Off the Record (June 30, 2021)

CONSERVATIVE DEMOCRATS of the Pelosi-Schumer type locked down the Northcoast for the foreseeable future with the election of Jared Huffman to Congress in 2013, the irony ever since being that Northcoast Democrats are predominantly soft left Bernie types, or to the left of Huffman certainly. A Bernie progressive, Norman Solomon, ran against Huffman in the primary but lost, perhaps to some slick maneuvering by the secret society-like Democratic insiders who choose our candidates for us these days. The insiders, I suspect, encouraged a gang of fagged out, unserious old hippies to also register for that Demo primary who took enough votes away from Solomon to give us Huffman forever, or the dissolution of the United States, whichever comes first.

SOME OF US will remember the heady year, 1990, when there was still somewhat of a coherent left on the Northcoast, because ’90 was the year the last gasp Peace and Freedom Party ran Darlene Comingore against the conservative, sorta kinda liberal, Doug Bosco, taking enough votes from Bosco to knock him out of Congress, but electing the last Republican likely to be elected to national office from the 2nd District, Frank Riggs, a comb-across ex-cop from Sonoma County. Riggs did one good thing in office — he voted against the Gulf War Resolution. Most Congressional libs, natch, including our current president, voted for it, thus destabilizing the entire world to this day. 

RIGGS LASTED two terms until he was unseated by Dan Hamburg, Ukiah’s eternal Hamlet, then Riggs roared back to unseat Hamburg for a third term. Then Thompson beat Riggs, and the Republicans then disappeared from the Northcoast, although a jolly fellow named Stan Anderson of Fort Bragg always appears at the Boonville Fair, most recently with a cardboard cutout of Trump. He’s the only visible Republican in Mendocino County. These days, the Republicans don’t even bother to run candidates in the heavily lib-gerrymandered 2nd Congressional District, although a token Garberville guy, a market clerk apparently innocent of class consciousness, appears every two years on the ballot as a Republican. 

IN ’97, Riggs made the national news when protests in his seldom visited Eureka office saw several women lock themselves to a log in his office, where they stayed until the Eureka cops, one of them carefully rolling back the ladies’ eyelids and wielding cue tips dipped in liquid pepper-spray, applied the substance directly on their eyeballs. Riggs of course had described the locked-down women as “terrorists.” Consensus national opinion was that roll-on pepper spray to the eyeballs was excessive, that there had to have been a less violent means to extract the ladies from the congressman’s office.

SALLY ‘COMPOST’ was one of the young women who had her eyes swabbed with the pepper concoction in Riggs’ office. “It was very painful for about an hour,” she said, “and still painful for another few hours; my eyes still hurt the next day when I woke up. They hurt for a couple of days.” When the four demonstrators were hauled off to jail, where they languished for several days, kindly matrons offered to spray water in their faces and offered them a cleansing saline solution. Sally describes the offered assistance as “debatably helpful.” Sally chuckled when she said she had no idea where the Eureka PD had come up with the idea to swab pepper compound directly onto the eyeballs of demonstrators. She said she was pretty sure that Pacific Lumber had dropped all charges against demonstrators in an earlier demo where the direct application of pepper had first debuted. Sally insisted that Riggs’ ski mask allegation, as in ski-masked intruders bursting through his office door, was “a complete fabrication.” She said one kid had the hood of his sweat shirt pulled up, but that no one had worn ski masks before, during or after the occupation of Riggs’ office.

VIDEOS taken by Riggs staffers, one of whom, turning on the show biz tears two weeks after the event when she suddenly became traumatized by the sit down occupation of the Congressman’s office, show a female staffer calmly locking the office door from the inside and laughing to the locked-down demonstrators that the pictures she was taking of them were for “Riggs’ scrapbook.”

AS IT HAPPENED, Ms. Compost was resting her badly abused peepers over in Covelo when I talked to her, lo these many years ago. She’d learned that Riggs himself had promised Covelo school authorities to appear to tout some scheme he claimed to have for rewarding schools that cut down on their dropout rates. Sally hoped to take advantage of Riggs’ Covelo appearance to talk to him about her experience in his office. Riggs sent an aide by the name of Berkowtiz who fielded complaints from Ms. Compost about the Congressman’s bonehead lies about the pepper spray incident. The bland flak catcher for Riggs took it all in, not that any correction of the record is likely.

