Mendocino County Today: Monday, Nov 30, 2015

• Cold Outside
• Jail Scam
• Thompson Club
• Max Beerbohm
• Black Friday
• Marco for Manager
• Intellectual Ebola
• Yesterday's Catch
• Huff Does Paree
• Dancing Dogs
• Samoan Pipeline
• Flit King
• Brain Pirates
• Cancer Resource
• Mendo Magic
• Postal Banking
• Brownish Green

BABY IT’S COLD OUTSIDE!

I really can't stay 
(But baby, it's cold outside)

I've got to go away
 (But baby, it's cold outside)

This evening has been (Been hoping that you'd drop in)

So very nice
 (I'll hold your hands, they're just like ice)

My mother will start to worry 
 (Beautiful, what's your hurry?)

My father will be pacing the floor
 (Listen to the fireplace roar)

So really I'd better scurry
 (Beautiful, please don't hurry)

But maybe just a half a drink more
 (Put some records on while I pour)

The neighbors might think
 (Baby, it's bad out there)

Say, what's in this drink?
 (No cabs to be had out there)

I wish I knew how
 (Your eyes are like starlight now)

To break this spell
 (I'll take your hat, your hair looks swell)

I ought to say no, no, no, sir
 (Mind if I move in closer?)

At least I'm gonna say that I tried
 (What's the sense in hurting my pride?)

I really can't stay
 (Baby, don't hold out)

Oh, but it's cold outside

I simply must go
 (But baby, it's cold outside)

The answer is no
 (But baby, it's cold outside)

This welcome has been
 (How lucky that you dropped in)

So nice and warm
 (Look out the window at that storm)

My sister will be suspicious
 (Gosh, your lips look delicious

My brother will be there at the door
 (Waves upon a tropical shore)

My maiden aunt's mind is vicious
 (Gosh, your lips are delicious)

But maybe just a cigarette more
 (Never such a blizzard before)

I've got to get home
 (But baby, you'll freeze out there)

Say, lend me your coat
 (It's up to your knees out there)

You've really been grand
 (I thrill when you touch my hand)

But don't you see
 (How can you do this thing to me?)

There's bound to be talk tomorrow
 (Think of my life long sorrow)

At least there will be plenty implied
 (If you caught pneumonia and died)

I really can't stay
 (Get over that old doubt)

Oh, but it's cold outside

— Frank Wildhorn

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-EJ1SBAO1HU

THE SCAM

It's just before 8:00 in the morning on Tuesday the 24th.

I'm sitting at my desk on the computer trying to figure out how we might save the world from the water sucking, poison spraying wine industry.

The phone rings. "Hullo?"

"Hi Grandpa, it's Otto." I hear from a weak, affected voice.

"What's up?" I said, immediately worried.

"I drank too much with some friends and got in a wreck driving home."

My heart sinks further and I groan. "Are you all right? Where are you?"

"I'm a little bruised and scratched up from hitting the steering wheel but I'm OK. I'm in jail."

It sounded more like Otto's brother Angus and the inflection was off for Otto but of course the guy's still drunk, I think.

Rather stupidly and not expecting any other answer than the one I got, I did ask, "Is this really you, Otto?"

"Yeh, Grandpa, It's me," sounding close to the way Otto would say it.

"OK, so what do you want me to do?" I asked.

"I just want to get out of this mess. I've got some money and I can pay you back and was hoping you would get together with my lawyer and put up bail."

Now those of you who know me, know that I have had some experience with fielding calls from jail concerning DUI arrests. But when I started questioning about how in the hell he got a lawyer so quickly he seemed too confused to answer properly.

Again I'm thinking he's still drunk. He added, "I'll straighten it all out down the road but for now I'd like to keep it just between you and me." I took this to mean, "Don't tell my folks."

"Sure," I said, "But it will be in the booking log and I won't be able to keep it out of the paper."

Still not understanding who his "lawyer" might be, I told Otto to hang tight and I'd look into what could be done. As soon as I hung up the phone I looked at the clock. It was 8:03 and the Public Defender's office should be open so I immediately dialed them and explained the situation. Otto had said he was going to be arraigned this morning but the PD receptionist said that with the Holidays he wouldn't be arraigned until Friday.

"So what do I do to bail him out?

"Call the jail."

I hung up and called the jail. "Otto Fraser? Nobody by that name here. Maybe he's still in booking."

"What about bailing him out?" I asked.

"If it's his first offense, we'll sober him up and kick him out later today."

"Thanks!" I said, and no sooner had I hung up when the phone rang.

"Hello, Mr. Severn?" I heard from a stern male voice. "I'm Yoses Livingston a court appointed Public Defender representing Otto Fraser. Blah blah blah. $1169."

"Sounds like a scam to me" I said.

He didn't stop, "Blah blah blah, 347-778-7536 as soon as possible. Blah blah."

"OK" I said and hung up to call Otto's mom who lives right next door. "Hey Saffron, do you know where Otto is?"

"Sure," she replied "he's in the bathroom taking a poop."

Thank god!

After telling her of the attempted scam, I called the Sheriff's office to report the crime and was told in so many words that there was nothing they could do. "We are aware of that scam. It's common; just don't fall for the trick." They weren't even interested in the phone number Yoses gave me to call to cough up the fictitious bail fees.

— David Severn

TAI KNOWS FIRST HAND…

TO: Kristen Phipps,

This is in response to the 11/4/15 letter from Kristen Phipps of Ukiah.

Let me first offer my condolences to Ms. Phipps regarding the unfortunate situation with John Mendoza. While I am unfamiliar with the specifics of John’s case, I am intimately familiar with Ms. Thompson’s practices.

I am willing to help Ms. Phipps in any way that I can. I have given my contact information below if she or anyone else has any questions I might be able to answer.

Sincerely,

Tai Abreu T-61118,

High Desert State Prison, Facility A2-220-U,

PO Box 3030, Susanville, CA 96127.

ED NOTE: Mendo Public Defender Thompson defended Mr. Abreu into life without the possibility of parole. Abreu was one of three Fort Bragg youths guilty of the murder of a Los Angeles man in Fort Bragg in 2001. The other two pled out and are likely to be back at home in another five years or so. Thompson convinced Abreu to take his case to a jury. She called no witnesses on his behalf in a trial that lasted for one day. The Abreu matter was such an extreme travesty that the entire County Courthouse, including the cops, was disgusted. Thompson should have been fired years ago, but the Supervisors like her because she stays under budget (a no defense strategy will save money, won't it?) and because no one gives a hoot whether or not guilty people even get a defense, let alone a competent one. And, natch, you're up against Mendocino County's prevalent ethic — palsy-walsyism. Lawyers will laugh up their sleeve about Thompson but will never say a public word against her, partly out of the fear of being called a homophobe, as if her sexual preference has anything to do with her legal abilities. On the theme of prevalent palsy-walsyism, you've got doctors who are a menace to your health, educators who can't read, social workers who kill, unprosecuted murderers, and all of it occurring in a context of situational amnesia — Mendocino County! Where history starts all over again every day and everyone is whatever he says he is.

