Mendocino County Today: Friday, Feb. 25, 2022

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A COLD AND DRY AIR MASS will stick around over the region through midday on Saturday. A cold front will move through the region late on Saturday and into Sunday, bringing some rain and mountain snow back to Northwest California. Additional precipitation will be possible through late in the upcoming week. (NWS)

THIS MORNING'S LOWS: Boonville 28°, Yorkville 25°

18 NEW COVID CASES and three more deaths reported in Mendocino County yesterday afternoon.

WILLED MADNESS

by James Meek

The Russians and Ukrainians of the 1990s were able to temper regret at the collapse of the USSR with their own knowledge of the dismembered country’s shortcomings. A generation later, this is less and less the case. Many of the most articulate and thoughtful Russians and Ukrainians, those of middle age who knew the realities of Soviet life and later prospered in the post-Soviet world, have moved abroad, gone into a small business or been intimidated: in any case they have been taken out of the political arena. In Russia and Russophone Ukraine the stage is left to neo-Soviet populists who propagate the false notion of the USSR as a paradisiac Russian-speaking commonwealth, benignly ruled from Moscow, a natural continuum of the tsarist empire, disturbed only by Nazi invaders to whom “the west” are heirs and the only obstacle to its re-creation. 

If you were born after 1985 you have no remembered reality to measure against this false vision, just as you have no way to situate those charming Soviet musical comedies of the 1960s and 1970s, idyllic portrayals of an idealized Russophone socialism, brightly colored and fun, propaganda now in a way they weren’t when they were made. 

This is the context that has made it possible for Vladimir Putin and his government to sell Russia’s opportunistic invasion of Ukraine to his own people and to Ukrainian neo-Soviets: the idea that it undoes what should never have been done, an artificial division of Russian-speaking Eurasia by fascists/the West/America/rabid Ukrainian nationalists – in neo-Soviet discourse, avatars of a single anti-Russian monster.

The truth is that Russia and Ukraine have been reunited for a long time, in a corrupt mosaic dominated by Moscow. Putin didn’t begin invading Ukraine to bring it back into the fold but to stop it escaping. He established a patriarchal-oligarchic police state in Russia; the now universally despised Ukrainian president-in-exile, Viktor Yanukovich, was well on his way to establishing one in Ukraine; the leaders of Belarus and the Central Asian republics have established similar repressive polities. Russophone Ukrainians have real fears about Ukraine’s new leaders. Putin’s great fear is that the people of a future better Ukraine might inspire an entirely different unification with their East Slav brethren on his side of the border – a common cause of popular revolt against him and other leaders like him. The revolution on Maidan Nezalezhnosti – Independence Square in Ukrainia – is the closest yet to a script for his own downfall. In that sense the invasion is a counter-revolution by Putin and his government against Russians and Ukrainians alike – against East Slav resistance as a whole.

I got up early Wednesday morning for a last walk around Kyiv before leaving. I expected war to come to the city sooner, and it seems wrong to leave before it has really begun. On the other hand, perhaps, in my self-indulgent psychodrama, it’s easier to go now, when Kyiv is still at the parmesan shaving, wine sipping, guided architectural tour stage, than later, when I’d be turning my back on a city under attack.

There are some extraordinary works of architecture in Kyiv, but the greater beauty is in the streets of tall Silver Age apartment blocks, some restored, many painted in now faded colors, each brick distinct, often ornamented with art deco ironwork balconies, caryatids and elaborate stucco. In and out of this old cityscape, often in a way that seems chaotic, is blended the new consumerist capitalist world of cafés, restaurants and boutiques. There are exclusionary prices; there are a fair number of giant advertising screens, although these, rather than being garish, create a kind of Blade Runner vibe of energy and purpose set in a built fabric that’s half dilapidated, half lovingly conserved. Kyiv has become a city of small businesses and local chains, rather than being overrun by global brand eateries.

When a place is poised between a past of late communist and post-communist stagnation, and a possible future of violent oppression, the most banal manifestations of comfort, the kind of thing I either take for granted or am saddened by because it’s an exploitative piece of mass produced crap – a bottle of Radisson shower gel, a bag of fries, a pair of Nikes – can be seen as scatterings around a crater, reminders of a life that was. I remember as a teenager in the early 1980s returning from a trip to Europe and sneering at the bourgeois habits of a German family that had been kind enough to put me and my friend up. My father listened and said: “People who grew up in war find it more important to be neat, and ordered, and tidy.” And they know the value, he might have added, of electricity, and running water, and children not having to go to school with their blood group marked on their schoolbags.

I went into the antique shop to buy something from Alexander. He looked a little more worried than before. A soldier in a unit commanded by a friend in the east had been killed by Russian, or rebel, shelling. Alexander was still repeating the popular mantra that the Ukrainian army is strong, that it is large and experienced, that it has anti-tank missiles. But I’ve noticed that Ukrainians talk often about tanks and soldiers, never about the other, more ghastly armaments Putin has in abundance: helicopter gunships, long range artillery rockets, cruise missiles and the Iskander rocket, a much modernized version of the Scud missile used by the Iraqis in the 1991 Gulf War.

Alexander said he was flying to Germany on business at the weekend. He was booked on Wizz Air. “Are they still flying?” he asked. “I think so,” I said, and immediately thought: “Why did I say that? I have no idea.”

I arrived in Kyiv Alpha, the Kyiv of peace – where, in a remarkable example of mass consciousness change over time, drivers, even of big, fancy cars, will stop to allow pedestrians to cross the road, despite the near disappearance of the once ubiquitous traffic police – and Kyiv Alpha was the Kyiv I left. But the baleful alternative of Kyiv Beta, the Kyiv of war and the rage of slighted men, seemed closer. And that presence compels me to imagine – especially since I lived in Kyiv for two and a half years, at the time Ukraine came into independence – the choices faced by Kyivans. To stay or flee? To flee when, where, how? To stay and take up arms, or hunker down and look to your family? And if defense fails, what then? To join the resistance? To demonstrate against the new regime, risking prison or death? To accept the occupation? To see your enemies returned to power at the barrel of a gun? And what happens to your house? And what happens to your land? And what happens to your café? Well, of course, they do have cafés now in Grozny, an earlier target of Putin’s wrath: the city looks quite smart, if you can get past the torture, the abductions, the total intolerance of dissent, and the bones and ruins the new city is built on.

As my plane was about to push off from the terminal – Ryanair continues to fly to Kyiv – the Ukrainian government announced a state of emergency. By the time I landed in London, the country was under cyber-attack. I hope for the best; I fear the worst. Artem, a reservist, is expecting to be called up. Iryna is going to Europe (with Andrei) not because they are fleeing but for work; she has every intention of returning. Lina and Yura and their son live closer to a Ukrainian military base, a potential target, than I would like. The injustice that Putin threatens Ukraine with is so large, so criminal – essentially, without exaggeration or over-emotiveness, a choice between rape and murder – that few can really believe he might carry it out.

