Mendocino County Today: Tuesday, March 15, 2022

Lingering Showers | 16 New Cases | Ukraine Updates | Televised Protest | Tribal Rally | Navarro Mill | Winery Job | Variety Show | Restaurant Week | Pi Day | Basket Making | Ed Notes | Yesterday's Catch | Military Madness | Setting Sail | Destroying Inheritance | Angry Bees | NATO Caution | War Victims | Class Warfare | Family Carriage | Chinese Stocks | Chinatown Photos | Alt Whereas | Wedger Mill | Empty Fellow | NATO Lifeguard | Mendo Welcome | Trestle Builders

A FEW LINGERING SHOWERS are expected across the area today. Tonight temperatures will drop to near freezing or freezing and a dry day is expected Wednesday. A few clouds and possible showers are expected for Thursday with dry weather Friday. There is a chance for rain and mountain snow over the weekend. (NWS)

RAINFALL (past 24 hours): Leggett 0.68"- Willits 0.55" - Laytonville 0.54"- Covelo 0.51"- Yorkville 0.28"- Hopland 0.25" - Boonville 0.13" - Ukiah 0.11"

16 NEW COVID CASES (since last Friday) reported in Mendocino County yesterday afternoon.

WHAT WE KNOW ON DAY 20 OF THE RUSSIAN INVASION

by Martin Farrer

China has already decided to provide Russia with economic and financial support during its war on Ukraine and is contemplating sending military supplies such as armed drones, US officials fear. The US national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, laid out the US case against Russia’s invasion in an “intense” seven-hour meeting in Rome with his Chinese counterpart, Yang Jiechi, pointing out that Moscow had feigned interest in diplomacy while preparing for invasion, and also that the Russian military was clearly showing signs of frailty. Earlier, it was reported that the US had told allies that China “responded positively” to a Russian request for military equipment, a claim Beijing has denied.

An employee of Russian interrupted a Russian state TV broadcast by shouting “No to war” and holding a sign that read “Don’t believe the propaganda. They’re lying to you here.” The poster held up by Marina Ovsyannikova on Monday evening also said, in English, “Russians against the war”. The protest was welcomed by Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskiy, who said: “I’m thankful to those Russians who don’t stop trying to deliver the truth.”

Russia-Ukraine talks will continue on Tuesday, Zelenskiy said. In an address on Monday night he also called on Russian soldiers to surrender. Addressing them directly he said: “What are you dying for?… If you surrender to our forces we will treat you as humans have to be treated, with dignity.”

The UK’s Ministry of Defence said Russia could be planning to use chemical or biological weapons in a “faked attack” in Ukraine or a “staged discovery” of biological agents.

“Almost all” of the Russian advances in Ukraine “remain stalled”, a senior US defence official said during a background briefing, CNN reports. Russian forces moving on Kyiv have not appreciably progressed over the weekend. A close ally of Putin, national guard chief Viktor Zolotov, blamed the slower than expected progress on what he claimed were far-right Ukrainian forces hiding behind civilians.

US president Joe Biden is considering travelling to Europe for in-person meetings with Nato allies, Reuters reports. Biden could meet other leaders in Brussels on 23 March and then travel to Poland, the report said.

A convoy of more than 160 cars departed from Mariupol today, local officials said, in what appeared to be the first successful attempt to evacuate civilians from the encircled Ukrainian city. After several days of failed attempts to deliver supplies to Mariupol and provide safe passage out for trapped civilians, the city council said a local ceasefire was holding and the convoy had left for the city of Zaporizhzhia.

The mayor of Ukraine’s frontline city of Kharkiv said the city had been under constant attack by Russian forces, Reuters reports. Speaking on national television, Ihor Terekhov said Russian troops had fired at central districts causing an unspecified number of casualties.

A Russian airstrike hit a residential building in Kyiv as Moscow’s forces stepped up their brutal campaign to capture Ukraine’s capital and other major cities. One person was found dead in the nine-storey apartment building, officials said, with three more people hospitalised as air raid sirens sounded in the capital and other cities hours before Ukrainian and Russian negotiators were set to resume talks.

The Antonov aircraft plant in Kyiv was shelled by Russian forces, the Kyiv city administration said in an update on its official Telegram account on Monday morning. At least two people were killed and seven injured, it said.

Ukrainian authorities have denied accusations by Russia after a Ukrainian missile allegedly exploded in the separatist-controlled city of Donetsk killing 20 civilians. Ukrainian military spokesperson Leonid Matyukhin said the missile, that carried warhead shrapnel, was in fact a Russian rocket. The Russian and Ukrainian claims cannot be independently verified.

There are reports that Russian forces blew up explosives at Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant. Ukraine’s parliament earlier said Russian troops planned to begin “disposal” of ammunition in front of the Zaporizhzhia plant, Europe’s largest nuclear power station.

At least nine people were reportedly killed and nine more wounded in an airstrike on a television tower in Ukraine’s northern Rivne region today. “There are still people under the rubble,” governor Vitaliy Koval said in an online post, Reuters reports.

Ninety children have been killed and more than 100 wounded in Ukraine since Russia invaded on 24 February, the Ukrainian general prosecutor’s office said. “The highest number of victims are in the Kyiv, Kharkiv, Donetsk, Chernihiv, Sumy, Kherson, Mykolayiv and Zhytomyr regions,” it said in a statement.

Ukraine’s prime minister, Denys Shmyhal, said Russian forces were “behaving like terrorists” and Putin had started a “full-scale war” in the centre of Europe that could “become a third world war”. Addressing the parliamentary assembly of the Council of Europe, he said Europe “chose the road of pacifying the aggressor” for years instead of “defending the values of democracy, the rule of law and human rights”.

