Off the Record 3/31/2025

TOM YATES (The Coast):

The current story in the Chronicle about the end of Dick’s Place is about one-quarter of what’s real. The news has been out there since at least January. It’s a lot more than the bar. It’s the property from Main Street to Albion and includes Dick’s, the large retail building next door, the two story house on Albion and the liquor license — worth a lot by itself — and all fixtures. Not in favor of losing our history or culture. Just want to see the whole story

MIKE GENIELLA notes:

My kind of bar - I have not had a drink in years, but I love Dick’s and bars like it. My hometown had a few classics, so my attraction is lifelong. What I didn’t learn was when to stop, but that is another story. The price tag obviously underscores the value of Mendocino Village property. However, a buyer would have to move a lot of whisky shots and beer across the bar to take on that debt. Maybe the romance of Dick’s is enough to keep it going. Thanks to Matt LeFever for writing about a classic.

FROM THE LATEST KZYX news letter….. “The “new David,” David Strock, told The KZYX Connector that he has been a KZYX listener for many years. “I’ve been wanting to get involved,” he said, “and when [Supervisor] John Haschak told me about the open seat, I saw it as a great opportunity—especially given the scarcity of dependable local news sources. I want to help make sure we can get reliable, trustworthy news in this county. KZYX is an invaluable community asset, and I’m looking forward to helping the station in any way I can.”

IN FACT, Mendocino County has an abundance of news sources, all of them, IMO, ‘reliable’ in the flexible sense of the term but not, I daresay, in the KZYX-NPR sense. This Strock character is, by his own implication, ultra-discerning, and certainly ultra-reliable otherwise he couldn’t possibly have been appointed to the station’s board of directors.

ONE MAJOR WAY you could help the station lift itself out of its and your impermeably smug miasma, Strock, is to know that in fact Mendocino County has an abundance of reporters and news sites with many years of experience in a variety of media, all of them ”reliable” in the flexible sense of the term but not, I daresay, in the KZYX-NPR sense. By his own implication, this guy is ultra-discerning, and certainly ultra-reliable otherwise he couldn’t possibly have been appointed to the station’s board of directors.

AN ELDERLY MAN was walking home one night around 2am when a police officer stopped him and inquired where he was going. “I’m on my way to a lecture on alcohol abuse and the effects it has on the body and soul, plus some additional information about smoking and staying out late,” he said. The cop was skeptical. “And just who might be giving such a lecture at this hour?” the cop asked. The man replied, “That would be my wife.”

AWESOME. Time to retire this tiresome superlative. Way overused, as our language drifts farther and farther from meaning, a fact of American life that results in, to name one obvious example, the collection of nuts and clowns presently running our fast fading United States.

A LESS awesome example of worn out awesomeness occurred one afternoon when I was walking my bicycle up the steepest block of San Francisco’s 17th Street when a youngish woman with a car full of dogs pulled over, rolled her window down, beckoned my sweat-soaked, trudging bulk over to her vehicle to tell me, “Awesome bike!”

AS AN OLD SCHOOL dude from a time when a dude was a fancy dressing man, and bros were the Hill’s Bros Coffee Company, I resisted the impulse to reply, “Will you please fuck ALL the way off?” I’d thought maybe she’d needed directions, or her dogs were threatening to eat her, but no, she’d accosted me simply to congratulate me on my bicycle.

SO I SAID thank you, and trudged on, wondering why anybody would even notice, let alone go out of their way to comment on a hundred dollar bike built out of spare parts.

LATER the same day I left a phone message for a guy whose answering machine wished me, an imperfect stranger, an “awesome day.”

MOST of us will settle for any kind of day, and every day that we survive is, strictly speaking, awesome, but this constant drip drip drip of false feeling is, like our shrinking vocabularies, adding considerably to the prevailing insanity.

A READER WRITES

Feral Darryl Cherney, among others, always had an eye out for the unattached young women defending the forests when they should have been a little more wary of the two-footed creatures stalking them.

Spring is springing and unspringing down here.

I hope to make another trip to your community before I turn up my toes, if for no other reason than to pay homage to my old friend, Alex.

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I love coming across old AVAs as I mentioned in a former email. This time there was one in a bunch of papers and you had an article on Clint (Smith?) on the front page. A teacher who had a long and lascivious love affair with a 15 year-old.

We have a friend, a forest defender (he was with Gypsy when he was killed, only 16 at the time). He’s being grilled by the Earthfirst Forest Defense Star Chamber right now for relationships with younger women. Not statutory rape, just younger women. I’m going to give him your article to document the range of opinions about that behavior.

