Dime Bag Day 2016

Lemonade Day is coming up this Saturday June 4^th. Have you heard of Lemonade Day? Lemonade Day was designed to teach kids about capitalism and running their own business by encouraging them open a lemonade stand. They’ve had Lemonade Day in the northern part of the county for a few years now, but our 2nd District County Supervisor Estelle Fennell introduced me to a woman named Lynette who told me that they received a $3,000 grant to help get Lemonade Day off the ground in Southern Humboldt.

How about that! I never made anything like $3,000 from all of my childhood lemonade stands put together. Maybe we should have Grant Writing Day instead. Certainly more people around here make their living by working for non-profits than do by selling lemonade.

 

Then Brian Elie told me a story of an inspiring young entrepreneur. I don’t know his name, and I’m sure I wouldn’t use it if I did, but Brian showed me a picture of a rather pissed-off looking young man, about 20 years old, with a shaved head wearing a white, wife-beater T-shirt. I didn’t recognize the kid in the picture.

 

“He hit me!” Brian exclaimed, and proceeded to tell me about this young go-getter. One day recently, as Brian approached his office, behind the bagel shop in Garberville, he noticed this young man involved in what appeared to be a drug transaction, behind his office. Brian said he yelled at the kid: “Hey, don’t do that around here!” to which the kid replied “Fuck You Asshole!” Then, Brian said he saw a cell phone laying on the ground. He picked it up. That’s when the kid attacked Brian physically, and slugged him. I guess it was the kid’s phone.

The cops eventually caught the kid, and sent Brian the photo, to see if Brian recognized his assailant. He did. Brian said that all of the text messages on the phone were notes like “I ned n 8th.” Can you believe it? That kid was hustling nickle bags of weed in Garberville! That’s like selling bottled water to a drowning man. “What a spunky young businessman.” I thought.

Then I thought to myself, “Where would this community be without thousands of energetic, self-motivated young men, just like the one Brian told me about, who work so tirelessly, all across this country, to sell the product for which Humboldt County is so well known?

I’ll bet a good percentage of Humboldt County’s successful businessmen began their career as one of those young men. It must take an enormous army of resourceful, motivated young street dealers to insure that every Jr. High and High School student in America has access to Humboldt County’s most famous export. Yes, this community owes its prosperity to the hard work, determination and can-do spirit of young entrepreneurs just like the kid who punched Brian Elie in the face, outside of his office.

All over this country, every day, nice people like Brian get cursed at, punched and worse, by the wonderful people who work so hard to make this community prosperous. Talk about aggressive marketing! As the price of cannabis continues to fall, marketing will only become more important. That’s why, here in Southern Humboldt, we need to rethink Lemonade Day.

The Lemonade Stand is cliche and passe. Nobody around here makes money on lemonade, but more than 500 families in SoHum have made more than a million dollars each, thanks to an army of drug-dealing street thugs just like that enterprising young man who slugged Brian Elie. You can find them operating in every single town in America.

Besides destroying communities and terrorizing neighborhoods, every year, an alarming number of this tremendously successful marketing team die violent deaths well before their time. More still find themselves incarcerated, serving long, work-related, prison sentences. I cannot stress how important it is to the economy of Humboldt County that children growing up today learn the skills they need to fill those empty shoes. That’s why I encourage all of you to join me in making this Saturday June 4, the first official Dime Bag Day in Southern Humboldt.

Here’s how it works: If you grow weed, you can sponsor a child on Dime Bag Day by fronting them an ounce of pot. The child then takes the marijuana home, splits it up into quarter, and eighth-of-an-ounce bags, and decides how much to charge for them. By doing this, children learn about math and fractions, weights and measures, materials costs and profit margins. Then on Saturday, June 4^th, all of the kids come to town and try to sell their weed. Anyone can participate, and we encourage everyone to come out and support the kids.

This Saturday, on Dime Bag Day, if a kid comes up to you and offers to sell you some weed, say “Yes, Please.” Even if you have plenty of weed, or don’t smoke weed at all, buy some weed from a kid on the street on Dime Bag Day. We want these kids to have a positive experience, and for this early success to bolster their confidence. Just give them your money, and try not to haggle too much about the price. Don’t make them bust a cap on your ass.

