Off the Record 3/18/2025

WHEN PINCHES GOT A MUG

When Supervisor John Pinches was on the Board of Supervisors he often complained about costly but limited fish habitat restoration projects that seemed to be spending more money per fish than the County’s general fund spent per person for poor and senior-aged people. At one meeting he was provoked again when, toward the end of a meeting when Board members were giving their typically lame “supervisor’s reports,” Supervisor Dan Hamburg described a large, expensive habitat restoration project in the Hopland area. Supervisor Carre Brown took the opportunity to rubbed it in, asking: “Supervisor Pinches, will you please show everybody what I got you?”

Hamburg piled on: “Oh yeah! What’s that, Johnny?”

Pinches reached for a paper bag near his Supervisor’s podium and reached into it, saying, “She got me this cup and she said she’d provide me with the quart of vodka later.”

Pinches pulled out a hand-made cup from a pottery shop in Ukiah that had some kind of design painted on it.

Supervisor Kendall Smith: “Nice!”

Hamburg: “It’s a Hoyman-Browe!”

Brown: “Show ‘em what’s on it, John.”

Pinches tried unsuccessfully to laugh, grumbling: “It’s a fish.”

Everybody but Pinches laughed.

Brown: “It’s very timely!”

Pinches quickly figured out a way to appreciate his unwelcome gift: “You know what? It’s a good fish — it’s dead.”

Brown laughed, but nobody else did.

Pinches, conspicuously unamused, set the cup off at arm’s length away from the rest of his papers, and continued on a different subject.

(Mark Scaramella)

ED NOTES

THE HEADLINE in the Ukiah paper read, “Taste of Redwood Valley this weekend.” Ah, yes. A taste of Redwood Valley, maybe a bite of Calpella, certainly a nibble of The Forks, perhaps a sip of summertime Lake Mendocino as aperitif and it’s, “The last thing I remember, doctor, I’d just remarked to my wife that there is no place in all God’s creation more glorious on a hundred degree day than North Ukiah…”

A FRIEND WRITES of his day at the Ballpark: “As we were drifting out of the park, if one can drift when trapped in a mob and being hauled roughly toward the gates, both feet off the ground at times, the I Left My Heart in San Francisco song came over the loudspeakers, and I wondered if it was used as crowd control — you know, a quiet, calm, nostalgic and familiar song to soothe the inebriated masses and make it far less likely that those of differing team preference would resort to shouting and shoving one another. Probably not. But I’ll bet it works that way. We’ve been to AT&T a few times, too. Parking? $60 dollars US. Beer? Don’t ask. The volume of commerce going on in and around the park was like some middle eastern bazaar — black guys with makeshift stalls hawking cheap orange t-shirts on the street, lots and lots of folks trying to buy or sell or trade tickets, and several hundred legit concession stands inside the facility. It’s truly like a mall in there.”

A PERSPECTIVE on the Greek back when they were going through one of their financial crises with a near-riot protest: “We should all become Greeks. The American work ethic is overrated. I’m serious. We rush about to maintain our crappy suburban lifestyles in cars that cost too much. My Greek barber once ripped out his lawn and planted an orchard. It was the only work other than cutting hair that he ever did. When the suburban neighbors complained, he pretended he did not speak English and tore out more lawn. He told me, “Screw the grass. Americans are crazy. I am Greek and I like to EAT. We Americans, on the other hand, work like Dilbert, disposable workers in service of a bunch of rich bastards who buy our elections to put more rich bastards in office. What if we ALL became honorary Greeks. Would it not improve the national character generally if our citizens spent more time arguing politics in cafes? Nowadays we just yell back at the TV or radio and get fat eating crappy food. I think we should be like the old Greek guys at the Starbucks near me. They sit around and yell at each other for hours, eat decent pastries, teasing the hot baristas, then all go home laughing, telling jokes with the guys they were just yelling at. I was in Athens a few years back: same scene. It was not tourist season so I just hung out with Greeks and soon I was a slacker, too, buying rounds of coffee as they practiced their English and Spanish on me. If we become less obsessed about working so dang hard, live modestly, stop making a fetish of our houses, cars, and electronic doo-dads, we might just hang out more, drink good coffee, and yell happily at each other. Then we’ll all live to be crusty old Greek guys. This is my dream. Don’t forget we also need to tear up most of the parking lots so old dudes can abuse each other over a game of Boule. I’m a pretty good player, btw, so you’ll be paying for the next round of coffees. The Chinese might give us trouble when we become a nation of jovial but active and Stoic bums, instead of mean-spirited fat fundamentalist workaholics. No worries. We’ll nuke ‘em with the weapons left over from our Imperial legacy or, better still, begin a campaign of subversion to turn THEM into Greeks too.”