The scene of the packed courtroom standing in unison to protect the school teacher. Amazing, because the forest defender in question is broken-hearted over this raking over the coals his comrades are giving him, and feeling worthless.

Someone should write a book about forest defenders 20 years later. We had house finches at the bird feeder today! And lambs jumpng around.

Spring comes…

“I COULD HARDLY RECOGNIZE the country as the same. I knew in the summer and when I got off the train at night in Madrid snow was blowing outside the station. I had no overcoat and stayed in my room writing in bed or in the nearest cafe drinking coffee and Domccq brandy. It was too cold to go out for three days and then came the lovely spring weather…The heat and the cold come and go quickly here… I have watched on a July night, when I could not sleep , the beggars burning newspaper in the street and crouching around the fire to keep warm. Two nights later it was too hot to sleep until the coolness that comes just before dawn.”

— Ernest Hemingway, ‘Death in the Afternoon’

VERY YOUNG REPORTERS think you need to take notes on a tape recorder, but you can’t. You might get something on a tape recorder but that’s not what I wanted. Essentially, I don’t want what comes out of [the subject’s] mouth the first time any more than I want the editor to read what I write the first time. I might rewrite a sentence twenty times, or a lede fifty times. The reader doesn’t know that, but I know that. My prose might read as if it had been easily written but it isn’t anything at all like that.”

—Gay Talese

THERE WAS NO SUBSTANTIAL COUNTY BUSINESS on next Tuesday’s Board of Supervisors agenda. None. Despite looming budget cuts, the recent return of the elected Auditor-Controller/Treasurer-Tax Collector and the coordination of financial staff and a looming civil suit there are no closed session items. Major unresolved issues such as HIP camps, AirBnB regulation and taxation, declining sales and cannabis taxes, the upcoming opening, financing, and staffing of the Psychiatric Health Facility and the new wing of the Jail, the decline of the wine industry, uncollected tax revenues, a years-long delay in even trying to comply with Measure B’s mental health and substance abuse services requirements, staffing shortfalls, Sheriff’s department budget gaps, homeless encampments, and on and on — remain unaddressed much less resolved. Instead, the only non-routine items are a bunch of awards for the County’s “leadership training” class, and a review of a letter of support for Assembly Bill 263 having to do with Scott and Shasta River watersheds and fishing. Mendo might as well have five AI robots sitting as “supervisors.” (Mark Scaramella)

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SUPERVISOR BERNIE NORVELL:

Tuesdays meeting agenda…

I cannot argue that there is not a lot of meat in this agenda. However, staff is in in the middle of budget building,

Meeting with department heads to hear their needs. Hip camps was given back to planning and building and we should see that come back soon. Cannabis in on for Wednesday’s GGC meeting. There are in fact three closed session items on Tuesday’s agenda, 6a, 6b, 6c. We were told at the last BHAB meeting that the RFP for a PHF service provider was in the review process, per Dr. Miller. Homeless encampments have not been forgotten and are being worked on. The county’s CORE program is new and still being worked on. I hope to have some updates to share soon.

A RECENT INVITATION: “Grand tour of BART’s bathrooms — from the pristine to the pathogenic.” Pathogenic in my experience. If there’s a pristine public bathroom anywhere in the Bay Area it’s maybe one of those automated French loos directly after a cleaning crew treatment. Public bathrooms should all be privatized, one to each entrepreneur who would agree, as part of the deal, to work on-site for a minimum number of hours a week to ensure quality control. Rather than enter the fetid, toxic dank of the typical public lavatory, wouldn’t you pay a buck or two to use scrupulously clean facilities manned or womaned by a smartly uniformed attendant who hosed you down afterwards and handed you a fresh towel? Why, think of it! The national transformation of the public bathroom experience! Clearly a business made for free enterprise!

I ASKED former Boonville school superintendent, Louise Simson, for her opinion of the federal Department of Education. She said that the number of reports required of local superintendents by the feds is “crazy,” and too often don’t have anything to do with classroom education. Onerous bureaucracy, though, is not the reason the Maga Gang wants to eliminate the Ed Dept. They claim it’s teeming with “left-wing lunatics,” by which they mean its funding should go to rightwing lunatics to teach the kids all about the days America was great, i.e., white, and free of ethnic and sexual minorities.

