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Mendocino County Today: Tuesday, Apr 19, 2016

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CALEB DAIN SILVER, 25, has been arrested in Southern California and extradited to Mendocino County where he is the primary suspect in the murder of Dennis Boardman of Fort Bragg.

CalebSilver

Silver, who grew up in Boonville, is being held at the County Jail on two felony charges and a misdemeanor charge related to a series of break-ins along the Mendocino Coast and in Lake County. Boardman, who also lived in Boonville for many years, was found bludgeoned to death January 2nd in his Fort Bragg home. Silver, who knew Boardman, had been sought in the Ventura area where Boardman's truck, with its distinctive hand-crafted camper, was found within two weeks of the popular Fort Bragg man's death.

UPDATE: FBPD Press Release (April 18, 2016)

Officers from the Fort Bragg Police Department took Caleb Silver into custody on April 16, 2016 on Felony warrants for Auto Theft and Animal Cruelty charges. He was subsequently booked on the above crimes as well as for the murder of Denis Boardman, whose death was investigated as a Homicide. Mr. Silver is considered the only suspect in the Homicide, but the investigation is still ongoing. Mr. Silver had been in custody at the Santa Clara County Jail, North Facility, for the last four months, under an alias. Investigators are awaiting analysis of evidence recovered at the scene and are continuing to follow up on numerous leads and evidentiary discovery following the murder of Mr. Boardman, a long time Fort Bragg resident.

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THAT BIG POWER OUTAGE in Willits yesterday was apparently caused by a blown transformer. Went out at 6:14pm for 3,058 grid slaves and began to flicker back on about 8pm, and, as per PG&E's prediction, was back on for everyone by 11pm. A Willits person writes: “All I know is that power came back on at my place before the 9:45pm that myself and my neighbor both heard as ETA in the PG&E robo call. Which came, by the way, pretty quick, maybe 20 minutes after power was out? I decided I’d go out for a drive around the valley probably not far after 7pm, and when I came back about an hour later, the power was back on here. Power wasn’t out downtown (at least not the few blocks south of Commercial Street) but I saw a Facebook report that Brown’s Corner didn’t have power and closed around 8 pm after hearing an update from PG&E that it would be off there until 11pm. I also saw reports that some other local areas got power back later."

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AS THE ELECTION heats up, and it's heating up in rather ominous fashion, I can't help but note some sloppy rhetoric out there beyond the usual fact-free bushwa that is the election process in our doomed country. The carelessness that annoys me most is the casual conflation of socialist and communist as it applies to Bernie Sanders. The Bern is a socialist. Fidel Castro is a communist.

IN REAL LIFE, and real life history, there's more of a difference between communist and socialist than there is between Democrat and Republican. In America our two parties run the gamut from communist to fascist. We don't have many socialists, and we have very few communists. We've got fascists coming in the windows.

IN THE PARLIAMENTARY countries of the world each ideology has its own political party. (Fascists are coming on strong in much of Europe.) Here, we're stuck with essentially one party owned by the very wealthy. (There were some unintentionally hilarious comments from Pacific Heights matrons like Doris Fisher and Charlotte Mailliard in Sunday morning's Chron. They said they'd probably have to leave the country if Bernie became president, and how embarrassed they'd be if Trump got elected. The Fisher family owns the Mendocino Redwood Company, Mrs. Mailliard-Schultz has an interest in Yorkville's vast Mailliard Ranch.)

BERNIE the socialist says he'll tax big incomes at 55 percent and break up the big banks. FDR taxed the rich at 95 percent, and the rich were compelled to pay their fair share of the social load up through Eisenhower, after whom the rich took over government for good.

FIDEL CASTRO the communist would simply confiscate the money and property of the rich, including the banks. That's what he did in Cuba. By the way, he didn't shoot very many people, but most of the Cuban rich (and criminals) fled the island, as we know.

