scholar named Ernesto Priego at University College, London, writes: “I am Mexican, and lived in Mexico for 29 years, but I never heard anyone use the term ‘gringo’ to refer to anyone other than US citizens. In the third volume of ‘Historia, tradiciones y legendas de calles de Mexico,’ Artemio de Valle-Arizpe writes that the word ‘gringo’ first appeared in Mexico after the incursion of General Winfield Scott in September 1847. De Valle-Arizpe describes an ‘unhappy’ and ‘abominable’ song that Scott's troops sang incessantly, and which began with the words ‘Green Grow…’ The Mexican historian tells how the locals, not knowing English, interpreted the song's first words as ‘gringo.’ I grew up seeing graffiti that read ‘Green Go Home’ next to a cartoon of Uncle Sam…” But Gustavo Arellano, who writes the widely circulated newspaper column called, “Ask A Mexican” says, “Mexicans don't call gringos gringos. Only gringos call gringos gringos. Mexicans call gringos ‘gabachos’.”

YEARS AGO I took a call from a subscriber who’d bought twenty acres on Chicken Ridge in Covelo. He said he was a Bay Area accountant who’d purchased the property sight-unseen at a foreclosure sale. The twenty acre parcel was cheap and he’d always wanted a place in the country. The accountant said it took him almost a year before he visited his acquisition, and when he finally got around to making the long trip north to Covelo he brought his wife and two small children along for what he envisioned as a weekend camp out, a young family together in the country far from the bright lights, where the kids could run around without fear of traffic and other urban hazards.

THE UNWITTING new owners of their own country estate, arrived about noon only to be greeted by the startling sound of nearby gun fire. The accountant said he walked up the hill to both introduce himself to his new neighbors and to politely ask that they cease fire, explaining that he feared he and his family might be hurt by a stray bullet.

THE ACCOUNTANT said he was met by a “wild-looking male individual” who promptly told the accountant “to get the bleepity blank off my property or I'll shoot you!” The accountant drove into Covelo and called 911.

THE LATE DEPUTY Bob Davis, a former Navy Seal familiar with ultra-vi, soon appeared, listened sympathetically to the accountant's unhappy story and said, “I wouldn't camp up there myself without a gun.” When the accountant called me he asked, “Where am I anyway? What kind of place is this?”

MENDOCINO COUNTY IS A VERY large place with a very small police force relative to its area, which is vast. And home to a significant number of residents with zero respect for the law, or any other rules. Unless you live in one of Mendocino County's incorporated areas where law enforcement is only minutes away, you should probably have some means of defending yourself. As former Sheriff Allman himself once suggested during an appearance in Gualala. “I don't want to push guns on anyone who doesn't want one,” Allman said, “but I encourage concealed weapons as the Second Amendment gives you that right and you have every right in the world to protect yourself.”

THE SECOND AMENDMENT says you can keep a gun in your house if you're a member of “a well-regulated militia.” Which most gun owners, me included, are not — well-regulated, that is. The Second Amendment doesn't say anything about concealed weapons, which don't seem to me a particularly good idea for most citizens, especially those with infirmities, physical and mental, and there goes roughly half our population right there if you figure in the infirmities.

THE ONLY PART of the Constitution most gun people have read, the Second Amendment, was written by the rural aristocrats who'd just beaten back mad King George and feared a counter-attack on their new country, so new it didn't have (or want) a standing army, hence the idea of a musket by the door in case the redcoats came back. George, Tom, Ben and the boys could not have foreseen a seething population of 330 million locust-like consumers scared bleepless of each other and armed with automatic weapons and endless supplies of ammo. But a home defense unit isn't a bad idea these days as the chaos beyond one’s front door grows by the day.

AMONG THE MANY things local libs get completely wrong is their hostility to the armed services as an option, often the only option, for local youth. Yes, a kid might get killed, but the odds are heavily in favor that he won't be killed; but the odds that he'll drive drunk into a redwood or get shot in a pot patch are more likely than him or her buying eternity at the hands of a furriner. But what do you see for the typical Mendo County high school graduate? Nothing. Take a look at all the young people caught up in the justice system, and tell me the military services wouldn't have given them a chance at life.

