Off the Record 2/18/2025

AS THE LONGEST preliminary hearing in County history — 18 months and counting — takes a break because the judge and witness CEO Darcie Antle absolutely had to go on vacation, I stepped back through the obscuring mists of time to see if I had something in my archive about the judge, Ann Moorman, and the local justice system. Darned if I didn't find the following from 2010:

LOTS of local lawyers donated to Ann Moorman’s successful campaign for judge. These same local lawyers donated exactly nothing to Moorman's opponent, Caren Callahan. Just as corporations buy advantage from our state and national elected reps, lawyers buy favorable treatment from His and Her Elected Honor who, purely in theory, claim to be far above this sort of thing. Election cash to prospective judges is a form of corruption, of course, but who are you going to complain to about it? The courts?

DAYS PAST, our legal apparat was even more literally incestuous; they'd all go out to Lake Mendocino and get drunk together, often pairing up and disappearing into the bushes to, ahem, seal professional relationships. When the bar association's Lake Mendocino bacchanal got a little too public, and the cops were no longer willing to drive all the drunks home rather than arrest them, our justice establishment moved its annual festivities to a more secluded spot on the Eel River near Willits where, one year, the rectitude came all the way off the pillars.

I'VE NEVER HEARD of the Mendocino County Bar Association doing anything at all in the public interest, and I’m disinclined to their claim that they’re available to assist debtors. Like most Mendo people who pay attention to the legal “community,” I’ve always assumed the Mendo Bar Association’s only group function was its annual drunk at Emandal. (Their majesties used to get loaded out at Lake Mendocino, but when too many suckers, er, citizens, began noticing the less than magisterial hijinks of yer honors and yer honorable gentlemen, the show moved to the relative seclusion of Emandal east of Willits where the robes and the robbers could sleep over.

I UNDERSTAND these events are pretty sedate anymore, what with the participants being armed with photo phones and a professional predisposition to treachery. (The point, man! Will you please get to the point of this gratuitous assault on the fine men and women of the Mendocino County Bar Association!)

HERE WE GO. All this election cash used to be called influence peddling, cronyism, or good old fashioned moral turpitude, but now it’s a way of life, leaving us Courthouse outsiders with no recourse and completely outside in the cold, our red runny noses pushed wistfully to the glass.

SO, JUDGE MOORMAN'S contributors included the most expensive defense attorney in Sonoma County, Chris Andrian, who tossed in what he undoubtedly expects will reward him at least triple the $1,450 he sent Judge Ann; Mendo County Deputy County Counsel Terry Gross kicked in $125; John Ruprecht, part-time Fort Bragg City attorney and tree rustling facilitator, was good for $300; Coast defense attorney Mark Kalina $100; former judge James King of Willits $250; James Larson of Fort Bragg $100; Barry Vogel of Ukiah $100; G. Scott Gaustad of Ukiah $125; Tom Mason of Ukiah $100; Linda McNeil of Willits $200; Tim Morrison of Ukiah $100; Chris Neary of Willits $500; Assistant DA Liz Norman of Willits $100; Robert C. Petersen of Fort Bragg $100; David Rapport, Ukiah City Attorney $125; David Riemenschneider of Ukiah $100; Pano Stephens of Ukiah $200; Deputy DA Tim Stoen of Mendocino $100; Kitty Elliott of Redwood Valley $100; Legal Services of Northern California’s Lisa L. Hillegas of Ukiah $100; twice busted former dope impresario and neo-attorney Don, now ‘Donald’ Lipmanson of Ukiah $100; Myron Sawicki & Henwood Attys at Law of Ukiah $100; and wife beater Philip Vannucci of Ukiah $100, the guy who hired self-identified feminist Moorman to reduce his felony domestic battery of his wife to a misdemeanor. And Ukiah DEA Supervisor Bob ‘Nish’ Nishiyama was good for $250.

SO, FELLOW DUPES, we've got everyone from prominent libs like Barry Vogel and Don Lipmanson to the chief of the DEA's Mendo outpost, Agent Nishiyama, forking over to Judge Moorman. Nishiyama busts them, Lipmanson and Co. haul the hapless shlubs before the judge, and everyone gets paid. Shall the circle be unbroken! Is this the harmonic convergence the hippies are always going on about?

