White People are Crazy

I’m very white. Both of my parents are white, and I got a good white education, went to white college, studied science, and learned to think like a serious white man. I’m pretty good at it too, especially in writing, but I also sound white and act white. I’ve got the whole white shtick down pat, but I’m not proud of it, and I don’t think it healthy. In fact, I recognize it as a mental illness, and I am doing my best to recover from it.

You don’t need to go to college to learn to think like a white person. Spending time online will do it, even if the people you communicate with are not white. The internet itself is a white-man’s invention, and it shows. There’s no physical contact; it’s completely detached from reality, and everyone is trying to sell you something. How much whiter could it be?

When you look at the history of white colonization in America, unless you are white, you see cold-blooded murder and plunder for profit. You see genocide, slavery, poverty, exploitation, environmental devastation and unspeakable violence giving rise to an empire of unprecedented power and influence. Unless you are white, the colonization of North America looks like a terrible thing, if not the most terrible thing to ever happen. It was the world’s worst holocaust, but if you are white, you gloss over the genocide, slavery and other bad stuff as “unfortunate chapters” in a whole other story.

If you are white you see things completely differently. We don’t see ourselves as violent and greedy. Instead, we see ourselves as intellectually sophisticated and technologically advanced. For white people, it is the story of “the Enlightenment” (literally “whitening”), the rise of objective science, and our relentless search for truth, that led to certain technological innovations that made our rise to power inevitable. White people think that we built this empire because we are smart people, not because of the ruthless greed that drove colonial expansion. White people believe that we run the world because we’re smart.

When white people look at something like the Golden Gate Bridge, for instance, they’ll marvel at the engineering, and think, “Isn’t it amazing what smart people can do when they work together for the good of everyone.” White people forget the genocide that made that bridge conceivable, the gold rush that made it possible, and the sprawl that made it necessary. White people somehow forget that 100 million people died, wolves and grizzlies were extirpated, millions of acres of the world’s tallest trees leveled, wiping out an abundance of salmon that people today can scarcely imagine, let alone believe, in order to make that bridge a reality. When you look at it from a wider perspective, smart people would have had nothing to do with that project, nor is it anything to be proud of.

White people somehow manage to take pride in the monumental achievements of empire, but largely overlook it’s crimes against humanity and nature. We white people take collective pride in things like the lunar landing, the ability to split the atom, and this new information wonderland we call the internet. We think these things demonstrate the superiority of our way of doing things. And by “our way of doing things” we don’t mean our habit of spending more on military programs than the rest of the world combined, while millions of our own people go hungry and sleep outside in the cold. No, we don’t mean that at all. Why would you think that?

No, we mean something else entirely. White people really believe that it was our relentless pursuit of the truth, that led us to a superior understanding of the world. That scientific understanding of the world gave rise to our great power, and that wisdom now necessitates the inevitable subjugation and assimilation of all other cultures. You see, we’re just smarter, that’s all. (I told you we were crazy)

I don’t just mean that White Supremacists believe this, of course they do, but liberal PC white people believe this too, deep down. White people can’t imagine that it could be any other way, and that’s especially true of “smart” liberal, PC white people. When you press them on it, white people all believe that our modern white dominated society constitutes an evolutionary advance over indigenous tribal cultures, and that our science is the ultimate authority on everything. That’s what white liberals mean when they say “we are evolving as a species.”

Being smart really matters to white people, and by “smart” I don’t mean “make intelligent decisions that lead to a rich and fulfilling life.” Smart means something else entirely to white people. Smart, to white people, means knowing stuff that nobody in their right mind would ever want to know, and knowing how to make money from it. Being smart is so important to us that we find a way to think of everything we do as “smart,” as in the previous example of the colonization of North America.

You see, when you are white, anything you do can be “smart.” Sometimes it’s “smart” to be cowardly. Sometimes it’s “smart” to attack unarmed people without provocation. “Smart” has no morals. If the outcome was favorable, it was a “smart” move. If the outcome was a disaster, we ask ourselves, “What can we learn from this?” and it makes us feel even “smarter.” We have “smart” bombs and “smart” phones and we want everyone and everything to be “smart” like us.

White people consider “smart” our great gift to humanity. White people know that there is a thin line between genius and insanity, but we don’t realize that we already crossed the line with “smart.” That’s why “smart” white people tend to be the craziest. In reality, our real skill, our unparalleled cultural achievement, as well as the key to our insanity, is our salesmanship.

White people are the best salesmen to ever walk the Earth. We can sell anything to anyone, including ourselves. Selling makes us feel smart. Of course, the first part of selling stuff is convincing people that you are smart, and that you know what you are selling. The second part of selling stuff is convincing the buyer that they are smart for buying your product. The more stuff you sell, the smarter people think you are, and the more stuff you buy, the smarter you think you are. Buying and selling stuff makes us feel smart, no matter how stupid the products, and sometimes, the dumber the product, the smarter we feel about buying and selling it.

In order to be a truly great salesman, however, you need to believe in what you sell. If you are black, native or latinex, you don’t have to believe in, approve of, or condone white culture, you just have to survive in it. White people, on the other hand, feel a strong need to believe in our way of doing things, so we constantly sell it to ourselves, each other, and anyone who survives their encounter with us.

White culture’s dark and violent history makes it hard to see our way of life as a good and benevolent thing. It’s what we call a “hard sell.” So, we don’t sell the past. We sell the future. We sell every new technological innovation as the key to an idyllic future utopia, that never materializes, because it was never more than a fantasy, but white people really believe in a future in which technology has solved all of our earthly problems and we’re all “smart”, good-looking, and rich.

By now, most white people have replaced “heaven,” the postmortem paradise of Christian lore, with Star Trek, the high-tech paradise of the future, a future so dazzlingly bright that it justifies, nullifies, and more than compensates for all of the crimes of the past. Secular white liberals believe as deeply in this future, as Christian conservatives believe in heaven, and like Christians, they will do anything to get there.

White people worship technology as our savior, but no matter how many times it fails to deliver, and no matter how many intractable problems technology creates, we still believe that the technology to make it all better is right around the corner. We avoid learning from the past, by focusing on the future. Isn’t that smart? You see, white people really are crazy. Unless you are white, of course, you already knew that.

That’s enough thinking like a white man for today. At the bottom of this essay, you’ll find a piece of music I recorded coincidentally, during the period I was thinking about and writing this essay. It began as a piano-like accompaniment to another piece of music for a string quartet, but eventually grew into something else. I composed this piece on just one instrument, my diminutive circuit-bent Casio Magic Light ML1 keyboard.

