MCT: Saturday, September 19, 2020

• Warm Dry
• Ukiah Hispanics
• Evacuations Reduced
• Ruth Bader Ginsburg
• Radio Covelo
• Sheriff's Budget
• Early Coast
• Street Trash
• Yard Signs
• Streetscape Update
• Yesterday's Catch
• Eel Story
• Groundwater Sustainability
• Ken Kesey
• Retard Beauties
• Black Progress
• Soul Possession
• River Name
• Willits Depot
• Journalist Testifies
• Gone Miracle
• Wokesterism
• Libtard Checkpoint
• Removing Trump
• Laying Hands
• Election Fraud
• Broken System
• Yee Ha
• Overpopulation Issue
• Burning Beatles
• Leaf Blowers

DRY WEATHER and seasonably warm temperatures will return today and last through much of next week before the next chance of rain arrives mid to late week. (NWS)

11 NEW COVID CASES reported in Mendocino County on Friday bringing total to 833. Also, according to the County’s Covid data summary page there are almost 1100 tests pending. So far tests in Mendo have yielded 833 positive and 23,294 negative, or a positive test rate of 3.5 out of 100 / 3.5% (3.3% in the last seven days). At that rate, about 38 of those 1100 will be positive, but we don’t know when the results will arrive. Also, we didn’t notice before that the County is making a distinction between “In quarantine” (106) and “in isolation” (43). We assume that “in quarantine” is due to close contact with someone known to have the virus and “in isolation” means they have the virus. 

A FEW MORE RANDOM ROUGH COVID STATS: Assume Mendo’s total population is about 90,000 and a third of them are Hispanic (a very rough guess). Then assume that nobody has been tested twice (?), then assume that the approximately 24,000 tests so far are skewed toward non-Hispanics, meaning that maybe 6,000 of those tested are Hispanics. 541 of Mendo’s postive tests are for Hispanics. So 536/6,000 gives a positive covid rate of about 9%. Conversely, non-Hispanics account for around 280 postive tests (including 105 “Unreported”). So non-Hispanic tests are positive for 280 / 18,000 or around 1.5%. 

AGAIN, then, it looks from here like the County is not doing enough to notify and enforce covid rules on our Hispanic population, particularly in Ukiah. Only 46 of the cases are attributed to “work/out of county travel,” and most of those are probably out of county travel, meaning that very few covid cases are related to work/workplace. Mendo needs to make a much more focused effort to deal with the Hispanic population, especially in Ukiah, in their living and gathering places, not at work, if it expects to significantly lower the infection rate. But so far, most of what we’ve heard so far on this very particular aspect of Mendo’s covid experience is rhetoric, not action. 

(Mark Scaramella)

AUGUST COMPLEX- WEST ZONE EVACUATION ORDERS HAVE BEEN REDUCED TO AN EVACUATION WARNING, North Of Covelo Trinity/Mendocino County Line And East Of Covelo Near Eel River

Effective Immediately

Areas of Mendocino County:

Zone S: South of the County Line, East of Bell Springs Rd, North of Bell Springs Creek and West of the North Fork of the Eel River.

Zone Q: South of the County Line, West and North of the North Fork of the Eel River, North and East of Bald Mountain Road.

Zone D: South and East of the Eel River, North of Bentley Basin and West of the National Forest Boundary.

Zone N: North of the Middle Fork of the Eel River including the Eel River Ranger Station and Black Butte Store, West and South of the National Forest Boundary, East of Williams Creek.

Road Closures:

Hearst Willits Road at the Eel River Bridge

FH7 at M1 – Eel River

Notes:

The public is reminded to stay vigilant on current fire conditions. Please continue to adhere to road closures and any Evacuation Warnings and Evacuation Orders. Please remember to drive slowly and yield to emergency personnel in the area. There may still be smoke in the respective areas as firefighters continue their suppression operations.

View the most current evacuation map at: https://tinyurl.com/mendoevac

For more information about wildfire preparedness visit: www.readyforwildfire.org

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AUGUST COMPLEX UPDATE (Saturday morning):

CAL FIRE’S unified team and the U.S. Forest Service are engaged in a coordinated response to take suppressive action on the August Complex, which has been split into three zones to effectively provide a response for the communities at risk. CAL FIRE’s Incident Management team ordered the National Guard to assist with fire suppression efforts due to resource draw down throughout the state. The current acreage of the August Complex West Zone is 88,806 acres and is 7% contained. Resources from across the state of California as well as Montana, Idaho, Texas, and New Jersey have been assigned to assist on the August Complex-West Zone. Some evacuation orders and warnings have been reduced. Overnight the fire made active runs in the southern portion, moderate fire behavior was observed with interior burning, creeping and backing. A firing operation was conducted in the Lake Pillsbury area, putting up a significant smoke column. The potential for active fire behavior will continue throughout the day.

fire.ca.gov/incidents/2020/8/16/august-complex-includes-doe-fire/

SUPREME COURT JUSTICE RUTH BADER GINSBURG champion of human and women's rights, dies of metastatic pancreatic cancer at age 87

by Mark Sherman

Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a diminutive yet towering women’s rights champion who became the court’s second female justice, died Friday at her home in Washington. She was 87.

Ginsburg died of complications from metastatic pancreatic cancer, the court said.

Her death just over six weeks before Election Day is likely to set off a heated battle over whether President Donald Trump should nominate, and the Republican-led Senate should confirm, her replacement, or if the seat should remain vacant until the outcome of his race against Democrat Joe Biden is known.

Chief Justice John Roberts mourned Ginsburg’s passing. “Our Nation has lost a jurist of historic stature. We at the Supreme Court have lost a cherished colleague. Today we mourn, but with confidence that future generations will remember Ruth Bader Ginsburg as we knew her — a tireless and resolute champion of justice,” Roberts said in a statement.

Ginsburg announced in July that she was undergoing chemotherapy treatment for lesions on her liver, the latest of her several battles with cancer.

Ginsburg spent her final years on the bench as the unquestioned leader of the court’s liberal wing and became something of a rock star to her admirers. Young women especially seemed to embrace the court’s Jewish grandmother, affectionately calling her the Notorious RBG, for her defense of the rights of women and minorities, and the strength and resilience she displayed in the face of personal loss and health crises.

