Letters (October 21, 2020)

• Garcia Grange/Guild At The Brink
• Uglification Via Overharvest
• Soft Science
• A Dollar For Tommy Wayne
• What’s At Stake
• Wine Yuppies & Weak Knees
• Eel River Dreams
• Fo Mo
• Too Bad
• Understanding Trumpism
• Give ’Em Cookies
• Trump: Worse Than Nixon
• Wake Up, Cloverdale

GARCIA GRANGE/GUILD AT THE BRINK

Editor,

It is with a heavy heart that we on the Garcia Guild board must inform our membership and the community that has supported us of the following: the California State Grange has begun suing local guilds around the state of California to take over the organizations, buildings and assets. The Garcia Guild is one of many guilds that has been sued by the California State Grange. 

The Garcia Guild board which has been managing the Manchester community center has maintained that the building and assets belong to our local community. In the midst of preparing for the lawsuit the Garcia Guild was informed by its insurance company that the board officers’ insurance would not cover the Garcia Guild in a defense against this lawsuit.

The Garcia Guild has been advised by a number of attorneys that it would cost approximately $100,000 to pay for an attorney to defend against this lawsuit. Meanwhile, the California State Grange won a judgment against the Fort Bragg/Inglenook community center. The Fort Bragg/Inglenook community center, like the Garcia Guild, was formerly a Grange.

Based on the prohibitive costs for the Garcia Guild to defend against a lawsuit filed by the California State Grange and the potential negative impact of the judgment in the Fort Bragg/Inglenook community center’s case, the future of the Garcia Guild and the Manchester community center is uncertain.

The Garcia Guild is working to retain an attorney to assist with the resolution of this lawsuit within the resources currently available. We will do our best to keep you informed during this difficult process.

Susan Levinson Palmer

President, Garcia Guild

Manchester

UGLIFICATION VIA OVERHARVEST

Editor:

As you may have read in a recent article in the Independent Coast Observer, Gualala Redwood Timber continues to put profit before our environment. They are now pushing in your face timber harvests that will deface our viewscapes.

It's one thing to destroy habitat in remote areas that they won't let you trespass on. Now they have the temerity to “uglify” the beautiful scenery that you have come to take for granted along Annapolis Road.

GRT knows no shame and they will trod on you and your sensibilities like they would a red legged frog. They are doing similar work in Guerneville where local people are coming together to fight them.

As usual, the Department of Forestry is rigged to support their lumber production over protection of habitat; and now our habitat. This is hitting close to home folks. Our viewskape is part of our very own habitat. We humans. Get it? GRT does not care about residents of habitats.

While they are being fought in court, GRT has its lawyers and they benefit from Calfire's lawyers who are paid with taxpayer money to support the environmental transgressions of GRT. We are paying them to resist the people's efforts to protect habitat.

By all means write to Calfire and your politicians. GRT is owned by Redwood Empire, a division of Pacific States Industries Inc. which is owned by the Burch family. They have a website and they like to talk about how they sustainably harvest timber.

But their algorithm does not take into account habitat. They manage their forest holdings for marketable tree products with the vision of a plantation owner, not for other life forms or your very eyes. So much collateral damage. Redwood Empire's website is buyredwood.com. Get it?

They invite contact. Let them know what you think.

Nicholas Pinette

Point Arena

SOFT SCIENCE

Editor:

Regarding the Valley People item of October 7 in which the Editor asked Boonville high school principal about history requirements for students --

It's interesting to me how history and most of the social sciences save for psychology which now is a lucrative field have little prestige or career potential. This is in comparison to the hard sciences and the business/economics field.

I have always been interested in a social science that Americans are woefully ignorant in, geography. There was predictably no geography class offered at my high school in the early 1980s. Fortunately I have an uncle who was a high school teacher and during my sophomore year in high school he got me a World Geography Today textbook.

To me the issue seems to be a male/female bias that the hard sciences and the business fields are male, and the social sciences are female and “soft.”

But then again during my one year at UC Davis as a geography major in the late 80s I ran into a female acquaintance from high school and when I told her that my major was geography her face took on a pained expression and she spat out, “What can you do with that?”

So I guess some modern females see the social sciences as “soft.”

Keith Bramstedt

San Anselmo

A DOLLAR FOR TOMMY WAYNE

To the Editor:

I’d like to give a big thanks to Tommy Wayne Kramer for his eye-opening statement about homelessness expressed in his last Sunday column. While he has clearly demonstrated a total lack of understanding about why we have homeless issues at the federal, state, county and local levels and he has not previously given us even the slightest hint of how he would deal with these issues, he has brought an interesting idea to the discussion. In a simple minded paragraph in that column he has reminded us of the good old days when we could hand a quarter to a street beggar and presumably solve their problems. Tommy pointed out how much cheaper that was than today’s efforts by non-profits.