This is a great opportunity to teach kids about business and how the economy really works, so get the whole family involved in SoHum’s first Dime Bag Day. Your kids will learn the value of a dollar, gain valuable business experience, and get a taste of the exciting fast-paced life of a street dealer. They’ll also give those Lemonade Day sucka’s something to spend their hard-earned money on.

Seed ’em for Freedom

The other day, I found myself stuck behind two, empty, 25 yd dump trucks, returning to Redway, waiting for two more 25 yd dump trucks, full of soil, to clear the one-lane bottleneck in the middle of the redwood grove between Lower Redway and Ruby Valley on Briceland Rd. Between the four of them they completely engulfed that remarkable fragment of ancient forest in a thick cloud of diesel exhaust. Ah, the smell of a Spring day in the forests of Humboldt County.

I must have passed two dozen trucks, of various sizes, loaded with soil, or components thereof, in my sixteen mile trek into town. It reminded me of fire season, with soil trucks instead of firetrucks. You can literally watch our roads crumble beneath their weight. Meanwhile, the forests echo with the crass flatulence of chainsaws, bulldozers and ATVs all day, and the endless roar of generators, that fuel the UFO-like glow of brightly lit greenhouses, all night.

This is crazy! I love marijuana as much as the next guy, but it’s not worth destroying the planet over, and it’s not worth destroying Humboldt County over, either. It’s just pot, for God’s sake. If it weren’t for prohibition, you could hardly give the stuff away. If our pot had seeds in it, weed would be sprouting up everywhere by now, and everyplace in the country would have its own variety, adapted to the local environment and local tastes.

Pot doesn’t need special soil. I once found a fully mature sinsemilla plant growing in the expansion groove of a sidewalk in downtown Akron, OH. Thousands of people must have trampled on that plant over the course of the Summer. No one watered it, fertilized it, or mulched it. No one brewed tea for it, dusted it’s roots or sprayed it with neem oil, and no one strung lights over it, turned a fan on it or put a heater near it. It grew there, all on it’s own. Why? Because pot used to have seeds.

Weed should be as common as blackberries, and as full of seeds. No one should ever get shot over it, go to jail for it, or fork over a days wages just to enjoy a taste of it. By the same token, no one in their right mind would bulldoze a forest, trash a truckload of plastic film and sink a lot of money into soil and amendments, thinking they were going to get rich off of it, either. Our entire cannabis industry is built on the lunacy of prohibition. It was born crazy, and it’s only gotten crazier.

We shouldn’t build on prohibition. We should end prohibition. We shouldn’t white-wash the black market. We should end the injustice of it and let nature take its course. We can replace the trucks and the soil and the generators and the lights and the pollution and the growers and the dealers and the cops and the lawyers and the prison guards and the laws and the prisons and the money with the gentle motion of the breeze and a card on an album cover. Pot for the people, period. Anything less is a graceless scam that needlessly destroys habitat, generates pollution and creates poverty.

A lot of people around here have no appreciation for this place at all. They measure everything in dollars, so they know the price of everything, and the value of nothing. They know that the price of marijuana is high, all over the country, right now, and the risk of going to jail for growing a lot of it here in Humboldt County, is low, and that was all they needed to know about Humboldt County.

Salmon streams and old-growth forests don’t interest them one bit. Deer, bear, raccoon, skunks, gophers, rats and mice all fall under the category of: “pests,” and the rest of the community of life is just “roadkill,” dead stuff that got in the way. For them, regulations serve no purpose. To them, regulations are nothing more than bureaucratic “red tape” to be avoided, resisted, and opposed politically, rather than complied with, and because of them, regulations will not protect wildlife, preserve habitat or even insure our rural quality of life. Regulations won’t stop this madness. Regulation created this insanity in the first place, and new, more or better regulations will only make things worse. This is a concocted problem with a natural solution.

If you love living in the forest, and you’re sick of the green-rush, grow some seedy pot this year. Let a patch of your favorite seed-stock go feral on your land. Seed ’em for Freedom! Seed ’em for Freedom, because it’s the only way we’ll ever really put prohibition behind us. Seed ’em for Freedom to put cannabis in the hands of the people who need it the most, and wrench it from those who would rather destroy the world first, and Seed ’em for Freedom because seeds are life, and life knows what it’s doing.

 

The Southern Humboldt Community Discredit Union

Whether you enjoy my columns or not, if you live in Southern Humboldt, and do business at the Southern Humboldt Community Credit Union, I hope you will take time to read this post, which I also submitted as a letter to the editor of both local SoHum newspapers.