(TheGuardian.com)

MARINA OVSYANNIKOVA, an editor at Russia’s Channel One, burst on to the set of the live broadcast of the nightly news on Monday evening, shouting: “Stop the war. No to war.” She also held a sign saying: “Don’t believe the propaganda. They’re lying to you here.” It was signed in English: “Russians against war.” The news anchor continued to read from her teleprompter speaking louder in an attempt to drown out Ovsyannikova, but her protest could be seen and heard for several seconds before the channel switched to a recorded segment. 

PARTICIPANTS IN TRIBAL RALLY HOPE TO HALT LOGGING IN JACKSON STATE DEMONSTRATION FOREST

by Mary Callahan

Tribal members from across Northern California joined with environmentalists Monday in support of efforts by the Coyote Valley Band of Pomo Indians to halt logging in the Jackson Demonstration State Forest in central Mendocino County.

About 180 people, many wearing yellow “Pomo Land Back” T-shirts, watched traditional dancers from several local tribes perform ancestral songs. The celebration underscored the need to preserve the region’s Native American culture and ancient customs, some of which are tied to the sprawling forest.

Coyote Valley Band Tribal Chairman Michael Hunter has been working to bring attention to conditions in logged areas of the nearly 50,000-acre state-owned forest in the hope of protecting cultural sites and artifacts there.

The tribe is working with the California Natural Resources Agency under initiatives by Gov. Gavin Newsom to improve Native American access to ancestral lands that are owned or under control of the state. The tribe ultimately would like to enter into a comanagement agreement with the state for the forest, which covers roughly twice the square mileage of the city of San Francisco.

The goals are to ensure ancient village sites are not destroyed by logging activity; to gain or maintain access to certain areas of the forest for cultural practices, like food gathering; and to preserve the overall ecosystem.

“We want to be able to have access to our territories — that was our territory — and be able to go in and be able to have ceremonies with our ancestors,” said Hunter’s mother, Priscilla Hunter, the tribe’s historic preservation officer.

Both say negotiations have been proceeding slowly. They fear logging in the forest, suspended since Feb. 1 for Northern Spotted Owl survey season, will resume in April before an agreement can be reached.

They are particularly concerned about a 533-acre segment of forest known as the Caspar 500 timber harvest plan area. Logging in the area, on the coast near Caspar, was paused in June after activists took the woods to stop the timber cut. It is scheduled to resume in April, Cal Fire forest managers have said.

“I’m hoping for a moratorium on logging before the logging in Caspar 500, which I believe will happen in mid-April,” Michael Hunter said.

Priscilla Hunter also expressed concern about work on the 445-acre Soda Gulch plan on the eastern side of the forest, which State Forests Program Manager Kevin Conway said should be expected to continue.

“We’re encouraging (state Sen. Mike) McGuire) and (Assemblyman Jim) Woods and (Rep. Jared) Huffman to stop the cutting,” Priscilla Hunter said. “We were told that they’re going to cut starting in the Caspar and the Soda Gulch area, and that area really has a giant cultural site, sacred site we found, and it has a lot of village sites there. And we don’t want the trees to be cut around there and roads to be built in there.”

As Monday’s rally concluded, participants walked a petition to McGuire’s office, then sang songs and prayed.

Jackson forest is one of nine demonstration forests in the state and by far the largest. It was created in 1949 to demonstrate forest restoration and sustainable logging after a century of clear-cutting across the region left much of the North Coast decimated.

Though the timber is sold to commercial logging interests, it is harvested under a management plan aimed at advancing some areas of older-growth forest, limiting removal of the largest trees.

But some very large second-growth redwoods are still regularly cut, raising objections that the trees best able to sequester carbon being lost in the midst of the climate crisis.

Monday’s rally was supported Monday by tribal members from Point Arena, Manchester, Round Valley, Hopland, Robinson Rancheria, Sherwood Valley and even Redding.

Jack Potter Jr., chairman of the Redding Rancheria of Wintu Indians said he came “to stand in solidarity.”

The effort was also widely supported by environmentalists who have been spent most of the past year working to raise awareness of increased logging in the forest near popular recreational areas.

“I’m very concerned about logging in a way that is very inappropriate for long-term fire survival,” said Marc Jensen, who came from Fort Bragg to attend.

Redwood trees 16 inches in diameter and larger should be preserved to capture and store carbon and not be logged, he said.

“They’re managing the forest like it’s a tree plantation, when what we really need is carbon banking with all these redwoods, considering the life span of these trees is upward of 1,000 years.”

Willits City Councilwoman Madge Strong said she came down, not as a city representative, but because of her own desire to see the logging stopped and “the native people in charge of the forest, and not for logging.”

Coyote Valley Letter to Governor_JDSF_1-31-2022 (2) (004).pdf

(The Press Democrat)

PHILLIPS HILL WINERY IN PHILO is currently hiring a tasting room associate to fill in on the weekends. Whether you’re a local interested to learn about the wine and hospitality industry or someone who recently relocated from the city, we are flexible with applicant’s weekend availability. The ideal candidate is 21 years or older, gracious, articulate, and enthusiastic about wine and our Valley. 

ANDERSON VALLEY VARIETY SHOW, 2022

These three Boonters been waiting a long time to be in the Variety Show and they are gonna have to wait another year. 

Yup, we have cancelled the 30th “annual” AV Grange Variety Show until next March.

The brain-trust for planning the show got together and figured if we waited until May the Covid will have calmed down, more people would be vaccinated and a lot of the unvaccinated would have caught a case and we'd be close to herd immunity. Add to that the wearing of masks and opportunity for rapid tests at the door (prior to opening), and even the possibility of getting enough air exchange machinery to catch any loose virus running around. We also spoke with two local doctors who expressed optimism that with these precautions we could proceed. 

Ahem, off the record of course.