SIGN OF THE TIMES: A Hopland man said he’d made an early run to Ukiah where, in the WalMart parking lot, he watched a “transient type kid with a backpack” rummage through a garbage pan, extract a crushed bag of Frito-Lay Potato Chips, then hold the bag up to his mouth, draining whatever crumbs were in it. “I drove over to him and laid a twenty on him, and he burst into tears and god blessed me so many times I darn near asked him for my twenty back. But you know what? Something’s gotta give in this country. We can’t go on like this.”

MIKE GENIELLA RECOMMENDS

The best podcast yet on Freedom of the Press issues

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/fresh-air/id214089682?i=1000698771278

TED DACE:

At the very least, Columbia University must make a public statement on Mahmoud Khalil’s detention and disclose its role in his arrest. Let’s not be “good Germans” in this crucial moment.

“A university is a place where ideas are meant to be challenged, where the status quo is questioned, and where students push boundaries to make change in the world. Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs claims to educate students to serve and to lead in support of the global public interest. Instead, under your leadership, it has become a place where students are punished for speaking the truth, intimidated for advocating justice, and detained for standing against genocide.”

THE GROWING opposition to Trump too often focuses on his obvious unfitness, that he’s an idiot and so on, but the people behind him, the people running him aren’t idiots and they aren’t incompetent, and they’ve already, in less than three months, successfully gotten US far down the road to a kind of government we don’t recognize and, hopefully, won’t tolerate. This really is a rolling coup, and the Magas aren’t leaving office now that they captured it.

WHAT’S ENCOURAGING about the growing opposition to Trump, the great unifier, is the broad cross-section of Americans he’s unified. Against himself. It may be the wildest wishful thinking, but I think we may be headed, at last, to a Maidan-like uprising this summer, mass permanent rallies in all the major cities that drive these people out of office.

BUT, BUT, BUT… They have the cops, they have the Army, they have the Proud Boys.

DO THEY? Trump’s brown shirts aren’t even a sliver of the population, and already in Seattle and Portland the forces of righteousness have more than held their own against the Trumpian militias.

COPS? Elements thereof probably, but not unified departments. In Portland the cops didn’t intervene when the militias were pounding on counter-protesters, but protesters still held their own. Trump sympathies among police forces are stronger in suburban and rural areas than they are in cities where police forces include large contingents of ethnic minorities, most of whom are emphatically not Magas. Ditto for Army units.

THE CLOSEST we’ve come to mass opposition lately occurred during the Occupy Movement, and that was two decades ago, ignited by the 2008 federal bailout of the crooks atop the mega-banks. The crises we face today multiply by the day, and again it’s the captive federal government doing the igniting.

OCCUPY SAN FRANCISCO, in my experience, was fun. The neo-Occupy presently taking shape across the United States is shaping up as massive and much more serious, and certainly more enduring, than Occupy.

MY OCCUPY MEMORIES: Occupy SF was looking pretty scruffy that Thursday, less scruffy Friday, and even less scruffy Saturday, but the Chronicle exaggerated just how scruffy anyway. While I was making my solidarity visit at Justin Herman Plaza, foot of Market Street, the Porta Potties were being attended to and the Reverend Cecil Williams, getting about with a cane, and his rail thin wife, the poet Janice Mirikitani, the thinnest woman I’ve seen outside a hospital, seemed to be inspecting the food tent, which has always looked spotless to me, sometimes with fancy spreads that look like they’ve been catered.

A FEW of the usual walking wounded were shuffling around, and one suddenly blurted, “And another thing! I’m not gay!” The two bocce lanes had been cleared of tents, not that anyone had ever much bocce-ied on them, Justin Herman Plaza bearing no resemblance to the busy humanity and flower beds of a real plaza. The Occupiers enlivened the otherwise dead and foreboding swathe of unrelieved concrete.

A SENIOR CITIZEN walked by with a sign that said, “My Own Left Wing Theory.” I asked him for a copy. “I’m out,” he said. Nearby was a placard that began, “Wisdom is the ability to aspire through one’s own creations…” A man identified only as Brian was scheduled at 11:30am to deliver a lecture called “Restorative Justice.” I wanted to hear what Brian meant by restorative justice. It was exactly 11:30. No Brian. Brian never did appear and justice will be restored on that glorious day that capitalism is reconfigured to serve us instead of us serving it.

OF COURSE there were a lot of marginal people in this Occupy camp, but millions more people are being marginalized, which is why today’s neo-Occupy has resonated with so many, and is steadily, in the Age of Trump, angrily resonating with millions more Americans.

