Mendocino County Today: Thursday, Feb. 17, 2022

Mostly Sunny | 32 New Cases | Lost Property | Mendo Dean | Vacation Rentals | Little League | Online Books | Dress Code | Ed Notes | Fluid Fellow | Slime Slingers | Permaculture | Rancher Co-op | Free Borscht | Mill Street | Public Education | Why Nevedal | Mendo Forest | PG&E Bill | Yesterday's Catch | Freedom Convoys | Surrender | Zuckerboned | Kurt Vonnegut | Hitler Assets | Holly/Sullivan | America Finale | Mendo Cannabis | Caspar Woods | Climate Emergency | Log Skidding | Deprivation Stories | Maru 2 | Insane Specter | One-Stop Shopping | Unwanted Extremes | Pie Eaters

TODAY WILL TURN OUT MOSTLY SUNNY with much lighter winds than the past couple days. Inland areas will see unseasonably warm afternoons through Saturday, while light onshore breezes and some marine layer clouds will keep the coast cooler. Brisk and cooler weather will commence on Sunday and continue into next week. (NWS)

32 NEW COVID CASES reported in Mendocino County yesterday afternoon.

FORT BRAGG POLICE DEPARTMENT:

We received a report lost property at Harvest Market today. In reviewing surveillance footage we determined someone may have located the property before we could. We at the department would like to invite the male adult wearing a camo jacket, jeans, black cap, blue mask, who purchased items from aisle 1 (elk aisle) driving a white pick-up with a covered bed to please contact Officer Beak in order to return the property. You can reach him at (707) 964-0200. We know the owner would appreciate the return of the property.

AS MENDOCINO COUNTY sorta-kinda-maybe-someday considers some kind of vacation rental (i.e., airbnb) restrictions, they might want to consider that Sonoma County has been doing just that for years. According to SoCo’s permit portal: 

“On November 4, 2014, the [Sonoma County] Board of Supervisors directed staff to make revisions to the Vacation Rental Ordinance after an extensive public outreach campaign. Revisions have been made to address issues related to the potential loss of permanent housing stock, property manager requirements and responsibilities, and monitoring and enforcement of vacation rental rules. A revised Vacation Rentals Ordinance was adopted by the Board of Supervisors on March 15, 2016, with an effective date of April 14, 2016.”

The core of SoCo’s ordinance, as we read it, issues permits with reasonable conditions including rental registration for Bed Tax collection, for “primary owners,” but not “residences or condominiums owned as a timeshare, limited liability partnership or corporation, or fractional ownership of six (6) or more interests.”

Mendo could adopt a version of this tomorrow and we doubt there’d be much opposition. But…

(Mark Scaramella)

sonomacounty.ca.gov/PRMD/Regulations/Vacation-and-Hosted-Rentals/Vacation-Rentals-Ordinance/

LITTLE LEAGUE DAYS

Editor,

Greetings from Enon Ohio! Being 74, I find it's time to go through much of what I’ve accumulated over the years. One set of things in that category is the collection of slides that I'd taken which led me to a few pictures of Anderson Valley Little League circa 1975-1976!

Those were interesting and good times that we shared helping young men to follow the dream of many on the baseball diamond. I remember the Anderson brothers blasting softballs far over my head in leftfield in the Valley softball league. I played with Harold Perry on the Boonville team!

Anyway, I thought I would try to connect with you and share the pictures I took at that time. One team picture (above) was a slide dated July 1975. I wish the clarity was better. Three of the others look like they were taken on a day when we played Manchester. It was definitely a league that meant traveling from Anderson Valley to the Coast and Manchester, Point Arena and Gualala. But I enjoyed that. 

Here's the coach sitting next to his son as well as Eric June in the foreground and his dad Jack in the background.

I have plenty of good memories of my five years as pastor of the Anderson Valley and Philo United Methodist churches from 1973-1978. I got married and moved to Biggs and Princeton, California, then got divorced and several years later met Tim Alexander's first cousin while attending a national church meeting in Ohio. By the way, Tim and Sandy divorced and he's now living in Goodyears Bar, four miles south of Downeyville on California State Highway 49.

I moved to Ohio in 1984, served a small church and worked for a Christian television station there before we -- my wife Patty, her son and daughter and our son -- moved to Auburn, California in 1990.

Here's the 1970 16 picture.

We moved back to Ohio, serving two small churches in the northwest area of Dayton, then to the northeast part of the metro area in Enon in 2007, retiring in 2017.

We took a family trip to California in June of 1989 with the Alexanders and spent one night in Boonville with Tim's mom. The Boonville church held a potluck for us. Unfortunately, that was the last time that I've been in your neck of the woods. I have missed it. Those were good times with many memories.

Life has been good. Patti and I have two grandsons in Colfax and two grandsons and a granddaughter in Cortez, Colorado. So we spend a good amount of time on the road.

I'm glad you are still at it, sharing your thoughts (I'll call them that!) and life in an area that I called home and miss often.

Here's to you and any folks who are still around and who may remember my time with you all.

Sincerely,

Jeff Mohr

Enon, Ohio

PS. I just saw an article about “Yewgene” Waggoner from April 22, 2020. I was lucky enough to be the fifth man on his team in 1973-1974. With Jim Hans, I was there to attempt to get rebounds when Gene and Gary plus David Summit missed — not that often!

