Mendocino County Today: Friday, March 18, 2022

Dry Day | 1917 Ukiah | Ortner Subpoenaed | Zantedeschia | No Covid | Craft Fair | Ukiah Shelter | Relief Bouquets | Goodnight Weed | Rainbow | Ed Notes | Orr Cleanup | Insect Protein | Yesterday's Catch | Gas/Coffee | Water Resource | Solar Median | General Zhukov | Equestrienne | Art Talk | Soviet Hero | Podhoretz Yapping | Strangling Sunflowers | Corrupt Elite | Bee/Flower | Ukraine Documentaries | Delbert Phelps | War Cheerleaders | Stumped | Russian Reparations | Donnie Dollar | Wylie Unfit | Container Huts | Ukiah's Embrace | Trump Gang | Disinfo Admission | Rosemary

DRY WEATHER is forecast to continue today. A front will bring rain, breezy winds and high mountain snow tonight and Saturday morning. Dry weather and colder morning temperatures are forecast for Sunday. Strong upper ridging will yield above normal temperatures, especially for the interior on Tuesday and Wednesday. (NWS)

MENDO SUBPOENAS ORTNER — SIX YEARS LATER

by Mark Scaramella

Next Tuesday the Supervisors have agendized an unusual item which demands that two officers of Ortner Management Group (OMG) — Melissa Lance and. Thomas Ortner — appear before the Supervisors to answer financial questions about their contract and produce some documents relating to their three-years as Mendocino County’s Adult Mental Health Services contractor from 2013 to 2016. 

Item 4a) Discussion and Possible Action Including Return on Legislative Subpoenas Requiring Appearance and Examination of Certain Officer(s) of Ortner Management Group, LLC (OMG) and For Receipt of Production of Documents Related to the County’s Contracts With OMG 

(Sponsors: County Counsel and Behavioral Health and Recovery Services) 

Recommended Action: Examine certain former officer(s) of Ortner Management Group, LLC (OMG), and receipt of production of documents related to the County's contracts with OMG.”

The most interesting part of the subpoena is that it appears to be related to a “pending” audit by the state Department of Health Care Services (DHCS) which, given the long delays in mental health services audits, may mean that the state now wants more documentation than Mendo has, or more accurately more than what they got when the Ortner contract ended without renewal in 2016 after a parade of local cops, doctors and patients complained about their inadequate services. 

Long time readers may recall that the Supervisors were assured by CEO Angelo and Mental Health Director Dr. Jenine Miller back in 2016 that all required documentation was being provided by Ortner. They even paid Ortner an additional $464k to finish it and provide it.

From our report of the June 2016 Ortner status Supervisors meeting:

“Supervisor McCowen asked why Ortner seemed to be slow in providing various documents that the County wanted. Dr. Miller explained that if Ortner had not been terminated prematurely, these documents would have been due in a matter of years, not right away, due to the long delays in billing and reimbursements. But since Ortner is being terminated, Ortner needs to provide the docs earlier than expected, and it’s taking time. So much time that Ortner needs an extra $64k (over the $400k they already got) to maintain staff to provide the billing documents before Ortner becomes one more sad chapter in Mendocino County history, bunco division. Dr. Miller’s boss HHSA Director Tammy Moss-Chandler added that ‘these items are being resolved and OMG is working cooperatively to deliver all the items called for’.”

Mendo paid Ortner about $464k on top of their contract value to finish up the paperwork and deliver whatever documentation was required. 

CEO Carmel Angelo justified the additional expense: “I am in communication with Mr. Ortner,” said Angelo. “So these questions are being asked. I have assurance for a successful closeout. What you will see on June 21 is the [$64k] four-month contract [extension] to cover staff to continue billing for rest of the contract.” That $64k was in addition to the $400k Ortner previously got for “a successful closeout.”

Supervisor Dan Gjerde said he would “reluctantly” vote for the additional $400k and the $64k, adding, “But staff should hold back additional funds to make sure documents are submitted in timely manner.”

* * *

Now it looks like some documents were not submitted, much less in a timely manner. So there must be remaining info gaps stemming from Ortner’s tenure that the State is finally getting around to asking about via a belated audit. In theory, if Mendo can’t prove that it provided reimbursable mental health services, the State can refuse to cover it — as they had done prior to Ortner — creating another large hole in Mendo’s post-Angelo general fund. If Ortner can’t provide the required info, it’s possible that Mendo would sue Ortner to recover whatever funds the state refuses to pay. But all of this will take a long time to sort out.