BRUCE McEWEN WRITES: I first read Max Beerbohm's classic rejection letter in a C.P. Snow textbook on writing essays back in my junior college days, the early 1970s, and I learned it by heart. Over the following decades I collected an impressive number and variety of rejection slips, but nothing to compare with this one, which has been included in a new book published this summer, The Prince of Minor Writers: The Selected Essays of Max Beerbohm, Edited with an introduction by Phillip Lopate.

* * *

"Dear Mr. Emanuel Fowler,

It was kind of you to think of sending me a copy of your new book. It would have been kinder still to think again and abandon that project. I am a man of gentle instincts and do not like to tell you that A Flight into Arcady (of which I have skimmed a few pages, thus wasting two or three minutes of my not altogether worthless time) is trash. On the other hand, I am determined that you shall not be able to go around boasting to your friends, if you have any, that this work was not condemned, derided, and dismissed by your sincere well-wisher, Wrexford Cripps."

Other quotes of Max Beerbohm, include:

"Only the insane take themselves quite seriously."

"People who insist on telling their dreams are among the terrors of the breakfast table."

"Only mediocrity can be trusted to always be at its best."

“Nobody ever died from laughing.”

MIKE KALANTARIAN WRITES:

Years ago, in order to listen to baseball games at home, I needed to find a radio with good reception. Some online research brought me to the Sangean PR-D5, which has a powerful built-in antenna for AM.

An unintended result of this purchase is the peculiar pasttime of occasionally listening to AM talk radio. Anyone who has toured the AM spectrum knows this has become the natural habitat for some of the most vile audio ranters of our time: people like Michael Savage and Mark Levin. The sheer hatred and wrongmindedness that spews at these wavelengths is absolutely mindboggling, and they seldom fail to drop my jaw in very short order.

The other interesting thing about good radio reception is the ability to hear from distant foreign cultures in places like Fresno, Sacramento, Barstow, and San Diego. Recently my radio has been tuned to KNX 1070 AM, a news & traffic station in Los Angeles. I’ll sometimes turn it on for a few minutes in the early evening to marvel at their alternate reality. One thing they like to focus on is terror, both domestic and foreign, but the big focus this Thanksgiving weekend was Black Friday (which is, in turn, a prelude to Cyber Monday).

KNX has helicopter reporters who constantly fly over the LA region reporting on the everpresent freeway traffic jams, and this weekend they’ve been joyfully observing the fantastic crowds that were pressing in at the great shopping malls (which have names like The Citadel).

Friday evening these whirly-reporters were marveling at the fact that they could not spot any open parking spaces in the megamall parking lots, and were warning of 45-minute waits to simply enter these parking lots (to then troll about in order to eventually find a space). They were urging listeners to immediately pull into any opening spot as quickly as possible, regardless of how far it might be from their destination. We heard a brief interview with a brave soul who had parked on a nearby street and walked about eight blocks to get to the mall. To me, it sounded like mass insanity.

MARCO'S THE MAN FOR THE JOB

Letter To The Hiring Committee For General Manager Of KZYX&Z.

Hi. Marco McClean, here. You should hire me to manage KZYX&Z.

I can save you over $100,000 in the first year, and at the same time improve the station by welcoming people who will take creative risks, and not shutting them out in favor of timid sycophants. I will put a remote studio in every community in the county, where everyone you've had up to now has quailed at just putting one in Ukiah. The main studio can be any of them, or all of them in turns. I'll move the office to a population center, in a storefront on a street, where people can walk in and don't have to skip work and drive for hours just to read the public inspection file. I'll put an open unmoderated public forum on the main page of the station's website so listeners and members and airpeople and boardmembers can communicate in one place and hash out solutions to problems, and quibble and swear at each other if that's what they need to do to be heard and to organize for what they want done. I'll bring in children to read aloud from the Anderson Valley Advertiser for newstime, and engage a network of correspondents on different subjects, in different areas. I'll pay the airpeople for their time. And I'll leave the door open to others to apply their talent, and give ideas a fair chance, for a change.

I taught radio and music production in the early 1980s to adults and children at the Mendocino Community School. I had a music show on KMFB, where I played the results of my radio show project. We made and sold tapes of the radio drama shows I wrote and produced at the Community School. I produced live-on-stage radio drama in local halls.

I cooked in restaurants, ran an electronic repair service, wrote for local newspapers.

I built recording studios. I built small, functional radio stations — built the mixing boards, transmitters, everything. I put an automatic radio station on the air in Mendocino, connected to a telephone line, so people could call and recite poetry or play music or report on their lives, and they were on the air until they hung up, and then someone else would call.

I taught physical sciences and electricity and radio drama at the Albion Whale School. We did a live weekly radio show on KKUP in Cupertino, via phone hookup.

I've been doing sound design and setting up sound effects systems for local theater companies since the early 1980s. I did sound design for literally hundreds of plays.

For two-plus years in the mid-late 1980s I did a public access variety teevee show on MCCET channel 6 in Fort Bragg, where every Wednesday people would show up at my house and eat dinner and take turns doing their own segment of the show. It was always different, but it always started with a little boy and a little girl going into the studio (the back room), winding up the theme music box and introducing the Radio Free Earth TeeVee Show. Sometimes dozens of people showed up and sometimes only three or four. We used to play board games on teevee. A neighbor was a painter; he'd paint pictures on teevee. A woman brought her children's choir. A diver brought things he found in the ocean, to show and talk about. One woman came nearly every show to read from her bible and talk about it.

I had a music show for four months in the very beginning of KZYX.

I edited and typeset the Mendocino Commentary newspaper from 1989 through 1991, then published (edited, typeset, designed, did the press and delivery runs and managed the subscription list, all with the help of the many writers) until Christmas of 1996. I printed everything sent to the paper, including the transcribed telephone messages. Anyone who wanted a regular column got one, simply by being regular about sending in work. I never refused to print a story. A couple of years ago the people of Kelly House helped archive all those newspapers.