LENIN the communist would and did do the same thing in Russia as Castro was later to do in Cuba. Mao broke lots of eggs to make the Chinese revolution. (He gave criminals one warning to stop being criminals. If they didn't stop, up against the wall they went. Mao executed several million criminals and who knows how many alleged "enemies of the people." Stalin the communist would take all the wealth of the rich and shoot them into the bargain. And shoot anyone who complained about the shootings. "No man, no problem," he liked to say.

BERNIE THE SOCIALIST would have been imprisoned or shot by all of the above.

GOT IT? Communists kill or otherwise neutralize socialists and liberals. For communists, force is Option One through Ten. Socialists are democrats. They go about it by argument and election. Don't call Bernie a communist because he isn't one.

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ATTN. Out-of-Towners! You are certain to enjoy our annual spring flower show at the Boonville Fairgrounds this Saturday and Sunday. And if all the floral splendor somehow gets your goat, why you can just step off a few feet to the west on the very same premises for our second annual Goat Extravaganza where you'll not only learn everything you need to know about this hardy, versatile beast, your kids can meet them up close and personal. Of all our weekend events here in the spectacular Anderson Valley, these two are among the most interesting for wholesome good fun.

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PHIL JERGENSON stopped in last week, his visit again reminding me that this County, for the pure ingenuity of so many of its residents, has got to be one of the cleverest places on earth. Mr. J is based in Willits, and has lived in the Willits area for many years. He often works with his equivalently talented brother, Richard. Phil, Richard and Wilma Keppel, the last a professional welder but a professional welder who has made an art form out of the craft. Phil gave me a useful book this gifted trio has assembled. It's called, "How to Build With Grid Beam — a fast, easy and affordable system for constructing almost anything." Which is not hype. This is a valuable how-to book with easy to understand directions for building stuff out of almost anything. Phil also gifted me with a Mendo Pipe, "hand made with solar power." I've been gazing at this amazing brass-bowled artifact for a week now, feeling much like the mystified apes in Kubrick's Space Odyssey. Not being a smoker myself but thinking of becoming one simply to fire one up in this intriguing pipe unlike any pipe ever, this thing is the perfect stocking stuffer for the tokers on your Christmas list. You can find these remarkable people and their array of inventions at MendoMountain.com

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THE VIABILITY of the now vacant Howard Hospital (Willits) as a central Mental Health facility? Mike A'Dair's excellent piece on Sheriff Allman's proposal for that facility for last week's Willits Weekly addresses the question directly:

"David Byrnes, information officer with OSHPD, told Willits Weekly that, while there are no requirements that Frank R. Howard Hospital be retrofitted if it were to be used as a crisis/residential facility or a locked mental health facility, owners may wish to do so as a safety precaution.

‘Even though there are no requirements for structural retrofit of these buildings, they are after all SPC-1 buildings, that is, at risk of possible collapse in a strong earthquake,’ Byrnes said. ‘Some SPC-1 buildings may not be structurally suitable for housing patients of any kind.’

The hospital may want to investigate the structural safety of the old building in terms of suitability for the intended end use before doing any kind of conversion, Byrnes said."

OldHowardHospital

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WHAT'S with that hysterical report on KMUD about a "cleansing" of Fort Bragg's homeless? FB's Measure U would do no such thing. It simply restricts homeless services to neighborhoods more suitable than the center of the town's struggling tourist area. It's certainly a reaction, though, to the secretive, hurry-up deal that saw nearly a million public dollars handed to the private citizen who happened to own the graceful old Coast Hotel so another murky entity, the inevitable "non-profit" with handsomely compensated bosses, could deliver vague "services" of alleged value to drug and alcohol-addicted transients. I wonder how Garberville, already an open air homeless camp, would react if the Taj Mateel, with its rare wood front door, were converted to an indoor homeless center? At some point there's got to be an honest discussion of who the homeless are and why they're homeless. That conversation has finally begun to take place with Fort Bragg's Measure U.