Thinking about my condition, our condition, and the condition of the world, reminded me of what I love about circuit-bending, and especially the spectacular, dynamic, cyclical, yet unpredictable ways that this little keyboard malfunctions, glitches-out and loses its mind when you short-circuit its tiny electronic brain in certain ways. I think it kind of parallels what’s happening to us, our society and the world around us. I hope you enjoy it.

“Polarization?”

I hear a lot of talk these days about “polarization.” People complain that “polarizing rhetoric” poisons our democracy by “polarizing” the American electorate. It’s funny that we lay the blame for the complete failure of our government to address global climate change, on political “polarization.” I don’t buy it at all. Yes, something has poisoned our democracy, and it has something to do with our current political environment, but “polarization” is not the right word for it.

 

The word “polarization” implies a two way process. Politically, the word “polarization” implies that both the right and the left have become radicalized. I see no evidence of this. I’ve watched a steamroller of right-wing radicalization crush left-wing radicals, crush unions, and crush the Democratic party for the last four decades. It began in the ‘80s with the unholy union of the Evangelical Christian Movement and the Republican Party, which brought Republican greed, avarice and thirst for power into league with the Christian values of bigotry, sexism and disdain for science and reason. They gave us Reagan.

Reagan broke the unions. Bush amped up the War on Drugs, but Clinton was all about compromise. Instead of standing up for working people and Democratic principles, he sold out the American people with NAFTA and Welfare Reform, which the Republicans could have never done on their own. Then in 2000, the Democrats proved their complete impotence and demonstrated their willingness to settle for nothing when Al Gore conceded the 2000 presidential election. W pushed that radical right-wing steamroller, full throttle for eight years, getting us into two intractable wars. Then he made millions of people homeless, a few of his friends rich, and completely wrecked the economy.

Obama convinced us to bail out the banks, and gave us the Affordable Care Act, which insures maximum profits for insurance companies, doctors and drug manufacturers and makes the most expensive health-care system in the world available to people with pre-existing conditions, for the first time, even though they still can’t afford it. Obamacare was a terrible compromise. It was such a bad compromise, that the Republicans can’t even imagine a plan that they would like better. In fact, Obama sold the American people a health-care plan devised largely by Republicans, and again, like Clinton, did to the American people what they would never let a Republican do.

Now we’re back on that right-wing steamroller, led by the most obnoxious, egotistical, chauvinistic, bigoted asshole they could find, an asshole who inspires and emboldens obnoxious bigoted assholes all across the land, an asshole who takes pride in his privilege, and has no shame or moral principles. Trump is a perfect pig, who leads a regime of pirates that reign over a nation of overworked, underpaid wage slaves who live paycheck to paycheck if they’re lucky. That radical right-wing Republican steamroller has crushed working people for forty years straight, while Democrats have become the party of compromise, collapse and capitulation. That’s not polarization. That’s four decades of hard right turns.

This radical shift to the right was accomplished by a massive and relentless propaganda campaign that began with radical right-wing pundits like Rush Limbaugh, George Will and Morton Downey Jr, not to mention a throng of TV preachers like Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell, and continuing to this day with the likes of Pat Buchanan and Sean Hannity. These guys have spewed radical right-wing bigotry, hate and lies 24-7-365, for 40 fucking years. The radical right owns thousands of TV and radio stations. The left has PBS, NPR and Community Access Television, all of which they must share equally with the right.

In the last 40 years, the radical right has revolutionized and reshaped our society, our institutions and our culture, in their image, and they didn’t do it with civil debate in an open marketplace of ideas. They did it with cunning opportunism and sleazy propaganda full of hatred, bigotry and lies. They spent big money on it, and when that didn’t work they used violence without hesitation. They don’t care about the “quality of the debate.” They want it all, and that includes the contents of your life, and they’ll do anything to get it.

Meanwhile, the Democrats have moved steadily to the right, and they continue to look for ways to sell out the American people. They refuse to stand up for working people. They refuse to stand up for the poor, and they refuse to stand up to the Republicans. When Bernie Sanders excited their base, they cut him off. Bernie Sanders is no radical, but even his brand of moderate socialism is just too far to the left for the Democratic Party leadership. So where is this other pole?

Antifa? Black Lives Matter? Standing Rock? Me too? If you call that “radical,” then mutual self-defense must be a “radical” idea to you. If mutual self-defense seems like a radical idea to you, then you haven’t been exposed to many radically leftist ideas. If you haven’t been exposed to many radically leftist ideas, it’s probably because there aren’t many radical leftists left in the US. There aren’t many radical leftists in the US because Republicans persecute them and Democrats disown them. Democrats are disowning radical leftists when they say things like, “polarization is poisoning our democracy.”

When Democrats complain about “polarization” they aren’t complaining about the fascist propaganda machine on the right, they are complaining that their traditional working class base refuses to settle for their pathetic compromises. They use the term “polarization” to include the “Bernie Brohs” they betrayed, in their condemnation of the Steve Bannons and David Dukes behind Trump. There is no polarization. This is just another right turn by Democrats.

“Polarization” is the word Democrats use to blame their own base for their complete failure. You’ll even hear them say “it’s on both sides.” A lot of rich Democrats would like to see the Democratic Party look even more like the Republican Party, but with legal abortion and equal rights for gay people. They want to screw working people as much as Republicans do, and they’ve learned that sometimes that’s easier to do as a Democrat. Those are the people who complain the most about this alleged “polarization.”

The Republicans empower their radicals, while Democrats disown theirs, and as long as Democrats continue to disown leftist radicals, Democrats have no power and nothing to negotiate because they have no base. If you can’t stand up to defend your life and protect your home without being labeled a “radical,” then, damn it, we need more radicals on the left, and if we want more leftist radicals we’ll need a lot more fiery and inspiring rhetoric.

Book Review: Kind Nepenthe by Mathew V Brockmeyer

I don’t read a lot. Hell, I wouldn’t read my own work if I could avoid it. I mean, why should I? I already know what I think. For some people, however, reading offers an escape from reality, and many people become addicted to it. Whether it’s online articles and newspapers, romance novels and mysteries or historical biographies and serious non-fiction, reading is all about filling your head with other people’s ideas, and if you do it a lot, pretty soon you know more about what other people think than you know about yourself.