In 1989 I went to work for a software engineer who has a few rental units. Carpentry, roofing, plumbing, and repairing and calibrating biofeedback equipment, building and installing remote measuring systems for pumphouses, in the early days going on field calls to companies in San Francisco to service their computers and printers. I'm still working there. That's my day job.

In February of 1997 I went to KMFB and started Memo of the Air, reading aloud on the air all night, every Friday night, everything sent to me and the interesting bits of whatever I was reading all week. I sold ads for my own show and it paid for itself and also KMFB paid me to do maintenance and repairs — plumbing, carpentry, electronics — and also to design and build electronic devices. I built phone boxes and a mixing board. I built microphones and integrated swing-arm stands. I configured satellite dish receivers. I can't think of everything I did there to write down for you — I was there for like 15 years. The station was sold, the new owners fired everyone, changed the call letters, affiliated with Fox News and went to near-24-hour automated pop schlock and sports, but for decades KMFB, a commercial station, was a place of far more freedom for the airpeople than noncommercial KZYX could ever hope to be under the sort of people who've been running it so far.

Speaking of which, in early 2012 I tried to get my show on KZYX but Mary Aigner refused to take even a single step in the direction of scheduling it. When I went to talk to her, she dismissed my show proposal, saying, and I quote: "Nobody's gonna read that." I waited eight months, then called Bob Young of KNYO in Fort Bragg and was on the air there within the week, and I've been there since November of 2012, every Friday night, 9pm to 3am and sometimes to 5am. Just the underwriters of my late-night show are paying for, currently, about a sixth of the station's entire budget. I've bought and built equipment for KNYO. We have a system where anyone can do his show live by remote from anywhere there's reliable web access, using a portable studio that costs in the 200-to-300-dollar range to assemble. (A microphone, a USB mixer, a refurb laptop and, if you want to spluge, a cheap tablet for a music player.)

I've done more than 900 weekly 6-hour-plus Memo of the Air shows, each one absorbing about 20 hours in prep time, and in all those live shows, with the phone lines live and no tape-delay unit and no restrictions on what (or who) I broadcast, there hasn't been a single lawsuit by an aggrieved listener nor any legal problems with the FCC.

A couple of months ago talking with Ed Nieves of KMEC in Ukiah resulted in KMEC picking up the stream of my show in progress at midnight to broadcast it live also in Ukiah and Redwood Valley until 3am. That's ongoing. So my show is on two stations with a combined three-fourths the potential audience of KZYX for a combined budget of a twentieth of what KZYX has been throwing away.

And all the above and more, everything I've done in media, has been a workaround to get past the sort of people who run organizations like MCPB and who say no, no and no by default, and I've always been about just doing the art, doing the project and showing how easy and fun (and cheap) it can be, and inviting others to participate, and demonstrating how not to be afraid.

In short, I have more experience in publishing, teevee, theater (media in general) and radio in particular in this county than anyone else you're likely to look at for the job of managing your little radio station. It is said that if you want to find out who a person is, give him a little power and see what he does with it. Unlike the people you've hired in the past, whenever I've had a little power, I used it to bring everybody up to the same level of power. The idea is: give the talent the tools and access to the medium, whether you like the person or agree with him or not, and let him work, and then if the project results in money left over, pay everyone for hours actually worked, and don't lie that it's way harder than it actually is.

No more secrets; no more secret cabals and back-room decisions. Every aspect of the station's government, every decision and the composition and disposition of every committee can and should be posted and put on the air. Meetings should all be on the air, live. The resumes of people applying for management positions should be displayed on the station's website. The station's members and the public can and should be part of the process.

You have been fooling yourself since the beginning of KZYX that radio is difficult and very expensive and depends on secrecy and trickery and suckers. It isn't and it doesn't. It's simple. It's a bandstand and a library and a public place. Once you have a microphone and a transmitter and the license to switch it on, it's practically free thereafter.

If you hire another antisocial, talent-fearing, Nixonian schmuck like John Coate was (or Stuart Campbell is) or — worse — if you make someone like Mary Aigner the general manager — which I dread is what you're about to do — you'll have only yourselves to blame for the continued failure of KZYX to climb out of its tepid bath of lazy mediocrity and become greater than it is.

Thanks for reading, committee people.

p.s. I have a lot of good references I can give you from, among others, Charles Bush, who runs the Senior Center in Fort Bragg and ran the Mendocino Community School in the 1980s, and Eduardo Smissen, who's dead but whose opinion of my work is documented. And Jamie Roberts comes to mind; ask him about my influence on radio in the county. And the last nine managing directors of the Mendocino Theater Company, going back nearly thirty-five years, can tell you about my audio work. Chief among references, though, will come from Bob Woelfel, who ran KMFB (and paid the talent) on a third the budget of KZYX and with no government grant to bail him out, and who I hope is applying to be manager of KZYX. If so, he would be a great choice. Pick him over me.

Marco McClean memo@mcn.org

http://MemoOfTheAir.wordpress.com

ON LINE COMMENT OF THE DAY

A reasonable man might reasonably ask what the fuck have these pampered campus clowns got to do with anything? The reasonable man might reasonably conclude not one fucking thing, that the hysterics and histrionics are only relevant inside their carefully constructed bubble of money and privilege.

So now they’re all exercised about the Woodrow Wilson Building? Jesus help us, can’t we cut our losses and just tear the fucking thing down and be done with it?

But don’t stop there, the intellectual ebola is widespread and deep. So start with Princeton, disband the organization, take the whole fucking pile and throw it all, brick by brick, into the nearest body of water. No more money pissed away.

And if there’s another exalted institution of supposedly higher learning nearby, tear that one down too. Maybe the frauds employed at these places, charging exorbitant piles of money, misinforming the young and impressionable, will take the example.

This bullshit can’t go on. Physical laws governing the use of scarce resources won’t forever tolerate this incontinent and unlimited spillage in these playgrounds for the delusional. It has to stop. Once the edifice is relegated to rapidly receding history, everyone can move onto things that matter.

As for the carefully manicured grounds, maybe we can put them to better use, maybe we’ll use them for grazing sheep.

CATCH OF THE DAY, November 29, 2015

SAMAYA CLEARWATER, Willits. Domestic assault, probation revocation.

HEATH DOW, Ukiah. DUI-drugs, under influence, child endangerment.

WILLIAM EVANS, Fort Bragg. Probation revocation. (Frequent flyer.)

CHARLES HENSLEY, Ukiah. Drunk in public. (Frequent flyer.)

GARRIE HOAGLIN, Covelo. Failure to register, parole violation.

AMANDA KENNEDY, Ukiah. DUI, child endangerment.