IN THE PAST, it was common for lawyers to join what they called the “$99 Club,” meaning that they donated $99 to all candidates for judge or DA so that they could 1. Cover their cringing, opportunistic asses no matter who won, and 2. Stay below the $100 reporting threshold so no one knew who they were donating to. In the race between Callahan and Moorman, however, many lawyers decided that there was no need to join the $99 Club, just give it all openly to Moorman who was heavily favored to win.

AND MOORMAN DID WIN, and here she is all these years later presiding — when she isn't on vacation — over a simple case, really, brought by her Courthouse buddy, District Attorney Eyster who, out of personal pique that a County Auditor dared challenge his parties at public expense, brought a conjured felony charge against Ms. Cubbison, easily persuading our five spine-free supervisors to fire her at the request of Eyster, our fearless top law enforcement officer. Eyster had her arrested and dragged her into court on a see-through bogus charge suggesting that the Auditor is a thief, or a thief-abettor. No due process for you, my dear. And certainly no presumption of innocence.

A LOT of really, really bad stuff goes down behind Mendo's Green Curtain that's routinely sanctioned by our Superior Court, stuff that would get called out any other place. In this case, the bad stuff is right out front.

PREDICTION: When the Love Boat finally sails through the Golden Gate, and the judge and the witness, County CEO Darcy “I'm Here To Serve” Antle, who also just had to take a winter holiday, disembark tanned and refreshed, Ms. Cubbison's and Ms. Kennedy's preliminary hearing will resume, at the end of which, assuming it does end some day, Judge Moorman will find that there's sufficient “evidence” to proceed to trial, and this ugly farce will stumble on. And on.

JEEZ, MR. EDITOR, isn't this diatribe a little too righteous? Just a little over the top, even for you? Yes, I'll stipulate to that, as they say in the halls of justice where the justice is confined to the halls and you can count on getting what you pay for, and I'll also stipulate to the obvious reality of outback justice where professional collegiality is inevitable, understandable, even necessary, but incest?

WHEN the DA brings a bogus felony case out of personal malice for his target, and the judge drags the prelim out over months and months and takes off for the goddam Bahamas or some equivalently ghastly venue without taking care of business (as the two defendants twist and twist in the winter winds, their right to a speedy trial ignored) we have every right to ask WTF?

TED STEPHENS

When one looks at all the facts now, it is hard to imagine why the supervisors would have gone along with this DA scheme unless they were in it to bring the Auditor-Controller/Treasurer-Tax Collector functions under their full control and obfuscation. Many of us advised against the consolidation and had serious concerns about the timing. Now their argument is going to be, oh well, we are already along the journey of getting rid of these independent offices and it would just create more confusion trying to put it back as it was.

After the dust settles on the criminal charges, I think we, as citizens and voters, need to demand they put it back as it was for two reasons. First, so we maintain the independence and accountability of the separate offices. Two, to send a message if you try these shenanigans we are not going to let you get away with it.

This experience is going to cost our county A LOT of money. We should also make sure the two remaining supervisors in this debacle go down the road and find another place to practice their mayhem. As for the DA’s use of the law, I think it is pretty clear who he was protecting. We should demand better.

MIKE SWEENEY at Stanford, as editor of the Stanford ‘Chaparral,’ Sept 1969 to Feb 1970, when he was kicked out.

https://chappiearchives.org/doku.php/1969-70

SCENES from the city: The bus was jammed, so jammed the driver, a jolly black guy who'd amused us sardines by singing out the stops operatic style, was no longer opening his front door to let on more passengers. At Hyde, a nicely dressed woman, who looked like a manager of something, a woman unaccustomed to being denied, pounded on the bus door. “Open it, goddammit!” she yelled. The driver shouted back that he couldn't. “I'm full,” he explained. “The rules say no more.” “Don't give me that rules bullshit,” the woman shouted back. “I know the rules.” The driver said, “I know the rules better than you and you're not getting on.” We drove off. A bunch of us applauded. “I wouldn't let her on an empty bus,” the driver laughed, and more people applauded.

A YOUNG MOMMY wrote to the Chronicle with a child-rearing question: “How do I explain to my children why that man is allowed to pee on the sidewalk, and that man is allowed to yell at people and be drunk without getting in trouble?”

SHORT ANSWER: They're just having a real bad day, Timmy.