WE’RE a one-party state these days in the vast 2nd Congressional District, but if the Republicans ever manage to corral all the closet Trumpers in the area, they might again manage to contest an election.

PICKED UP an ancient Good Housekeeping-type mag the other day in the dentist’s waiting room and came across a piece by, of all people, the novelist Jay McInerney (Big City, Bright Lights), called “What Goes with Turkey?” Mac says, “Good companions for turkey include burgundy, champagne, zinfandel, Pinot Noir, Gewurztraminer, and rose champagne,” which seems a roundabout way of saying any liquid with alcohol in it.

STEVE ROSENTHAL reminded me on-line last week that Stan Anderson is not Mendocino County's most prominent Republican or Trumper. Al Kubanis, the Ukiah lawyer, with offices at State and Perkins, and a Trump placard prominent in his window, wins the ubiquity trophy. Congratulations, Al.

TRUMP BUMPERSTICKERS? Pretty scarce on the Northcoast until you get to Crescent City or anywhere east of 101, and I can’t recall even a single Trump bumpersticker around here, although Orange Man pulled 31% of the Mendo vote, while Biden garnered 56.5%, Greens 2%, Gloria LaRiva, a partisan of North Korea, pulled 176 Mendo votes, 5 of which came from the Anderson Valley (!) 

OVERALL in Mendo, Trump did well in Deerwood, Ukiah's haute bourgeois suburb east of town, but the Orange Beast did best of all in several Redwood Valley precincts where he won more votes than Biden. 

IN ANDERSON VALLEY, Biden racked up 676 votes from deluded libs, while at the even crazier end of the spectrum, Trump got 189 votes in AV, the Greens 14 votes, Libertarians 12. How about you, Mr. Smarty Pants Editor? I felt the Bern to the bitter end, writing him in.

ACCORDING TO THE NY POST, Joe Biden seems to have partly funded a series of 2018 sordid nights his son Hunter enjoyed with a mercantile woman at Hollywood's Chateau Marmont Hotel, as revealed by text messages and receipts obtained from Hunter's laptop, which Hunter had forgotten to retrieve from a repair shop. 

DURING their several days holed up in the hotel, the two of course had carnal relations, downed lots of vodka, and filmed pornography, whether their own or others wasn’t specified, while Hunter smoked crack. At one point Hunter balanced a line of M&Ms on his erect penis, this breakthrough performance also memorialized in files stored on the laptop Hunter abandoned for repairs. 

BUT HUNTER apparently overpaid his playmate, “Yanna,” by some $25,000 charged to dad's credit card. (She had righteously earned $8,000.) When the credit card discrepancy was spotted by the Secret Service, an agent texted Hunter that he'd paid Yanna out of an account tied to his father. “Come on H, this is linked to Celtic's account,” the agent texted, using the Secret Service code name for Joe Biden when he was vice president. “DC is calling me every 10. Let me up or come down. I can't help if you don't let me H.” “I promise be right down. Sorry.” Hunter answers.

EXACTLY HOW do you balance M&M's on an erect penis? I guess Yanna asks, “Hunter, you want what to do what with?” Hunter replies, “Only the yellow ones, Yanna. They'll show up better on film.”

WHEN THE FOX FROTHERS refer to the “Biden Crime Family” they aren't as far off as they usually are. Hunter, distractions with Yanna and his crack pipe notwithstanding, was pulling down $80 grand a week sitting on the board of a Ukranian power company, and who knows how much from the Chinese he was also name-trading with.

THIS ROUTINE KEEN TEEN CASE got all the way to the Supreme Court? 

When 14-year-old Brandi Levy of Mahanoy City, Pennsylvania didn't make the varsity cut as a freshman cheerleader for the Mahanoy Golden Bears, she sounded off on social media, as teenagers are known to do. “I was frustrated. I was upset. I was angry. And I made a post on Snapchat,” Levy told ABC News Live. “I said, 'F school, F cheer, F softball, F everything'.” And for spouting off on her own time after school, her high school suspended her. Brandi made a federal case out of it and won. 