THERON NELSON, Fort Bragg. Court order violation.

LONNIE PIERCE, Fort Bragg. Drunk in public, dirk-dagger, resisting.

ERNESTO RAMOS, Suisun/Ukiah. Drunk in public.

JOSE RIVAS, Fort Bragg. Domestic battery.

JOHN SISK, Covelo. Drunk in public, failure to appear, probation revocation.

EDWARD STEELE JR., Ukiah. Vehicle theft, evasion, possession of more than an ounce of pot, hypodermic needles, suspended license.

HUFF DOES PAREE!

http://www.pressdemocrat.com/news/4823746-181/rep-jared-huffman-joins-congressional

THE SAMOAN PIPELINE

https://story.californiasunday.com/samoan-football-pipeline

THE BUTTERFLY & THE TANK

On this evening I was walking home from the censorship office to the Florida Hotel and it was raining. So about halfway home I got sick of the rain and stopped into Chicote’s for a quick one. It was the second winter of shelling in the siege of Madrid and everything was short including tobacco and people’s tempers and you were a little hungry all the time and would become suddenly and unreasonably irritated at things you could do nothing about such as the weather. I should have gone on home. It was only five blocks more, but when I saw Chicote’s doorway I thought I would get a quick one and then do those six blocks up the Gran Via through the mud and rubble of the streets broken by the bombardment.

The place was crowded. You couldn’t get near the bar and all the tables were full. It was full of smoke, singing, men in uniform, and the smell of wet leather coats, and they were handing drinks over a crowd that was three deep at the bar.

A waiter I knew found a chair from another table and I sat down with a thin, white-faced, Adam’s-appled German I knew who was working at the censorship and two other people I did not know. The table was in the middle of the room a little on your right as you go in.

You couldn’t hear yourself talk for the singing and I ordered a gin and Angostura and put it down against the rain. The place was really packed and everybody was very jolly; maybe getting just a little bit too jolly from the newly made Catalan liquor most of them were drinking. A couple of people I did not know slapped me on the back and when the girl at our table said something to me, I couldn’t hear it and said, “Sure.”

She was pretty terrible looking now I had stopped looking around and was looking at our table; really pretty terrible. But it turned out, when the waiter came, that what she had asked me was to have a drink. The fellow with her was not very forceful looking but she was forceful enough for both of them. She had one of those strong, semi-classical faces and was built like a lion tamer; and the boy with her looked as though he ought to be wearing an old school tie. He wasn’t though. He was wearing a leather coat just like all the rest of us. Only it wasn’t wet because they had been there since before the rain started. She had on a leather coat too and it was becoming to the sort of face she had.

By this time I was wishing I had not stopped into Chicote’s but had gone straight on home where you could change your clothes and be dry and have a drink in comfort on the bed with your feet up, and I was tired of looking at both of these young people. Life is very short and ugly women are very long and sitting there at the table I decided that even though I was a writer and supposed to have an insatiable curiosity about all sorts of people, I did not really care to know whether these two were married, or what they saw in each other, or what their politics were, or whether he had a little money, or she had a little money, or anything about them. I decided they must be in the radio. Any time you saw really strange looking civilians in Madrid they were always in the radio. So to say something I raised my voice above the noise and asked, “You in the radio?”

“We are,” the girl said. So that was that. They were in the radio.

“How are you comrade?” I said to the German.

“Fine. And you?”

“Wet,” I said, and he laughed with his head on one side.

“You haven’t got a cigarette?” he asked. I handed him my next to the last pack of cigarettes and he took two. The forceful girl took two and the young man with the old school tie face took one.

“Take another,” I shouted.

“No thanks,” he answered and the German took it instead.

“Do you mind?” he smiled.

“Of course not,” I said. I really minded and he knew it. But he wanted the cigarettes so badly that it did not matter. The singing had died down momentarily, or there was a break in it as there is sometimes in a storm, and we could all hear what we said.

“You been here long?” the forceful girl asked me. She pronounced it bean as in bean soup.

“Off and on,” I said.

“We must have a serious talk,” the German said. “I want to have a talk with you. When can we have it?”

“I’ll call you up,” I said. This German was a very strange German indeed and none of the good Germans liked him. He lived under the delusion that he could play the piano, but if you kept him away from pianos he was all right unless he was exposed to liquor, or the opportunity to gossip, and nobody had even been able to keep him away from those two things yet.

Gossip was the best thing he did and he always knew something new and highly discreditable about anyone you could mention in Madrid, Valencia, Barcelona, and other political centers.

Just then the singing really started in again, and you cannot gossip very well shouting, so it looked like a dull afternoon at Chicote’s and I decided to leave as soon as I should have bought a round myself.

Just then it started. A civilian in a brown suit, a white shirt, black tie, his hair brushed straight back from a rather high forehead, who had been clowning around from table to table, squirted one of the waiters with a flit gun. Everybody laughed except the waiter who was carrying a tray full of drinks at the time. He was indignant.

“No hay derecho,” the waiter said. This means, “You have no right to do that,” and is the simplest and the strongest protest in Spain.

The flit gun man, delighted with his success, and not seeming to give any importance to the fact that it was well into the second year of the war, that he was in a city under siege where everyone was under a strain, and that he was one of only four men in civilian clothes in the place, now squirted another waiter.

I looked around for a place to duck to. This waiter, also, was indignant and the flit gun man squirted him twice more, lightheartedly. Some people still thought it was funny, including the forceful girl. But the waiter stood, shaking his head. His lips were trembling. He was an old man and he had worked in Chicote’s for ten years that I knew of.

“No hay derecho,” he said with dignity.

People had laughed, however, and the flit gun man, not noticing how the singing had fallen off, squirted his flit gun at the back of a waiter’s neck. The waiter turned, holding his tray.

“No hay derecho,” he said. This time it was no protest. It was an indictment and I saw three men in uniform start from a table for the flit gun man and the next thing all four of them were going out the revolving door in a rush and you heard a smack when someone hit the flit gun man on the mouth. Somebody else picked up the flit gun and threw it out the door after him.

The three men came back in looking serious, tough and very righteous. Then the door revolved and in came the flit gun man. His hair was down in his eyes, there was blood on his face, his necktie was pulled to one side and his shirt was torn open. He had the flit gun again and as he pushed, wild-eyed and white-faced, into the room he made one general, unaimed, challenging squirt with it, holding it toward the whole company.

I saw one of the three men start for him and I saw this man’s face. There were more men with him now and they forced the flit gun man back between two tables on the left of the room as you go in, the flit gun man struggling wildly now, and when the shot went off I grabbed the forceful girl by the arm and dove for the kitchen door.