LONG ANSWER: Collapse of Western Civ.

INTERMEDIATE ANSWER: Nobody is “allowed” to pee on the sidewalk and nobody is “allowed” to menace passersby. There are laws against it, but it happens a lot because standards of public behavior have disappeared and the cops are so overwhelmed by so much seriously bad public behavior of all kinds they can hardly be bothered.

I'M OLD ENOUGH to remember when women wore hats and gloves downtown, and the men wore suits. Everyone looked very cool, like George Raft and Betty Davis. Even the bums wore suits and fedoras. Public drunks were confined to a couple of blocks on Third Street, and people living in tents on the sidewalk was simply unthinkable.

TODAY? The cops are asked to arrest people for the kind of bad public behavior that didn't exist until… the hippies, the non-artistic illegitimate sons and daughters of a handful of pioneer North Beach beatniks, when they began flaking out and spare changing on Haight Street's sidewalks.

THERE WERE CALLS for the cops to “clean up the area,” and the cops duly tried to clean up the area, and a good time was had by all during the ensuing riots. The Haight Street sweeps were led by a legendary cop named, as I recall, Art Gerrans, easily the Bay Area's all-time hippie hater. Gerrans was both a rhetorical and literal hippie basher. “The hippies are ruining the city,” Gerrans told the Chron.

GERRANS would personally lead the Tac Squad's charge down Haight, promiscuously swinging his fungo bat baton at everyone slow to move. “Going, going gone! Yer outtahere!”

THE GUY was a case, so extreme his kids probably all grew up to be hippies.

THE SPIRITUAL grandchildren of the original 1967 exhibitionists are still out there. It was a tired act in ‘67, but to most us nothing more than other minor urban irritants like gratuitously rude bus drivers, 40-year-old skateboarders, the tubercular loogies of Chinatown, and the people who pick whole bouquets out of the public parks.

MANY TIMES, I've stepped over six-packs of yellow-fanged street oafs; a couple of times when fights seemed imminent the always nearby bicycle cops swooped down to make arrests. It all seems rather quaint now, with true desperation and harder drugs on the streets and America undergoing a quasi-fascist coup run out of the White House.

I TAKE the long view. I lived in the Haight in 1963 when it was quiet and cheap and convenient to the rest of the city, and I lived there again in ’67 during The Summer of STDs, when the cheap rents and convenience gave way to the hippies.

BY ’67 Haight Street was a round-the-clock mob scene. Which it has been ever since. Nothing has changed except the demographics. The city is both a lot richer than it was, and a lot poorer than it was, as Trump unwittingly mobilizes the mother of all American resistance. Or wittingly, hoping for the ultimate showdown. This summer is going to be a wild one.

BUT HOW prevalent is Slob-ism to begin with? About as prevalent as the traveling urinator and the doorway defecator, I'd say. It happens but not enough to pass new laws against it. Anyway, given that the jails are full, and given that the cops are usually busy with more menacing criminal behavior, Slobbism is here to stay.

THE PEOPLE lying around the city these days are drop-fall drunk or immobilized on dope, or they are untreated crazy people. But on Haight from Ashbury on west into Golden Gate Park all the way to the tennis courts, you run a long gauntlet of people you'd just as soon greet with a flame thrower. The cops, by simply being visible, can instantly dry up the whole show, or at least send it scurrying into Golden Gate Park’s battered bushes.

WHAT'S NEW about the homeless discussion, though, is that some of San Francisco's supervisors, the so-called “progressives,” argue that enforcement of laws aimed at tidying up the streets are unfairly aimed at the poor and the homeless. Not true. It's aimed at people who have destroyed public spaces.

THE COPS in San Francisco these days strike me as a polyglot, multi-ethnic, gender-diverse mix of 5’7” chubbies. I haven’t seen a large, psycho-looking, psycho-acting cop in San Francisco for many years, but then I'm not out at night much.

THERE WAS A TIME in America when there was a national consensus on standards of public behavior, but these days the slightest misdemeanor interference with the publicly obnoxious is so aggressively resisted by “progressives” you don't have to wonder why they're absent on the big stuff, like who has all the money and power.

ANYWAY. Why is there even an argument about a hostile kid with a barely controlled dog blocking a sidewalk so everyone else has to walk around his fetid self?