FROM HERB CAEN’S column of September 24th, 1969 in the San Francisco Chronicle: “Towards a brighter America: The Ukiah Public Library has five copies of Philip Roth’s ‘Portnoy’s Complaint,’ with 12 people on the waiting list. As soon as these have satisfied their curiosity, the five copies will be destroyed by burning as ordered by the Library’s trustees. Bully! …”

ONE MORNING, back in my Explore Mendo days, I’d parked my truck at the Fort Bragg Cemetery which, incidentally, is eternal home to a female survivor of the Donner Party and Vince DiMaggio, and I hiked the Skunk line tracks to the first tunnel, a distance of three or four miles. The tunnel hadn’t yet collapsed. I had the vague idea of walking on through to the other end but hadn’t realized how long the tunnel was and I hadn’t brought a flashlight. I intended to come back someday properly prepared but never did.

SHUFFLING along in the early morning fog, a steady stream of transients loomed up out of the mists, perhaps as many as twenty of them alone or in pairs, all of them walking towards Fort Bragg. They all took careful note of me as I passed in the eastward direction but left me alone.

ON the Pudding Creek side of the tracks there were quite a number of camps, nicely outfitted with tents and sleeping bags and cooking facilities. I wondered how many people were living between the cemetery and the tunnel, and may have still been wondering when I rounded a bend to discover a man defecating on the tracks, a sight that so roiled my sense of what ought to be I yelled at him to move his jarring visual out of my viewshed. “I’ll move you, big boy,” the man yelled back but, hiking up his trousers, he moved on down off the tracks and out of sight while I stood where I was looking around for an impromptu weapon, regretting that I hadn’t brought my gat.

OVER the years, and probably like many locals who hike the outback, I’ve had several uncomfortable encounters with menacing persons. This one I’d brought on myself, and I waited several whole minutes until I was sure he was gone before I walked on.

GOVERNOR HARRIS? Insiders are already speculating that Kamala Harris has the inside track for Governor of California in 2026 after Newsom terms out. No one else polls even close to Harris’s numbers and she’s reportedly been making the rounds of events and funders leading people to assume she’s running. Lt. Governor whatshername has no name recognition but lots of campaign cash from her mega-developer father. The highly vocal Caitlyn Jenner is a possible candidate. State School Superintendent Tony Thurmond is a wannabe pol. Rob Bonta has said he has no plans to run. A couple of SoCal Republicans are considered long-shots. (Mark Scaramella)

A READER WRITES: Whenever I see the word “we” in the modern political context I take it to mean: “Never gonna happen.”

OAF-ISM is now common at public events, and fairly prevalent in everyday life. And it's gone co-ed. Mass vulgarity kicked in about '67. I remember when it first occurred to me that bad public behavior was with us to stay. I was watching a Giants game with my brother in the leftfield bleachers at Candlestick, his preferred ballgame site. Young guys were constantly in fights all around us. It was obvious that fighting with strangers was the reason they were there. Another contingent of fans constantly yelled obscenities at the nearby left fielders for both teams.

AROUND THAT TIME, at a football game at Candlestick, a couple of people were shot, a guy was badly beaten in a men's room, fat women brawled in the parking lot, numerous fist fights broke out in the stands. The occasion? A 49er-Raider game. The guy beaten in the men's room was wearing a t-shirt that said “Bleep the 49ers.” An offended oaf simply commenced trying to beat the Bleeping 49ers guy to death at the urinal.