But alas, after a very unofficial survey of the locals there was uncertainty and caution where what we needed was enthusiasm and energy. It is understandable, we are exhausted by this thing and there are still lots of unknowns.

We look forward to the day when we can gather again where everybody feels good together. The Variety Show has been the biggest yearly fundraiser for the Grange and we may put on a fundraiser to help keep the doors open — it just won't be the V-show. 

Stay tuned, come to the Pancake breakfast Second Sunday of every month, rent the building for your class or event and most important, you all have almost a whole year to work on your act for next March.

Many thanks to the Historical Society for letting us use the photo, Sheri, Joann and the Stewarts.

(Captain Rainbow)

PI DAY

People who think pi day (March 14) is only for math nerds have probably not wanted to estimate how much water their well has. A Boonville resident/friend of ours on the Valley floor who was curious about how much water his well had, asked to estimate his 90 foot well recently. He taken had a long measuring tape sounding showing that the well casing went down 90 feet and his water level was at 30 feet down, so he had about 60 feet of standing water in the well. He also knew that last year he pumped up to 8,000 gallons a day a few times. Each time he pumped that much he said the water level went down six feet, but then it recovered the next day back up to the 30-foot level. He wondered how much water the well might be drawing from. 

Assuming the well is drawing from a cylinder (it’s not, but we were just trying to get an idea of how much water was down there), the volume would be:

Volume = pi x the square of the radius times the height. 

So we know and can plug in some of the numbers.

Volume = 8,000 gallons.

pi = 3.14

radius = x

height = 6 feet.

If the well is at least 90 feet deep with water starting at 30 feet, that’s 60 feet of water with about 1300 gallons (8,000 / 6) per foot. 

Or 60 x 1300 = around 80,000 gallons in about 60 feet of water.

So shifting the formula to solve for the radius of the imaginary cylinder:

r = the square root of ([80,000 / 3.14] x 60)

80,000 / about 200 (3.14 x 60) is about 400.

The square root of 400 is 20.

So the diameter (twice the radius) of the imaginary well cylinder would be the rough equivalent of about 40 feet going down about 60 feet which is recharging up to 8,000 gallons overnight.

For perspective, remember that one acre-foot is about 326,000 gallons. 

We told our friend that even if he was drawing up to 8,000 gallons a day out of the estimated 80,000 gallon rechargeable aquifer with an equivalent diameter of 40 feet, he’d have to pump more than 8,000 gallons a day for at least 40 days to even get near the amount of water that an average 10 acre vineyard uses annually (conservatively).

(Mark Scaramella)

CORINE PEARCE!

On Saturday, March 19, from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m., Corine Pearce will lead a basket making workshop at the Grace Hudson Museum in Ukiah. Pearce, a Pomo artist and cultural educator from Redwood Valley, will help people make their own twined basket to take home. Class sizes are limited; kids under 10 can join with an adult present; and masks are required. To sign up, call the Museum at (707) 467-2836.

The Grace Hudson Museum in Ukiah will have an in-person, guided tour of The Art of Collecting, its latest exhibit, at 2 p.m. on Saturday, March 19. This will be an inside look at how museums build their collections and how this particular collection came to be. The tour will be led by Museum Director David Burton and Curator Alyssa Boge. To sign up, call the Museum at (707) 467-2836. 

ED NOTES

THE SAME WIZARDS who brought us the unmasked mobs disrupting Ukiah businesses a couple of months ago, are taking their Trumpian show on the road this coming Saturday, driving up and down State Street then on up to Willits. The “Mendocino Patriots” are calling Saturday's event a “Freedom Convoy” after the recent trucker's non-event in Washington D.C.

SO, CLASS, we've got late-stage capitalism and early-stage fascism with the “Mendocino Patriots” as World War Three kicks off, not to mention the apparently endless covid infestation, unprecedented drought, unchecked inflation, and all manner of lesser disasters. You are excused for feeling some anxiety.

BAD MUSHROOMS, Mr. Blanton's Saturday night. “At 10:49 p.m. dispatch informed local emergency services that a male was lying in the middle of State Route 128 impeding on both lanes near Philo. The reporting party told dispatch the man could be heard yelling and they heard him say he was not going to move from the roadway because he ate some ‘bad mushrooms’.”

WHAT SOUNDED LIKE a routine call to Anderson Valley's emergency services Saturday night about 10:30, turned out to be a wild encounter with a berserk Fort Bragg man who, before he was finally subdued by a CHP officer and two AV first responders, damaged a first responder's private vehicle and broke out the driver's side window of a Philo-based fire truck driven by Don Gowan. Jesse Blanton of Fort Bragg had been seen lying on the highway and stopping traffic on Highway 128 near Handley Cellars before a CHP unit out of Ukiah arrived to restrain him. 

WE LOG a lot of calls and notes of the type we received last week from Jon Spitz of Laytonville. Jon said we hadn't printed a letter from him apparently chastizing us and Dead Dog Brennan, the famous North County trapper, because we were afraid to run his letter. I wrote back to Spitz to tell him we didn't get his letter, and to please re-send it as we and Dead Dog tremble in anticipation. 

THE MEAN GIRLS have kicked off another round of their endless campaign to vilify County Superintendent of Schools, Michelle Hutchins, who is running for re-election. The Get-Michelle offensive kicked off in Boonville seven long years ago when Mrs. Hutchins was superintendent of the Boonville schools. The persons libeling her, all women, all employees of the district at the Boonville elementary school, have never ceased their active hostility, now going on a decade. The MG's are presently on the phones and on the internet, like the true cranks they are, threatening school people who support Mrs. Hutchins' re-election. I think that old instruction, “Get a life” applies here.

I REMEMBER a vicious school board meeting right here at ground zero that startled even me, a veteran of hostility. I would have fired every one of those whining hags on the spot, but in the school context the hate object has to just sit there and take it, as Mrs. Hutchins did that night with remarkable aplomb.