* * *

I bought my son a present just before I flew out of Kyiv Wednesday – it already seems weeks ago – a porcelain ornament of a little boy riding on the back of a swan. It was too fragile for a six-year-old, really, but he likes swans, and I thought the boy looked a bit like him.

By the time he came into the bedroom just after six o’clock this morning I’d been scrolling through Twitter for the best part of four hours. While I was away a storm left something rattling on the roof in the wind and when I woke up just after two, before I remembered I was home, I had an idea there was shooting in the distance. I reached for the phone, hoping for a pause in Putin’s tumble into infamy, but Ukraine had just closed its airspace. Soon the Russian leader was announcing his plan to invade Ukraine, to “denazify” a country led by a man whose Jewish forebears died in the Holocaust. The rockets began to fall. It was spotted that Putin wore the same clothes as during his menacing Monday rant about Ukrainian history, suggesting the two diatribes were recorded at the same time. The more telling clue was not so much the identical clothes as the identical mood: a threatening, vengeful man waving a big stick made up of the bodies of other people’s children.

When the Ryanair jet lined up for take-off the day before, I looked out the window and saw Ukrainian military transport planes parked in a row next to the runway. I wondered if they would be there in the morning. I wonder if they’re there now. Russia has thrown tons of explosives at Ukrainian airfields and air defense bases in the past hours. As I write, there’s good reason to believe Russian ground forces have begun attacking Kharkiv from the east; moved deep into Kherson region in the south, capturing the head of the canal that until 2014 carried water from the Dnieper to Crimea; and are threatening Kyiv from two sides, from (Ukrainian) Sumy in the east and Belarus in the north. An airborne assault by Russian paratroopers using dozens of helicopters has seized a cargo airfield to the north-west of the capital. Ukrainian forces have fought back with the limited array of armor and missiles at their disposal. Aircraft have been shot down; tanks have been burned out; civilians killed and injured. In what so far seems like a pinnacle of willed madness, Russian and Ukrainian troops were reported to be fighting over control of the Chernobyl nuclear power station.

How might this play out? The most likely scenario is that things get worse, then worse again. Many Ukrainians will flee, either to the west of Ukraine, which has been attacked by Russian rockets and cruise missiles but so far has not reported Russian ground troops, or across the border into Europe. Most won’t, and some will fight. The Ukrainian army and even air force are standing their ground as best they can. On the Russian side, Putin has set the bar incredibly high for success: to “demilitarize” Ukraine without occupying it, and to “denazify” the country – in other words, to use Nazi/Stalinist methods to arrest, try, imprison or kill selected opponents. This would appear to mean a requirement to control the entire country, even the most nationalist areas. Given that his whole persona and reputation is built, now more than ever before, on the successful and merciless use of force, he cannot afford to retreat or lose any territory his benighted troops have won for him. In other words, the two sides are doomed to go on fighting: one to survive, the other for total victory. The most likely outcome is still a Russian win, at an enormous cost in lives and Russian prestige – and if it seems Russian prestige can’t sink any lower than it is now, stick around.

At the earliest possible opportunity, Russia will introduce a puppet government, which it will recognize. The former Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych is still alive and, presumably, available. Russia never accepted his ouster in 2014; his involvement, even to sign over his powers to someone else, might lend, at least for Putin, a sheen of legality to the grisly charade. Even if parts of Ukraine were still defiantly holding out against Russia, the Kremlin presumably believes it could use this as a starting point to begin handing enforcement duties over to local surrogates. Certainly there are a number of Ukrainian citizens, and not only in the east of the country, who would happily become Moscow’s enforcers on the spot, for reasons of money, power and revenge. But how many? Large enough to hold down a nation of forty million people without a drainingly large Russian garrison?

Overestimating the eagerness of Ukraine’s population to go back inside Putin’s laager was the mistake Russia made in 2014. The country will be still less accepting this time round. Resistance from nationalists – but it’s wrong to call them nationalists, given that the biggest chauvinist on the current stage is Putin himself. Better to call them, borrowing terms from the related division in Ireland, Ukrainian republicans – those who value independence – and Ukrainian unionists: those who put ties with Russia above complete self-determination. Resistance from Ukrainian republicans would be inevitable, and in a situation where Ukrainian unionists and Russian troops act as joint agents of repression, the obvious target of the republicans would be the unionists – the collaborators, as they would see them. A spiral of ever increasing bitterness would follow.

Most of the people I know in Kyiv are safe for now, as far as I’m aware. One family, whose home was close to a targeted base, planned to head west, risking the massive refugee traffic on the E40 highway; another had waved off their grown up children, again to western Ukraine, and planned to wait things out. Iryna was in the shelter; Artem, her husband, was getting ready to return to the army.

I’m glad to be home, and guilty to be home. I think perhaps the best way to imagine what Ukrainians are going through is not to try too hard to project your thoughts onto a place you’ve probably never been but to think about the familiar small routines of your own day and how they’d be affected by an invasion. Are you or your family sitting by the window? Mightn’t it shatter in an explosion? Are you seriously going to drop your child off at school with missiles falling? You were going to have coffee with a friend, but it says on Facebook there’s a gun battle going on near the place you were supposed to meet up. You pop into the Co-op for groceries, but they’re only taking cash, and there’s a line around the block for the ATM. Your covid test comes out positive, but you live alone, and there’s nobody out there to deliver food to you. Among all the awful aspects of what’s going on, Russia invaded Ukraine while both countries’ heavily unvaccinated populations are still enduring a harsh phase of the pandemic. On just the day it began killing Ukrainians, and its own young soldiers, Russia lost 762 people to Covid.

(London Review of Books)

KYIV EXODUS, February 24, 2022

“WAR IS A PLACE where young people, who don’t know each other and don’t hate each other, kill themselves, by decisions of old people who know each other and hate each other, but don’t kill themselves.“ (Erich Hartman)

THE ANDERSON VALLEY SENIOR CENTER is hiring for a cook. It is 14 hours a week job, 5 hours (8-1) on Tuesdays and Thursdays, plus flexible hours to be worked as needed to order/prep/fill out reports. Menus are provided. Pay starts at $18.00+ an hour depending on experience. The cook helps supervise the assistant cook and the dishwasher. The cook needs to be organized, work well with others and pass the state required food handlers’ class. The position is open until filled: Contact Renee at 707-895-3609 or 707-621-3843

JOIN US!

Love to Table / Free Food Philo is serving our farm to table meals to those in need at Building Bridges Homeless Shelter in Ukiah -- THIS FRIDAY 5 pm! Come join us to pour out some love! If you're interested in joining us tomorrow or in the future contact me on facebook or call/text (510) 541-9430. We cook and serve meals in Philo and Ukiah multiple times each week - we would love to get to know you!