By honoring his approach I will donate a dollar, to account for inflation, to Tommy to give to that poor beggar so they can solve their homeless problem forever. Tommy should be willing to do this even though it will take some buzz out of his future columns. He may have to resort to the humor that occasionally seems to occur to him.

Mike Pallesen, Ukiah

WHAT’S AT STAKE

To the Editor:

Trustworthy people tell us that Amy Coney Barrett is smart and nice, as if that decides the question whether she should be made a Supreme Court justice. 

But the court has had plenty of smart, nice members who were terrible justices, just as there have been great justices who were neither. What the Supreme Court requires is good judgment and a sense of justice, neither of which is particularly correlated to being loved by friends or to loving one's family.

We don't know much about Judge Barrett's judgment or sense of justice, and she did her best at her confirmation hearings to keep it that way. 

What we do know is that she has been aggressively promoted by radical movement conservatives and that she was chosen by a president who has dedicated himself to putting such conservatives on the court.

To think she is anything other than a radical movement conservative assumes that the people who have promoted her are incompetent in advancing their agenda. And whatever one may think of them or their agenda, they have been anything but incompetent in advancing it.

Can we at least stop pretending that there's any question about what she'll do on the court?

Larry Kramer

San Francisco

(Ed note: The writer is president of the William & Flora Hewlett Foundation and former dean of Stanford Law School.)

WINE YUPPIES & WEAK KNEES

Editor,

One of the reasons we are having so many fires around is all the overstory of foliage in different places, like the national forests and where ranches used to be but are not anymore. The winery yuppies coming up here from the Bay Area have bought most of it up. They refuse to have any livestock. So the grass grows up to 4 feet high and nobody is out wandering in the countryside to make sure things are OK. Then you have a fire start and the wind might be blowing which we have no control over and you end up with a hell of a fire. It's happening all over California. No land management, no controlled burning, no nothing. It's going to get worse and worse. If you think 400 million burned acres is a lot, wait till next year, or even this year yet. We still have the rest of October and November.

If we let a weak kneed politician like Joe Biden get in for president, this country is done for. The Liberals will take over and there will be no more peaceful days in the United States because they will ruin everything we have built for them in the last 150 years. All down the drain.

Joe Biden has always been a weak kneed politician. Donald Trump is a strong man with the right ideas for the United States. He's done so much in four years with all this opposition from liberals. It's amazing what he's accomplished. We need him for four more years.

God bless Donald Trump

Jerry Philbrick

Comptche

EEL RIVER DREAMS

Dear AVA:

Even though we don't live in the ’hood, we love it and we are always hoping to do so one day, maybe live on the land we own with two other families on the north fork of the Eel River.

It's most likely burning right now, maybe fodder for the backfiring being done “preventively” in many unnamed places. Ah well.

We've been reading your paper on the net quite a bit and decided it's time to put some money into your remarkable efforts. Thanks for your great, honest, fearless journalism!

Wayne & Jutta Collins

Berkeley

FO MO

To the Editor:

I would like to support Mo Mulheren for County Supervisor for the Second District. She has been the greatest supporter of the rail trail here in Ukiah. I live very near the trail and I have seen personally its transition from a largely alienated population to a majority of bicyclists and walkers, families and children, joggers and dog walkers (with leashes!). It's not perfect, but it's a huge change and getting more popular. I think Mo has been the most active in bringing attention to the trail, strongly supporting and coordinating trails financing plus her energy in creating walking tours, murals, sculptures and attractive plantings. For her energy and persistence, I support Mo for supervisor.

Roy Krausen

Ukiah

TOO BAD

Editor: 

It is extremely disturbing to learn that some folks think it is OK to take down or vandalize political signs that others might have put up in their own yards. This has happened before, and it is happening again now. Others think it is OK to deface public signage with political slogans.

It doesn’t matter for which candidate, or for whatever office a candidate is running for, if your neighbor wants to put up a sign to show personal support that is your neighbors right as a citizen. If you don’t like it, well, that’s too bad. You do not have the right to vandalize or destroy your neighbor’s, or anyone else’s yard-signs, just because you don’t like the candidate or position your neighbor supports. It all comes down to the basic and essential concept of treating others as you would have them treat you. More simply put, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”

Jonathan Lehan

Fort Bragg

UNDERSTANDING TRUMPISM

Editor, 

I keep hearing people who are confused about Trump’s support. “How can they when he --”? Christians supporting a man so unchristian, poor and unemployed people supporting a man who flaunts his wealth, loggers supporting a fat old man with dyed hair and face makeup like an aging queen?