EVERY TIME I visited Occupy SF there were as many conventional people present as street people. A quartet of uniformed airline workers, while deliberately positioning themselves a few feet from the main body of the camp, distributed leaflets outlining their work site beefs, and an articulate man named Richard Kreiger was on camera with the omni-present media vultures. Kreiger did a lot of Occupy’s talking, which is a good thing because he stays on message, which is that American capitalism has become cruel and oppressive, if it wasn’t already which, of course, depends on both your perspective and bank account. Contrary to what a lot of media and pundits are putting out, there are a lot of smart, creative people involved with Occupy, and they aren’t fooling around and they’re not going away.

SF, LIKE MENDOCINO COUNTY, is teeming with self-identified “progressives,” a Rorschach-like term that seems to mostly translate as a spiffier kind of liberal, but a liberal who can be depended on at election time to vote for conservative Democrats. Myself, I don’t see a whit of evidence that San Francisco is any more progressive in public policy than retro Mendocino County is. In Frisco, even the communists call themselves progressives (as they always have), but these days it’s a place where “progressives” erect high rises for zillionaires while defending the rights of suicidal drunks and dopers to die on the streets. What we really have in SF is not a politically progressive population but a concentration of comfortable people whose true priorities are food, fashion and arse tattoos.

BLACK FRIDAY was a representative Frisco event, funny as all heck in a sort of dancing-to the-apocalypse way. At Union Square, a couple hundred people were marching against mindless consumption as thousands of mindless consumers poured in and out of the high end emporiums. And here come the Women In Black scaring the little kids — “Mommy, are they dead?” — while a delegation of animal people, one of whom seemed to be draped in a pile of mutilated coyotes, protested fur coats. Do they still sell fur coats? I haven’t seen one on a live person since 1950.

JIM SHIELDS

I’ve always advised people to take politics seriously but never lose your sense of humor as it helps you keep a more rounded perspective and promotes healthier minds, at least that’s my story. In keeping with that theme, this Saturday if you time check out:

Jim Shields Talks To Supe Haschak On KPFN This Saturday, March 22nd This Saturday, March 22, 2025 at 12:30pm, District 3 Supervisor John Haschak will appear on KPFN 105.1 on “This & That” with Jim Shields and his partner-in-crime Mendocino Mike.

They will be talking about all the recent happenings at Board of Supervisors meetings with the exception of the infamous Cubbison affair, since the Supes have been gagged by their legal brain trust who played a large role in creating this mess in the first place. There still will be lots of other topics up for discussion, however.

IF THERE’S ONE EPISODE that perfectly summarizes what the cops have to deal with on a daily basis, it’s this one: 

I WAS IN FORT BRAGG on my way to meet a person who could be counted on to tell me more than I wanted to know, but needed to know for professional purposes, about that perennially intriguing little town. 

IT WAS ABOUT 11am. In front of me on Main Street a female Fort Bragg cop was pulling over a small, camper-shelled pick-up truck. I stopped to watch. Soon, three officers were on-scene, and just as soon all three were trying to pull a large, bellowing woman out of the vehicle, her “sovereign” vehicle, she was insisting, as her snarling dog, maybe a 40-pounder, bounced around in the cab yipping and biting at the three cops, two large-ish men and the woman who’d made the initial stop. 

THE BELLOWING woman had immediately gone off , nutted up it seemed to me, with no calm prelude, as in the usual version of, “What’s the problem, officer?” Nope. It was instantly as if she was being kidnapped. “Get your hands off me, you bastards!” 

I ASSUMED she was drunk. She had a death grip on her steering wheel and was shouting, “You have no right to do this,” with a lot of profanity where the exclamation points go. 

I THOUGHT for sure the cops would have to taze or pepper spray the beast to pry her out of her truck. I wanted to see how they managed the extraction.

BUT DARNED if Fort Bragg’s Finest didn’t soon have their frothing, red haired, 200-pound antagonist up and out with what seemed to me remarkable restraint and a minimum of force. And off she went in handcuffs. And, because he’d bitten one of the officers, off went Loyal Dog to Ukiah Animal Control for a period of quarantine to see if he was rabid. 

PUNCTUALITY being my sole remaining virtue, and the show apparently over, I hurried on for my eleven o’clock appointment, but a week later I read in the Ukiah paper about a woman named Jessica Rachelle Armstrong and an “unidentified male companion” had pulled off a pretext raid on Animal Control to free Loyal Dog from custody. The couple had distracted Animal Control’s Bliss Fisher with a question about the County’s spay and neuter program. While Bliss hustled off to get the information, the unidentified male companion raced into the dog impound and grabbed Loyal Dog.