ALTHOUGH I was magically tracked as college material in high school through zero effort on my part, I had no desire for more class time and no money anyway, but I had to do something to support myself and opted for the Marines, deluding myself that I was tough enough to manage it. Just barely, in the harrowing event.

IF IT WEREN'T for sports I would have dropped out of high school, and I don't regret going into the Marines. The “warrior” experience de-deluded me. Additionally and moreover, those of you who know something about the history of this country, will know that it was the wonderful world of sports and the military, those two institutions, that achieved what ethnic harmony we've since achieved in this country. Sports and the military threw us all in together and, for the most part, it was good for us, and very good for US.

I KINDA ENJOY spam, the daily deluge of electronic come-ons. In a darkening world, I see spam as an opportunity for tiny funsies, the amusement opportunities for a tiny, idle mind. I recently wrote back to a guy who calls himself Brother Steve, a self-alleged man of the cloth who sells everything from gospel music to accounting services. Brother Steve hits me at least once a day with special discount offers on an implausibly large range of services. I wrote back to Brother Steve to ask him if he was related to Br'er Rabbit. Brother Steve instantly responded.. “Br'er Rabbit's my cousin,” he said. Dorothy Lee Donahue describes herself as an “energetic alchemist” and a “Certified Reiki Master Instructor.” I asked Dot if she could make me some gold out of the old newspapers cluttering up my office. “Hmmm,” the energetic alchemist replied, “I'll see what I can do.”

THE ANNUAL hypocrisy defaming the memory of Martin Luther King has come and gone, an orgy of media self-congratulation on the reverence Americans now have, thanks to King, for non-violent political progress when in living fact King would be appalled at who and how his memory has been hijacked. I happened to be alive and more or less cognizant in 1968 when King was murdered, alive and more or less cognizant in what has since magically become synonymous with, of all delusions, “progressive” civic policy in that adult playground known as San Francisco.

I REMEMBER widespread jubilation among white people, men especially, at King's murder, and I remember most vividly that it was the national media that whipped up public opinion against King, the bravest kind of man there is because he wasn't naturally courageous according to his biographers, the kind of guy who got up every morning not knowing if he'd be alive at the end of the day. Prominent as he was, King, most places, had no police protection. His house with his wife and kids in it was fire bombed with impunity and J. Edgar Hoover, arguably America's greatest nutball ever, who spent his down time prancing around in a cocktail dress, bugged King's hotel rooms and passed the tapes of King's robust private life around to Washington big shots. When King started denouncing the Vietnam War and the U.S. as “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world,” and saying “maybe there's something wrong with capitalism,” well, here was a man walking around with a neon bull's eye on his chest. And sure enough, King didn't live to be 40. A few people reading this will remember the lefty hall south of Market from where many Bay Area protests were launched beginning in the early 1960s. Something Alley. I've forgotten the address although I was a habitue. So, the night of King's murder I headed to Troublemaker Central to see what we were going to do about it, which turned out to be a big march, a very big march but not so large that it intimidated into silence a lot of race baiters shouting insults from the sidewalk. I wound up leafleting on Market Street near Powell in preparation for that event. A totally unhinged guy went at me verbally so intensely I had to warn him that I was not a non-violent person and bluster blah-blah mothafucka get away from me or I'll Gandhi your nose for you. That was the worst of it that day for me, and not any kind of a big deal over a lifetime of unpleasant political encounters. But I can still see that fool's red face screaming foul insults at me and MLK. And I can remember the tenor of the editorial comment in area papers that King, just prior to his assassination, had “gone too far” and ought to confine his efforts to civil rights, about which he'd also gone too far before he became too famous to go too far on that one. King was always going too far, and if he were around today he'd be going wayyyyyyy too far for the idiot cadres of the DNC with their wars on the poor, their giveaways to the banks, their phony healthcare reform, their eager support for mass murder in Gaza, their bland collaboration with everything gone terribly wrong in this doomed country. King’s real legacy has turned out to be an intensification of everything he gave up his life to prevent. King's birthday ought to be a national day of mourning for missed messages. (The best book on the man remains the little Penguin bio by Marshall Frady.)