At the time that CEO Angelo engineered the privatization of mental health services in 2012 and 2013 by hiring former Ortner executive Tom Pinizzotto to make sure Ortner got the adult services half of the mental health contract, her primary stated reason was to avoid just this kind of “audit exceptions” problem. Reportedly, the Schraeder monopoly that expanded to replace Ortner in 2016 is better at paperwork and billing. But then, that’s what they said about Ortner at first. 

Angelo could have “privatized” the mental health billing to a contractor that specialized in such arcana without privatizing the whole mental health department, but she wasn’t interested in solving the actual problem. She wanted to farm out the entire $20-plus million operation to her friend at Redwood Quality Management Services. Since then millions of additional sole source contracts and amendments have been added to the Schraeders’ portfolio without competitive bidding and mostly on the consent calendar.

This inconvenient history of Ortner’s services failures and Angelo’s and Miller’s dubious assurances in 2016 that the paperwork was provided and the transition was “smooth” will of course not come up on Tuesday. Instead, poor Ortner, which got off to a bad start and was never really qualified for Angelo’s novel privatization experiment, will be made the scapegoat for Angelo’s and Miller’s mistakes.

Frankly, we’d be surprised if Ortner et al can provide all the stuff the County is now asking for some seven years after the fact. So, this exercise of trying to put the Ortner on the spot looks more like an attempt to shift the blame to them, and then hoping that the state will be easy on Mendo when the info DHCS wants is unavailable.

If we had to guess (and thank you for asking) since this is now sounding very legalistic, we’d expect that Ortner will hire an attorney to appear before the Supervisors for them. Ortner might even counter-sue trying to blame Mendo for at least part of the problem. Millions of dollars are at stake. Then County Counsel Christian Curtis will hire an expensive outside law firm to handle the case, and legal costs will escalate and Curtis will get another raise, and… Everything will work out fine!

PS. According to available on-line info Melissa Lance is a CPA, now Chief Financial Officer for “Horizon Management & Consulting” with an address in San Marcos (San Diego area) but Horizon is listed as based in Yuba City, the same city where Ortner is based. On line info also indicates that Ms. Lance is/was also known as Melissa Ortner. And before that she was known as Melissa Callicott, CPA, MSA, Chief Financial Officer of OMG. She may be Ortner’s wife or sister or ex-wife. Thomas Ortner is listed as 72 years old and Ms. Lance/Ortner/Callicott is 47 years old.

* * *

Here’s the text of the two (identical) subpoenas sent to Lance and Ortner:

Attached:

LEGISLATIVE SUBPOENA FOR PERSONAL APPEARANCE AND PRODUCTION OF BOOKS, PAPERS AND DOCUMENTS (Cal. Gov. Code § 25170, et seq.) 

IN RE: Pending and future audits by State of California DHCS of Mendocino County regarding its contracts for specialty mental health services including but not limited to Board of Supervisors Agreement No. 13-016 with Ortner Management Group (“OMG”) 

COUNTY OF MENDOCINO BOARD OF SUPERVISORS 

TO: Melissa Lance, 1553 El Paseo Drive, San Marcos, CA 92078 

and TO: Thomas Ortner, 1721 Claire Ct., Yuba City, CA 95993 

FROM: COUNTY OF MENDOCINO, BOARD OF SUPERVISORS 

Pursuant to California Government Code section 25170, et seq., and Resolution No. 21-024, YOU ARE HEREBY ORDERED to appear in person and produce the documents described in Attachment A at the meeting of the County of Mendocino Board of Supervisors at County Administration Center, Board Chambers, 501 Low Gap Road, Ukiah, CA 95482, on March 21, 2022 at 9:00 a.m., or at such a later date and time as you may be directed by the requesting party. 

All documents produced to the County of Mendocino pursuant to this subpoena shall be accompanied by a declaration or affidavit warranting to their authenticity and completeness sufficient to meet the requirements of California Code of Civil Procedure section 2020.430. Pursuant to Government Code section 25176, the County is not required to pay witness fees. 

This subpoena is issued by the Mendocino County Board of Supervisors, pursuant to Government Code section 25170, et seq., and February 23, 2021, Resolution No. 21-024, Resolution of the Mendocino County Board of Supervisors Authorizing the Issuance of Subpoenas for Documents and the Examination of Persons Related to the County’s Contracts with Ortner Management Group. 

