MCT: Thursday, January 2, 2020

• Sunny Skies
• Candidate Forum
• Boonville Meeting
• Intelligent Life
• National Vision
• Divinator
• Apocalypse Night
• Proud Boy
• Roaring Twenties
• Quiz 2020
• Mucker Wanted
• Will Rogers
• Mr Rat
• Ball Droppers
• Yesterday's Catch
• Across America
• Conspiracy Ceiling
• People Barbie
• Market Manipulation
• Goldfish Bowl
• Young Reg
• Lament Configuration
• Homeless Control
• Weight Gain
• Biden Graft
• Found Object

OTHER THAN areas of morning fog...mainly sunny skies are expected today and tomorrow as weak offshore flow and high pressure combine to bring a brief period of dry weather to the region. Another fast-moving front will bring more light to moderate rain to the region late on Friday and into Saturday. (NWS)

MEET THE FOURTH DISTRICT CANDIDATES

The League of Women Voters will host a Fourth District Supervisor's Candidate forum at Fort Bragg City Town Hall, 363 N Main St., on Thursday, January 16, 2020 at 6:30-8pm.

NOTICE TO BOONVILLE RESIDENTS

Be advised: Thursday, January 2, 2020 a Water Projects Standing Committee meeting will be held at the Anderson Valley Firehouse in Boonville. The notice was posted online with a list of invited attendees, supporters, and other involved community, state, and county officials. The early Thursday morning meeting is scheduled for 10:30 AM tomorrow.

AVCSD members will be discussing the mandatory SEWER/water municipal project currently being under consideration for Boonville.

Boonville residents who will be impacted should attend this poorly publically announced meeting or send a spokesperson in their behalf to present their views. Members of the public are only allowed three minutes to present their views and ask questions about the project; this may be the only opportunity to be heard.

The board of directors has not addressed concerns of the community in a forthright manner. The Brown Act (Public’s Right to Know) meeting law has been violated on two different occasions.

One of the major concerns Boonville residents question is the matter of the 1974 contamination issue that has been repeatedly used by AVCSD – it is inaccurate propaganda and needs to be clarified.

FACT: According to a Division of Environmental Health/County of Mendocino letter dated March 27, 1974 to the Anderson Valley Board of Directors, a “survey” of the Boonville area was undertaken. Information was gathered by an above ground walk-through. Quote: No bacteriological water samples were taken.  Why does the current board state there is on going water contamination from 1974 when there is zero proof available to back up this continually false claim?  

A much, much earlier report (probably 70 years ago) with no date but obviously before 1974 showed 31 “privys” (privies: outdoor toilets, aka outhouses) located in the area.  Also noted were excessive garbage, litter, rubbish issues, flies, rodents, and ground contamination. During this time Boonville had 18 sawmills with employee housing on their mill sites (most were non-permanent shacks). Notices were issued by the Health Department to clean up the yards. Obviously they were cleaned up or we would have noticed 31 privies by now. Today, the employee housing has been almost entirely removed.

A letter sent to California Senator Manning from the Anderson Valley Community District Board states they did a “blind” study in 2016 of 24 unidentified wells; CSD reported they found alarming results.  There is no indication where these samples were gathered.  Were the samples taken from above ground areas with animal contamination or from clustered wells where sewers were not properly cleaned out and maintained?

These questions and many more need to be answered before this massive, dangerous, expensive, Forever Plan is enacted.

Meeting date/time: Thursday January 2, 2020 – 10:30AM AVCSD Firehouse

Joan Burroughs

Kelseyville

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REGULAR MEETING of the Water Projects Committee

ANDERSON VALLEY COMMUNITY SERVICES DISTRICT

To be held at the BOONVILLE FIREHOUSE, 14281 Highway 128

January 2nd, 2020 at 10:30am

1. CALL TO ORDER AND ROLL CALL:
2. RECOGNITION OF GUESTS AND HEARING OF PUBLIC:
3. APPROVAL OF MINUTES
4. CHANGES OR MODIFICATION TO THIS AGENDA:
5. NEW BUSINESS
6. OLD BUSINESS

a. REPORT ON DRINKING WATER PROJECT

b. REPORT ON WASTEWATER PROJECT

1. PUBLIC OUTREACH-DRAFT NEWSLETTER FOR ENTIRE VALLEY ON WASTEWATER PROJECT
2. CLOSED SESSION-DRINKING WATER NEGOTIATION & EASEMENT DOCUMENTS WITH LANDOWNERS
3. CONCERNS OF MEMBERS:
4. ADJOURNMENT:

NOTE: The AVCSD Water Projects Committee meets only once per month on the first Thursday of the month. In consideration of the time constraints, the Board asks that individuals limit their speaking time to three minutes. For time and location of meetings of the Board of Directors or other standing committees, please contact the District Office at 895-2075.