AFTER THE CLOUD

Editor,

If, Mr. Anderson, unlike you, I find Tommy Wayne Kramer to be periodically banal and irritating, must I forbear to comment, as “he” is a fictional device, the ventriloquial instrument of Tom Hine? Would it be as amiss for me to take issue with "him" as to complain to the publisher of Penguin Books that I heartily disagree with what Emma Bovary asserts on page 223? Notwithstanding the possibility that “Kramer” is a satirical puppet of sorts expressing sentiments distinct from those of his puppetmaster, I respond to the puppet as follows.

Libraries need not exist, you argue, as everything is on Kindle. I suppose, if you don't mind the world's literature being virtual, being kept in reserve on the other side of a corporate gatekeeper, and dependent on an external power supply being provided to a device made by slaves in China. Has anyone genuinely read and finished “The Magic Mountain,” “Moby Dick,” or the “Charterhouse of Parma” by reading it on Kindle? Of course not. Besides, every choice of book, every "turn" of the page, becomes part of a data set associated with any sap oblivious enough to read books via computers, a data profile sold to third-party information brokers or handed over without a warrant to one of the government's alphabet agencies. Not to mention the fact that all computer devices run mostly on oil and coal, not some minty ether. Some day "the Cloud" will dissipate and the decision to entrust so many treasures to its safekeeping will seem like history’s greatest fatuity. As for bowing before the juggernaut of Amazon, besides doing your part to sign the death sentence of used bookstores, you feel no embarrassment when an algorithm tells you what “people like you” would like to read next? You are comfortable with the proposition that your penchants and interests are so predictable that a machine knows better than you do what book should be next in your venture of self-education? You don't bristle at being moved down a chute that spares you the uncertainty of fortuitous and serendipitous discoveries?

The Internet has made so many pleasures unnecessary.

Regards,

Volt-Voort

Rome, New York

ED REPLY: You might agree, VV, that all of us are regularly "banal and irritating," but I agree with you "that the internet has made so many pleasures unnecessary." You may be reassured that I, having known Mr. Kramer for forty years, can attest that he is most def a book guy, and his description of the Ukiah Library as a kind of book-themed out-patient center is, I'm afraid, accurate.

ED NOTES

JODY MARTINEZ'S history column for the Ukiah Daily Journal is one of my local must reads. Here are few items from the February, 1893 edition:

(1) “The Mendocino County Board of Supervisors met in adjourned session yesterday. All members present. The principal business before them is to award contracts for keeping the public highways in repair for the ensuing four years. There are forty-one road districts in the county and more than 100 bids have been filed. At the hour of going to press the bids had been opened but no contracts had yet been awarded.”

(2) E.W. Campbell, made notorious by his testimony against Sidney Bell, who was tried for the murder of Samuel Jacobson in San Francisco, was sentenced in the Justice’s Court at Fort Bragg on Monday to 180 days in the County jail for stealing a gold watch from the show case of a store. It will be remembered that a few weeks ago the Dispatch-Democrat published an interview with Campbell in which he said that he was conducting a saloon at Caspar and making heaps of money by “rolling” drunks. Campbell will be needed in San Francisco again shortly to testify in the murder case of Sidney Bell, which will be tried again.

(3) C. Hofman’s Cheap Cash Store (Willits)

• 15 lbs. best island rice, $1.00.
• 5 lbs. green coffee, $1.00.
• 4 lbs. parched coffee, $1.00.
• 18 lbs. dry granulated sugar, $1.00.
• 20 lbs. golden C sugar, $1.00
• 20 lb. box full weight soap, $1.00.
• 22 lbs. rolled wheat, $1.00.
• 50 lb. sack best Sperry’s flour, $1.10.
• Syrup per gallon, 40 cts.
• Cups and saucers, 6 each, 50 cts.
• 6 dinner plates, 50 cts.

These are no bait, all other goods at like prices. Good goods, full weight, and honorable dealing maintained.

ONE MORE REASON TRUMP WILL BE RE-ELECTED: The Biden administration has hired the first “non-binary person” to a federal government leadership position, according to Sam Brinton, who will now serve as deputy assistant secretary of spent fuel and waste disposition in the office of nuclear energy for the Department of Energy. 

Brinton, who applies the pronouns they/them to him/herself, said in a post on LinkedIn that “They believe they will be the first gender fluid person in federal government leadership. In this role I'll be doing what I always dreamed of doing, leading the effort to solve the nation's nuclear waste challenges. I'll do all I can to bring innovative thought into this government role.”

