Mendocino County Today: Friday, Feb. 11, 2022

By AVA News Service on February 11, 2022

GUSTY OFFSHORE WINDS alongside hot, dry weather will continue Friday with slightly more marine influence along the coast. Conditions will gradually cool and calm this weekend. A cold front along with light rain for much of the coast is expected early next week. (NWS)

48 NEW COVID CASES reported in Mendocino County yesterday afternoon.

SKUNK SHOULD FOLLOW LOCAL RULES, like everybody else

by the Fort Bragg City Council Communications Ad-Hoc Committee, Tess Albin-Smith & Lindy Peters

For well over a century, Fort Bragg has been dominated by the logging industry. Before Georgia Pacific ceased operations in 2002, they occupied the “Mill Site,” which included approximately 425 acres of ocean front property – roughly a third of the land within city limits. They directly employed +/-2,000 workers in our community of just over 6,800 residents at the time. Since its closure, extensive public engagement and community planning has taken place to repurpose this land for the maximum community benefit.

Following the mill closure, the city hosted nearly 20 years of public input and workshops. Meanwhile Georgia Pacific removed many structures and arranged environmental remediation of contaminants left behind from mill operations, but stopped short of cleaning dioxin pollutants from two ponds. The City Council agreed that the best way to pursue the community’s interest was for the City to own the land. In May 2021, the Fort Bragg City Council and Georgia Pacific began serious negotiations for the City to acquire 210 acres on the southern portion of the Mill Site, as well as 62 acres of Pudding Creek watershed. The City was actively engaged in due diligence activities, including conducting a Phase I environmental report, securing liability insurance and necessary financing, and coordinating with partners committed to assisting with restoration. Working as quickly as possible, and after much effort and cost, the City was just about prepared to move forward with property acquisition. However, Georgia Pacific acted in poor faith, and instead ceded all holdings to Mendocino Railway on October 28, 2021.

Although the City Council and many in the community are disappointed with this turn of events, we understand that regardless of who owns the site, reuse and new development on the property offers an opportunity to build a diverse economic base, develop much needed housing, restore wetlands and preserve open space for wildlife and recreation. The City has policies in place to ensure development is consistent with the Coastal Act and community objectives - and a specific policy that requires a comprehensive community planning process take place when rezoning the land currently designated as “Timber Industrial.”

However, based on Mendocino Railway’s actions to date, the City is concerned that normal permitting processes will be bypassed.

The City is alarmed by the Mendocino Railway’s claim to operate as a common carrier “public utility” providing an essential public service. This designation would set the Skunk Train’s sightseeing excursion train on the same legal footing as Amtrak, Delta Air Lines, BNSF Railway, and therefore exempt Mendocino Railway from local or state oversight. In court documents Mendocino Railway has asserted it “is a federally regulated railroad and, as such CEQA [California Environmental Quality Act] is preempted and CEQA is not applicable.”

For many reasons, the City of Fort Bragg wants to ensure that Mendocino Railway operates as all other businesses within city limits and follows standard permitting processes. The City has a responsibility to protect Fort Bragg’s community interests as development plans are considered, vetted and pursued. And the community has been steadfast over the years that reuse of the Mill Site should include a variety of zoning designations and land uses to meet community needs in order to promote environmental goals, protect public access, and diversify the economic base.

The City is being advised and represented by a team of experienced attorneys who filed a lawsuit challenging Mendocino Railway’s claims that it is exempt from local and state oversight. To be clear, the City values the role of the Skunk Train in our local economy, and acknowledges the contribution their trains impart on our local identity. That said, it is essential that the Mendocino Railway abide by rules for development and simply comply with local, state, and federal regulatory protocol guiding land use.

Mendocino Railway could put all of our concerns to rest by submitting a Coastal Development Permit application and committing to abide by the same rules as everyone else. We hope they’re ready to get on board.

THE SKUNK TRAIN PROMISES TO BUILD A WORLD CLASS INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT ON FORT BRAGG MILL SITE!! … just as soon as it finishes repairs on the tunnel.

by Bruce Broderick

If the thought of a new international airport in Fort Bragg sounds absurd, it’s no more absurd than thinking that Mendocino Railway has any intentions of rebuilding the collapsed tunnel 3.5 miles up the tracks.

Recent images of the west end of the tunnel show just what shape the tunnel is really in. The tracks have been removed, a concrete barrier has been built with a gravel barricade in front of the concrete and a stream is emanating from the base of the tunnel. It reminds me of an abandoned mine tunnel, not a train tunnel for the safe passage of people and goods.

Reopening the tunnel at this point would require a complete rebuild of the tunnel to current standards. That much is plain to see by anyone who visits the Mendocino Railways party site 3.5 miles east of town.

The tracks that run through our town and close our streets and highways serve no purpose but to enrich the corporate shareholders of Sierra Railroad and serve NO PUBLIC UTILITY function.

So what about the other side of the tunnel? It’s current use is to house the rail bikes that are used in the $500 excursions up the tracks 12 miles closer to Willits. I wonder what shape those tracks are in? Probably closer to the entropy that has occurred with the rails in Eel River canyon than anything resembling a functional set of tracks.

So why lead everyone on with the absurd story that there will be both freight and passenger trains resuming operation at some point in the near future? Why keep up this persistent lie that there is some current passenger traffic as well as current mail delivery when it is completely obvious that there is no such thing going on? The images don’t lie.

It all gets back to a corrupt land grab that the City of Fort Bragg is suing Mendocino Railway over and the legitimacy of Mendocino Railways Public Utility Status. On February 17, 2022 at 2:00 pm there will be a hearing at Ten Mile courthouse in Fort Bragg. One of many to come involving the validity of Mendocino Railway as a “real” train. Something that it hasn’t been able to perform as for quite some time now. Hopefully the end of the line for this charade is coming soon. I’m not saying that the tourist rides should end, only that Mendocino Railway pretending to be something that it is not should end. As shown by the third image.

The end of the line is really 3.5 miles outside of town.

HEALTH ORDER TO CONTINUE MASKING IN MOST INDOOR SETTINGS

Mendocino County Health Officer Dr. Andy Coren continues to order masking in most indoor settings due to current COVID-19 case and hospitalization numbers, effective February 15, 2022.

The Health Officer had previously issued a universal indoor masking order in October 2021 and updated it in January 2022 after local and statewide trends showed an increase in COVID cases due to the Omicron variant. A new exemption has been added to this current Health Order that all may remove their masks in venues where the operator/organizer can show documentation (not including self-attestation) that all attendees including presenters/performers and maintenance staff have been vaccinated and boosted.

While Mendocino County appears to be recovering from the Omicron surge based on a decrease in reported cases from PCR testing, this data is believed to be an undercount because it does not include all positive antigen test results. The County also continues to be an area of highest risk, as defined by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), with “High Community Transmission.”

Furthermore, the County’s COVID-19 hospitalization and ICU rates are still higher than they were during the Delta surge. Since February 1, Mendocino County has had less than 10% ICU capacity. On some days, there are 0 or 1 ICU beds available, compared to California overall, which currently has 18-20% ICU capacity. This adds stress for local hospitals and their staff and delays other medical procedures.

“We will continue to assess the COVID-19 situation as it evolves and will reevaluate the need for continued universal masking orders on March 15, 2022, based on community transmission and burden to the local hospital system. For now, continued masking will protect our residents as we are still at the highest CDC risk level,” explained Dr. Coren.

The Health Officer strongly recommends that all eligible persons in the County be vaccinated and boosted to protect against severe COVID and death. If you have questions about boosters or vaccines in general, speak with your doctor, or call Public Health at 707-472-2759. To find the nearest vaccine clinic in your area, please visit the Public Health website at: www.mendocinocounty.org/covidvaccine

(Mendocino County Presser)

BIG NUTS TRAINING LITTLE NUTS

WITH 40 YEARS in the Treasurer-Tax Collector’s Office (the last 15 as the elected Treasurer-Tax Collector) Shari Schapmire has a wealth of knowledge and experience and also best exemplifies what it means to be a Public Servant. During the last two years the Treasurer-Tax Collector’s Office has been the only county office the public can walk into without an appointment. Some you can't walk into at all. Shari has always gone above and beyond to assist the public or share her knowledge and experience with the Supervisors. Which is why it's so disheartening that the Board of Supervisors completely ignored her advice against consolidating her office with that of the Auditor-Controller. The Board has taken this rash action without any response to the concerns raised, without any explanation of the anticipated benefits and without any plan or even discussion of how the consolidation is to occur. As a direct result, Shari Schapmire, who had every intention of serving out her term, has decided to retire early. What else could possibly go wrong?

— John McCowen

DISGRACED UKIAH POLICE SERGEANT KEVIN MURRAY CITED IN LAKE COUNTY FOR TAKING WOMAN’S WALLET WHILE ON BAIL

by Matt LeFever

Former Ukiah Police Department Sergeant Kevin Murray has found himself once again at the wrong end of the law. Yesterday, February 10, 2022, Murray was cited for his alleged role in the theft of a woman’s wallet from a Lakeport grocery store while out on bail for multiple felonies in Mendocino. According to Lakeport Police Department Chief Brad Rasmussen, on the afternoon of November 30, 2021, Murray came into the Lakeport Police Department and turned in a wallet he reportedly found at a grocery store. Approximately one hour later, LPD received a report that a separate grocery store’s surveillance system had captured footage of a man grabbing a woman’s wallet off a store shelf after she accidentally left it there. Chief Rasmussen said his officers responded to the scene, reviewed surveillance footage provided by the business, and found that the man seen on video grabbing the wallet was the very same man that had entered Lakeport Police Department earlier that afternoon claiming to have found a wallet and felt the need to turn it into authorities. Investigating officers provided the woman the wallet that had been turned in and determined three items were taken from within: a pair of earrings, $16, and a singular 9mm bullet. Murray’s rap sheet is extensive and infamous for charges ranging from possession of methamphetamine, forced oral copulation, and rape.

kymkemp.com/2022/02/11/disgraced-ukiah-police-sergeant-kevin-murray-cited-in-lake-county-for-taking-womans-wallet-while-on-bail-allegedly-stole-16-earrings-and-a-9mm-bullet/

YAHOO NEWS REPORTS that the Department of Homeland Security is ready for an anti-vaccine mandate convoy of truckers to cause chaos across the United States — and the disruption could begin as early as this weekend’s Super Bowl Sunday. Yahoo News reports DHS has warned law-enforcement and public-safety officials to prepare for a copycat version of the protests that have brought Canada’s capital city of Ottawa to a virtual standstill in recent weeks. “The convoy will potentially begin in California as early as mid-February and arrive in Washington, D.C., as late as mid-March, potentially impacting the Super Bowl LVI scheduled for 13 February and the State of the Union Address scheduled for 1 March,” a leaked DHS bulletin states. The document adds that “the convoy could severely disrupt transportation, federal government, and law enforcement operations through gridlock and potential counterprotests.” An DHS official told Yahoo: “They are definitely going to follow the Canadian model and shut down Washington.”

JOAN VIVALDO UPDATES US ON THE LATEST STALLING TACTIC OF BLACK BART TRAIL BURGLAR DOUG STONE:

Doug Stone Preliminary Examination of Monday, Feb. 7, 2022

The Victims' Advocate Unit called me Friday, Feb. 4, 2022 to tell me that on Thursday, Feb. 3, 2022, the court approved Mr. Stone's request to fire his attorney, John Runfola, and hire a new one. Accordingly, the Preliminary Examination is now set for June 10 and 11, 2022. Those dates are to be confirmed on May 6, 2022.