THE FINAL DAY of 2019 was largely uneventful, but I did find a dollar bill while on my morning walk, which seemed a harbinger of maybe another dollar bill some time. Boonville, reeling from a bad fire year, its beating heart now piles of rubble where a lively bar and store and humble homes once stood, speculation begins about what might restore our little town to at least a semblance of its former, raucous self. Over the hill to Safeway, the CostCo gas pumps and coffee and cookie at Sunny's Donuts, the always sunny Maria at the counter. At Safeway, a young woman was explaining to an old man, "This year will be better for me because I divorced him. I'm not going to be anybody's maid." The old man replied, "Good for you," and turning to me with a big grin, "Ain't that right, old timer?" I said I wanted to hear the ex-husband's side of it, which neatly put an end to the checkout line's bonhomie. And I also had to beat back a Biden impulse to challenge the old boy to arm wrestle. Want to see who the old timer is here, buddy boy? The nerve of this gaffer with hearing aids the size of water wings calling me me with my jaunty red and black holiday scarf, "Old timer!" The indignities of age are endless. And then they end. Full stop. At the faultlessly ecumenical Sunny's Donuts, proprietor Maria prides herself on remembering her customers. She forgot my name. I told her it didn't matter, that old white guys are pretty much interchangeable in their wispy white beards and pink faces. "No, Bruce, you get a free apple fritter. Take it. That's the deal." For all its aesthetic terrors, there's one place in Ukiah that really knows how to do customer service! Back at the bunker, other than the usual on-line tiffs with keyboard out-patients, the day remained uneventful. After dark? Used to be, celebratory gun fire and mysterious explosions began at sundown on New Year's Eve. No more. I did hear a series of muffled gunshots from somewhere on Lambert Lane about 9, then another volley from the same area awakened me at the magic hour, and here we were. 2020 had commenced. I ask you, has the national vision ever been more impaired?

THE NIGHT OF THE APOCALYPSE: New Year's Eve, 2000 by Bruce Anderson

I set out from Haight Street for a night’s walkabout anticipating end-of-the-world chaos and dangerous spectacles. It was New Year’s Eve, end of an even thousand years if you calculate things by Anglo ways of reckoning, the last night of dot.com prosperity American ingenuity brought to about two thirds of its citizens. 

Up at home base, Deep Mendo, the hill muffins were hunkered down on the ridgetops, a year’s worth of rice and beans buried out by the pot patch in waterproof containers. The muffs had their generators gassed up and their AK-47’s on lock and load. Old lady muff had perimeter duty while old man muff checked out fields of fire. At the more excitable venues like KZYX and the Mendocino Environment Center where linear thought processes were long ago traded in for intuition and non-print input, the libs, for a solid year, had been positively giddy at the prospect of world’s end.

I kinda like the world myself and, like most old commies, have great respect for the resilience of capitalism. I knew in my bones that the boys with all the booty weren’t about to let the counting house fall down just because a gaggle of techno-nerds had forgotten to adjust the computer clocks.

But just in case the four horsemen rode in on January One, what better place to watch them do their thing than San Francisco?

But nothing happened.

I’ve never seen The City emptier or quieter. It was so quiet it was eerie. I started out from Haight and Ashbury, these days a fashion center for tatooed young people who can afford two hundred dollar pairs of rubber shoes with two-foot heels. I’ve lived long enough to watch the area do five sociological flip-flops, from working class to hippie to gay to rich gay to very rich gay.

I walked up Ashbury, down steep 17th Street, through the deserted deserted Castro, down a silent Market to the Embarcadero where a sedate crowd had gathered to listen to singers I’d never heard of. But as one ages, there's more unheard of, not that I've ever felt info-deprived.

There were cops of various kinds all the way down Market posted at each intersection. Critical Mass, at least 30,000 bicyclists short of achieving it, pedaled quietly up Market about a thousand strong. A phalanx of motorcycle cops followed them while a police helicopter rotor-whipped the night air above. At Van Ness and Market, Critical Mass stopped for the red light as the police saw them through to the other side as if they were grandmas on three-wheelers. At 9th and Market a couple of cops confiscated two cans of beer from two hat backwards dudes. (It’s one thing to be a moron, but why try to look like one too? Kids these days….) “But dude….” one of the hat backwards complained as the cop plucked the beer from his hand. “Sorry,” the cop said, “This is a no-alcohol night.”

At the Embarcadero a group of Chinese kids stood laughing and taking pictures of one another as each posed from behind a pair of oversized glasses. Of the dozen of them, about half wore their hair short and dyed in day-glo colors. An old guy said to another old guy, “Al, did you ever think you’d see a Jap with green hair?” Al replied, “Maybe, but I never thought I’d see two of ‘em.” The old guys chuckled.

I seemed to be the third oldest guy in the throng. Huge speakers pounded out the painfully loud sex rhythms and ya-ya lyrics. Young people danced as cops plucked beers out of startled but unresisting hands. I didn’t see any fights or even anything that resembled the usual free-floating hostility present in mob scenes. There were a few groups of ganga banga warriors who looked like they wanted to fight, but nobody seemed inclined to rumble.

There was no point — celebratory or otherwise — standing around listening to music played so loud I couldn’t listen in on conversations so I walked back up Market, then up Taylor for a bolito bowl at Original Joe’s. The waiter put everything in perspective: “the Mayor wrecked the whole weekend for everybody — the no drinking rule, all the baloney about how the cops were going to crack down on people, the Y2K bullshit from the hippies. That’s why nobody’s out there.”

Lots of stores on Market were boarded up, lots weren’t. Old Navy and the Gap store windows were covered with three-quarter plywood. Between the cracks, I could see fat guys in rent-a-cop unis standing around. Some of them wore sidearms. Would they die for ten bucks an hour when the wealth redistributors hurtled through the plywood?