HILLARY CLINTON has finally responded to the recent revelations that she hired people to spy on Donald Trump, calling it “desperate” and “a fake scandal.” “Trump & Fox are desperately spinning up a fake scandal to distract from his real ones. So it's a day that ends in Y,” the former presidential candidate tweeted. “The more his misdeeds are exposed, the more they lie,” Clinton said. “For those interested in reality, here's a good debunking of their latest nonsense.” Clinton referred to this story by Bess Levin for Vanity Fair as refutation:

YOU’LL NEVER BELIEVE IT BUT HILLARY CLINTON DID NOT, IN FACT, SPY ON TRUMP’S WHITE HOUSE

In less breaking news, Donald Trump remains a moron.

by Bess Levin

Imagine, if you will, that a special counsel appointed by the federal government declared in a court filing that he had evidence that a major political figure — let’s call her Hillary Clinton — had paid spies to infiltrate the White House and run surveillance on Donald Trump in order to frame him as a foreign asset. The whole thing would be a big flipping deal! One for which there would be major, major consequences and far-reaching fallout. The country, nay, the world would be gripped by the story, and for good reason — a former candidate for office spying on the president? In the White House? That would be crazy! And you’re right — it would be crazy if something like that had actually happened. Which it didn’t, though unfortunately for reason, logic, and the concept of the truth, Donald Trump, Fox News, and various other deranged conservatives cannot be convinced of that.

Yes, as you’ve probably heard, on Saturday the former president released a statement claiming “Special Counsel Robert Durham” — he meant to say “John Durham” but was apparently too angry to keep his Johns and his Roberts straight — had uncovered “indisputable evidence that my campaign and presidency were spied on by operatives paid by the Hillary Clinton Campaign in an effort to develop a completely fabricated connection to Russia,” a “scandal far greater in scope and magnitude than Watergate” for which Trump suggested those involved should be executed but would settle for criminal prosecution. The problem? Neither Robert Durham nor John Durham nor anyone else for that matter had actually provided evidence of any such crime, let alone even suggested it.

Per The New York Times:

When John H. Durham, the Trump-era special counsel investigating the inquiry into Russia’s 2016 election interference, filed a pretrial motion on Friday night, he slipped in a few extra sentences that set off a furor among right-wing outlets about purported spying on former President Donald J. Trump. But the entire narrative appeared to be mostly wrong or old news — the latest example of the challenge created by a barrage of similar conspiracy theories from Mr. Trump and his allies.

The latest example began with the motion Mr. Durham filed in a case he has brought against Michael A. Sussmann, a cybersecurity lawyer with links to the Democratic Party. The prosecutor has accused Mr. Sussmann of lying during a September 2016 meeting with an F.B.I. official about Mr. Trump’s possible links to Russia. The filing was ostensibly about potential conflicts of interest. But it also recounted a meeting at which Mr. Sussmann had presented other suspicions to the government. In February 2017, Mr. Sussmann told the C.I.A. about odd internet data suggesting that someone using a Russian-made smartphone may have been connecting to networks at Trump Tower and the White House, among other places.

According to the filing, Sussmann had gotten his information from technology executive Rodney Joffe, whose company, Neustar, had performed server-related work for the White House. In Durham’s estimation, Joffe and his colleagues had “exploited this arrangement by mining [certain records] for the purpose of gathering derogatory information about Donald Trump.” Fox News took this line from Durham’s filing and ran with it, claiming Durham had said he had found that the Clinton campaign had paid the technology company to “infiltrate” White House servers. The lack of similarly baseless claims from the mainstream media led Trump to declare “The press refuses to even mention the major crime that took place. This in itself is a scandal, the fact that a story so big, so powerful and so important for the future of our nation is getting zero coverage from LameStream, is being talked about all over the world.”

Strangely, there wasn’t a lot of fact-checking going on down at Mar-a-Lago, but the actual reason that the “LameStream” media hadn’t covered the story was likely because, as the Times notes: (1) Sussmann’s conversation with the CIA had already been reported last October (2) Durham never once said anything about the White House being “infiltrate[d]” (3) the special counsel also never claimed the Clinton campaign had paid Joffe’s company and (4) perhaps most importantly, “the filing never said the White House data that came under scrutiny was from the Trump era.” In fact, lawyers for the data scientist who helped develop the data analysis in question, say this happened during — wait for it — Barack Obama’s presidency.

“What Trump and some news outlets are saying is wrong,” attorneys Jody Westby and Mark Rasch told the Times. “The cybersecurity researchers were investigating malware in the White House, not spying on the Trump campaign, and to our knowledge all of the data they used was nonprivate DNS data from before Trump took office.”

In other words, Trump and company got the whole thing hilariously, mortifyingly incorrect. But fear not: We’re sure they’ll issue a lengthy correction and heartfelt apology to the people whose reputations they impugned — and the ones Trump suggested should be put to death — in no time.

ED NOTE: All of the above is true, as verified by other sources, including the NYT. But it remains true that the Democrats vilified Trump as a Russian tool and traitor throughout most of his four years in office. No apologies forthcoming from Big Lib Media and Demo touts like Adam Schiff. They all sail on as if they hadn't pedalled the big lie that Trump was a Russian agent, devoting thousands of hours of media time to Schiff and other slimers who, so to speak, slimed the slime for the four years of the Trump interlude.

BAY AREA RANCHERS OPEN THEIR OWN MOBILE MEAT PROCESSING PLANT, filling key gap for local industry

by Guy Kovner

Bay Area livestock ranchers, including 24 in Sonoma County, are welcoming this week’s opening of their own slaughterhouse that fills a critical gap created more than two years ago.

The $1.2 million mobile processing plant, with a gleaming white 36-foot-long trailer purchased and set up at an area ranch by the 39-member Bay Area Ranchers Co-op, puts farmers producing beef cattle, pig, goat and sheep meat in control of their industry.