Pursuant to Government Code section 25173, disobedience of this subpoena is punishable as contempt and shall be reported to the Superior Court of Mendocino County. Should you have any questions regarding this subpoena please contact: Christian Curtis, County Counsel, Mendocino County, 501 Low Gap Road, Room 1030, Ukiah, California, 95482, (707) 234-6885. 

Date issued: March 9, 2022 BY: TED WILLIAMS, Chair, Mendocino County Board of Supervisors 

Attachment A 

For the period July 1, 2013 through June 30, 2016, any and all documents required by State of California Department of Health Care Services (DCHS) in the anticipated regular cost report audits of Mendocino County regarding its contracts for specialty mental health services, i.e., Board of Supervisors Agreement No. 13-016 between Mendocino County and Ortner Management Group, LLC and all subsequent amendments of the same. 

For the period July 1, 2013 through June 30, 2016, the general ledgers and general journals for each fiscal year (2013-2014, 2014-2015, and 2015-2016), documenting a complete record of all of the financial transactions for Ortner Management Group, LLC. 

For the period July 1, 2013 through June 30, 2016, the working papers used to prepare the filed cost reports for each fiscal year (2013-2014, 2014-2015, and 2015-2016), for each provider contracted by Ortner Management Group, LLC, to provide specialty mental health services to Medi-Cal beneficiaries of Mendocino County under the Mental Health Plan and Mental Health Services Act. 

For the period July 1, 2013 through June 30, 2016, the patient day/visit statistics for each fiscal year (2013-2014, 2014-2015, and 2015-2016), for each facility contracted by Ortner Management Group, LLC, to provide inpatient acute psychiatric hospitalizations, inpatient intensive residential care or inpatient board and care for Medi-Cal beneficiaries of Mendocino County. 

For the period July 1, 2013 through June 30, 2016, the billing records and/or program logs for each fiscal year (2013-2014, 2014-2015, and 2015-2016), for each provider contracted by Ortner Management Group, LLC to provide specialty mental health services to Medi-Cal beneficiaries of Mendocino County under the Mental Health Plan. 

For the period July 1, 2013 through June 30, 2016, program audit reports for each fiscal year (2013-2014, 2014-2015, and 2015-2016), for each facility contracted by Ortner Management Group, LLC, to provide inpatient acute psychiatric hospitalizations, inpatient intensive residential care or inpatient board and care for Medi-Cal beneficiaries of Mendocino County. 

For the period July 1, 2013 through June 30, 2016, the working papers used to support the expenditure reports for each fiscal year (2013-2014, 2014-2015, and 2015-2016), for each provider contracted by Ortner Management Group, LLC, to provide specialty mental health services to Medi-Cal beneficiaries of Mendocino County under the Mental Health Plan and Mental Health Services Act. 

For the period July 1, 2013 through June 30, 2016, the organizational charts for each fiscal year (2013-2014, 2014-2015, and 2015-2016), for Ortner Management Group, LLC. 

For the period July 1, 2013 through June 30, 2016, the payroll records for each fiscal year (2013-2014, 2014-2015, and 2015-2016), for Ortner Management Group, LLC. 

For the period July 1, 2013 through June 30, 2016, each contract and any amendments thereto for each provider contracted by Ortner Management Group, LLC, to provide specialty mental health services to Medi-Cal beneficiaries of Mendocino County under the Mental Health Plan and Mental Health Services Act services, including but not limited to, Integrated Care 

Management Solutions (ICMS), Manzanita Services, Inc., Mendocino Coast Hospitality Center, Mendocino County AIDS Volunteer Network (MCAVN), and Willow Glen Care Center programs. 

For the period July 1, 2013 through June 30, 2016, each contract and amendments thereto for each facility contracted by Ortner Management Group, LLC, to provide inpatient acute psychiatric hospitalizations, inpatient intensive residential care or inpatient board and care for Medi-Cal beneficiaries of Mendocino County, including but not limited to North Valley Behavioral Health, LLC, Restpadd Inc., and Willow Glen Care Center programs. 

For the period July 1, 2015, through June 30, 2016, cost reports for provider Manzanita Services, Inc., contracted by Ortner Management Group, LLC. 

SCHOOLS TEST COVID FREE, Superintendent Simson reports. 

Subject: All pools negative this week

We are delighted that all tested pools were negative this week. We had one unusable pool at the Jr. High school (damaged in transport/testing/or some other issue).