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THE TRUE HISTORY OF RONN OWENS

AVA,

Your mention of San Francisco radio talk show host, Ronn Owens having survived the latest purge of hosts at KGO represents but the latest example of the Israel Lobby's power over the media, not just in Washington, but in every major US city.

This is not speculation since I was inadvertently responsible for Owens having become KGO's morning talk show host in 1984. It's an ugly story, but worth telling.

RonnOwensIn 1984 and for a number of years before that, Owen Span had been the most popular morning talk show host in San Francisco. Owens was around to substitute for him and other hosts when they were sick or on vacation.

I met him on one of these occasions after I had arranged with the show's producer to have Spann interview Avi Oz, a former Israel tank commander and college professor who had participated in Israel's 1982 invasion of Lebanon. After seeing the devastation that his colleagues in the Israel military had brought upon the Palestinians and the Lebanese in the south of their country (which he had earlier described to me in an interview), Oz refused to return to the front and joined other Israeli reservist “refusals” in Yesh G'vul (Hebrew for “there is a limit” and “there is a border.”), 267 of whom would end up serving short terms in an Israeli military prison.

On this particular occasion, Oz was astonished to find himself and his direct experiences on the ground in Lebanon being aggressively challenged by Owens, a know-it-all New York born American Jew, who had never been to Israel or anywhere else in the Middle East and wouldn't get there for more than another decade.

Some time later, Sinai Peter, one of the founders of Yesh G'vul, then an actor and more recently a controversial theater director, who I had interviewed and come to know while I was in Israel, arrived in San Francisco, and I arranged with Spann's producer to have Sinai interviewed on his show.

What would be literally impossible today was rather easy in those days. The Israel Lobby's clampdown on the mainstream media was yet to become what it is has been for the past two decades.

In the interview, Sinai revealed that what the Israeli government of former Jewish terrorist and then prime minister, Menachem Begin, had been saying about the justification for the invasion of Lebanon, which took the life of 20,000 civilians, was nothing but a pack of lies.

The main argument of the Begin regime was that the Palestinians had been shelling Israel from Southern Lebanon, breaking an 11 month cease-fire arranged by American envoy, Philip Habib which the PLO had observed despite repeated Israeli provocations.

Sinai was in a position to know the truth since he had been stationed at that short border and he told Spann, there had been no shelling from the Palestinian side.

When Spann opened the phones to listener's questions, one of the very first was a man who in a very strong European accept demanded to know, “Who is responsible for putting this communist on the air?”

“I am,” Spann gallantly and professionally responded, shielding his producer who, as is normal in the AM radio business, takes care of arranging the program's guests.

What was worse from the Israel Lobby's perspective is that the interview and exchange occured during the third and last hour of Spann's program went out to a national audience.

That, as it turned out, was the end for Spann. He was soon fired and replaced by Owens who has held down the fort there for Israel ever since, being the only host to have survived another station purge in 2011.

Of course, the last thing Israel's friends in America want is the US public to hear the truth about their beloved Israel and they can count on Owens, and others like him, not to tell it and to spoon feed Israel's agenda to his listening audience during the prime morning hours, five days a week.

The first thing visible when opening Owens' blog, posted in 2014, is an apology for having supported Obama in 2012. Obama's crimes “Not having attacked Syria when it crossed the “red line” (which it didn't); that he was negotiating with Iran, presumably having Owens, like Netanyahu, preferring we bomb Tehran; withdrawing US troops from Iraq and, “His contempt for Israel has fractured our relations with our only heretofore trustworthy ally in the region.”

Ronn Owens, doing Israel's bidding which requires fooling the American people. But he can't do it alone. He has a counterpart in every major US city.

Jeff Blankfort

Ukiah

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WHO IS HE & WHO DID HIM IN?