Those health issues included five bouts with cancer beginning in 1999, falls that resulted in broken ribs, insertion of a stent to clear a blocked artery and assorted other hospitalizations after she turned 75.

She resisted calls by liberals to retire during Barack Obama’s presidency at a time when Democrats held the Senate and a replacement with similar views could have been confirmed. Instead, Trump will almost certainly try to push Ginsburg’s successor through the Republican-controlled Senate — and move the conservative court even more to the right.

Ginsburg antagonized Trump during the 2016 presidential campaign in a series of media interviews, including calling him a faker. She soon apologized.

Her appointment by President Bill Clinton in 1993 was the first by a Democrat in 26 years. She initially found a comfortable ideological home somewhere left of center on a conservative court dominated by Republican appointees. Her liberal voice grew stronger the longer she served.

Ginsburg was a mother of two, an opera lover and an intellectual who watched arguments behind oversized glasses for many years, though she ditched them for more fashionable frames in her later years. At argument sessions in the ornate courtroom, she was known for digging deep into case records and for being a stickler for following the rules.

She argued six key cases before the court in the 1970s when she was an architect of the women’s rights movement. She won five.

“Ruth Bader Ginsburg does not need a seat on the Supreme Court to earn her place in the American history books,” Clinton said at the time of her appointment. “She has already done that.”

On the court, where she was known as a facile writer, her most significant majority opinions were the 1996 ruling that ordered the Virginia Military Institute to accept women or give up its state funding, and the 2015 decision that upheld independent commissions some states use to draw congressional districts.

Besides civil rights, Ginsburg took an interest in capital punishment, voting repeatedly to limit its use. During her tenure, the court declared it unconstitutional for states to execute the intellectually disabled and killers younger than 18.

In addition, she questioned the quality of lawyers for poor accused murderers. In the most divisive of cases, including the Bush v. Gore decision in 2000, she was often at odds with the court’s more conservative members — initially Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist and Justices Sandra Day O’Connor, Antonin Scalia, Anthony M. Kennedy and Clarence Thomas.

The division remained the same after John Roberts replaced Rehnquist as chief justice, Samuel Alito took O’Connor’s seat, and, under Trump, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh joined the court, in seats that had been held by Scalia and Kennedy, respectively.

Ginsburg would say later that the 5-4 decision that settled the 2000 presidential election for Republican George W. Bush was a “breathtaking episode” at the court.

She was perhaps personally closest on the court to Scalia, her ideological opposite. Ginsburg once explained that she took Scalia’s sometimes biting dissents as a challenge to be met. “How am I going to answer this in a way that’s a real putdown?” she said.

When Scalia died in 2016, also an election year, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell refused to act on Obama’s nomination of Judge Merrick Garland to fill the opening. The seat remained vacant until after Trump’s surprising presidential victory. McConnell has said he would move to confirm a Trump nominee if Reached by phone late Friday, Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., the chairman of the Judiciary Committee, declined to disclose any plans. He said a statement would be forthcoming.

Ginsburg authored powerful dissents of her own in cases involving abortion, voting rights and pay discrimination against women. She said some were aimed at swaying the opinions of her fellow judges while others were “an appeal to the intelligence of another day” in the hopes that they would provide guidance to future courts.

“Hope springs eternal,” she said in 2007, “and when I am writing a dissent, I’m always hoping for that fifth or sixth vote — even though I’m disappointed more often than not.”

She wrote memorably in 2013 that the court’s decision to cut out a key part of the federal law that had ensured the voting rights of Black people, Hispanics and other minorities was “like throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet.”

Change on the court hit Ginsburg especially hard. She dissented forcefully from the court’s decision in 2007 to uphold a nationwide ban on an abortion procedure that opponents call partial-birth abortion. The court, with O’Connor still on it, had struck down a similar state ban seven years earlier. The “alarming” ruling, Ginsburg said, “cannot be understood as anything other than an effort to chip away at a right declared again and again by this court — and with increasing comprehension of its centrality to women’s lives.”

In 1999, Ginsburg had surgery for colon cancer and received radiation and chemotherapy. She had surgery again in 2009 after being diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and in December 2018 for cancerous growths on her left lung. Following the last surgery, she missed court sessions for the first time in more than 25 years on the bench.

Ginsburg also was treated with radiation for a tumor on her pancreas in August 2019. She maintained an active schedule even during the three weeks of radiation. When she revealed a recurrence of her cancer in July 2020, Ginsburg said she remained “fully able” to continue as a justice.

Joan Ruth Bader was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1933, the second daughter in a middle-class family. Her older sister, who gave her the lifelong nickname “Kiki,” died at age 6, so Ginsburg grew up in Brooklyn’s Flatbush section as an only child. Her dream, she has said, was to be an opera singer.

Ginsburg graduated at the top of her Columbia University law school class in 1959 but could not find a law firm willing to hire her. She had “three strikes against her” — for being Jewish, female and a mother, as she put it in 2007.

She had married her husband, Martin, in 1954, the year she graduated from Cornell University. She attended Harvard University’s law school but transferred to Columbia when her husband took a law job there. Martin Ginsburg went on to become a prominent tax attorney and law professor. Martin Ginsburg died in 2010. She is survived by two children, Jane and James, and several grandchildren.

Ginsburg once said that she had not entered the law as an equal-rights champion. “I thought I could do a lawyer’s job better than any other,” she wrote. “I have no talent in the arts, but I do write fairly well and analyze problems clearly.”

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Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is dead. The political battle starts now. (Guardian editorial comment)

Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death just over six weeks before Election Day is likely to set off a heated battle over whether President Donald Trump should nominate, and the Republican-led Senate should confirm, her replacement, or if the seat should remain vacant until the outcome of his race against Democrat Joe Biden is known, the Associated Press reports.

Ginsburg spent her final years on the bench as the unquestioned leader of the court’s liberal wing and became something of a rock star to her admirers. Young women especially seemed to embrace the court’s Jewish grandmother, affectionately calling her the Notorious RBG, for her defense of the rights of women and minorities, and the strength and resilience she displayed in the face of personal loss and health crises.

She resisted calls by liberals to retire during Barack Obama’s presidency at a time when Democrats held the Senate and a replacement with similar views could have been confirmed. Instead, Trump will almost certainly try to push Ginsburg’s successor through the Republican-controlled Senate — and move the conservative court even more to the right.