The kitchen door was shut and when I put my shoulder against it it did not give.

“Get down here behind the angle of the bar,” I said. She knelt there.

“Flat,” I said and pushed her down. She was furious.

Every man in the room except the German, who lay behind a table, and the public-school-looking boy who stood in a corner drawn up against the wall, had a gun up. On a bench along the wall three over-blonde girls, their hair dark at the roots, were standing on tiptoe to see and screaming steadily.

“I’m not afraid,” the forceful one said. “This is ridiculous.”

“You don’t want to get shot in a café brawl,” I said. “If that flit king has any friends here this can be very bad.”

But he had no friends, evidently, because people began putting their pistols away and somebody lifted down the blonde screamers and everyone who had started over there when the shot came drew back away from the flit man who lay, quietly, on his back on the floor.

“No one is to leave until the police come,” someone shouted from the door.

Two policemen with rifles, who had come in off the street patrol, were standing by the door and at this announcement I saw six men form up just like the line-up of a football team coming out of a huddle and head out through the door. Three of them were the men who had first thrown the flit king out. One of them was the man who shot him. They went right through the policemen with the rifles like good interference taking out an end and a tackle. And as they went out one of the policemen got his rifle across the door and shouted, “No one can leave. Absolutely no one.”

“Why did those men go? Why hold us if anyone’s gone?”

“They were mechanics who had to return to their air field,” someone said.

“But if anyone’s gone it’s silly to hold the others.”

“Everyone must wait for the Seguridad. Things must be done legally and in order.”

“But don’t you see that if any person has gone it is silly to hold the others?”

“No one can leave. Everyone must wait.”

“It’s comic,” I said to the forceful girl.

“No it’s not. It’s simply horrible.”

We were standing up now and she was staring indignantly at where the flit king was lying. His arms were spread wide and he had one leg drawn up.

“I’m going over to help that poor wounded man. Why has no one helped him or done anything for him?”

“I’d leave him alone,” I said. “You want to keep out of this.”

“But it’s simply inhuman. I’ve nurse’s training and I’m going to give him first aid.”

“I wouldn’t,” I said. “Don’t go near him.”

“Why not?” She was very upset and almost hysterical.

“Because he’s dead,” I said.

When the police came they held everybody there for three hours. They commenced by smelling of all the pistols. In this manner they would detect one which had been fired recently. After about forty pistols they seemed to get bored with this and anyway all you could smell was wet leather coats. Then they sat at a table placed directly behind the late flit king, who lay on the floor looking like a grey wax caricature of himself, with grey wax hands and a grey wax face, and examined people’s papers.

With his shirt ripped open you could see the flit king had no undershirt and the soles of his shoes were worn through. He looked very small and pitiful lying there on the floor. You had to step over him to get to the table where two plain clothes policemen sat and examined everyone’s identification papers. The husband lost and found his papers several times with nervousness. He had a safe conduct pass somewhere but he had mislaid it in a pocket and he kept on searching and perspiring until he found it. Then he would put it in a different pocket and have to go searching again. He perspired heavily while doing this and it made his hair very curly and his face red. He now looked as though he should have not only an old school tie but one of those little caps boys in the lower forms wear. You have heard how events age people. Well, this shooting had made him look about ten years younger.

While we were waiting around I told the forceful girl I thought the whole thing was a pretty good story and that I would write it sometime. The way the six had lined up in single file and rushed that door was very impressive. She was shocked and said that I could not write it because it would be prejudicial to the cause of the Spanish Republic. I said that I had been in Spain for a long time and that they used to have a phenomenal number of shootings in the old days around Valencia under the monarchy, and that for hundreds of years before the Republic people had been cutting each other with large knives called navajas in Andalucia, and that if I saw a comic shooting in Chicote’s during the war I could write about it just as though it had been in New York, Chicago, Key West or Marseilles. It did not have anything to do with politics. She said I shouldn’t. Probably a lot of other people will say I shouldn’t too. The German seemed to think it was a pretty good story, however, and I gave him the last of the Camels. Well, anyway, finally, after about three hours the police said we could go.

They were sort of worried about me at the Florida because in those days, with the shelling, if you started for home on foot and didn’t get there after the bars were closed at seven-thirty, people worried. I was glad to get home and I told the story while we were cooking supper on an electric stove and it had quite a success.

Well, it stopped raining during the night, and the next morning it was a fine, bright, cold early winter day and at twelve forty-five I pushed open the revolving doors at Chicote’s to try a little gin and tonic before lunch. There were very few people there at that hour and two waiters and the manager came over to the table. They were all smiling.

“Did they catch the murderer?” I asked.

“Don’t make jokes so early in the day,” the manager said. “Did you see him shot?”

“Yes,” I told him.

“Me too,” he said. “I was just here when it happened.” He pointed to a corner table. “He placed the pistol right against the man’s chest when he fired.”

“How late did they hold people?”

“Oh, until past two this morning.”

“They only came for the fiambre,” using the Spanish slang word for corpse, the same used on menus for cold meat, “at eleven o’clock this morning.”

“But you don’t know about it yet,” the manager said.

“No. He doesn’t know,” a waiter said.

“It is a very rare thing,” another waiter said. “Muy raro.”

“And sad too,” the manager said. He shook his head.

“Yes. Sad and curious,” the waiter said. “Very sad.”

“Tell me.”

“It is a very rare thing,” the manager said.

“Tell me. Come on, tell me.”

The manager leaned over the table in great confidence.

“In the flit gun, you know,” he said. “He had eau de cologne. Poor fellow.”

“It was not a joke in such bad taste, you see?” the waiter said.

“It was really just gaiety. No one should have taken offense,” the manager said. “Poor fellow.”

“I see,” I said. “He just wanted everyone to have a good time.”

“Yes,” said the manager. “It was really just an unfortunate misunderstanding.”

“And what about the flit gun?”

“The police took it. They have sent it around to his family.”

“I imagine they will be glad to have it,” I said.

“Yes,” said the manager. “Certainly. A flit gun is always useful.”

“Who was he?”

“A cabinet maker.”

“Married?”

“Yes, the wife was here with the police this morning.”

“What did she say?”

“She dropped down by him and said, ‘Pedro, what have they done to thee, Pedro? Who has done this to thee? Oh, Pedro.’ ”

“Then the police had to take her away because she could not control herself,” the waiter said.

“It seems he was feeble of the chest,” the manager said. “He fought in the first days of the movement. They said he fought in the Sierra but he was too weak in the chest to continue.”