On April 17, 2016 around 7:34 PM Mendocino County Sheriff's Deputies were called to the 35500 Block of Eureka Stagecoach Road, northwest of Willits regarding a found body. Deputies responded and confirmed a 60 year old Willits Caucasian man was deceased. The decedent was located in a field next to the roadway. The case is being investigated as a suspicious death. The next of kin had not been identified or notified. The decedent's identity is not being released at this time. Anyone with information on this case is requested to contact the Sheriff's tip line at 707-234-2100.

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THE 2016 GREENWOOD ROAD POTHOLE AWARDS

All I can say is that they either fix our roads or county voters need to throw all these big talkers out. —Mike Koepf

PotholeM
The John McCowen Perpetual Landslide (In existence since Christmas.)

 

PotholeG
The Dan Gjerde Liberal Asphalt Maze

 

PotholeB
The Carrie Brown Two-For-One Spine Breaker

 

PotholeD
The Howard Dashiell Memorial Crater (Director Mendocino County Department of Transportation)

 

PotholeW
The Woodhouse Nature Preserve

 

PotholeH
The Hamburg Hump (11 inches high and growing.)

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STOPPING PROGRESS

To the Editor:

I find myself today flummoxed as to why Mendocino County CEO Carmel Angelo would look at Humboldt County when it comes to offering mental health services. Both Sonoma County and Marin County are closer and offer far superior services. Maybe it’s time for the CEO to step away and allow others to take the lead.

When the former Department of Mental Health Crisis Services Center was developed it was based on the center at Marin General Hospital. I know, I came up with the initial concept, and helped, along with dozens of others, develop it. It was highly successful. It was so successful the State actually had no idea what it was and filed complaints about it — literally trying to force the County into putting people into costly inpatient hospitals instead of inexpensive outpatient services.

Sadly the County today has no memory of the successful programs that mental health operated just a little over a decade ago. They seem to be choosing to ignore the hard work of people like Kristy Kelly, Beth Robey (now Meyerson), and many others. All of us worked hard to make sure people were getting the best treatment possible.

What stopped us? The Board of Supervisors. I have many newspaper articles in my collection from when the BOS started cutting funding — slowly chipping away at all of the great work everyone had done. It was devastating. There were protests — even sit-ins. But the BOS didn’t stop.

And today it appears the BOS is still stopping progress from happening. I simply don’t understand it. They should be ashamed of themselves.

William French, San Francisco & Ukiah

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THIS MAN COULD NOT GET A DRINK IN SF.

SFBartender

Could He Get One In Boonville? Absolutely.

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THE FOLLOWING was posted by Nicholas Wilson to the MCNlistserv @ 4:01 pm Sunday:

Dear Little River Airport Road neighbors:

Good news just in from Yahel Ben-David, PhD, Executive Director of DeNovo Group, the nonprofit organization that operates Further Reach wireless Internet service provider (WISP). He says they expect to have the new relay tower installed by May 18, and to begin connecting customers in late May or early June.

He also said the latest signups for service bring the totals to 17 sign-ups within a mile radius from me (near the Y) and 29 at 1.5miles radius and 39 at 2 miles radius.

So this is REAL, not air-pie! Further Reach has made the decision to install a new relay station and begin serving at least the eastern half of LRA Road. I don't know for sure, but I think the new relay will also let them serve eastern Albion Ridge and the Comptche-Ukiah Rd. area.

There will probably be a local public information meeting around June 1, possibly a bit sooner, at a time and place to be announced.

Please continue to tell your neighbors about Further Reach and their no-data-limit, high-speed broadband Internet service. Now we can say goodbye to the limited and expensive satellite and cellular data connections that have frustrated so many. And we can take advantage of streaming video and audio services without concern about going over data limits. For me that means I can dump Exede and Dish Network, and also get my phone connection via Further Reach. Better service, lower cost, what could be better?

Further Reach offers three levels of residential service at $70, $100 and $130, with only the speed of connection increasing as the price goes up. Even the lowest price plan should be faster than Exede, Wildblue or HughesNet satellites. Details on plans at www.furtherreach.net/#plans

There is a one-time installation fee of $150, refundable in full within the first 30 days if you don't want to stay with Further Reach. There is no rent, deposit or charge for the equipment that Further Reach will install at your place. They loan it to you free as long as you keep their service.

