The power was out in our neck of the Mendocino woods for nearly five days last week. Can we blame PG&E? I do. With the money they’ve stolen charging millions of people ten dollars a month not to have stupid, er, smart meters, combined with the billions of dollars they spend annually responding to multi-day power outages all over the state, they could easily have afforded by now to bury all their power lines and be done with outages forever. But that’s not how monopoly capitalism works.
Posts published in “Essays”
The 32nd Annual Winter Abundance Workshop, known by regulars as the Seed and Scion Exchange, was held this year at the Mendocino County fairgrounds in Boonville on the last day of January. The weather was…
Bill Bennett, who had been Secretary of Education under Reagan and Drug Czar under George H.W. Bush, was on the talk shows last Sunday plugging his new book, “Going to Pot: Why the Rush to…
Do New Yorkers smoke weed? Yes, indeed, and apparently lots of it, though most of the New Yorkers on the new web series “High Maintenance” don’t seem to know where it comes from or how…
Humans are exploring the moon, checking out Mars, digging deeper into the makeup of the atom, mapping incoming asteroids, yet dreaming, a common, ubiquitous experience, still eludes scientific certainties. In the words of William Dement,…
After reading Troy King's offering in the first AVA of February, this writer feels compelled to respond to some of the points of misconception raised by Mr. King. The opening line of Troy King's piece…
After the Sebastopol City Council heard from two-dozen residents on Feb. 3 -- all of whom spoke against the huge Dairyman Winery and Distillery proposed for Highway 12 -- it unanimously and vigorously opposed the…
The barometric pressure is falling on a Sunday afternoon. I can feel it in my bones as I gaze out the window at the evergreen holly branches dancing in the breeze. The skies darken. I've…