I walked on up to Union Square where some kind of mega-millennial ecumenical prayer and music event was supposed to come off at $10 a pop. The believers had stayed away in droves. Union Square is a lot more crowded on Christmas day than it was on End Of The World Night.

There was nothing else to do so I stopped to listen to an unaffiliated evangelical do his thing at the corner of Geary and Stockton. He was a stocky guy about 40 who resembled a squat Elvis Presley, black hair swept back like fenders on a ‘55 Buick. Elvis the God Guy was dressed in a black leather-like, head-to-toe zippered jump suit with an American flag sewed into its chest. God Guy wore a ten gallon cowboy hat festooned with flag medallions and alternating “Praise God!” decals. Nike running shoes rounded out the millennial attire. If this odd man trying to save us from ourselves was suddenly raptured right off the corner, he might have a tough time getting past the security check at Heaven’s Gate in this get-up, but who dresses for death, so to speak?

Reverend Elvis was bellowing apocalyptic warnings through a small bullhorn. He put on a lot better show than anything happening at the Embarcadero. Bill Graham Presents and Willy Brown should have hired him to liven things up. “God is not pleased with the Pope,” Elvis hollered at me as I settled in for the show. “Pope rhymes with dope. There’s no hope with the Pope.” That vein of alliterative gold quickly exhausted, Elvis brought his bullhorn inches from my face. “You ask me how I was brought up?” he bellered as if I’d asked. “Doesn’t really matter; it’s where I’m going that counts.” With that do-it-yourself exchange completed, Elvis pivoted to shout anti-Clinton insults skyward. “Bill Clinton is a filthy, stinking sinner. Will I pray for this stinking, rotten, evil man? Why should I? He’s pro-queer, pro-abortion.”

It wasn’t hard to understand why the preacher was reduced to an open air Post Street pulpit. His wasn’t exactly a Frisco-friendly message, although he did toss out a few sops to the libs, whether or not out of concern for Frisco sensibilities or out of mental illness, who knows. “All weapons should be buried. They are evil. Praise God.” All he drew was chuckles from me and a few fish eyes from the few passersby who even seemed aware of him.

A young Chinese guy soon appeared, a mischievous grin on his face and a violin case under his arm. I got the feeling the preacher and the violinist were old antagonists. The kid took out a small amplifier and plugged an electric string instrument into it and began sawing unmusically away a few feet from God's rambunctious representative. “The devil won’t drive me out!” the preacher shouted at the kid who promptly turned up the volume on his violin for a round of Waltzing Matilda. As I walked up Post the preacher and the electrified violinist were a foot apart, the kid laughing and hacking away with his bow at his amplified strings, the preacher screaming, “The devil hisself is knocking at my door but he sure is wrong if he thinks God will let him in!”

At the rear door of the St. Francis Hotel a bunch of cops were assembled to launch a mini-motorcade. The very sight of big black cars and motorcades makes me yearn for hand grenades, but I lingered, joining 50 or so other gawkers. I wanted to see who gets tax-funded escorts these days. The last time I checked, we were paying for the cops to whisk senior sluts from the U.S. Senate out to SFO as the peons pulled over to the side to let the leadership pass. A guy asked me, “Who’s here?” Al Gore, I replied. The guy turned to the lady with him and said authoritatively, “Al Gore. Wonder what he’s doing here? Let’s stick around.”

“Al Gore Al Gore Al Gores” ripple excitedly through the crowd, passed from one person to the next like a beer at a ball game. The crowd waiting for Al Gore grew larger. I regretted my little treachery until I reminded myself that anybody who’d wait outside a hotel door for a glimpse of Al Gore on the last day of a thousand years or any other day deserves whomever eventually appears.

At the Civic Center another music festival of some sort was tuning up, but it also seemed lightly attended. I think it was a second whoop de doo sponsored by The City. I walked on up a deserted Polk Street until I got to Sacramento where I hopped a free New Year's Eve bus. The Muni is never entirely free, broadly considered if you include the emotional toll it often takes, but it was free to riders on this, The Last Night.

The bus was empty except for four Mexicans just getting off work. Early in the morning, late at night, the Muni is a mobile Third World, ferrying the legions of underpaid people who do the real work of our latest economic miracle, the SUV-Dot Com decade where the dollars go up and fewer come down.

I get off at California and Masonic to catch the 33 back to the Haight. Two middle-aged women, one black, one white join me at the bus stop. They're nicely done up, and how good it is to see women looking after themselves again after the long visual drought years of no paint and no pain over appearances! The area is deserted. “Do you mind if we stand near you?” one asks. “It’s creepy out here.” Yes, I’m the only one, I reply. They laugh. Me? Armor against the urban night?

The 33 eventually appears. My wards and I are the only passengers until Hayes Street where an odd guy in white bucks trips and sprawls through the doors, lying on the steps like he’s dead drunk or has just dropped dead from the exertion of climbing onto the 33. But he’s neither, just clumsy. “Are you going to ask me if I’m alright, driver?” Mr. Prat Fall asks. No, the driver says without even looking at the guy as he pulls out into a uniquely vehicle-free Masonic. “How about you folks? Are you going to ask me if I’m alright?” Mr. Prat Fall ask us. Are you alright? I and my two wards chorus. “Yes, I am, thank you,” Prat says and, apparently gratified at our concerned response to his inquiry, sits down without saying another word.