THE REAL ISSUE in the city, apart from the fundamental one of power arrangements, is the large number of visibly insane people wandering around. What kind of society doesn’t take care of the deranged? Ours, for one.

EXAMPLE: The other morning on Clement Street between 7th and 8th, a crazy guy, about thirty I guessed, was walking rapidly west. Every few yards he shouted obscenities at invisible provocations. Crazy Guy was angry, and he was large enough to make him doubly menacing, although he was clearly oblivious of his surroundings and seemed unlikely to pause long enough in his forced march to the Pacific to choke anybody out.

OLD LADIES, most of them Asian, are out early shopping the fresh fruit and vegetable bins of Clement. They immediately took cover from the bummer-in-transit, shrinking into doorways, and we all watched him go his bellowing way to make sure he stayed gone before we resumed pawing through the snap peas.

OBJECTIVELY, that brief episode wasn’t a big deal, but multiply that guy by a few thousand doomed souls wandering San Francisco’s finite neighborhoods, a few pitbull punks sprinkled in, the usual street criminals on the prowl for soft targets, and prevalent bad public manners… What you get is a frightened general population, and when people get scared bad political things happen, like the ultimately bad thing underway today.

ASKED by a reporter why white women seemed so attracted to him, 1920s boxing champ Jack Johnson famously replied, “Because we eat live cold eels and we think distant thoughts,” which just may be the wittiest remark ever from an athlete.

THE OTHER DAY I got into an argument with a family member who works as a public defender, and freelances as a defender of the system which employs him, all the while deluding himself that he's an enemy of capitalism and driving around with a KPFA bumpersticker on his hybrid. I said judges make way too much money, that upwards of $250,000 a year plus every perk known to Western Man is excessive. The public defender cited another family member who happens to be a judge. “Do you think she's paid too much? You don't think she's a good person?” I said good person-ism isn't the question. I said I was sure Her Honor doesn't kick her dogs or force-feed her kids Big Macs, but so what? The public defender came back with, “She earns every nickel. You know what she has to do first thing every morning? She's got to sign foreclosures on people, put people out on the street?” Which, I said, is exactly my point. Judges are well paid to do the system's dirty work. Most of them would toss their mothers out in the street for that kind of money, and every single one of them acts as enforcer for a justice system that is more unjust by the day. We never did agree on much of anything.

SAN FRANCISCO has always had some pretty good street acts and, in the absence of a central casting, a whole bunch of bad ones. Fisherman's Wharf features a concentration of open air entertainers, a few of them licensed, I believe, by the dominant merchant's association. Another concentration of street performers works Market Street, a few the Mission, and on Grant Avenue in Chinatown a few old men eke out livings playing traditional Chinese music on traditional stringed instruments. The licensed acts at Fisherman's Wharf range from blues singers to organists. Their venues are rotated to give them more or less equal exposure to the largest concentrations of tourists. But jammed in among them are all kinds of non-sanctioned acts, all them terrible. But none of the people now playing the streets of San Francisco approach, in pure creativity, the late Grimes Poznikov, Automatic Human Jukebox.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=03Nhm3t2G5w

Grimes was a fixture at Aquatic Park, usually at the cable car turnaround. You'd drop a dollar or two into his designated coin box and Grimes, who could actually play the trumpet, would appear in the window of his refrigerator crate and tootle a tune and, often as not, deliver an always amusing little speech on contemporary affairs. He was eventually busted for selling pot out of his box and he got crazier and crazier, so crazy he drifted off onto the streets unable to get his unique performances together.

The senior street act in the city these days is BushMan, a genial black guy named David Johnson who pops out from behind a handheld screen of leafy branches to startle inattentive passersby.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lfhZtcwZW4l

There are two BushMen, actually, who spell each other. The original Bush Man said once he pulled in upwards of 60 grand cash money a year with his no overhead act. The Bush Men have been at it since 1980. Presently, there's a mime glut, and there are guys spray painting gaudy abstracts on Fisherman's Wharf who always draw a crowd, plus Three Card Monte men, acrobats, break dancers and, a mile to the south, a street poet who, for a modest donation, will bang out tailor made lines arrayed at an oblique on a tattered page of typing paper. Even if the final product makes no sense the thing looks nice.