“And yesterday afternoon he just went out on the town to cheer things up,” I suggested.

“No,” said the manager. “You see it is very rare. Everything is muy raro. This I learn from the police who are very efficient if given time. They have interrogated comrades from the shop where he worked. This they located from the card of his syndicate which was in his pocket. Yesterday he bought the flit gun and agua de colonia to use for a joke at a wedding. He had announced this intention. He bought them across the street. There was a label on the cologne bottle with the address. The bottle was in the washroom. It was there he filled the flit gun. After buying them he must have come in here when the rain started.”

“I remember when he came in,” a waiter said.

“In the gaiety, with the singing, he became gay too.”

“He was gay all right,” I said. “He was practically floating around.”

The manager kept on with the relentless Spanish logic.

“That is the gaiety of drinking with a weakness of the chest,” he said.

“I don’t like this story very well,” I said.

“Listen,” said the manager. “How rare it is. His gaiety comes in contact with the seriousness of the war like a butterfly—”

“Oh, very like a butterfly,” I said. “Too much like a butterfly.”

“I am not joking,” said the manager. “You see it? Like a butterfly and a tank.”

This pleased him enormously. He was getting into the real Spanish metaphysics.

“Have a drink on the house,” he said. “You must write a story about this.”

I remembered the flit gun man with his grey wax hands and his grey wax face, his arms spread wide and his legs drawn up and he did look a little like a butterfly; not too much, you know. But he did not look very human either. He reminded me more of a dead sparrow.

“I’ll take gin and Schweppes quinine tonic water,” I said.

“You must write a story about it,” the manager said. “Here. Here’s luck.”

“Luck,” I said. “Look, an English girl last night told me I shouldn’t write about it. That it would be very bad for the cause.”

“What nonsense,” the manager said. “It is very interesting and important, the misunderstood gaiety coming in contact with the deadly seriousness that is here always. To me it is the rarest and most interesting thing which I have seen for some time. You must write it.”

“All right,” I said. “Sure. Has he any children?”

“No,” he said. “I asked the police. But you must write it and you must call it ‘The Butterfly and the Tank.’ ”

“All right,” I said. “Sure. But I don’t like the title much.”

“The title is very elegant,” the manager said. “It is pure literature.”

“All right,” I said. “Sure. That’s what we’ll call it. ‘The Butterfly and the Tank.’ ”

And I sat there on that bright cheerful morning, the place smelling clean and newly aired and swept, with the manager who was an old friend and who was now very pleased with the literature we were making together and I took a sip of the gin and tonic water and looked out the sandbagged window and thought of the wife kneeling there and saying, “Pedro. Pedro, who has done this to thee, Pedro?” And I thought that the police would never be able to tell her that even if they had the name of the man who pulled the trigger.

— Ernest Hemingway

PIRATES

by Manuel Vicent

(Translated by Louis Bedrock)

El País, 25 Oct 2015

When it was the time to explain some characteristics of the human brain, the teacher told his students that this organ is the most important raw material existing on our planet, the only source of energy that was inexhaustible, sustainable, and renewable. Millions of newly born are incorporated into this world everyday with this treasure installed in the cell of the cranium. At the moment of birth, the organ has the same value in all cases, regardless of its source or where it occurs, but the immense majority of these brains are thrown away while very few have the fortune to develop their full capacity. There is no injustice more perverse nor waste more stupid than the discarding of this treasure.

To encourage his students to cultivate this treasure, the teacher told them that everything they learned in school and in college would be an invisible treasure they would carry with them forever no matter where they went. They would not be obliged to declare it in customs, the scanner couldn’t detect it, nor could any policeman prohibit it; and it would always be safe from thieves.

But when he observed that one of his students, disconnected from his words, remained under the spell of the video game on his tablet, the teacher added that although it is difficult to steal the brain, it is easy to devour it or wash it. Indeed, brainwashing is the most common technique that pirates use today to take control of this treasure. Fanaticism, superstition, sectarianism, the cutbacks to education, and the manipulation of social networks are the forms of piracy that can convert the most intelligent child into a future slave.

But alongside the power to develop intelligence, the brain also carries the latent capacity for rebellion. This rebellion and nothing else is our freedom, the last bastion that must be defended against the pirates.

WHERE DO I GO FOR INFORMATION? WHERE DO I GET HELP?

Dear Friends and Neighbors,

It's been 20 years!

The Cancer Resource Centers of Mendocino County (CRC) opened in 1995 with the audacious goal of providing services free of charge to anyone with cancer in our county. CRC started its life with $1,300, a desk, a chair, and a phone, and set up in an alleyway garage in the town of Mendocino.

Much has changed since 1995, but what hasn't changed is the need for human connection. CRC's mission is simple. "To improve the quality of life of those facing cancer in Mendocino County." Our vision is that no one will face cancer alone. We hold to these commitments in everything we do. CRC is a vital resource for people living with cancer and their families and friends. Through our offices in Ukiah and Mendocino, CRC offers support to every resident in the county confronting a cancer diagnosis.

In the last 20 years, over 9,000 people have been diagnosed with cancer in our county, and every year has brought with it an increased need for CRC's services. A cancer diagnosis changes lives forever, for people with the disease and for those who love them. Everyone struggles with the complex questions that cancer raises for them, the first questions often being, "Where do I go for information? Where do I get help?" CRC exists to be the answers to those questions.

Your support, through annual donations, monthly contributions, or longer-term commitments, ensures that CRC will be here, so that no one in our communities faces cancer alone. We promise to stretch your dollars as far as they can go, and we can assure you that 100% of your donation will stay right here in Mendocino County.

With gratitude,

Sara O'Donnell

Executive Director
Donate online: www.crcmendocino.org -
http://cts.vresp.com/c/?CancerResourceCenter/71a36379b3/e9632b6940/ac0702d650

Or call us:
Coast office: (707) 937-3833 or Ukiah office: (707) 467-3828

Or Mail to:
CRCMC Administration
P.O. Box 50
Mendocino, CA 95460

Thank you in advance for your generosity.

WELCOME TO MENDOCINO - WE'VE GOT MAGIC.

From: Scott Peterson

Here's my latest video comic strip: https://youtu.be/JObXrvAJST4

HOW TO GET A BANK IN BOONVILLE

Postal banking.

Of course, Big Banks and predatory lenders hate it. If the US Postal Service started offering basic bill paying, check cashing and small-dollar lending services, whole categories of shameful (but legal) scams would be forced out of business.

Which is, of course, the point.