If you would like to be on my contact list for further updates please reply off list and I will add you.

I have not heard of any complaints about FR service, which is certainly not the case with the satellite Internet systems. In fact there are a number of testimonials from happy customers that you can find atwww.furtherreach.net/#testimonials

So please share the good news with your neighbors so they can have a chance to benefit too. Just go to www.furtherreach.net to sign up as an interested potential customer so they can plan their expansion.

On his 'Point-and-Click' computer radio program last Wednesday on KZYX, host Jim Heid said he is a very happy customer of Further Reach. He said that they have plans to gradually expand into the inland areas, such as Rancho Navarro, though up to now they have served mostly the coast from Gualala to coastal Albion. Their offices and management are located in Berkeley. They have local technicians and installers in this area, and are looking to hire additional qualified help.

Once again, I have no connection to Further Reach, am not authorized to speak for them, and receive no incentives from them. I'm just eager to get their service and want others to know about it too.

Cheers,

Nick Wilson

Little River Airport Rd.

* * *

CATCH OF THE DAY, April 18, 2016

Brunelle, Caron, Lewis
Brunelle, Caron, Lewis

MAJARA BRUNELLE, Fort Bragg. Battery on peace officer, resisting, drunk in public.

ROBERT CARON, Fort Walton Beach Florida/Redwood Valley. Drunk in public.

RICKEY LEWIS III, Ukiah. Protective order violation, probation revocation.

Mansfield, Medina, Nhuy
Mansfield, Medina, Nhuy

GEORGE MANSFIELD, Fort Bragg. Burglary.

MARIA MEDINA, Ukiah. Unspecified charges.

SOBIN NHUY JR., Bakersfield/Ukiah. Parole violation.

Ridenour, Silver, Villalobos-Jacuinde
Ridenour, Silver, Villalobos-Jacuinde

DERRICK RIDENOUR, Ukiah. Drunk in public.

CALEB SILVER, Fort Bragg. Murder, cruelty to animals, personal use of deadly weapon, vehicle theft, receiving stolen property, evidence tampering.

JOSE VILLALOBOS-JACUINDE, Richmond/Ukiah. DUI.

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THE ELEPHANT COMETH

by James Kunstler

The elephant’s not even in the room, which is why the 2016 election campaign is such a soap opera. The elephant outside the room is named Discontinuity. That’s perhaps an intimidating word, but it is exactly what the USA is in for. It means that a lot of familiar things come to an end, stop, don’t work the way they are supposed to — beginning, manifestly, with the election process now underway in all its unprecedented bizarreness.

One reason it’s difficult to comprehend discontinuity is so many operations and institutions of daily life in America have insidiously become rackets, meaning that they are kept going only by dishonest means. If we didn’t lie to ourselves about them, they couldn’t continue.

For instance the automobile racket. Without a solid, solvent middle-class, you can’t sell cars. Americans are used to paying for cars on installment loans. If the middle class is so crippled by prior debt and the disappearance of good-paying jobs that they can’t qualify for car loans, well, the answer is to give them loans anyway, on terms that don’t really pencil out — such as 7-year loans at 0 percent interest for used cars (that will be worth next to nothing long before the loan expires).

This will go on until it can’t, which is what discontinuity is all about. The car companies and the banks (with help from government regulators and political cheerleaders) have created this work-around by treating “sub-prime” car loans the same way they treated sub-prime mortgages: they bundle them into larger packages of bonds called collateralized loan obligations. These, in turn, are sold mainly to big pension fund and insurance companies desperate for “yield” (higher interest) on “safe” investments that ostensibly preserve their principle. The “collateral” amounts to the revenue streams of payments that are sure to stop because the payers are by definition not credit-worthy, meaning it was baked in the cake that they would quit making payments — especially when they go “under water” owing ever more money for junkers that have lost all value.