NORTH COAST SINKING BACK INTO ‘EXTREME DROUGHT’

by Mary Callahan

Coastal Sonoma County and virtually all of Mendocino County have slipped back into a state of “extreme” drought amid a prolonged dry spell during what should be the wettest part of the year, according to the latest update of the U.S. Drought Monitor.

With just a few spits of rain through all of January and February, and predicted dry weather ahead, conditions are ripe for a long, parched summer of water use restrictions and other extreme measures.

But water watchers continue to hold out hope for a “miracle March” that could at least bolster supplies and lessen the pain.

“We’re not going to see a rebound to normal conditions I think right now,” said Don Seymour, principal engineer at Sonoma Water. “What we’re hoping for is to get as much improvement as we can.”

The National Weather Service Climate Prediction Center says rain is unlikely for the first half of March and that the area has equal chances of dryer and wetter than usual wetter for the latter half.

Seymour said European atmospheric models suggest “a bunch or storms coming our way” in March.

“It’s wait and see,” he said.

Ten months after Gov. Gavin Newsom proclaimed a drought emergency while standing in a patch of dry lake bed at Lake Mendocino, the entire region continues to operate at a deficit, with season-to-date and year-to-date rainfall totals running well below normal.

What rain has come was mostly all at once, during an atmospheric river Oct. 24.

The October storm and a few smaller ones at least boosted water courses and storage enough that North Coast counties were mostly downgraded from “extreme” to “severe” drought in the Dec. 21 Drought Monitor update. They were completely out of the “extreme” category by Dec. 28.

But then the rain stopped.

Both Santa Rosa and Ukiah have had less than an inch of rain since Jan. 1, where normal would be 12.20 and 11.82 inches respectively, National Weather Service forecasters said Thursday.

Sonoma County is doing better for the Oct. 1-to-Sept. 30 season, thanks primarily to the October storm, which brought record rainfall to the region.

Santa Rosa has had 22.02 inches season-to-date, compared to a normal of 24.19. Ukiah, which roughly reflects the amount of rainfall in the Lake Mendocino watershed, has had 15.35 inches to date. Normal is 24.06, the National Weather Service said.

But while folks in the Sonoma/Marin county “dairy belt” around Two Rock and Valley Ford, where water supplies are especially fragile, were able to store some water during autumn rains, the dry weather since means pasture isn’t growing as well as it should.

“Obviously, unless we get more rain, later in the year we are going to start hauling water again,” veteran dairy rancher Neil McIsaac said. “But right now everything is OK.”

Though a decent amount of rainfall can accumulate in each of the first three months of the year, “we do tend to fade away when it comes to precipitation in March,” meteorologist Matt Mehle said. “But we have had a few years where March has had what is dubbed a ‘Miracle March,’ where we’ve had a lot of rain that has erased the deficit of earlier in the year.”

But La Nina atmospheric conditions continue to dictate a dry pattern, he said.

Lake Mendocino is holding more water than it did last year at this time, with about 62% of its storage target. Lake Sonoma, meanwhile has less water, though only slightly, and stands at about 61% full.

The state water board has suspended curtailments on water diversions from the upper Russian River that were imposed last year to try to sustain river flows and reduce withdrawals from Lake Mendocino. That order is expected to be reviewed in early March.

The U.S. Drough Monitor calculates that about 6.7% of the state is now in extreme drought, and 68.77% is in severe drought.

The U.S. Drought Monitor, updated weekly, is produced by the National Drought Mitigation Center at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and the U. S. Department of Agriculture.

(Santa Rosa Press Democrat) 

JONAH RASKIN SPEAKS AT 1PM SATURDAY AT THE SAN FRANCISCO PUBLIC LIBRARY

EXPLORE COMMON SENSE PHYSICS AT THE LARRY SPRING MUSEUM

Tucked away in a storefront on East Redwood Avenue in Fort Bragg sits a whimsical collection of art and science honoring the work of Larry Spring. Although unconventional and fanciful, the museum dedicates most of its space to Spring’s experimental, scientific observations about the basic laws of nature. The museum has much to offer to those with curious minds, from electromagnetism to the “Spring atom,” from energy transfer to solar motors and even artistic wooden sculptures. According to museum Director Anne Maureen McKeating, “It is a visionary environment just as he left it.” …

advocate-news.com/2022/02/24/explore-common-sense-physics-at-the-larry-spring-museum

EX MENDO COP, TRENT JAMES:

THE WRECK OF THE COASTAL STEAMER, SAMOA

by Anne Cooper

Falling apart at the seams? That’s what happened a little over a century ago to a coastal steamer belonging to the Caspar Lumber Company. The Samoa carried a crew of twenty-one men and 380,000 feet of lumber on the morning of January 28, 1913. She was making her usual run from Caspar to San Francisco through a thick blanket of fog. No GPS or even radar in those days.

The Samoa hit the beach known as Ten-Mile, not far from the Point Reyes life-saving station. The captain ordered her whistle to be blown, as there was no time to lower the boats. The life-saving crew heard the whistle (good thing the ship had enough steam to keep up the whistleblowing) and came out into the early morning fog. They literally couldn’t see but a few feet in front of them.

According to the Beacon of February 1, 1913, there was quite a time affecting the rescue. A line was ‘shot’ 200 feet toward the Samoa, which was rapidly breaking up, and a ‘breeches buoy’ was rigged. If you’re not familiar with the rigging and use of a breeches buoy, you need to look no further than the Mendocino Coast Model Railroad and Historical Society’s web page, link provided here: mendorailhistory.org/1_shipping/breeches_buoy.htm. The web page, in turn, features the ‘Kelley House Calendar’ article authored by Louis Hough and published on August 29, 2002.

Essentially, a breeches buoy is a life-saving ring, rigged with multiple lines to a pulley system, used to carry persons from a deck (sinking) to the point of safety. Inside the ring, ‘breeches’ are attached. The person ‘rides’ inside the ring, wearing the ‘breeches’ as they are brought to shore or the deck of a safe vessel. Ingenious!

The Beacon article provides further information regarding the wreck of the Samoa. One can well imagine that the process of being brought to shore through the breakers, many of which were dangerously filling with lumber and debris from the ship, would soak the crewmen to the skin. Once safe on the beach, the task was to get out of the wet clothes and into dry things. Here is where the wife of the captain at the Point Reyes life-saving station came into the story:

A couple of hours later, a strange scene was being staged on the bleak sands about the life-saving house. One by one, the sailors came from the station, each succeeding one looking more grotesque than the one before him (Mendocino Beacon, February 1, 1913, 1:5).