THE ELECTION of County Superintendent of Schools is of zero interest to the wider public, and this election for Superintendent in June is in the issue-free tradition. So far just a lot of nasty slurs aimed non-publicly at the incumbent.

LAST TIME AROUND, the Ukiah schools and their vapid administrators ran one of their own against the rest of the county. The Ukiah school district had enjoyed sweetheart funding deals with former Superintendent Paul “The Lexicographer” Tichinin, but The Vaps lost to Mrs. Hutchins four years ago and savvy politicos that they are, this time persuaded a female administrator named Nicole Glentzer to run against the female incumbent. The only issue in this contest, besides the sordid libels aimed at Mrs. Hutchins is this one — the Ukiah School District wants first dibs on all that cash money flowing through the County Office of Education from the state and the feds. The incumbent has always made sure that edu-dollars are distributed equally throughout Mendocino County. She should be re-elected. There are zero reasons she shouldn't be.

CATCH OF THE DAY, March 14, 2022

CHRISTOPHER ASHURST, Ukiah. Disobeying court order.

ELEAZAR CAVERO-MARTINEZ, Santa Rosa/Ukiah. DUI, false personation of another, suspended license, failure to appear.

LUIS DONES-LOPEZ, Willits. DUI, no license.

VICTOR LUCAS, Ukiah. Disorderly conduct-alcohol.

MARQUES MACIEL, Ukiah. Failure to appear, probation revocation.

MARCIE QUESTONI, Petaluma/Ukiah. Disorderly conduct-alcohol, probation revocation.

EMIL REDZIC, Ukiah. Domestic battery, burglary, taking vehicle without owner’s consent, evasion, failure to appear, offenses while on bail.

JASON REED, Fort Bragg. Paraphernalia, probation revocation.

WALTZING TOWARD ARMAGEDDON WITH THE MERCHANTS OF DEATH

by Chris Hedges

The Cold War, from 1945 to 1989, was a wild Bacchanalia for arms manufacturers, the Pentagon, the CIA, the diplomats who played one country off another on the world’s chess board, and the global corporations able to loot and pillage by equating predatory capitalism with freedom. In the name of national security, the Cold Warriors, many of them self-identified liberals, demonized labor, independent media, human rights organizations, and those who opposed the permanent war economy and the militarization of American society as soft on communism. 

That is why they have resurrected it.

The decision to spurn the possibility of peaceful coexistence with Russia at the end of the Cold War is one of the most egregious crimes of the late 20^thcentury. The danger of provoking Russia was universally understood with the collapse of the Soviet Union, including by political elites as diverse as Henry Kissinger and George F. Kennan, who called the expansion of NATO into Central Europe “the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-Cold War era.” 

This provocation, a violation of a promise not to expand NATO beyond the borders of a unified Germany, has seen Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Albania, Croatia, Montenegro, and North Macedonia inducted into the Western military alliance. This betrayal was compounded by a decision to station NATO troops, including thousands of US troops, in Eastern Europe, another violation of an agreement made by Washington with Moscow. The Russian invasion of Ukraine, perhaps a cynical goal of the Western alliance, has now solidified an expanding and resurgent NATO and a rampant, uncontrollable militarism. The masters of war may be ecstatic, but the potential consequences, including a global conflagration, are terrifying. 

Peace has been sacrificed for US global hegemony. It has been sacrificed for the billions in profits made by the arms industry. Peace could have seen state resources invested in people rather than systems of control. It could have allowed us to address the climate emergency. But we cry peace, peace, and there is no peace. Nations frantically rearm, threatening nuclear war. They prepare for the worst, ensuring that the worst will happen. 

So what if the Amazon is reaching its final tipping point where trees will soon begin to die off en masse. So what if land ice and ice shelves are melting from below at a much faster rate than predicted. So what if temperatures soar, monster hurricanes, floods, droughts, and wildfires devastate the earth. In the face of the gravest existential crisis to beset the human species, and most other species, the ruling elites stoke a conflict that is driving up the price of oil and turbocharging the fossil fuel extraction industry. It is collective madness.

The march towards protracted conflict with Russia and China will backfire. The desperate effort to counter the steady loss of economic dominance by the US will not be offset by military dominance. If Russia and China can create an alternative global financial system, one that does not use the US dollar as the world’s reserve currency, it will signal the collapse of the American empire. The dollar will plummet in value. Treasury bonds, used to fund America’s massive debt, will become largely worthless. The financial sanctions used to cripple Russia will be, I expect, the mechanism that slays us, if we don’t first immolate ourselves in thermonuclear war.

Washington plans to turn Ukraine into Chechnya or the old Afghanistan, when the Carter administration, under the influence of the Svengali-like National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, equipped and armed the radical jihadists that would morph into the Taliban and al Qaeda in the fight against the Soviets. It will not be good for Russia. It will not be good for the United States. It will not be good for Ukraine, as making Russia bleed will require rivers of Ukrainian blood. The decision to destroy the Russian economy, to turn the Ukrainian war into a quagmire for Russia and topple the regime of Vladimir Putin will open a Pandora’s box of evils. Massive social engineering — look at Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya or Vietnam — has its own centrifugal force. It destroys those who play God.