The Muni is endlessly fascinating. San Francisco is endlessly fascinating. The libs are lamenting The City’s alleged loss of its “diversity,” but I’ve never seen it more diverse, and I’ve either been living there or visiting there for 55 years.

At Haight and Masonic I alight. One of the two ladies I'd protected en route wished me happy new year as the other said, “Thank you for guarding us.”

Shucks, ma’am, twarn't nuthin'.

Haight Street was deserted. Ben and Jerry’s was the only place open. Even the bums and the winos and the tax-funded dopers had disappeared. Excuse me. Even the homeless seem to have packed it in for the night. Maybe the people who refuse to consider the revival of the state hospital system took them home to welcome in the new year or to celebrate the end of all years, whichever came first, but nobody was out anywhere in San Francisco. Only a few thousand suburbanites were massed at the Embarcadero, gaping at the Ferry Building and lining up at the rows of Porta Potties for easily the most chaste New Year’s Eve in the history of the Golden Gate.

The next day the Chronicle said that there were fewer police and fire calls on New Year’s Eve than there are on any Friday night of the year. People stayed home for the end of the world, but it didn’t end anywhere, even the places where it was supposed to, like Mendocino County.

JUST IN FROM LAKE COUNTY where a Proud Boy is running for supervisor. KPFZ’s “Philadelphia Lawyer,” Ron Green, tried to interview the candidate but he walked out — proudly, presumably, after a few minutes during which he was asked questions he could not or would not answer. The author of the following post is Dwain Goforth, long known in the Lake community as a level-headed and intelligent individual:

“Kevin Ahajanian is running for Fifth District County Supervisor in Lake County. He is endorsed by the Lake County Republican Party where he is secretary and he said on KPFZ last Saturday that he is also endorsed by the ‘local chapter of the Proud Boys.’ Ahajanian also said that while his campaign will not exceed the $2000 limit for reporting campaign contributions under campaign finance law, the Lake County Republican Party will be sending election fliers to voters in his support. If you google Proud Boys you will immediately find at Wikipedia that ‘the Proud Boys is a far right neofascist organization that admits only men as members and promises political violence. The group sees men — especially white men — and Western culture as under siege; their views have elements of white genocide conspiracy theory.’ The Southern Poverty Law Center designates the Proud Boys as a hate group with ties to white nationalism. Other designated hate groups include the Ku Klux Klan, the new Black Panther Party, American Promise Ministries and the Aryan Nation. According to SPLC’s roundup of recently active general hate groups, ‘With 44 total chapters, the big story in general hate was the Proud Boys who hit the streets — ostensibly in the name of "free speech” — to create combustible situations and provoke violence. At roughly a dozen political rallies this year they succeeded, resulting in the most relentless campaign of right-wing street violence in recent memory.’ The Federal Bureau of Investigation says, ‘White Nationalist domestic terrorism is rising.’ What do you think of the Lake County Republican Party endorsing and paying for election materials for Mr. Ahajanian's election to the Lake County Board of Supervisors?”

THE PROUD BOY running for Supervisory District 5 is in competition with a well respected field of opponents: A businesswoman from Cobb, a high school teacher from Kelseyville, and a businessman also from Kelseyville. The surprise to me is that the local GOP would actually come out of the closet and endorse the Proud Boy.

ON HIS FACEBOOK PAGE, Ahajanian asks, "Why would anyone call an Armenian a white nationalist." I'll take a stab at that one: Because he's white? And real dumb?

THE FIRST BOONVILLE QUIZ of 2020 will be Thursday, January 9, 2020. Hope to see you there. Wishing you a Happy, Healthy, and Brain Exercising 2020. Cheers, Steve Sparks, Quiz Master

RANCH HAND WANTED, $15-20 per hour depending on experience and abilities. Help with mucking (goat and chicken), other occasional odd jobs like moving wood, and staining/painting sheds. Start date: ASAP, hours: probably 4-8 first time, 2-4 hours thereafter every one or two weeks, on-going. Days and times flexible. Must have own transportation to/from Inglenook (5 miles north of Fort Bragg).

John or Wendy Gallo homegallo@gmail.com

MR. RAT: RATS & A BOY WHO LOVED ONE

by Flynn Washburne

I have rats, which I suppose is another way of saying that I have a place for rats to be, a fact for which I am surpassingly grateful. Once you’ve experienced even a casual acquaintanceship with the condition of houselessness your perspective shifts and all the granted-taking-for of a roof and four walls, presuming you did not grow up sleeping rough, that you learned in childhood goes right out the window as you spend the rest of your life in a condition of Damoclean readiness. If I have to share my bed and board with a few creepers from the lower orders, so be it.

I have nothing against rats, either per se or personally; quite the reverse, really, having kept several as pets over the years and finding them affable, intelligent, and charming companions. My first was procured shortly following my 11-year-old obsession with the book and movie Willard (the obsession did not span 11 years; I was eleven years old), and if there’s anyone out there in the Flynniverse who doesn’t remember the early 1970s, it was first an actually good movie featuring Bruce Davidson and Elsa Lanchester before the dry wells out Hollywood way brought up another bucket of dirt and said fuck it, let’s just slap a coat of paint on another old one. Those idiots won’t know the difference. Bwah-hah-ha-ha-ha! The fact that they’re right doesn’t make it right, if you take my meaning.