AYN RAND is among the Trump Gang's favorite writers, at least the only one they dare mention publicly, The Turner Diaries perhaps the unmentionable one. The more cerebral, or pretentious Magas, go deeper, but Schicklgruber had all kinds of big thinkers behind him, too, including a broad swathe of the German faculty. Unfair of me to malign the maligners this way since I have no idea what they read, but they'd likely appreciate Rand, the worst fiction writer in the history of English lit because lots of the insider Trumpers think of themselves as intellectuals. And supermen.

THE ONLY TWO Randians I've known directly have been about as far from Randian supermen as it's possible to get. One was Millie Perkins' brother. Millie Perkins, I think, is the actress best known for having played Ann Frank. Jim Perkins, Millie's brother, worked at Safeway.

I MET JIM when I rented a room with a shared kitchen in an old Victorian on Scott near Hayes in San Francisco. My housemates included a German baker who always worked this one comment into the conversation: “I vant to get out of dis crazy country.” There was also a fellow named Henry Cohen who said he'd fought with the Castro Cubans at the Bay of Pigs. “The trouble with you, kid,” Cohen would say to me, “is that you're not educated.” By which he explained that I wasn't a Marxist-Leninist like he claimed to be. ”Henry, every time I try to read that stuff I fall asleep.”

WHENEVER I saw Perkins he, too, enumerated my educational deficiencies but assured me I could put myself right by reading Ayn Rand. The most interesting guy in the building, which is now a very fancy bed and breakfast without so much as a hint of its life as a $40 a week tenement circa '63, was a young drunk who threw himself down the stairs every night at precisely 8 o'clock. The first time I saw “Mr. Stairs,” as we called him, hurl himself from the grungy top floor kitchen to the first landing, I was startled. And worried that he'd hurt himself. I hustled out of my room just as Stairs was un-crumpling himself halfway down the curved stairwell.

EVEN with the curve that spared him another 15 feet of free fall, the plunge was a good 20 feet down. “Are you all right?” Mr. Stairs just looked at me, got to his feet and disappeared into his room. Perkins, the Randian appeared. “Do it again, you bastard!” he yelled at Mr. Stairs retreating back.”And break your neck this time!”

I ONCE INVITED a girlfriend over for a communal dinner with my lunatic housemates, but as soon as she saw the kitchen she said, “This is too depressing. I have to leave.” Just as she reached the front door, Stairs did his 8pm self-toss. “God!” she exclaimed as she left, forever, as that tenuous romance turned out.

I WAS dismayed by Stairs myself. It was his creepy punctuality that got to me. A guy throwing himself down the stairs every night at exactly the same time? I'd start looking at the clock about 7 in anticipation, and right at 8 here he'd come, head over loose-limbed heels, and no faking the pure heedlessness of his plummet.

BUT STAIRS always picked himself up and walked away. Perkins, the objectivist, was totally contemptuous not only of Stairs but all mental illness. He took the hard view of everything, the dog-eat-dog perspective, although at Safeway, in the two years I knew him, he never moved up from bag boy. I used to tell him that a true Randian superman would, at a minimum, be in charge of the vegetable bins by age 22. “What kind of superman are you, Perkins?”

I'LL BET if you surveyed “the Randian community” you'd find wall-to-wall cranks and fantasists, the raw material for fascist movements, the Trump demographic, the people who walk around just seething, people like a guy calling himself Al Blue who reminded me of my life on Scott Street. He'd written in to suggest that instead of sending money to Haiti, we should send it to Meg Whitman, the Republican then running for Governor.