It’s easy to see how that ends in tears for all concerned parties, but we “buy into it” because there seems to be no other way to a) boost the so-called “consumer” economy and b) keep the matrix of car-dependant suburban sprawl in operation. We took what used to be a fairly sound idea during a now-bygone phase of history, and perverted it to avoid making any difficult but necessary changes in a new phase of history.

Health care is now such a blatant, odious, and ruinous racket that it is a little hard to believe that it hasn’t ignited an outright revolution or, at least, a workplace massacre in some insurance company C-suite. It is a well-known fact that most Americans don’t even have $500 to pay for a car repair. How are they supposed to cope with a $5,000 deductible health insurance incident? Answer: they can’t. Their mental health is destroyed in the process of attempting to fix their physical health. Not uncommonly, they have to declare bankruptcy after a routine appendectomy or a visit to the emergency room to set a broken arm. Sometimes, they don’t even bother to go to the doctor, seeing clearly how this plays out. The pharmaceutical industry has, of course, been allowed to convert itself into a simple extortion racket. Got an unusual kind of cancer? We have something that might help. Oh, it costs $43,000 a month….

What kind of a polity allows this cruel and indecent grift to go on? Why, the Obama administration, which allowed the health insurance company lobbyists and their colleagues in Big Pharma to “craft” the Affordable Care Act — the name of which must be the biggest public lie ever floated.

It’s interesting to see how a parallel fraud is playing out in higher ed. I submit the reason that college presidents are not pushing back against the Maoist coercions of the undergraduate social justice warriors is because the marvelous theater of the gender, race, and “privilege” melodrama is a potent distraction from the sad fact that college has turned into a grotesquely top-heavy and high-paying administrative racket offering boutique courses in fake fields (Dartmouth College: WGSS 65.06 Radical Sexuality: Of Color, Wildness, and Fabulosity… Harvard University: WOMGEN 1424: American Fetish) in order to pander to their young customers (students) conditioned to tragic “oppression” sob stories. All in the service of paying huge salaries + perks to the dynamic executives running these places.

Then there is banking, aka the financial system, certainly the greatest racket of rackets, since the fumes it’s running on — combinations of ZIRP, QE, and “forward guidance” (happy talk) — is all that there is to maintain the illusion that “money” remains a reliable gauge of value. Finance is the racket that will go down first and hardest, and when it does, all the other rackets currently running will go up in a vapor. That elephant will storm into the room before the political conventions, and when it does, it will usher in the recognition that nothing can go on as before.

(Support Kunstler’s writing by visiting his Patreon Page: https://www.patreon.com/JamesHowardKunstler?ty=h)

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THE MONEY CHASE compromised my politics. As a consequence of my fund-raising I became more like the wealthy donors I met, in the very particular sense that I spent more and more of my time above the fray, outside the world of immediate hunger, disappointment, fear, irrationality, and frequent hardship of the other 99 percent of the population — that is, the people that I’d entered public life to serve. And perhaps as the next race approaches, a voice within tells you that you don’t want to have to go through all the misery of raising all that money in small increments all over again. You realize that you no longer have the cachet you did as the upstart, the fresh face; you haven’t changed Washington, and you’ve made a lot of people unhappy with difficult votes. The path of least resistance — of fund-raisers organized by the special interests, the corporate PACs, and the top lobbying shops — starts to look awfully tempting, and if the opinions of these insiders don’t quite jibe with those you once held, you learn to rationalize the changes as a matter of realism, of compromise, of learning the ropes. The problems of ordinary people, the voices of the Rust Belt town or the dwindling heartland, become a distant echo rather than a palpable reality, abstractions to be managed rather than battles to be fought.