I’d read The Ratman’s Notebooks (as the book was originally titled) a couple of years previously, and the reason that slim epistolary took such a firm grip on my supple young mind was that for a boy so disturbingly preoccupied with revenge fantasies, this stuff was meat and potatoes. When the film was released I camped out in my usual seat at the theater (left side, sixth row from front, third seat in—I still sit there, if it’s available—and watched all three showings the first day. It took three more visits to the theatre before I’d had enough of watching Ernest Borgnine, whose grotesquely grinning pan had been giving me nightmares since watching Marty at the age of 5, fall to the marauding rat army as Willard gave the chilling command: Tear him up. I gleefully envisioned my own furry death squad stripping the living flesh off my stepfather’s bloated wineskin of a body as I laughed in triumph and righteous fury.

That first rat was named Socrates, after the real hero of the movie, Willard’s first pet and the leader of the good faction, the entire cadre having split into two over creative differences (actually, Socrates was content with being a kept rat and taking orders, while Ben wanted to take charge and make his own decisions) and entered into a circa 2016-American-legislative-body level of antagonistic polarity. I was furious on learning it was Ben, the rabble-rousing wobbly who couldn’t leave well enough alone, and not Socrates, the sophisticated and tasteful rodent whose general mien was as sensible and elegant as his namesake, who was chosen to headline the sequel. Socrates may not have captured the fancy of Michael Jackson, which could convincingly be argued to be a clear step in the right direction, but a movie about a disciplined, obedient army of man (and bully)-eating rats emptying my bete-noir inbox would be miles more satisfying than the same old tired formula of Good v. Evil and significant event, conflict, apparent failure, regroup, battle royale, and eventual victory leavened with sacrifice. Ben was a traitor, a scoundrel, and, yes, a rat. Calling an actual rat a metaphorical rat even though the rat in question is a fictional rat is yet another example of the sort of linguistic legerdemain for which they pay me the big bucks.

So I went to the pet store and chose the most Socrates-resembling in the seething pile of rodents, a piebald male with a set of balls like an Arabian stallion (two equine descriptors applied to a rat in one sentence: another rabbit out of a hat) and the usual accessories, cage, cedar chips, water bottle, exercise wheel, etc. Socrates II proved worthy of his namesake, though, and was clearly a genius-level creature, as he made it clear from the outset that he would not be caged, thank you very much, but would instead enjoy the run of the house and the specials of the day. No rat chow for this discerning gourmand. He showed no inclination to absquatulate beyond the confines of the cage, though, trotting room to room, climbing on shoulders and poking his snout inquisitively into ears (which habit more than once surprised and terrified unsuspecting guests) and napping in laps. One of his more impressive accomplishments was figuring out and using the cat box, and if his life had been concordant with the age of smartphones and YouTube, the sight of him taking a dump while the cats sat around the box looking quizzically at him and each other would’ve been viral in the extreme.

The cats and dogs presented no problem, as not only would he not back down, but in most confrontations he was the aggressor, hurling himself headlong into the face of whoever dared question his claim to the grounds. One lush of a dog, named Beer Puppy for obvious reasons, decided he’d had enough after a bowlful of Coors and went for Socrates in earnest, losing a significant chunk of nose in the process. I believe he took the pledge after that and joined AA.

Most notable and even difficult to credit were his orienteering skills. My sister took him to a party one night in an effort to expand his social circle, and two weeks later he showed up on the front porch of the party house unaccompanied. It was on the same street, but eleven blocks away. My sister and brother and I were all at school, and it’s a lucky thing that someone at the destination recognized him and brought him home. I still find it hard to believe, but as I said, this was no ordinary rat.

Names being what they are and Socrates being a little unwieldy an appellation, he came to be known simply as Mr Rat to everyone but me, still holding out hope for my squadron of vengeance, waiting for the day I’d find Soc II in the backyard drilling his recruits.

He simply disappeared one day, never to be seen again, and while the odds of him coming to some sort of bad end are overwhelming, I clung to romantic notions of him eloping with some fine-ass sewer rat or stowing aboard a Med-bound steamer. He left a much larger than rat-sized hole and to this day, whenever the family assembles and gets to reminiscing, the legend of Mr Rat comes nostalgically up.

My current rats are about twice Socrates’s size, big gray greasy buggers who host, from the sound of it, nightly orgies and wrestling matches. Still, I have no problem sharing my space with them except when they get into the fruit bowl and chew divots out of the apples. The landlord takes a different view and is intent upon their eradication, daily bringing over traps and poisons of escalating complexity and toxicity and mystified as to how they seem to work everywhere but in my pad. I shrug and make vague comments about the shrewdness of rats in general and mine in particular, but as God and the memory of Mr. Socrates Rat is my witness, no rodents enjoying my hospitality will depart this earth by any but natural means.

NOBODY CHOOSES THEIR PARENTS

On 12-31-2019 at approximately 8:00 PM, Mendocino County Deputy Sheriffs were dispatched to a 911 hang up that originated from the area of the 21000 block of North Petaluma Avenue in Fort Bragg, California.