A MOVIE RECOMMENDATION from twenty-five years ago, and more valid than ever, plus a pair of neverminds: ‘The Golden Door,’ an Italian film, recreates the Ellis Island immigrant experience circa 1900 so faithfully it’s as if a documentary film crew had followed the new Americans from Sicily to Ellis Island. Introduced and produced by Martin Scorcese whose own grandparents came over through Ellis Island, Scorcese says the movie is so faithful to the facts that it took him back to the stories his grandparents told of leaving the old world for the new. ‘The Golden Door,’ in Italian with subtitles, is one of the best movies I’ve seen. ‘The Best of Youth,’ another Italian film, always gets raves, but I found it a little too charm-heavy, the characters way too handsome, the writing way too cutesy and soap-opera-ish on its way to all that charm. When one suicidal guy leaps over his balcony I hoped it would create a chain reaction and the movie would be over sooner than later. Denmark is a place I’ve always associated with Hamlet, little cookies with jelly splotches in the middle of them, and tidy people washing down their sidewalks. But ‘Pusher’ is a Danish movie about Danish tough guys, drug tough guys, who beat each other up and rip off Swedes while muttering about Norwegians. It’s very well acted, but the sub-title translations are in tin-eared, pseudo-American tough guy idiom. I’m sure Scandinavian tough guys watch all our gangster movies and listen to our ganga banga rob yo granny and her momma too music, but I’d have preferred a literal translation from Danish to Danish-English. It would have made the mayhem much more interesting to hear the Danes talk in Dane as they hit each other over the head with pool cues. ‘Crazy Heart’ is a chick flick set to cowboy music. It’s pretty good, though, because Jeff Bridges is always good. In this one Bridges is a broken down country western singer who stops drinking to almost get the girl. Overall, though, and as the astute readers of this fine publication certainly know, most modern movies aren’t what they were. For example, try watching the original ‘The Taking of Pelham 123’ and the more recent re-make. The original is a well-acted, witty little gem, the re-make simply moronic crash and flames, as is most of what’s out there these days. Except for ‘The Hurt Locker.’ It's really really good. And there's lots of good stuff on NetFlix. We may be going down the tubes, but good movies are better than ever.

TULSI GABBARD, a former Democratic lawmaker from Hawaii, was once a darling of the political left.

Gabbard was feted by liberal activists in Mendocino County, where she spoke several times. But in less than 10 years, Gabbard has gone from being an ally of Bernie Sanders to a key figure in the MAGA movement as Trump's proposed head of the nation's intelligence agencies. Naturally, I am suspect of Gabbard's zig-zagging through our chaotic politics. Are we supposed to rely on her to analyze what is going on around the globe? (via Mike Geniella)

THE COST OF MENDOBLATHER. At a typical Board of Supervisors meeting you have the CEO, the Assistant CEO, the Board Clerk, five Supervisors, County Counsel, one department head speaking and one or two more in the bullpen warming up their interfaces and paradigms, with maybe five other County staffers sitting in the audience available to back up bossy-wossy. Not counting various County staffers who stop work to listen to the meeting on-line… Well, your tax dollar at work. We calculate that each minute of Board meeting time costs the taxpayers at least $20. So ten minutes of Williams or Mulheren or Haschak free associating to no audible purpose runs us $200 or more. (John Pinches used say what he had to say and hung up.) The Board has a rule that supposedly limits supervisors to two comments per agenda item with each comment not to exceed five minutes. Of course the blather rule is very loosely enforced, if at all. We therefore propose a set of flashcards numbered 1 through 5 minutes and with the corresponding cost — $20, $40, $60, and so on. A local taxpayer could do a major public service if each time a Supervisor exceeded his or her alloted speaking time, the corresponding amount in wasted public time would be toted up, turned in to the Board Clerk, and the cash value deducted from their plump paychecks.

DASHIELL HAMMETT invented noir, private eye fiction, at 891 Post, San Francisco, in a murphy bed studio apartment overlooking Post and Hyde. There’s a plaque out front of the aged, four floor building commemorating that illustrious, pivotal, literary fact.