Deputy DA Ms. Larsen opined almost a year ago that Ms. Stone would employ this tactic to further delay his trial. Last I heard, Mr. Stone planned to plead not guilty because of PTSD brought on by the trauma of seeing burned bodies during his role as first responder firefighter, and exacerbated by substance abuse in an attempt to alleviate the PTSD. Since his unlawful activities, Mr. Stone has completed substance abuse counseling and PTSD treatment. He is living near his mother in Arizona.

It has been almost two years since Mr. Stone's crimes. In my opinion, only the degree of guilt needs to be determined. He was caught fleeing my home with burglar tools, matched the description I gave the police, had goods from his many burglaries in his home (as well as an enormous cache of weapons) and, after he was released from custody because of Covid rules, threatened to kill his best friend with a large kitchen knife.

Mr. Stone seems to have ample funds for his defense. Lady Justice may be blindfolded, but she can feel bills crossing her palm.

THE ANDERSON VALLEY VILLAGE GATHERS IN PERSON AT THE MUSEUM 3PM SUNDAY.

NOT IN ANYONE’S LIFETIME (More re Coastal Conservancy Board)

A READER WRITES: Hey Mr. Editor Sir – You missed the point of you specifically needing to take your BP meds before looking to see who is on the Board of the Coastal Conservancy, the entity that will now be managing the Great Redwood Trail according to Sen McGuire in a recently published media release. That would be your friend Doug Bosco, previously the manager of a certain rail line that is now slated to become the trail. Just FYI, I think the trail will eventually be a good thing for the region, just not in our lifetimes!

THE VALUE of the North Coast’s 2021 grape harvest was up to $1.4 billion, a 48% increase from the smoke-tainted 2020 harvest but still off from record levels reached a few years ago, according to federal agriculture data released Thursday.

Grape growers in Sonoma, Napa, Mendocino, Lake and Marin counties had an almost 17% increase in yield at nearly 400,000 tons, according to a preliminary California harvest report by the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

The 2021 harvest was still below the 10-year average of 476,679 tons, reflecting a lighter crop two years in a row.

The average price paid for a ton of grapes in the region increased from $2,771 to $3,501. The price jump was largely driven by fruit from Napa County that reached a record high of $6,091 per ton.

In 2020, the Walbridge and Glass fire disrupted picks and tainted fruit and produced tainted fruit because of the smoke.

The record crop in value occurred in 2018 at more than $2 billion.

— Bill Swindell, Press Democrat

COUNTY NOTES (AVA News Service)

Coast Winter Shelter Update

SUPERVISOR TED WILLIAMS sponsored an informational update on the coast winter shelter at Tuesday’s Board meeting. The presentation was made by Captain Thomas O’Neal of the Fort Bragg Police Department. Captain O’Neal recounted that Supervisor Williams met with Fort Bragg Mayor Bernie Norvell and other City officials when it became clear that no one was taking responsibility for a Coast winter shelter. The police department agreed to take on the program and the County funded it.

THE SHELTER, i.e., Motel 6 in Fort Bragg, and another if additional rooms are necessary, operates when temperatures are expected to dip below 40 or rain is forecast. Mayor Norvell was instrumental in bringing the program together and in finding a motel willing to participate. In 21 nights of operation, 106 bed nights were provided at a cost of $14,544 as of Feb. 7. The cost compared favorably with the previous model of churches hosting the shelter.

O’NEAL SAID THE POLICE DEPARTMENT issued a temporary ban on one person for behavior and the motel banned six people. The police department was prepared to offer alternate lodging as a back up but no one took them up on it. The police were called out 12 times for such things as failure to leave the premises or loitering.

THE CAPTAIN explained that the police department was willing to take on the shelter management as a community service but would prefer if the churches or another entity would take it on. The captain again thanked Mayor Norvell and Supervisor Williams for their role in getting the program in place.

MAYOR NORVELL thanked the Supervisors and the County, especially Supervisor Williams who in turn thanked everyone involved. Supervisor Gjerde (in whose district all this was taking place) sat tight lipped and grim faced throughout the presentation. It’s no secret that Mayor Norvell is interested in running for Supervisor. The puff piece presentation shows Norvell as someone who rolls up his sleeves and gets things done. And Williams (who all but openly supported Lindy Peters the last time Gjerde was up for election) is clearly signaling a preference for Norvell.

Supes Approve Unnecessary Long Term Debt

BEFORE THE LAST RECESSION in 2008-2009 exposed the economic weaknesses of the County, previous Supes binged on long term debt, issuing Pension Obligation Bonds (POBS) and Certificates of Participation (COPS). The former were supposed to save money on the County’s unfunded pension obligation and the latter (a real estate financing scheme) were used to acquire and renovate the County Admin Center among others.

AS A RESULT, the County was awash in interest-loaded debt, including the infamous Teeter Plan. Inadequate reserves were soon exhausted. The predicament was compounded by employee salaries that were inflated to unsustainable levels as a result of the Slavin Study. Former Third District Supervisor John Pinches, who was not on the Board at the time, famously said of the Slavin Study, “There’s an acorn for every pig.” But by 2007 Pinches was back on the Board and helped put in place fiscally prudent policies, including paying off long term debt, not adding to it.

THE TEETER PLAN DEBT — a complicated program that secures predictable allocations to special districts when property taxes are not paid but lets the County keep the penalty and interest imposed, much later — was paid off years ago. And the POBS are set to pay off in 2026 followed by the COPS in 2030. For the first time in decades the County would be free of long term debt. (Except for the unfunded pension obligation, which magically is not considered County long term debt, although the County’s on the hook for it.)

BUT ON TUESDAY the Supes started the process to acquire new long term debt. Interest rates are low, and refinancing the COPS at current low interest rates might seem justified. But instead of refinancing the existing debt at lower interest, the Supes were asked to approve borrowing $6 million of “new” money. The guesstimated interest savings on the COPS will evaporate (and go negative) when debt service on the new money is factored in.

REMARKABLY, the decision to reverse the long standing policy of not taking on debt was done in barely two and a half minutes from start to finish. Assistant CEO Darcie Antle, reading from a prepared script probably written by the paid financial consultant, briefly introduced the item, deferring any questions to the consultant. There were none. Board discussion lasted 20 seconds, the time it took Supervisor Gjerde to say it would save money and was a smart move. As usual, there was no Public Comment.

THE ITEM was accompanied by 47 pages of Mendocino County Public Finance Training Materials provided by the consultants (who will walk away with several hundred thousand dollars for their services in extending the County’s debt). The Supes must have closely studied the training materials since no one had any questions. (Not.) More likely no one bothered to read the material and wouldn’t have understood it if they had.

THE SUPES (or their handlers) were unclear on the purpose and need for the new money. The “training materials” said it was for capital projects, including the jail roof (except the jail roof was replaced a few years ago), and that the County “may need to identify an additional leased asset for the new money portion.” Antle said $3 million was for the new jail building/expansion and a few other unspecified items of deferred maintenance. No one questioned the apparent discrepancy.

ANTLE said $3 million was needed in April for the jail expansion and would be withdrawn from General Reserves. (Isn’t that what reserves are for? After all CEO Angelo said last month that the County had accumulated over $20 million in reserves.) The money taken from reserves would be paid back after the refinancing in June. Both Antle and the authorizing Resolution said the uses of the new money would not exceed $4 million. So why is the County borrowing $6 million if the identified need is only $4 million?

THE SUPES, who always say there’s no money (unless they or the CEO want something) previously pledged $2 million for unspecified “climate change” projects. Will the extra $2 million in long term debt function as a climate change slush fund for the Board’s pet projects? Or just put back in reserves after paying maybe double the cost in interest payments?

INSTEAD OF SAVING MONEY, the Supes plan to incur $6 million in new debt, when at most, only $4 million is needed. And instead of paying off County long term debt in 2030, the Supes are extending the payoff date to 2042. The $4 million (or $6 million) could be withdrawn from the General Reserve and paid back out of current fiscal year salary savings since the County is running about a 25% vacancy rate — for funded positions — across all positions.

Navarro Point Appeal Continued

RIXANNE WEHREN and the Sierra Club appealed the approval of a two-story 25-foot tall house on the east side of Highway One, across from the Navarro Point Preserve. The problem, as laid out in a letter from the Coastal Commission, is that the site was limited to a single story no more than eighteen feet in height, based on a condition of the subdivision that created the lot back in 1987. The Coastal Commission letter said the condition was needed to meet the scenic impact requirements of the Coastal Act and for the same reason attempting to change the condition would be futile.

THE ADVICE FROM COUNTY COUNSEL completely contradicted the advice from the Coastal Commission. County Counsel said the Board could deny the appeal and the applicant could apply to the Coastal Commission after the fact to change the conditions. Except the Coastal Commission letter said an application to change the conditions would probably not be accepted for processing.

Supes Stifle Public Expression

AT THE START of Tuesday’s meeting Chair Williams announced without explanation that Public Expression (usually the first item after roll call in the morning) would be heard at the end of the meeting. Two years after CEO Angelo locked the Supervisors and the public out of the Board Chambers only a few diehard cannabis advocates and a single anti-vaxxer make the convoluted effort to offer public comment. But these few are apparently too many for Williams.

WILLIAMS COMPLAINS at almost every meeting that cannabis is taking up too much time during Public Expression. But Williams has also consistently opposed having an Ad Hoc or Standing Committee to deal with cannabis. The few people still struggling to get permits through have lots of issues and insist there must be a public forum where they can be heard. By default, Public Expression has become that forum.

AT EVERY MEETING Michael Katz of the Mendocino Cannabis Alliance and cannabis advocate Ron Edwards zoom in for Public Expression. And Public Comment. On anything remotely having to do with cannabis. If cannabis is on the CEO report they are on-hand to comment. And if it’s not, they comment about its absence.

CARRE SHATTUCK, the anti-vaxxer rightly and forcefully chastises the Supervisors for “hiding behind your screens” and locking the public out of the meetings. At a recent meeting Williams tried to strike a deal asking Shattuck if she’d follow covid protocols and be civil if the Board returned to open meetings.

AT THE END of Tuesday’s meeting Williams announced the last item on the agenda was Supervisors Reports. The Clerk of the Board quickly reminded Williams they still had Public Expression. Williams wearily intoned “Oh, Yeah” in a voice that telegraphed indifference.

RON EDWARDS complained (as he often has) that the format for Public Comment is not user friendly. Unlike many zoom meetings, where the public can follow the meeting and opt in for public comment when the meeting is opened to the public, in Mendo you can only comment if you sign up before the meeting begins. As a result, Edwards said he signed up for some items not knowing if he would have comment or not. And again urged the Supes to allow the public to speak without making an appointment in advance.

CARRE SHATTUCK was also on the line to speak but was unable to, either as a result of technical glitches, or poor communication or coordination with the Clerk of the Board. When Ms. Shattuck was first called on there was silence. So the Clerk moved to Mr. Edwards. Then tried coming back to Shattuck. Between muting and unmuting, Ms. Shattuck could be heard saying “I’m not even fucking on there!” Williams issued a warning for language. The Clerk said he muted the speaker because of the language. Then the Clerk announced she was unmuted. Then announced she was not on the line. And with that, Williams announced the meeting was adjourned.

