MCT: Tuesday, June 18, 2019

• Sunny Hot
• Bridge Event
• ROTR Cancelled
• Noyo Dusk
• Rainbow Ridge
• Village Training
• Fuel Reduction
• Selective Reporting
• Comptche Fundraiser
• Herbal Tea-Party
• Disturbed Person
• Mow Day
• Boonfire Show
• Vet Visits
• Dimmick Reopening
• Sattui Complaint
• Yesterday's Catch
• Mars Rescue
• Official Truths
• Artist Advice
• Big Farms
• Corporate Tyranny
• Meeting Cancelled
• Improv Workshop
• Flea Market
• Festivals
• Measles Encephalitis
• Corporal Roberts
• Thoughts & Prayers
• Comments
• Oligarch 15

HOT AND SUNNY weather will continue into mid week across inland northwest California, before an upper level trough brings somewhat cooler temperatures for Thursday and Friday. Coastal areas will see areas of morning clouds with afternoon sunshine accompanied by a brisk northerly breeze. (National Weather Service)

ON SUNDAY, JUNE 9 at least 100 community members including 5th District County Supervisor Ted Williams, gathered to celebrate the 75th anniversary of the historic Albion River Bridge at the Albion River Inn.

We were entertained by musicians Karl Schoen, Martha Smith, Mark Gauche and Miguel Elac. We saw short films about the Albion River Bridge and the headlands by local filmers Laurie York, Carmen Goodyear & Jim Heid.

Local architect John Johansen’s spoke about the designation of the historic bridge and cited engineers specializing in timber structures who found the Albion River Bridge to be “safe for continued use” and “in remarkably good condition.”

Coastal land use consultant Norbert Dall addressed the need for the community to speak up for the bridge’s preservation, and continued repair and maintenance. He and his partner Stevie Dall, also answered questions from the floor.

Local baker Sharon Garner treated the gathering to her carrot birthday cake with cream cheese frosting and Albion River Inn chef Stephen Smith served light refreshments. Julie Apostolu of Julie’s Trips and Tours provided the shuttle service.

Raffle ticket prizes and a group photo with the beloved bridge in the background culminated the memorable event.

The Albion Bridge Stewards thank everyone for their continued support and encourage anyone who would like to join us to do so at albionbridgestewards@mcn.org

https://albioncab.wordpress.com

https://www.facebook.com/pg/savethealbionbridge

REGGAE ON RIVER CANCELLED, WORLD NOT SHOCKED.

kymkemp.com/2019/06/17/high-times-announces-reggae-on-the-river-is-cancelled/

SUNSET AND FULL MOON RISE over Noyo, with Jupiter (photos by Dick Whetstone).

ACTIVISTS OUT AT RAINBOW RIDGE, Attempting to Stop Humboldt Redwood From Logging Doug Fir on a 560-Acre Chunk of Its Land in the Mattole Watershed

by Hank Sims

For the last couple of years, a group of local activists have been attempting to prevent the Humboldt Redwood Company from carrying out logging operations on Rainbow Ridge, in the Mattole watershed. They’ve written letters of protest to state regulators and people associated with the Forest Stewardship Council, a third-party nonprofit organization that certifies the company as a producer of “sustainable” or “eco-friendly” lumber. Last summer they took to direct action.

But they’ve failed to persuade the company to cancel their harvest plans, or to persuade regulators to deny the plans. Earlier this year, Calfire approved the company’s plans to log about 380 acres of a 560-acre chunk of Rainbow Ridge, on the company’s property. So in the last week, as the company prepares to cut, they’ve again taken to direct action. A week ago, four elderly Petrolia-area members of the Lost Coast League were arrested at the gates to the logging operation, and this morning comes word that the Sheriff’s Office is arresting more people today.

“HCSO deputies are assisting with protests again this morning at the Humboldt Redwood Company. This morning company employees arrived to approx. 15 protesters, one of which was located on a 24 ft ladder attached to the property gate (gate is located on private property). Resources from HC Public Works are being utilized to safely lower the ladder and take the protester into custody on charges of trespassing. Three arrests have been made as of 8 am for charges of trespassing, resisting arrest and impeding traffic.”