Personally, I prefer to think for myself. I enjoy my own thoughts, and I cultivate them, so I tend to have a lot of them, and they consume a lot of my time. If I’m going to think someone else’s thoughts, I expect them to be at least as good as my own, tell me something I didn’t already know, and make me care about it. That’s a tall order, but I got sucked into a new book of horror fiction recently that really made the grade.

Local author Mathew V Brockmeyer has written a terrific new book titled “Kind Nepenthe.” I had to look it up, so I’ll save you the trouble. According to Webster: “nepenthe – a drug supposed by the ancient Greeks to cause forgetfulness of sorrow.”

It’s a ghost story, set somewhere in Humboldt County. Brockmeyer tells us that his story takes place in the far South-East corner of the county, where Humboldt, Mendocino and Trinity counties meet, but the scenery he describes sounds much more like South-West Humboldt County, like maybe Whitethorne or Gopherville, and the store in the story reminds me of the Honeydew General Store.

It’s a fictional world, but the monsters in this book are very real, very SoHum, and they haunt our streets every day. The horrors described in this book, really happen, all too frequently in our community. That’s what makes this book so scary.

The story revolves around a couple of young dreadlocked idealists from San Diego. He’s a young certified permaculture designer. She’s a fiercely protective mother of a five year old girl. Together, the three of them take a job sharecropping on a monster-sized diesel grow, in this remote corner of Humboldt County. They share a dream of living sustainably, off-the-grid, on their own land, and if they can just get through one more cycle, that dream could come true, but the grow is haunted.

 

In pursuit of their dream, the young couple compromise their principles again and again, and each time, it draws them deeper into the abyss. Meanwhile, we meet a cast of local characters, living and dead, who inhabit this abyss and call it home. The couple’s boss, “Coyote,” a Deadhead who drives a Lincoln Navigator and eats at McDonalds. the neighbor, “Diesel,” a mechanic with a drug problem, who’s family used to own all of the land in the area, and “DJ,” Diesel’s teenage son, and father to be, lead a cast of very realistic SoHum characters through a horrific nightmare that consumes them all.

The story sucked me in immediately, and the rich character development kept me engaged until the wrenching and the weeping and the unspeakable horrors take over, and then I just couldn’t stop reading til it was over. Kind Nepenthe is not only engrossing to read, but it reveals a lot about our community, our times, and our condition. The ghosts in this story give the characters bad dreams, and play tricks on them, but the horrors that Mathew V Brockmeyer describe in this book, really happen here in Southern Humboldt, all too often, and the monsters he describes are our neighbors.

I don’t usually like horror fiction. You didn’t see, “scare the shit out of me” in that list of stuff I want a book to do, but this genre proved to be a perfect vehicle for conveying these great character studies. In Kind Nepenthe we see how drugs, greed and the War on Drugs all work together to destroy peoples lives and poison the culture of a community. I think everyone should read Kind Nepenthe by local author, Mathew V Brockmeyer, but especially, everyone in SoHum really must read Kind Nepenthe by Mathew V Brockmeyer.

Make time for this SoHum horror story this Fall! Read it aloud to your trimmers. They’ll love it! You can find Kind Nepenthe at King Range Books in Garberville, Northtown Books in Arcata, and Eureka Books in Eureka, just in time for Halloween.

Better People

Someone who left a comment in LoCO’s “Thunderdome” last week thought I showed poor judgment in who I associate with because I have friends who are “homeless.” I realize that “homeless” is a bigoted term, as is the term “dope yuppies” which I also used to describe other friends of mine. I don’t usually talk about my friends in such pejorative terms, but in the context of the piece, those terms brought their legal, economic, and political status into focus. I used the term “homeless” to emphasize the level of disenfranchisement and prejudice my friends endure.

I didn’t use the term because I think they are bad people, quite the opposite. Most of the good, decent and interesting people in Southern Humboldt lack adequate housing, or are subject to the fickle whims of SoHum’s notorious slumlords. On the other hand, the real monsters in this community all seem to have nice, comfortable, stable homes. Gary Lee Bullock is a good example of the kind of people who live in nice homes, and come from respected SoHum families.

Gary Lee Bullock was high on meth, as usual, and started terrorizing his neighbors, who called the cops. He fought with the cops, who arrested him and took him to jail in Eureka. In Eureka, they charged him, booked him, and released him on his own recognizance. After that, while aimlessly wandering the streets of Eureka in the middle of the night, Bullock broke into the rectory of St. Bernard’s Catholic Church, and then tortured and killed Father Eric Freed, the Priest who lived there, before stealing Father Freed’s car and driving it back to his cozy SoHum home.

Zachary Brown makes a fine example as well, last Fall, Zachary, and a teenage accomplice beat an old man they did not know, almost to death, in the Garberville Town Square, with baseball bats. Zachary then walked back to his comfortable Garberville abode, leaving a trail of his victim’s blood all the way to the front door.

Then there’s Estelle Fennell, who works tirelessly to undermine the rights of poor people with new laws that criminalize poverty, ignores violent crime, as long as it is directed against poor people, and who appointed an unqualified Public Defender to make it even easier to railroad poor people into false convictions. These are the kind of people who have homes in Southern Humboldt. How could the people without homes be any worse?

 

I know that we have a few decent people living indoors here in Southern Humboldt, and a lot more who think they are decent people, and probably would be decent people, if they lived somewhere that encouraged them in that way, but if you are looking for genuinely decent, interesting people, you have a better chance of finding them among the people who pay rent, or can’t find a place to rent, than you do among the landed gentry.

That’s why I advocate for affordable housing and better treatment of the poor. I don’t do it out of charity. I do it because we need better people in SoHum. We need better people in SoHum, not richer people, or greedier people. We need better people, and better people have better things to do than squeeze bloody profits out of political corruption. Better people aren’t afraid of honest work, but they don’t want to work themselves to death either. Better people have better things to do. Nonetheless, better people deserve to be treated like human beings, and they deserve an affordable place to live.

The more we do to make life easier for people at the bottom end of the economic spectrum, the easier we make life for everyone, and the more attractive we make it for better people, and that’s how we build a better community. The problem is: the people at the top of the economic scale don’t see it that way.

Greed is a character flaw. It’s a kind of blindness connected to an inferiority complex. Greed creates a yawning chasm of need that enslaves greedy people who always want more. It comes across as pitifully coarse and shallow. Greed is insatiable, and it makes greedy people insufferable, and that’s a large part of the problem around here.