“It’s a big game changer in our food system,” said Duskie Estes, co-owner of the Black Pig Meat Co. and a co-op board member. “We are opening up the business place for small-scale animal husbandry.”

The co-op “exists solely for the benefit of the ranchers themselves who now have a guaranteed place to process their animals,” said Vince Trotter, sustainable ag coordinator at the Marin County UC Cooperative Extension, who helped the co-op get started.

“This is for ranchers who want to sell meat under their own label,” he said, noting that farmers will no longer need to share their revenue with a commercial slaughterhouse.

New slaughterhouse owner envisions different approach

Marin rancher in deal to purchase, reopen Rancho Feeding, expand operations Sonoma County livestock ranchers produced $26.2 million worth of cattle, sheep and lambs in 2020, with more than 33,000 cattle accounting for 78% of the value, according to the latest county crop report.

The co-op’s members, ranging from Santa Cruz to Mendocino County, raise animals in open pastures rather than factory farms, officially known as confined animal feeding operations.

U.S. Department of Agriculture Undersecretary Jenny Lester Moffitt visited the new facility and met with some members Saturday to find out what it took to establish the co-op.

“USDA is working to build a more resilient, more transparent food system rooted in local and regional production where all businesses can compete fairly,” an agency spokesman said in an email.

Moffitt, a fifth-generation California rancher, wants to hear about the roadblocks the co-op faced “so she can bring that information back to the USDA to try to make it easier in other communities,” he said.

“There’s going to be a lot of interest in how we put it together,” said Adam Parks, a co-op board member and co-owner of Victorian Farmstead Meat Co., a Sebastopol meat company and butcher shop.

Inquiries have come from as far away as Oklahoma and North Carolina, he said.

The co-op is reluctant to name the location of its new facility out of concern over protests like the actions that have targeted Petaluma area poultry farms.

The unit, manufactured in Washington, is set up on a covered concrete pad with an adjacent corral, a facility designed to be “super humane” to the animals, Parks said in a video on the BAR-C Facebook page.

Animals are killed outside the trailer and carcasses come in through the back door into a small room where they are eviscerated and skinned one at a time, then moved to an adjacent room for cooling.

Motivation to form the co-op came when Marin Sun Farms, whose Petaluma slaughterhouse is the only USDA-certified facility in the Bay Area, announced in December, 2019 it wold no longer process animals for private rancher-owned labels.

“This puts us out of the business of selling to the retail market,” Pam Torliatt, a former Petaluma mayor and rancher, said at the time.

Marin Sun Farms continues to process animals for its own brands, Estes said. Her bacon company turned to ranches in Oregon and Washington for meat.

Some ranchers quit raising livestock for meat rather than undertaking the alternative of trucking their animals to slaughterhouses in the Central Valley and Eureka, traveling up to 250 miles each way.

In eight months, a dozen Sonoma County ranchers logged 26,150 miles making those trips, the equivalent of driving around the world, Estes said. Those trips combined resulted in 19.6 tons of emitted carbon dioxide, according to the co-op.

The co-op, about two years in the making, “will make sure that never happens again,” Parks said, adding that the cost savings to farmers “ultimately get passed to the consumer.”

Mobile slaughterhouses are cheaper than brick and mortar facilities, Trotter said, noting that two others, both in Petaluma, opened within the past year and operated by ranching entrepreneurs.

Any profits from the operation will be returned to the co-op members, he said.

The only other USDA-inspected mobile slaughterhouse is in the Central Coast, Trotter said.

BAR-C raised $1.2 from investors and is now seeking an additional $400,000 to cover recent cost increases and unexpected expenses.

There’s an environmental payoff, as well, Parks said, from invigorating small-scale, multigenerational ranches that sustain their lands.

“This is the future of regenerative agriculture,” he said.

(Santa Rosa Press Democrat)

FROM OUTTA THE FOG…

Subject: Point Arena Mill Street Construction Update

The Mill Street Rehabilitation Project is moving into its final phase which involves grinding and paving the roadway.

Due to this, Mill Street from Center Street to the east end will be completely closed to traffic from February 22-25.

No cars will be allowed on the street. Residents should find alternate parking. Residents will need to walk to and from their residences during this time.

The City of Point Arena and Granite Construction understand this places a burden on the residents of Mill Street. However, this is the final phase of the project and after the next week, the street will be open with new sidewalks, curbs, and roadway as well as much better drainage.

Please call City Hall at 707-882-2122 with any concerns.

Kindly,

Paul Andersen <cm@pointarena.ca.gov>

Point Arena City Manager

WHY NEVEDAL?

To the Editor:

A few factoids about Mendocino County Cannabis Czar, Kristin Nevedal:

ONE. Kristin Nevedal is a direct report to the Board of Supervisors, a unique arrangement considering all other department heads report to the CEO, except for elected department heads, like the Sheriff, County Treasurer, or District Attorney.

TWO. The County of Mendocino’s website stated the position of Cannabis Program Manager was opened and closed within 19 hours. I did not see it posted for two weeks.

See the following:

https://www.governmentjobs.com/careers/mendocinoca

Cannabis Program Manager

Ukiah, CA

Full-time Permanent – $83,699.20 – $101,732.80 Annually

Category: Administration / Management / Professional / Miscellaneous / Customer Service / Project Management

Department: Cannabis Program

Bilingual English/Spanish encouraged to apply.