When Justice Antonin Scalia died in 2016, also an election year, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell refused to act on Obama’s nomination of Judge Merrick Garland to fill the opening. The seat remained vacant until after Trump’s surprising presidential victory. McConnell has said he would move to confirm a Trump nominee if there were a vacancy this year.

Reached by phone late Friday, Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., the chairman of the Judiciary Committee, declined to disclose any plans. He said a statement would be forthcoming.

KYBU COMMUNITY RADIO - A voice in the darkness - Volunteer station eases fears as wildfire nears Covelo

by Justine Frederiksen

It wouldn’t take much for the remote Mendocino County town of Covelo to be cut off completely from the rest of the world.

“There’s one paved road, one power line, one phone line and one cell tower,” said longtime resident Lew Chichester, one of the founders of the town’s all-volunteer radio station, KYBU Round Valley Radio. “There are also no fire hydrants here, because there’s no water system and everybody’s on a well.”

So when the August Complex Fire (now the largest wildfire in California history) began inching closer and closer to Round Valley this month, the community understandably grew worried. And their worry turned into panic last week when the skies suddenly turned “dark as night,” prompting Chichester to “go online and try to find out what the heck was going on. And there was no information anywhere.”

When the skies cleared the panic only intensified, because “then we could see flames. Before, we could just see the smoke, but when we could see the flames, and they were looking like they were coming over the pass toward the (Eel River), people started really freaking out,” he said.

And the Nixle alerts arriving on residents’ phones just made it worse, Chichester said, “since they had very little details, just told us there was ‘fire to the north, south and east of Covelo,’ which was really alarming. People didn’t know if they needed to evacuate, and they didn’t even know if they could go to Ukiah to get supplies, because they might not be able to get back home again if the road back in was closed.”

So Chichester, who has lived in Covelo for 50 years and has known Mendocino County Sheriff Matt Kendall since he was just one of the sons of the local Cal Fire captain, called up the sheriff to see how he could calm the fears of residents.

“And he suggested that we do these spots on the radio, so he and Lt. Shannon Barney, who also grew up in Covelo, could help people understand where the fire is, where it’s headed, what resources (firefighters) they have on it, whether they need to evacuate, and whether if they go to Ukiah, will they be able to get back here again?

“And those radio spots have been great, because the texts people have been sending me with questions really slowed down, and (Kendall) has been really great about assuring people that the fire is still miles away from Highway 162, the Covelo Road,” he said, adding that having people familiar with Covelo explaining the situation was invaluable, since many residents only two hours away in Ukiah have no idea where landmarks like Mexico Ridge and Indian Dick Road are, let alone the state and federal agency representatives who had been giving status updates on the fire.

“It’s so comforting having people who know the area describing where the fire is,” said Emily Ellickson-Brown, who helped found the station and manages its website as one of about 20 volunteers who keep the station running. She said residents of Covelo know that Mexico Ridge is where their only cell tower sits, and that Indian Dick Road was named after a man named Richard, “and locals don’t laugh at the name like others do.”

Chichester’s segments with Kendall and Barney are uploaded to the station’s website through an automated system created by volunteers Max Dunn and Eric Hoaglin, so anyone who doesn’t have a radio or missed the broadcasts can still listen. He said the first few updates were almost a half-hour long as he culled through all the questions residents had, “but now they’re much shorter, because I think people now really understand where the fire is, how they are fighting it, and what all these evacuation warnings and orders really mean.”

The station has also recently begun uploading segments in Spanish that are read by a bilingual member of the Sheriff’s Office.

Chichester said he feels very proud of his station and of what the all-volunteer crew has been doing lately, especially since he understands from accounts of events like Hurricane Katrina, “that a natural disaster becomes a catastrophe when the people start freaking out. It is the panic that makes it get out of control.”

How KYBU started

Chichester said the radio station began as a conversation on his porch one day after the community had raised a million dollars to build a library about 10 years ago.

“I was thinking that we had this great new building, and all this community support, and that I knew all these young people, including my kid, who had just completed college with degrees in communications, and had experience on their college radio stations, and I thought, ‘This is the time to start a radio station,’” he said, recalling that while researching how to get on the air, the group from his porch soon discovered someone had already acquired a construction permit for a radio repeater in Round Valley.

“Because here in the valley at the time, there were only two stations you could get if you were lucky: KMUD in Redway (southern Humboldt County), and KZYX (in Mendocino County),” he said.

Ellickson-Brown was on that porch with Chichester and his son Imil Ferrara, whom she met while both were studying at Vassar College, and remembers learning that the permit was owned by KOZT in Fort Bragg, which had planned to put a repeater on a cell phone tower that was never built.

“And KOZT became our godparents, because they just gave us the permit, which was going to expire in like three months,” she recalled, explaining that after KOZT also paid the fees to transfer the title and relocate the transmitter, the Covelo radio station founders began raising the $10,000 they needed for equipment, including their own “cell phone tower.”

“Which was just a really long pole we hoisted onto the library building,” Ellickson-Brown said with a laugh. In December of 2011, just before the permit was about to expire, KYBU went on the air. And while they waited for the former coffee shop in the building to be turned into a studio, she said, “we were broadcasting out of a closet, sitting there with the janitor’s mops.”

Several months later the North Pass Fire broke out in 2012, and as Ellickson-Brown was airing remote updates from the firefighters’ base in Covelo, “I thought, ‘This is why we started this station!’”

Nearly 10 years later, Ellickson-Brown said she has scaled back her work at the station to devote more time to her young son, but she and a core group of volunteers, as well as a steady supply of community donations, keep the station on the air.

“The licensing fees are a few thousand a year, and with all volunteers, it only costs about $800 a month to keep the station running,” Chichester said.

The station is on the air 24/7, so it also plays plenty of music that Chichester said was acquired after “we asked listeners to send us their favorite songs.”

Those thousands and thousands of songs were then divided into genres like folk and soul that are played during the day, and “things like hip hop that have profanity are played late at night,” he said.

There’s also a show called “Bulletin Board,” which Ellickson-Brown said is hosted by a woman named Sharon Mills, who “goes around town, taking photos of the posters on the bulletin boards and reads them on the air.” Other volunteers include Louisa Bolton-Ast, Rainbow Gibbs, Bill Cull, Jon Guisti, Terrance Planty, Ginny Chichester, Blaire AuClair, Suzanne Jung, Josh Bennett, Dixie DeBerry and Howard Wenz.