UKIAH has been flummoxed for years about what to do with the Palace Hotel, one irony being that it's Ukiah's most attractive large structure although it's been abandoned for forty years. Here's my idea, Ukiah, and I waive consulting fees: Announce that you will give the property to anyone who can prove they have the means and the serious intent to rehab it. The Hopland Hotel, betcha, cost more to rehab than the Palace would, and it's an architectural masterpiece that lifts the whole town. In fact Hopland, for a wide spot in the road, looks pretty darn good, while Ukiah looks like some small city in Chechnya after its civil war, complete with the walking wounded shuffling up and down State Street. BTW, I find it hard to believe that the ghastly motels on Airport Boulevard are so busy that an even larger ghastly hotel (Charlie Mannon's Savings Bank-financed, of course) has been erected down the street, complete with vistas of CostCo. I understand that the Airport motels are locally known as the Tweaker Riviera, especially in the hot weather when they check in to tweak with the AC turned up full blast.

THE REPORT that detailed that the Champlain Towers South building was sinking before its horrific collapse on Thursday described other areas in Miami Beach where buildings could be at risk of collapse because of land sinking and coastal flooding. Shimon Wdowinski, a professor in the Department of Earth and Environment at Florida International University, found that parts of west South Beach and to the north, where the building collapsed in Southside, have been sinking at a rate of between 1 and 3 millimeters a year since the 1990s. It happened mostly on reclaimed wetlands, Wdowinski told USA Today. He said that he knew instantly which building had collapsed when he heard news reports of it because he had studied the building for a report published last year. “I looked at it this morning and said ‘Oh my god.’ We did detect that,’ he said. His study was part of a wider look at how buildings in Miami were sinking generally with rising sea levels caused by climate change. According to the study, the building was sinking at a rate of about 2 millimeters a year in the 1990s because it sits on reclaimed wetlands — which could have impacted the building's structure. However, that rate could have slowed down or sped up since then, Wdowinski said, adding to the Miami Herald that the land subsidence alone would not have caused the building to collapse. The study analyzed data from satellites using the technology Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar, known as InSAR, to compile datasets spanning from 1992–1999. The study found that land sank annually in parts of both Norfolk, Virginia and Miami Beach – potentially causing an increased coastal flooding hazard for both communities. 

BOOMERS, an on-line tribute: “Found the Boomer! AKA the Me Generation who protested war because they didn’t want to get drafted, but then waged decades of war since Reagan, as well as giving all generations afterwards the typical screw you I got mine pick yourself up by your bootstraps attitude, while buying cheap shit from China ruining the economy their parents not only built but fought and died for against totalitarianism, gambling on the housing market nor paying their fair share in taxes putting it on future generations, and bailing out the rich including property owners. Which is on full display by OP. Thanks for screwing America, Boomers.”

FIDDLEHEADS, the small diner in Mendocino that garnered national attention for defying mask rules and later charging an extra $5 to customers who entered wearing masks, is going out of business. Owner Chris Castleman says his last day will be the Fourth of July. The closure has nothing to do with his refusal to follow masking orders. The building which houses his tiny food business and a bunch of other small tourist oriented operations in the "village," has been bought by a Marin County investment group who terminated Castleman's lease and refuses to negotiate an extension. Like many retail and restaurant businesses during covid, Castleman's business was already down, which only added to Castleman's financial problems. Castleman's popular sandwich shop was grossing what he says was upwards of $1 million a year before covid, but volume dropped precipitously as tourists disappeared. Castleman doesn't know what he's going to do next, but for now Fiddleheads will close at its present location on freedom day, July 4. Castleman's resistance to the mask orders had its roots in Castleman's strong belief in independence and freedom. 

ADD to the endless list of things I didn't know, the fact that CalFire has a police force of its own, as fully trained as the Mendocino County Sheriff's Department. And now I'm wondering if it will be the CalFire cops tasked with the looming mass ritual arrests at Jackson State Forest where something's gotta give because logging is on hold with protesters vowing it won't resume.

FLORIDA HIGH RISES undermined by rising seas did not surprise the many engineers who predicted it — the New Yorker covered the prob in depth several years ago — but the Florida story I've never been able to off-load is the revelation that so many non-native species, originally purchased as pets, now thrive in the Everglades, everything from Burmese pythons to feral hogs.

BAY AREA police departments, especially San Jose, Frisco and Oakland, are short officers to keep our imploding society from further implosion. According to the KPIX News, 129 emergency calls had to be put on hold last Thursday night in Oakland. Older cops are getting out, young people aren't applying to do this impossible work. No surprise that gun sales are up everywhere.