CANDLESTICK was never a place you'd want to take Gran and the kids to a football game. Guns at the ballpark were new, Oaf-ism was not. But Oaf-ism is definitely more prevalent everywhere at all kinds of venues, from backyard barbecues to wedding receptions. Fights at ball games were nothing new. Lots of fights at the ballgame were definitely new.

OAF-ISM as a way of life has since caught on big time. There are millions of them out there, big fraidy cats pumped up in the gym looking like Maori warriors with their head-to-toe tattoos. They want us all to know they aren't the puffballs deep down they've got to be. But they look menacing which, I guess, is the point.

PUBLIC PROFANITY, vulgar t-shirts and mass drunkenness are fairly new, and seem to coincide with the end of days vibe inspired by the anxieties innate in late capitalism, early chaos, although way back to the Niners at the old Kezar Stadium of the 1940s criminal behavior by small groups of alleged fans was such a problem that the Niners had to screen the tunnel leading to their locker room to protect players from thrown objects.

AND I remember as a little kid the ballplayers themselves —baseball players — climbing into the stands to slug abusive fans. But up until the late 1960s a guy simply bellowing obscenities in the general direction of the playing field would have been unanimously beyond the limit of acceptable public behavior.

FOOTBALL CROWDS, inevitably, have always been rougher than baseball crowds, but baseball crowds at Candlestick, not that there were what you could call “crowds” at Candlestick very often, always contained knots of Oafs who were there simply to fight and raise hell.

AT&T park is much better managed. There, Oaf-ism gets the Oaf a quick heave-ho, which is as it should be. Ironic, though, how tough and tough talking Americans in the aggregate can seem while politically we're a nation of total wimps, sitting still for the clown show in the White House, massive financial swindles, a government funded by the swindlers, joblessness and wage depression on a scale not seen since the Big Depression, and so on. Where are all the tough guys and battling bimbos where it counts?

HEADLINE OF THE DAY: “BOE Adjusts the Proposition 19 $1 Million Intergenerational Transfer Exclusion Amount”

DEAL OF THE WEEK

I’m trying to find a new home for my three pet rats as I’m moving and can’t take them with me. they are under a year old and will come with a large cage/toys/and anything else I have for them. Free to a loving home. (Facebook post)

TRUMP ISN'T LEAVING. This really is a coup underway. Implausible figurehead that he is, there's nothing funny about Trump and he continues to have enormous popular support, lots of it here in our rustic liberal paradise, muted though that support is in lib-dominated areas.

THE PEOPLE behind Trump, his deranged intellectuals, know exactly what they're doing, and they know Trump is their best shot to “throw off the precedents and legal paradigms that have wrongly developed over the last two hundred years, that scar tissue resulting from decades of bad cases and bad statesmen.”

THAT'S RUSSELL VOUGHT speaking, primary author of Project 25, primary creator of this latter day Mein Kampf guiding Trump's decree blizzard in his first month in office. Vought himself has been rewarded with a job in the White House as boss of the Office of Management and Budget. Musk is his executioner.

TRUMP'S unprecedented decree-spree is a harbinger of Vought's plan to vest all power in the president, especially this president or versions thereof, so that America will be ruled hereafter by an authoritarian version of this lethal clown. Trump is the rightwing's man on a white horse, and that big mustang is up and running straight at US.

POST-TRUMP? Godzilla Trump, his giant son Barron, is a few years away from the power levers, and Trump's other two rat-faced heirs are probably too stupid and obnoxious even for Maga Nation, but for now, and the speed with which the Project 25 Gang is gnawing away at our tottering democracy, no one can possibly predict how far they'll get into their dream of a fuhrer state.