ALL THREE of the absconders were running out the door when Bliss returned with the spay and neuter info. Sheriff’s deputies soon contacted “Ms. Armstrong,” the dog’s owner, by phone. She said she was “home quarantining” Loyal Dog at an undisclosed location in Lake County and had no intention of bringing either him or herself back to Mendocino County.  

MS. ARMSTRONG subsequently identified herself as Jurrassica Raptorsaurette Armstrong, and her place of work as Amazon Warrior Goddess of Valhalla. (Her history seems off here; life on Earth was barely into the Frog Age in Jurrassica times.) 

ARMSTRONG-JURRASSICA had been stopped in Fort Bragg because she was not wearing her seat belt. She said she didn’t have to. “Show me where the Constitution says I have to wear a seatbelt or possess a driver’s license.” And so on. 

TO ONE on-line critic Jurrassica replied, “Are you a Communist? I live in a free country where you don’t have to show the nazis your pay-pahz (papers) and you don’t have to beg your slave masters permission to travel.” 

JESSICA JURRASSICA wrote in capital letters, managing to sound like she’s yelling even in print. To another critic she explained, “I was not charged with any crime. There has been no warrant issued for my arrest. Therefore, I will not be going to court. And I have been sitting at home since last Thursday. I believe I told you all this twice now. Please pay attention.” 

JURRASSICA claimed she was indeed wearing a seatbelt when the female officer pulled her over. “Maybe if the Fort Bragg cops would refrain from stealing people’s dogs, they wouldn’t get bit,” she wrote, adding, “The Fort Bragg cops beat me up and stole everything I had.” 

IN FACT, the Lake County crackpot was back behind the wheel of her camper truck in a couple of hours, and she certainly had not been beaten. The cops took the beating in that one, from her and her dog.

THE AWESOME FILES, Jeff Costello writes: “When Jim Gibbons’ son Eli was about 13, he was whacking away on the MacPlus, the very same machine I used to write my first letter to the AVA, which puts us in 1988 or 89. I commented on the kid’s rapid-fire attack on the keyboard and he said, ‘I’m an awesome typist.’ The abuse of the word goes back a way. I told Eli that ‘awesome’ was more aptly applied to things like volcano eruptions or supernovae, but the admonition fell on deaf ears. The language is changing, like it or not. And I don’t, but that’s where it’s at. By far, the current most awesomely overused word, at the end of the day, is ‘iconic.’ If you will.”

SIGNS OF THE TIMES: A Hopland correspondent reports: “I was in the pet food aisle of a Santa Rosa store where I started a conversation with a woman who said she was 65 and grew marijuana so she can afford pet food. She teared up and said, ‘I never thought it would come to this.’ Who would have thought an old lady would have to grow weed to feed her cats?”

I MISS the Ukiah Daily Journal’s Question Man column, the following as fresh in my mind as the day I read it. “What can be done to change the world in a positive way?” The answers ranged from “Abolish capitalism as a world system,” to “For people to use their turn signals,” to one young woman who said acupuncture would do the trick.

AS A CHILD, I walked in on an uncle slapping my aunt, and he didn’t stop slapping her when I appeared, and was still slapping her when I exited. All these years later I remember my shock. Years later, as a chronological adult, I was foolish enough to intervene in the domestic violence of persons barely known to me. Both interventions occurred when the male was hitting the female and I felt I had no choice but to intervene since I knew the vics.

IN ONE, the woman told me to mind my own business, in the other the man said he was going to come back with a gun and kill me. A week later, the latter two lovebirds, arm-in-arm, flipped me off. In unison. As if they’d choreographed their fight just so they could flip me off.

A READER sent in this quote: “There is nothing in which the birds differ more from man than the way in which they can build, and yet leave a landscape as it was before.” Oh yeah? Try chickens. They build nothing and tear things up almost as thoroughly as wild pigs. And while we’re discussing the animal kingdom I notice that the blue jays who always dominated our feeder suddenly disappeared. Do jays migrate? Another thing: Our neighbor’s rooster now flies his coop early every morning to stalk our hens, viciously attacking our rooster every time he comes anywhere near.

ONE DAY AT 4TH AND CLEMENT in the City, so many art trendies had gathered to get into an exhibit that they spilled out into the early evening street. The next day I stopped by to look at the art. There wasn’t any. A note soon appeared on the door that said the art had moved to Mission Street, somewhere around 16th. I never did catch up with the display, but I heard it was interesting.