In normal times, the station raises money by “hosting parties with bands and free beer from local breweries, but of course we can’t do that now because of the pandemic. So we’ve been asking people to make donations, which they’ve been really good about.” And the station can accept such donations since it is officially a project of the Friends of the Round Valley Public Library, which is a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization.

The station also usually sells T-shirts at Covelo’s annual Blackberry Festival, which was canceled due to Covid, but Ellickson-Brown said the station found a way to bring at least its music to the valley this year.

“Lew and another volunteer curated a bunch of songs that have been recorded during the Blackberry Festival, like 60 hours worth, and we played them over an entire weekend, so you could listen and at least feel like you were at the festival,” she said.

Since 2020 is also a Census year, Chichester said the station has been running announcements urging residents to fill out the forms, especially since so much of the population in Covelo is Native American, which he described as “historically underrepresented in the Census.”

“And I don’t know if it will make a difference, but I figured we had to try,” he said. “Because how I understand it is, the Census is how the federal government allocates money to Mendocino County. And by last count they have 1,300 people living here. But I look around, and there’s at least 4,000 people here.”

(Courtesy, the Ukiah Daily Journal.)

SHERIFF'S BUDGET NOTES

ACCORDING to a detailed Sheriff's budget breakdown for this fiscal year (July 2020-June 2021), the largest expenditure besides base salaries is the County’s contribution to law enforcement retirement. The base department salary budget is about $8.1 million, the county contribution to law enforcement retirement is a little over $4.1 million. On top of that there's another expense line item of about $1.8 million entitled “County contribution retirement increment,” bringing the retirement cost in the Sheriff's budget to almost $6 million or about 75% of the base salary cost. 

ANOTHER INTERESTING LINE ITEM in the Sheriff's budget is the overtime budget. Overtime cost about $1.8 million two years ago and about $1.4 million last (fiscal) year. But the Board budgeted only about $750k for OT this year knowing full well that won't be anywhere near enough — besides the usual high-profile crimes that always come up causing overtime, there's the unprecedented wildfires that the Sheriff's department has to deal with (and will clearly continue until the fire season ends). Some of that OT may be reimburseable under emergency declarations, but you'd think that closer attention would be paid to this line item since it's going to require some very creative bookkeeping to balance. 

THE SHERIFF'S DEPARTMENT gets almost $7 million a year in outside (non-general fund) revenues, mostly from the Prop 172 law enforcement sales tax increment (also expected to be lower this year than budgeted) and state realignment funds. But the County general fund has to pick up the rest at about $14.5 million — which includes the $6 million in retirement contributions — (plus whatever large overtime overrun there is). 

THE SHERIFF'S BUDGET SUMMARY, a fairly clear and understandable chart, is in stark contrast to the departmental summaries found in the County's giant budget book, which are intentionally obscure and unreadable, larded as they are with jargon and abbreviations and grant breakouts that nobody can understand. Which is good for the obfuscating departments, of course, because it makes even the most basic oversight impossible. 

(Mark Scaramella)

EARLY COAST IMAGES

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FROM SUPERVISOR WILLIAMS:

Street Trash, Mendocino - BOS item 5c - September 22, 2020

Discussion and Possible Action Regarding Matters of Solid Waste Collection in the Town of Mendocino (Town of Mendocino Area)

Recommended Action/Motion:

Provide direction to staff on matters of solid waste collection in the Town of Mendocino (Town of Mendocino Area).

Summary of Request: 

In recent months, several county departments as well as the Fifth District Supervisor have begun receiving complaints of overflowing trash receptacles in the Town of Mendocino and waste strewn about on the sidewalks and streets, creating a health and safety issue. Upon investigation and internal discussion, it has become apparent there are several correlated but separate contributing factors. There are currently twenty-six public trash receptacles located within the Town of Mendocino that have been historically serviced by Empire Waste Management (EWM) under the Franchise Agreement for Solid Waste Collection Area Number Two. Collection occurs twice weekly May through September and once weekly the remainder of the year. The cost of this service is factored into the service rates for the collection area. The source of the waste problem appears to be a combination of illegal household dumping, receptacles filling up more quickly due to a sudden increase in to-go containers, and the design of the receptacles. 

As a short-term solution to the over-flowing receptacles, Department of Transportation (DOT) has authorized a third weekly collection through the end of September, with a total overall cost of approximately $3,000. This may help to alleviate the problem through the end of the peak tourist season. DOT plans to request a first quarter budget adjustment in Budget Unit 4510 (Solid Waste) to cover the cost of this temporary solution. Per the terms of the Franchise Agreement, after September 30th, the collection would normally be reduced from two days to one day. DOT has requested information from EWM regarding the feasibility and cost of adding an additional day of collection during the off-season.

Another contributing factor is the design of the receptacles. The current design allows for easy access by birds and other animals, which frequently spread the waste onto the sidewalks or streets. Additionally, the current non-locking receptacles can be opened and waste spread by people most likely searching for recyclables. DOT is working on an estimate of the cost to add locks to the receptacles and has requested from EWM an estimate of any additional cost to unlock and lock receptacle during pickup. Once these costs are known, the Board may consider replacing the receptacles with a better design or altering the current ones. Replacement would most likely require approval by the Mendocino Historical Review Board. Another topic related to the receptacles themselves is they could benefit from regular maintenance and cleaning, which currently is not occurring. The Board may want to consider options for contracting maintenance of the receptacles.

Lastly, illegal dumping of household waste next to the receptacles appears to be a large contributor to the issue. To curb illegal dumping, some municipalities have implemented mandatory collection in certain areas. Other municipalities have removed public trash receptacles altogether. Both strategies have proven effective in some areas and warrant discussion. 

The current Franchise Agreement will expire on June 30, 2021, and at that time will be rebid or renegotiated. In the short term, the Board may consider funding some of the additional costs; however, as a long-term solution, some of the costs and services could be negotiated into the next Agreement with a new rate structure to cover the cost of the additional services.

NO LIB LAB SHOULD BE WITHOUT ONE!

Biden-Harris yard signs

Another chance for a yard sign - this message from Jane Person:

If you would like a biden-harris yard sign, be at harvest market in Fort Bragg at 7:30 on saturday in the parking lot. Joe wildman from the Inland Democratic club is selling them at cost for $6. He won't stay long, so be on time.