CRIME OF THE MONTH — THE MENDO TRIATHLON

On Sunday, June 20, shortly after 11am, a Mendocino County deputy was on routine patrol when he attempted a vehicle code stop on a silver Ford sedan in Redwood Valley.

The driver of the suspect Ford sped off, northbound on East Road, failing to stop at the intersection of East Road and School Way, then careening past a vehicle on the right shoulder just before passing another vehicle over the solid double yellow lines, barreling along at a high rate of speed in the oncoming lane as he hit speeds estimated at a hundred miles an hour before running off the road and hitting a tree at East Road and Tomki but miraculously not disabling his vehicle.

He then made a u-turn and headed east and into a property in the 3000 block of Road J where he plowed through vineyards before jumping from his battered and finally inoperable Ford and running off to a large pond, where he jumped into a small aluminum canoe and paddled out to the middle of the pond, at one point falling into the water where he struggled to stay afloat, telling pursuing deputies that he couldn’t swim.

By now numerous emergency service people were on-site preparing for a water rescue. But the fugitive was able to clamber back into the boat and paddle around the pond for another two hours as he negotiated his surrender, finally swimming to shore when his canoe capsized.

Nathan Werkerishna Feliz, 22, of Redwood Valley was arrested and charged with numerous felonies on top two outstanding warrants for the possession and manufacture of assault weapons. He is being held in the Mendocino County Jail on $210,000 bail. Note: Feliz is a surname that goes way back in Mendocino County history to the Spanish land grant to the Feliz family, whose holdings ran from Hopland to the Ukiah Valley.

PROBABLY because I fielded a call earlier in the day from a young local wanting to know about Jim Jones that I dreamt that Jones had returned to Mendocino County, and had stopped by for a chat. I recognized him right off, although his hair was gray and he sported a wispy, vaguely Asiatic beard. “How have you been, Bruce?” Fine, JJ. Yourself?

JONES said he was now Jonesy Jim, and I was the first Mendo person to see through his makeover as a Korean. “Bruce, you know how you always say that this is a county of amnesiacs, that history here starts all over again every morning, and you are whatever you say you are? Well, the damnedest thing,” Jones continued, "I've only been back a week and I've got a talk show on KZYX, the first person of Asian descent to be a programmer, and I've resumed my position as foreman of the county's grand jury. No questions asked! It's just like 1975 again, although I see that the scraggly-ass hippies of '75 took over local government when I left for Frisco.” 

NEVER met the Rev himself, but he sent an emissary, Maria Katsaris, and a delegation of zombos, who huddled off to the side by themselves while Maria promised she could get us an invitation to her cool-o Redwood Valley church. It was our multi-cult delinquent farm six miles south of Boonville which apparently roused Jones' interest in us. “Our pastor, Jim Jones, is amazing,” Maria said. “His speeches can last six, even seven hours and no notes.” Hmmm. The Rev seemed deep into amphetamines, then ravishing the Love Generation in the Haight Ashbury. We decided to stick with our secular Sundays rather than listen to some outback speed freak rave at his doomed parishioners. And poor, deluded Maria, described post-jungle slaughter as Jones' mistress! Beyond sad. Pretty girl, but like all the Jones people I can remember something already dead in her. Nobody home behind her tired eyes. 

JIM JONES taught the 5th grade here in Boonville full-time for two years. Fresh from Indiana, he needed income. He was hired by his fellow Hoosier, Bob Mathias, then superintendent of the Boonville schools. The deal was that Jones would bring a bunch of his kids over the hill to go to school here, thus boosting state enrollment reimbursements. 

THE REV had already latched on to dependent kids and dependent seniors and any other dependent, unaccounted for person who came with a fat government check every month. A lot of his appropriated Seniors signed over their homes to him. It was via all these lost but lucrative souls that Jones amassed his first fortune big enough to finance his move to SF and his easy seduction of Willie Brown, Mayor Mosconi and the rest of the Bay Area's cash and carry Democrats. Warren Hinckle told me that Jones also furnished a couple of the Demo big shots with young girls, but Warren had a dim view of humanity generally so I have no way to verify this perhaps canard, but given that both parties attract major degenerates…

IN THE EARLY 70s, Jones was foreman of the Mendocino County Grand Jury. As he was to do later in Frisco, he easily seduced Mendo's rubes, and soon his consiglieri, Tim Stoen, was County Counsel. Stoen, again employed by the Mendo DA's office, could write quite a book if he were ever to fully debrief himself, which is unlikely at his age.