The current vacancy is in Planning & Building Services – Cannabis Program, Ukiah. This position is an at-will; exempt from Civil Service. This position reports to the Board of Supervisors and works closely Cannabis Program Ad Hoc Committee and the Planning and Building Department. Under administrative direction, implements the goals, strategies, policies and programmatic framework for the issuing of permits/licenses through the Mendocino County Cannabis Program. This position shall take the necessary steps to manage…

Posted 2 weeks ago | Closes in 19 hours

Why didn’t the County of Mendocino and the Board of Supervisors interview all candidates before hiring Ms. Nevedal?

THREE. The Board of Supervisors did not publicly require Ms. Nevedal to resign her board seats with the “California Cannabis Industry Association” (CCIA), the “International Cannabis Farmers Association” (ICFA) and the new trade association in Mendocino, the “Cannabis Business Association of Mendocino County” (CBAMC) of which ICFA and CCIA are “organizational partners”?

https://www.cacannabisindustry.org/board-of-directors/

https://www.icfa.farm/our_team

https://cbamendocino.org/

2021 Policy Priorities for the New CBAMC include:

1) Mendocino County Board of Supervisors’ adoption of a Phase 3 cannabis ordinance which includes expanded cultivation up to 10% of parcel size in agriculture-appropriate zones by Spring 2021.

2) Procurement of Annual Licenses from the State of California for Mendocino County cultivators.

So, it looks like CCIA and CBAMC have their new inside woman direct with and paid for by the Mendocino government. Hello Agribusiness! Goodbye legacy farmers! Goodbye small independent family farmers!

FOUR. Ms. Nevedal has no apparent educational qualifications nor professional licenses. She has held chairs and committee seats and was apparently appointed by a governor to something…so what!? She was a great networker. She was a great schmoozer. That doesn’t make her qualified.

By comparison the County Ag Commissioner is required, by law, to be professionally credentialed.

FIVE. Ms. Nevedal is not a “local and long-time cannabis professional.” She moved here a few years ago from South Carolina. You would think the Board of Supervisors would have hired someone who has actually been in our industry for a long time and knows our problems with Mendocino County’s insane, unworkable regs first-hand.

John Sakowicz

Ukiah

MENDOCINO NATIONAL FOREST is opening several developed recreational campgrounds and trailheads to the public on Feb. 16, 2022, ahead of the Presidents Day weekend.

Current information on campgrounds and trailheads can be found on the forest website.

Several campgrounds and trailheads identified in Forest Order 08-22-01 remain closed due to safety hazards from the 2018 Ranch Fire and 2020 August Complex.

These recreation sites remain closed to the public:

• Forest Trail No. 85463
• Cedar Camp Campground
• Copper Butte Trailhead
• Hammerhorn Campground
• Kingsley Glade Campground
• Lower Nye Campground
• Plaskett Meadows Campground
• Smokehouse Ridge Trailhead
• Soldier Ridge Trailhead
• Sugar Springs Campground
• Sugarfoot Campground
• West Crocket Trailhead
• West Crocket Campground

Forest officials remind visitors to continue recreating responsibly.

“We want visitors to have fun, but we ask everyone to make smart decisions,” said Mendocino National Forest Supervisor Ann Carlson.

“Let someone know where you’re going. Bring extra supplies and pack out your trash. It’s also a good idea to carry a satellite phone in case of an emergency. Downed trees and falling limbs continue to be a hazard on the forest. Visitors should bring a chainsaw and plan for alternate routes in case roads become impassable.”

PG&E, AN ON-LINE COMMENT: “Consumers will be digging deeper into their pocket to pay the power bill. The average residential bill of $152 per month now will spike to $166 per month starting in March.” This is patently untrue and absurd. I posted about my January PG&E bill to NextDoor.com and received 505 comments and counting, all with similar stories to mine. My bill went from $162 for December (which is average to a bit high for winter) to $314, with no change in usage. 87% of the bill was for gas. I turn my furnace off at night, and never set it higher than 68 degrees. After the shocking bill, I use the furnace for one hour each morning before turning it off. I have always been thrifty with my energy use, but this is unconscionable. I'm lucky that I can pay the bill. Many others who responded to the post simply cannot pay. It's eat or heat for them. We in Sonoma County should not be living under the restrictions characterized by third-world countries. We need to have publicly owned utilities, like 2,000 other communities in this country.

CATCH OF THE DAY, February 16, 2022

JOHN BARRY, Covelo. Protective order violation, probation revocation.

JOHNNY CASTANEDA, Ukiah. Controlled substance, paraphernalia, disorderly conduct-alcohol, failure to appear, probation revocation.

FRANCISCO ESTRADA, Cotati/Ukiah. DUI.

JONATHAN HENDERSON, Hopland. Child cruelty with infliction of injury. 

ERIN JENNISON, Willits. Probation revocation.

CHRISTOPHER KEYES, Ukiah. Disorderly conduct-alcohol.

JORGE LANDEROS, Clearlake/Ukiah. Failure to appear.

VANCE LANGENDERFER, Laytonville. Inoperative fire protection system with great bodily injury.

TRAVIS MARESH, Clearlake/Ukiah. Paraphernalia

ADAM PARKINSON, Leggett. Burglary.