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AND FOR YOUR FEMINIZED MAN....

Subject: Fwd: Signs for voting

Meg Courtney has 5 of these VOTING signs ready for hanging. If you would like one, contact her at mcourtney1@mcn.org. They are 22 x 22 with grommets to hang them by.

THE UKIAH STREETSCAPE PROJECT continues to take shape! The first of the new concrete is now visible—the curbs and gutters are being poured on the east side of State Street. Once this is done, crews will be installing conduit for lighting and irrigation, and then finally pouring the new sidewalks in about mid-October. 

On the south end of the project, underground utility work continues. In most of the downtown, the electric lines were already undergrounded. This project will extend that portion from Seminary to Mill, as well as replacing all of the water and sewer mains and laterals. 

North Side: Perkins to Henry Street 

Ghilotti Construction will continue the forming and pouring of concrete curbs and gutters on the east side of State Street between Perkins and Henry Streets. 

Monday-Friday: Curbs and gutters will be formed and poured on the east side of State Street, as well as on the west side between Henry and Smith Streets. 

During the week, Smith Street and East Standley Street may be intermittently closed for short periods of time. 

Work hours are from 7am to 5pm in this area this week; no night work is planned. 

Upcoming: Ghilotti is preparing to redo the sidewalks adjacent to the courthouse on Perkins, Standley, and State Streets (NOT the sides with businesses on them), though no construction is anticipated next week. 

South Side: Church to Mill Street 

Wahlund Construction continues to install new sewer lines this week. 

Monday-Friday: General excavation and sewer lateral work will occur between Mill and Church Streets. 

Through traffic will be maintained on State Street, but there will be some intermittent interruptions to Mill Street between Main and School Streets while the manhole in the intersection is accessed. 

Driveways on the west side of State Street will remain open with ramps. 

Construction work will begin at 7 am this week, and no night work is planned. 

As always, please feel free to contact me directly if you have questions. More information about the project can be found on our website at www.ukiahstreetscape.com.

— Shannon Riley, Deputy City Manager

CATCH OF THE DAY, September 18, 2020

JESSIE ANGUIANO-LOZANO, Willits. Failure to appear, probation revocation.

KYLE BYRNE, Ukiah. DUI-alcohol&drugs, suspended license (for DUI), paraphernalia, probation revocation.

DANIELLE DAUGHERTY, Ukiah. Probation revocation.

MICKEY HILL, Willits. Community supervision violation.

VINSON HILL, Ukiah. DUI, suspended license, failure to appear.

NATALIE MENDEZ, Ukiah. DUI.

JASON MILLS, Fort Bragg. Trespassing/failing to leave.

JASON REED, Elk. Domestic battery.

JAIME RODRIGUEZ JR., Ukiah. Parole violation.

MARTIN RODRIGUEZ, Santa Rosa/Ukiah. County parole violation.

TYLER ROWE, Willits. Domestic abuse, false imprisonment, probation revocation.

ERIC SEALE, Fort Bragg. Suspended licesne, protective order violation.

CARVONTE SIMON, Ukiah. Suspended license, probation revocation.

ELEA VANWORMER, Fort Bragg. Domestic battery, assault with deadly weapon not a gun, criminal threats, protective order violation.

FERNANDO ZARAGOZA-FERNANDEZ, Ukiah. DUI-alcohol&drugs.

ODD OLD NEWS: AFLOAT AND AFOOT, TRAVELS THROUGH MENDOCINO COUNTY INTO HUMBOLDT, PT. 3

Odd Old News returns to Reverend McDonald’s narration of the journey of a party of men who had determined to float down the Eel River. We resume their story where they set out following the drainage of Outlet Creek after leaving Sherwood Valley, presumably in the neighborhood of today’s Longvale. Even before they have reached the Eel River, the nature of the journey they have embarked upon begins to reveal itself.

kymkemp.com/2020/09/18/odd-old-news-afloat-and-afoot-travels-through-mendocino-county-into-humboldt-pt-3/

UKIAH VALLEY BASIN GROUNDWATER SUSTAINABILITY PLAN - online meeting affecting county economies here — virtual community meeting: Tuesday, September 29th at 6:00 pm

Zoom webinar link: https://mendocinocounty.zoom.us/s/95844745458

Join by Phone: 253 215 8782

Webinar ID: 958 4474 5458

The Ukiah Valley Basin Groundwater Agency is a public agency formed to sustainably manage groundwater in the Ukiah Valley Basin. The agency was formed in 2017 and is in the process of developing a local Groundwater Sustainability Plan in accordance with the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act (SGMA).

The Agency includes representatives from:

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• City of Ukiah
• Upper Russian River Water Agency
• Russian River Flood Control
• Tribal Community
• Agricultural Community

HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO KEN KESEY (9/17/1935 - 11/10/2001)

Novelist. Essayist. Merry Prankster. Counterculture icon.

Considered himself a link between the Beats and the hippies. Author of "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" (1962) and "Sometimes a Great Notion" (1964). Host of the "Acid Tests" in 1965-1966.

THE END

Editor:

Vote it in or out!

Democracy, where have you gone? Like all good things there will be an ending whether we like it or not. The Earth is a little closer to the sun every day/every year and one day will eliminate all life as we know it here on this planet.

Democracy, like the sun, every day, every year is losing its power. Democracy was given great consideration when it was brought to the fore. In these modern times this word, democracy, in practice is being misused and stretched far beyond its intent. That is, “it is my right not to—“ Burning the American flag on the courthouse steps, freedom of speech? Come on! And those sworn to keep the peace and uphold the laws stand by and do nothing. Even Nero did something. Look that one up in your history book, you ignaro, retard, beauties. You may learn something. Then again, I doubt it!

The race to build a better America is being elbowed out by flamers and skulking utopians shouting, Find a way to get in the way. Doesn't that blast of ignorance throw a cat in the chicken coop? You think!

It is evident to me and a few others there are those now seated in power seats who are on the other side or are about to retire and don’t want to take a chance losing a fat retirement payday.

Take your pick, doesn't matter! You lose!

Those wobbles don't want the masses to vote on name changes like Sir Francis Drake high school, Squaw Rock/Valley, Eskimo pies, Aunt Jemima syrup, Uncle Ben's rice and so on. What are we going to do with the Bible and dictionary loaded with words and terms and events that can be misconstrued as ethnic racisms? I know what you are thinking! It didn't work for Der Fuhrer.