Greed takes a further toll when greedy bosses inevitably try to squeeze more work out of their employees. Overworked, poorly treated workers become bitter and resentful. Instead of resenting their greedy bosses, who they continue to suck-up to, they resent anyone who doesn’t work as hard as they do. Overwork tends to make people dull, and bitterness and resentment are not exactly attractive.

Finally, greed creates poverty. The needfulness of the greedy drives them to exploit the underclass, mercilessly, and the bitter resentment of overworked workers gets expressed in punitive attitudes and overt hostility towards the poor. Greedy people are too stingy to share, and resentful people like to see other people suffer, Together they they maximize the destructive power of poverty and inequality to destroy the lives of good people. Then they complain about all of the traumatized, and addicted people lying around who have no respect for this community.

You see how greed can really undermine the quality of the people, and the quality of life, in any community, but the black market in marijuana adds a whole new dimension to the sick, death-spiral of greed here in Southern Humboldt. As long as we remain focused on squeezing every last dollar out of each other, things are just going to get worse around here. On the other hand, everything we do to make this community more livable for people who don’t enslave themselves to greed, or work themselves to death, makes this community a better place to live, and tends to attract better people.

Human Rights in SoHum

 

Last Thursday, I attended the Humboldt County Human Rights Commission’s regular monthly meeting on the first Thursday of the month. This “regular” meeting of the HRC proceeded very differently from the “special” meeting they held in Garberville back in February, which I also attended. At that “special” meeting back in February, the HRC conducted no business. Instead, they listened to us for a couple of hours, and scribbled notes in magic marker on a big pad of paper.

This, most recent, meeting was very different. This time, we got the see the HRC in action, and after seeing what they do, I understand why the Humboldt County Board of Supervisors appreciates them so much. The HRC does a lot of work for the Board of Supervisors. In this particular meeting, we watched them hammer out language for a county ordinance modeled after so-called “sanctuary city” laws that other places have passed, or are now considering, in response to recent changes in Federal immigration policy. The volunteers of the HRC drafted the resolution at no charge, so that the Supervisors can get paid to grandstand about it. What a deal!

“Human Rights Commission” is a great sounding name, and if you read their charter you could imagine that they have awesome power, especially when you read the part about them investigating human rights abuses. The charter makes them sound like UN Peacekeepers, but the Humboldt County Human Rights Commission doesn’t work like that. The HRC is made entirely of laypeople, chosen, it seems, because they know how to give good meeting. They have no training in recognizing human rights abuses and no expertise in investigating them, because, as HRC Chairman Jim Glover put it, “That’s not what we do.”

I started going to these meetings because of an ongoing pattern of violence against poor and homeless people in Southern Humboldt. The HRC has received sworn testimony from people who claim they were assaulted, robbed and evicted by vigilantes in Southern Humboldt. These vigilantes handed out eviction notices bearing the Humboldt County Sheriff’s Department logo, and told their victims that they were acting on behalf of the Sheriff. I’ve seen a lot of corroborating evidence for these allegations, and investigative reporter Nicole Norris, aka Shakti, has been covering the story for KMUD.

These evictions were, at the time they occurred, just the latest violent attacks on poor and homeless people in Southern Humboldt, and concerned citizens were very careful to get statements from the victims, and sent those statements to the HRC, because this kind of violence has gotten so out of hand in Southern Humboldt. We demand an investigation into these crimes. We want to know who conducted these raids, and what, if any, legal authority they had to do so. We want to know how the Sheriff is involved, and why they have been so slow to investigate and prosecute these crimes, and we want the perpetrators of these crimes to be held accountable for their actions, and the victims compensated for their losses, because we don’t want vigilante violence in SoHum.

That’s why we went to the Humboldt County Human Rights Commission. We went to the HRC because of these specific human rights violations, and because we want to see them investigated. By now, it has been six months since these events took place, and two months since the special meeting where we complained about them not doing anything about the complaints made four months earlier. In the meantime, the HRC has gotten another dozen or so complaints of human rights abuse in Humboldt County, and another one walked in the door on the night of their most recent meeting. The HRC has investigated none of these complaints, and I doubt they would even know how.

I did get a copy of the HRC’s second draft of a new “proposed resolution” for “Houseless Emergency, Affordable Housing Zones and Sanctuary Parcels” which was at least partially motivated by testimony the HRC heard in Garberville back in February. The commissioners told us that the HRC had made similar recommendations to the Board of Supervisors in the past, which the Board of Supervisors repeatedly rejected. Commissioner Byrd Lochte told us that these recommendations had strained their relationship with the Board of Supervisors, because the Board of Supervisors just doesn’t want to hear it.

 

The way I see it, we have three overlapping problems here in Southern Humboldt:

1. The ongoing housing crisis in Humboldt County, which the Board of Supervisors doesn’t want to hear about, because the real-estate developers and property owners who pull their strings are too busy coming with ecstasy over all of the money they make from it.
2. As a result of the ongoing housing crisis, we have a lot of people living outdoors and in vulnerable situations, by necessity.
3. We have serious allegations against local vigilantes who attacked poor people in their camps, stole and destroyed the belongings of their victims, and evicted them from their camps without due process, using an eviction notice bearing the Humboldt County Sheriff’s Department logo.

 

This vigilante violence remains an ongoing problem in Southern Humboldt with deadly consequences. We demand an investigation into these crimes, and that the perpetrators be held accountable. We also want to know if anyone at the Sheriff’s Department gave these vigilantes permission to hand out eviction notices or in any way endorsed or allowed vigilantes to commit violent crimes against poor people in Southern Humboldt. These specific allegations of human rights abuse must be investigated and prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.

Our Sheriff tells people that if someone breaks into your home, holds you at gunpoint and steals your money, you should call 911, even if you have a ton of weed around, because they want to catch violent criminals, and they’ll overlook the weed. Shouldn’t the Sheriff protect people who camp illegally, out of necessity, from violent vigilantes who raid their camps at least as much as they protect black market growers from the shady characters they associate with?

We need to know that the Humboldt County Sheriff’s Department is not protecting violent criminals within our community, and we need to know that they will uphold the law, and protect the peace by protecting the most vulnerable people in our community. Garberville is crawling with cops these days, and they spend most of their time harassing poor people, but we still don’t know who killed Stephany Gawboy, who set Ron Machado on fire or who’s been leading the vigilante raids into homeless camps in Southern Humboldt. It’s not enough for the Sheriff to be visible; the Sheriff has to arrest and prosecute the violent criminals who prey on the SoHum community, including those who prey on the poor and homeless.