JACOB PETERSON, Fort Bragg. Disorderly conduct-alcohol, contempt of court, failure to appear.

JONATHAN SALES, Fort Bragg. Robbery.

THE FREEDOM CONVOY

by Matt Taibbi

As Ford Fischer notes, the protesters are a mix of people who see themselves as politically liberal, and politically conservative. There are some whose objections seem to be purely about mandates. “I’m double-vaccinated,” says one speaker. “To think… I will show my papers to buy a sandwich? Hell, no!”

For others, the issue is the vaccine itself: “They said, ‘Get your booster…’ If it doesn’t work once, it doesn’t work twice, maybe it’ll work the third time. You know who does that? Gamblers. People who play blackjack!”

The scenes outside the Super Bowl, meanwhile, looked quite different. Although trucker protests have gathered steam in too many countries around the world to count by now, the U.S. version has so far failed to produce the large numbers Canadians have seen. News2Share footage also shows a crowd that looks and sounds different from the ones in Ottawa. Stories like the Freedom Convoy are exactly why we like the idea of having Ford Fischer and his shooters just let the cameras run for a while at heavily covered events. The idea is to let audiences watch longer pieces of footage with minimal contextualization, so they may draw their own conclusions. Hopefully, News2Share’s pictures from Ottawa and L.A. shed some light.

He goes on: “What we’re fighting against are the politicians and the media,” he says, adding, “What’s been done to them by the media is, they’ve twisted their fear, and made them think their fear is a virtue.”

A WAFFEN SS OFFICER SURRENDERS to a US Army Sergeant on the West side of the Elbe River bridge near Tangermünde Germany in 1945

FIRST OF ALL, MARK ZUCKERBERG IS SO BONED… Facebook recently lost $232 billion dollars of worth, and Mark personally lost $30 billion in falling share price. Because everyone and their third cousins could see Mark's greedy gimme, gimme, gimme mitts all over the future and told him in no uncertain terms... Hell No! The problem is that precisely the same human douche canoes that turned the real world into a toxic sewer, have done exactly the same thing to the internet. So it's no small wonder it too has become just another brick in a dystopian wall of shame and horror. This is what happens when your resource, process, product, customer, labor, and toxic waste is all of humanity. Needless to say, this ends well for nobody. 

— Marie Tobias

AMERICAN AUTHOR KURT VONNEGUT was a POW in the city of Dresden on that fateful night of February 13-14, 1945. He was captured while serving as a recon scout with the 106th Infantry Division during the battle of the bulge in December. After being bounced around he wound up there. 

His experience in the war inspired him to write, “Slaughter House Five.” It's a great read, and the movie is not too bad either.

HITLER HAD A MEASURE OF SUPPORT almost from the start, but it was not until some time later, when he was already a political force to be counted with, that the industrialists began to finance him in a big way. As a politician he had three great assets. One was his complete lack of pity, affection, or human ties of any kind. Another was his bottomless belief in himself and contempt for everybody else. And the third was his powerful and impressive voice, which within a few minutes could make any audience forget his Charlie Chaplin-like appearance. Within a few years he had talked a formidable movement into existence, pouring on platform after platform, a message — anti-Jewish, anti-capitalist, anti-Bolshevik, and anti-French — which appealed equally to unemployed workers, the ruined middleclass, and the officers who were pining for another war. 

— George Orwell

BUDDY HOLLY AND THE CRICKETS had first appeared on the Sullivan show in 1957, singing two songs and making a favorable impression on Sullivan. He invited the band to make another appearance in January 1958. The band was received so well that Sullivan was forced to invite them back for a third appearance. Holly's response was that Sullivan didn't have enough money. Film of the performance survives; photographs taken that day show Sullivan looking angry and Holly smirking and perhaps ignoring Sullivan.

ON LINE COMMENT OF THE DAY

The best god damned reality show ever, the series finale of America.

MENDOCINO CANNABIS PROGRAM WEEKLY PUBLIC MEETING

The County of Mendocino Cannabis Program will also be hosting it’s first weekly public meeting on Friday, February 18, 2022 from 8:30 a.m. to 10:00 a.m. (PST). No registration will be required for these meetings and the following link will be used weekly: https://mendocinocounty.zoom.us/j/87694156954. The agenda for our Friday meeting is as follows:

• Website Update Tour
• Following Discussion
• Future Agenda Items

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ON-LINE COMMENT: Mendocino County hasn’t given out any of this equity money. As other jurisdictions have created successful programs, and awarded funds, Mendocino County just has excuses.