The Ukrainian war has silenced the last vestiges of the Left. Nearly everyone has giddily signed on for the great crusade against the latest embodiment of evil, Vladimir Putin, who, like all our enemies, has become the new Hitler. The United States will give $13.6 billion in military and humanitarian assistance to Ukraine, with the Biden administration authorizing on Saturday an additional $200 million in military assistance. The 5,000-strong EU rapid deployment force, the recruitment of all Eastern Europe, including Ukraine, into NATO, the reconfiguration of former Soviet Bloc militaries to NATO weapons and technology have all been fast tracked. Germany, for the first time since World War II, is massively rearming. It has lifted its ban on exporting weapons. Its new military budget is twice the amount of the old budget, with promises to raise the budget to more than 2 percent of GDP, which would move its military from the seventh largest in the world to the third, behind China and the United States. NATO battlegroups are being doubled in size in the Baltic states to more than 6,000 troops. Battlegroups will be sent to Romania and Slovakia. Washington will double the number of U.S. troops stationed in Poland to 9,000. Sweden and Finland are considering dropping their neutral status to integrate with NATO.

This is a recipe for global war. History, as well as all the conflicts I covered as a war correspondent, have demonstrated that when military posturing begins, it often takes little to set the funeral pyre alight. One mistake. One overreach. One military gamble too many. One too many provocations. One act of desperation. 

Russia’s threat to attack weapons convoys to Ukraine from the West; its air strike on a military base in western Ukraine, 12 miles from the Polish border, which is a staging area for foreign mercenaries; the statement by Polish President Andrzej Duda that the use of weapons of mass destruction, such as chemical weapons, by Russia against Ukraine, would be a “game-changer” that could force NATO to rethink its decision to refrain from direct military intervention — all are ominous developments pushing the alliance closer to open warfare with Russia.

Once military forces are deployed, even if they are supposedly in a defensive posture, the bear trap is set. It takes very little to trigger the spring. The vast military bureaucracy, bound to alliances and international commitments, along with detailed plans and timetables, when it starts to roll forward, becomes unstoppable. It is propelled not by logic but by action and reaction, as Europe learned in two world wars.

The moral hypocrisy of the United States is staggering. The crimes Russia is carrying out in Ukraine are more than matched by the crimes committed by Washington in the Middle East over the last two decades, including the act of preemptive war, which under post-Nuremberg laws is a criminal act of aggression. Only rarely is this hypocrisy exposed as when US Ambassador to the United Nations Linda Thomas-Greenfield told the body: “We’ve seen videos of Russian forces moving exceptionally lethal weaponry into Ukraine, which has no place on the battlefield. That includes cluster munitions and vacuum bombs which are banned under the Geneva Convention.” Hours later, the official transcript of her remark was amended to tack on the words “if they are directed against civilians.” This is because the U.S., which like Russia never ratified the Convention on Cluster Munitions treaty, regularly uses cluster munitions. It used them in Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, and Iraq. It has provided them to Saudi Arabia for use in Yemen. Russia has yet to come close to the tally of civilian deaths from cluster munitions delivered by the US military.

The Dr. Strangeloves, like zombies rising from the mass graves they created around the globe, are once again stoking new campaigns of industrial mass slaughter. No diplomacy. No attempt to address the legitimate grievances of our adversaries. No check on rampant militarism. No capacity to see the world from another perspective. No ability to comprehend reality outside the confines of the binary rubric of good and evil. No understanding of the debacles they orchestrated for decades. No capacity for pity or remorse.

Elliot Abrams worked in the Reagan administration when I was reporting from Central America. He covered up atrocities and massacres committed by the military regimes in El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and by the US-backed Contra forces fighting the Sandinistas in Nicaragua. He viciously attacked reporters and human rights groups as communists or fifth columnists, calling us “un-American” and “unpatriotic.” He was convicted for lying to Congress about his role in the Iran-Contra affair. During the administration of George W. Bush, he lobbied for the invasion of Iraq and tried to orchestrate a U.S. coup in Venezuela to overthrow Hugo Chávez.

“There will be no substitute for military strength, and we do not have enough,” writes Abrams for the Council on Foreign Relations, where he is a senior fellow: “It should be crystal clear now that a larger percentage of GDP will need to be spent on defense. We will need more conventional strength in ships and planes. We will need to match the Chinese in advanced military technology, but at the other end of the spectrum, we may need many more tanks if we have to station thousands in Europe, as we did during the Cold War. (The total number of American tanks permanently stationed in Europe today is zero.) Persistent efforts to diminish even further the size of our nuclear arsenal or prevent its modernization were always bad ideas, but now, as China and Russia are modernizing their nuclear weaponry and appear to have no interest in negotiating new limits, such restraints should be completely abandoned. Our nuclear arsenal will need to be modernized and expanded so that we will never face the kinds of threats Putin is now making from a position of real nuclear inferiority.” 

Putin played into the hands of the war industry. He gave the warmongers what they wanted. He fulfilled their wildest fantasies. There will be no impediments now on the march to Armageddon. Military budgets will soar. The oil will gush from the ground. The climate crisis will accelerate. China and Russia will form the new axis of evil. The poor will be abandoned. The roads across the earth will be clogged with desperate refugees. All dissent will be treason. The young will be sacrificed for the tired tropes of glory, honor, and country. The vulnerable will suffer and die. The only true patriots will be generals, war profiteers, opportunists, courtiers in the media and demagogues braying for more and more blood. The merchants of death rule like Olympian gods. And we, cowed by fear, intoxicated by war, swept up in the collective hysteria, clamor for our own annihilation.

(scheerpost.com)

INHERITANCE

by Olesia Ostrovska-Liuta

Rilke wrote in The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge that we depend on our family heirlooms – house, furniture, books – to give us our roots. Those old walls, dark wardrobes, paintings in worm-eaten frames, yellow photographs passed down from generation to generation, create a sense of continuity that we can fall back on in times of crisis.

I am writing this in Kyiv, cut off from my library, unable to look up quotations; I have to rely on my memory. Yet I can watch in real time – thanks to modern technology – as the Russians bombard my suburban neighborhood, blowing up places I know, their rockets destroying buildings that survived even the Second World War.