Beginning next month, the Southern Humboldt Community Credit Union will start draining your bank account every time they send you a statement, and not just a little. Your so called “free” checking account will now cost you $60 a year. Every time you get an envelope from the credit union, they will deduct $5 from your account. This fee applies to savings accounts as well. Instead of earning interest on your money, the credit union will now send you a statement every quarter showing that they’ve taken $5 from you for the service.

The Southern Humboldt Community Credit Union takes in hard-earned money from working people like me, and they loan it it out to dope growers in the hills, to finance all of the environmental destruction going on in the forest, including special low-interest loans for water tanks. Then they launder all of that drug money and turn it into legally owned land, vehicles, phony businesses, and interest paid to the credit union, but instead of paying me interest on my money, they now have the nerve to charge me $5 every quarter for loaning it to them. That’s an outrage.

Not satisfied with the revenue they receive from the millions of dollars worth of black market income they launder, the Southern Humboldt Community Credit Union has stooped to ripping off working people who live paycheck to paycheck, and need a place to cash their paycheck. A credit union is supposed to be a safe place for working people to keep their money, but if your money evaporates while it’s there, the Southern Humboldt Community Credit Union is clearly NOT a safe place to keep your money.

 

 

When I complained about these new fees, the teller told me that there was an exception. If I was sixty-two years old or more, I would be exempt from these charges. That didn’t make me feel any better, because, first, I’m a long way from 62. Second, because it means that the Southern Humboldt Community Credit Union has structured these fees so that we working age people, in our 20s, 30s, 40s and 50s, who didn’t get here when land was cheap, will now subsidize the cost of written statements graciously provided, at no cost, to the aging Baby Boomers who own most of the land and control most of the money in Southern Humboldt.

 

Believe me, I don’t need another reason to resent Baby Boomers. Their greed is insatiable, and their stupidity, boundless. We’ll be paying for their extravagantly indulgent lifestyle for generations to come. They’ve already cost us enough, and I don’t feel particularly charitable towards them right now.

The Southern Humboldt Community Credit Union is trying to force us all to do our banking online. Not everyone wants to see all of their personal financial information dangled around in cyberspace waiting for hackers to strike. Not everyone in Southern Humboldt has a secure internet connection to do their banking on. Internet connectivity costs a lot in Southern Humboldt, especially if you live off-the-grid, and you certainly don’t want to do your banking at the library or at a wifi cafe.

When I complained to Shon Welborn at the credit union, she suggested that I to go to the Board of Directors meeting, this Wednesday, May 18^th at 3:00 pm at The Southern Humboldt Community Credit Union in Garberville to voice my complaint. Of course, most of the working people effected by this policy change, can’t afford to take off of work early on Wednesday. I hope you will attend the meeting if you can, but whether or not you can attend the meeting, please call, email, write or visit the Southern Humboldt Community Credit Union and tell them to dump these outrageous new fees before they go into effect on June first. Their number is: 707 923 2012 Thank you.

My Impressions of 2nd District Candidates Debate in Garberville

What planet is Estelle Fennell from? She sure isn’t from anywhere near Southern Humboldt, that much was apparent at last Wednesday’s 2^nd District Candidates Debate. Bonny Blackberry’s Rights Monitoring Project hosted the debate, and Bonny Blackberry herself moderated the event. She still calls her organization the Civil Liberties Monitoring Project, but if you’ve listened to her radio show on KMUD lately, you know that Bonny Blackberry doesn’t really care much about people’s rights anymore.

Back during the War on Drugs, I used to think the Civil Liberties Monitoring Project was one of KMUD’s best shows, a unique shining example of what community radio should be. Bonny challenged the police and held them to account. She stood up against profiling, invasive surveillance, illegal searches, and code enforcement inspections. She taught people how to invoke their rights, preserve their rights and demand their rights. She helped this community hold the police state at bay, and her work made a huge difference in how the cops around here treated people.

Not any more. Lately, Bonny just whines about the Supervisors and the Sheriff not doing enough to protect the income of so called “Mom and Pop” growers. It’s about time she changed the name of the show, or better yet, took it off the air to make room for something else. We need a good show about civil rights around here, that’s for sure, but it’s a shame to see the CLMP show go so lame, and I’m afraid it’s time to put it out of its misery.