ED NOTES

MEANWHILE, AT THE GROCERY STORE, inflation is slamming Americans as basic costs of living — food, shelter, electricity, gas — have skyrocketed during Biden's presidency. Inflation hit a 40-year high in January, with prices rising 7.5% from last year. That number was driven by higher costs of food, electricity and shelter costs, the Bureau of Labor Statistics said on Thursday. Medical costs have also risen during the pandemic.

77 DEGREES here in Boonville this afternoon. Con Creek, my guide to The Valley's eco-welfare, is fading fast but still has an encouraging flow, encouraging, that is, if it were flowing like this in August.

THOSE EARLY MORNING vans seen by early risers are transporting vineyard workers from hither and yon. Big grape labor shortages within Mendocino County.

PREVALENT MEDIA RUMOR says a trucker blockade is being organized for the Super Bowl, and another one for Washington D.C.

THAT PD HEADLINE a couple of weeks ago can only be exorcized by sharing it with you: "Mountain lion spotted near Hwy. 101 in Mendocino County."

MARIN GETS PRANKED: A Texas-based comedian has forced Marin County’s supervisors to wrestle with the question of what is allowable public comment.

The issue came up after supervisors received a unique complaint during the public comment portion of a meeting earlier this month.

Appearing via teleconference at the board’s Feb. 1 meeting, a man named Alexander Stein said he wanted to file a formal complaint against a county sewage maintenance worker who began an affair with his wife after being dispatched to their fix pipes. Stein said they had run off together, leaving him to care for his three children.

“I’m at the vaccine clinic every day,” said Stein, dressed in blue hospital-style scrubs, becoming increasingly agitated. “I’m injecting people every day and you have a county employee that is in my house doing stuff to my wife.”

“Every day I miss her. I can still smell the vodka and cigarettes on her breath when she kissed me goodbye,” he said. “Marin County, I hold you guys directly responsible for what happened to my wife and my family.”

KIRK VODOPALS: “The county has been funneling all the weed taxes to staff up on weed permitters and planners with the assumption that weed taxes will be able to maintain these levels of staffing. But this is probably the peak of taxes from weed. Then, as the bloated weed processing staff gets rolling, the taxes will drop as everyone shuffles back into the black market and all the promises and hopes of weed taxes paying for roads and mental health and infrastructure goes up in smoke.”

EMPIRE WITHOUT THE EMPIRE. Kristen Nevedal is capo di tutti of Mendocino County's “Cannabis Program,” an odd position given that the pot market has collapsed. Although a few naive pot farmers have tried to go fully legal, hence Ms. Nevedal's burgeoning staff, the whole show is grant-funded. And what happens when the grant cash runs out? A dozen or so jobless pot bureaucrats unless they can catch on as regular, protected county employees.

WHAT WE HAVE is a typical Mendo farce, an office of freshly hired people hired by their pal processing a trickle of applications to do a business that no longer exists in Mendocino County. It may come back, but for now it's over. And, Mendo being Mendo, the county's expanded pot program was magically breathed into life via the consent calendar, meaning it was created with no questions asked, and could become a major county liability when the grant money is exhausted because all the pot paperwork processers are full-time public employees. Ms. N has already received a big pay boost that puts her well over a hundred grand a year in a county where the annual average income is about $30k a year, if that. Her raise was of course granted via the consent calendar.

“Adoption of Resolution Amending Position Allocation Table as Follows: Cannabis Program Budget Unit 2810, Add 1.0 FTE Cannabis Program Manager; 1.0 FTE Senior Planner; 6.0 FTE Planner II; 1.0 FTE Cartographer Planner; 1.0 FTE Department Analyst II; 1.0 FTE Office Services Supervisor; 1.0 FTE Administrative Assistant; 1.0 FTE Staff Assistant III.”

TRANSLATION: The Mendocino Cannabis Department has added a Program manager, a senior planner, six journeyman planners, a mapping specialist, an analyst, an office supervisor and two admin assistants — a total of 13 mostly high paid people.

THE COMPLAINTS about Ms. Nevedal are many, beginning with an allegation that her husband is a large-scale grower, which would seem to be a conflict of interest even by Mendo's infinitely elastic ethical standards.

COMPLAINTS about the program overseeing non-existent businesses range from portal rules are suddenly changed for no explained reasons, that applications are arbitrarily ruled incomplete, that growers are bounced for trivial reasons like misspellings.

THE POT business being conducive to paranoia because it's still illegal at the federal level, local arrests are still frequent enough to keep the remaining growers alert that they could be busted at any time on any pretext. (Pot arrests can be like the old baseball joke when an exasperated umpire suddenly yells, “I'll show you the rule when the ink's dry!”) Some growers suspect that the Nevedals are weeding out competitors to keep their own pot farming viable.

THE MENDOCINO PRODUCERS GUILD is believed to be poised to do a major push-back against Ms. Nevedal's management via a class action suit.

ANOTHER SIGN OF THE COLLAPSING POT MARKET: More and more heavy and medium-sized equipment is being repo’d for non payment and re-sold at used/discount prices, including tractors, dozers, water tenders, ATVs, dump trucks, etc. as more and more pot growers abandon their grows.

MY DARK GRAY CAT has to stay out of the sun on these abnormally sunny warm days because the sun heats her dark fur up to where she’s almost hot to the touch. She’s good at finding shade; she better be as summer arrives. (Mark Scaramella)

CATCH OF THE DAY, February 10, 2022

ANDRES AMERY, Ukiah. Domestic abuse.

ERNEST ELLIOT JR., Hopland. Attempted murder, battery, vandalism, probation revocation.

MICHAEL GILBERT, Ukiah. Disorderly conduct-alcohol, fugitive from justice.

WILLIAM LEE, Willits. Controlled substance, ammo possession by prohibited person.

JEANETTE LONG, Ukiah. Failure to appear.

LAWRENCE MARTINEZ JR., Redwood Valley. Parole violation.

MARCIE QUESTONI, Petaluma/Ukiah. Probation revocation.

JULIAN SALAZAR IV, Ukiah. County parole violation.

DAVID THOMSEN, Hopland. Elder abuse resulting in great bodily harm or death, protective order violation, probation revocation.

DAVID WORTHY, Ukiah. County parole violation, probation revocation.

MIKE GENIELLA:

During my years as a working journalist, I knew, engaged, and respected elected public officials who saw themselves as Republicans. I grew up in a Roosevelt house, so I have never embraced the notion that Main Street business values should determine how the rest of us live and work. Still, in general (besides Richard Nixon) Republicans largely served honestly and reliably and strove to improve local communities. It is unbelievable how fringe thinkers and political cons like Donald Trump have seized control of the GOP. Hopefully, more responsible Republicans will start publicly disavowing the relentless campaign by Trump and his kind for control at any cost.

THE TEMPERATURE IN SOCAL on Thursday was 90 degrees, before Valentine’s Day. The ocean is now permanently boned, producing massive heat bubbles annually, as opposed to as transient events. We are about to discover how unpleasant life on earth can be. And the folks who made it this way are spending billions to keep it this way. You and I probably won't see the worst of this, but if there are any grandkids, I experience a swell of pity for what they're going to endure, or worse fail to endure. Trees and landfills are just window dressing. States burning to the ground, constant ping-ponging between drought and flood, tropical diseases moving into the temperate regions as the mercury rises, the ugly predictions by our best and brightest beggar the imagination of even the most resigned and cynical. So housewives and social media talking heads go after the things they can actually do something about in the hope of ignoring the scary stuff they seem impotent in addressing. I guess that's human nature.

— Marie Tobias

THERE IS NO MAN, however wise, who has not at some period of his youth said things, or lived in a way the consciousness of which is so unpleasant to him in later life that he would gladly, if he could, expunge it from his memory. And yet he ought not to entirely regret it, because he cannot be certain that he has indeed become a wise man -- so far as it is possible for any of us to be wise -- unless he has passed through all the fatuous or unwholesome incarnations by which that ultimate stage must be preceded. I know that there are young fellows, the sons and grandsons of famous men, whose masters have instilled into them nobility of mind and moral refinement in their schooldays. They have, perhaps, when they look back upon their past lives, nothing to retract; they can, if they choose, publish a signed account of everything they have ever said or done; but they are poor creatures, feeble descendants of doctrinaires, and their wisdom is negative and sterile. We are not provided with wisdom, we must discover it for ourselves, after a journey through the wilderness which no one else can take for us, an effort which no one can spare us, for our wisdom is the point of view from which we come at last to regard the world. The lives that you admire, the attitudes that seem noble to you are not the result of training at home, by a father, or by masters at school, they have sprung from beginnings of a very different order, by reaction from the influence of everything evil or commonplace that prevailed round about them. They represent a struggle and a victory. I can see that the picture of what we once were, in early youth, may not be recognizable and cannot, certainly, be pleasing to contemplate in later life. But we must not deny the truth of it, for it is evidence that we have really lived, that it is in accordance with the laws of life and of the mind that we have, from the common elements of life, of the life of studios, or artistic groups -- assuming that one is a painter -- extracted something that goes beyond them.

—Marcel Proust, 1913; from "In Search of Lost Time"

"ONE CONSEQUENTIAL DYNAMIC few mainstream pundits dare discuss is the "crapification" of the entire U.S. economy. That isn't my description, "crapification" is now in common use. If the word offends you, substitute terminal decay of quality, competition, utility, durability, repairability and customer service.

One aspect nobody seems to notice is the transformation from a society that once drew its identity from producing quality goods and services to a society that draws its identity from consuming crapified goods and services. Now that Americans define themselves by consuming, they are enslaved to consumption: to limit consumption is to disappear--and 'spending time" on social media is a form of consumption, even if no goods or services are purchased directly, as one's attention / time are valuable commodities.

In other words, Americans have been trained like Pavlov's dogs to consume, no matter how poor the quality and service. We just buy it anyway, and grumble over the decaying quality and service--but we won't take the only action that would impact corporations and the government: stop buying the products and services. Opt out, drop out, make it at home, cancel the service, just stop buying abysmally made junk and pathetically poor services.”

— Charles Hugh Smith

SPACED OUT

A Review of “Bewilderment,” By Richard Powers. (WW Norton 278 pp. $27.95.)

by Larry Bensky

Movie screens are often tinged with it these days. Fiction and non-Fiction authors seem intrigued by it, when not immersed in the genre. There used to be a category labelled “sci-fi” which traded in imagining this sweet, often hyperemotional space. It was where accepted limits of “life” dissolved into a haze of inter and intra-galactic power and energy exploration. Shorthand for this was “Little Green Men.”

People affected by sci-fi were often dismissed as “loony” or just plain “nuts.”

And sometimes they got seriously mistreated for their beliefs.

But what if these “nuts” were on to something?

What if “legitimate” science and inquiry were, and continue to be, all wrong?

Missing something more essential than their fact-bedeviled assessments?

Could it be that there are energy poles working in a very different nature than the ones we know – our meadows, rivers, mountains? And that there are so many of them – billions, in fact – in comparison to which our planet counts for little or nothing?

It takes a very daring and gifted writer to explore that possibility.

Richard Powers is such person.

The author of twelve previous books, winner of many prizes (including a Pulitzer) and a distinguished teacher, he knows how to tell stories. Living voluntarily well out of literary (and political) circles in the Great Smoky Mountains of Tennessee, he has already made a commitment to the extremes of our planet.