Last summer, at the tenth International Book Arsenal Festival in Kyiv, I took part in a panel discussion on charity and culture. (The festival is organized by Art Arsenal, Ukraine’s largest cultural center, of which I’m the director.) As we were talking it occurred to me that people my age, in our forties, are the first generation of Ukrainians to have inherited material assets of any kind. Our grandmothers experienced two world wars, the Holodomor and the Holocaust, dispossession and expulsion to Siberia. They had nothing to pass down.

My peasant grandparents inherited morgens of agricultural land from their parents, but this zemlya was later expropriated from them. ‘I can’t give you anything,’ my mother recalls her father telling her, ‘so you must study and provide for yourself.’ After the Second World War the cities of Ukraine lay in ruins. Everything that might have been passed down from one generation to the next – houses, furniture, china, paintings, photographs – had been lost in the terrible destruction. But my generation inherited something, or at least we were supposed to: an old Soviet apartment, a small dacha plot, a collection of books, a set of dusty cut-glass tableware. Whatever it was, we were the first to inherit in a long, long time.

In the early 20th century, the most valuable items were removed from Ukrainian museums and archives to Moscow and St Petersburg. Even the archives of the Ukrainian National Republic, I think, are still there. Many works of art, including frescoes by the brilliant modernist Mykhailo Boychuk, were destroyed for contradicting Soviet ideology. The artists were shot. During the Second World War, many Ukrainian museum collections left the country with the Germans; others were lost in the bombing.

An exhibition at the Art Arsenal, Futuromarennia, closed a few days before the Russian invasion. On display in this broad panorama of Ukrainian Futurism were paintings, graphic art, embroidery, film, literary works, theatrical costumes, reconstructed theatrical props etc. Curating it took enormous effort, with scarce surviving material gleaned from various sources and painstakingly put together into a representative whole. Now all those works are in danger again. Everything that had been tracked down, preserved and presented to the public, our heritage for future generations, is being destroyed by the Russians. They are destroying everything we inherited: not only beautiful architecture and works of art, but also our parents’ flats in Soviet-era nine-story buildings.

(Translated by Ksenia Maryniak. London Review of Books)

PUTIN HAS GROSSLY OVERPLAYED HIS HAND, BUT NATO COULD BE MAKING THE SAME MISTAKE AS IT SENSES IT’S WINNING

by Patrick Cockburn

By invading Ukraine two weeks ago, President Vladmir Putin grossly overplayed his hand and inflicted a political disaster on Russia from which it will struggle to recover for decades.

But are the US and Nato powers – over-confident because they sense that they are on the winning side – now making the same mistake by raising the stakes so high that the crisis is becoming less about Ukrainian independence and more about the survival of Putin and the future of the Russian state?

The extent of the Russian failure in Ukraine since 24 February cannot be overstated. Putin has presided so far over one of the great fiascos in military history, and it is getting late in the day for him and his generals to reverse this. They have not defeated the Ukrainian army, surrounded and captured the bigger cities of Ukraine, decapitated its government or found any local allies willing to work with the occupiers. A show of Russian strength has become a humiliating demonstration of weakness.

The one force that could come unintentionally to the rescue of Putin and his regime is Nato itself. Reasonable it may be to impose stringent sanctions on Russia in order to pressure the Kremlin to withdraw from Ukraine. But if sanctions become a weapon to enforce regime change in Moscow, or remain in place after the original objective is achieved, then the targeted population will view them as a cruel and undeserved form of collective punishment, strengthening the government that they were intended to undermine. US sanctions on Cuba, Iraq, Iran, Syria, Venezuela and North Korea produced plenty of misery, but not any changes in regimes that have, if anything, been strengthened by these economic sieges. It should be clear that as soon as Russian troops are out of Ukraine, sanctions will end.

A no-fly zone over Ukraine was always a terrible idea, and making it into a political issue has advantages for Russia because it shifts focus from the Russian invasion to the prospects for World War III. Leaving aside the fact that Ukrainian cities are largely being bombarded by artillery and missiles and not from the air, it would inevitably mean Nato air strikes on Russian S-400 anti-craft missile batteries and airfields inside Russia, inviting retaliatory Russian airstrikes on Poland and other east European states.

Washington has for the moment vetoed the idea of Poland handing over MiG-29s to the US, to be replaced by the transfer of American aircraft to Poland, while the old Soviet planes would be given to the Ukrainian air force. These probably would not make much difference to Ukrainian air defences, but they would be another step in direct Nato involvement in the war.

It is becoming clear that this war is unlikely to produce a definitive military victor on the battlefield, though in relation to its original war aims, Russia has comprehensively lost the conflict. One remaining big question is how far Putin knows this and accepts that he needs to cut his losses and withdraw his army, and whether this is politically feasible for him.

Russian war aims were from the start ambivalent, but at first “de-Nazification” and “demilitarisation” appeared to mean the overthrow of the Ukrainian government – to be replaced by a puppet regime – and the surrender of the Ukrainian army. Obviously, these objectives are not going to be achieved and were always illusory – as was the claim that the Russian-speaking minority was the victim of “genocide”. These claims were always vague and Putin could pretend that, somehow or other, the Nazis had been repelled and Russian speakers saved from slaughter.

As for Putin’s objection to Ukraine moving into the orbit of the West, his invasion has done far more than anything Nato could have done for Ukrainians to become viscerally anti-Russian. As for the Russian demand for a “neutralised” Ukraine, Nato powers have always made clear that their soldiers would never fight in Ukraine. Issues like the Russian annexation of Crimea, which is not going to be reversed, could be left where it is, possibly with a Ukrainian promise not to interrupt the water supply.