YOU LEFT OUT IVANKA. Here all us girls are out in the streets on International Women's Day smashing the patriarchy and you leave her out? I'll concede that Ivanka's the only apparently normal Trump, and not to seem overly ruthless about it, and bear with me here as I launch into garrulous old coot mode, but way back when I was a com-symp, I read how Lenin had ordered the basement execution of the Czar's family, right down to his small children. Intellectually, I understood why; the tenuous Boshevik government couldn't risk a restoration of the Czar's regime, but emotionally I chose career Lib-Lab-ism, Menshevism in com-think. And not that I'm suggesting mass extinguishment of the Trump family, but for the political health of the nation it would be a good idea to permanently exile them to the Greenland they seem to covet. Call it Ice-A-Largo, and confine them to a high rise igloo.

A SOUTH CAROLINA senior citizen was executed by firing squad Friday night. In his turbulent youth he'd beaten his ex-girl friend's parents to death with a baseball bat. (Hey! Nobody's perfect.) After decades on death row, the old boy was a different person than the maniac he'd been that one monstrous night in his youth, and talk about cruel and unusual punishment that our constitution says is forbidden, how sadistically cruel and unusual is it to keep someone alive for years only to kill him?

THE THEORY is that capital punishment serves as a deterrent to people who may be murderously inclined. Har de Har. That's a hot one in this country where there's a mass killing every day, mass defined by the stat-keepers as more than two people. And what kind of a deterrent could execution be when it’s carried out in private? By the government! Logically, state executions should be held in stadiums and televised. Thousands used to turn out for hangings, and millions today would certainly enjoy watching some indefensible criminal get what's coming to him. And think of the money that could be raised for the vics.

FAKE EXECUTIONS would also be boffo box office. The great Russian writer, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, as a youthful revolutionary, ran afoul of the Czar. After months in prison, Fyodor and several of his comrades were tied to execution stakes, the order given to fire… and, ha-ha kids, you can go home but next time you get it for reals. Dos was scared straight into church but several of his fellows went nuts on the spot.

THE OLD BOY offed in South Carolina wisely chose to exit via a firing squad, which is a surer and radically superior method of death than the midnight needle, even if the serum works, which it often doesn't, and radically more efficacious than hanging, which also often doesn't work, killing slowly by strangulation. If revenge is the point, capital punishment in private serves less point than capital punishment as government policy, which never applies to anyone with the means to contest it.

GENE HACKMAN. What strikes me as especially odd, and sad, about the exit of the Hackmans, was their apparent isolation. You'd think that in their income bracket they'd have people popping in all the time, from housekeepers to maintenance people, nevermind immediate family. But they were incommunicado for almost three weeks, and it took a gardener peering through a window to alert the authorities that there was a major problem in the Hackman home.

JUST IN CASE

In case he's passed on, I wrote this ditty for him.

It occurred to me, you'd know.

Pebbles Trippet

San Francisco

BILL KIMBERLIN

Recently I was challenged by the esteemed editor of our beloved local newspaper, the Anderson Valley Advertiser. I had posted a reply to a comment in his paper to the effect that Vladimir Lenin was not the simple son of two Russian school teachers.

His response to my post was basically to say, “Nope, they were school teachers of modest means.” To my assertion that Lenin’s mother was close enough to the Czar at the time that she had Lenin’s imprisonment softened to a lavish country house, was met with the statement that Lenin’s brother was hanged, so much he said for the Czar connection. Let me say that I have great respect for our editor and his newspaper, for which I sometimes write. This is just a clarification to my objections.

When I pointed out that Lenin’s brother, Aleksandr refused to accept simply giving an apology, preferring to die a martyr, the response was a demand for the book I claimed that all this nonsense was coming from.

Frankly, there are several books that document this. The one in question I can’t find right now because I don’t remember which house I left it in.

However, how about this one? “Reconstructing Lenin: An Intellectual Biography” by Tamas Krausz, a prolific Hungarian Marxist professor of Russian history.

Here is a sample of Lenin’s family history. Lenin was born and raised by his parents and grandparents. His father was born in humble circumstances but raised himself to a position in the Czar’s government. Lenin’s father was a Nobleman. He was “Director of Public Schools for the province, overseeing the foundation of over 450 schools as part of the government’s plans for modernization. In January 1882, his dedication to education earned him the Order of Saint Vladimir, which bestowed on him the status of hereditary nobleman.” This meant that his son Lenin was considered a nobleman in waiting. When his father died he would inherit that distinction.