AMITAV GHOSH has challenged the idea that the social realist novel, with its fascination with the everyday, the ordinary celebrated by Orwell in Joyce and Miller, is up to the task of confronting the unthinkable transformational scale of the climate emergency. Others have made the case that science fiction, with its daring imaginative reach, is best placed. Many fine contemporary writers have dashed the blubber from their shoulders and made the attempt. Margaret Atwood, Barbara Kingsolver, Kim Stanley Robinson, James Bradley, Hilary Mantel, Jeanette Winterson, Richard Powers. They and scores of others have risked a form of aesthetic ruin. But they have made a conscious, serious choice. The matter is too urgent to resist. A climate catastrophe can become the only subject, simply because it looks like it has already begun to change our politics and culture, our flora and fauna, our sense of the seasons, our rootedness in the world, our feeling for the future, our sense of the local, of the community threatened by migration on a scale we have yet to encounter, in millions, in tens of millions fleeing uninhabitable parts of the planet. Or we will be the ones who are fleeing, and facing the hostility of new neighbors. There is a metaphysics, a zeitgeist enfolded within the climate alteration that we have hardly begun to grasp or express. Even if all CO2 and methane emissions were to cease tomorrow morning, there is inertia in the process and our natural and man-made world is going to be, has started to be, different. The ordinary, the everyday is about to be utterly changed. The realist novel will have to work hard if it wishes to avoid or deny what is real. 

— Ian McEwan

DID SHE LIE?

by Laura Newey

Last month my social media feeds were flooded with the tale of Mackenzie Fierceton, a University of Pennsylvania graduate who lost her Rhodes scholarship to Oxford after allegations she had misrepresented her background. Fierceton had apparently made much of her status as a “first generation, low income” student, an abuse survivor who aged out of foster care. As an anonymous letter writer revealed, however, she was also the privately educated child of a radiologist, brought up in an affluent suburb. Did she lie? Or was she merely “canny,” as the Rhodes Trust put it, in emphasizing certain aspects of her personal history over others?

During my BA at Oxford I received a Crankstart bursary [scholarship], a partial fee remission given to undergraduates with household incomes under $37,500. The university awards a handful of fully funded scholarships to Crankstart recipients who stay on as postgraduates; I’m one of them.

I wonder if I, too, am defrauding the university. My mother subsisted on benefits for several years in my teens, and after that on a salary well below Crankstart’s upper income threshold. We often couldn’t afford to heat our home. On the other hand, both of my parents went to Oxbridge. My father was a philosophy professor. I boarded at a specialist music school, funded by the government’s Music and Dance Scheme, then at a highly academic private school on a full bursary. Among other huge boons, these facts – educated middle-class parents, a financially secure early childhood, elite schooling – ensured I never felt I didn’t belong at Oxford.

The nature of American college admissions essays may be in part to blame for Fierceton’s exaggerations. Applicants are encouraged to weave personal narratives of adversity and hardship – by some accounts, to “sell their pain.” UCAS personal statements, by contrast, focus prosaically on academic achievements and interests. Oxford allotted me the Crankstart bursary based on a set of bald facts: the schools I went to, my parents’ occupations and educational backgrounds, our household income, whether we had ever claimed benefits. I was never asked (or given the opportunity) to spin this information into a personal mythology of deprivation. I hope that, in Fierceton’s position, I would have given a nuanced account of the coexisting privileges and disadvantages in my background. But the incentives to exaggerate can be overwhelming.

UK universities are also keen to present themselves as champions of marginalized students. One Crankstart scholar writes that “careers advisers have encouraged me to place [the bursary] front and center on my CV as an emblem of my academic success against the odds.” Even if you are scrupulously honest, universities subtly massage the data regarding access. Oxford’s rising percentage of state school admissions – 68.9 per cent in 2021 – regularly makes headlines. But offers are dominated by a small number of high-performing grammar schools in prosperous areas.

It’s hard to say that Fierceton lied, exactly. It was an article in the Philadelphia Inquirer that claimed she had “grown up poor,” not Fierceton herself. She did spend a year in foster care, and the allegation of abuse against her mother that led her to be placed in care was credible, though never conclusively proven. Being estranged from her college-educated mother, she also meets Penn’s rather broad definition of “first generation, low income.” As two of Fierceton’s teachers at Penn have noted, such a definition allows the university’s senior administration “to boast, as it regularly does, that Penn has many [FGLI] students.” By smearing her as a liar and a grifter, Penn and Rhodes have disguised their own complicity.

Admittedly, Penn or Oxford’s capacity to effect genuine social change is limited. Educational inequalities are entrenched long before university – indeed, before primary school. All the same, universities should not obscure the reality that the benefits of access initiatives are often reaped by cash-poor middle-class people. We might also ask whether resources should be concentrated on the vanishingly small number of multiply deprived students who have a shot at Oxford, rather than the much larger contingent of their peers who don’t even get a good set of exams.

MENDO, HERE I COME!

Sitting here at Local Flavors enjoying a brownie and cream cheese square and a red eye coffee, totally aware of the complexity of the present situation, about to leave Garberville, California now that the latest mission is essentially accomplished, and still not certain just where I am going tomorrow (although a temporary stay in Mendocino county is possible), and then more importantly than anything else is the challenge of controlling the mind, the jittery mind, which requires ongoing spiritual sadhana in order to keep from panicking amidst all of the uncertainty, and the need to keep the mind under control so that it does not freak out inducing the body to have a heart seizure, and then of course we have the emotions, and even though appropriate given the general situation, but who needs an explosion of anger just because the American political liberal left wing is nowhere near its drug induced fantasy of being revolutionary, (i.e. otherwise I would have a place with others in solidarity with me, to go to from here; as opposed to this insane specter of homelessness and the accompanying weird haunt of death), which brings us back to the main issue, which is keeping the mind united with its Source, fully embracing the "paths are many, truth is one" approach, because when you are cornered, all of the bullshit goes and you do that which works! 