Lots of Soil, Not Many Vegetables

We don’t garden much, but this year we thought we’d grow some purple carrots, garlic chives and green onions in pots around our home. We stopped at Dazey’s garden supply store to look for some vegetable starts, because, as I recall, they used to have a pretty good selection in the Spring. When we got there, the place was mobbed. All around us people were piling sacks and loading and unloading trucks in every available space. We asked about plant starts. They told us they don’t do plants anymore.

They’d happily sell me a trimming machine, bubble bags, and all the soil and amendments I could ask for, but they had no plants at all in their “garden center.” They sent me to Sylvandale’s and Redway Feed, both of which, like Dazey’s, were hopping with customers, but unlike Dazey’s, actually had a few plants. Still, the selection seemed pretty slim at both locations.

Back in high school, I used to work in a garden center. We had more plants than all of the “garden centers” in SoHum put together. I mixed mountains of soil, filled thousands of flats with six-packs and soil and watered millions of tiny seedlings every year, for people who grew flowers and vegetables in their gardens. That’s why they called it a “garden center.” I guess we don’t even pretend to grow anything but pot around here anymore.

A friend of mine, who works at one of our local “garden canters” told me they had an order for 600 pallets of bagged soil (that’s well over 1,000 cubic yards of sterilized potting soil, packed into over 30,000 bags) for one customer. I have no idea how many tractor-trailer loads that comes out to, but the delivery driver is going to know that route well by the time it is all delivered. The garden center I worked at couldn’t move that that much soil in a decade, no matter how they sold it. Here, you could sell all the dirt on the planet to Humboldt County pot growers if you could just find enough trucks and drivers to deliver it.

Who’s got the time for a vegetable garden when you’ve got 30,000 bags of soil to open before you plant, and you pay almost as much for soil as you would for all the vegetables you could grow in it? If it doesn’t make sense to grow vegetables that way, why grow pot that way? If it weren’t for marijuana prohibition, no one would dream of cutting down trees or draining salmon streams, or hauling 600 pallets of sterilized potting soil, half-way across the state and ten miles up a muddy dirt road to a hole in the forest, to grow a common, hardy, agricultural staple. None of this makes any sense, outside of the War on Drugs, but it looks like we’ll see more Drug War madness in 2017 than we ever saw before.

2017 promises to be the biggest soil delivery season in Humboldt County history, and our roads are in the worst shape I’ve ever seen them. Just add the cost of the road damage, both to county roads, and to private roads and adjacent habitat, to the long litany of costs born by the community at large for the War on Drugs. I know you don’t want to think about that. You really don’t want to think about the millions of lives, lost and ruined, even though you know some of them. You don’t want to think about what it has done to you and your kids, and how it affects our community. You don’t want to think about what it says about our society, and what it is doing to the Earth. You don’t want to think about it, because you don’t want to know, and you don’t want to know because if you knew, you couldn’t do it. You wouldn’t do it. You wouldn’t tolerate it.

 

According to 2^nd District Supervisor Estelle Fennell, so far, Humboldt County has only granted 19 cannabis cultivation permits, and they’re holding meetings all over Humboldt County to decide how to spend the tax money they collect from these few growers who paid the fees, made the improvements and submitted to inspections, and still dare to compete with the black market. Meanwhile, the vast majority of Humboldt County’s growers have opted to remain in the shadows to serve the nationwide black market.

 

The County received over 2,000 cannabis permit applications before the deadline last December. Most of those permit applications will never get approved. Growers knew that they could file a little paperwork and pay a fee that would keep the Sheriff out of their hair for a year or two. The black market has always had a cut and run attitude. The fact that over 2,000 people filed applications for permits, doesn’t mean that they intend to comply with state and county regulations, it just means that they intend to cut big this year. Instead of bringing the cannabis industry out of the shadows, Humboldt County’s cannabis permit program seems to have allowed a couple thousand growers to buy cover for all of them for one more big year in 2017. After that, we’ll see what’s left of Humboldt County.

Three Facts That Prove Everything We Know is Wrong

Here I offer three indisputable facts, that everyone already knows, that thoroughly indict our culture and way of life. If we trace the roots of these facts, they lead us, invariably, to the foundation of Civilization, our own culture, a relative newcomer in the pantheon of human cultures. We, civilized humans, like to think of Civilization as some kind of evolutionary leap forward for humanity, as a cultural advance over more “primitive” cultures, and even as an indicator of the superiority of human intelligence over the rest of creation. These three facts should disavow us of these beliefs, once and for all, along with everything else we think we know about how to live in the world.

People outside of our culture, the precious few uncivilized, indigenous people left in the world, see civilization as something else. They see civilization as a heartless killer, an enslaver of people, a poisoner of water and a raper of the land. They see civilization as a terrible plague, and a disease of the mind. It’s about time we recognize the acuity of their assessment. Here are three facts you already know that prove it.

Fact #1, Overpopulation You must have heard about this. For most of human history, the Earth’s population of human beings grew, like that of most other large animals, very slowly, related largely to our expanding range. Then, about 10,000 years ago, coincident with the birth of Civilization, human population exploded at an exponential rate, and our global population began doubling in ever shorter time-spans. The Earth’s population recently doubled from 3 to 6 billion people in less than 40 years. We’ve since surpassed 7 billion on our way to 11 by the middle of the century, barring a catastrophic population collapse of some kind.

Of course, at some point, a catastrophic collapse becomes inevitable. That’s the problem with exponential growth. You can’t have exponential growth, forever, in a finite world. This exponential population growth pattern is a unique characteristic of our culture. No indigenous cultures share this characteristic. In the 10,000+- year history of civilization, this population problem has caused much bloodshed and suffering, and we can expect it to cause much, much, more in the future. Attempts by civilized people to solve this problem, throughout history, have failed miserably, despite all the latest technology.

Today, we think it will be easier to colonize Mars than control our own exploding population. That’s how intractable our population problem has become. Of course, you knew this already, and there’s nothing newsworthy about it, but it says something about how we, as civilized people, do things. Overpopulation stresses social cohesion and brings out the worst in people, but overpopulation takes it’s biggest toll on the environment. Which brings us to…

Fact #2, The Environmental Crisis Even if you live under a rock, you’ve heard of this. Al Gore has a new movie about it. Thanks to the endless “awareness raising” efforts of myriad environmental organizations, pretty much everyone knows that “the environment” needs help. Everyone knows about global warming, even if they deny it. Not everyone knows that we’ve lost half of the world’s biodiversity since 1970, and that species are going extinct at a rate of 100 to 150 every day. Not everyone knows that this is the highest rate of extinction in geological history, since the Cretaceous Extinction Event that wiped out the dinosaurs more than sixty million years ago. You know about the environmental crisis, but the truth about it is even worse than you know.