Louise Simson, Superintendent
Anderson Valley Unified School District
Cell: 707-684-1017

BUILDING BRIDGES - SHELTER OPENS TO CLIENTS ALL DAY

by Justine Frederiksen 

The overnight shelter at the Building Bridges Community Center in Ukiah now allows clients access to their beds all day, a change that the facility’s manager describes as significantly reducing the problematic behaviors that staff members were having to address.

“Previously, the shelter was closed during the day and only the resource center was open, and we found that our guests congregated in the day room or the backyard, and there was way more conflicts on the property, or they would leave the property and have challenges on the street,” said Sage Wolf, the Homeless Services and Housing Manager for Redwood Community Services, which operates Building Bridges.

Once the shelter started offering 24-hour access to its dorms, however, Wolf said “we immediately noticed a real significant drop in the number of conflicts, assaults and violent situations that our staff was having to intervene with. Just by having a place to be, we found that people could get more rest and be more productive.”

Wolf also noted that the shelter has been open continuously since November of 2019, and currently has “funding to keep the shelter open year-round,” rather than only operating during the winter months.

Wolf’s update on the shelter’s operations was given to the Ukiah Planning Commission at its last meeting March 9. And though such reports are no longer required to be given every six months, Wolf said, “I was thrilled when the city asked to continue these reports. I see this as such a great opportunity to provide information on the kinds of things that we’re offering.”

Craig Schlatter, Community Development Director for the city of Ukiah, told the commission that one of the conditions of the facility’s use permit was that he report on the operations every six months for two years, but as of September 2021, those reports are no longer required.

In addition, Schlatter pointed to a new state law (and subsequent city zoning changes) which states that “low-barrier navigation centers, such as the RCS facility, are no longer subject to use-permit requirements. So, technically, they still have their use permit, but there is no enforceability, because they no longer need their use permit to operate their facility.”

However, Schlatter said the regular reports helped solidify “a growing partnership between RCS staff and city staff that I think has assisted everyone in making this project more successful. So city staff requested that these reports continued, and RCS agreed.”

As to the report he gave last week, Schlatter said it covered the six-month period ending on Feb. 6, 2022, and focused on four areas: “We look at complaints received from the public, police activity, fire and EMS calls, and also an overall assessment of how things are working.”

And while police calls increased slightly, to 69 in the latest report from 60 in the previous, Schlatter said that overall, the shelter’s “impact to the surrounding area is decreasing, especially in comparison” to his second report, which reported 189 calls to the Ukiah Police Department. (The first report had 131 calls, the second 189, the third 135, and the fourth had 60.)

Wolf addressed the slight increase in police contacts (from 60 to 69) and explained that the facility staff pays “really close attention to our police contacts, because it’s a great way for us to track the incidents that are happening, and to notice whether we need to change a policy or how we’re approaching something.”

Wolf said the shelter increased the number of beds available in November, “and in December we started to notice an increase in our police contacts. Also at that time, we were bringing on new staff that had not previously had experience in homeless services, and so we definitely noticed a small increase in police contacts.”

After working with the new staff members and reducing the number of beds at the shelter in January, Wolf said the police contacts then decreased. However, by this week the number of beds will have increased again.

“We have increased the number of beds again this month (for a total of 55), and will be paying attention to our incidents and our police contacts again to see if they have an uptick,” Wolf said.

After Wolf’s presentation, most members of the commission said they appreciated the work of the shelter staff, and Chairwoman Laura Christensen said she had definitely noticed improvements in the area surrounding the shelter in the past few months.

“Something has changed in the neighborhood, it’s so much cleaner,” Christensen said. “I know there are little pockets where it kind of gets messed up, but for the most part, it’s gotten a lot cleaner.”

(Courtesy, the Ukiah Daily Journal)

CHRIS CALDER: Sunflowers for Ukraine starts today! Buy a bouquet of sunflowers and all proceeds will be matched by Harvest Market and go towards humanitarian relief for the people of Ukraine.

NIGHT LIGHT OF THE NORTH COAST: TWO OF HUMBOLDT COUNTY’S BEST KNOWN FEATURES–OUR GORGEOUS NIGHT SKIES AND OUR CANNABIS

by David Wilson

If asked to share one thing for which Humboldt County is best known, most would agree: our dark skies provide excellent night sky viewing and photographic opportunities. But who would also think of outdoor cannabis? Yet it is an actual thing — I hear. And evidently the two subjects work well when mixed together, like two great tastes…

So I did. I present to you here what I found when I mixed outings into California North Coast’s dark skies with some of Humboldt’s finest. It is too early in the season for outdoor cannabis growing as I write this, so these images from earlier times are previews of the season’s coming attractions.