P.S. This is an example of Automatic Writing. How would you like to start an Automatic Writing writers group with me?

Craig Louis Stehr, craiglouisstehr@gmail.com

SAN FRANCISCO OUSTERS

by David Leonhardt

Elections to the San Francisco Board of Education are not normally national bellwethers. The city is a proud symbol of liberalism, not a swing district, and school-board elections — as Thomas Fuller, The Times’s San Francisco bureau chief, notes — “have for decades been obscure sideshows to the more high-profile political contests.”

But the recall election this week that ousted three board members wasn’t about only local politics. It also reflected a trend: Many Americans, even in liberal places, seem frustrated by what they consider a leftward lurch from parts of the Democratic Party and its allies. This frustration spans several issues, including education, crime and Covid-19.

Consider these election results from last year, all in politically blue places:

• In Minneapolis, voters rejected a ballot measure to replace the city’s Police Department with an agency that would have focused less on law enforcement.
• In Seattle, voters elected Ann Davison — a lawyer who had recently quit the Democratic Party because she thought it had moved “so far left” — as the city’s top prosecutor. Davison beat a candidate who wanted to abolish the police.
• In New York, voters elected as their mayor Eric Adams, a Democrat who revels in defying liberal orthodoxy. As a candidate, Adams promised to crack down on crime. Since taking office, he has signaled his frustration with Covid restrictions.
• In the Democratic-leaning suburbs of both New Jersey and Virginia, Republican candidates for governor did surprisingly well. Several postelection analyses — including one by aides to Phil Murphy, New Jersey’s Democratic governor, who narrowly survived — concluded that anger over Covid policies played a central role.

Three reasons for change

The San Francisco school-board recall joins this list. There, three separate issues drove the campaign.

First, the school board had attempted to rename 44 schools, so that they no longer honored anybody deemed reactionary. Among the apparent reactionaries were Paul Revere, George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Senator Dianne Feinstein and John Muir, the environmentalist.

Second, the board tried to scrap an admissions system, based on grades and test scores, for Lowell High School, which Mark Barabak of The Los Angeles Times calls “one of the city’s most sacred institutions.” A lottery would have replaced it.

Third, the board kept schools closed for months during the pandemic and showed little concern for the damage. One of the since-recalled board members waved away the ineffectiveness of remote classes, saying that children were “just having different learning experiences.”

To many parents, board members have seemed overly focused on projecting symbols of virtuousness while ignoring the needs of families. “We are not getting the basics right,” Siva Raj, a father who helped organize the recall effort, said.

Another recall organizer, Autumn Looijen, used an analogy to explain the anger. Covid was akin to an earthquake that forced people to move into tents on the sidewalk, she suggested. “Finally, your elected leaders show up and you’re like, ‘Thank God, here’s some help,’” Looijen told Politico. “And they say, ‘We are here to help. We’re going to change the street signs for you.’”

What’s striking about this situation is that the Republican Party is also out of step with public opinion on many of the same issues. Republicans have defended the Confederate flag, nominated candidates who make racist comments and launched an exaggerated campaign against critical race theory. Republicans have opposed popular measures to improve police accountability and gun regulations. Republicans have made false statements about Covid vaccines and claimed that masks are a tool of government oppression.

Rather than responding with positions that are both more liberal and more popular, some Democrats and progressive activists have responded by overreaching public opinion in the other direction.

They have opposed the resumption of normal operations in schools. They have said they would no longer honor popular former presidents, like Thomas Jefferson and Theodore Roosevelt. They have called for defunding the police.

They have also called for abolishing the agency that enforces immigration laws; eliminating private health insurance, maintaining the current system of affirmative action and forbidding almost all abortion restrictions.

Dividing lines

On some of these issues, public opinion splits along racial lines, with Democrats taking the positions favored by voters of color and Republicans aligning with white voters. Many Democrats believe that it would be immoral to do otherwise, whatever the political price.

On other issues, though, the racial dynamics are messier. Many Asian and Latino voters oppose the current version of affirmative action, which helps explain why the changes to Lowell High School resonated in San Francisco. Many Black and Latino voters are to the right of Democratic politicians on abortion and crime.

Class seems to be at least as big a dividing line as race. College-educated Democrats — who dominate the ranks of politicians, campaign staffs and activist organizations — tend to be well to the left of working-class Democrats. By catering to its well-off base, the party creates electoral problems for itself, because there are more working-class Americans than college graduates.

You could see this dividing line in the New York mayor’s race. Adams won the Bronx, Brooklyn, Queens and Staten Island with a multiracial coalition, while losing affluent white neighborhoods. (Adams’s heterodox politics are common among Black Americans, the political scientist Christina Greer has written.)

You can also see the dividing line in San Francisco, where the city’s mayor, London Breed, who is Black, endorsed the recall. In an interview with Yahoo News this week, Breed said, “It breaks my heart that kids in our public school system still have to wear masks.”

Her comments are a reminder that many elected Democrats, including President Biden, tend to disagree with the party’s left flank on several of these issues and to be more in tune with public opinion. But that flank nonetheless influences voters’ image of the party. In the most recent national elections, in 2020, Democrats fared worse than they expected, despite the highest voter turnout in decades.

(nytimes.com)