THE CITY is teeming with artists and art schools but there’s never been less art, confirmed for me by my annual visit to SFMOMA where, the last time I visited, in the building’s endless atrium there was a huge neon mass, which I liked better than the atrium without it.

I LOOKED at sculptor Richard Serra’s drawings of the big hunks of steel he installs in the big empty spaces of big empty buildings housing big empty people who would become suicidal looking at these things all day. In the context of industrial soul-less-ness Serra’s installations make sense.

THE MOST IRRITATING DISPLAY, however, and there are always at least three or four vying for the top phony award, was a video of two high school kids talking about the photographic genius of their mother, an obvious lunatic, seen at work in the film snapping hazy pictures of dog bones. Right here I propose that photography be downgraded to Art, Class 5. Art, Class 6 would be macrame and beading, Art, Class 7 videography — all of it.

THE MOMA has some arresting photos in its vast collection of random stuff, about half that random stuff being of no artistic value whatsoever, but almost all the MOMA’s interesting pictures were taken in either the last half of the 19th century or the first half of the twentieth. Besides, anyone with better than the sensitivities of a stone can take an interesting picture, and everyday right here at the ava we feature some really beautiful photos of our incomparably beautiful county. Somehow, few people among the shutterbug pros on exhibit at SFMOMA manage to pull off beauty, and their camera equipment costs thousands.

TAKING A BREAK from the non-art across the street, I sat on the park bench watching the passing parade. Now there’s an art show! As it happened, there was a photography class in progress, all of them snapping away at… seagulls! Granted, it was a class, but still.

NO, I don’t like Ansel Adams enough to pay my way in to look at his photographs. I can get a nice shot of a redwood all by my ownself, and store it permanently in my head where I can call it forth any old time to enjoy. And my mental picture is better! Better, I tell you!

ANYWAY, the guy who used to do the booking photos at the Mendocino County Jail turned out much more interesting pictures every day than most “art” photographers manage over their fraudulent careers. If you called the booking photographer an artist he’d probably arrest you, but he or she has got a nice eye, and Mendocino County yields to no one in the pure photogenic diversity of our criminal population.

A SENIOR MOMA ticket costs $25! Pure extortion, and no break at all for the average senior even in up-market Frisco.

BUT there were two paintings I’d never seen before worth the inflated price of admission: Edward Hopper’s ‘The Equestrians’ and a painting called ‘Potrero Hill’ by an old beatnik whose name I failed to write down. (Bechtle?) The old boy can paint, whoever he is.

It occurred to me that what’s generally missing at the MOMA is any kind of consciousness, social or political. The artists have no ideas. They all float in a hazy nimbus of neo-decadent. Like Dudes and Butt Cheek Tattoos untethered to the reality the rest of us know and are fascinated by. And their art is boring and mostly awful and, I’ll bet, a lot of them are fascists in their bones.

AS THE ANTIDOTE to dead art by the walking dead at 3rd and Mission, I hopped on the 2 Clement out to the Legion of Honor where there was a Pissarro exhibit called Pissarro’s People. At last! Whole rooms full of the real deal! Pissarro was an anarchist who managed to get himself on all the right government hit lists. As a person of the left, he was also a person of feeling and sympathy which, as a genius, he can also make us feel through his paintings. Even his sketches for paintings have power.

MARK SCARAMELLA ADDS:

Speaking of artistic photography, we like the photography from the “Humans of Berkeley” project.

Check their facebook page for more…

MARTIN LUTHER KING, April 1967: “I should make it clear that while I have tried to give a voice to the voiceless on Vietnam and to understand the arguments of those who are called enemy, I am as deeply concerned about our troops there as anything else. For it occurs to me that what we are submitting them to in Vietnam is not simply the brutalizing process that goes on in any war where armies face each other and seek to destroy. We are adding cynicism to the process of death, for they must know after a short period there that none of the things we claim to be fighting for are really involved. Before long they must know that their government has sent them into a struggle among Vietnamese, and the more sophisticated surely realize that we are on the side of the wealthy and the secure while we create hell for the poor. Somehow this madness must cease. We must stop now. I speak as a child of God and brother to the suffering poor of Vietnam. I speak for those whose land is being laid waste, whose homes are being destroyed, whose culture is being subverted. I speak for the poor of America who are paying the double price of smashed hopes at home and death and corruption in Vietnam. I speak as a citizen of the world, for the world as it stands aghast at the path we have taken. I speak as an American to the leaders of my own nation. The great initiative in this war is ours. The initiative to stop it must be ours. There is something seductively tempting about stopping there and sending us all off on what in some circles has become a popular crusade against the war in Vietnam. I say we must enter the struggle, but I wish to go on now to say something even more disturbing. The war in Vietnam is but a symptom of a far deeper malady within the American spirit, and if we ignore this sobering reality we will find ourselves organizing clergy — and laymen — concerned committees for the next generation. They will be concerned about Guatemala and Peru. They will be concerned about Thailand and Cambodia. They will be concerned about Mozambique and South Africa. We will be marching for these and a dozen other names and attending rallies without end unless there is a significant and profound change in American life and policy. Such thoughts take us beyond Vietnam, but not beyond our calling as sons of the living God.”