The area to be logged consists of Douglas fir and hardwood. Second-growth Doug fir will be harvested; some tan oak will be removed using herbicide (aka “hack-and-squirt“). There are some old-growth Doug fir trees within the limits of the proposed timber harvest area, but as per company policy they will not be logged. Calfire’s timber harvest division approved the plan earlier this year.

While people on the ground continue to try to stymie the company’s access to the site, members of the Lost Coast League have been applying pressure via the company’s Forest Stewardship Council’s “ecofriendly” certification, which must be renewed annually. Late last year an auditor toured the Rainbow Ridge site with Lost Coast League members and found many of their complaints to be unfounded — the area has, in fact, been logged previously, and it wasn’t what the FSC would consider an “old-growth forest.”

However, the auditor did say that the company should update its policy on herbicide usage and to clarify how it goes about determining which of its lands have “high conservation value.” (Read the auditor’s report of his investigation at this link.) The company says it has done those things and has submitted them to the auditor.

The Lost Coast League recently issued a press release about the most recent round of direct action, and its objections to logging at the Rainbow Ridge site; the company response can be found here.

Meanwhile, here’s the Humboldt County Sheriff’s Office on today’s arrests:

“On June 17, 2019, at about 3:42 a.m., Humboldt County Sheriff’s deputies were dispatched to Monument Road, in the county’s jurisdiction of Rio Dell, for the report of protesters blocking an access gate to Humboldt Redwood Company property.

When deputies arrived on scene, they located about 15 protesters, in addition to an approximately 24-foot ladder standing in front of the gate, tethered to nearby trees with a subject at the top.

Three protesters, Michael John Gammariello, 32, Brittany Krystal Soohoo, 25, of Los Angeles, and Georgia Hanrahan Doremus, 32, of Arcata, were taken into custody and booked into the Humboldt County Correctional Facility on charges of trespassing, resisting arrest and impeding traffic.

Humboldt County Public Works responded and deployed a boom truck to assist deputies in lowering the ladder in front of the gate. The protester on the ladder, Isabel Xochitl Osheroff, 24, of Berkeley, CA, was safely taken into custody and booked into the Humboldt County Correctional Facility on charges of trespassing.

The Humboldt County Sheriff’s Office would like to remind the public to obey all laws when protesting a cause. Sheriff’s deputies will continue to respond as needed to Monument Road if further violations of state law occur.”

(Courtesy, LostCoastOutpost.com)

ANDERSON VALLEY VILLAGE has two volunteer trainings coming up – learn more about the Anderson Valley Village and how you can get involved. Volunteers are welcome to provide all manner of help, from basic chores, transportation and errands to check-in calls and visits to skilled services. It’s up to you how, and how often, to volunteer. Forms are available at the training, Senior Center, Health Center and/or our website https://www.andersonvalleyvillage.org/. Please RSVP if you can attend one of the following trainings:

Cell: 707-684-9829, Email: andersonvalleyvillage@gmail.com

Hope to see you there - they are both going to be at Lauren’s Restaurant in Boonville:

Sunday June 23rd 10 to 11 am

And

Sunday July 14th 3 to 4 pm (right before our monthly gathering)

https://www.andersonvalleyvillage.org/

THE NEW CALIFORNIA PROPERTY OWNER PRIORITY Is Conducting Pre-Emptive Strikes Against Wildfires thru Fuel Load Reduction in the Urban — Wildlands Interface; thinning and chipping trees to enhance soils to grow food and process biomass to provide energy.

http://firesafefortbraggsouth.com

JOHN CHIV is a HumCo blogger, and one of only a few journalists on the Northcoast who can't be bought off or otherwise manipulated into silence:

"First Glenn Goldan tries to bribe me to take down a post, then he has his attorney contact me. I was the only one to report on Eureka Natural Foods owner Rick Littlefield's 5th DUI for which he got SWAP and probation, on Kathleen Bryson's DUI, the only one to report on Glenn Goldan's arrest for alleged corporal injury to spouse and cohabitant. Goldan's post was on May 17. On May 31, he tried to bribe me to take the post down via a third party. I declined and I have saved those posts. Didn't write about it then.

Today, I received a call and then a text from his attorney.

To me, Glenn Goldan is no different than anyone else. Had he approached this differently, I may have just let it go after the initial post about the arrest.

This is what happens when other local media look the other way and do selective reporting. Instead of suporting and standing up for freedom of press for everyone, they allow such intimidation by their silence. By selective reporting, they allow those with money and power to get a pass.