In that very isolated location (see The Guardian 6/16/2018 for a thorough interview) Powers plies his trade. A trade that explores a fabulous universe whose parameters no one knows.

This orientation towards the (for want of a better word) supernormal may make you assume that Powers’ latest fiction, “Bewilderment,” is too over the top, unreal. But if you read fiction to get a sense of character development through challenge, to put you in physical and psychic circumstances you haven’t and won’t encounter, to admire and be moved by very skillful writing, “Bewilderment” will meet and exceed your expectations. As it did mine.

There are three main characters. Two parents and a child. One parent, Adam, the father, narrates. He has ruined a research and teaching career because of extensive involvement in the life of his troubled son. The son’s other parent, his mother Alyssa, dies in an accident when he is four years old. In life, she was an activist/lobbyist for environmental causes. In death, she haunts Adam, her husband of 12 years, and their child, Robin.

The haunting forms the third narrative presence in “Bewilderment.” Both her son who grows into adolescence as the book unfolds, and her husband, are visited by her after her death. In the son, it is an aspect of his vast, nuanced mental life. For the father, it’s the opportunity to relive the twelve years he spent with her and to imagine roads taken and not taken.

It is “normal” to wonder “what if,” when someone dies. But can that wondering become a sickness, a hallucinatory disease? When do others notice, and begin to isolate a person as “disturbed”? Off the spectrum of what we can tolerate, and onto a spectrum that may lead to disaster?

Early in “Bewilderment” Powers tells us that Robin, his then toddler, “wet the bed a few times each season, and it hunched him over with shame. Noises unsettled him, he likes to turn down the sound on the television, too low for me to hear. He hated when the cloth monkey wasn’t on its shelf in the laundry room above the washing machine. He poured every dollar of allowance into a trading card game – Collect them all! - but he kept the untouched cards in numeric order in plastic sleeves in a special binder. He sketched constantly and well, laboring over fine details lost on me. Intricate buildings and machines for a year. Then animals and plants.

“His pronouncements were off-the-wall mysteries to everyone but me. He could quote whole scenes from movies, even after a single viewing…when he finished a book he liked, he’d start it immediately, from page one. He melted down and exploded over nothing. But he could just as easily be overcome by joy.”

The father seeks help. But the mental health practitioners he finds are diagnosticians, not healers. They all want to put Robin “on the Spectrum.” Adam “wanted to tell them that everyone alive on this fluke little planet was on the spectrum. That’s what a spectrum is. I wanted to say that life is a spectrum disorder, where each of us vibrated to some frequency in the continuous rainbow. Oddly enough there’s no name in the psychiatrists’ ‘Diagnostiic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders’ for the compulsion to diagnose people.”

“Bewilderment” is a formatively political book, though political issues and personalities aren’t often mentioned. There’s a President, a re-elected Trump type, who refuses to conduct a traditional re-election calendar, also refuses to accept the result when he loses. There are legislators who control budgets, but are more concerned with posturing positions than with scientific accomplishment.

Young Robbie gets invaded by political activity, hard as his father tries to keep him out of such a a contentious zone. One day. Before his father can reach over and change the station, they hear news on the car radio, for example, “Following the fires that had taken out 3,000 homes in the San Fernando Valley, the President was blaming the trees. His Executive Order called for 2,000 acres of national forest to be cut down. The acres weren’t even all in California.”

Young Robbie doesn’t know what to say. Neither does Adam, his father. But from the car radio comes a voice assuring listeners that “In the name of national security the President could do just about anything.”

Desperately Adam consigns his son to a therapist who specializes in “mindfulness.” Meaning that with mental energy a person can exercise agency over objects and people And it is here that Powers brings his narrative into the very contemporary discussion of Artificial Intelligence. The therapist says Robbie is “basically practicing mindfulness. Like doing meditation but with instant, powerful cues steering him toward the desired emotional state.”

Using a contraption similar to an MRI, Robbie learns to move a dot just by thinking it should move. Then it seems that his freaky exchanges with his (dead) mother are mental gymnastics as well. Robbie becomes calmer, more responsible as he exercises mental control. When he encounters the real world, it can be a frought world.

One day, as Adam and Robbie navigate a nearby river in a rowboat, “A butterfly more staggering than any stained glass window landed on Robin’s downy forearm. Robin held his breath, letting it stumble, fly, and land again on his face. It walked across his closed eyes before flying away.”

We are granted the privilege of sharing Robin’s notebook, which Adam, his father, accidentally on purpose discovers in his son’s room.

Where do finches go when it rains?

How far does a deer walk in one year?

Can a cricket remember how to get out of a maze?

If a frog ate that cricket, would he learn the maze faster?

I warmed a butterfly back to life with my breath.

I love grass. It grows from the bottom, not the top. If something eats the tips, it doesn’t kill the plant. Only makes it grow faster. Pure geniu.s”

I watch children a lot. My current accidental disability makes it hard to walk far, but my recuperation makes it necessary to try. One regular destination for me is the elementary school a few blocks away, where I sometimes arrive as families are dropping off or picking up kids. Fresh from my daily, nauseating dose of print and on-line tales of destruction and death (yes, interspersed with chronicles of valor, determination, and heroism) I see kids seemingly oblivious of my universe being read to by adults. Chalking the sidewalk, drawing in pads and notebooks. Still inventing games of tag.

Where, I wonder, do they pick up their ideas and cues? How much, I wonder, and how do those adults shield and protect them from the fright inherent in the current pandemic? My liberal city’s (Berkeley’s) elected and hired minions have made a confusing mess out of recommendations and regulations in response to this major health crisis. What’s coming next, from it, and from them?

And since most of the adults involved in parenting at this school are Spanish speakers, what is being done, what could be done to reach them?

Powers sees an “endless civil war” going on behind seemingly normal school scenes. Playing out in “Bewilderment” is a bitter fight about educational issues. Research like Adam’s into life on other planets is expensive. His and his secular colleagues struggle for funding. “Our side claimed the discovery of other planets would increase humanity’s wisdom and empathy. The President’s men said that wisdom and empathy were collectivist plots to crash our standard of living.”

“This late in the world’s story,” thinks Adam, as his side loses the funding war, “everything was marketing. Universities had to build their brands. Every act of charity had to beat the drum. Friendships were measured out now in shares and likes and links. Poets and priests, philosophers and fathers of small children, we were all in an endless, flat-out hustle.”

You get to know and care about Powers personages. But the three questions underlying his narrative are not new ones. Among other places, they appear as the title of Paul Gauguin’s famous painting, done in Tahiti.

“Where do we come from?

What are we?

Where are we going?”

A fitting coda for Power’s brilliant narrative. No answers, and there never will be. So don’t let it make you veer to lunacy to respond “correctly.” The kids, like Powers creations in “Bewilderment,” are here to try that. One develops a strong desire to find out what will happen to Robbie, with his brilliant, disturbed self growing older.

I won’t spoil Powers’ tale with a spoiler. For me, part of it is to think about the little family’s ethos. Informed by stories like “Bewilderment.”

What can we do to help?

CHRIS CALDER:

Weed, home to Northern California's tiniest Greyhound bus station (a bench), suffered the loss of its Burger King recently. When a town the size of Weed loses one of its fast food restaurants, it doesn't just mean a 30 percent reduction in dining and career options - really, an entire lifestyle - it's a chilling reminder of mortality that everyone wants to hush up again as quickly as possible.

Online polls are good for that. This one, designed by someone who wants a Panda Express (split the burger vote - I see what they did there) revealed some interesting trends. First, people in Siskiyou County are not that hot on In'n'Out - "In'n'Out will come with a long line. Domino's, as they already have a plan for delivery." Second people who like Der Wienerschnitzle cannot be reasoned with.

"PHILIP KINDRED DICK was an American science fiction writer. He wrote 44 novels and about 121 short stories, most of which appeared in science fiction magazines during his lifetime. His fiction explored varied philosophical and social questions such as the nature of reality, perception, human nature, and identity, and commonly featured characters struggling against elements such as alternate realities, illusory environments, monopolistic corporations, drug abuse, authoritarian governments, and altered states of consciousness. Born in Chicago, Dick moved to the San Francisco Bay Area with his family at a young age. He began publishing science fiction stories in 1952, at age 23. He found little commercial success until his alternative history novel The Man in the High Castle earned him acclaim, including a Hugo Award for Best Novel, when he was 33. He followed with science fiction novels such as Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?"

Born: Philip Kindred Dick, December 16, 1928, Chicago, Illinois, U.S.

Died: March 02, 1982, Santa Ana, California, U.S.

Pen name: Richard Phillipps, Jack Dowland

Occupation: Writer: novelist, short story writer, and essayist

Nationality: American

Period: 1952–1982

Genre: Science fiction, paranoid fiction, philosophical fiction

Literary movement: Postmodernism

Notable works: Ubik, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, The Man in the High Castle, A Scanner Darkly, Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said, VALIS trilogy, "Second Variety", We Can Remember It For You Wholesale

Original 1977 advertising poster for Berlin Zoo designed by Roland Bayer, Germany.

ON LINE COMMENT OF THE DAY

I would like to see the Death Penalty repealed and those on Death Row having their sentences changed to life without parole. There are so many flaws inherent to the DP that it’s structurally unfair to the poor and minorities. Then there’s the cost. Here in California, it costs an average of $45,000 a year to house an inmate for life, whereas it costs over $85,000 to house an inmate on Death Row. Then there’s the litigation. On average, it takes an average of 24 days to prepare an LWOP case for trial, whereas a DP case takes over 145 days from pretrial motions to sentencing. The costs of a DP trial also exceeds an LWOP trial by almost $400,000. Factor in appeals and that figure can easily double. Because the majority of DP cases are handled by public defenders, these costs are paid by the taxpayers.

Then there’s the final issue with the DP: what if the convicted is innocent? Since 1973, 156 people who were sentenced to death were later found to be innocent. That’s 1 out of every 10 individuals given the DP since 1973 and those are only the ones who could be exonerated. Texas, for instance, forbids the introduction of new evidence at appeal and this law was responsible for the wrongful execution of Todd Willingham who was convicted of the arson deaths of his three kids based on junk science. Once an innocent person is executed, there’s no taking it back and no matter how you slice it, that’s just wrong.

TODAY IN OLD-WEST HISTORY -- On today’s date 171 years ago, Sunday, February 9, 1851, notorious Native-Texan Old-West desperado James Middleton Riley (1851-1913), better-known as “Doc” Middleton, "The King of the Horse Thieves,” was born at the town of Bastrop in Bastrop County, Texas, although his death certificate erroneously states that he was born in Mississippi.

Middleton was known by a variety of aliases including David Charles Middleton, David Cherry Middleton, & Jack Lyons, & he was also variously known as Texas Jack, Gold-Tooth Jack, & Gold-Tooth Charley amongst various & sundry other monikers. A life-long horse thief, he was said to have stolen his first steed when he was around the age of 14. In 1870, he was convicted of murder in Texas, but he was able to make his escape & he began running from the Law.