SAN FRANCISCO is pretty good about acknowledging its cultural history in a kind of tourist-oriented way, if a little heavy on the better known artists and, these days, way too heavy on the antiseptic, politically correct inserts these low times demand. There’re still interesting writers around, but you’ve got to search them out, got to get past the milk monitors of academe. How about some plaques for that pivotal beatnik Kenneth Rexroth who lived on Wisconsin Street on Potrero Hill and at 187 8th Avenue where he entertained Dylan Thomas and Kerouac and Howlsberg, among others. There’s no plaque at 187 8th Avenue or at Rexroth’s place on Wisconsin, but one wishes that all the old buildings kept their histories in their lobbies with the stories of all the lives lived in them.

HAMMETT’S APARTMENT on Post has been restored right down to period furniture and the wallpaper by Robert Mailer Anderson. The day I visited there was an abandoned wheelchair in the tiny closet left by the pre-restoration tenant. The wheelchair fits with the fixed-income building, vaguely owned but managed by ghouls out of a fancy office in the financial district. Hammett, a communist, would appreciate the irony.

THE STRUCTURE is one of several thousand buildings like 187 from pre-War Frisco, the kind of lonely habitations where people drink themselves to death and their bodies aren’t found for a month.

SAM SPADE’S granddaughter donated an alarm clock to the restoration of his old murphy bed apartment at Post and Hyde, and they’ve even found a photo of Hammett standing in his livingroom, the livingroom he created by pushing the murphy bed back into the wall before he sat down to write The Maltese Falcon.

LOOKING WEST, the neighborhood looks pretty much like it looked when Hammett lived there, which was roughly 1926 to 1929. The buildings may look the same along Post Street but the demographic is now positively thrilling in this odd city where the numbers of people employed to do good almost outnumber the people to whom good is to be done, many of them crazy, many more swimming at the bottom of the bottle or so far gone into hard chemicals the chemicals are their bodies. Fifty years ago they’d all be cared for in lock-up facilities. Now, they’re on the street, and in San Francisco if an officeholder so much as hints at compulsion, as in mandatory treatment, the pirates of the non-profits come running, yelling about civil rights for people unable or unwilling to care for themselves, as if allowing people to kill themselves in public is humane public policy. Hammett would have to double-lock his doors these days, but he’d understand that this is what capitalism has wrought in the city he loved.

HAMMETT would like this one: “January 20, 1910, San Francisco Chronicle: A woman, a policeman, two bulldogs, two revolvers and a horse and buggy were the potent factors in drawing a crowd in front of the Spreckels building on January 19. Mrs. Emily Miller of 3925 Folsom Street owns a horse and buggy, one of the revolvers and both of the bulldogs, which ownership is the prime reason for her now being an inmate of the police station. Mrs. Miller, who says she is a Secret Service agent, stopped in front of the Spreckels building with the head of her horse turned in the wrong direction. Policeman Gaylord informed Mrs. Miller that both she and the horse were violating the city’s traffic regulation, whereupon she set the two bulldogs to chewing the uniform of Officer Gaylord. Which annoyed him. To show his annoyance he pulled his revolver, whereupon Mrs. Miller did the same, and policeman, woman and dogs lined up in battle array, to the delight of the crowd of constantly increasing proportions. Finally the dogs were pacified, the revolvers returned to their places of concealment, Mrs. Miller was taken to jail and Gaylord to a tailor. Mrs. Miller was recently arrested for insanity but succeeded in convincing her inquisitors that she was sane enough to be turned loose.”

A DEA officer stopped at a ranch in Texas to talk with an old rancher. “I need to inspect your ranch for illegally grown drugs.” The rancher replied, “Okay, but don’t go in that field over there,” pointing to the no go zone. The DEA officer exploded, “Mister, I have the authority of the Federal Government with me!” Reaching into his rear pants pocket, the DEA man produced his badge. “See this badge? It means I am allowed to go wherever I wish. On any land. No questions asked. Have I made myself clear? Do you understand?” The rancher nodded politely and went about his chores. A short time later, the old rancher heard screams and saw the DEA running for his life, the rancher’s Santa Gertrudis bull right behind him. With every step the bull gained ground on the officer, and it looked like Mr. DEA would get gored before he reached safety. The officer was clearly terrified. The rancher threw down his tools, ran to the fence and yelled at the top of his lungs, “Your badge! Show him your BADGE!”