— Barack Obama

* * *

COMMENT OF THE DAY

Of course people would rather prop up a system that abuses them in relative comfort than venture into the unknown. I suspect that is because the unknown is known… in the dark recesses. Cheney was wrong, and we all know it, the American way of life is negotiable. When 5% consumes over 25% or something along those lines, the odds are stacked against it long-term. I’m surprised Americans have not brought out the pitchforks when it comes to college debt. States no longer fund the universities because they are not getting the tax revenue that is now legally hidden off shore, and the expense is passed on to students and their families. In-state tuition is now averaging around $20K a year in most states. It’s unfathomable, the world’s best university system is now a racket for debt peddling. Obamacare was a vanity project from the inception. It didn’t matter that it would be a failure, it mattered that he could point to it and say, now everyone can be insured. It was, and is, all ego. We are the only developed/civilized country that allows big-pharma to peddle their addictions on TV. Try watching 60 minutes. CBS should be ashamed. Big-Pharma wants everyone on a prescription and a prescription to counteract side-effects of those prescriptions from childhood ’til death. It’s sickening. Bill Ford, the heir eponymous and failed CEO is in the news, selling his future of mobility where we are still dependent on cars of course, but more expensive electric ones that we will be forced to share. New start-ups tout groceries brought to your home (yes, this is a new concept for millennials) because we need less human and community interaction and not more. We need to stay in our homes (pods) on our screens, ordering things delivered to our doors. We don’t want communities, we want consumers addicted to pain killers and shopping highs. People need to come clean. In a system not worth saving, why not unleash the elephants?

* * *

UPCOMING EVENTS AT THE UKIAH LIBRARY.

www.mendolibrary.org

* * *

FRESH FROM THE BEAST'S INTESTINE

Leaving the Beast's Intestine

This being the afternoon before I leave Washington, D.C. to go to New York City, I am jotting down a few impressions to share. First and foremost, since my arrival from California to participate with Beyond Extreme Energy's anti-fracking campaign, the overall experience here in the "belly of the beast" has been satisfactory. And it is not because we generally accomplished short term goals, insofar as confronting the stupidity of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and its energy company masters, nor because my subsequent participation with Democracy Spring (which transitioned into Democracy Awakening April 16th) was also generally successful.

The reason that this has been satisfying is because the district and the people who actually live here year around are wonderful! I have had blissful times at the Catholic basilica during easter season, and regularly made use of the lower Crypt Church for silent meditation, plus going to the Franciscan monastery and chillin' out on its spacious grounds. As well, countless hours have been spent at the 35 year young anti-nuclear vigil in front of the White House, with the volunteers who keep this continuously going, regardless of the weather, 24/7/365. It is always a joy to be at "the igloo"...the dome-like structure wrapped in clear plastic so that volunteers may sleep there at nights...which has faced off with the ever-changing residents across the way at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. And once in awhile I even run into some of my old Catholic Worker crew, as they once again arrive en masse to speak truth to power.

More commonly, the district has countless uptempo friendly places for breakfast, and there's lots of entertainment because this is the place where Chuck Brown invented Go-Go Music. And the jazz is hot at Blues Alley. And Hard Rock Cafe shows endless vintage and current videos. And the Rocket Bar on 8th Street near the Chinatown arch, below the sidewalk, has big screens for basketball game viewing with a festive crowd; they even have California brews like Sierra Nevada and Lagunitas...and lots of pool tables...need info on what's happening at regional gambling casinos?...the Preakness odds at Pimlico? And then there is Busboys and Poets and Kramer's Books for everything else. And ya, you can go to the Smithsonian Mall.

So, as I leave the Beast's Intestine tomorrow, I do so with a sublime fondness for the real Washington DC, which is separate from the United States Federal Government. Maybe the D.C. Statehood advocate whom I spoke with is right. Maybe it would be appropriate to move the seat of the federal government to Saint Louis, declare the District of Columbia the 51st state, keep the tourist attractions to finance local social programs, and let's see if the politicians and their corporate masters can make it in the midwest.

Craig Louis Stehr

Washington, DC

2 Comments

  1. Stephen Rosenthal April 19, 2016

    Well, certainly seems like she’s forgotten it now.

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