Not coincidentally, the Environmental Crisis also began about 10,000 years ago, with the advent of the farming lifestyle in the Middle East, considered to be the birth of modern civilization. Early farmers deforested huge swaths of land in the Middle East to grow wheat and barley, which quickly exhausted the fertility of the thin soil. They then abandoned the fallow, depleted land to erosion and continued to slash and burn their way through abundant forest rich with fish and game. That’s how they turned “The Fertile Crescent” into the Sahara Desert.

Now ask yourself, “Why did the people who founded our culture, and gave birth to Civilization, burn millions of acres of wild, abundant forests, unleashing plague after plague of pests, to grow wheat and barley, thousands of years before the invention of bread?” What do you think they did with all of that barley and wheat? They made beer out of it. Beer! Which brings us to the third fact you already know about.

Fact # 3, Alcoholism Alcoholism is a debilitating disease that destroys the life of the alcoholic, and creates dysfunction within the alcoholic’s family. One-hundred alcoholics, and their dysfunctional families create a dysfunctional community, and a hundred beer-soaked generations of dysfunctional community is what we call “The Birth of Civilization.” Alcoholism is so deeply entwined with our culture that Civilization could rightly be called “Alcohol Culture.” If you doubt this, I recommend a Discovery Channel documentary titled “How Beer Saved the World.” In the video, they assume that Civilization is a great thing, but they outline the hard evidence for beer’s role in it pretty well.

Alcoholism requires a lot of work. It’s hard to keep that thirst quenched, and alcohol culture quickly devolved into slavery, as evidenced by great monuments like the Sphinx and the pyramids of Ancient Egypt. The workers who built the pyramids were paid in beer, and people willingly sold themselves into slavery for it.

We’ve all seen what alcoholism does to people. We’ve all seen what alcoholism does to families. We know that alcoholism is an enormous social problem, but try to imagine how much alcoholism has twisted our culture, from the beginning. You knew alcoholism was a serious problem, but, like the environmental crisis, it’s worse than you can imagine.

An alcoholic lifestyle will never be sustainable. Alcoholism creates an imbalance that no technology can overcome, but which requires constant technological innovation to mitigate. Alcohol culture compensates for this imbalance by constantly expanding, and in it’s relentless expansion, Civilization exterminates and enslaves every sustainable indigenous culture it encounters along the way. That’s the “civilized” way of doing things.

Let these three facts sink in. Take some time to think about them. Then, take a look at President Trump. Take a good long look at Donald J Trump, because Civilization is a machine that consumes the lives of billions of people, and wipes out over a hundred species of plant and animal every day, in order to produce Donald J Trump, and people just like him. We’ve sacrificed damn near everything natural, beautiful and alive in the whole world, so we could have the Trump we deserve, before we keel over and die from the overwhelming toxicity of our own sick culture.

We’ve hit rock bottom, folks. Face it. We need to sober up, now, or we are going to die. Forget the Democrats; they can’t be trusted. Forget the Constitution; it never worked. Forget democracy; it gave us Trump. Everything we know is wrong. Our culture, Civilization, is the product of hundreds of generations of alcoholic dysfunction. We need to get away from that alcoholic mindset altogether if we want to survive. It’s not going to be easy, and we’re going to need help, but we have got to do it, and we’ve got to do it now.

 

The remaining traditional indigenous cultures of the world remind us that human beings can live in a sober and respectful way, and that some still do. We’re not flawed creatures. We were born into a sick culture, and traumatized by our alcoholic ancestry. Indigenous people can show us how to live in the world, without enslaving it, and ourselves, to an insatiable thirst for more. But first, we need to admit that we have a problem.

Landlords Threaten Last Bastion of Hippie Culture in SoHum

The more they try to beautify this town, the uglier it gets. The people with money in Garberville think they can cover up injustice with a fancy new facade, and blot out dysfunction with a fresh coat of paint, but the more they try to cover it up and push it away, the more their ugliness sticks out like a sore thumb. We see it in the hideous orange fence that surrounds the Town Square, excluding everyone from our central commons, and now we see more of it in actions taken against Tigerlilly Books.

Tigerlilly Books, also known as Paul’s Bookstore, at the North End of Garberville is the last surviving hippie business in Garberville. Paul Encimer has been a pillar of this community for decades, and few people have done more to serve the community than he has. In fact, that’s why landlords Childs, Hodges, and Sinoway and their Manager Jenny Edwards say they are evicting him.

In the “Two Week Notice” dated 9/23/16, they claim that Paul is in violation of his lease because “the premises are being used to store and distribute goods other than books.” Further, they demand that he “must not store food, clothing, or items/provisions other than those that relate to a bookstore and not to distribute such items from the premises.” Paul, and his recently deceased wife Kathy, have, for decades, helped match donations to needs in this community, through their bookstore,

…and Paul still maintains a community free box in front of his store. If you have extra coats, blankets, tents or sleeping bags, Paul knows who needs them. Apparently, charity is grounds for eviction in Garberville.

By far the biggest distribution of food that happens at Paul’s Bookstore is the, once-a-month, Mountain People’s Food Buying Club. Members of the club order food from a catalog, at wholesale prices, and once a month, a truck unloads a pallet of groceries in front of the bookstore. The whole club helps unload it and sort it all out. This cooperative community grocery project rose out of the ashes of the long defunct Co-op in Ruby Valley, which Paul was also involved with. The Co-op in Ruby Valley was a central hub of back-to-the-land, hippie culture, back in the day, and when the Co-op went under, that culture retreated to Paul’s Bookstore. Paul doesn’t just run a bookstore, he keeps that culture alive.

 

Besides being THE place to pick up a book, meet the cool people in town, and catch up on the latest gossip, Paul’s Bookstore has cultural and historical significance. For a short time, after the rednecks killed the Indians and cut down all of the trees, but before the dope yuppies sucked the salmon streams dry, a bunch of idealistic young people, called “hippies,” inspired by new ideas and psychedelic drugs, moved out here to escape the rat race, and to learn to live differently. Those back-to-the-land hippies gave us alternative energy, owner-built homes, composting toilets, organic farming and California sinsemilla. Paul cultivates the last surviving remnant population of “back-to-the-land” hippies in SoHum, at his bookstore in Garberville.