Deputies arrived and began checking the area for signs of distress. Deputies located three juveniles (age 9 years, 23 months, and 7 months) screaming and crying from within a residence. Deputies entered the residence to check the welfare of the children and could not find a parent or guardian within the home. Deputies confirmed the 9 year-old male called 911 for assistance.

Deputies observed that the conditions in the home were unsanitary, unsafe, and posed life safety hazards to the children.

Deputies determined the children had been left, unattended, for an extended period of time. Due to the hazardous conditions the children were found in, Mendocino County Child Protective Services Social Workers arrived and took emergency protective custody of the children.

Deputies were able to identify the parents of the children as Angela Ariaz and Joshua Shaun Ethier.

At approximately 10:10 PM, Deputies responded to a bar in the 100 block of East Redwood Avenue in Fort Bragg, where they located Ariaz who was highly intoxicated.

Ariaz was arrested for 273a(a) PC (Felony Child Endangerment), without incident.

At approximately 10:15 PM, Deputies responded to a bar in the 300 block of North Franklin Street, Fort Bragg, where they located Ethier, who also had been drinking.

Ethier was arrested for 273a(a) PC (Felony Child Endangerment), without incident.

Due to the severity of this investigation, a Mendocino County Superior Court Judge was contacted and briefed on this investigation. The Superior Court Judge ordered a bail enhancement, which was set at $150,000.00 for both Ariaz and Ethier.

Ariaz and Ethier were booked into the Mendocino County Jail where they were both to be held in lieu of $150,000.00 bail.

(Mendocino County Sheriff's Office)

CATCH OF THE DAY, January 1, 2020

ANGELA ARIAZ, Fort Bragg. Child endangerment.

SHERRI BETTS, Willits. Disorderly conduct-alcohol.

DANIEL CONTRERAS, Upper Lake. DUI, suspended license, criminal threats, resisting.

JOSHUA ETHIER, Fort Bragg. Child endangerment.

STACY EZELL, Ukiah. Disorderly conduct-alcohol, under influence.

LAXA GUERRERO, Willits. Domestic abuse.

ERIK MAGANA-MACEDO, Ukiah. DUI.

JORGE MARTINEZ, Ukiah. Burglary, probation revocation.

JUAN QUINTERO-BOLANOS, Philo. DUI, protective order violation, evasion, probation revocation.

JAIME RIVERA, Stockton/Ukiah. Controlled substance for sale, ammo possession by prohibited person, criminal street gang partcipation, county parole violation.

TREVOR WRIGHT, Willits. Disorderly conduct-alcohol.

ON LINE COMMENT OF THE DAY

I just drove coast to coast across America and did I see the sites!

Gas was on average a dollar cheaper everywhere outside of Kommiefornia.

New cars everywhere and the Starbucks were universally packed!

Texas is covered in windmills for power generation.

It was weird driving at night with all the blinking red lights, blinking in unison like some huge alien ship was taking over.

Tennessee had the worst drivers I have ever seen anywhere.

Virginia the state I visited for a week is a buzz with Gun rights advocates standing up militias and my son in Law was open carrying everywhere we went.

Dead squished Deer in every state, all over the roads and a black bear in Virginia, no one drives the speed limit anywhere in America and doing so got you tail gated and cursed at.

Driving was a white knuckle experience which left my poor wife with ptsd.

It was freezing everywhere thank god for my heated seats!

The one standard thing I noticed was everywhere was busy and looked like life was pretty good except Mississippi and El Paso —God what shit holes.

A JFK CONSPIRACY THEORIST dies and goes to heaven. When he arrives at the Pearly Gates, God is there to receive him. “Welcome. You are permitted to ask me one question, which I will answer truthfully. Without hesitating, the conspiracy theorist asks, “Who really shot Kennedy?” God replies, “Lee Harvey Oswald shot him from the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository. There were no accomplices. He acted alone.” The conspiracy theorist pauses, thinks for a minute, then says “Shit! This goes up higher than I thought!”

"THE MORE POWERFUL MESSAGE HERE is the implicit realization and admission by politicians, not just Trump but also his peers and challengers, that the stock market is now seen as the consummate barometer of one's political achievements and approval. Which is also why capital markets are now, more than ever, a political tool whose purpose is no longer to distribute capital efficiently and discount the future, but to manipulate voter sentiments far more efficiently than any Russian election interference attempt ever could."

— Tyler Durden, ZeroHedge.com

MATISSE!

ELTON JOHN WAS BORN REGINALD DWIGHT in 1947 in the north-west London suburb of Pinner. His mother was a nightmare, his father a bully. He was a boy who did not start thinking about sex until he was 21. While he shared an interest in football [i.e., soccer] with his father – they both supported Watford – his father didn’t approve of his taste in music. From early on, Reg loved shopping and acquiring things. Like many of his generation, he found his first glimmer of true happiness in record shops on Saturdays, flicking through all the new releases, finding a life in them that was, for him, unimaginable in its glamour and its excitement. Even when he grew famous, he never stopped remembering that his nose had spent time up against the window of this world. It filled him with wonder and surprise when he escaped and got to perform with and befriend singers whose music he was crazy about.