ON LINE COMMENTS OF THE WEEK 

[1] Illegal Cannabis growth is coming to a neighborhood near you. With this growth comes security issues, countless cars all hours of the night, terrible stench, incredible use of water during a drought and water contamination. Also, second hand smoke when kids are in the room attacking their developing brain, impaired driving, basic lack if incentive to be productive, and for many a gateway drug. Yahoo we hit the motherlode.

[2] I’m sorry you’ve come to this conclusion. In the real world of cannabis culture there are many gardeners and farmers who are respectful of their neighbors, who take care of the land and the water sources on it and are highly conscious and respectable people. There are also gun toting violent thugs that don’t give a rat’s ass about the environment or for the people in their neighborhood or community. I believe they are in the minority. So let’s not lump everybody in the same category. I prefer to see the culture for what my experience has been. Good people being stewards of their land, learning loving from this plant and forwarding that spirit to nourish and grow the community. Sounds hippy dippy. But our intention our tending our love for this sacred plant is real and guess what? It radiatessssssssss out from there. Get it? Haha it’s all about love people.

[3] Alcohol and tobacco are legal and murderous. The old fascists can’t live without alcohol because their life is one of pain and disease with no cure. The old fascists and the young–many of whom comment here–are in absolute denial as to what is causing their pain unto death. The nation is separated by class and caste. Each sector has its own arguments. But the fact is in any annual cycle the old fascists end up with 90% of the wealth produced by all us peasants. That’s what has to be understood. Loyalists are total dupes. They believe the old fascists aren’t perverts with secret agendas. So we are at a cultural stand still until you realize how indoctrinated and duped and hogtied you are by the fascist memes that you have been fed with since birth. You have to be an atheist to see the meaning of religion and patriotism as diseases inducing submission to illegitimate authority. That’s why hippies separated out of the war mongering mainstream: remember only the rich make laws and only the poor end up in prison.

[4] When I die and (hopefully) go to Heaven and can ask God just one question (I have hundreds), I would say, “During the 2020 Covid 19 pandemic, what percentage of U.S. doctors were mindless, cowardly twits out to just go along and not question any authority in order to get checks?”.

God says, “82%”. And my reply, “I knew it!!!”

Then God says, “But you are still dead.”

[5] You would be surprised the number of people who consider Biden competent. To me it’s amazing that anyone can look at him and not realize the man is struggling. From one brief article I read, the meeting between him and Putin was scheduled for 4 hours and broke up early. It was a mistake to give Putin a close-up view of his opponent but he probably already knew he was dealing with the dummy, not the ventriloquist.

[6] In a world where conversations about science often get mired in pointless, bad-faith arguments, pitting cynical science denial against overheated science-based panic, it’s sometimes helpful to stare at tables of raw data. And the public hydrological data for California—to name just one state caught up in the drought—are horrifying.

Look for yourself, and you’ll see that, well, the water supply is down, no matter how you measure it. Measurements of reservoir storage, snowpack, and precipitation are all low in the dozens of places they’re measured (Yosemite, which saw low rainfall this season, but more than it saw last year at least, seems to be the lone exception that proves the rule).

The University of Nebraska-Lincoln’s drought monitor map is even scarier: blobs of “severe,” “extreme,” or “exceptional” drought cover nearly three quarters of the western United States. And experts say the numbers are exactly as ominous as they might appear.

“Am I scared? You betcha,” said James Holland Jones, associate professor of Earth system science at Stanford whose research focuses on human ecology, or the ways humans interact with their environments.

For starters, he, too, is worried about fires. “It’s hot and dry and it’s only June,” Jones told The Daily Beast.

[7] I’m reminded of the Simpsons cartoon where there’s a gay pride parade.

Marchers: We’re here! We’re queer! Get used to it!

Lisa: We ARE used to it! You do this every year! 

My main impression of Pride Month is that it’s a crashing bore. The most predatory corporations put rainbow flags on their websites, so isn’t that nice!