The achievements born from this brief flowering of a creative counterculture stand in stark contrast to the long, dark history of violence, exploitation, and stupidity that otherwise characterize the history of white settlement in this area.

For this reason alone, we should preserve hippie culture wherever we find it, but we’ve been told, time and time again, that hippie culture is the key to our economic future as well. Will we ever learn? Today, hippie culture has all but vanished from the hills, but it still survives at Paul’s Bookstore in Garberville, at least for now.

Paul’s bookstore keeps hippie culture alive, and reminds us of what community looks like. Not only does Paul keep his shelves stocked with the ideas that shape hippie thinking, he also lives up to the ideals of hippie culture. He has opposed every war since Vietnam. He still has the sea turtle costume he wore in the “Battle for Seattle” WTO Protest, and he has chained himself down inside his congressman’s office. Paul has organized free meals, and run emergency shelters. Paul is a fountain of knowledge about hippie culture, community organizing and non-violent resistance, and he’s all too eager to share that knowledge with anyone who’ll listen.

Today, the dope yuppies circle him like sharks. Drug dealers dominate the local culture now, and they bring an entirely different set of values from those of the hippies. Drug dealers don’t care about community. That’s why they became drug dealers in the first place. Drug dealers only care about making money, and drug dealers like to show off their money.

 

 

Drug dealers care a lot about their “image” because they can’t talk too much about what they do for a living, and because dealing drugs is a pretty low-status job. So, drug dealers use their money to appear wealthy and sophisticated, and to draw attention away from the the very sleazy nature of their business. It’s the same way with strip clubs and pornography. The marque reads: “Entertainment for the Discerning Gentleman,” only because the sign reading “Live Nude Girls” brought in enough money to renovate the club. They didn’t change what they did for a living, they just changed their image.

Now that a new cadre of greedy, image-conscious, dope yuppies have taken to laundering their money through Garberville’s downtown, they’ve declared war on anyone who doesn’t have the look they’re looking for. They’ve made it clear that they don’t want no commie food club or hippie free box in their town, and they sure as hell don’t want anyone to give food, warm clothes, sleeping bags or tents to people who need them. They want to get as far away from the “hippie” look as possible, and Paul just doesn’t fit into their sharp new upscale image of Downtown Garberville.

It’s not enough that Sohum’s drug dealers exterminate charity in their own heart, they insist on sterilizing the whole town. When they say, “Oh, I’m sorry, we don’t have any services for poor people down here in SoHum,” they say it like it’s a strange coincidence. They should say “We’re greedy pricks here in SoHum. We don’t share, and we like to bully people. If we find you asleep, anywhere in this town, we just might beat you to death with a stick, just for kicks. Not only that, if anyone in this town tries to help you, we will crush them. That’s how little we care and how much we want you gone.”

You can’t build real prosperity from greed, injustice and exploitation, and you can’t escape the poverty created by the War on Drugs. The profits of prohibition are cursed. The skeletons hidden behind the new faux-stone facade going up downtown, and the bodies buried under the Garberville Town Square will haunt this town for generations. Paul’s bookstore on the other hand, stands as a shining beacon of hippie culture, in a vast, dark, violent sea of predators and bottom-feeders. As a community, we can’t afford to lose it.

SoHum Needs Rehab

On the radio the other day I heard two women talking about the cannabis industry in Humboldt County, and the challenges they face from new regulations and changing market forces as cannabis becomes legal. They talked about “bad press” as one of those challenges. Apparently, Humboldt County’s cannabis industry has come in for some bad press lately. Specifically, they talked about the recent article in Reveal, by Shoshana Walter, about sex abuse and human trafficking in Southern Humboldt’s marijuana industry.

The women on the radio admitted that it was a fair article, and that the facts contained in it were disturbing, but they talked about it from the perspective of how this article negatively effects the Humboldt Brand. The story itself revolved around several different woman who had been lured back to remote SoHum cannabis farms with the promise of work, and then held against their will and sexually abused. Most of the women profiled, never went to the police, so the perpetrators remain at large, in our community, presumably. I can see where people might not want to buy pot grown by rapists, if they have a choice, and I can see where this kind of bad press might hurt the Humboldt brand, but that’s not what shocked me about this conversation.

What shocked me, was what the women were not talking about. They were not talking about the very serious problem described in the article. They were not talking about rape culture in our community. They were not talking about how we can prevent rape in our community. Even as harvest season draws neigh, they were not talking about setting up an emergency phone line, or starting a campaign to raise awareness, and discourage this horrendous behavior by local landowners perpetrated against transients. No, they were talking about how “bad press” tarnishes their brand.

A couple of weeks ago another local teenager beat another old man, nearly to death, in the Town Square in Garberville. Besides rape and human trafficking, local teenagers beating old men with baseball bats is another chronic problem around here. Admittedly, it’s not as sexy as the human trafficking story, but it still has the potential to bring bad press, and it certainly happens often enough. We laugh off the graffiti-covered, vandalized, and burned-out vehicles on our county roads, but someone might make a picture book called “The Wreckage of Humboldt County.” What would that do for your brand?

We have a problem. It’s not a matter of branding. It’s about what the War on Drugs has done to us, and what we have become. We have a problem. We have a problem that money can’t solve. It’s a cultural problem that drags down our quality of life, drives social dysfunction, and leads to most of our “bad press.” If we could face facts and work together, we could beat this problem, but first we need to admit that we have a problem.

We don’t have an image problem. This problem effects us much more than it effects how other people see us. The rapes and the murders and the beatings happen in our community, and they involve our people. Who cares what Reveal readers think of it? We create a culture of violence and coercion here in our community, because our community has been shaped by the violence and coercion of the War on Drugs.

We all feel economic pressure. Some of us buckle under that pressure, give up and turn to drugs. Most of us work entirely too much, and pay taxes in hopes of enjoying the few hours we have to enjoy our lives in a decent civilized society. Meanwhile, some of us decide to cheat the system. For whatever reason, we overlook the harm it causes. We tell ourselves that it’s OK and that everyone does it, but internally, it corrupts us.

Profiting from prohibition is like drinking the blood of the community. Before long, you divide the community into two groups of people, “our people,” the people you love and nourish with your illegal loot, and “those people,” the ones who buy your product, do your work, take your order and stock your grocery shelves, whose blood you drink to survive. Here, we try to build a community from people who cheat the community for a living, and we wonder why we find it so draining.