JEFF BLANKFORT

Sorry, but I have been observing “Not in My Name!” protests of Israel and International Zionism’s war on the Palestinians and Lebanese people by American Jews since Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in June 1982 and with all due respects to those Jews who participate, I consider those protests, when one gets past the images, to have contributed to what has been the utter failure of “the Palestinian solidarity movement,” with which I have been heavily involved since 1970.

What the organizers and participants seem to be telling the world is that, as Jews, they have a special relationship with the issue, that “it’s a Jewish thing,” and not the responsibiliry of ALL Americans to protest their tax money being used by the lickspittles of the political class to furnish Israel wirh the weapons of war and genocide.

That these protests never lead with a demand to stop US weapons for Israel nor raise the one issue that organized Judasim, across the spectrum, has managed to keep from the American public, would bring home to most Americans the sadistic nature of the Israeli attack on the USS Liberty on June 8, 1967, the suppression of which by JVP as well as our national media have been among American Zionsts’ most successful accomplishments.

Too many Palestinians, so pleased and respectful of Jews who are willing to condemn Israel, have, in effect, turned over the agenda of the struggle for Palestine in the US to Jewish Voice for Peace, which has a history of targeting the ONE organization in the US calling for stopping US funding for Israel and educating US citizens about the Liberty, Alison Weir and her If Americans Knew which some years back JVP attempted to destroy. Having failed that the JVP now ignores her and her campaigns on both issues.

Check out If Americans Knew’s website and subscribe to her daily reports on Palestine, Gaza and the West Bank and what US politicians are up to on Israel’s behalf.

https://us11.campaign-archive.com

WHEREVER he is I will always admire Pete Wilson, the KGO newsman who died unexpectedly while undergoing hip replacement surgery. Wilson was a free speech guy all the way. When the Judi Bari cult tried to prevent author Kate Coleman from appearing on Wilson’s KGO talk show (they did prevent Kate from speaking at the Fort Bragg library and nearly shut her down in Mendocino), Pete, on-air, said, “Let me ask you about the bomb case, and we’ll open up the phones and give people a shot at this. They will be calling in. I hope this doesn’t become only the people on one side who have decided to call in and grab the phones. But that can happen… Which I think is a form of fascism, but that’s just me.”

NO, PETE, that’s most of us, and when it comes to shutting down opinions they don’t like, the “progressives” could show the Fox News Network a thing or two. Cindy Sheehan, in a poignant observation, said she found that many of the people she thought were on her side were as bad, if not worse, than the Bush-ism monsters back in the day.

WHEN JIM MITCHELL, of the renowned or, depending on how blue your nose is, reviled, Mitchell Brother’s Theater in San Francisco, shot his brother Artie to death back in 1991, Jim and his supporters were very unhappy with the prejudicial coverage the shocking event was receiving in the Bay Area papers. Warren Hinckle decided Jim would get fairer treatment in the AVA, especially if Warren wrote the coverage himself. So every week while Jim’s trial was underway in Marin, we’d print up a couple thousand extra papers and trundle them down to the theater. I was handsomely compensated for the extra effort, and not only by the fleshly acre of naked women I couldn’t help but see as they roamed the busy premises as I, an all-business bumpkin from Boonville, lugged the papers to the theater’s upstairs office. From the O’Farrell Street sin palace the papers were driven to Marin where they were distributed the next day throughout the Marin County Courthouse. Maybe the counter-coverage worked because Jim got three years for ending his brother’s turbulent (manslaughter), apparently menacing life. Naked women in the aggregate might as well be a field of sunflowers and I came away with only one vivid memory of the theater — an old man in a walker emerging from one of the alcoves with a big smile on his face. “Do you get a lot of old guys?” I asked theater manager Jim Armstrong. “Right around the first of the month, we do,” he said, “when their social security checks come in.”