While the typical outdoor growing season lasts from spring through fall, the North Coast’s skies offer outstanding year-round stargazing, weather permitting, and if you drive a little way out of town. They are not far from anywhere.

The content of the skies changes with the seasons, gradually shifting the constellations and planets across the sky through the months. The moon cycles through its phases throughout the season. For some, the highlight of the night is the Milky Way, that path of lightness that stretches across our night sky soon after dark in the summer and fall seasons. If you are an early bird, you’ll find it instead in the predawn hours in the first few months of the year, reaching from the southeast to the north.

That “milky way” in the sky inspired the name of our galaxy, the Milky Way. We see it as lighter than the rest of the night sky because when we look toward it, we are looking through our pinwheel-shaped galaxy edge-on, right through the densest number of stars, glowing nebulae, etc. In our edge-on view, all of it blends together into indistinct milkiness in the vast interstellar distances involved. The Galactic Core is the center of the galaxy, and this densest region, the part with the greatest visible detail from Earth, can be seen at the southern end of the Milky Way. I admit to being fascinated by the it. It is a true wonder in the universe.

The North Coast’s dark skies are dazzling, and in combination with its finest outdoor cannabis, any evening can be a terrific nighttime photographic outing. With camping, glamping and cannabis tours in the area, opportunities abound for enjoying either, or, should you be so inclined, the two together.

To read previous entries of “Night Light of the North Coast,” click on David’s name above the article. To keep abreast of his most current photography or purchase a print, visit and contact him at his website mindscapefx.com or follow him on Instagram at @david_wilson_mfx. David teaches Art 35 Digital Photography at College of the Redwoods.

ED NOTES

ST. PATRICK'S DAY. Any excuse for a drunk, but it got me thinking about the noble House of Anderson, my ancestry, what is known about it. Like most people, lineage gets pretty hazy after the great grandparents. On one side, we've been in one place in Scotland — a town called Selkirk — since Caesar marched in to organize the primitive clans he found there. On the other side it's the now reviled Scotch-Irish traced back to Kentucky and Southern Missouri with one great-great grandfather a great friend of Jesse and Frank James with whom he grew up in Clay County. My grandmother always said “Mr. Major” — she always spoke formally of him — may have been close to Frank and Jesse James “but he was never involved in their robberies and such.” Doubt the old boy could have avoided criminal participation, seeing as how Clay County was a very bad neighborhood and his closest friends were outlaws from early in their teen years. Family lore has it that Frank James, who also, as it happened, touched down in the Anderson Valley where he visited other Clay County ex-pats, was a good fellow but his brother, the infamous Jesse, was a psycho, several times shooting people just for the hell of it. Major was well known as a horseman and trick shot ace, his feats written up in the St. Louis papers. He used to visit Frank in Texas where Frank had retired to a horse ranch. 

AMONG THE INNUMERABLE media stories on the Anderson Valley, a sentence from a recent one seems awfully careless: “As the quaint town of Boonville comes into focus three final wineries step up offering you a variety of bubbles worthy of a day trip.” Quaint? In the ye olde-ye olde sense we can only offer, in all of Mendocino County, the “village” of Mendocino. I suppose a writer who drives all the way up here for “bubbles” our dusty, depleted little town could seem quaint.

THE LOCAL WOKE BRIGADE doesn't seem much for scholarship, but even they've got to know that Fort Bragg was not named after Braxton Bragg, the South's most incompetent general by all accounts, only the fort in Fort Bragg was named after the old boy, and named after him four years prior to the Civil War when, having married a wealthy slave owner, Bragg fought for the South. His association with our Fort Bragg is tenuous, but the righteous also aren't much for distinctions. 

PUTIN'S WAR ON UKRAINE is, by itself, a major crime and, potentially, this time next year we could be roasting squirrels over open pit fires in the hills of Mendocino County if Putin decides to go out with the ultimate bang. But the nightly barrage of atrocity visuals on television is, sic, overkill. Most, for instance, of the civilians sheltering inside a makeshift bomb shelter in a Mariupol theater a couple of days ago, have survived, according to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s office. “After an awful night of not knowing, we finally have good news from Mariupol on the morning of the 22nd day of the war. The bomb shelter was able to hold. The rubble is beginning to be cleared. People are coming out alive.” 