THE COMPTCHE Father’s Day Fire Department fund raiser as described by Katy Tahja: “Take 1,400 pounds of chicken, hundreds of pounds of beans, potatoes and salad making, throw in 120 loaves of bread and 200 volunteers and you can pull off a great fundraising dinner for over 1,000 folks. Oh, and don't forget 200 homemade pies and Mother Nature cooperating with lovely weather…Hubby and I have done this for 42 consecutive years on Father's Day…”

ON-LINE COMMENT: “Notice to downtown Boonville businesses and residents. There is an obviously very, very mentally disturbed young man in downtown Boonville. He is wearing a red Angels shirt and black ball cap. He made his way into town Friday from the Ukiah Walmart and was apparently dropped off in front of Pic n Pay/Lizbby's by CHP earlier today. Not great for downtown business as he is scaring tourists. He obviously has no place to go, but if there are any suggestions on helping him move along to a better location in a humanitarian manner, I'm all ears.”

THE TRANSIENT mentally ill should be called in to the Sheriff’s Department. They respond quickly. A deputy will take the disturbed (and disturbing) person into custody and drive him or her to either the emergency room in Ukiah or Fort Bragg for an evaluation. If the patient is determined to be a danger to himself or others he will have to be held in the Mendocino County Jail until he regains possession of himself. The County Jail is not a mental health facility but it is humanely managed and a much less dangerous place for a disturbed person than permitting that person to simply wander around where he may be harmed by unsympathetic parties.

MONDAY, JUNE 17TH, is move day for the homeless camp on Airport Boulevard, Ukiah. Few, if any of the 70 or so campers have a place to re-locate to. But since Ukiah says it only needs the squatters outta there to mow the grass for fire protection, once the boulevard is fire-protected what's to prevent the homeless from re-occupying the site which, for all practical purposes, is the logical one for the Ukiah Valley since it can, with a few basic amenities, be humanely managed.

BOONFIRE! Saturday, June 29 at 9 p.m. BoonFire will be playing at La Cantina! No cover! 21+ only. BTW, Dan Richert has done a terrific job in reviving the bar at La Cantina, a prefect venue for a beer and a fine Mexican meal only a few steps from the plank, by far the most beautiful bar in Mendocino County.

MENDOCINO ANIMAL HOSPITAL at Anderson Valley Farm Supply. Dr. Burns from Mendocino Animal Hospital will be at the Anderson Valley Farm Supply seeing patients twice in July.

Thursday, July 11th AND

Thursday, July 25th

She's there between 2:00 and 4:00 pm. People can always check our Facebook page in the events section for more information - it's always posted when we're going to be there.

Michelle Fetzer, Mendocino Animal Hospital.

DIMMICK STATE PARK is open again after an 8-year hiatus. Also known as Navarro Redwoods State Park, Dimmick's 12 acres of redwoods is located on the banks of the Navarro around mile marker 8 just off Highway 128, and is named after Paul Dimmick, a long ago mill superintendent for the Albion Lumber Company.

I ALWAYS ASSOCIATE the park with what used to be called Iron Bridge, a swimming hole a little farther west and not associated with Dimmick. And I make both associations because of a weird incident reported to me years ago by an Elk woman. She said she and several other young mothers were at the swimming hole with their children when a naked man with an eye-slitted paper bag over his head charged out of the bushes and sprinted past them before disappearing back into the brush and on out to his vehicle on 128. The moms chased the sprinting perv out to the road and were able to get his license plate number. He turned out to be a guy from Fort Bragg who was duly slapped on the wrist by Ten Miles' notoriously indulgent court (Judge Heeb?) and…. probably did it again.

THE REMOVAL of a stand of trees on a hill northeast of Boonville appears to be the handiwork of V. Sattui winery, owned by the wealthy Napa grape grower Darryl ‘Dario’ Sattui. Sattui bought out the Dennison vineyard, and has cut down the privacy screen of eucalyptus that shielded the house overlooking the existing winery on the property. Sattui owns several other vineyard properties in Anderson Valley; he was one of the targets of Mark Scaramella’s wind machine noise-nuisance lawsuit a few years ago. The Fairfax native makes his headquarters in the Napa Valley at “Castello de Amarosa.”