He gives them back their dignity. He makes them feel powerful. He shits on their class enemies every day on TV that they watch. He denigrates science -- which is the religion of their class enemies. That's why they forget or ignore his personal self. He is taking care of their business. When we moan they cheer -- he proves that he is effective. Stop asking why and start asking how we restore the worth and dignity of the people which our brilliant world has left behind. If we allegedly smart people don't figure this one out disaster for us is just around the corner. The brownshirts are chanting in the stadiums.

Michael Nolan

Comptche

PS. Our brilliant international socioeconomic creation has eliminated most of the entry-level jobs in which many of us first earned our own money and entered the world of work. And then next the jobs which a person of modest intelligence could do competently. Elevator operator, milkman, drill press operator, telephone operator, typist, automobile assembly line, food prep. Mostly lost by automation -- ATMs, robots, more efficient management of resources and time with better equipment and education. Some outsourced (the displaced workers never blame the plant owners who sent their job to China read no, they blame China). That's the basic problem. About half of us are below average intelligence. The new employment reality rewards people who are of above average intelligence and offers little social or economic benefit for the below average intelligent.

In my teens a guy could graduate from high school, go to work on the line at Ford or GM, get married, buy a new two-bedroom house, have a homemaker wife and a couple of kids in a three year old car, a two week vacation and maybe even a season ticket for the Tigers. None of that is possible for him today.

She has graduated from UC with a degree in biometrics, goes to work at Apple and he is an attorney, they are buying a new condo, they decided to wait to start a family until he makes partner, three-year lease on a BMW. Maui vacation. Golf at the club.

It is getting increasingly difficult for a high school grad to live a middle-class life. It used to be normal. He knows about that time and wants it back. He and his good wife want 1957 back. Their mental wattage is too low to grasp how complex the elements reacting together have resulted in this moment and how impossible it is to reconstruct those particular conditions: the rise and fall of countries, the power of dispersed knowledge, the new materials and methods the science that they can't understand has wrought. They attribute their loss to politics. To the erosion of the social standards and religious beliefs that would ensure their prosperity and standing in their community. The shameless coarsening of our entertainment. They look to the past to cure the present. The successful look to the future to cure the present.

GIVE ’EM COOKIES

Letter to the editor:

“Rights”? Give ‘em cookies!

Re: a letter in the October 7 AVA by Cindy Young of Santa Rosa --

My dear Santa Rosan, Ms. Young:

I am of the opinion your letter on teen voting is heartfelt but smacks of visionary utopianism.

I am also of the opinion you must be a shut in with no that is zero connection with current events associated with the younger generation. You may be institutionalized with no newspapers, no radio, no television. If you had any of the aforementioned and/or outside contact you would then be able to grasp the truth and understanding you unfortunately have been deprived of. This ongoing increase of covid 19 and destructive (peaceful, yeah right!) protests can be placed at the doorstep of our late bloomer teens. Like it or not, take your head out of your bleep, the sand. The truth is sometimes very hard to accept. You and others are in some cases just adding another arrow in their quiver of discontent. It should not be vote and grow up, but rather grow up and vote, 21.

Your governor, Mr. Cave-In Nuisance, has previously stated that our 25 and under Yutes do not have all fully develop cognitive powers and in an unknowing state are breaking laws. What? Gramps calls them brain-dead. In any event your governor has asked the court system to show leniency when sentences are given out. Let's close our eyes, hold our breath and then say, okay Governor, let's say you are on to something, tongue in cheek! How in hell can we then turn around and give these acknowledged retards the power to vote at a lower age of 18? Come on, you must have a gradeschool education!

A potential problem might be these Yutes being allowed to vote then turning around and setting the polling places on fire. After that adding insult to injury complaining that their vote does not count! A stretch perhaps, get the point?

Sometime past an on the street interviewer in New York asked two young ladies about 18 who would you like to see run for the new president and vice president in the next election? They agreed Da and DaDeDah would be their choice. Again asked, And what do you like about their platform? These two girls looked at each other and tittered and said “What platform? We just think they’re cute.” There you have it. A well-thought-out vote from the well educated teens. God help us!