Zach Houston, poet, is in business most Saturday mornings at the Ferry Building. I laid a tenner on him once and he dashed one off for me. I know it's for me because it's got my name in it and there's the inaccurate phrase “wise old men” my grizzled presentation seems to have inspired. The poet often sports a top hat and he works on an ancient Underwood typewriter, the total visual so arresting he's got customers lined up. He even has a website: www.zachhouston.com

REMEMBER THESE? (Does former Sheriff Allman remember them?)

THE SINISTER, “can-you-believe-this-shit” smirk on the face of Netanyahu tells you everything you need to know about the direction things are heading…

Earlier this week, Trump referred to Gaza as a “demolition site” and then he rolled out the red carpet at the White House to welcome the man (referred to in a White House press release as “His Excellency”) who has been indicted for demolishing it and lavished him with gifts, including a billion-dollar shipment of new bombs, shells and military hardware, a pledge to take over Gaza off his hands and forcibly evict the 1.9 million Palestinians who survived the demolition by US-made weapons previously gifted to Israel by Biden, reconstruct it into a seaside resort and, in a few weeks, give him the green light to annex the entire West Bank.

— Jeffrey St. Clair, CounterPunch

A SPECIAL NOT-GETTING-IT award goes to the guy who shot it out with the cops on Highway 580 one day. His mom said he was “mad at left-wing politics.” Mr. Dumbkopf, who was on parole, was wearing body armor and headed for? Who knows? Nancy Pelosi’s office? He was definitely on a mission when he was riddled with non-fatal bullets fired by, you can be sure, a platoon of delighted CHP officers, whose poor marksmanship spared idiot child. The problem with any analysis of the Trumpian “Marxist liberal” type is that there is no left-wing in America, let alone revolutionary Marxists. There hasn’t been a left-wing since, I’d say, around 1975, and that was a feeble and terminally ill left-wing, since deceased. The owning classes have won. At least for now. They and their media outlets, which is most of the big ones, have convinced the more volatile schmoes out there that liberals are left-wingers. Liberals are not left-wingers. Most liberals are barely liberals. (cf Mendolib.) One more time: liberals and right-wingers alike believe in capitalism as the basis for social organization. Left-wingers think capitalism should be killed before it kills US. Moderate liberals of the Obama-Pelosi type, and right-wingers of the Trump-Musk type, own the media and everything else, including the government. They’re on the same side. Most of the rest of US don’t own a damn thing except our credit card debt. The libs and the right-wing want to keep things as they are because they live high off the hog as the hog is presently butchered. And you and me, brothers and sisters, are the hog! Comprende? If that fool who shot it up with the CHP down on 580 knew what his own true interests were he’d be a left-winger.

RECOMMENDED READING: ‘Empire of the Summer Moon — Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History.’ Quanah Parker’s mother, age 9, was captured by the Comanches. She was a tough kid. Had to have been because she survived the Comanche way of life — plunder, the torture and slo-mo murder of adult males, gang rape and murder for most non-tribal women, and the carrying off and Indian-ization of male and female children unless they cried a lot as they were being carried off and summarily decapitated or simply abandoned. The Comanches’ childcare practices were totally inappropriate, as we say here in Mendocino County. Only 9 the day of her abduction, Quanah’s mother, Cynthia Ann Parker, had witnessed the murders of immediate family members and, in the euphemism of those times, “many gross indecencies,” including the rape of her grandmother. Cynthia Ann Parker not only survived all this but thrived, becoming a Comanche herself. When Cynthia Ann was re-captured she spent the rest of her life trying to return to her adopted tribe. (No Indian ever ran away to become white, but lots of whites preferred to be Indians.) Mean time, Cynthia produced Quanah, a tactical genius as a Comanche warrior, the fiercest of the fierce, who became a kind of white man himself when his Comanches were finally put down. Or died from cholera or one of the other introduced plagues that carried off a lot more Indians than Whitey himself ever did. Quanah did pretty well as a post-Comanche white man in Oklahoma. His mother had died unhappy, having endured a kind of house arrest after she was recaptured a second time. The whole story is nicely told by S.C. Gwynne, complete with riveting descriptions of Comanche life, including a Comanche how-to on the taming of wild horses: “A Comanche would lasso a wild horse, then tighten the noose, choking the horse and driving it to the ground. When it seemed as if the horse was nearly dead, the choking lariat was slacked. The horse finally rose, trembling and in a full lather. Its captor gently stroked its nose, ears, and forehead, then put his mouth over the horse’s nostrils and blew air into its nose. The Indian would then throw a thong around the now-gentled horse’s lower jaw, mount up, and ride away.”