Sign our special coalition petition urging the Postmaster General to make postal banking a reality.

Big Banks are closing branches in low- and moderate-income communities. Today, one in four Americans lacks access to a traditional bank — and financial predators that trap vulnerable consumers in devastating cycles of debt have moved in.

These financial predators — with interest rates of 300 percent and higher — are part of an industry that rakes in nearly $103 billion each year at the expense of struggling families.

The US Postal Service — with its more than 30,000 branches nationwide — can step in to address such outrageous exploitation by providing affordable, nonprofit, consumer-driven financial services.

Post offices already provide some limited financial services, such as money orders. And postal banking is not even a new idea. From 1911 to 1967, post offices provided basic financial services.

But, some will wonder, how much will it cost?

The (surprising) answer: Nothing.

In fact, while charging significantly lower rates than predatory lenders, a government report estimates postal banking would add $8.9 billion a year to postal service revenue.

As Senator Elizabeth Warren has said, postal banking is a triple win for government, the public and the Postal Service.

Tell the Postmaster General that it’s time to bring back postal banking.

Thanks for all you do,

Rick Claypool Public Citizen’s Online Action Team

action@citizen.org

JERRY BROWN’S INSUFFERABLE GREEN PIETY

by Joel Kotkin

As the UN’s climate change conference opens in Paris on Nov. 30, California Gov. Jerry Brown’s holier-than-thou pronouncements on climate change will be the gospel of choice.

At the site of real and immediate tragedy, an old man comes, wielding not a sword to protect civilization from ghastly present threats but to preach the sanctity of California’s green religion. The Paris Climate Change Conference offers a moment of triumph for the 77-year-old Jerry Brown, the apogee of his odd public odyssey.

Jerry Brown has always been essentially two people — one the calculating, Machiavellian politician, the other the dour former Jesuit who publically dismisses worldly pleasures for austere dogma. Like a modern-day Torquemada, he is warning the masses that if they fail to adhere in all ways of the new faith or face, as he suggested recently humanity’s “extinction.”

Brown is important because many other green cheerleaders like Al Gore grate on the public, in part because of rampant greed and a penchant for unsupportable predictions. In contrast, Brown presents, with some justification, the very model of enlightened leadership and smart management, certainly in comparison with the ideologues and public employee pawns who dominate his party, and the blatant wealthy hypocrites who rule the green universe.

Increasingly, Brown has become the patron saint of climate change, while at the same time exposing the effort’s flaws and contradictions most clearly. Railing against the satanic greenhouse gases, Brown, one supposes unwittingly, seems unconcerned he is waging what amounts to a war against the state’s own middle and working classes. His intolerance of dissent — albeit less extreme than some — reflects the current trajectory of environmentalism, which increasingly seeks to silence and even criminalize those who dispute their analyses and prescriptions.

Like the Spanish father of the Inquisition, Brown has it in for anyone who dissents from his “God is not mocked,” as he suggested recently, attacking critics of his policies as “falsifying the scientific record,” something climate change advocates have also been caught doing on more than one occasion. Brown dismisses all climate skeptics, even those who admit some carbon-caused warming, as “a well funded cult.”

Like a religious adept, Brown shows his need to link everything to one sin — greenhouse gas emissions — to explain virtually everything from wildfires to the current drought on climate change, although with little support from scientists who study such things. As was common in the worst aspects of the medieval Catholic Church, one increasingly cannot dissent in any way from revealed doctrine without being essentially evil.

Between Image and Reality

In Paris, Brown hopes to present himself as the great green success story, leader of an economy that has thrived despite some of the world’s most draconian climate change measures. And he has something of a case since California, after suffering greatly in the recession, has finally recovered its lost jobs and has bolstered its critical role as the dominant technology power on the planet.

For many progressives, California represents “a beacon of hope.” Its “comeback” has been dutifully noted and applauded by left-wing economist Paul Krugman, and Michael Kinsley and the Washington Post’s Chris Cilizza have even suggested that Brown should run for president — at the ripe age of 77.

These fans miss a big part of the reality. Outsiders think of California as a prosperous place that mints billionaires, but overall the state’s economic recovery has done little for many, if not most, state residents. Even with the boom in Silicon Valley, roughly one in three Californians live check to check, the state has higher rate of poverty than Mississippi, as well as one-third of the nation’s welfare recipients. Among the emerging Latino majority, a prime Brown constituency, the state’s cost-adjusted poverty rate is more than 33 percent, compared to just 22.7 percent in Texas, a state often derided as unenlightened and cruel.

During this “boom,” most California blue-collar workers in farming, fishing, and forestry have experienced actual average wage decreases. Employment in fields such as construction and manufacturing remain well below their 2007 levels. Much of this has to do with environmental regulation, which has raised energy costs almost twice those of nearby competitors and also helped raise housing prices to an unsustainable level.

Once the beacon of opportunity, California is becoming a graveyard of middle-class aspiration, particularly for the young. In a recent survey of states where “the middle class is dying,” based on earning trajectories for middle-income cohorts, Business Insider ranked California first, with shrinking middle-class earnings and the third-highest proportion of wealth concentrated in the top 20 percent.

Most hurt, though, are the poor. California is home to a remarkable 77 of the country’s 297 most “economically challenged,” cities based on levels of poverty and employment, according to a recent USC study; altogether these cities have a population of more than 12 million. Some stressed cities exist cheek-to-jowl with the state’s uber-rich — Oakland, Los Angeles, as well as Coachella, near Palm Springs. Most others are in the poorer, more heavily Latino interior, places like Riverside, Stockton, and Vallejo. Journalists who come to California to praise the governor may think it’s still “California Dreamin’” but for all too many, particularly away from the coast (PDF), it’s more like The Grapes of Wrath.

The Making of a Modern Medievalist

Of course, there’s a long history of such bifurcated society, where people tend to stay in their class and the poor depend largely on handouts from their spiritual “betters.” It’s called feudalism.

In many ways, Jerry Brown is a perfect medievalist — the son of a self-made man, a person who largely inherited his position. Without the legacy of his father, Edmund G. “Pat” Brown, a natural politician and arguably the greatest governor in the state’s history, it’s unlikely the shy, awkward, although unquestionably bright kid would have been elected the first time in his mid-thirties.

Brown came to politics bathed not in the practicum of politics but in theology. As a seminarian, he imbibed the Jesuitical approach — highly intellectualized, hierarchical, and accepting of class distinctions. Although he occasionally dabbled in populist politics, particularly in his presidential runs, Brown’s achievement has been to undermine not just the Reaganite regime but also the pro-growth progressive structure left behind by his father and earlier California governors.