As seen on TV news hundreds and thousands of 18-year-olds are gathering in close contact at beach clubs. Churches with no masks with a marked increase of covid 19 cases being recorded. Over half the country is on a steep incline. For some unknown reason these teens showed no concern for themselves or anyone else. Sad! Sad!

On the East Coast a large group of teens started a cash pool for the first one to get sick of covid 19 who would win the cash. For what? Perhaps for gravesite flowers. And who said these teens are without malice of forethought? When we have teens that bet placing money on sickness with no concerns of death, how in the world can anyone allow the 18-year-olds to vote on health care matters at the polls? And other matters they could care less about?

Yet you and I feared time and time again, It's my right not to wear those masks. Right on sweet cheeks, and it is also your right to get sick and your right to die! But what you fail to recognize is it is not your right to give your grandma and others your sickness. Doesn't require a PhD in astrophysics to understand that keeping six feet distance and wearing a face mask could save your life. But it helps!

There are thousands of teens with three or four or five credit cards maxed out and unusable that may be paid up by their parents or grandparents. Poor planning, you think? And you want to give these retards the right to vote? I don't think so!

Even Pandora, Medusa’s sister, would have concerns about this. We are very close to the bottom of the box with little hope remaining. Look that one up in your Greek book of mythology.

When we see the vast majority of youths 18 or so wearing masks and keeping distances and controlling credit card spending and showing they are concerned about others' welfare I would say they could vote at 18. We have two chances of this coming to fruition: slim and none. I think I saw Slim getting on the out-of-town bus to Milpitas.

Gran said, We got off his stool and urine test back from the clinic this morning and they think he may have a bad case of swamp ass. My my! I think I'll put a little cement dust in his morning oatmeal. That may not cure him but I won’t have to scrub his shorts with that stiff Navy brush and lye soap anymore. No more peanut butter and cookies for Pops. Love you Gran!

God bless America, the Donald, Jerry Philbrick and the Kracken,

Very old and very angry

Boonville

TRUMP: WORSE THAN NIXON

Dear Mr. Anderson,

The Senate Bipartisan Report Vol. 5, describes hundreds of actions by Trump, his campaign, and his associates in the run-up to the 2016 election that involve participation by Trump and associates in Russian activity. 

1. The Trump campaign was run for a time by a man with an ongoing business relationship with a Russian intelligence operative, to whom he gave proprietary internal polling data.. 

2. Trump’s campaign, and later transition, were filled with a remarkable number of people who had secret interactions with Russian actors, about which they lied.. 

3. All of this activity, amounts to a grave set of counterintelligence concerns, which any number of Trump campaign figures—including Trump himself—exposed themselves to coercive pressures from adversary foreign actors.. 

The over 900 page report summary can be found at www.lawfareblog.com and shows the Mueller Investigation was not a hoax, but based on very real U.S. National Security Concerns. 

Speaking of Useful Idiots… after former Ukrainian parliamentarian Andriy Derkach, who's been feeding dirt on Joe & Hunter Biden to Rudy Giuliani, was identified by the U.S. Treasury Department as “an active Russian agent.” Giuliani explained, “There's nothing I saw that said he was a Russian agent.” The Week News, 9-25 20 So FOX News viewers get dumb Russian Propaganda, as “News” straight from Trump's lawyer Giuliani. 

Also, it's false to say it's BOTH Democrats & Republicans equally corrupt. Trump's first term has brought 215 criminal indictments, and 7 convictions of senior Trump officials. 

No indictments or criminal conduct found in eight years of Obama, including the Benghazi-Clinton “scandal.” Ten investigations, no indictments! 

So it's Trump who has three times as many criminal indictments as Nixon even, one of the MOST Corrupt Ever. A New Record! 

Best Regards,

Rob Mahon

Covelo

WAKE UP, CLOVERDALE

Editor: 

Cloverdale residents may want to check out their city’s intention to double water and sewer rates for all residential customers. The city’s process for raising rates requires individuals to vote by sending the city an objection to the rate increase. Alternatively, if a parcel owner or renter doesn’t object in writing, their parcel will be counted as a vote for increasing water and sewer rates by more than 100% when combined.

Of roughly 3,300 service locations in the city, half will need to vote against the increase to prevent the rise in cost. The city appears to be betting that won’t happen because of a lack of information made readily available to residents, a lack of notices to all ratepayers and, most deviously, making the default vote a yes on the increase.

I encourage all ratepayers in Cloverdale to contact the city office or council members for information regarding the intended rate increase of more than 100%.

Craig Carni

Cloverdale