SUPER SAQUON

How about this picture of Saquon Barkley in elementary school growing up in the Lehigh Valley! Now he could have the greatest season ever by a running back.

A FAN'S NOTE: Tomorrow's Superbowl holds some interest with two very good teams meeting. Saquon Rasul Quevis Barkley is an amazing running talent. I've never see a back spin and run backwards through tacklers like he does. And Mahomes and the Chiefs exhibited a remarkable quality this year to do just enough to win almost all their games. It's like they have preternatural control of what happens on the field and scoreboard.

TOM STIENSTRA'S must read outdoors column in the San Francisco Chronicle has said that “the best drive” is Highway 20 between Willits and Fort Bragg. Hmmm. I suspect there would be a lot of opposition to that statement from people compelled to drive it regularly, but here's Tom's thinking: “The engineer who designed Highway 20 from Willits to Fort Bragg must have had a motorcycle, because this road has perfect curves and banks as you head through redwoods and Douglas fir en route to the coast. Pick an early morning for an open road and take it all in.” Tom said the “most frustrating drive” is on Highway One between Jenner and Point Arena, especially “if you find yourself behind a big RV, you can hit top speeds of 10, 15mph on the curves, for what seems hours.”

EVERY COUPLE OF YEARS the Santa Rosa cops send a female cop or two out to Santa Rosa Avenue where the lady cops stroll up and down looking provocative, trolling for the pathetic characters who try to pick up prostitutes on the street. An undercover giraffe in a mini-skirt and lipstick would arouse most guys, such is male sexuality. But in these undercover Santa Rosa stings as soon as the random mopes, overcome by sudden lust on their way home from wherever, start to hit on the cop ladies they're arrested and cited for what? Arresting a man for soliciting a perceived prostitute is like arresting a dog for chasing a cat. If the Rose City cops really wanted to cut down on public prostitution they'd arrange with the Press Democrat to publish the mopes' names, pictures and home addresses, and put the information right there on the front page.

A SIGN on the Palace Hotel door well into the 1950s read, “No dogs, no Indians.”

KAREN RIFKIN, who's written the definitive history of the Palace Hotel, can't find proof that the No Dogs And Indians sign ever existed anywhere on its premises. Maybe it didn't, maybe there was a passing reference to it in something I read and I plucked the ref from deep in the recesses of what's left of my brain. My intentions were and are pure, free of gratuitous malice. While Team AVA buckles down to some serious research, most old timers can confirm that a strict segregation applied everywhere in the Ukiah Valley through the 1940s and early 1950s. There was, for example, a famous episode at the Bluebird Cafe, which in '46 also functioned as the Greyhound Bus station, where a pair of heavily decorated Native American veterans of WWII were denied service. And so on.

SO FAR, we've found this, although no specific stores and restaurants are mentioned, free enterprise Ukiah did not welcome NAs: https://www.doi.gov/sites/default/files/rth-ca-graton-rancheria-transcript.pdf

Melody Williams: “…But even so, growing up in Ukiah in 1941, she [Ms. Williams’ grandmother] remembers that on the stores and restaurants there, there were signs that said, ‘No dogs. No Indians.’ And so there are a lot of places that they couldn't go at that time…”

THE ONE TRUE GREEN, the late Richard Johnson, took his one-man Mendo Green Party with him to his grave on the highest ridge in Redwood Valley from where he presumably hopes to eternally ensure nothing politically hopeful other than Democrats ever happens in Mendocino County.

OTG used to occasionally print what he called ‘The Confluence Directory,’ in which several hundred pseudo-medical quacks advertised their dubious wares, everything from French Roast enemas (“crapachinos”) to “past life readings.” Johnson himself was a dedicated juicer, once being arrested in Ukiah for being drunk in public while riding the bicycle he was forced onto because he'd lost his driver's license for repeat DUIs. The poor guy couldn't even steer his bike straight. Johnson’s Confluence roster was impressively large given that there were, at the time, roughly 300 cranks listed for a Mendo population of only 90,000, albeit a population with a high percentage of pure dingbats for The Confluence crooks to prey on.