Lenin’s mother was Maria Alexandrovna. After her mother’s death her sister took her into her patronage. Her father acquired hereditary nobility, as did her husband, and thus she herself became noble, though the title appeared only in the paternal line.

Maria’s father (Lenin’s mother) bought the famous Kokuskino estate in 1848, approximately 1,200 acres with 39 serfs and a watermill, where his grandchildren (Lenin and his siblings) later spent many summers. Maria’s wedding was also hosted on this estate.

In short, revolutions are not started by peasants or school teachers. They are started by the intellectuals who often come from wealthy families. Lenin himself said this. We saw this in our own revolution of the wealthy plantation class. So I don’t know why that is in dispute.

The three photos are first of the book I mentioned, then the Lenin’s family home where he grew up, and then the country estate of his grandparents where he summered every year and near where he was later, “imprisoned” in a huge mansion with a large library that his mother arranged for him.

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BILL KIMBERLIN

When my mother drove my brother and me up to Boonville we would often stop in Petaluma and pick up large orders of eggs and butter which we would deliver to Ray’s Resort, my aunt and uncle’s place at the end of “Rays” road out of Philo. This road is named after them. These supplies were to feed the guests staying there, as there were no restaurants open in the Valley for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. 

We also often stopped at this water trough a few miles up the Cloverdale/Boonville road. My mother drove a 1951 Baby Blue Cadillac that she bought off of Bill Harrah the casino magnate after he dropped the girlfriend he intended to give it to. 

The intense heat of mid summer could cause a “vapor lock” on this vintage of cars, so we stopped it and ourselves off at this oasis. I am happy to say that it is still there although the water is not safe to drink anymore.

SELMA. THE 60TH ANNIVERSARY of the famous march and ensuing cop riot was celebrated last weekend. In ‘65 I was deep in a Borneo jungle with the Peace Corps, but darned if my FBI file didn’t have me down as a Selma marcher. Flattered at the error and doubly proud  that the feds were aware of my feeble liberalism — I belonged to Bay Area CORE as a kid — at a time of police red squads, when CORE, along with Martin Luther King, was considered a com-op, and leftwing ““activism” was still small enough for Big Bro to keep track of the participants.

“Poland PM fires off blistering attack on Europe’s ‘cowardice’ as he seeks nuclear weapons to stare down Putin.” One of many recent headlines indicating an inexorable march to catastrophe.

ANOTHER signs-of-the-times headline: “California Democrats see a spike in constituent calls urging them to ‘fight back’.”

THEY CAN’T and, from their comfortable principle-free sinecures, they wouldn’t know how, generally speaking of course, and excepting Bernie and the Black Congressional Caucus. Our congressman? He might go to the wall for new office furniture, or an exciting lunch with Chuck and Nancy, but he didn’t land where he is by getting in political fights.

“MOSTLY DRY weather today although conditions are changing synoptically as the ridge breaks down and the cutoff low continues south and offshore of SoCal.” Like our reader Chuck Dunbar, “synoptically” sent me scurrying for my dictionary where I learned the fifty cent term dropped on us this morning by the National Weather Service translates as “complete,” in this context a complete change from False Spring to wintery wind and rain.

A READER DEMANDS, “What happened to War on the palaces, Peace to the cottages on your masthead? You giving up?” As a family values kinda dude, and seeing as how my dear nephew owns a palace, several of them in fact, it began to feel hypocritical of me to keep on making the recommendation while parenthetically exempting him, as in, War on the palaces, peace to the cottages, except my nephew’s palaces. 