In 1876, Doc joined a cattle drive to Ogallala, Nebraska. In January, 1877, he killed a soldier in a saloon at Sidney, Nebraska. Although arrested, he was able to escape again, after which he organized a gang of outlaws known as the “Pony Boys,” who began to steal horses, primarily from Indians but sometimes from the government as well. Operating in Nebraska, Iowa, the Dakotas, & as far south as Texas, they were responsible for stealing thousands of horses. The Pony Boys included Kid Wade, Curly Grimes, Jack Nolan, & briefly Luke Short.

In 1878, Doc was wounded in a shoot-out, captured, & taken to Sidney, Nebraska. Convicted of Grand Larceny, he served five years in a Nebraska prison. After his release from prison in 1883, the other members of his old gang had either been captured or killed & Middleton earned his living as a bartender, a gambler, a deputy sheriff, & even working for a few months in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show.

In 1893, Middleton entered the famed Chadron, Nebraska, to Chicago horse race, when the World’s Columbian Exposition was being held in Chicago, & although he finished, he didn’t win. Later, he opened a saloon at Ardmore, Nebraska & was involved in bootlegging to the Sioux Indians on the Pine Ridge Reservation. After soldiers from Fort Robinson wrecked his saloon, he moved to Orin Junction, Wyoming, where he operated an illegal tent saloon.

After a knife fight in his saloon, Doc was arrested & thrown into the County Jail at Orin Junction, where he died of illness or infection on December 13, 1913. Sources differ as to whether or not Doc was wounded in the knife fight, the reason for his arrest, & whether he died of an infected wound, or from consumption (tuberculosis), or from a erysipelas (a severe bacterial skin infection that is also known as Saint Anthony’s Fire).

Despite his horse-thieving ways, Middleton was described as a likeable man -- good-tempered, sober, & industrious. He was never known to drink or to gamble & he made a number of friends throughout the frontier, including Wild West showman Buffalo Bill Cody (1846-1917) & several ranchers in the areas in which he was known to steal horses. Doc Middleton was described by the Cheyenne Daily Sun as a “golden-toothed lover of other folks’ cattle & horseflesh.”

The circa-1891 photograph of Doc Middleton was made when the King of the Horse Thieves was around 40 years of age.

MY ALL-TIME FAVORITE EXCUSE, popularized in New York Magazine, was that Clinton’s campaign was “too smart to win,” because the “iron self-confidence” of key aides in their prognostication models made them “largely impervious to feedback” about “danger signs” emanating from key states. Most of us would define this not as smartness but its opposite, but this was the kind of thing that prestige media ate up at the time.

— Matt Taibbi

IT HAPPENED ON SUNSET BLVD.

Young starlet Raquel Welch (1960) poolside at the Beverly Hills Hotel.

LATINX

Editor,

I am opposed to the use of “Latinx” in place of Latino or Latina.

As a former resident staying up on local news, I noticed the term in a recent quote from a UDJ article. Besides being hard to pronounce, it seems unnecessary in a language like English, which is already almost completely devoid of gender. A few remaining vestiges such as the waiter-waitress, actor-actress distinction are being rapidly suppressed.

By contrast, in Latin countries like Italy, France, Spain and Portugal and the entirety of Latin America where romance languages are widely spoken, everything has a gender. All articles, definite and indefinite, and all nouns are either feminine or masculine.

Even adjectives and verbs must “agree.” This is purely a matter of convention. The word planet, for example, is masculine in Spanish and Italian, feminine in French.

John Kress, Tlatlauquitepec (Mexico)

RIP JACK KEROUAC (1922-1969)

He loved the sounds and the heft of words, though the first words he heard were not English words. Mais non. They were joual, the dialect of working class French Canadians spoken by his parents in Lowell, Massachusetts, where they attended church, prayed and raised a family, though a son named Gerard died as a child, leaving brother Jack alone and lonely, weeping daily and knowing in his heart that there must have been a hundred words for crying, much as Eskimos had a vast wilderness of words for snow, which he imagined as frozen tears, and so he grew up thinking of himself as a lowly Canuck, found salvation first in the blues on records that gave him permission to experience his pain and later in the city he heard alive and in person, the Prez Lester Young, and Billie Holiday, the Queen, wrote without stopping, without thinking, let words pour out, filled endless pages, went on the road, covered mile after mile, traversed the continent with companions Neal and Allen, the radio blaring, the landscape blurring and words eating up the miles, and so he lived in sadness and in joy, and in joy and sadness, killing the pain anyway he could, and so now I remember him, angel headed hipster, 100 years after his birth, March 12, 1922, RIP Jack Kerouac.

— Jonah Raskin

THE CHINAGO

by Jack London

Ah Cho did not understand French. He sat in the crowded court room, very weary and bored, listening to the unceasing, explosive French that now one official and now another uttered. It was just so much gabble to Ah Cho, and he marvelled at the stupidity of the Frenchmen who took so long to find out the murderer of Chung Ga, and who did not find him at all. The five hundred coolies on the plantation knew that Ah San had done the killing, and here was Ah San not even arrested. It was true that all the coolies had agreed secretly not to testify against one another; but then, it was so simple, the Frenchmen should have been able to discover that Ah San was the man. They were very stupid, these Frenchmen.

Ah Cho had done nothing of which to be afraid. He had had no hand in the killing. It was true he had been present at it, and Schemmer, the overseer on the plantation, had rushed into the barracks immediately afterward and caught him there, along with four or five others; but what of that? Chung Ga had been stabbed only twice. It stood to reason that five or six men could not inflict two stab wounds. At the most, if a man had struck but once, only two men could have done it.

So it was that Ah Cho reasoned, when he, along with his four companions, had lied and blocked and obfuscated in their statements to the court concerning what had taken place. They had heard the sounds of the killing, and, like Schemmer, they had run to the spot. They had got there before Schemmer--that was all. True, Schemmer had testified that, attracted by the sound of quarrelling as he chanced to pass by, he had stood for at least five minutes outside; that then, when he entered, he found the prisoners already inside; and that they had not entered just before, because he had been standing by the one door to the barracks. But what of that? Ah Cho and his four fellow-prisoners had testified that Schemmer was mistaken. In the end they would be let go. They were all confident of that. Five men could not have their heads cut off for two stab wounds. Besides, no foreign devil had seen the killing. But these Frenchmen were so stupid. In China, as Ah Cho well knew, the magistrate would order all of them to the torture and learn the truth. The truth was very easy to learn under torture. But these Frenchmen did not torture--bigger fools they! Therefore they would never find out who killed Chung Ga.

But Ah Cho did not understand everything. The English Company that owned the plantation had imported into Tahiti, at great expense, the five hundred coolies. The stockholders were clamouring for dividends, and the Company had not yet paid any; wherefore the Company did not want its costly contract labourers to start the practice of killing one another. Also, there were the French, eager and willing to impose upon the Chinagos the virtues and excellences of French law. There was nothing like setting an example once in a while; and, besides, of what use was New Caledonia except to send men to live out their days in misery and pain in payment of the penalty for being frail and human?

Ah Cho did not understand all this. He sat in the court room and waited for the baffled judgment that would set him and his comrades free to go back to the plantation and work out the terms of their contracts. This judgment would soon be rendered. Proceedings were drawing to a close. He could see that. There was no more testifying, no more gabble of tongues. The French devils were tired, too, and evidently waiting for the judgment. And as he waited he remembered back in his life to the time when he had signed the contract and set sail in the ship for Tahiti. Times had been hard in his sea-coast village, and when he indentured himself to labour for five years in the South Seas at fifty cents Mexican a day, he had thought himself fortunate. There were men in his village who toiled a whole year for ten dollars Mexican, and there were women who made nets all the year round for five dollars, while in the houses of shopkeepers there were maidservants who received four dollars for a year of service. And here he was to receive fifty cents a day; for one day, only one day, he was to receive that princely sum! What if the work were hard? At the end of the five years he would return home--that was in the contract--and he would never have to work again. He would be a rich man for life, with a house of his own, a wife, and children growing up to venerate him. Yes, and back of the house he would have a small garden, a place of meditation and repose, with goldfish in a tiny lakelet, and wind bells tinkling in the several trees, and there would be a high wall all around so that his meditation and repose should be undisturbed.

Well, he had worked out three of those five years. He was already a wealthy man (in his own country) through his earnings, and only two years more intervened between the cotton plantation on Tahiti and the meditation and repose that awaited him. But just now he was losing money because of the unfortunate accident of being present at the killing of Chung Ga. He had lain three weeks in prison, and for each day of those three weeks he had lost fifty cents. But now judgment would soon be given, and he would go back to work.

Ah Cho was twenty-two years old. He was happy and good-natured, and it was easy for him to smile. While his body was slim in the Asiatic way, his face was rotund. It was round, like the moon, and it irradiated a gentle complacence and a sweet kindliness of spirit that was unusual among his countrymen. Nor did his looks belie him. He never caused trouble, never took part in wrangling. He did not gamble. His soul was not harsh enough for the soul that must belong to a gambler. He was content with little things and simple pleasures. The hush and quiet in the cool of the day after the blazing toil in the cotton field was to him an infinite satisfaction. He could sit for hours gazing at a solitary flower and philosophizing about the mysteries and riddles of being. A blue heron on a tiny crescent of sandy beach, a silvery splatter of flying fish, or a sunset of pearl and rose across the lagoon, could entrance him to all forgetfulness of the procession of wearisome days and of the heavy lash of Schemmer.

Schemmer, Karl Schemmer, was a brute, a brutish brute. But he earned his salary. He got the last particle of strength out of the five hundred slaves; for slaves they were until their term of years was up. Schemmer worked hard to extract the strength from those five hundred sweating bodies and to transmute it into bales of fluffy cotton ready for export. His dominant, iron-clad, primeval brutishness was what enabled him to effect the transmutation. Also, he was assisted by a thick leather belt, three inches wide and a yard in length, with which he always rode and which, on occasion, could come down on the naked back of a stooping coolie with a report like a pistol-shot. These reports were frequent when Schemmer rode down the furrowed field.

Once, at the beginning of the first year of contract labour, he had killed a coolie with a single blow of his fist. He had not exactly crushed the man's head like an egg-shell, but the blow had been sufficient to addle what was inside, and, after being sick for a week, the man had died. But the Chinese had not complained to the French devils that ruled over Tahiti. It was their own look out. Schemmer was their problem. They must avoid his wrath as they avoided the venom of the centipedes that lurked in the grass or crept into the sleeping quarters on rainy nights. The Chinagos-- such they were called by the indolent, brown-skinned island folk--saw to it that they did not displease Schemmer too greatly. This was equivalent to rendering up to him a full measure of efficient toil. That blow of Schemmer's fist had been worth thousands of dollars to the Company, and no trouble ever came of it to Schemmer.

The French, with no instinct for colonization, futile in their childish playgame of developing the resources of the island, were only too glad to see the English Company succeed. What matter of Schemmer and his redoubtable fist? The Chinago that died? Well, he was only a Chinago. Besides, he died of sunstroke, as the doctor's certificate attested. True, in all the history of Tahiti no one had ever died of sunstroke. But it was that, precisely that, which made the death of this Chinago unique. The doctor said as much in his report. He was very candid. Dividends must be paid, or else one more failure would be added to the long history of failure in Tahiti.