That said, I do appreciate that Bonny put together this forum so we could hear the two candidates competing to represent us on the Humboldt County Board of Supervisors. Side by side, in a room full of SoHum people, the contrast was remarkable. We have a unique culture here in Southern Humboldt. We look at the world differently, and we think differently. We look at the world differently, and we think differently, because we smoke the best weed in the world, all day long, every day, or at least we did, for long enough. For all of our many differences, cannabis unites us, enlightens us, and makes us who we are.

Which leads me to wonder: Where is Estelle from? Even during her long tenure as the voice of KMUD’s Local News, Estelle sounded so unlike anyone else I’ve met in SoHum that I could scarcely believe the News was really local. I knew that the stuff she reported happened around here, but I didn’t know anyone around here who talked like her. Listening to Estelle at Wednesday night’s debate reminded me of her days as KMUD’s news anchor.

On the News, Estelle spoke in complete sentences built for efficiency. There were no flowery hippie colloquialisms, no Rastafarian religious references, no expletives or imitation ghetto slang in her reports. She asked relevant questions and sometimes even follow-up questions. No one around here does that, and no matter how many strange occurrences she reported, Estelle never suggested that the freemasons, Jewish bankers, the Catholic Church, Skull and Bones, the CIA, FBI, aliens, or even an alignment of celestial bodies was responsible. Who was she protecting?

More importantly: Who was she working for? Estelle lost her job at KMUD because of her blatantly slanted coverage of the Reggae Wars. Estelle went to the mat for crooked concert promoter Carol Bruno, in an embarrassing, unsuccessful attempt to quell public outrage over the fact that Bruno had just swindled the Mateel Community Center out of a quarter of a million dollars. Estelle’s hidden agenda only became too obvious to ignore when she dove deep into the muck in that last ditch effort to save Momma Moneybags.

I told you last week what I thought of Journalism. Well, the only people who lie more than journalists, are lawyers and politicians. Estelle decided to skip law school. Instead she found a new puppet master in a cadre of greedy developers who used their money and her slick low-key delivery to take over the Board of Supervisors.

Once there, she helped them secure gigantic subsidies for their McMansion developments, and raised taxes on the poorest people in the county to pay for it. Then she screwed over the back-to-the-landers, who put her in office in the first place, and sold out to greedy mega-grow greenrushers, giving them a green light to destroy the environment and ruin our quality of life with the recently passed medical marijuana ordinance.

That’s her record. She’s a liar for hire, and just like when she worked at KMUD, she draws a paycheck from us all, but she only really works for the ones who pull the strings. She’s been playing the rest of us for rubes for decades. Why would she stop now?

Bud Rogers, on the other hand, revealed himself as a true man-of-the-people at last Wednesday’s debate. His sentences may run on for weeks without reaching conclusion, but you can tell by listening to him that Bud Rogers smokes a lot of really good weed. We need someone who smokes a lot of good weed on the Board of Supervisors. The Supervisor from the Second District should have a bong on his desk (I know I would). We should insist that our Supervisor use it, religiously, before every meeting.

It’s hard to lie convincingly when you are stoned. Most stoners are too lazy to even try. That’s the beauty of cannabis. Cannabis reminds you that telling the truth is easier than lying. We should insist that the 2^nd District Supervisor get absolutely wrecked on some of SoHum’s best cannabis before every Supervisors meeting, just to keep them honest. Bud Rogers could handle it. You know he could.

 

We need more Bud on the Humboldt County Board of Supervisors. We need an honest stoner to represent Southern Humboldt. If you don’t smoke weed every day, all day, you have no business representing this community. You just don’t get it. You’re not one of us. Bud Rogers is one of us.

Like you, Bud Rogers smokes a lot of really good weed. Like you, Bud Rogers loves living in the woods. He doesn’t want to go to the courthouse in Eureka any more than you or I do, but unlike you and me, Bud Rogers is willing to drive to that goddamned courthouse every fucking week, and listen to everybody’s complaints, and do his level best to make the best sausage possible for the people of Southern Humboldt, because he cares about us, and he cares about this place.

Bud has graciously made this sacrifice for the people of Southern Humboldt because no one else would step up to the plate. You can tell by listening to him how much Bud loves this community, and he doesn’t like what’s been happening around here with Estelle in the driver’s seat. None of us do. We’re sick of the mega-grows and the generators and don’t like the new ordinance that encourages them. We’re sick of the war against the poor, and endless hand-wringing about our lack of housing, and we’re sick of greedy land developers pulling the strings of our elected representative in Eureka.