PROHIBITION, the one we didn’t learn from, lasted in this country from 1920 until 1933. It was stoutly but narrowly resisted by the incorporated and coastal areas of Mendocino County but prevailed in the County at large, as a majority of Mendo citizens, all 25,000 of them, went for temperance by a small margin. Ukiah, for instance, voted to remain wet by a mere 16 votes while Point Arena was so frightened at the mere prospect of no booze it incorporated itself before the election, confident that its electorate would vote to go on drinking. Point Arena’s been drunk ever since. And Fort Bragg voted to remain wet, although the vote there was also close. One doesn’t need to be particularly imaginative to understand the sentiment against drink. With no social welfare beyond a few private charities, and male breadwinners in large national numbers cashing their meager weekly pay at the corner gin mill, women and children were at the mercy of the bottle.

INTERESTING story in an old SF Chronicle described the efforts of an “ethnobotanist” named Jolie Egert to promote the acorn as a sustainable food source. Which it was for ten thousand years among Native Americans. “A mature oak tree can produce 300 to 500 pounds of acorns per season,” Ms. Egert says, and the 20 species of that hardy tree grow in every part of the state.

SO FAR, nothing new, really, in the latest release of Kennedy Assassination files. I remain an Oswald Did It Alone guy while conceding other possibilities. As a Marine of the same vintage and qualifying marksmanship as Oswald — he was at Camp Pendleton the same time I was, and, I think, may even have been in the same ITR (infantry training regiment)

HAVING seen the charts of the distances between the Book Depository window and the fatal street below, and having read up on Oswald’s imported, perfectly functional, scoped rifle, my dear old mum could have hit Kennedy twice from that vantage point without getting out of her wheelchair. I could have hit that easy target at least three times, and I barely qualified as a Marksman, the lowest rung on the Corps’ qualifying ladder, but still making me a pretty good shot by most standards. (The training was infallible.)

OSWALD, by the lock-step psycho-social standards of the 1950s, was indeed one strange dude, a self-taught Marxist who apparently thought Stalin’s Russia would make a congenial home for an American expatriate with left-wing sympathies. When the skeptical Russkies shunted Lee off to a factory job, he was soon homesick and returned to the U.S. with a Russian bride and a baby daughter. Mrs. Oswald was the daughter of a KGB colonel, whom her weird husband mentally and physically abused.

FOR A YOUNG GUY, the kid sure got around.

AS the only person in America with his uniquely peculiar bona fides, Oswald aroused the slumbering attentions of the CIA and the FBI, who tracked his adventures as a noisy pro-Castro partisan on the streets of Miami where he was attacked by Cuban exiles to his trip to Mexico where he visited the Cuban embassy, and at all times in between. It was as if Oswald coveted federal attention.

(NOTE: I think he probably was a proto-communist. He took a shot at a John Bircher general named Walker, and was angry at Kennedy for trying to overthrow the Cuban government.)

(Note: It’s ironic that the FBI, founded by a blackmailing closet case who spent his nights in cocktail dresses, the same lady-man who hounded the American left all his days with a special animus for black radicals and Martin Luther King, is now lamented by many libs as being “corrupted” by the Trump lunatics now in charge of it.)

BE ALL THIS as it is so far documented, the only smoking gun all these years later is Oswald’s Italian carbine, a rifle similar to the Marine Corps’ M-1. If there is incriminating documentation of his involvement in a government conspiracy to kill Kennedy, it long ago would have been destroyed by the conspiracists

(I HUGELY ENJOYED Oliver Stone’s movie on the assassination primarily because it indicts all the right people and institutions, but there’s no evidence for any of it, and it’s the basis for whatever information on the case succeeding generation will have on it.)

NO INSULT intended to any of my conspiracy buds, but what strikes me about conspiracy theorizing, on any subject, is the seemingly dire emotional need of the theorizers to believe there was one, and their equivalently intense need to damn non-believers.

ANYWAY there are, after all, larger conspiracies, real ones, one of which was mounted right here in Mendocino County by the FBI who managed to exclude Judi Bari’s ex-husband from the primary suspect pool.

BEST book on Oswald will probably always be Norman’s Mailer’s ‘Oswald’s Tale.’ Don Delillo’s ‘Libra’ is also a must read for anyone interested in the Kennedy assassination.