I THOUGHT of the old boy as I binge-watched a brilliant NetFlix series based on the true story of a young female hustler who parlayed her own faked cancer into a small fortune hustling “alternative” cancer cures. (The series is called Apple Cider Vinegar).

THE PURE CREDULITY of the ailing millions who detour from modern medicine to death avoidance strategies based on Peruvian medicine man cures and kindred quackery is both startling and sad, sad that so many people who could live on if they chose the modern Western medicine they sneer at instead of the dingbat procedures pedaled by nuts and criminals certain to kill them.

AS A RECENT victim of thyroid cancer, I'm sure I could have found any number of costly “homeopathic” alternatives guaranteed to have finished me off a few months before yesterday's Super Bowl. Instead of dialing up The Confluence Directory, I opted for the seven-hour surgery that cut the main body affliction and its thriving satellites out of my throat, along with my voice, my senses of smell and taste, leaving me depleted but alive with a neat hole in my throat, a surefire conversation starter if only I still had the ability to converse. I've adjusted, and fully expect to enjoy next year's Super Bowl between the Forty Niners and the Eagles.

THE CONFLUENCE QUACKS continue to thrive in Mendocino County. There is certainly one or more in a neighborhood near you, someone calling him or herself something like Apache Astroid at a Center for Integrative Medicine — midwife and midman, herbalist, massage therapist and black belt in Tae Kwan Tumbling. If we don't get your chakras aligned pronto you probably need the sacred Full Moon mystical gathering on the Mendocino Headlands where you can renew and reconnect your credulous self via astro transmission and, if you're lucky, a deep healing sound bath.

WE'VE THOUGHT for years that the entire County history effort should be combined under the auspices of the Held-Poage Library, a private volunteer entity based in Ukiah whose archive already contains much of the true history of the County, including a readily retrievable newspaper trove. For years now, Held-Poage has been the sole reliable repository of County history. H-P is more accessible to more people and its collections are much more comprehensive than the County Museum's because Held-Poage pre-dates the County's effort and benefits from an effective core of volunteers. The County Museum has much more space than Held-Poage, and much of the stuff housed at the County Museum in Willits includes artifacts too large for Held-Poage. These artifacts include a hippie van, a pre-War Willits lunch counter, horse-drawn wagons, Judi Bari's bombed vehicle, and so on. (No mention of the man who blew up Bari's Subaru, of course, but between you, me, and the FBI that managed not to consider him the primo suspect, his name is Mike Sweeney, presently an extraditable resident of New Zealand.) Held-Poage is books, documents, newspapers. But both Held-Poage and the County would profit from a merger. And someone really ought to retrieve and preserve the County's trial histories a'moulderin' in the County Courthouse basement.

OF COURSE COUNTY HISTORY has always been pretty hazy, perhaps because so much of it is so shameful, beginning with the mass murder of Indians and on through a local racism so intense that it wasn't until the early sixties a black person could live safely in Fort Bragg. And not to even mention the thriving Mendo Klan of the 1920s and astonishing unsolved crimes like the 1987 Fort Bragg Fires and the so-called “mystery” of the Judi Bari interlude. Not to worry, though history mavens; I've got the goods in my archives, some of them already stored at UC Davis, some at the County Museum in Willits, some at Held-Poage, but the real hot stuff I'm keeping with special instructions to my heirs and assignees to copy and air drop on the County Courthouse after I'm gone.

REAL GOOD MOVIES you may not have seen include, ‘Mesrine: Killer Instinct,’ the best gangster movie I've ever seen, better than the ‘Godfather’ because it doesn't glorify criminals like the Godfather movies do. Mesrine is apparently based on the adventures of a real guy, a French bank robber (mostly), who pulled off a series of spectacularly unreal crimes, becoming a kind of reverse national hero in France as he went. You think Marlon Brando was menacing in Godfather? Wait until you see the great Gerard Depardieu as a French crime boss. Another grisly but boffo cinematic adventure is a Brit film called ‘The Disappearance of Alice Creed,’ a harrowing tale of kidnap with a series of startling interludes, all of it masterfully acted as only the Brits seem capable of doing. Also worth seeing is a grim saga based on the true history of the French Resistance called ‘The Army of Crime.’ You know going in how it's going to come out – too many of the true heroes die, most of the collabos live on, with the entire subject still understandably sensitive in France where, if you didn't know better, you'd think the entire nation rose up to resist the Nazi Occupation while only a small percentage of the population took up arms against it. In fact, most of the population either cooperated or simply hunkered down until the Nazis were defeated. The movie is quite well done but makes for some painful watching.