A COMPLAINT HAS BEEN FILED with the Planning Department regarding Sattui’s steep slope stripping, which is occurring in the Mendo context that prohibits marijuana growers from cutting down trees to grow pot plants.

CATCH OF THE DAY, JUNE 17, 2019

BRIAN CARDOZA, Crescent Hills/Ukiah. DUI, misdemeanor hit&run.

JOSHUA CATE, Willits. Disorderly conduct-alcohol.

SCOTT FABER, Ukiah. Under influence, probation revocation. (Frequent flyer.)

IAN FORMAN, Fort Bragg. Criminal threats, probation revocation.

JERROD FRENCH, Laytonville. Assault with deadly weapon not a gun, battery with serious injury, criminal threats.

GUADALUPE GARCIA, Ukiah. Failure to appear.

BRANDI KOWALSKI, Guerneville/Ukiah. DUI.

CHRISTOPHER RASCHKE, Ukiah. DUI.

ALFREDO RODRIGUEZ, Ukiah. Protective order violation, probation revocation.

REBECCA RULKA, Ukiah. Petty theft with priors, probation revocation.

CHARLES SCHLAPKOHL, Ukiah. Failure to appear, probation revocation.

DAVID SIMMONS, Nice/Redwood Valley. DUI.

MICHAEL STANLEY, Albion. Disorderly conduct-alcohol, probation revocation.

LEODES VANBUREN, Ukiah. Disorderly conduct-alcohol, trespassing/refusing to leave.

CLAUD WALKER, Willits. First degree burglary, parole violation, resisting.

RAVEN YOUNG, Covelo. Hit&run with property damage.

ON LINE COMMENT OF THE DAY

You got it. Excessive belief in gravity will hinder belief in Mars. We are going to Mars my bitches! People have to know that if things get bad enough we will all be able to just head on down to our local airports and board Musk specials to the red planet. Kardashians and Influencers will travel first class of course. The boon to interplanetary trade will both save the economy here on earth and make Mars great again too so obviously any disagreement from this point of view is an act of terrorism. Excessive belief in gravity must be prevented or the public will panic.

THE TRUTH VS. YOUR TRUTH

by James Kunstler

Who knew that these mid-cycle days of the long emergency (i.e. the collapse of techno-industrial economies) would feature the willful abandonment of reason by the thinking class of Western Civ, and America extra-specially? Reminder: the basic catalyst for collapse is over-investments in complexity with diminishing returns. The rest follows from there.

Another name for diminishing returns is blowback. The Internet is certainly the most complex assembly of human thought in human history and it is blowing back ferociously on humanity in ways that are far from obvious. It has set in motion countless recursive feedback loops of misinformation, disinformation, and ideas that are simply bad in the sense that they don’t comport with reality. Hence, the new elastic meaning of the concept known as “truth.”

Capital T Truth used to be mankind’s conduit to reality. To even state it that way now may invite censure for sexism, since the word “man” has lately been burdened with toxic overtones; while the concept of sexism itself is tinged with the unreal notion that the hard-wired tensions between men and women should not be allowed to exist and must be abolished. That’s how hopelessly complex it’s getting. The divorce between truth and reality is nearly complete now that everybody has his/her/zhe’s own truth, and the facts are just ornaments subject to rearrangement within anyone’s own story.

The stupendous failures of authority driving America to political collapse are one manifestation of these dynamics, and one that might concern the thinking class, if it wasn’t so busy mind-fucking itself and everybody else. For instance, that most recent example of non-inclusive “truth” known as the Mueller Report. That hallowed document states unequivocally that Russia hacked the Democratic National Committee’s email server in 2016.

In reality, there is no evidence of that being true. Neither the FBI nor Robert Mueller and his own investigators made any attempt to conduct a forensic examination of the DNC’s servers. They left the job to an outfit called Crowdstrike, a DNC contractor, and Crowdstrike’s “conclusions” were conveyed to the FBI and Mr. Mueller in a half-assed memo from the DNC’s lawyers. Anybody notice the embedded interests there? No one connected with these authorities ever even deigned to interview Julian Assange, either, and he was the one person on earth who might know for sure how those purloined emails came to Wikileaks.