ON-LINE COMMENTS OF THE WEEK

[1] I can’t believe I wasted an evening listening to Trump’s blather. He could have said what needed to be said in 20 minutes, half an hour tops. The other 90 minutes of self-aggrandizing bullshit wasn’t worth it for a couple of pretty decent zingers. He is certainly not “great”, I consider him as merely “good”, and that’s only in comparison to the alternative. He needs to get over himself (not gonna happen). As to the libs, if they had any real balls, they would have totally boycotted the speech, instead of sitting there like hypnotized morons.

[2] Trash hole people. It is also super bs that all the freaks run to the rez to hide. Is it something of tolerance to violence? Is it something of a tolerance within the culture or they think it’s okay for criminals to be defended or I’m not exactly sure. Look at the number of these trash hole type people that have wound up at the res Richard Allen Davis Coyote Valley. The Jerk that killed the people up in Samoa and at Weott. This jerk. Negie Fallis and missing Kadijah. The Covelo crew. The constant stream of craziness at Bear River. At some point harboring trash holes to continue being trash holes is a problem. Why isn’t there metal detectors and a screening to enter the Sherwood Casino site?

[3] Scam calls. I’ve had this landline for 35 years. I keep it for my elderly family members and the grandkids who finally have remembered it. It’s an easy number to remember (if they, the actual grandkids get stuck somewhere and their phone is out of juice and they don’t remember phone numbers). My cell doesn’t get much spam at all, but I use it not as nearly as much. Flip phone for the win. I’m well aware of the spam crap I get. “Medicare” plans mostly, which I ignore. We have a great local plan. Plus I would never have had the “Hey Grandma” calls, which amuse me to no end. Yeah, I’m easily amused.

[4] Traveling abroad for the first time since November, I saw pity in the eyes of strangers when they heard my American accent. Pity, empathy, and utter confusion, as if to convey “What the hell is happening to your country?” with a mere glance or a quiet sigh. Believe me, I’m American and I’m just as confused as you are.

[5] Like our problem is the “Dem” sock puppet, as “opposed” to the “Repub” sock puppet (who championed the Iraqi $8 trillion, War of Aggression, 1 million civilian deaths.) So now the multi-decade Bi-partisan Looting operation tries to sell the risible notion that the problem is some irrelevant split, Dems v. Repubs (like these are actual choices), or Liberals v. Conservatives (like these words haven’t been long stripped of meaningful definitions)…anything to distract from the Mob that perpetuates it all. Let’s you & him fight! I’m suppose to care about the comic opera of Musk’s tax-payer money saving operation…which hasn’t touched the Pentagon, the biggest Money-Laundering operation in history, who regularly starts & loses 20 year wars with no consequences? That maintains, at some expense I imagine, a hundred TIMES more overseas bases than China & Russia together? It’s THEATER! I’m being encouraged to give a sh-t despite the clear fact that every cent saved will be used, along with Medicare & SS to finance tax breaks for the Billionaires who make up this government (& did under the previous Sock Puppet). Hannah Arendt observed, propaganda is NOT designed to convince you of a point of view. It’s to wear you out, discourage you from thinking or caring about the issue. Please watch, w/your thinking cap on, the absurd 33 second AI video of Trump Gaza and still believe its point isn’t to make evil banal, acceptable, mainstream. (PS: Bondi will never expose Epstein’s operation since Israel is behind it, with again, “BOTH” parties)

[6] NAME CHANGE FORT BRAGG, an on-line comment:

It’s disgusting that this group continues to pimp out children in a vain attempt to keep alive their failed effort to change the name.

But it’ll be a financial windfall for the students who play the game — pro tip for participants: be sure and argue in support of the name change — the “independent” judges have never picked a winner that argued against the name change.

[7] I remember at least three restaurant jobs I quit for the bad behavior of the boss. One was a well-known country club owned by a famous golfer in Orlando. The chef chased me with a butcher knife. One time I got locked in the walk in till someone needed something and opened the door. The third time I got groped by a chef who was allegedly teaching me some cooking. I was poor, but there were limits.