Russian grievances against Ukraine pre-war were real enough, but they were scarcely existential. Putin was in a strong position to extract at least some concessions while he threatened to invade Ukraine so long as he did not actually do so. In the event, few invasions have foundered so swiftly and spectacularly. As with many leaders who have confidently launched wars down the centuries, Putin will find that diplomatic solutions that were achievable before blood was spilt are no longer feasible.

Advocates of widening the war through no-fly zones, sending aircraft from Nato states, stopping Russian ships entering or leaving the Baltic, and similar measures only aid Putin by providing an opportunity for him to shift the focus of the conflict from Russia against Ukraine to Russia against Nato.

(Patrick Cockburn is the author of War in the Age of Trump (Verso).)

CLASS WARFARE

Editor: 

We all don’t have to learn to drive less. Only the poor and the middle class will need to learn to drive less. The rich will always have their private jets and limos. Government employees and politicians will have government-provided limos and credit cards. 

Those who govern us and dictate to us have provided for themselves. Those who endorse this class warfare by refusing to explore our resources should be the first to turn in their cars. Those who are so concerned about global warming in this country, and not rest of the world. These are the same people who will gladly buy oil from a country that bombs women and children. Those of us who will not fall for this false concept will have more gas and less people on the road. 

As a disabled Vietnam vet, I'm glad I have more behind me and less ahead of me. I feel sorry for my grandchildren, who will have to pay for all this good feeling stuff and learn to live with less. 

Dave Del Bonta

Santa Rosa

PANIC SELLING GRIPS CHINESE STOCKS IN BIGGEST PLUNGE SINCE 2008

Chinese stocks listed in Hong Kong had their worst day since the global financial crisis, as concerns over Beijing’s close relationship with Russia and renewed regulatory risks sparked panic selling.

The Hang Seng China Enterprises Index closed down 7.2% on Monday, the biggest drop since November 2008. The Hang Sang Tech Index tumbled 11% in its worst decline since the gauge was launched in July 2020, wiping out $2.1 trillion in value since a year-earlier peak.

The broad rout follows a report citing U.S. officials that Russia has asked China for military assistance for its war in Ukraine. Even as China denied the report, traders worry that Beijing’s potential overture toward Vladimir Putin could bring a global backlash against Chinese firms, even sanctions. Sentiment was also hurt by a Covid-induced lockdown in the southern city of Shenzhen, a key tech hub, and the northern province of Jilin.

That comes on top of a spate of regulatory worries. Tencent Holdings Ltd. is reportedly facing a possible record fine for violations of anti money-laundering rules, which pushed the stock down nearly 10% on Monday. There’s also a risk of Chinese firms delisting from the U.S., as the Securities and Exchange Commission identified some names as part of a crackdown on foreign firms that refuse to open their books to U.S. regulators.

“If the U.S. decides to impose sanctions on China in total or on individual Chinese companies doing business with Russia, that would be a concern,” said Mark Mobius, who set up Mobius Capital Partners after more than three decades at Franklin Templeton Investments. “The whole story is still up in the air in this case.”…

news.yahoo.com/china-tech-rout-deepens-amid-020459021.html

PHOTOGRAPHS OF PORTSMOUTH SQUARE - A TRIBUTE TO PAUL STRAND

Photographs and text by David Bacon

In presenting these images of Portsmouth Square, in San Francisco's Chinatown, I've tried to keep in mind some of the ideas of Paul Strand, the great modernist and realist photographer.

stansburyforum.com/2022/03/13/photographs-of-portsmouth-square

CEO ANGELO: ALT-WHEREAS

Board of Supervisors Meeting 

March 15, 2022

Consent Calendar Item 3f:

Proclamation Recognizing the Abuses of Power and Mismanagement by Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Carmel J. Angelo for the Last Twelve Years Upon Her Retirement from the County of Mendocino 

Introduced: John Sakowicz and Many Other Members of the Public

* * *

Proclamation Of The People Of Mendocino County Recognizing The Abuses Of Power And Mismanagement By Chief Executive Officer Carmel J. Angelo Upon Her Retirement, March 19, 2022

WHEREAS, Carmel J. Angelo became Assistant Chief Executive Officer in September 2007 where she reorganized the Executive Office for her eventual takeover of the Executive Office; and

WHEREAS, Angelo while also functioning as Chief Financial Officer balanced the county budget by firing or otherwise furloughing one third of the county workforce and freezing the salaries of the remaining workers without regard to the human costs of those measures; and

WHEREAS, Angelo was appointed Chief Executive Officer in March 2010 and dominated the Board of Supervisors by controlling the Board agenda and the Clerk of the Board for the next twelve years; and

WHEREAS, Angelo further consolidated power at the Executive Office by eliminating the county departments for budget, emergency services, risk management, IT, and general services, and bringing those functions into the Executive Office; and 

WHEREAS, Angelo further grabbed power by consolidating the constitutionally elected offices of the County Treasurer and County Auditor; and 

WHEREAS, Angelo also dominated the Board of Supervisors by controlling the necessary information to govern by never providing the Board with monthly detailed financial reports and departmental performance reviews; and 

WHEREAS, Angelo built the county’s mythical financial reserve on the backs of county workers who suffered high burnout because of high vacancy rates in their departments, and also built the so-called reserve on the deferred maintenance of county buildings and on a ballooning unfunded county pension liability; and 

WHEREAS, Angelo privatized county services, especially mental health services where a sole contractor, Redwood Community Services, now gets tens of millions of dollars in no-bid contracts, making that contractor stinking rich with almost no accountability; and 

WHEREAS, Angelo hijacked Measure B funds so that those funds would become the Executive Office's private slush fund, and also hijacked the Measure B Advisory Committee so the committee would become totally dysfunctional and ineffective, thereby breaking the promise of building a Psychiatric Health Facility; and 

