Off the Record 10/14/2025

CAROL WEASE:

Propaganda is not free speech. It is not organic debate. It is intended to sell something. "Iraq has weapons of mass destruction." was not free speech. Donald Trump is a Russian asset is not free speech. Election interference in general is not free speech. Selling a harmful product to the public or making false claims about a product (like a vaccine or anything, really.) is not free speech. Lying under oath or on official documents, or while working for a federal agency, to a federal agency, to the population for the purpose of election interference or to criminally harm others is not free speech. Making up words to fit a narrative and censoring the general population who don't agree with that narrative and claiming that the lies you used to sell the narrative is free speech is exactly why we have laws about commercials or propaganda intended to sell things. We have laws that cover much of this. Changing the name of propaganda to free speech doesn't make it so. Propaganda is not news and it's not free speech.

SHERIFF MATT KENDALL:

I got my first tattoo when I was 15, I was drinking some wine on the reservation with a buddy of mine after hauling hay for an old rancher in Covelo. My older buddy had an uncle who served some time in the joint and came home with a new skill. He built a tattoo gun out of a Walkman tape player, an ink pen barrel, and a guitar string.

He burned a white plastic spoon while holding a frozen coffee cup over the burning spoon. As the spoon burned the smoke and some nasty black webs went upwards and were captured in the cup. He then mixed it with a little water and voila we had tattoo ink.

This masterpiece was the initials of a young princess who I thought I was in love with that summer. It was small and couldn’t be seen if I kept my shirt on which wasn’t often during the summers of my youth.

When I was about 19 I entered a real tattoo parlor and had it covered up. Now it’s basically a blurry spot on my skin.

My mother called tattoos the “self inflicted scars of youth.” I think she hit the nail squarely on the head. Too much freedom without good sense, that’s what it was like being 15 in Covelo.

ON-LINE COMMENTS OF THE WEEK

[1] Mothers need to back off coddling their children and toughen them up. What other animal species prepares their offspring for life out of the nest by making them weak and unable to survive on their own? Children need to learn self-discipline and mothers are failing to give them that. Life is tough. No one ever said it was easy. You're born, you find purpose in life to make it meaningful, you die. In a nutshell.

[2] But in what universe are Trump and all his corporate cronies, the ones who are making out like bandits thanks to his policies, not members of the elite that has done so much harm to this country? Trump is as elite as they come. He's also an absolute master of media manipulation, a genius at exploiting the anger of a frustrated electorate, at convincing them that he's a pissed-off populist who's on the side the side of working men and women--the same working men and women he stiffed so many times during his climb up the greasy pole in New York City. The only side that Trump is on is his own and his only aim in life is using people, including, sadly, the American electorate, to puff up his ego and fatten his wallet. If a disgraceful individual like Trump is needed to do the job, how do we rationalize that to our children, who, presumably, we want to become decent human beings and not Don Corleone?

[3] My first political activism was canvassing for McGovern. I started to sour on the Democrats with the Patriot Act and Iraq. I cried the night Obama won, but none of the change he promised and I'd hoped for actually happened. Then I watched the DNC kneecap Sanders twice.

Then they gleefully shut the country down and took ownership of covid as an election issue: Trump's killing Americans, but we will save you. That was it. I'm so done. I've never felt so intellectually and emotionally healthy as I no longer identify with a group of self-serving politicians while looking down on those with differing views. I also learned my only loyalty ever again will be to the truth.

[4] There's a lot of commentary about how much men have been hurt by feminism, but as a man, I'd argue that it has actually hurt women so much more. Most of the women I know, and those I see in public life, seem to be deeply confused and angry. This is not to let men off the hook, but I think women are in a bad place right now.

[5] State-run mental hospitals were mostly degrading storage bins for people whose minds were seriously malfunctioning. Or in some cases, places to stash inconvenient family members who stood in the way of inheritances. It only took two doctors to certify a person fit to be institutionalized; for well-connected relatives, the two could be rounded up in an afternoon.

A humane revulsion against the reality of abusive psychiatric hospitals was part of the motivation for shutting them down in the '70s and '80s. (There were other, less charitable reasons.) The trouble was, in our short-attention-span culture, few reformers thought about what would become of the poor ex-patients released into a world they couldn't cope with. At most it was thought they could be taken care of in "halfway houses," a high-maintenance and expensive solution that often fell short of being practical.

Yes, the lost souls presently inhabiting our streets, parks, and tent cities need to be re-institutionalized. But in settings far more enlightened than the Bedlams of our shameful past.

[6] Our entire country and culture, from politics to sports to movies to lame late-night TV shows, revolve around the same axis: the cold civil war taking place throughout the entire West between the Globalist/neoliberal managerial/ownership class and the Nationalists, who comprise more or less everyone not on the other team from Christian conservatives to libertarian tech bros.

Nothing else matters: judges and generals and bureaucrats and journalists and professors etc will do or say anything—journalists against free speech, judges against the Constitution, professors against free thought (debate is violence!) etc—that is required at any moment to help and support their own side and attack and wound the other side.