Another whopper staring the credulous thinking class in the face is the obvious fact that Mrs. Clinton’s campaign colluded with Russians. Mr. Mueller left out of his report the fact that two Russians present in the infamous Trump Tower Meeting of 2016, Natalia Veselnitskaya and Rinat Akhmetshin, were in the service of Glenn Simpson’s Fusion GPS “oppo research” company, hired by the Clinton Campaign and progenitor of RussiaGate, in particular the janky documents known as the “Steele Dossier.” Would you consider that a material omission? I would. How is it that the news media shows no interest in these matters? I suppose because it is not their truth.

Mrs. Clinton’s additional dealings with Russians — and the choo-choo train of cash money they rode in with — reached a high tide during her tenure at the State Department, when her foundation hauled in more than $150-million from Russian business interests alone (that is, from oligarchs), not to mention the mere half-million in walking-around-money that husband Bill received for giving a single speech to a Russian banking group. How is it that a Secretary of State trafficked in so much grifted loot without raising any red flags for institutional auditors?

America’s relationship with authority is in grievous disrepair with Robert Mueller as Exhibit-A — a would-be Moses-like figure, only with feet of clay and a head rotting like the proverbial fish of institutional corruption. He announced in his May 29 “news conference” — in which he refused to entertain questions — that he preferred not to testify in any further inquiries about his Special Counsel investigation. What a cheeky fellow! It was, perhaps, a message to Reps. Nadler, Schiff, and comrades on the various congressional committees to (hint hint) not even bother calling him. But Mr. Mueller was, after all, a mere employee of the US Department of Justice, not a herald of God Almighty. I rather imagine that the Attorney General, Mr. Barr, has a few additional questions he would like to ask his “old friend.” Will Mr. Mueller, this Greta Garbo of jurisprudence, coyly demur? And on what basis, exactly? I don’t think he can get away with it.

The complexities of RussiaGate make all previous government scandals look as simple as Pin the Tail on the Donkey. The Internet will prove to be both its doing and its undoing. The much abused and perverted official “truths” of the matter were amplified by the Internet. And, of course, these “truths” were enlisted in service of Mrs. Clinton and the rogue bureaucracy looking to defend her (and themselves) at all costs. The cost turns out to be the dismemberment of thinking itself in America. It is now taken for granted that anyone who persists in thinking for him/her/zheself will be tossed out of the Internet’s large “social media” arenas in Mark Zuckerberg’s and Jack Dorsey’s quest to purify history.

They will not succeed. But they have certainly succeeded in needlessly antagonizing Russia, shoving foreign policy debate into sequestered game rooms that are at once halls-of-mirrors and echo chambers, and making the world a much more dangerous place. There is also a pretty fair percentage chance that America is too far gone intellectually to sort all this out.

(Support Kunstler’s writing by visiting his Patreon Page.)

"I'm going to be an artist."

"Do you have any advice for other artists?"

"Don't press down too hard with your crayons."

HOW SANTA BARBARA COUNTY OPENED DOORS TO THE WORLD’S LARGEST POT FARMS

With no size limits, cannabis operations spread like weeds

latimes.com/local/california/la-me-santa-barbara-pot-grows-20190612-htmlstory.html

THE COMING SHOW TRIAL OF JULIAN ASSANGE

"The publication of classified documents is not a crime in the United States, but if Assange is extradited and convicted it will become one. Assange is not an American citizen. WikiLeaks, which he founded and publishes, is not a U.S.-based publication. The message the U.S. government is sending is clear: No matter who or where you are, if you expose the inner workings of empire you will be hunted down, kidnapped and brought to the United States to be tried as a spy. The extradition and trial of Assange will mean the end of public investigations by the press into the crimes of the ruling elites. It will cement into place a frightening corporate tyranny." - Chris Hedges

truthdig.com/articles/the-coming-show-trial-of-julian-assange/

DELAY, STALL, OBFUSCATE, CONFUSE

The Mental Health Treatment Act Citizen's Oversight Committee meeting scheduled for June 26, 2019, has been cancelled.

HIT & RUN THEATER presents its workshop show on Wednesday night, June 19 at 7pm at the Community Center of Mendocino. 998 School St., Mendocino! Join Hit & Run Theater players and their students--Janet Atherton, Nicole Traber. Mindy Ballentine, Stevie Jean, Windflower for a fun evening. See you there!