The answer to all of the civil unrest in the so-called peaceful protests: starting with all city mayors: man/woman up and direct law enforcement to take aggressive action, use the laws on the books as allowed. If black or white is breaking the law go to jail. Those who throw bricks, fireballs, striking an officer after warnings, should be shot with real bullets! We need to get their attention with some awakenings to save a life that be their own. Caving in to these homegrown terrorists is not a meaningful solution. They want to get our attention. Well what's good for the goose is better for the gander!

After dispatching a few we could start them thinking, perhaps we should not be doing this.

Nah! Once a retard, always a retard. So the Green may be the answer. Soylent Green is/was a very old movie. Look it up. You may not like the ending!

Again my old Gran would say, My my, not nice. I'll bake some cookies for those poor misguided young uns. Again I say, hold it Gran, go out back and get some wood for the stove and grab an old rooster, I'll make the dumplings. Love you Gran.

Not to worry. If our God is too busy, Betsy and I will take care of those misguided!

God bless America, the Donald, Jerry Philbrick

Old and angry

Boonville

IT’S REAL. It’s not going away. I said this before, but Obama becoming the president, it’s progress for white people. It’s not progress for Black people. It’s the Jackie Robinson thing. It’s written like he broke a barrier, as if there weren’t Black people that could play before him. And that’s how white people have learned about racism. They think, when these people work hard enough, they’ll be like Jackie. And the real narrative should be that these people, the Black people, are being abused by a group of people that are mentally handicapped. And we’re trying to get them past their mental handicaps to see that all people are equal. Humanity isn’t progress — it’s only progress for the person that’s taking your humanity. If a woman’s in an abusive relationship and her husband stops beating her, you wouldn’t say she’s made progress, right? But that’s what we do with Black people. We’re constantly told that we’re making progress. The relationship we’re in — the arranged marriage that we’re in — it’s that we’re getting beat less.

— Chris Rock

IT'S TRAGIC how few people ever possess their souls before they die. Nothing is more rare in any man, than an act of his own. It is quite true. Most people are other people. 

— Oscar Wilde 

(Book: The Complete Letters of Oscar Wilde https://amzn.to/32l4atE)

"IF EVER A RIVER feels disgusted or humiliated or belittled because of the name that has been conferred upon it...this stream to which we have now come might justly do so. The name it bears on the maps is 'The South Branch of the Middle Fork of Eel River.'"

WILLITS TRAIN DEPOT

FORMER DER SPIEGEL JOURNALIST exposes US government lies that Assange “failed to redact” and “put lives at risk”

by Laura Tiernan

Award-winning investigative journalist John Goetz testified at Assange’s extradition hearing yesterday morning from Berlin, blowing out of the water US government claims that Assange had failed to redact names from US classified documents, placing the lives of US government informants at risk.

Goetz, Head of Investigations for German public broadcaster NDR, was a journalist at Der Spiegel when it partnered with WikiLeaks in 2010. He travelled to London in June of that year where he worked with Assange and senior journalists from the Guardian and New York Times on what later became known as the Afghan War Diaries.

Goetz had earlier worked on major stories for Der Spiegel exposing German war crimes in Afghanistan. These included the bombing in Kunduz ordered by German military officers in September 2009 resulting in civilian deaths. The story received a prestigious Nannen Award for investigative journalism.

Despite a half-hour time limit imposed by District Judge Vanessa Baraitser, Goetz comprehensively refuted the US indictment that Assange published “certain classified documents that contained the un-redacted names of innocent people who risked their safety and freedom to provide information to the US and its allies.”

His expert witness testimony established that the only “harm to life” came from US war crimes which Assange and WikiLeaks were trying to expose.

Mark Summers QC for the defence asked Goetz about the content of the Afghan files, “Were they anodyne, irrelevant?”

“They were a fascinating first-hand eyewitness diary of what was happening in Afghanistan during the war, as it was happening,” Goetz replied. “I ended up working together with Nick Davies on a story about Task Force 373, which was a kind of assassination squad that existed in Afghanistan and which became then a cover story for Der Spiegel.”

Task Force 373 was “something parallel to Operation Phoenix that existed in the Vietnam War, a team that went out and did assassinations … In the documents you could follow their activities. That hadn’t been known, and that’s why it was a major story at the time.”

A second witness statement submitted by Goetz related to the plight of German citizen Khalid el-Masri, whose story of CIA kidnapping, rendition, sodomy and torture Goetz had investigated in 2005-06. “At that point,” Goetz explained, “very few people believed it was true.”

Goetz later tracked down El-Masri’s CIA kidnappers in the United States. After NDR broadcast the story, Munich’s state prosecutor issued arrest warrants for each of the 13 CIA abductors, but the warrants were never issued in the US, where the perpetrators lived.

“When I finally saw the diplomatic cables, one of the first things I typed in was ‘Khalid el-Masri’ and I was fascinated to see the pressure that the United States had placed on the German government not to issue the arrest warrant in the United States,” Goetz recalled.

Goetz’s testimony established the “extreme” efforts Assange made to protect documents and redact names.

Recalling his own time in the Guardian’s “bunker,” Goetz said, “I remember being very annoyed and very irritated by the constant, unending reminders by Assange that we needed to be secure. That we needed to encrypt things, to use encrypted chats, and it was the first time in my life I had ever seen or used or touched a cryptophone. The amount of precautions around the safety of the material were enormous.”

Goetz admitted he had thought Assange’s focus on data security “paranoid and crazy, but later it became standard journalistic practice.” He recalled interviewing Assange at the Guardian’s downstairs restaurant in 2010, with Assange explaining that WikiLeaks’ harm minimisation process “was designed to protect innocents.”

The media partners’ own efforts at “harm minimisation” had involved contacting the White House, “[T]he New York Times team we were working with based in Washington, they had the connections, they knew how to reach the White House, and they sent a delegation to the White House to discuss their concerns about the publication.”

Straight after the White House meeting, the Times’ editor Erick Schmitt relayed a request for redactions, with WikiLeaks confirming they would redact 15,000 documents from the Afghan war logs. WikiLeaks said they would be open to receiving “technical assistance” from the International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan over the redaction of names, Goetz recalled.