It is a waste of time and energy to keep sniffing out hypocrises or inconsistencies or violations of oath or duty, and certainly a waste of time to parse truth and fact from lies—all these standards and claims are dead and buried.

The progressive aristocrats who consider themselves the rightful owners of "Our Democracy" have no interest in anything but destroying their political opponents and stripping them of social power.

Social Justice vs MAGA is the only game in town and "Whose side are you on?" is the only question. The postliberal post-literate tribal future is here and the 21st century resembles the first scene of Kubrick's "2001": Two bands of ugly apes screaming threats and slinging shit at each other. This is the real right side of History.

FROM THE ARCHIVE: EDITOR’S DESK 10/2/1985

I GREW UP a hundred miles south of here, or at least I got bigger, agreeing at least partially with the feminists who maintain that American men never really grow up but remain forever boys. Last weekend I journeyed south to see a couple of movies and check out book stores, my idea of a hot time. (Whatever you do, don’t pay your way in to see Scorceses’ new one, “After Hours.” It’s Awful. Many critics are praising it to the skies, of course, but then most critics are on the take one way or another.)

HAVING AN HOUR OR SO to squander before movie time, I had a look at a new shopping center erected on the marsh where in the winter thirty-five or so years ago my buddies and I would make rafts of old railway ties and float around the edges of San Francisco Bay. I won’t bore you with the usual harangue about shopping centers other than to say I am looking forward to the next earthquake as a restorative measure. Many of these monstrosities will be reduced to rubble, hopefully with the developers in them. This particular one, at Corte Madera, would seem to be at risk of flooding. Pray to your respective gods that Mother Nature soon reasserts herself.

AS I WANDERED AROUND, marveling at the degeneracy of the place, men in their fifties, fat buns stuffed into designer jeans, shop after shop dedicated to the principle there is no tomorrow, cashing in on the basic American economic delusion that there is no difference between necessity and luxury, my attention was caught by what appeared to be a corpse propped up on a bench in one of the shopping center’s plazas. A woman of indeterminate age, caked with a couple of layers of make-up, had apparently been disinterred for one final shopping binge.

I MUST HAVE STARED TOO LONG. The crone suddenly rose from her seat to ask me, “You have crank?” One anticipates these kinds of berserk encounters in Berkeley or downtown San Francisco, but not in consumer’s paradise, Marvelous Marin. By the least rigorous standard, I am no fashion plate, but I maintain a reasonably respectable appearance. I huffed back at her that a toot of crank or a sniff of uncut whiff would return her immediately to her drawer at the mausoleum. If she wanted to survive long enough to see the rest of the gew-gaw shops in this particular shopping center open, she’d better lay off the dope and eat all of her vegetables.

THAT SAME MORNING I saw a story in the newspaper that Ferris Fain had been arrested for cultivation of marijuana somewhere up around Placerville. To baseball fans of a certain age, that news comes as a bit of a shock. Ferris Fain played for the San Francisco Seals in the thirties and forties and went on to become a great major league hitter. I used to memorize Coast League batting averages and, as a little kid, saw Fain play. I mulled over the bad news while standing in line at an ersatz French bakery. A guy about my age asked me what I would like. I pointed at one of the pastries, refusing to attempt pronunciations of words from a foreign tongue. “Yes, you want the pastrie groseille.” No, I want that sonofabitch right there, the one with the goddamn berries on it.” He handed me the muffin, averting his eyes.

AS MOST OF US KNOW here in Mendocino County, we live in perhaps the most ethically corrupt jurisdiction in the State. The bureaucracies theoretically charged with protecting our health, safety and the public purse are riddled with incompetents and toadies of the basest kind. Various right wing money bags can get whatever they want from local agencies, viz the recent Coast giveaway where a bunch of wealthy condo brains got permission to destroy farm and timberland to erect versions of Sea Ranch., the gauche abode of the vulgar rich defiling a large area south of Gualala.

A LOCAL RESTAURANT OWNER recently told me about an inspector from the Mendocino County Department of Environmental Health who decreed that the Boonville restaurant guy would have to prove to the satisfaction of the inspector that potatoes from a crate marked “Idaho Potatoes” were actually from Idaho. We wouldn’t want and unsuspecting diner to bite into a spud smuggled in from Oregon, would we? I mean, really, think of the menace to public health that would present! Local bureaucracies, especially health and building, are regularly manipulated by the MCA and other anonymous wanks into harassing people the snitches don’t like. Genuine health hazards owned and operated by, say, friends of Superior County Judge, Timothy O’Brien, are ignored by health and building flunkies.

PUBLIC BODIES in Mendocino County are packed with Republican know-nothings of the Marilyn Butcher, John Cimolino variety. Members of the County Grand Jury are interchangeable with the membership of the Mendocino County School Board, the Mendocino County Juvenile Justice Commission, the Private Industry Council and most County school boards. Any complaints about local officials or bureaucracies will be sloughed off because the people you are complaining to and about belong to the same clubs and are often close personal friends. They certainly share assumptions. For justice you’ve got to go abroad, to the state and federal levels which is where I’ve gone recently and I will report back to you on what I’ve discovered.