Doug Nunn

17TH ANNUAL CASPAR FLEA MARKET THIS SUNDAY

Sunday June 23rd will be a busy day at the Caspar Community Center as the 17th Annual Flea Market fund raiser will pop up on the grounds outside the community center building while the ongoing monthly 4th Sunday Breakfast will happen inside. The flea market will be open from 9am to 2pm, the breakfast will be served by busy volunteers from 9 to 11:00am. The list of items on sale at the market include, antiques & collectibles, much household stuff, books, tools, bicycles, craft supplies, imports, jewelry, purses, plant starts, leather work, music CD's, garden mosaics, beadwork, handmade soap, locally made kimchi, record albums, imported rugs, thing-a-ma-jigs and much more. Highlights of the breakfast menu are Open faced fried egg BLT, Summer squash frittata & Southwest tofu scramble. Spaces for vendors are still available.

For information, emailjima@mcn.org or call 964-4997. Complete Breakfast menu at www.casparcommons.org

MEASLES: A DANGEROUS ILLNESS

by Roald Dahl (1986)

Olivia, my eldest daughter, caught measles when she was seven years old. As the illness took its usual course I can remember reading to her often in bed and not feeling particularly alarmed about it. Then one morning, when she was well on the road to recovery, I was sitting on her bed showing her how to fashion little animals out of colored pipe-cleaners, and when it came to her turn to make one herself, I noticed that her fingers and her mind were not working together and she couldn't do anything.

“Are you feeling all right?” I asked her.

“I feel all sleepy,” she said.

In an hour, she was unconscious. In twelve hours she was dead.

The measles had turned into a terrible thing called measles encephalitis and there was nothing the doctors could do to save her. That was 24 years ago in 1962, but even now, if a child with measles happens to develop the same deadly reaction from measles as Olivia did, there would still be nothing the doctors could do to help her.

On the other hand, there is today something that parents can do to make sure that this sort of tragedy does not happen to a child of theirs. They can insist that their child is immunised against measles. I was unable to do that for Olivia in 1962 because in those days a reliable measles vaccine had not been discovered. Today a good and safe vaccine is available to every family and all you have to do is to ask your doctor to administer it.

It is not yet generally accepted that measles can be a dangerous illness. Believe me, it is. In my opinion parents who now refuse to have their children immunized are putting the lives of those children at risk. In America, where measles immunization is compulsory, measles like smallpox, has been virtually wiped out.

Here in Britain, because so many parents refuse, either out of obstinacy or ignorance or fear, to allow their children to be immunized, we still have a hundred thousand cases of measles every year. Out of those, more than 10,000 will suffer side effects of one kind or another. At least 10,000 will develop ear or chest infections. About 20 will die.

LET THAT SINK IN.

Every year around 20 children will die in Britain from measles.

So what about the risks that your children will run from being immunized?

They are almost non-existent. Listen to this. In a district of around 300,000 people, there will be only one child every 250 years who will develop serious side effects from measles immunisation! That is about a million to one chance. I should think there would be more chance of your child choking to death on a chocolate bar than of becoming seriously ill from a measles immunisation.

So what on earth are you worrying about? It really is almost a crime to allow your child to go unimmunized.

The ideal time to have it done is at 13 months, but it is never too late. All school-children who have not yet had a measles immunization should beg their parents to arrange for them to have one as soon as possible.

Incidentally, I dedicated two of my books to Olivia, the first was James and the Giant Peach. That was when she was still alive. The second was The BFG, dedicated to her memory after she had died from measles. You will see her name at the beginning of each of these books. And I know how happy she would be if only she could know that her death had helped to save a good deal of illness and death among other children.

THE LONG AND THE SHORT OF IT

Corporal Bob Roberts was overseeing the surrender of dozens of enemy soldiers during the Battle of Normandy when the 7-foot/6-inch German loomed into his view.

Cpl Roberts, who stood two feet below him at 5-feet 6-inches, had the daunting job of frisking the German lance corporal for weapons before taking him prisoner.

Out of shot of the photo, Cpl Robert's comrades and even the captured German soldiers sniggered together at the sight of the little and large encounter.

It was a moment of lightness during the grim duty of war.

For just a few minutes before the picture was taken, Cpl Roberts faced a life-or-death duel with another German soldier who pulled out a pistol as he pretended to surrender.

Luckily, he raised his gun in the nick of time and shot the enemy soldier dead.