With the Iraq War Logs, Goetz recounted, WikiLeaks had “overshot” the redaction process, publishing fewer documents than had already been released by the US Department of Defence under Freedom of Information.

WikiLeaks’ vetting and redaction process for the release of US diplomatic cables was tighter still. They were to be rolled out over the course of an entire year, on a country-by-country basis, with an expanded group of local media partners. Meanwhile, Assange’s initial media partners took a conference call from US State Department officials who cited document numbers to the journalists, “pointing out [the] things that were sensitive.”

As the 30-minute limit for the defence expired, Summers alluded to sections 30-31 of Goetz’s written evidence, citing the role of Guardian journalists Luke Harding and David Leigh in publishing a “codeword” created by WikiLeaks to protect unredacted cables, “Are you able to explain the process by which unredacted State Department cables came into the public domain if anybody wants to ask you?”

“Yes,” replied Goetz, explaining later under cross-examination that the only unredacted documents published by WikiLeaks were those already widely available via the Cryptome site, thanks to the Guardian’s own journalists.

James Lewis QC on behalf of the US government referred to a batch of 133,000 cables released by WikiLeaks in August 2011, prior to the Cryptome release. But Goetz explained these were unclassified. Moreover, as Summers established in his re-examination of Goetz, the main source for claims that Assange had placed the lives of US informants at risk was an article by LA Times journalist Ken Dilanian, later fired for sharing stories in advance with the CIA.

Lewis’s cross-examination of Goetz floundered on several occasions. He mixed up dates and appeared at one point to confuse the Afghan War Logs with the US State Department Cables. Lewis later tried to block the reading into evidence, in summary form, of expert witness testimony from Khalid El-Masri, claiming its sole motive was to prejudice his client, the US government.

wsws.org/en/articles/2020/09/17/assa-s17.html

BRINGING A BAZOOKA TO A KNIFE FIGHT

by James Kunstler

You heard it here first: Joe Biden will call in “sick” to the presidential candidates’ debate on Tuesday, September 29, and within days the Democratic Party will be obliged to replace him. Enough said for now. Wait for it….

Onto the election issue du jour: putting out ideological fires set by political arsonists: namely, the “systemic racism” hustle cooked up by “progressive” anarcho-terrorists to provoke hatred and division in a nation sore beset by propaganda, psy-ops, and seditious subterfuge — not to mention Covid-19 and economic collapse, as if those were not enough. This week, President Trump released an executive order halting all federal agency in-service training programs purporting to address “critical race theory,” “white privilege,” “unconscious bias,” and other hobgoblins of Wokesterism, a scam that has become a multimillion-dollar consulting racket funded by taxpayers.

Russell Vought, director of the Office of Management and Budget, sent a memo to executive branch agency heads directing them to identify all contracts or other agency spending related to any “propaganda effort that teaches or suggests either (1) that the United States is an inherently racist or evil country or (2) that any race or ethnicity is inherently racist or evil.” When the National Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) attempted to defy the order and go forward with training to “examine the mechanisms of “systemic racism, white supremacist ideology, and systems of structured inequality,” Mr. Vought had to remind the agency to cancel it. So it goes with “the Resistance.”

One consulting outfit, CAST (the Coalition to Abolish Slavery and Trafficking) has received $16-million from the Department of Education. At its August 2020 conference, attendees (including DOE staff) were told the United States has a “racial contract” that “says it’s okay for white people to kill blacks with immunity [sic]” (Did they mean impunity?). They also advocated abolishing prisons. The DOE press secretary says it’s investigating.

God knows what kind of swamp creatures lie embedded in the lower mudbanks of that agency, but at the top, at least, the department is cleaning up its act. DOE Secretary Betsy DeVos took aggressive action days ago after Princeton University President Christopher Eisgruber sent out an open letter to “the Princeton community” stating that “racism and the damage it does to people of color persist at Princeton” and that “racist assumptions” are “embedded in structures of the University itself.”

From the DOE to Mr. Eisgruber:

Okay, it being the case that Princeton officially claims to be a “racist” institution, the DOE has opened an investigation into Title VI violations under US Civil Rights law so as to recover the $75-million in federal funding Princeton has received since Mr. Eisgruber became president of the institution in 2013. Seems fair, dontcha think? The DOE has required Princeton to produce electronic records of every conceivable type — memoranda, emails, calendars, text messages, telephone logs, you name it — in order to determine whether Princeton has made false representation of its compliance with civil rights law — that is, if it is actually racist as its leadership claims it to be.

Princeton is given 21 “calendar days” (includes weekends) to comply. That ought to keep Mr. Eisgruber’s subalterns in the Office of Diversity and Inclusion quite busy in the weeks ahead, a monumental Chinese fire drill that can only end badly for the university. Either they have to come up with proof that Mr. Eisgruber’s asseverations are true — that Princeton is indeed, and has been for a long time, a racist school — or that Mr. Eisgruber and his administrative colleagues have constructed a false narrative to please and mollify the “social justice” mob among its own faculty and student body. In the first case, they are strictly evil; in the second, they are lying cowards. In either case, Mr. Eisgruber must resign, and several vice-presidents and deans along with him. Notify the Princeton board of trustees.

Next up: University of Chicago President Robert Zimmer, whose graduate school of English Language Studies announced that it is “accepting only applicants interested in working in and with Black Studies” for the 2020-2021 admissions cycle. (See official U of Chicago announcement.) Hmmmm, no studies at all of literature written by white people allowed? Sounds a little discriminatory, possibly even racist! How much funding are they getting from the US DOE?

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

IT COULD HAPPEN HERE

TRUMP’S CLIMATE DENIAL GAINS STRENGTH IF WE’RE IN DENIAL ABOUT HIS NEO-FASCISM

by Norman Solomon

Spiking temperatures, melting glaciers, rising seas, catastrophic hurricanes and unprecedented wildfires are clear signs of a climate emergency caused by humans. Denying the awful reality makes the situation worse. The same can be said of denial about the current momentum toward fascism under Donald Trump.

Trump’s right-wing base and leading Republicans are in lockstep with both types of denial. They embrace the most absurd claims about climate, such as Trump’s recent comment during a visit to fire-ravaged California that “I don’t think science knows, actually.” And they refuse to recognize or deplore his autocratic moves.