We need Bud Rogers now more than ever. It’s time we put one of our own in the 2^nd District Supervisors seat, instead of some slick-talking alien with a hidden agenda. With Bud Rogers in the Supervisors seat, SoHum will never again be taken unawares by Annunaki lizard people bent on enslaving humanity. Bud Rogers is hip to their M.O. He knows who’s seeding the clouds and he recognizes the secret handshake of the New World Order. Don’t let anyone tell you that these are not concerns for the County Board of Supervisors. The Illuminauti work at every level, and Bud Rogers is the only candidate willing to face their looming menace.

I don’t know why, but I just feel the spirits calling Bud to shake off the old paradigm and lead our consciousness to a whole new spiritual level. Like the Lion of Judah, Bud Rogers will smite the lies of Babylon with righteous herb and bring peace, justice and freedom to Jah people of SoHum. Shit man, you gotta vote for Bud bro, he’s your homeboy. However you say it, Bud Rogers is the best choice we have for 2^nd District Supervisor, and it’s up to us to give him the job.

You still have time to register for the June 7 election.

Anti-Journalism

Every week I rack my brain for an idea to write about, ideally, one that requires no research, phone calls, interviews, or leaving home If it weren’t for the research, phone calls, interviews and driving, I might have pursued a career in journalism. Not because of any burning desire to expose corruption, or inform the public on issues that matter in their lives, but mainly for the paycheck. I coulda used the dough. Now that I’ve seen what has become of journalism, I’m glad I didn’t make the effort.

Not that I think I would do any better. I’m sure that as soon as I discovered that I could cut and paste whole paragraphs from a corporate press release into a story with my byline, I’d be the first one out of the office door on Friday afternoon. Still, I don’t think I could cut it. Journalists have to confine themselves to the facts, and adhere to “journalistic ethics.” That would get old fast.

 

These ridiculous restrictions castrate the truth and hamstring creativity. That’s why: if you want to know the truth about the human experience, you don’t look in the newspaper, you look under “fiction,” at your library. If you want to know anything else, google it. Journalists tell you stuff you didn’t want to know in the first place, in a way that doesn’t make any sense. That’s what you get when you focus on facts, an endless timeline of meaningless events, devoid of context and drained of perspective. Journalism announces everything, but reveals nothing.

You’ll find journalism everywhere you look: in your home, on your TV, radio and computer, on your phone, stacked up in front of the grocery store, laying on your cafe table, underfoot, blowing down the street, in the trash. Journalism is as disposable as, well, yesterday’s news, but its ubiquity is its power, and its power is considerable.

Journalism and advertising work hand in hand, and you rarely see one without the other. Together they distort reality for the purpose of economic exploitation. Journalists lie even more than the people who write advertising copy, and the biggest lie that journalists tell, is the one that convinces us that facts are objective. Objective reality is the biggest lie ever constructed, and journalists promulgate it every time they file a story.

Media moguls understand this. That’s why they spend so much money on disposable, hack, writing. They don’t care about the truth, and even if they did, they have no interest in sharing it with the general public. Instead, they want everyone to believe the same lie, because that lie motivates people to get up and go to work every day, so they can buy the useless products their advertisers sell. Journalism is the process by which media moguls replace your thoughts with their narrative, and their agenda.

I prefer to think my own thoughts, and write my own truth. You can call my writing “anti-journalism,” because I don’t care what happens in the “real world,” what I think is all that matters. Nobody reads this column because they want the facts. You read this column because you recognize the truth in it, and the rest of it isn’t too boring.

Today, it’s not enough to report the day’s events and call it “the news.” We need new ideas, new ways of thinking and a fresh perspective, and journalism won’t take us there. It’s going to take more than journalism. It’s going to take imagination, intelligence and sensitivity to build a better culture. Journalism blinds the imagination, hamstrings the intelligence and desensitizes humanity to the complexity and subtlety of the human experience with a bland disembodied narrative that lacks grace and annihilates beauty.

Journalist tell us what to think and how to think about it. They narrow minds and promote conformity. Today, with our long, proud history of a free press, look at us. Can we get any dumber? Reading the papers (or the websites), won’t make you any smarter. Instead, journalism promotes a very special kind of stupidity, and this stupidity threatens us all. Take it from me; I’m not a journalist.