ON-LINE COMMENTS OF THE WEEK

[1] Ever since some incautious journalist referred to J. Edgar as a sissy boy (we’re going w-a-a-a-y back) and he panicked and adopted that tough bulldog pose, the official stance of his federal monster has been brutal and heavy. The style of the J. Edgar Hoover Building, aka “Johnny ‘n’ Clyde’s Joint,” is best characterized as “architorture.”

[2] I read with great interest that Trump is considering directing the Treasury Department to buy a boatload of Bitcoin to create some sort of strategic reserve for the country. But why stop there? I urge Trump to consider also having the Treasury stockpile state lottery tickets, Kentucky Derby bets and, while they’re at it, Monopoly money. I might also ask him to consider betting a chunk of Treasury bills on the Eagles to win the Super Bowl, but, on second thought, that would actually be a good investment.

[3] I would like to see all advertising for drug companies stopped. If you can't advertise cigarettes on TV, why should we be subjected to constant, non-stop advertising of drugs whose names we can't pronounce to treat diseases that we've never heard of before? Why can't we go back to a time when we trusted our doctors to tell us what our afflictions are and prescribe what they know is best for us?

[4] If Bill Clinton hadn’t blatantly lied to us all, thus railroading Gore in his wake, If Hillary and DNC had not been so arrogant and entitled, railroading Bernie, and if Jill Biden had had just a teeny tiny hint of shame and been humbled and thankful by the fame and fortune she received, I believe we would not be here. Please stop blaming folks who are simple and half educated and could not stomach the arrogance and disdain of financially comfortable and educated “elites,” themselves shocked that the “regular folks” take issue with college student loan forgiveness and tax dollars paying for prisoners and military members gender transitions. It’s not as simple as “I didn’t vote this way and I told you so.” But here we are, and maybe we should march in the streets with pitchforks, and soon, given the lack of any other apparent checks on the insanity.

[5] I didn't watch the Super Bowl this year. First time since the last time the 49ers won (1994) I think that I had no interest. I was sick of the Kansas City Chiefs and the Taylor Swift montages every time they get a first down. The Philadelphia Eagles are just an ugly team. Ugly uniforms. Ugly colors. Ugly fans. Ugly stadium. Ugly coach. Don't know why anyone would want to be a fan of that team. Anyway, I digress. I gave up watching Super Bowl halftime shows since the Janet Jackson accidental nipple exposure incident. One thing I have noticed is that out of all the "performers" they could have at a Super Bowl halftime show it seems to me that they always choose black rappers. All these idiots and all their dancers do is stand up there and rattle off inane poetry that none can understand and then gyrate around while thrusting their hips back and forth. It isn't entertainment. It isn't talent. I don't know what the hell it is. I'd take a marching band over this bullshit any day + Sunday.

But hey, what do I know? People like Jelly Roll (a fat 400 pound slob) or Post Malone (a skinny tatted up slob) are now famous. Gone are the days where the pretty people wowed the audience with their looks and talents. Gone are the bands like Def Leppard, Van Halen and Bon Jovi where they actually played their music and sang the lyrics without auto tune. Today popular entertainers are rappers and tatted up white guys who do everything in their power to make themselves look as nightmarish and disgusting as possible. And people like this!

[6] I shake my head that many Americans who absolutely despise taxes are quizzically “all in” for tariffs. Simply put, a tariff is an import tax with a different name. You know that, right?

I've watched seemingly bright people think that tariffs will cost foreign countries money. In reality, of course, these import taxes will be paid by the American consumer.

Take an avocado from Mexico, for example. Say it costs the US retailer 50 cents and it is then double marked-up to $1. A 25% tariff will increase the cost to the retailer to 62.5 cents and it is then double marked-up to $1.25. Mexico still gets its 50 cents. The retailer goes from getting 50 cents to getting 62.5 cents and the US government goes from 0 to 12.5 cents. In this simple scenario, the US avocado consumer now pays an extra quarter which is split by the retailer and Uncle Sam.

A tax by any other name is still a tax.