Apparently, the captain’s wife gave out what spare clothing she had. By the time the 21st man emerged, he was obliged to wear a ‘calico skirt and faded blue shirtwaist.’ How ironic that the men were now able to put their clothes out in the sun to dry! Fog can certainly be unpredictable.

No lives were lost. The losses to the Caspar Lumber Company, which had purchased the Samoa from the Beadle Brothers in 1905, were estimated at $60,000. The seas took about 30 minutes to break up the steamer, whose floating parts were sighted, both north and south of the wreck, for days afterward.

A further irony is that the Samoa was making her first round trip from Caspar to San Francisco after receiving a general overhauling.

(Courtesy, Kelley House Museum)

ESTHER MOBLEY: I loved Alicia Kennedy's meditation on the allure of people watching at dive bars, in Bon Appetit. “A dive bar late at night sets a certain kind of scene, one that is dreamlike and absurd, both clouded and heightened by the effects of alcohol consumption,” Kennedy writes. (SF Chronicle)

SUPERVISOR MULHEREN, FEB. 22, 2022

Each week I issue a written report about some of the projects I’m working on and the meetings I attend. This is not a comprehensive list of my activities but meant to give you some ideas about topics that I am working on that might be of interest to you.

Meetings you might have missed on the Mendocino County Video YouTube page:

Mendocino County Drought Task Force (2/10/2022)

Civil Service Commission (2/16/2022)

Mendocino County Employees Retirement Association Board Meeting (2/16/2022)

Local Equity Entrepreneur Program Update Public Meeting (2/16/2022)

MCP Weekly Public Meeting (2/18/2022)

Local Jurisdiction Assistance Grant Program - Direct Grant Development Meeting (2/23/22)

I usually catch up with the Ukiah City Council Meetings after the fact but on Wednesday I caught the meeting live. You can watch City Council meetings online here: http://www.cityofukiah.com/meetings/

Every Thursday morning I start my day with a meeting I call Coffee and Conversation. I hope you’ll take the time to join and discuss whatever is on your mind. The meeting ID is 7079548230 and the Password is LOCAL707 (I won’t be online this week 2/24 as I will be speaking in person at South Ukiah Rotary)

At our monthly Mendocino Business and Government Leaders we discussed the next steps out of the Covid pandemic, current case and vaccine rates. There will be some changes to the formatting of the data to provide current information that is relevant to where we are in the pandemic. 

The monthly meeting of MSWMA had a fairly light agenda with an update from the Interim District Manager. Here is the link to the job description which the City of Fort Bragg is helping advertise for: https://fortbragg.applicantpro.com/jobs/2232916.html

On Friday I met with Judy Morris and Supervisor Haschak on Zoom with Congressman Huffman.

Over the weekend I didn’t do any activities beyond checking emails and responding to folks on Facebook. It was nice to have a weekend to get caught up on household and office chores, I took a friend on a hike at Lake Mendocino and got to spend a full day with my granddaughter. 

I spent some time on Monday picking up and hauling trash. If you would like to help volunteer for a community trash pick-up, to pick up homeless trash at various locations or clean up a park please send me your email address and I’ll make sure you get notified. Many hands make light work! 

Of course this is not an all-inclusive list of the meetings I attend or work that I do, this is just to give you an idea of what I am working on so you can ask for an update of a topic that is interesting to you. 

I am always available by cell phone 707-391-3664 or by email at MulherenM@MendocinoCounty.Org

NINETEEN CHARGES FILED AGAINST REDBEARD

by Colin Atagi

Prosecutors, on Friday, will present evidence against Mendocino County’s suspected “Red-Bearded Burglar” to determine whether he will stand trial for alleged offenses he’s accused of committing during his 10 months as a fugitive.

William Evers’ preliminary hearing is set for 10 a.m. Friday at the Mendocino County Superior Courthouse in Ukiah.

Court records show Evers is represented by the Mendocino County Office Public Defender’s Office but officials did not respond to calls seeking comment Friday.

A criminal complaint shows that Evers is charged with 19 counts of criminal activity: Fifteen counts of burglary, two counts of vandalism and one count each of attempted murder and grand theft.

More than a dozen charges have been added to the five counts of burglary and one count of attempted murder that were filed after his arrest on Nov. 4.

In a previous interview, Mendocino County District Attorney David Eyster said the original charges each carried potential sentences of 25 years to life in prison since Evers has prior convictions.

Oct. 2014, in Shasta County, he was convicted of making criminal threats, according to the complaint.

If the new charges carry the same potential, Evers could be sentenced to at least 475 years in prison if convicted of all 19 counts.

Evers was arrested after spending nearly all of last year living in the Mendocino County wilderness west of Ukiah. For a bit more than three months, he has since been held at the Mendocino County jail in lieu of $2.5 million bail, according to jail records.

Investigators say he broke into numerous vacant homes in search of shelter, food and supplies. Burglaries occurred near Ukiah and the towns of Philo, Elk and Albion.

Three burglary charges are associated with a home on Cameron Road near the coastal town of Elk. Burglaries occurred in 2021 at that home on April 7, May 12 and June 14.

Evers is also accused of opening fire on a Mendocino County Sheriff’s deputy who confronted him while investigating the burglary on May 12.

This encounter led to the attempted murder charge, although Evers said in an interview with The Press Democrat that he fired into the air and never tried to hurt the deputy.

According to the complaint, the grand theft charge relates to a theft of a Ruger revolver, Winchester Model 94 rifle, Winchester Model .22 rifle and a Mongtomery Ward semi-automatic shotgun.

Authorities say the theft took place on Jan. 22, 2021. Court records, though, didn’t specify a location, though, Evers is charged with a burglary that occurred on that date along Pine Ridge Road near Ukiah.

The vandalism charges pertain to incidents that occurred five months apart.

Evers is accused of damaging a heater and several walls at a home on Low Gap Road, west of Ukiah, on Feb. 10, 2021. He’s also charged with a burglary at that home.

The second vandalism allegedly occurred about five months later on July 4 and involved a damaged game camera.

A specific location for that alleged offense isn’t listed in the complaint, but Evers is charged in a July 4 burglary that authorities say took place along Philo-Greenwood Road near Elk.

The last burglary included in the complaint allegedly took place Sept. 8 on Middle Ridge Road in the town of Albion — about two months before Evers was arrested.

The homeowner told The Press Democrat that he lost a $25 bottle of champagne, several bottles of wine, cans of sardines, fur-lined slippers, travel bags, a pillowcase and a roll of toilet paper.

In November, Evers was arrested just north of there near Albion Ridge Road after he’d been chased by sheriff’s deputies and a K9 unit.

(Santa Rosa Press Democrat)

ON LINE COMMENT OF THE DAY

Everyone, can’t be a pot farmer.