While his mother emerges in Me, his memoir, as one of the sourest people who ever walked the earth, she plays a heroic role at the beginning by introducing her only child to the music she loved. After work on Fridays, she often bought a new 78, enjoying the sound of big band and some American singers. One week she brought home a record by Elvis Presley. Her son already knew the name: the previous weekend in the local barber’s he had come across a photo of the “most bizarre-looking man I’d ever seen. Everything about him looked extraordinary: his clothes, his hair, even the way he was standing.”

Reg’s parents were a war couple. His dad was an amateur trumpet-player who spotted his mother in the audience one night. “They were both stubborn and short-tempered,” he writes, “two delightful characteristics that it’s been my huge good fortune to inherit. I’m not sure if they ever really loved each other … The rows were endless.” Since his father remained in the army after the war, Reg was brought up mostly by his mother and his grandmother, living in fear of his mother’s moods, the “awful, glowering, miserable silences that descended on the house without warning … she always seemed to be looking for a reason not to be happy.” She had unusual views on potty-training, he tells us, “‘hitting me with a wire brush until I bled if I didn’t use the potty.” She also had strong views on constipation: “She laid me on the draining-board in the kitchen and stuck carbolic soap up my arse.”

The young Reg didn’t like himself: “I was too fat, I was too short, my face just looked weird, my hair would never do what I wanted it to.” As his parents fought, he found solace in his bedroom, where everything was kept in perfect order. He began to study the singles charts, “then compiling the results, averaging them out into a personal chart of charts. I’ve always been a statistics freak … I’m just an anorak.”

He began to take piano lessons, studied at the Royal Academy of Music, and eventually started playing in a bar, becoming fascinated by Little Richard and Jerry Lee Lewis. He got a Saturday job to fund his record-buying habit. As he became more involved with what was happening in music, he was aware that the older generation was not amused. “People fucking hated it. And no one hated it more than my father … he thought the whole thing was morally wrong.” Then his parents split up and his mother found a new partner whom Reg called Derf. In their two-bedroom flat, Reg acquired an electric piano and joined a band called Bluesology. They released two singles; neither was a success, but even so they were asked to be the support act for groups and singers whose names they recognized. “The whole thing was a dream come true for me. I was playing with artists whose records I collected.” Even when the band went to Hamburg in 1966 and played at the Top Ten Club on the Reeperbahn, where the Beatles had played, Reg, aged 19, kept his innocence: “I barely drank and I still wasn’t interested in sex … I had no idea about penetration, no idea what a blowjob was … There I was, in one of Europe’s most notorious fleshpots … All I cared about was playing and going to German record shops. I was totally absorbed by music. I was incredibly ambitious.”

—Colm Toibín, London Review of Books

CONTROL!

Editor,

The homeless crisis is spiraling out of control.

So, what is my solution? CONTROL!

We need to be more in control of the situation.

We appear to have several schools of thought.

The first is to do nothing. The tents are everywhere. Encampments are everywhere.

Stolen shopping carts laden with personal "possessions" are wheeled up and down the street.

Warming fires are close enough to burn the entire town down.

Doing nothing appears to be quite dangerous.

So, let's look at two other approaches.

Most homeless advocates advocate what they call, Housing First.

This means that simply putting roof over ones head is a primary need in the direction of solutions.

This would imply that we would have a fair amount of alcoholics, drug addicts, and mentally ill, all with a roof over their head, and that any work on corrective personal measures would come after shelter.

If those corrective measures are currently in place, they would not appear to be as successful as we would hope.

Then, we have Mr. Marbut, from the Marbut report, who just got a gig from our President.

Dr. Marbut prefers his idea of Housing Fourth, as he calls it. This means that we work on solving their personal issues as the primary, and that the person of ultimate responsibility for a homeless person is that homeless individual themselves.

I am not seeing where someone actually wishes for poverty, or mental illness. They may have fallen prey to certain addictions.

Now, I am not seeing where we have the luxury to prioritize what is more important and what is less important.

And I certainly see no reason why we shouldn't be doing it all. Housing. Treatment. Intervention. Etc.

So, allow me to give my perspective on housing. Currently it's, hey, got a tent? Then pitch it wherever you wish.

Talmage, near the airport already has a community of tents that seems to be perfectly acceptable. Sleep in the Post Office? No problem. Break into an empty home? No problem. The owners weren't using it.

In my estimation, it is foolhardy to lack any "control" around where the homeless live. So, here are some solutions. I am not saying that any of them are necessarily perfect, but run with me on this.

Control option number one: A tent city. Yes, a large encampment on a piece of land that would not encroach on local legitimate property owners or the community.

It would have porta-potties, and portable showers. It would have some type of security, because safety is a primary need, like food and water. Feeling unsafe causes its own problems like paranoia and anxiety. Let's move on.

Control option number two: Safe parking lots. Yes, that word "safe" is still important.

Many of the homeless do own cars and RV's. The condition of these vehicles is abundantly clear as anyone can see by the line-up parked on South State Street. It's a disgrace. So, get them off of the public streets, and instead, allow the owners to park on a "safe parking lot". Many of the same facilities would need to exist. Important things like toilets for the general health and welfare of the public.

Right now, excrement in the public streets and walkways is becoming a health disaster in the making.

Control option number three. Navigation Centers or Sprung Centers, like they have in San Francisco.

It should be noted that one of the huge problems with this idea is for ways to convince the homeless population to consider relocating to one of these facilities.  Another problem is that once one Navigation Center is built, then another one is needed.