ON LINE COMMENTS OF THE WEEK

[1] Ok,Trumpers, can we at least finally admit that “eating the cats and dogs” was total bullshit, prices for groceries will NOT go down over the next 12 months, the Covid vaccine saved a lot of lives, the US is already producing all-time record amounts of oil and gas, and Musk’s fascist-style salute yesterday sure looked like, well, a fascist-style salute?

[2] To bring a little fun to the day, interesting custom from Central Mexico:

According to Central Mexico’s Huichol ancient traditions, both men and women experience the pain of childbirth together.

The father would position himself on the rafters with rope tied around his scrotum, which would be pulled by the mother during delivery.

[3] Trump’s pardons clearly send the message that (in his mind) violently assaulting and injuring police officers is perfectly acceptable — provided ithat violence is for the purpose of keeping Trump in power.

Gee What could possibly go wrong with that message? Especially when you also release people like Proud Boy leader Enrique Tarrio — yes, the dude convicted of seditious conspiracy — back into general circulation to pick up on spreading mayhem where he left off?

I’m old enough to remember when the GOP was a passionate believer in law and order. Boy, that seems quaint now. GOP interest in upholding the law is now totally contingent on the little detail of who is breaking it.

Trump is creating a silent army of Brownshirt shock troops ready to be deployed to support his authoritarianism. Meanwhile, the world’s richest man funnels money into the maw of the authoritarian machine while practicing his fascist salute at home in front of the mirror. What a world.

[4] The danger, as I see it, with AI comes in the fact that it creates things that are not real. There is no reality in AI. Here's an example. Do a Google image search for "lingerie" and see what you get. You no longer get pictures of REAL women in provocative garments. What now populates the search are AI images of unrealistic, too perfectly beautiful women with freakishly young faces, massive breasts, round hips and PERFECT skin. Not a zit, pimple, scar, stretch mark, mole, fold, dimple, nothing. Absolute perfection! Reality is being replaced with fantasy on our computer screens. Nobody is going to be happy with reality because reality can never produce what AI generates.

Just more evidence to me, personally, that we should cut the cord with technology. There comes a point where technology is no longer a tool to help us but becomes a detriment to society and ultimately destroys us.

[5] Trump wants to complete the ethnic cleansing in Gaza:

“I’d like Egypt to take people. I’d like Jordan to take people. We just clean out that whole thing.”

This was said on Air Force One by President Trump to reporters according to chief national correspondent Steve Herman of Voice of America.

You read that right — the US presidency is now arguing for crimes against humanity.

[6] The problem with Capitalism is:

…capitalism, by its very nature, cannot help but destroy the integrity and well-being of what we call “nature.” No need for yet another inventory of disturbances in the environment, our bodies, and our psychic balance. The enemy of nature is not oil or pesticides or factories or bulldozers but capital, “that ubiquitous, all-powerful and greatly misunderstood dynamo that drives our society.”

While traditionally the marketplace is a means of exchanging goods for money so as to purchase other goods, under capitalism it becomes a way of accumulating money…

As the basis of economics becomes the trade itself and not the tangible thing exchanged, money is transformed into an all-consuming monster. No longer bound up with the limitations of actual land, people, and resources, it springs to life, an abstraction with a will of its own.

There lies the source of our ecological crisis.

[7] Working on farms is hard and demanding. We have produced SOFT generations, heads down on their cell and social media and have hyped their worthless degrees as big deals. Getting some time on the farms and doing hard hand labor would not only get them in shape but show them what the true value of work means. An economic shock is likely to come and the whining won’t interest anyone, survival will be the way out. It’s going to be tough kids, but this is where we are.