This year marks 50 years since nineteen 67 and it seems everyone in San Francisco is filled with nostalgia for the Summer of Love. A lot of our cultural institutions are celebrating with hippie themed…
Posts published in “Essays”
I only ever deliberately killed another animal once in my life. It was in the mid-80s and I was working on a farm/nursery in Durango, Colorado, where the mistress of the concern poisoned several semi-domesticated…
Getting my first computer was inspired by a visit to AVA regular Jim Gibbons, in the hills outside of Willits. He was on solar power and had a Mac Plus hooked up to an inverter…
Today, more than six months after the deadline to apply, the Humboldt County Planning Department has received fewer than 200 completed cannabis cultivation permit applications from the entire county. That means that more than 2,000 permit…
As our politicos creep deeper into a legalistic wilderness hunting for phantoms of Russian collusion, nobody pays attention to the most dangerous force in American life: the unraveling financialization of the economy. Financialization is what…
Ever since the legalization of med-pot in the fall of 2015 and the voter-approved legalization of so-called recreational pot (“rec-pot”) last November, I’ve used this column and air time on my KPFN radio program talking…
The City of Fort Bragg convened at Town Hall for a full day budget workshop bright and early last Wednesday morning. They had coffee but only a modest bowl of grapes to go with it.…
While the current versions of newspapers in Fort Bragg and Mendocino rarely cover stories outside of the myopically local, their progenitor, William Heeser, reported on news from around the state, the nation, and the world…
The logic of the rich? - want more, get more. But there's never enough. Towers all over the world with your name emblazoned in big gold letters, proclaiming, extolling celebrating...ME. If billions of dollars and a constant torrent of publicity and attention don't satisfy, what is left? Power - what else? Whenever it was that the president of the United States started being called the Most Powerful Man in the World, as a kid who had grown up reading Superman comics, I knew, felt strongly, that something wasn't right about this. POTUS had become a comic strip character. Somewhere I had read that the desire for a position of authority and power ought to be the primary disqualification for the job.