On the left, hardly anyone doubts the climate crisis. And there’s widespread recognition that Trump’s presidency is a full-blown emergency. But — with justified enmity toward the neoliberal corporatism and militarism of Joe Biden and the Democratic Party — some question or pooh-pooh the importance of ousting Trump with Biden.

Yet no one can credibly dispute, for instance, that Trump is increasingly aligned with white supremacy. Or that Trump is enabling more repressive actions by “law enforcement” and the courts. Any ambivalence about defeating Trump goes against the left’s historic responsibility to fight tooth and nail against the extreme right.

Winning that fight is a victory for humanity as a whole. It also allows space for the left to function instead of being crushed.

But — after nearly four years of the Trump presidency — a normalization process has made denial a real hazard.

The book How Fascism Works, by Yale professor Jason Stanley, describes the dynamic this way: “Normalization of fascist ideology, by definition, would make charges of ‘fascism’ seem like an overreaction, even in societies whose norms are transforming along these worrisome lines. Normalization means precisely that encroaching ideologically extreme conditions are not recognized as such because they have come to seem normal. The charge of fascism will always seem extreme; normalization means that the goalposts for the legitimate use of ‘extreme’ terminology continually move.”

Even now, despite all that Trump has done and is threatening to do, some progressives still have trouble wrapping their minds around the reality of the neo-fascist threat right in front of us in real time. The current “encroaching ideologically extreme conditions are not recognized as such because they have come to seem normal.”

One of the clearest voices about the intertwined perils of the climate emergency and the Trump regime is longtime Green Party activist Ted Glick, who has devoted decades of his life to organizing against climate disaster and a political system with corporate power dominating both major parties.

Nearly 20 years ago, Glick was the Green Party nominee for U.S. senator in New Jersey. In 2007 he went on a “climate emergency fast” (water-only for 25 days) to protest the federal government’s failure to take action on global warming. In 2010, he hung banners inside a Senate office building that said “Green Jobs Now” and “Get to Work,” risking up to three years in prison.

“There are an awful lot of reasons why it is so important for Trump to be defeated and removed from the White House, but I continue to believe that the most important one is the climate crisis,” Glick wrote last week.

“There is no question but that the climate issue is very much connected to many other issues, among them the issues of jobs, poverty, immigration, health care, racism, and war and peace,” he pointed out. “That is why the concept of and the organizing for a Green New Deal must be central not just to the climate movement but to the movement of movements which, alone, can make it happen once Trump is out of the White House.”

And Trump will only be out of the White House four months from now if Biden receives enough votes in swing states this fall.

Glick’s conclusion rings true: “Removing Trump is the prerequisite for everything else. Those who don’t get that on the left should really ponder what will happen to the world’s disrupted ecosystems and the billions of people reliant on those ecosystems under a second Trump administration and beyond. We must do all we can in the next two months to literally save the world.”

Climate change is an emergency. And so is Trumpism. Flames are approaching what’s left of democratic structures in the United States.

Stopping the advent of fascism doesn’t offer any assurance of being able to create the kind of society and world that we want. But failing to stop the advent of fascism would assure that we won’t.

(Norman Solomon is executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy, where he coordinates ExposeFacts. Solomon is a co-founder of RootsAction.org.)

CAN TRUMP RIG THE ELECTION?

Greg Palast does not mince words about the 2020 elections.
Only the voter fraud he warns about is not by the voters, as President Trump insists. It’s by the vote-stealers in the Republican Party. And they’ve been at it for a long time, unbeknownst to the American people.

counterpunch.org/2020/08/21/how-to-rig-an-election-an-interview-with-greg-palast/

'A SAVAGELY BROKEN FOOD SYSTEM': Cory Booker wants radical reform ... now

US senator says everybody loses – except the massive corporations that have taken over America’s food industry

theguardian.com/environment/2020/sep/15/a-savagely-broken-food-system-cory-booker-wants-radical-reform-now

I CANNOT FUCKING BELIEVE the drivel about overpopulation still oozing out of so many not-okay boomers. Racist, misogynist, and stupid from the outset, the idea that population alone is responsible for a host of evils has been debunked in approximately ten million good essays, and yet still the sludge pours forth. Fuck Paul Erlich and his eugenicist ‘The Population Bomb’ (published in 1968), which led to epic forced sterilization campaigns. Fuck everyone who doesn't know how thoroughly off his dire predictions have proven to be, and how important feminist bodily self-determination was to that, and how when it comes to climate it's not sheer numbers but the actual carbon footprint of various populations, which is, yeah, about both scale of consumption and source of power, and all the rest we cleared up long ago when they were already not listening.

PS. "The world population growth rate declined from 2.2% per year 50 years ago to 1.05% per year." And: Sierra Magazine, 2019: "This mind-set doesn't take into account the fact that wealthier nations with smaller populations produce more greenhouse gas emissions per capita than poorer nations with larger populations. Then there's the fact that millions of women around the world still don't have control over whether, when, or how often they become pregnant. That's a human rights travesty, and it's also bad for the environment… But myopic, outdated ideas continue to creep into public discourse about population. In their most extreme forms, they manifest in racist, xenophobic, and even violent ways. The killers behind the mass shootings in New Zealand and El Paso, Texas, referenced overpopulation and environmental degradation as reasons to target immigrants, many of whom are fleeing the devastating impacts of climate change in their home countries. Such eco-fascist rhetoric has no place in the environmental movement."

— Rebecca Solnit

CHRISTIAN FUNDAMENTALISTS burning Beatles records Alabama, 1966

DOWN WITH THE LEAF BLOWER!

Editor: 

Noisy, polluting tools—

We look back to dangerous practices we once accepted and wonder how could it have been allowed. In the future, we will do the same for gas-powered lawn equipment.

Carried on one’s back, a two-cycle, gas-powered leaf blower gives off in a short time the same pollution as a new car driven a few thousand miles.

Sixty-one California cities, including some in the North Bay, and 350 cities across the U.S. ban these devices, and so will the state of California, hopefully, in a few years. Until then, in Santa Rosa we face daily these extremely noisy, highly polluting, cancer-causing Civil War relic monstrosities.

And for what? For a few of nature’s leaves on a lawn or driveway? Is a perfectly manicured lawn more important than the harm we do to our environment and to our health? Electric equipment is so much quieter and so much less polluting. Better yet, a rake.

David Charp

Santa Rosa