THE BUILDING had been marked “CHILDREN” but artillery and rockets, especially the way Putin is deploying them, are not sniper rifles. But the implication of the tv coverage was that the rat bastard Russkies were going to bomb a thousand or so children. The net effect of hyping this ongoing atrocity like this translates that the Russians, all of them, are beasts.

PUTIN, singlehandedly, started the war and he can end it. Russians, like most of US, have little to no influence on events. But resistance to Putin is growing inside Russia faster than, for instance, our resistance here in Liberty Land to the Bush Gang's wars in the Middle East ever grew. In fact, I can't recall much resistance at all, and we haven't faced anywhere near the danger Russians face in opposing Putin.

SUPERVISOR MULHEREN RELAYS PHOTOGRAPHIC PROOF OF ORR CREEK CLEANUP

FOOD, AN EXCHANGE

#1. I do hear tell he says that the reason 5,000 children starve to death every day is a "distribution problem."

#2. In his landmark bestseller “Homo Deus” Yuval Harari states, “During the last hundred years, technological, economic and political developments have created an increasingly robust safety net [against famine and starvation]. 

There are not longer natural famines in the world; there are only political famines. If people in Syria, Sudan or Somalia starve to death, it is because some politician wants them to. For the first time in history more people today die from eating too much than from eating too little. The average human is far more likely to die from binging at McDonald’s than from drought.”

Yes, it seems there is more of a food distribution problem than a food production problem.

#3. There are still problems with hunger due to disaster, but more and more of those disasters are directly or indirectly manmade as well.

We now produce enough food to feed every human being on the planet several times, but the penchant for meat in the first world means a huge amount of that food is used to raise livestock for slaughter. We could reduce our meat consumption by 30% globally, and neatly feed everyone as well as store surplus in case of disasters.

That, and at the same time prevent the destruction of rain forest, and inevitable loss of biodiversity that comes with that.

There are other protein sources that could be used to produce high quality meat substitutes that would be dramatically less impactful on the environment. A team of scientists, doctors, and cuilinary professionals are working on meat substitutes bases on insect protein that is indistinguishable from quality meat, uses a tenth of the resources to produce, provides amazing health advantages (reducing heart disease, cancer, and infammatory diseases associated with animal meat products.) You can already get some of these products, I've tried a couple out of curiousity, they aren't quite their yet, but including the health benefits and the reduced damage to the planet, there are some pretty strong reasons to consider adding them to your diet. And face it, compared to a soyburger or gluten patties, these things are great.

CATCH OF THE DAY, March 17, 2022

BHAKTI DILLENBECK, Disorderly conduct-alcohol. (Frequent flyer.)

THOMAS FORMICO, Willits. Large capacity magazine.

WILLIAM HAUSER, Eureka/Ukiah. DUI.

JARED KIDD, Ukiah. Disorderly conduct-alcohol, parole violation.

JORGE MARTINEZ, Ukiah. DUI-alcohol&drugs, reckless evasion, no license.

ROBERT MASSARELLI, Fort Bragg. DUI-alcohol&drugs, DUI while on probation, probation revocation.

MATTHEW MATUSHENKO, Ukiah. Probation revocation.

SHEVELLE PERKINS, Fort Bragg. Burglary, shoplifting, conspiracy, probation revocation.

CHRISTOPHER POWELL, Ukiah. DUI, suspended license, probation revocation.

KELLY STANTON, Ukiah. Causing a fire of property, failure to appear, probation revocation.

SCOTT STINER, Willits. Fugitive from justice.

AMY WOOLSEY, Ukiah. Domestic battery.

HOGS IN THE TROUGH

AVA,

I have been wracking my brain to recall a question I put before the authorities in a final public hearing about our 2008 County General Plan "Update" that resulted in then Supervisor Robey to say "it's just not that big a deal," when I protested their casual treatment of water management. I had at that point been a volunteer for our little water district here in Upper Lake for two years, and produced the precedent-setting content of its LAFCo Municipal Service Review to protect our groundwater recharge area, and I challenged some aspect of confounding misstatements presented for "public comment." I'm sure it's somewhere in my spiral bound notebooks, which I should find, but in the meantime, here are some thoughts I began a couple of days ago in reply to your recollection of a thwarted inquiry about the Mendocino 2008 General Plan's lack of substance regarding critical water resources.