Brown’s acuity has often been on target, as, for example, when he took on the encrusted bureaucracy at the University of California and inside state government. But Brown’s maverick approach also revealed a streak that reflected a harshness toward those who were weaker, including the poor. In his first term, Brown’s callous treatment of the mentally ill left 30,000 mental patients in worsening conditions in inadequate nursing facilities. As the Los Angeles director of mental health told me at the time, under Reagan there was “genuine concern for people,” while under Brown he didn’t “see much concern for people at all.”

He came into office, recalled top aide Tom Quinn, “questioning the values of the Democratic Party” and rejecting the “build, build, build thing” of his father. Like the 15th century Florentine Catholic monk Girolamo Savonarola, he came to Sacramento, in part, to rid it of suberbia and luxuria. Most important, he did not restart the infrastructure building, most portentously for water storage, that marked his father’s regime; the severity of the drought and the awful condition of the state’s roads are, to some extent, his legacy.

Brown’s initial politics were built around three principles—“serve the people, save the earth, and explore the universe.” Some, such as farmworkers, owe him much. But the biggest winners under Brown were the well-financed green lobby and public employee unions have become so powerful that that replaced the coalition of developers, farmers, and industrialists who had accepted, and often bankrolled, his father.

In recent years, Brown, after being praised for his moderation in his first four years as second time governor, has become more “crotchety,” according to the Los Angeles Times’ George Skelton. He has insisted on funding his favorite project, the much maligned “bullet train,” even though many on the left, including Mother Jones, have identified it not as an environmental benefit but a colossal waste of time and money.

In contrast, on most everything else, Brown leans toward austerity — he even reveals a fondness for the ration cards used during World War II. Yet surprisingly, Brown, the supposed ascetic, appears increasingly comfortable with his own wealth. He has speculated freely in Bay Area real estate and stocks, essentially creating a multimillion-dollar estate that, as the San Jose Mercury put it kindly, “belie [the] monastic image.” Recently he shocked his own green supporters by having a state agency perform a detailed analysis of the oil, gas, and mineral resources on his family’s 2,700-acre Northern California ranch, a service not readily available to other mere mortals.

As for the poor left behind in California’s recovery, this, Brown insists, is not due to policy failure but because the state is an irresistible “magnet” for the masses.

The High Priest of the Oligarchy

Early on Brown cleverly cultivated the emerging tech oligarchy in Silicon Valley. This has created a new class of major donors who, along with the unions and Hollywood, have financed his political re-ascendency.

The oligarchs seem kindred souls for Brown, with little patience for less advanced beings. He also knew that their success has allowed him to show economic gains without having to concede to the regulatory concerns of more traditional industries. In the new Silicon Valley, most of the “dirty work” is shoved off to other more benighted states, or abroad; regulatory overreach poses only limited problems. For his part, Brown sees the oligarchs as the state’s economic foundation. “We’ve got a few problems, we have lots of little burdens and regulations and taxes,” he said recently, “but smart people figure out how to make it.”

Brown’s Bay Area connection is helped by the fact that the venture and tech firm oligarchy often share his climate concerns. He has further tightened this alliance by lavishing enormous subsidies for often dodgy, expensive renewable energy schemes backed by companies such as Google and by many among the venture capitalist elite.

Ironically, none of Brown’s moves will, by themselves, have any demonstrable impact on climate. California is too small, too temperate, and, at this stage, too de-industrialized to make a difference. Indeed, as one recent study found, California could literally disappear tomorrow with virtually no effect on the climate. Perhaps less recognized, its efforts to reduce emissions have accounted for naught, since so much industry and so many people — some 2 million in the last decade — have taken their carbon footprint elsewhere, usually to places where climate and less stringent regulation allow for greater emissions. Some states, rather than embrace Brown’s formula and seeing an opportunity to score, have detached themselves from renewable mandates entirely.

And now the world

So why the dogged insistence on draconian policies? It’s very much for the same reason people take priestly vows, or why penitents whip themselves: moral posturing before the rest of the world and, for politicians, the prospect of attracting the adoring masses (or at least the media). President Obama looks to California policies for his future climate policies. On this issue Brown is the rock star, and will be in Paris, cool again after all these years.

Brown’s green religion now has a most powerful ally, the leading Jesuit on the planet, Pope Francis. This alliance offers something of a religious redemption for Brown, a former seminarian who has rejected most traditional Catholic teachings on such things as gay marriage, abortion, population control, and, most recently, euthanasia.

In Paris, Brown’s claims of economic infallibility should be questioned particularly among leaders of developing countries. Some 3 billion people suffer from pollution created by burning wood, coal, or dung. Some 4.3 million die annually from the resultant indoor pollution compared to 250,000 deaths that might be assigned to climate change by 2050. For many, fossil fuels represent a lifesaver today. To offer these people expensive and inefficient solar panels instead of basic necessities, as economist Bjorn Lonborg has suggested, represents nothing more than “inexcusable self-indulgence.”

Some developing countries are making their intentions clear. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has thrown out Greenpeace for agitating against coal mines in his energy-starved country. China, whose world-leading emissions are now almost twice those of the U.S., recently admitted to burning 17 percent more coal than previously estimated. No doubt they will happily wink and nod their assent to a vague green agreement while Western countries, following Brown, Obama, and the Pope, adopt ever stricter regulations. By the time we get to 2030, when China might begin reducing emissions, the West itself may be so weakened economically that it won’t be able to question anything Beijing wants to do anyway.

Russia and virtually the entire Middle East also are not likely to give up on fossil fuels, which is the only thing that makes the world pay attention to them. Rather than use our energy boom to create leverage against these autocracies, Brown and his confederates are pushing policies that consequently make them more influential, also allowing them to finance and arm terrorists, whether ISIS, al Qaeda, or theocratic Iran and their satraps.

A decade from now, the futility and wasted economic potential of this posturing will be clear. What could have been accomplished, at least initially, by replacing coal with natural gas and the careful expansion of nuclear power, will instead lead to a lower quality of life for all but the rich in the West, with perhaps worse ill-effects elsewhere. But by then Brown will likely have faded from the scene, although he may manage to get his wife, former Gap attorney Ann Gust Brown, elected to succeed him.

What will be Brown’s main legacy? A more environmentally pure but severely bifurcated California and, if he and his compatriots have their way, an accelerating decline of the Western world and arguably the stagnation of the entire world economy. But Brown and his crony capitalist and priestly friends will be happy. They may have messed up the world, but they will always have Paris.