There was no understanding these white devils. Ah Cho pondered their inscrutableness as he sat in the court room waiting the judgment. There was no telling what went on at the back of their minds. He had seen a few of the white devils. They were all alike--the officers and sailors on the ship, the French officials, the several white men on the plantation, including Schemmer. Their minds all moved in mysterious ways there was no getting at. They grew angry without apparent cause, and their anger was always dangerous. They were like wild beasts at such times. They worried about little things, and on occasion could out-toil even a Chinago. They were not temperate as Chinagos were temperate; they were gluttons, eating prodigiously and drinking more prodigiously. A Chinago never knew when an act would please them or arouse a storm of wrath. A Chinago could never tell. What pleased one time, the very next time might provoke an outburst of anger. There was a curtain behind the eyes of the white devils that screened the backs of their minds from the Chinago's gaze. And then, on top of it all, was that terrible efficiency of the white devils, that ability to do things, to make things go, to work results, to bend to their wills all creeping, crawling things, and the powers of the very elements themselves. Yes, the white men were strange and wonderful, and they were devils. Look at Schemmer.

Ah Cho wondered why the judgment was so long in forming. Not a man on trial had laid hand on Chung Ga. Ah San alone had killed him. Ah San had done it, bending Chung Ga's head back with one hand by a grip of his queue, and with the other hand, from behind, reaching over and driving the knife into his body. Twice had he driven it in. There in the court room, with closed eyes, Ah Cho saw the killing acted over again--the squabble, the vile words bandied back and forth, the filth and insult flung upon venerable ancestors, the curses laid upon unbegotten generations, the leap of Ah San, the grip on the queue of Chung Ga, the knife that sank twice into his flesh, the bursting open of the door, the irruption of Schemmer, the dash for the door, the escape of Ah San, the flying belt of Schemmer that drove the rest into the corner, and the firing of the revolver as a signal that brought help to Schemmer. Ah Cho shivered as he lived it over. One blow of the belt had bruised his cheek, taking off some of the skin. Schemmer had pointed to the bruises when, on the witness-stand, he had identified Ah Cho. It was only just now that the marks had become no longer visible. That had been a blow. Half an inch nearer the centre and it would have taken out his eye. Then Ah Cho forgot the whole happening in a vision he caught of the garden of meditation and repose that would be his when he returned to his own land.

He sat with impassive face, while the magistrate rendered the judgment. Likewise were the faces of his four companions impassive. And they remained impassive when the interpreter explained that the five of them had been found guilty of the murder of Chung Ga, and that Ah Chow should have his head cut off, Ah Cho serve twenty years in prison in New Caledonia, Wong Li twelve years, and Ah Tong ten years. There was no use in getting excited about it. Even Ah Chow remained expressionless as a mummy, though it was his head that was to be cut off. The magistrate added a few words, and the interpreter explained that Ah Chow's face having been most severely bruised by Schemmer's strap had made his identification so positive that, since one man must die, he might as well be that man. Also, the fact that Ah Cho's face likewise had been severely bruised, conclusively proving his presence at the murder and his undoubted participation, had merited him the twenty years of penal servitude. And down to the ten years of Ah Tong, the proportioned reason for each sentence was explained. Let the Chinagos take the lesson to heart, the Court said finally, for they must learn that the law would be fulfilled in Tahiti though the heavens fell.

The five Chinagos were taken back to jail. They were not shocked nor grieved. The sentences being unexpected was quite what they were accustomed to in their dealings with the white devils. From them a Chinago rarely expected more than the unexpected. The heavy punishment for a crime they had not committed was no stranger than the countless strange things that white devils did. In the weeks that followed, Ah Cho often contemplated Ah Chow with mild curiosity. His head was to be cut off by the guillotine that was being erected on the plantation. For him there would be no declining years, no gardens of tranquillity. Ah Cho philosophized and speculated about life and death. As for himself, he was not perturbed. Twenty years were merely twenty years. By that much was his garden removed from him--that was all. He was young, and the patience of Asia was in his bones. He could wait those twenty years, and by that time the heats of his blood would be assuaged and he would be better fitted for that garden of calm delight. He thought of a name for it; he would call it The Garden of the Morning Calm. He was made happy all day by the thought, and he was inspired to devise a moral maxim on the virtue of patience, which maxim proved a great comfort, especially to Wong Li and Ah Tong. Ah Chow, however, did not care for the maxim. His head was to be separated from his body in so short a time that he had no need for patience to wait for that event. He smoked well, ate well, slept well, and did not worry about the slow passage of time.

Cruchot was a gendarme. He had seen twenty years of service in the colonies, from Nigeria and Senegal to the South Seas, and those twenty years had not perceptibly brightened his dull mind. He was as slow-witted and stupid as in his peasant days in the south of France. He knew discipline and fear of authority, and from God down to the sergeant of gendarmes the only difference to him was the measure of slavish obedience which he rendered. In point of fact, the sergeant bulked bigger in his mind than God, except on Sundays when God's mouthpieces had their say. God was usually very remote, while the sergeant was ordinarily very close at hand.

Cruchot it was who received the order from the Chief Justice to the jailer commanding that functionary to deliver over to Cruchot the person of Ah Chow. Now, it happened that the Chief Justice had given a dinner the night before to the captain and officers of the French man-of-war. His hand was shaking when he wrote out the order, and his eyes were aching so dreadfully that he did not read over the order. It was only a Chinago's life he was signing away, anyway. So he did not notice that he had omitted the final letter in Ah Chow's name. The order read "Ah Cho," and, when Cruchot presented the order, the jailer turned over to him the person of Ah Cho. Cruchot took that person beside him on the seat of a wagon, behind two mules, and drove away.

Ah Cho was glad to be out in the sunshine. He sat beside the gendarme and beamed. He beamed more ardently than ever when he noted the mules headed south toward Atimaono. Undoubtedly Schemmer had sent for him to be brought back. Schemmer wanted him to work. Very well, he would work well. Schemmer would never have cause to complain. It was a hot day. There had been a stoppage of the trades. The mules sweated, Cruchot sweated, and Ah Cho sweated. But it was Ah Cho that bore the heat with the least concern. He had toiled three years under that sun on the plantation. He beamed and beamed with such genial good nature that even Cruchot's heavy mind was stirred to wonderment.

"You are very funny," he said at last.

Ah Cho nodded and beamed more ardently. Unlike the magistrate, Cruchot spoke to him in the Kanaka tongue, and this, like all Chinagos and all foreign devils, Ah Cho understood.

"You laugh too much," Cruchot chided. "One's heart should be full of tears on a day like this."

"I am glad to get out of the jail."

"Is that all?" The gendarme shrugged his shoulders.

"Is it not enough?" was the retort.

"Then you are not glad to have your head cut off?"

Ah Cho looked at him in abrupt perplexity, and said--

"Why, I am going back to Atimaono to work on the plantation for Schemmer. Are you not taking me to Atimaono?"

Cruchot stroked his long moustaches reflectively. "Well, well," he said finally, with a flick of the whip at the off mule, "so you don't know?"

"Know what?" Ah Cho was beginning to feel a vague alarm. "Won't Schemmer let me work for him any more?"

"Not after to-day." Cruchot laughed heartily. It was a good joke. "You see, you won't be able to work after to-day. A man with his head off can't work, eh?" He poked the Chinago in the ribs, and chuckled.

Ah Cho maintained silence while the mules trotted a hot mile. Then he spoke: "Is Schemmer going to cut off my head?"

Cruchot grinned as he nodded.

"It is a mistake," said Ah Cho, gravely. "I am not the Chinago that is to have his head cut off. I am Ah Cho. The honourable judge has determined that I am to stop twenty years in New Caledonia."

The gendarme laughed. It was a good joke, this funny Chinago trying to cheat the guillotine. The mules trotted through a coconut grove and for half a mile beside the sparkling sea before Ah Cho spoke again.

"I tell you I am not Ah Chow. The honourable judge did not say that my head was to go off."

"Don't be afraid," said Cruchot, with the philanthropic intention of making it easier for his prisoner. "It is not difficult to die that way." He snapped his fingers. "It is quick--like that. It is not like hanging on the end of a rope and kicking and making faces for five minutes. It is like killing a chicken with a hatchet. You cut its head off, that is all. And it is the same with a man. Pouf!--it is over. It doesn't hurt. You don't even think it hurts. You don't think. Your head is gone, so you cannot think. It is very good. That is the way I want to die--quick, ah, quick. You are lucky to die that way. You might get the leprosy and fall to pieces slowly, a finger at a time, and now and again a thumb, also the toes. I knew a man who was burned by hot water. It took him two days to die. You could hear him yelling a kilometre away. But you? Ah! so easy! Chck!--the knife cuts your neck like that. It is finished. The knife may even tickle. Who can say? Nobody who died that way ever came back to say."

He considered this last an excruciating joke, and permitted himself to be convulsed with laughter for half a minute. Part of his mirth was assumed, but he considered it his humane duty to cheer up the Chinago.

"But I tell you I am Ah Cho," the other persisted. "I don't want my head cut off."

Cruchot scowled. The Chinago was carrying the foolishness too far.

"I am not Ah Chow--" Ah Cho began.

"That will do," the gendarme interrupted. He puffed up his cheeks and strove to appear fierce.

"I tell you I am not--" Ah Cho began again.

"Shut up!" bawled Cruchot.

After that they rode along in silence. It was twenty miles from Papeete to Atimaono, and over half the distance was covered by the time the Chinago again ventured into speech.

"I saw you in the court room, when the honourable judge sought after our guilt," he began. "Very good. And do you remember that Ah Chow, whose head is to be cut off--do you remember that he--Ah Chow--was a tall man? Look at me."

He stood up suddenly, and Cruchot saw that he was a short man. And just as suddenly Cruchot caught a glimpse of a memory picture of Ah Chow, and in that picture Ah Chow was tall. To the gendarme all Chinagos looked alike. One face was like another. But between tallness and shortness he could differentiate, and he knew that he had the wrong man beside him on the seat. He pulled up the mules abruptly, so that the pole shot ahead of them, elevating their collars.

"You see, it was a mistake," said Ah Cho, smiling pleasantly.

But Cruchot was thinking. Already he regretted that he had stopped the wagon. He was unaware of the error of the Chief Justice, and he had no way of working it out; but he did know that he had been given this Chinago to take to Atimaono and that it was his duty to take him to Atimaono. What if he was the wrong man and they cut his head off? It was only a Chinago when all was said, and what was a Chinago, anyway? Besides, it might not be a mistake. He did not know what went on in the minds of his superiors. They knew their business best. Who was he to do their thinking for them? Once, in the long ago, he had attempted to think for them, and the sergeant had said: "Cruchot, you are a fool? The quicker you know that, the better you will get on. You are not to think; you are to obey and leave thinking to your betters." He smarted under the recollection. Also, if he turned back to Papeete, he would delay the execution at Atimaono, and if he were wrong in turning back, he would get a reprimand from the sergeant who was waiting for the prisoner. And, furthermore, he would get a reprimand at Papeete as well.

He touched the mules with the whip and drove on. He looked at his watch. He would be half an hour late as it was, and the sergeant was bound to be angry. He put the mules into a faster trot. The more Ah Cho persisted in explaining the mistake, the more stubborn Cruchot became. The knowledge that he had the wrong man did not make his temper better. The knowledge that it was through no mistake of his confirmed him in the belief that the wrong he was doing was the right. And, rather than incur the displeasure of the sergeant, he would willingly have assisted a dozen wrong Chinagos to their doom.

