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Posts published in “Essays”

Digging a Downtown Graveyard

We’ve seen renditions of the courthouse the State of California is threatening to inflict upon Ukiah, and the project is wrong and wrong.  Mendocino County’s proposed courthouse is the wrong building in the wrong location.…

New Museum Curator at the Kelley House

After serving as curator at the Kelley House Museum for four years, and guiding it through the challenges of COVID, Karen McGrath has retired. Her tenure was marked by interesting projects and exciting technological advancements,…

Medicare: America’s Single-payer Healthcare System

Medicare is a national health insurance program started in 1965 to provide coverage for certain health related expenses in Americans age 65 and older.  It is also the largest single-payer healthcare system in the US,…

On the Avenue of the Giants: Phillipsville Memories

The chilly April morning was spent packaging samples of last fall's marijuana crop into tiny plastic bags, then double vacuum-sealing the eight strains using several pairs of disposable vinyl gloves to keep them clean of…

Independence Day Afterword

By now, all the red, white and blue bunting has been taken down and stored. The last notes of “The Stars and Stripes Forever” have faded into silence. The last advertisements for “4th of July”…

Battle of the Titans

Though I was only nine years old, I still remember how overjoyed my parents were back in November of 1960 when the votes had been tallied and John Fitzgerald Kennedy had squeaked to victory as…

The Real Dope

(A Candid Review of Can Legal Weed Win? The Blunt Realities of Cannabis Economics (UC Press; $24.95)) Robin Goldstein and Daniel Sumner, two economists and professors at UC Davis—once known as the aggie school—ask a…

A Good Man Fallen Among Falun Gong: Dr. Peter Breggin

The foremost critic of Prozac from the time it hit the market in 1988 has been Peter Breggin, MD. Appearing as an expert witness on behalf of plaintiffs harmed by SSRIs, he has cost the…

We’re Thinking Backwards

What oughta be obituaries are instead heroic revivals as local cops save yet another moron from a fatal fentanyl overdose with a wonder drug called NarCan.  It’s enough to make you cry.  Instead of the…

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