The photo has been unearthed by an amateur historian who sent it to Cpl Roberts, now aged 87 and living in Bournemouth, Dorset, in the hope he could identify the Allied serviceman.

But the great-grandfather went one better than that and instantly recognized himself in the photo.

Holding the picture, Cpl Roberts said: "I didn't take a lot of notice of this guy at the time because I was so focused on what the Germans were doing after what had happened to me. I just passed the prisoners on one after the other after searching them. But my mates who were watching the rest of the men saw this giant of a guy approach me and I was aware they and the Germans were having a good laugh. The Germans were saying that he was the tallest man in the German army, he was 7 feet 6-inches tall. My mates took some pictures of me with him with a camera they had taken from the Germans. Luckily he didn't give me any aggravation. I couldn't believe it when I received the photo after all these years. It took me back to a moment of light-heartedness so soon after I had been a blink of an eye from death."

Cpl Roberts, who was 21 at the time, was a member of the North Shore New Brunswick Regiment of the Canadian army and stormed Juno Beach on D-Day in June 1944.

After seeing action in the town of St Aubin — he helped take out a Nazi machine gun nest that was wreaking havoc down on the beach — his company moved north towards Calais.

The men took the cliffs above five pillboxes from which the Germans were bombing Dover 22 miles away with huge guns.

After a four day stand off the Germans waved a white flag from one of the bunkers.

Cpl Roberts, a retired painter and decorator, said: "They had been bombing Dover with shells as big as barrels and we had them surrounded; there was no way out for them. It wasn't wise for a whole platoon to go down to capture them as they could have been bluffing and shot us all up. So I was chosen to take a small section of seven men to take them prisoner. Dozens and dozens of them came out and I just shouted out ‘Does anyone speak English?’ This officer came forward and I told him to tell his men to lay down their arms before coming to me so I could frisk them. I started to search him and suddenly he put his right hand in his pocket and pulled out a .38 pistol. I raised my gun and shot him in the eye and he went down. After that there wasn't any trouble from any of them, especially from this tall chap."

Cpl Roberts carried on fighting with his regiment through Belgium and Holland until February 1945 when he was badly injured in his right leg by a piece of shrapnel at Kappeln on the Holland/German border.

After the war he married wife Vera, who he still lives with him today at the War Memorial Homes in Bournemouth.

They have four children, 10 grandchildren and six great-grandchildren.

ON LINE COMMENTS OF THE WEEK

[1] I need to find a new place to settle down after traveling for a while and living overseas. I’m torn between my own rural very white but cold snowy state versus someplace warmer such as NC or VA. I want to live in a rural locale far enough away from large cities. I have to confess I also want a place that’s fairly white but not full of meth heads with jacked up cars in front of their trailers. Looking for a place with some decent conservative political and social values but not neo-Nazi sorts(who would hate me anyway). Gotta be affordable too. I’m starting to feel the urgency of finding a place to call home again, starting a big garden, stocking up the woodpile etc. Trying not to let panic set in but it’s feeling really unsettled in the world these days. I want to have a place that’s a refuge for my son if he needs it too; living in a studio apartment and just shopping for groceries isn’t going to work if things get bad..

[2] Estmated US population, 2050, 400 million. China and India headed to 1.5 billion each.

The reason I am cynical is, I don’t think any govt in the world is going to reduce energy usage or ‘carbon emissions, and switch to renewables, if it even remotely means mass unemployment, starvation, lower living standards, or political instability withins its own borders. It would be suicide.

To enforce reduced energy usage, it would take a repressive international governing body with a brutal police force not answerable to anything or anybody save the ‘Climate Change’ mandate. I don’t see that happening. The idea of nuking coal fired power plants in Russia and China probably won’t work either.

[3] It’s nice to see a few comments beyond the usual Deep States, rah rah Trumpers, and Hillary bad/me mad. Yes, the Clintons are bad, no bankers were jailed by Obama, and Obama sold Boeing 737max overseas and removed FAA oversights. And Trump? Well, the list is still being written and too long to fit in a book, let alone a comment section.

My 2 cents as this unfolds (and it is unfolding rather quickly):

get rid of your debts; take care of your health; move to somewhere livable; make a few preps (the list is insanely long and personal); develop community relationships; don’t believe in political explanations (any), or solutions; live each day deliberately; etc etc etc

KNOW YOUR OLIGARCHS (#15)