WHEREAS, Angelo helped create one of the worst county cannabis ordinances in California, and also mismanaged the county's cannabis permit program, thereby allowing the carpetbaggers and scallywags at Flow Kana to dominate so-called “legal” cannabis to the detriment of local farmers, until Flow Kana itself lost a hostile takeover bid to the Wall Street gangsters at Gotham Green Partners; and 

WHEREAS, Angelo was so indifferent to public corruption in the cannabis industry and law enforcement that a RICO investigation has now been undertaken by the U.S. Attorney's Office, rising to the level of regional and national news to the great embarrassment of the county; and 

WHEREAS, Angelo thwarted, stifled, or otherwise influenced the investigations and proceedings of the county grand jury; and 

WHEREAS, Angelo “disappeared” numerous county employees, including department heads, resulting in numerous expensive wrongful termination lawsuits; 

NOW, THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED, that the people of County of Mendocino hereby bid farewell to Carmel J. Angelo so that she may collect her $170,000 annual pension.

THE ETERNAL WITNESS

Message to Postmodern America

Warmest spiritual greetings, Please know that in the increasing confusion and chaos which defines the present state of the American Experiment with Freedom and Democracy, I am hereby defining how it is with me. Egoistically, I have given myself completely over to the Spiritual source of all creation, or God.

Example: When walking to Plowshares for a free lunch today, my identification was with the witness only. The body and mind look like a dead man walking. Empty. They are in fact only the instruments, for use by The Eternal Witness, or God. Please know that this is a permanent condition, unalterable, and forever. I am not the body nor the mind. I am the Self, or Eternal Witness.

Presently my residence address is: Building Bridges located at 1045 S. State Street in Ukiah, California 95482, and the staff telephone number is: (707) 234-3270, to send me a message. 

Thank you very much. 😊

Craig Louis Stehr

BLAST FROM THE PAST (AVA, November 2008)

Why America Is Dying, Exhibit A

by Mark Scaramella

Most of the people commenting at last Monday’s Supervisor's General Plan meeting wanted the Supervisors to give the interested public, much of it from Anderson Valley, more time to comment on the environmental part of the Updated County General Plan. The environmental impact report presently exists in draft form. 

A few speakers were curious about the status of zoning changes affecting their own holdings. These concerns could have been processed just as easily without updating the entire General Plan, an Update now approaching a decade in preparation and several million public dollars wasted on boilerplate-producing consultants.

But one speaker, KZYX's Christina Aanestad, perhaps the only person in the room who was doing honest work, asked the Planning Team’s droning consultants a question.

“I have a question,” she began. “I have made calls to the Planning Team and the Planning Commission and the CEO’s office. [They're out when they're in, in when they're out.] My calls for clarifications were not returned. So I thought I would try asking it here. This is regarding some potentially significant and unavoidable impacts regarding water. The Draft EIR says that subsequent land use activities may increase demand from groundwater sources, which could result in overdraft, a potentially significant impact. Then it goes into mitigations RM 6 and RM 14. The mitigations state that there's a lack of current knowledge of groundwater and the sustainability of aquifers with impacts that are considered significant and unavoidable because there is this lack of information. How can you have an EIR without the information? Am I missing something? … Am I missing something?”

The room fell silent. Then, beginning with Board Chair Jim Wattenburger, people began to chuckle, chuckle uncomfortably. 

Ms. Aanestad persisted.

“Am I? Am I misunderstanding?”

Finally, a young, insufferably smug, freshly hired planning consultant named Patrick Ford, from that well known bastion of forward thinking, Tulare County, condescendingly replied, “That's a legitimate comment. We don't respond to comments until the comment period is closed.”

“When is that?” asked Aanestad.

“January,” replied Ford with a straight face, at which point Aanestad would have been perfectly justified in leaping for his throat.

“So it will be answered in that document?” Aanestad wondered. “Why not now?”

The County’s newly hired senior planning consultant, Audrey Knight, explained, “This is all the information that's available.”

Aanestad refused to back off.

“Which is not information,” she said. “There is no information. There is no information about groundwater availability. If this document establishes the future of land use planning, which has an increase in over 500 acres for residential, which is what you need water for, and that's a state law, how can you have an EIR if you don't have that information?”

Another long moment of silence. Ms. Knight was among the silent.

Ford finally offered, “Actually, there's quite a bit of information about what's known about both surface and groundwater. The final EIR will respond to this point and provide additional detail and information that at this point I don't have in my ready hands. That would give you everything you're looking for.”

No it won’t. There is no groundwater availability information. [There still isn’t in 2022, although Supervisor McGourty’s self-created Ukiah Valley Sustainability Agency is still thinking about “modeling” that groundwater.] Ford’s attempt at faking it seemed to be undermined by his “ready hands” malaprop. 

Ms. Aanestad, fresh off a truly excellent report she did recently on Willits' water problems that indicated she's becoming something of a real authority on the subject, remained skeptical. 

“Elsewhere in the document it does state that the…?” Aanestad continued before the insufferable Ford interrupted her.

“Yes,” Ford said, without knowing what the question was, but weasel wording as best he could. “If you look in under hydrology and water quality there's citations to the best available data regarding the groundwater conditions of the county.”

But that wasn’t the question nor the answer. Aanestad tried again. 

“Uh-huh. So how come it says here that the knowledge regarding groundwater availability, that there's a lack of knowledge about groundwater availability?”

Ford dropped back to punt. Again: “We can respond to this in greater detail in the final EIR.”

“Ok,” Aanestad finally conceded.

Ms. Aanestad, new to the ways of official Mendo, doesn't know that direct answers are as rare in the County as people asking for them. Having embarrassed the whole gang of Ukiah-based incompetents, the young reporter can look forward to “potential litigant” status, meaning the County will have a legal reason to stonewall her. 

Welcome to Mendocino County, Ms. Aanestad!