Well, everyone can grow their own…

Marijuana should be so cheap, and it should grow everywhere! You should be able to buy a quart ziplock of fine flower at the Farmer’s Market, for $20.

It’s a weed! People are growing great Indica everywhere! Probably calling it “Humboldt”… 30 years ago, “Humboldt weed” was grown in garages and backyards in Yuba City…

Plant some “public pot” today! And then, go get a real job.

The environmental degradation, the sheer volume of crime and chaos, and the stupidity of the average pot farmer, are completely shocking!

Remember, the real estate price runup, the ridiculous rents, were caused by weed grower’s profits, and drug dealing by Mexican Cartels investing their cash in small town California.

40,000 unoccupied houses in San Francisco alone! Just sitting there…

And: pot farming caused huge wine/vineyard operations, which were then sold to “investment groups,” and then the former wine people started lending real estate money to, you guessed it, pot farmers!

The growing of marijuana in California is a phenomenon that California hasn’t even started to understand, and the idiots elected to public offices, are unable to grasp what is staring them in the face…

Get to work, and don’t waste your time planting weed this year…

It will take generations, to clean up the mess that “small farmers” have created, in Northern California…

AND: One more corporate weed farm was just approved outside Middletown (Lake County), in an area where there will probably not be sufficient water to get started…

Envision a world where Lake Berryessa is dry to the bottom, people can’t live outside of Woodland because the water table has been so badly depleted, and fires have burned every tree in the state. Imagine running the Bay Area with no hydroelectric, and little water. Imagine Agriculture in California, at a standstill, because the water has been cut off.

Go visit Ukiah.

This is where you are headed.

ED NOTES

CHRIS ‘DEAD DOG’ BRENNAN is the former federal trapper in the North County. Boonville's Gary Johnson used to be the guy to call in the South County. The two of them were the guys you called if you had a problem with a four-footed wild thing.

Brennan, a man with a robust sense of the absurd, and a walking definition of a polarizing figure, seems to enjoy his renown as “Dead Dog,” a tag awarded him by the kind of people, usually fresh out of the city, who say, “My dog couldn't have done that!” That being a late night rampage through a rancher's lambs or calves that cost the rancher plenty. 

Many ranchers, understandably, shoot loose dogs on sight. Loose dogs are a particular menace in the county's back country. Pot growers use the fiercer species as watchdogs then tend to abandon them at the end of the growing season. There have been times when packs of feral pitbulls roamed the outback; it was Dead Dog's job to stop the general menace these animals and unsupervised household pets presented. His task was not one likely to make him popular.

Dead Dog did his job effectively for years until…

Until Mendocino County got sued by wildlife defenders who maintain that troublesome creatures of the four-footed type can be cooled out “non-lethally.” 

Rather than resist the legal pressure brought by Sonoma County and Marin wildlife defenders, ”The three woke Supervisors,” as Brennan describes supervisors Mulheren, Haschak and Williams, voted to replace the two federal trappers, Brennan and Johnson, and their hundred years of combined direct experience and knowledge of Mendocino County's vastness and all the wild creatures that inhabit it and replaced them with Sonoma County Wildlife Rescue, a non-profit based in distant Petaluma comprised largely of volunteers.

“When they got rid of me they did me a big favor because I now cover the whole county as a private animal control guy doing 40% of the work I used to do and making twice the money.”

Dead Dog, with a rueful laugh, begins: “Here's how the deal with Petaluma is working out for Mendocino County. I recently got a call from an older gentleman who lives on the Mendocino Coast. He thinks he's got a raccoon stuck in his chimney. He asks me if I can get it out. I say sure. I go out to a big house that has a huge fireplace. I can't see anything from the bottom because it's all bricked off, so I go up on the roof. I'm in my sixties now. If I fall I'm done. Anyway, I've got a million-light flashlight. I made a 30-foot snare to dangle it in front of the raccoon to grab it by one of its paws and gently pull it up and out. This is a rescue. We're not killing the raccoon. I will get it up and out and let it go and it's over. But when I got to looking down the chimney, about 18 feet down there's a giant horned owl like three feet tall! They're huge. But as a private trapper I'm not authorized to work raptors. 

“The owl is in bad shape. Been in there two-three days. I have to make a bunch of phone calls before I can do anything. If this thing dies the animal people are going to come after me. “Dead Dog killed it.” So I call Fish and Wildlife. And lots of other agencies. I call and call and call and get the run around. No one knows what to do. The poor owl is going to need rehab. It's too weak just to be pulled out of there and let go. Finally, Fish & Wildlife the biologist gets back to me. He tells me that the people who can help me with the owl is Sonoma Wildlife Rescue! 

“These are the people who got rid of me. They are the people who testified before the Mendo supervisors and told them that the trappers are evil, that Dead Dog is particularly evil. One woman I'd never seen before actually started to cry when my name came up! I do a lot of non-lethal work these days all over the state, but Sonoma Wildlife Rescue told Mendocino County that they can do it all non-lethally. And make money for the county at the same time because people are going to pay us [them] to come up and talk to them to show them how to live in harmony with wildlife. 

“This is who I'm supposed to call to come help me with the raptor! So I call them. The first thing they ask me is if I want to donate money to them. Finally, I get to the person who's supposed to help. ‘Will you come up to Mendocino to help get the owl out and take possession of it?’ Guess what they say? ‘It's too far to drive up there!’ The people who conned the county into getting rid of wildlife services won't come help with the owl! 

“The only place I can catch an owl is around its feet, otherwise I'll break a wing or choke it. Fish and Wildlife finally says go ahead and try to get it out. They said we're not holding you responsible so go ahead and pull it out. But by the time I got back out there to Mendocino the owl was dead.

“Mendocino County hasn't done anything. They want to give these people a big contract to do non-lethal. I do non-lethal all the time. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. I've been doing this my whole life. Why pay Sonoma Wildlife a bunch of money to do what I used to do free along with two other government agencies who are also free, but the county… It's just a lot of virtue signaling, in my opinion.” 

OLIVES, AN EXCHANGE (Coast Chatline)

Trilby:

Hi mendocino people,

I've been wanting to plant some olive trees and wondering if others have experience with actual fruit-bearing olives on the coast (IN the fog belt & and windy areas). I have noticed quite a few olive trees in Fort Bragg, though never noticed any with olives on them.

Is this a silly idea? Perhaps this warm January/Feb is getting to me and I'm forgetting about the next seasons to come.

I planted some arbequinas where I used to live in the east bay and they are doing fantastic, and the olives are really tasty prepared in a brine to eat. There is wind and fog there, though less than here, and it does get consistently warmer in the warm months there too....

Would love to hear if folks have experience with olives here on the coast and what they've found/what varieties like the weather patterns we get here...

thanks,

Trilby

* * *

Sam G: Six varieties here 1 mile from the coast by air in the pygmy. No olives yet on 10 year old trees. Lots of medicinal leaves to use but no olives.