As for Ah Cho, after the gendarme had struck him over the head with the butt of the whip and commanded him in a loud voice to shut up, there remained nothing for him to do but to shut up. The long ride continued in silence. Ah Cho pondered the strange ways of the foreign devils. There was no explaining them. What they were doing with him was of a piece with everything they did. First they found guilty five innocent men, and next they cut off the head of the man that even they, in their benighted ignorance, had deemed meritorious of no more than twenty years' imprisonment. And there was nothing he could do. He could only sit idly and take what these lords of life measured out to him. Once, he got in a panic, and the sweat upon his body turned cold; but he fought his way out of it. He endeavoured to resign himself to his fate by remembering and repeating certain passages from the "Yin Chih Wen" ("The Tract of the Quiet Way"); but, instead, he kept seeing his dream-garden of meditation and repose. This bothered him, until he abandoned himself to the dream and sat in his garden listening to the tinkling of the windbells in the several trees. And lo! sitting thus, in the dream, he was able to remember and repeat the passages from "The Tract of the Quiet Way."

So the time passed nicely until Atimaono was reached and the mules trotted up to the foot of the scaffold, in the shade of which stood the impatient sergeant. Ah Cho was hurried up the ladder of the scaffold. Beneath him on one side he saw assembled all the coolies of the plantation. Schemmer had decided that the event would be a good object-lesson, and so he called in the coolies from the fields and compelled them to be present. As they caught sight of Ah Cho they gabbled among themselves in low voices. They saw the mistake; but they kept it to themselves. The inexplicable white devils had doubtlessly changed their minds. Instead of taking the life of one innocent man, they were taking the life of another innocent man. Ah Chow or Ah Cho--what did it matter which? They could never understand the white dogs any more than could the white dogs understand them. Ah Cho was going to have his head cut off, but they, when their two remaining years of servitude were up, were going back to China.

Schemmer had made the guillotine himself. He was a handy man, and though he had never seen a guillotine, the French officials had explained the principle to him. It was on his suggestion that they had ordered the execution to take place at Atimaono instead of at Papeete. The scene of the crime, Schemmer had argued, was the best possible place for the punishment, and, in addition, it would have a salutary influence upon the half-thousand Chinagos on the plantation. Schemmer had also volunteered to act as executioner, and in that capacity he was now on the scaffold, experimenting with the instrument he had made. A banana tree, of the size and consistency of a man's neck, lay under the guillotine. Ah Cho watched with fascinated eyes. The German, turning a small crank, hoisted the blade to the top of the little derrick he had rigged. A jerk on a stout piece of cord loosed the blade and it dropped with a flash, neatly severing the banana trunk.

"How does it work?" The sergeant, coming out on top the scaffold, had asked the question.

"Beautifully," was Schemmer's exultant answer. "Let me show you."

Again he turned the crank that hoisted the blade, jerked the cord, and sent the blade crashing down on the soft tree. But this time it went no more than two-thirds of the way through.

The sergeant scowled. "That will not serve," he said.

Schemmer wiped the sweat from his forehead. "What it needs is more weight," he announced. Walking up to the edge of the scaffold, he called his orders to the blacksmith for a twenty-five-pound piece of iron. As he stooped over to attach the iron to the broad top of the blade, Ah Cho glanced at the sergeant and saw his opportunity.

"The honourable judge said that Ah Chow was to have his head cut off," he began.

The sergeant nodded impatiently. He was thinking of the fifteen-mile ride before him that afternoon, to the windward side of the island, and of Berthe, the pretty half-caste daughter of Lafiere, the pearl-trader, who was waiting for him at the end of it.

"Well, I am not Ah Chow. I am Ah Cho. The honourable jailer has made a mistake. Ah Chow is a tall man, and you see I am short."

The sergeant looked at him hastily and saw the mistake. "Schemmer!" he called, imperatively. "Come here."

The German grunted, but remained bent over his task till the chunk of iron was lashed to his satisfaction. "Is your Chinago ready?" he demanded.

"Look at him," was the answer. "Is he the Chinago?"

Schemmer was surprised. He swore tersely for a few seconds, and looked regretfully across at the thing he had made with his own hands and which he was eager to see work. "Look here," he said finally, "we can't postpone this affair. I've lost three hours' work already out of those five hundred Chinagos. I can't afford to lose it all over again for the right man. Let's put the performance through just the same. It is only a Chinago."

The sergeant remembered the long ride before him, and the pearl-trader's daughter, and debated with himself.

"They will blame it on Cruchot--if it is discovered," the German urged. "But there's little chance of its being discovered. Ah Chow won't give it away, at any rate."

"The blame won't lie with Cruchot, anyway," the sergeant said. "It must have been the jailer's mistake."

"Then let's go on with it. They can't blame us. Who can tell one Chinago from another? We can say that we merely carried out instructions with the Chinago that was turned over to us. Besides, I really can't take all those coolies a second time away from their labour."

They spoke in French, and Ah Cho, who did not understand a word of it, nevertheless knew that they were determining his destiny. He knew, also, that the decision rested with the sergeant, and he hung upon that official's lips.

"All right," announced the sergeant. "Go ahead with it. He is only a Chinago."

"I'm going to try it once more, just to make sure." Schemmer moved the banana trunk forward under the knife, which he had hoisted to the top of the derrick.

Ah Cho tried to remember maxims from "The Tract of the Quiet Way." "Live in concord," came to him; but it was not applicable. He was not going to live. He was about to die. No, that would not do. "Forgive malice"--yes, but there was no malice to forgive. Schemmer and the rest were doing this thing without malice. It was to them merely a piece of work that had to be done, just as clearing the jungle, ditching the water, and planting cotton were pieces of work that had to be done. Schemmer jerked the cord, and Ah Cho forgot "The Tract of the Quiet Way." The knife shot down with a thud, making a clean slice of the tree.

"Beautiful!" exclaimed the sergeant, pausing in the act of lighting a cigarette. "Beautiful, my friend."

Schemmer was pleased at the praise.

"Come on, Ah Chow," he said, in the Tahitian tongue.

"But I am not Ah Chow--" Ah Cho began.

"Shut up!" was the answer. "If you open your mouth again, I'll break your head."

The overseer threatened him with a clenched fist, and he remained silent. What was the good of protesting? Those foreign devils always had their way. He allowed himself to be lashed to the vertical board that was the size of his body. Schemmer drew the buckles tight--so tight that the straps cut into his flesh and hurt. But he did not complain. The hurt would not last long. He felt the board tilting over in the air toward the horizontal, and closed his eyes. And in that moment he caught a last glimpse of his garden of meditation and repose. It seemed to him that he sat in the garden. A cool wind was blowing, and the bells in the several trees were tinkling softly. Also, birds were making sleepy noises, and from beyond the high wall came the subdued sound of village life.

Then he was aware that the board had come to rest, and from muscular pressures and tensions he knew that he was lying on his back. He opened his eyes. Straight above him he saw the suspended knife blazing in the sunshine. He saw the weight which had been added, and noted that one of Schemmer's knots had slipped. Then he heard the sergeant's voice in sharp command. Ah Cho closed his eyes hastily. He did not want to see that knife descend. But he felt it--for one great fleeting instant. And in that instant he remembered Cruchot and what Cruchot had said. But Cruchot was wrong. The knife did not tickle. That much he knew before he ceased to know.

R.D. BEACON:

How broken is our state government let me give you a clue, the California Department of Transportation which are the people that fix our highways and byways, and occasionally we get something new out of it not very soon, most of the money goes in to repairing major highways in cities we rarely see much out here in the countryside, we did get a new bridge at Greenwood Creek a few years back, now they want to work over the bridge down at Elk Creek, not necessarily making it better because there's never been a wreck on the bridge, and they're looking for an excuse to virtually steal land from me to an active condemnation, just because I won't play their little game, so let me tell you the story the original roadway from San Diego to the Oregon border on Highway 1, was only about 8 foot wide and barely good enough for wagons or an occasional horse, when the individual counties decided they didn't want to maintain it they handed it off to the state of California but the counties didn't have a legalese just the right of going down the road over hundreds of years and then later on they passed it off to the state in other words, not a legal roadway just a right of use, over the years the state of California Kicking the edges out and doing work on the road without even paying landowners for what they were stealing, figuring nobody notice, in the early days there were cattle guards at the various property owners division and we had open range, you know like Sonoma County down by gender, now the state has decided it wants to fix the bridge and Elk Creek and virtually steal five or 10 acres paying chicken feed for the property, even though it's Creek frontage and has development possibilities, and never been in the Williamson Act, I offered to sell him the highway 60 foot wide to all of my property, they turned me down, I offered to sell them the beach and give them the highway so the public would have a place to go recreate, and they turned me down it would rather steal it, from a senior citizen somebody who spent their life here keeping the tourists off the beach, protecting the environment specific salamander, and protecting the Indian artifacts that are scattered in the area, but the state of California they don't care, from the officials in Sacramento that are dancing on the end of the string for the governor was another broken individual, all the help that trickles down to the system they have a lack of understanding about true environmentalism, it's their way and the highway and they really don't care, only want to do is get their bridge and steal as much land in the process, it's not fair or even right to steal land from landowners and not pay them what it's worth, what's even worse in my investigation I've seen lands of the acquired and move the road over a bit and that get premium dollars at public auction for the land they sold for nickels and dimes, so now I'm going to have to hire some high-end lawyer to do battle with the state I thought, that government was supposed to be for the people and by the people, I'm beginning to think that's wrong, it looks like government is for government by government for the preservation of government and the hell with the people.

CRAIG'S CV

My Resume

Born in Cleveland, Ohio September 28, 1949 at 10:55 A.M. Graduated Summit Country Day (Catholic boy's school section) in 1963, graduated University School of Milwaukee high school in 1967, graduated from the University of Arizona, class of 1971, earning a B.A. degree in World Literature and Economics.

Spent the next 50 years as a peace & justice and environmental activist, which included 23 years performing unpaid service with Catholic Worker, in Berkeley, Los Angeles, New York City, and Washington, D.C. (which included participation at the Olive Branch House of Hospitality, and working at the Zacchaeus Soup Kitchen). Have been to Washington, D.C. fifteen times helping to maintain the peace vigil in front of the White House.

In addition to Catholicism, explored various disciplines in the yoga and Buddhist traditions, including spending the summer of 1994 in India. I have been involved with innumerable publications as a contributor, editor, plus uncountable poems have been written. Other skills include: financial office, chef work, and retail sales.

72 years of a genuine life sincerely lived has resulted in a present need to move on to my next highest good, doing only that which is pleasing to God. PAX VOBISCUM

Craig Louis Stehr

37 Comments

Eric Sunswheat February 11, 2022

POSSIBLY A PLANNING AND BUILDING CODE DEPARTMENT ENFORCEMENT BUREAUCRACY RAMP UP TROJAN HORSE SOON TO BE UNMASKED.

Re: TRANSLATION: The Mendocino Cannabis Department has added a Program manager, a senior planner, six journeyman planners, a mapping specialist, an analyst, an office supervisor and two admin assistants — a total of 13 mostly high paid people.

Reply
Harvey Reading February 11, 2022

BIG NUTS TRAINING LITTLE NUTS

I agree with every sign. Wake up, people! Or have you been too thoroughly conned, to the point that you no longer even think, over the past 40 years? Anyone who still trusts government or kaputalist medicine is a poorly programmed robot at heart.

Reply
- Marshall Newman February 11, 2022
  
  Not surprised. Not impressed, either.
  