These also appear to be more like internment camps, barracks, or stalags.

Control option number four would be a mini-community. Little small tuff-shed buildings, all in a row, one next to another, next to one another. A virtual city of little cubicles. Now, let's do keep things in perspective. In China, living like this is a normal way of life. And, actually, it's worse there as people sleep in little tubes just big enough for one person to lie down.

But here is where the problem is. All of this would still be out of control. Simply housing the homeless does little to stop the ills that actually cause homelessness.

So, let's put housing on the back burner for a moment and look at "correction" being the primary.

We have few control devices for this. We have many areas of assistance, with no co-ordination between service providers.

One hand does not know what the other hand is doing. Services are duplicated. Mr. Marbut wants to make it a crime to hand out food on the street. This is already in force in other cities. Now, he is not saying that the homeless should not be eating.

He IS saying that the way that we currently go about getting food to our homeless population is a free-for-all.

And hey, how could just handing out peanut butter and jelly sandwiches do any harm? Well, what happens when any wild animal discovers that you have great leftovers in your trash on a regular basis? They tell all of their friends. "Hey everybody, Chow Time".

Now, I would agree that the efforts of a great many are very well intended. They are also out of control.

Again, I am stressing "control". We need to have a higher degree of efficiency. We need to have all of these entities working in conjunction to achieve the common goal. But, this is not what we have now. We have independent "cells" that operate under their own authority, without regard to anything other then their mission statement. In other words, What they do, is what they want to do, when and how they want to do it. Well, how's that working out? We need to know "who" we are dealing with. We need to know specifically what their individual "problems" are. We need to define the "needs", and we need to define what "services" we have to offer. And we need to co-ordinate the whole thing, like the gears in a watch.

We need to stop acting like spoiled ideologues operating without concern for the community that supports them.

Because the community, like other communities are getting pretty fed up with the state of affairs that are simply, out of control.

And until we start to work more like Henry Ford in crafting and building an automobile, and less like kids spinning their cars in displays called sideshows, all the while surrounded by others gawking at a car going around and around in circles endangering those standing very close to it. We are going around in circles with our efforts in correcting the homelessness crisis.

This sideshow of homelessness has turned into a main event, and it is taking center stage. And it now has the attention of a master showman. The President. And he does not like to be upstaged. And he is soon to be pulling the plug, and bringing the curtain down, by taking more control into his own hands.

Because either we figure it out, in a way that works for us and do it with co-ordination, co-operation, education, intervention, while maintaining our compassion, or he will do it with just the stroke of his sharpie. And his sharpie will pierce through to the heart of this matter and many may die from the bleeding.

And the way that I see it, and the way that he sees it are similar, because the homeless crisis is way out of control.

And it needs to be more "In Control".

Johnny Keyes

Ukiah

BIDEN VS. MIDDLE CLASS?   

Joseph N. DiStefano

DiStefano is a staff writer for the Philadelphia Inquirer and the author of Comcasted: How Ralph and Brian Roberts Took Over America’s TV, One Deal at a Time.

He recently wrote the piece “Joe Biden’s Friends and Backers Come Out on Top — at the Expense of the Middle Class” for The Nation, which states: “Soon after Biden was first elected in 1972, banks from three states lined up to finance his brother James Biden’s new disco in suburban Wilmington. When the club defaulted, Joe Biden blamed the banks for exploiting his 23-year-old sibling and for pressing his office to get their money back. (They didn’t.) Despite this, over the years, many Biden-related projects have proved irresistible to local, national, and lately, Chinese businesspeople. …

“In 2008, a month before Biden was elected vice president, [John] Hynansky [of Winner Auto Group] made his biggest political donation: $28,500 to the Democratic National Committee. The next summer, Biden told a roomful of Ukrainian leaders in Kyiv, ‘My very good friend John Hynansky, a very prominent businessman from Delaware, is here.’ That fall, Winner won its first U.S. Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC) loan, in the amount of $2.5 million. …

“Given the Trump family’s penchant for mixing personal and official business, it’s tempting to dismiss the Biden clan’s affairs as no crime, no foul. But Biden’s friends and backers have won victories that cost the middle-class Americans he claims to champion dearly. …

“In 1996, Biden’s cozy relationship with the banks was used against him. A Republican challenger for his Senate seat complained that MBNA’s No. 3 executive, John R. Cochran, had bought Biden’s Greenville house for the full $1.2 million list price, despite a weak housing market. MBNA stuck with Biden; even after Wilmington’s News Journal published an internal MBNA letter coordinating employee donations to him, he won reelection easily.

“MBNA then hired his son Hunter Biden, fresh out of Yale Law School, as a management trainee. (He stuck out among the mostly state and Catholic college alumni who worked at the bank.) The New York Times reported that when Hunter Biden left in 2000 for Washington, DC, and a new lobbying firm, Oldaker, Biden & Belair, MBNA kept him on a $100,000 annual retainer — not to lobby his father, he said, but for advice on ‘Internet and privacy law.’

“With U.S. credit card debt doubling every five years, defaults and bankruptcies rose, too. Joe Biden joined the Republican lawmakers pushing new bankruptcy reforms that would make it tougher for individuals to write off a range of consumer loans.”

(John Sakowicz)

FOUND OBJECT