A READER WRITES: “My friend asked me to be her plus-one at a wedding. I had never met the happy couple. When we arrived, most of the guests were already there. I wore attire that I thought was suitable for the occasion. I was sorely mistaken. In contrast with the white satin pants and blouse I had chosen, the other guests were milling around in cut-off shorts and matching plastic cups filled to the brim with Coors Lite. My friend and I (the only people of color in attendance) dutifully took our seats and waited for the ceremony to begin. The preacher asked us all to stand. Then, to the tune of Marvin Gaye's ‘Let's Get It On’ the wedding party emerged. After the ceremony, the groom yelled, ‘Let's get it on,’ and chuckled to himself. That was our cue to go. Let the gringos party.”

THE BI-ANNUAL story on junkies and bums living in Golden Gate Park has hit the Bay Area media again. Everyone’s huffing and puffing about how the bums and the junkies are wrecking the park. Which they are for Mom, Pop and The Kids. And they irritate millions more like me, and I say, and I want each and every one of you to get out your notepads and write this down: “Persons unwilling or unable to care for themselves must be taken off the streets and out of the bushes and put into lock-up rehab facilities. It is not good to let the self-mutilating die in doorways. It is not right to let them wreck the most beautiful park in the land. It’s pure lunacy to give dopers needles and expect them to exchange them for clean ones. Frisco owns a lot of rural property in NorCal and in the Sierras. You put the junkies in one camp, the juicers in another, the nuts and incompetents over there, the weenie waggers and miscellaneous pervs over here, the merely undesirable you ship to Mendocino County as therapists.” Thank you. Next problem?

ON-LINE COMMENTS OF THE WEEK

[1] What a splashdown, chutes blooming and billowing, the SpaceX Dragon capsule and its crew gently gliding towards that beautiful blue ocean with blue skies above, along with dolphins cavorting about as if to welcome the ‘right stuff’ home. It was all so beautiful, watching the guys board the bobbing capsule on the outside before it was craned up onto the retrieving vessel, then watching the crew emerge! Bravo, I say, Bravo!

[2] As a Jewish alumnus of Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs, the graduate school that Mahmoud Khalil attended, and the stepfather of a first-year Barnard College student, I am horrified by the unconstitutional mistreatment of Mr. Khalil. If he had expressed pro-Israeli views, the Trump administration would have lauded him; for defending a Palestinian perspective, Mr. Khalil faces deportation. Time for Columbia to stand by its motto: “In lumine tuo videbimus lumen,” translated from the Latin as “In your light we will see the light.”

[3] Let me ask you something, Jim [Kunstler] Did you see Laura Ingraham’s interview with the great man? Are you as incredulous as I that anyone, anywhere, could regard him as qualified to be a school crossing guard in a town with no traffic, let alone president? Can there be any trace of doubt left that the guy is indeed, in George Will’s wonderful phrase, “a bloviating ignoramus”? My own favorite moment was when he marveled at son Barron’s having figured out how to turn his laptop back on after “Mr. Trump” had turned it off.

[4] ‘But, you know, when we talk about Democratic leadership, we’re talking about the Democratic Party in general, you know. It’s not just Chuck Schumer. It is – you’ve got a Democratic Party in general that is dominated by billionaires, just as the Republican Party is.’ (Bernie Sanders)

[5] As I understand it, the Ukranians are offering McDonalds cheeseburgers to entice conscripts. So, you can eat a McDonalds cheeseburger and die from the vax, eat a McDonalds cheeseburger and die from fighting the Russians, or eat a McDonalds cheeseburger and die from just eating the cheeseburger. I recall several years ago (possibly New York magazine?) a first-person article from a young writer who purchased a Big Mac and let it sit out on the coffee table for a year. Nothing happened. No rot or decomposition, no mold, nothing. A wonder of modernity.

[6] I'm really irritated to have to deal with some of these a-holes where I play pickleball. I go to play and compete. But some of these ladies (which is why I prefer to play the dudes) decide one day that "we all" need to work on a specific thing. Um, no, I'm not there for lessons. They're all libs. This mindset invades every single thing they do. If there is even the smallest opportunity for them to force what they want on others, they will do it. I don't know what motivates them except as you say, a power trip. There's no money involved. Just their wills against everyone else's.