At one time, the cheaters had plenty of money. They were generous and eager for any opportunity to improve their image, which lead to a whole wave of non-profit organizations who sprang up to accommodate them. These groups survive by getting dope yuppies drunk and telling them how great they are for supporting this work. In this way, the community was able to suck back some of their own blood. It worked for a while, but it’s not exactly what you would call, “functional.”

Today, legalization isn’t just about converting illegal enterprises into legal enterprises. It is about people who have cowered in the shadows their whole lives learning to stand up and become pillars of the community. It’s about people with few skills and wildly unrealistic expectations experiencing economic pressure they’ve never had to deal with before. It’s about facing that economic pressure, head-on, without cheating, and learning to do something else for a living. In other words, it’s about rehabilitation. It’s about time we faced the fact that we need it.

The War on Drugs attracts the worst people, and it brings out the worst in people. The cruel hand of the War on Drugs has twisted and warped our community for more than 40 years, and for all that time we’ve hidden it behind a veil of secrecy. As we move towards legalization, and the gnarled, twisted beast we’ve become, steps into the light of day for the first time, the truth about what we have become could easily make a bigger impact on Humboldt County’s reputation than the quality of our weed.

We’ve got two or three generations of dysfunction to overcome. Forty years of suspicion, secrecy and lies. Forty years of unrealistic expectations. Forty years of “us vs them” thinking. Forty years of corruption and parasitism. Forty years of gambling with your life. Forty years of stress. Forty years of CAMP, and ripoffs, and rats and mites and mold and mildew. Forty years of war.

Forget about trying to compete in the new legal cannabis industry. We’ve got rapes and murders and senseless hate-crimes going on, right here, all the time. We’ve got real problems, and our dysfunction presents a much bigger challenge to our future than competition in the cannabis industry. We have a lot of healing to do, and we need to go through a process of truth and reconciliation. Until we come to terms with what we have done, and what has been done to us, this war will never be over for us.

 

We need to tell the truth about what happened to us, and how it came to this. We need to reconnect with our own humanity and relearn empathy. We need to learn to live honestly and stand on our own two feet, before we try to step into a bigger pair of shoes, and we need to learn to live within our own means, without the overblown expectations of a dope yuppie. Those things will make our community stronger in the long run, which will make SoHum a better place to live, which makes us all richer, regardless of how much money we have.

We can’t control the marijuana industry, and we can’t prevent legalization, but we can change our culture. We can change our habits and build inclusive community values. We can refuse to tolerate rape in this community. We can offer a safe place, and an emergency phone line for women in trouble, and we can stop whipping our young men into hateful violent frenzies. We have a lot of work to do here in Southern Humboldt, but it’s not about building the Humboldt brand, it’s about rehabilitating our community, and it’s about time we got to work on that.

SoHum Has Created a Monster

The Humboldt County Board of Supervisors just passed a new, unnecessary, unconstitutional and unkind ordinance to limit free speech and criminalize poverty called the “aggressive solicitation ordinance.” They might as well have passed a dress code too, for all the good it will do. This is just the latest attempt to sweep Humboldt’s poor and homeless under the rug, but the poor and homeless will not go away because poverty is systemic in our local economy.

Because of prohibition, the marijuana industry breeds poverty, and the real-estate driven economy breeds homelessness. The people who complain the most about the poor and the homeless are the people doing the most to create the poverty and homelessness in our community. Rather than address our housing crisis, low wages, or the out-of-control organized crime problem, the Board of Supervisors decided to punish the victims, the honest, hard-working, low-wage workers who actually generate most of the wealth in Humboldt County.

This ordinance has nothing whatsoever to do with “public safety” and everything to do with greedy real-estate bloodsuckers, dope yuppies, business owners and mobsters who are making a killing right now off of the “green-rush.” The same people who sell out our forests and rivers to the highest bidders, create poverty and homelessness in our human communities too, but they hate to see it in public, so they send cops to harass the poor and create new laws that criminalize poverty, like this new ordinance.

Greed is even uglier than poverty. Greed poisons the soul and turns decent people into degenerate monsters of consumption. I don’t know if greed makes people stupid or if stupidity makes people greedy, but stupidity and greed always go together, and together, they make ugly. That ugliness is palpable in SoHum.

Even a newcomer can feel it. I noticed it the first time I came to Garberville almost two decades ago and it has only gotten worse since. The whole town loudly exudes ugly, stupid, crass, greed. You can practically see it in people’s faces and you hear it almost every time they open their mouths. That’s the kind of ugliness that makes Southern Humboldt so repulsive to decent people who might consider moving here, and that’s the kind of ugliness that undermines the quality of life for the people who do live here.

Real-estate offices don’t attract tourists. Increasingly, real-estate offices provide no service at all to ordinary citizens, who were long ago priced out of the housing market. The greedy leeches lurking within those offices only value the natural beauty of this area and the uniqueness of this community to the degree to which they can turn it into money that they can stuff into their own pockets. They are the ones inviting every drug-dealing greed-bag in America to come to Humboldt County to destroy our forests and choke out the last wild salmon. They are the ones making Humboldt County unaffordable to anyone but drug-dealers and they are the ones making the people of Humboldt County poor and homeless while they make themselves filthy rich.

Who needs them? We should have learned our lesson after the mortgage fraud collapsed the housing market. They are still the same greedy, lying, cheating bastards that wrecked the economy and made everybody homeless to begin with. Haven’t we had enough of their shit?

Drug-dealers aren’t any better. If anything, drug-dealers are even greedier, dumber, and even more dishonest than real-estate leeches, and there’s a lot of crossover around here. Most of our real-estate leeches deal drugs too, and a lot of our drug dealers get into real-estate as a way to launder their drug money. Between the two of them, they’ve turned SoHum into a vortex for the greediest and the slimiest. They’ve created the perfect environment for hard-drug pushers, prostitution, human trafficking and child pornography among other things, which they welcome with open arms, so long as it has enough money.

From the depths of this pit of depravity, and fueled by the filthy black market cash that fills it, Estelle Fennell rises like Godzilla to crush the poor, honest, working citizens of Humboldt County and all who would oppose her.

 

Stomp, new subsidies for real-estate developers.

Stomp, new subsidies for property owners.

Stomp, those subsidies now get paid by Humboldt County’s poor and homeless.

Stomp, this new ordinance makes it illegal to ask a stranger for help and effectively blocks grassroots organizers from building a campaign against her.

Stomp! What’s next?

A very real monster is destroying our forests and our communities, and that monster passed this ordinance to cover it’s tracks, and dispose of the bodies of it’s victims. We have to stop it, before it’s too late!