CATCH OF THE DAY, FEBRUARY 24, 2022

MARTIN BRIGGS, Laytonville. Controlled substance, evidence tampering, county parole violation.

ALEJANDRO DIAZ, Ukiah. Narcotic-controlled substance for sale.

WHITNEY HUGHES, Ukiah. Disorderly conduct-alcohol.

MELVIN KING, Gualala. Arson of property. 

CHERYL MATTSON, Ukiah. Protective order violation, probation revocation.

JEREMIAH MCOSKER, Ukiah. Paraphernalia, unlawful camping on private property, county parole violation. (Frequent flyer.)

GERALD MILLER, Ukiah. Suspended license, false personation of another, parole violation.

CONOR OAKES-BANNON, Westport. DUI.

FRANKLIN PATTY, Willits. County parole violation.

ROGER PETERS, Clearlake/Ukiah. Protective order violation.

MICHAEL SORRELL, Clearlake/Ukiah. Failure to appear.

HOUSE OF PATÉ: WORKING CLASS CHEF REVIVES FRENCH CUISINE

by Jonah Raskin

At San Francisco’s Maison Nico—an épicerie (a grocery) and a café—where I’ve been shopping, eating and sipping wine and coffee at least once a week for the past six months, I’m reminded of Paris in the early 1960s, when Les Halles, the old central fresh food market, was still in operation and the Algerian War waged. In those days, I relied on Eric Frommer’s essential text, Europe on $5 a Day, to secure affordable food and lodging. The $5 a day European budget is gone. In 2017, when Frommer published his last guidebook, the title was Europe on $95 a Day. Today, the price of food and drink at Maison Nico exceeds the price of food and drink in Paris in 1961. That summer I was happy eating peas from a can, munching on a baguette, wandering around the Left Bank and reading J.P. Dunleavy’s banned novel, The Ginger Man, which a Welsh bloke my own age lent me. I also splurged on foie gras and sole meunière. That was then. This is now.

At Maison Nico, I’ve met the French-born chef/ proprietor, Nicholas Delaroque and his American wife, Andrea. They introduced me to Paul Einbund, Maison Nico’s sommelier who doubles as the owner of The Morris, a San Francisco bistro named after Paul’s father. I think of Paul as Maison Nico’s “wine guy.” He’s the stellar master of the wine cellar housed in the basement at 710 Montgomery. “I go to Europe for wine as often as possible,” Paul tells me. “The last time I went was in November 2021. I’m itching to go again.”

Centuries ago, pâtés originated with European peasants who made them from what we’d call “leftovers” and from scraps of pork, chicken and duck. Gradually, pâtés became luxury items prized by the aristocracy and bourgeoisie. Now they’re on the menus of restaurants around the world and available to the masses in supermarkets. The history of the pâté is emblematic of the larger history of food, which reflects the movement of social and economic classes and cultural paradigms, though that’s not why I devour them. Still, the history adds to the appeal.

Nico’s uncommon, artisan pâtés have earned him a Michelin star at his épicerie and café on Montgomery that’s open five days a week Wednesday to Sunday. On weekends, tourists arrive from far and wide. Monday through Friday, office workers descend for lunch; word of mouth pulls them in. The window dressing first attracted me. My Montgomery Street office sits on the third floor of a building above the space where Nico and his close-knit team craft pâtés, brioche feuilletée and much more. These days, Parisian chefs would nod their heads in appreciation of his creations, though he also nods in their direction. “I was inspired to make pâtés on recent trips to Paris with my wife, Andrea,” he explains. She adds, “I’ve seen that nearly everyone truly knows their local butcher and bread maker. It’s not a cliché, it’s real! There are daily visits to the boulangerie and the boucherie.” The supermarket hasn’t taken over completely.

Nico comes from Rueil-Malmaison, a suburb of Paris, about eight miles from Notre Dame. The place name, “Malmaison,” has been translated into English as “bad home” or “evil house.” For Nico the town was a good place to grow up; has fond memories of his working class parents. “I’m still working class,” he says. “It’s in my soul.” Andrea adds, “Nico definitely has lowly beginnings.” His mother was a florist; his father an accountant, his step father a handy-man. As a teenager, he began to work near the bottom of the restaurant ladder. Nico remembers, as perhaps only a French person can remember, days during his youth that were devoted to nothing but food. On long summer afternoons the whole family—children, parents and grandparents—ate together and bonded over appetizers, entrées, salads and soups.

Yes, these days Americans are shopping locally, and yes families are eating together. But it isn’t the same here as it is in France, where the love of food cuts across class lines in a society and a culture where citizens are more aware of class than in the US. In France as in California good restaurants still exist, though there aren’t as many in France as there were when I visited in ‘61. “It’s sad,” Nico tells me. “In Paris in the 1980s, time and cost took over. Now you have to know where to go and what to look for.” He suggests bistros in the 11th Arrondissement, the onzième, once home to the Bastille, the notorious prison that Parisians stormed in 1789, and that sits on the right bank.

The big books on the shelf at Maison Nico, including a well-worn copy of Larousse Gastronomique, a bible for chefs, and a classic text by Auguste Escoffier, speak volumes about French food traditions and Nico’s dedication to them. Escoffier has inspired American chefs like James Beard, Alice Waters of Chez Panisse and Julia Child who once said, “The memory of a good pâté will haunt you for years.” Like Child and Beard, Nico does everything that can be done in a kitchen, though he’s not on TV and isn’t world renowned. Not yet. Still, Maison is making him famous in SF.

He also goes out of his way to get when he needs and wants for the kitchen. He buys meat from Oliver’s Butchery in San Francisco’s Dogpatch, a neighborhood that was once industrial and working class and that now boasts upscale cafes, restaurants and shops that are a destination for tourists and people who describe themselves as foodies. The French prefer the word “gourmand.” The website for Oliver’s Butchery reads, “We are an old fashioned French Boucherie founded not only with a passion for delicious, fresh food, but also caring for the health of the environment, the animals, and our beloved customers.”

When Nico was a boy the family gathered at Creuse, near the center of France. He calls the region “the middle of nowhere,” but back then twenty or so people sat around a large table. There didn’t seem to be a break, Nico says, between lunch and dinner. “There was usually a roast—lamb or pork—that my grandfather cooked on a spit, using the old engine from a lawnmower to turn it around and around,” he says. He adds, “It wasn’t fancy food. It was about family, conversation and laughter.”

Before there was eating around the table in the open air, there was cooking, and not only by his grandfather. “My mother and my grandmother were good cooks,” Nico tells me. “When I was 16 and looking around for something to do, a job, my mother sent me to a restaurant owner. I liked the camaraderie in the kitchen.” He divided his time between school and work; two weeks at one place and two weeks at the other.