  Reply
  - Harvey Reading February 11, 2022
    
    Not impressed with you, either. Keep lapping up the lies.
    
    Reply
    - Marshall Newman February 11, 2022
      
      Why waste my time when you – by doing so – waste yours? There is nothing noble about dying for one’s beliefs when one’s beliefs are demonstrably wrong.
      
      Reply
      - Harvey Reading February 11, 2022
        
        LOL. “Demonstrable” by whose definition? The liars of government or the liars of medical science?
        
        I have been lied to too often by both to take anything they peddle at face value.
        
        People who unquestionably trust the ruling class, politicians, and medicos are fools as far as I am concerned. Such people are easily led into wars and into believing it is their “right” to impose their will on others, around the world. And, the gullibility of such people is why we have fascist laws that make our “freedom” nothing more than some weird concept, fully available only to the despicable ruling class. Uppity and stupid describe such people perfectly. I despise them.
        
        Reply
        
        Marshall Newman February 11, 2022
        
        Demonstrable by statistics from multiple sources, many of which are independent of the US government. Tracking and comparing death rates, for example. You and your ilk likely will claim they are the result of some vast conspiracy. If so, prove it.
        
        A fair number of your fellow travelers have discovered their belief in “alternative” facts was wrong. In several cases that discovery came too late; it cost them their lives.
        
        Reply
        
        Harvey Reading February 12, 2022
        
        How many died in wrecks? In accidents at home? While crossing streets? Shot by police? Nice try at diversionary tactics, though. Just because studies are independent of government does NOT mean they are independent of kaputalist medicine, which includes lying drug manufacturers and peddlers.
        
        Enjoy the company of YOUR “fellow travelers”.
        
        Reply
        
        Marshall Newman February 13, 2022
        
        This little item is example #1 of diversionary tactics, Harvey.
        
        Reply
Harvey Reading February 11, 2022

YAHOO NEWS REPORTS

More power to the truckers, and screw the robber barons and their yuppie acolytes. That’s what happens when labor has been crushed by the wealthy for far too long. Down with the fascist department of “homeland” security, too.

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Harvey Reading February 11, 2022

MEANWHILE, AT THE GROCERY STORE

The “invisible hand” in action? LOL. No, it’s pure greed, the basis of kaputalism.

By the way, just who is Raquel Welch? Seems I recall the name, from a long time ago…

Reply
- Lazarus February 11, 2022
  
  “By the way, just who is Raquel Welch? Seems I recall the name, from a long time ago…”
  HR
  
  One Million Years B.C.
  
  Check it out, you might like it…
  Be well,
  Laz
  
  Reply
  - Harvey Reading February 11, 2022
    
    Not quite that long ago…
    
    Reply
Nathan Duffy February 11, 2022

Um dang Racquel!!!!
As far as LatinX my opinion is that X has already been defined in American English in the form of Malcolm X, or replacing the given slave name of the African-American, a practice started by the Nation of Islam.

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Joe Hansem February 11, 2022

The recent New York Times obituary of New Left historian Todd Gitlin lists one of his two exes from the 70s as Carol Wolman. I’m thinking this might refer to retired Mendocino psychiatrist and local activist Dr. Carol Wolman who apparently attended Harvard in the same period that Gitlin did.

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George Hollister February 11, 2022

“It is unbelievable how fringe thinkers and political cons like Donald Trump have seized control of the GOP”

Trump has seized influence in the GOP by making it the party of the working class. He has commonality with Bernie Sanders, in that both are people with a vision, which is unusual to see in Washington. Trump is a lot of things; a big mouth a-hole, narcissistic, and sometimes delusional, but hardly a con. Trump, is the most significant American political figure in this century, so far.

Reply
- Harvey Reading February 11, 2022
  
  “Trump has seized influence in the GOP by making it the party of the working class.”
  
  That is one of the dumbest assertions I have ever read. At best, he plays with the Working Class, like promising them a tax cut, then actually cutting taxes for the wealthy…sort of like Reagan fasciuglicans did. His game playing is pretty much par for the course among fasciuglicans.
  
  Reply
- Chuck Wilcher February 11, 2022
  
  Sharing this article with you again, George:
  
  “President Trump has said he would ‘protect’ and ‘fight for’ workers. Instead, his administration has systematically done the opposite.”
  
  https://www.epi.org/publication/50-reasons/
  
  Reply
- chuck dunbar February 11, 2022
  
  Trump ” has commonality with Bernie Sanders… ” Man, George, that is pretty out-there, and I have to agree with Harvey about this assertion. Trump has done little in reality to help working class Americans. He has entranced some via his culture war stances, and his “say it like it is” persona, even though most of what he says is either a lie or self-promotion. But putting him anywhere near the class of Bernie Sanders is a far, far stretch. Bernie is a progressive, Trump is clearly not.
  
  Reply
  - George Hollister February 11, 2022
    
    Trump, and Sanders share the same positions on immigration, and trade. Immigration and trade are the primary issues Trump has spoken about for at least the last 30 years, and big issues for the working class. Progressive, and otherwise?
    
    Reply
- Kirk Vodopals February 11, 2022
  
  You lost me at “making it the party of the working class”. Donald J Trump was the biggest huckster ever to make it into the oval office. The assertion that he did anything remotely beneficial for the working class is a complete ruse.
  
  Reply
George Hollister February 11, 2022

The article is nothing more than a political propaganda hit piece. Most working class people I know would take great exception. Trump mishandled Covid? Other than injecting himself, and shooting his mouth off, he did relatively good.

Reply
- Harvey Reading February 11, 2022
  
  Your comment is the propaganda piece, George. They almost always are. You appear to fear facing reality, preferring a dream world, comfortably snuggled with your buddies from the right-wing lunatic fringe, I suppose.
  
  Reply
Craig Stehr February 11, 2022

~PLEASE SEND THIS TO SENIOR SOCIAL SERVICES IN MENDOCINO COUNTY~
I need to leave the apartment where I am presently in Garberville, on or before Thursday February 17th. I have nowhere to go as I had to leave my previous residence in Redwood Valley , because the cannabis trimmers did not want to live in an intentional community environment with me. The individual in Redwood Valley who had the property title 1. demanded that I leave, and 2. took me to the Voll Motel on Ukiah’s State Street where he paid for several days. Subsequently, I visited a friend in Garberville who was doing an historical video digitization project, which I helped finance, as he did the technical work. The work is now done and stored in the cloud. Today I left a message for social services in Garberville (whose offices are closed February 11th due to Lincoln’s Birthday), asking them to contact social services in Southern Humboldt county and also Mendocino county, as I need to be taken to a senior shelter if nothing else develops. Thank you for your concern. PAX VOBISCUM

Craig Louis Stehr
Telephone Messages: (213) 842-3082
Email: craiglouisstehr@gmail.com

Reply
- Marmon February 11, 2022
  
  You might have better luck with Mental Health
  
  Marmon
  
  Reply
  - Craig Stehr February 11, 2022
    
    There is nothing the matter with my mental health! I might have better luck if the cannabis industry buys me a month at the Voll Motel for having displaced me from my residence of over one year in Redwood Valley. Yours for basic sanity, Craig Louis Stehr
    
    Reply
    - Marmon February 11, 2022
      
      All I’m saying Craig, if you need help don’t be afraid to ask. Homelessness can lead to all kinds of mental health issues. Call the crisis line if you have to.
      
      Marmon
      
      Reply
      - Craig Stehr February 11, 2022
        
        I will NOT hesitate to ask for help. Indeed, my situation is serious. ;-))
        
        Reply
        
        Bruce McEwen February 11, 2022
        
        You misread me, Craig. I’ve been in your position myself. I would take you in in a heartbeat, but I’d have to put a family member out on the street. So don’t take this advice adversely. You should answer that ad in the AVA from Sister Yasmine, who is a lovely hippy chick and she has been reduced to begging in these pages for a man around the house to do some of the things she can no longer manage due to her age. You, my good man, are remarkably fit, for your advanced years. You could labor like an honest monk for this good woman who would gladly cook and care for you, if you’d be Christian enough to do as much as she expected of you.
        
        Got community?
        
        Take a breath, look through some back issues, and look for a classified ad Sister Yasmin usually posts here. Get the number and call her.
        
        Keep the faith, and God help you if you won’t help yourself. There’s a scripture, methinks, about the Lord looking after and feeding even every sparrow, but as my daughter used to tell her lazy brats. “He doesn’t just throw it in the nest!”
        
        Reply
        
        Professor Cosmos February 12, 2022
        
        I could be wrong, but based on what I know, she may not be open to such an arrangement. I don’t think that’s likely. Craig’s best bet isn’t in Mendocino County due to voucher program assistance being closed with current long waiting lists. Instead, urban bay area counties have more active measures in play…..from building tiny home settlements to buying hotels and motels and housing people there. It is an outrage seniors have to deal with having no shelter in our local area. He might do better in SF or San Jose.
        
        Reply
Marmon February 11, 2022

RE: DISGRACED UKIAH POLICE SERGEANT KEVIN MURRAY CITED IN LAKE COUNTY FOR TAKING WOMAN’S WALLET WHILE ON BAIL

Trent James just did a video on this story today, giving Murray some sound advice. It looks like Trent is coming home next week, at least for at least a few days anyway. Stay safe Trent, and don’t forget to file your Certificate of Candidacy for Mendocino County Sheriff.

TRENT JAMES FOR SHERIFF

Marmon

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chuck dunbar February 11, 2022

Here’s a notice regarding the latest mission by these “patriots:”

Join us for a rally at our P.H.O.'s house this Sunday, February 13, at 1:30. We'll meet in Micheals craft store parking lot at 1:30, then leave the parking lot at 1:45 to head to his house.

The P.H.O. (public health officer) is the person making our county orders/mandates. The B.O.S. (board of supervisors) should be voting on them ,but they have decided to skip that step, and have given Coren all the power. Corens newest order allows the government to take you from your home,and detain you somewhere else if they dont think your ”quarantining”properly. Our silence is prolonging the nightmare. We need EVERYONE to stand TOGETHER, and say enough….. we WILL NOT comply. We will have extra signs on hand, so don’t worry if you don’t have the time to make one. Hope to see you all there!

Mendocino Patriots
368 Tumbleweed Way, Southlake
TX 76092 United States

Reply
- Marmon February 11, 2022
  
  What do expect from a Socialist Public Health Officer who idolizes Bernie Sanders? It’s all about big government and big government control. The same with Fauci.
  
  Marmon
  
  Reply
- Gary Smith February 12, 2022
  
  Yes, of course, Mendocino Patriots are based in Texas. Makes perfect sense.
  
  Reply
  - Stephen Rosenthal February 13, 2022
    
    There is a Southlake, Texas, but no such street or address. The Mendocino Patriots are too afraid to reveal where their “HQ” is or anything else about them. In the words of their cult leader: fake fake fake organization.
    
    Reply
Marmon February 11, 2022

A State of Emergency has been declared in Canada over trucker protests. The truckers could be jailed for a year and charged thousands of dollars. An American “People Convoy” will begin in California and end in Washington DC.

Marmon

Reply
- Chuck Wilcher February 12, 2022
  
  I’m old enough to remember when Republicans squawked like tortured squirrels if traffic was impeded during a protest. They even made laws declaring it legal to run over the protesters.
  
  Reply

Mendocino County Today: Friday, Feb. 11, 2022

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