Over the years, he met skilled chefs in Paris, Corsica and the Alps and little by little his passion for cooking grew. “After all these years, I still feel passionate about cooking,” he says. “I’m still reading and still learning more about techniques.” In France, preparing charcuterie (pâtés, comfits, terrines, bacon, ham and more) is different from cooking in a restaurant. “You either go to school to learn to cook or to learn how to make charcuterie,” Nico explains. They’re two different crafts and separate from patisserie. After he arrived in San Francisco, he added to his skill set at Luce, which calls itself a wine restaurant and at Manresa, which borrows from French and Catalan cooking, and which moved to Los Gatos in posh Santa Clara County, south of the city.

At Maison Nico, making pâtés takes three to four days. It’s labor intensive and a labor of love. The spotless kitchen isn’t behind closed doors, but rather is visible from the front counter and from the indoor tables. You can watch the preparations and the artistry. First, the meat—pork or duck— has to be cleaned, cut into small pieces and salt added. After a day or so, it’s ground, then assembled and put into a crust to rest. The next day, it’s cooked. After the pâté comes out of the oven it’s allowed to cool slowly and then topped off with aspic. “The taste builds up,” Nico explains.

When newcomers show up at his épicerie and want suggestions about where to start and what to buy, he recommends a savory pâté en croûte de canard, pomme et boudin noir (duck, pork, blood sausage, apple and pine nuts). For a sweet, he suggests the noisettes et chocolat or the flan Parisian which has a flaky crust with a vanilla pastry cream filling. “My mother always had a flan for me when I came home from school as a boy,” he says. “It was my favorite treat.” He adds, “Every culture, the Chinese, the Mexicans, the French, and Spanish have some kind of flan. It’s universal.”

When he goes back to France with his wife, Andrea. he knows that it will take a couple of days to get into the French rhythm. “Time will stop for a while,” he says. “We’ll be in one place and won’t be rushing to go somewhere else.” Now at Maison Nico, it’s San Francisco time. Hungry customers are arriving for lunch with appetites for pâté as big as their dreams.

(Jonah Raskin is the author of Beat Blues, San Francisco, 1955.)

NOTE TO READERS, ON THE INVASION OF UKRAINE

by Matt Taibbi

Part of news and even commentary is admitting mistakes, and though I always made sure when discussing the subject to note Vladimir Putin could still invade Ukraine, I have to admit, I didn’t see this happening. Some old colleagues I trust, including some Putin-critical Russians, didn’t see it, either, but in many cases they just didn’t want to believe it, for reasons that are more understandable from their perspective. My mistake was more like reverse chauvinism, being so fixated on Western misbehavior that I didn’t bother to take this possibility seriously enough. To readers who trust me not to make those misjudgments, I’m sorry. Obviously, Putin’s invasion will have horrific consequences for years to come and massively destabilize the world.

I fear there will be more to say soon, but I’ll leave it at that for today. When you’re wrong, you’re wrong, and I was wrong about this.

MR. IMPORTANT: ”In conclusion, I want to extend my sincere best wishes to all of my opponents, Republican and Democrat, and to state that, in the unlikely event I am not elected, I will support whoever is, even if it is Sen. John Kerry, who once came, with his entourage, into a ski-rental shop in Ketchum, Idaho, where I was waiting patiently with my family to rent snowboards, and Sen. Kerry used one of his lackeys to flagrantly barge in line ahead of us and everybody else, as if he had some urgent senatorial need for a snowboard, like there was about to be an emergency meeting, out on the slopes, of the Joint Halfpipe Committee. I say it’s time for us, as a nation, to put this unpleasant incident behind us. I know that I, for one, have forgotten all about it. That is how fair and balanced I am.” (Dave Barry)

ROOM 11 AT THE VOLL

Sitting comfortably in a chair
With the room heater on,
February’s cold weather is outside.

Calmly watching, it gets quieter
Still, as the spiritual guest arrives.
A presence is felt though not seen.
He makes everything alright,
Because Jesus Christ unconditionally
Loves us just the way we are.

The motel room fills with grace.
We are beautiful in the eyes of God.
Our blessed hearts overflow with the Lord’s bliss.

Craig Louis Stehr

ATTENTION, MENDO’S FEW REMAINING POT PERMIT HOLDERS who want to talk about updates, vegetation and agendas.

MCP Weekly Meeting Reminder - February 25, 2022

Greetings,

This is a reminder that the County of Mendocino Cannabis Program will be holding its weekly public meeting on Friday, February 25, 2022 from 8:30 a.m. to 10:00 a.m. (PST). No registration is required for this meeting.

Agenda:

• Program Updates
• Vegetation Modification
• Future Agenda Items

Meeting Invitation Details:

To join via zoom please use the following link: https://mendocinocounty.zoom.us/j/87694156954

If you would prefer to call in please use one of the following numbers and the meeting code listed below (for higher voice quality, dial a number based on your current location): 1-669-900-9128 (San Jose)

Webinar ID: 876 9415 6954

If you would prefer to watch the meeting, but not participate, you may do so utilizing the following YouTube link: https://youtu.be/K42EwGH-PR0

Sincerely,

MCP Staff

CHRONICLE OF A WAR FORETOLD

After the fall of the Soviet Union, there was a near universal understanding among political leaders that NATO expansion would be a foolish provocation against Russia. How naive we were to think the military-industrial complex would allow such sanity to prevail.

by Chris Hedges

I was in Eastern Europe in 1989, reporting on the revolutions that overthrew the ossified communist dictatorships that led to the collapse of the Soviet Union. It was a time of hope. NATO, with the breakup of the Soviet empire, became obsolete. President Mikhail Gorbachev reached out to Washington and Europe to build a new security pact that would include Russia. Secretary of State James Baker in the Reagan administration, along with the West German Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher, assured the Soviet leader that if Germany was unified NATO would not be extended beyond the new borders. The commitment not to expand NATO, also made by Great Britain and France, appeared to herald a new global order. We saw the peace dividend dangled before us, the promise that the massive expenditures on weapons that characterized the Cold War would be converted into expenditures on social programs and infrastructures that had long been neglected to feed the insatiable appetite of the military.

There was a near universal understanding among diplomats and political leaders at the time that any attempt to expand NATO was foolish, an unwarranted provocation against Russia that would obliterate the ties and bonds that happily emerged at the end of the Cold War. 

How naive we were. The war industry did not intend to shrink its power or its profits. It set out almost immediately to recruit the former Communist Bloc countries into the European Union and NATO. Countries that joined NATO, which now include Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Albania, Croatia, Montenegro, and North Macedonia were forced to reconfigure their militaries, often through hefty loans, to become compatible with NATO military hardware.

There would be no peace dividend. The expansion of NATO swiftly became a multi-billion-dollar bonanza for the corporations that had profited from the Cold War. (Poland, for example, just agreed to spend $6 billion on M1 Abrams tanks and other U.S. military equipment.) If Russia would not acquiesce to again being the enemy, then Russia would be pressured into becoming the enemy. And here we are. On the brink of another Cold War, one from which only the war industry will profit while, as W. H. Auden wrote, the little children die in the streets.

The consequences of pushing NATO up to the borders with Russia — there is now a NATO missile base in Poland 100 miles from the Russian border — were well known to policy makers. Yet they did it anyway. It made no geopolitical sense. But it made commercial sense. War, after all, is a business, a very lucrative one. It is why we spent two decades in Afghanistan although there was near universal consensus after a few years of fruitless fighting that we had waded into a quagmire we could never win.

In a classified diplomatic cable obtained and released by WikiLeaks dated February 1, 2008, written from Moscow, and addressed to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, NATO-European Union Cooperative, National Security Council, Russia Moscow Political Collective, Secretary of Defense, and Secretary of State, there was an unequivocal understanding that expanding NATO risked an eventual conflict with Russia, especially over Ukraine.

“Not only does Russia perceive encirclement [by NATO], and efforts to undermine Russia’s influence in the region, but it also fears unpredictable and uncontrolled consequences which would seriously affect Russian security interests,” the cable reads. “Experts tell us that Russia is particularly worried that the strong divisions in Ukraine over NATO membership, with much of the ethnic-Russian community against membership, could lead to a major split, involving violence or at worst, civil war. In that eventuality, Russia would have to decide whether to intervene; a decision Russia does not want to have to face. . . . Dmitri Trenin, Deputy Director of the Carnegie Moscow Center, expressed concern that Ukraine was, in the long-term, the most potentially destabilizing factor in U.S.-Russian relations, given the level of emotion and neuralgia triggered by its quest for NATO membership . . . Because membership remained divisive in Ukrainian domestic politics, it created an opening for Russian intervention. Trenin expressed concern that elements within the Russian establishment would be encouraged to meddle, stimulating U.S. overt encouragement of opposing political forces, and leaving the U.S. and Russia in a classic confrontational posture.”

The Obama administration, not wanting to further inflame tensions with Russia, blocked arms sales to Kiev. But this act of prudence was abandoned by the Trump and Biden administrations. Weapons from the U.S. and Great Britain are pouring into Ukraine, part of the $1.5 billion in promised military aid. The equipment includes hundreds of sophisticated Javelins and NLAW anti-tank weapons despite repeated protests by Moscow. 

The United States and its NATO allies have no intention of sending troops to Ukraine. Rather, they will flood the country with weapons, which is what it did in the 2008 conflict between Russia and Georgia. 

The conflict in Ukraine echoes the novel “Chronicle of a Death Foretold” by Gabriel Garcia Marquez.  In the novel it is acknowledged by the narrator that “there had never been a death more foretold” and yet no one was able or willing to stop it. All of us who reported from Eastern Europe in 1989 knew the consequences of provoking Russia, and yet few have raised their voices to halt the madness.  The methodical steps towards war took on a life of their own, moving us like sleepwalkers towards disaster. 

Once NATO expanded into Eastern Europe, the Clinton administration promised Moscow that NATO combat troops would not be stationed in Eastern Europe, the defining issue of the 1997 NATO-Russia Founding Act on Mutual Relations. This promise again turned out to be a lie. Then in 2014 the U.S. backed a coup against the Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych who sought to build an economic alliance with Russia rather than the European Union. Of course, once integrated into the European Union, as seen in the rest of Eastern Europe, the next step is integration into NATO.  Russia, spooked by the coup, alarmed at the overtures by the EU and NATO, then annexed Crimea, largely populated by Russian speakers. And the death spiral that led us to the conflict currently underway in Ukraine became unstoppable. 

The war state needs enemies to sustain itself. When an enemy can’t be found, an enemy is manufactured. Putin has become, in the words of Senator Angus King, the new Hitler, out to grab Ukraine and the rest of Eastern Europe. The full-throated cries for war, echoed shamelessly by the press, are justified by draining the conflict of historical context, by elevating ourselves as the saviors and whoever we oppose, from Saddam Hussein to Putin, as the new Nazi leader. 

I don’t know where this will end up. We must remember, as Putin reminded us, that Russia is a nuclear power. We must remember that once you open the Pandora’s box of war it unleashes dark and murderous forces no one can control. I know this from personal experience. The match has been lit. The tragedy is that there was never any dispute about how the conflagration would start. 

(scheerpost.com)

THOUSANDS OF RUSSIANS PROTEST ASSAULT ON UKRAINE

by Ivan Nechepurenko and Dan Bilefsky

Thousands of protesters took to the streets and squares of Russian cities on Thursday to protest President Vladimir V. Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine, only to be met with heavy police presence.

Many Russians, like people across the world, were shocked to wake up and learn that Mr. Putin had ordered a full-scale assault against a country often referred to as a “brotherly nation.”  At the protests, many people said they felt depressed and broken by the news of Russian military action.

In Moscow, the police blocked off access to the Pushkinskaya Square in the city center, after opposition activists called people to come there. Police officers dispersed even the smallest groups of protesters, ordering them to clear the area through loudspeakers. 

A few hundred people, mostly young, flanked the streets leading to the square, some chanting “No to war!” and unfurling a Ukrainian flag. The police detained more than 600 people in the city, according to OVD Info, a rights group that tallies arrests.

“The world has turned upside down,” said Anastasia, 44, bursting into tears after seeing that the square was not full of people. “Everyone must be here, it is the only way to show that something monstrous is happening,” she said, refusing to give her last name fearing repercussions from security services.

While many Russians credit Mr. Putin with lifting their country out of the economic hardship and instability of the 1990s, others are deeply uneasy about his leadership.  And tough sanctions that affect everyday Russians, like potential technology embargoes that could separate Russians from their beloved next-generation phones, could diminish his support at home.

Many Ukrainian politicians and public figures called for Russians to come out to voice their discontent with the incursion, but years of government oppression made the risks of taking part in anti-Kremlin demonstrations very high.

In Moscow, Ilya, 28, who also refused to give his last name, predicted that Russian people “will only get poorer because we depend on international trade so much.”

In St. Petersburg, Russia’s second-largest city, riot police officers rounded up at least 327 people who came to the Nevsky Prospekt, the city’s main thoroughfare. 

Wearing helmets and in full gear, they hit people and pushed protesters to the ground, according to video footage from the scene. Many people came out in other Russian cities, including in Yekaterinburg, a major city in the Ural Mountains, where protesters chanted “No to war!” in front of a Lenin monument.

(NYT)