Beginning in 2006, the elaborate preparations (including special advisory committees for handling controversial issues, such as the minimum size of a parcel that could be separated from ag-zoned large land holdings) conducted by the out-of-county consulting firm and a special water rights attorney for the creation of our very own Water Resources element (at a rate of $350/hour, including drive time from his distant home) attempted to exclude local tribes through a sleight of hand -- "forgetting" about SB 18, until one of the tribe's council members stepped up to challenge that elision, and ignoring the fact that the four tribes with riparian rights to the waters of Clear Lake could establish more stringent water quality standards than the state has chosen to accept -- were focused on the primary engine of what seems to be the raison d'etre of county government, generating revenues to pay itself to keep generating revenues (that is, collecting fees, assessments, and taxes).

There were then (and are now) restrictions on developing tax-generating construction projects requiring further demands on the limited capacities of already impaired groundwater supplies or Clear Lake's presumed abundance, partly due to the extreme degree of treatment needed to convert the lake's chemical and physical constituents into "legal" water (the preferred description of the general manager at the treatment plant with the worst levels of surface water pollution from its source intake point in the Lower Arm of the lake). 

[A number of large development projects in the southern district of the county, not dependent on Clear Lake, were ambitiously launched in the aftermath of the Valley Fire (2015), but sit halfway completed and apparently not moving "forward" any time soon. The state Attorney General challenged a major use permit issued to the Jeff Bezos equivalent in China, for construction of a 24-square-mile city east of Middletown, over water and wildfire protection issues; subsequent reflection on the state's wildfire vulnerability and extenuated "climate change" impacts have altered the course of such planning efforts. Now we're back to extreme water shortages in both our counties, even while Lake County is busy hustling legal marijuana "cultivation" (but not "agriculture") for its money-hungry top dogs.]

In addition, treatment plant capacity limits that were reached decades ago demand that any land use expansion be supported by their equal increase in throughput and sensitivity -- projects that entail millions of dollars of up-front investment before a single shovel of dirt can be turned. Most importantly, conservation and protection of the sources of most of the lake's annual "recharge" -- the high elevation forests ringing the Clear Lake basin -- was not addressed until the evidence of massive tree mortality across our two counties (and into northern Napa) was documented by UC's forestry advisor and CalFire, just recently.

That your Board of Supervisors thinks (?) that creation of a faux water "agency" to wrangle the bovines free-ranging throughout your non-governmental operations will do anything beneficial except keep passing the buck is not terribly surprising, but handing it off to the biggest culprits hogging the majority of what little water there is (under Supervisor McGourty's direction!) suggests that there are no responsible parties at the helm with the intelligence of a gastropod.

The least they could do is create a General Plan update that mimics ours -- full of goals, and policies, and promises, even while they ignore the state's requirements for implementing USEPA water quality protection programs and likewise dismissed the obligation to provide health and safety services for wildfire prevention -- with its dreamy water resources section that cost us a bundle and is less effective than a meme.

Solidaridaj,

Your friend in Upper Lake.

Betsy Cawn

IRV SUTLEY REMEMBERS: I recall that it was the Red Army divisions of Ukrainians under leaders like Zhukov and the Russians under Khrushchev that won the war in the European Theatre by nicely crushing the Nazi SS legions and the Wehrmacht divisions. Loved it when Paulus was forced to surrender at Stalingrad and had most of his surviving troops marched east into Soviet POW camps. Lend Lease was important to Russia certainly, but they only got a pittance compared to the United Kingdom and the countries and colonies of the British Commonwealth. 

WHAT MAKES GREAT ART?

Dennis Calabi talks on conservation, forgeries, and the true value of artwork

by Roberta Werdinger

On Thursday, March 24, at 7 p.m., the Grace Hudson Museum presents a virtual talk, followed by Q&A, by art conservator and gallery owner Dennis Calabi. Calabi performed the conservation and cleaning work on "The Wi-Ly," one of Grace Hudson's recently acquired paintings featured in the Museum's current exhibition, "The Art of Collecting." This presentation will give insight into the fascinating but little-known field of art conservation, and provide tips to avoid easy pitfalls for those interested in purchasing art. 

"I fall in love with things that have absolutely no value to anyone else," Dennis Calabi confesses. "As someone who has been spending 85 percent of my time for 52 years on my art practice, it's still very personal." This passion for preserving older art and promoting postwar (since WWII) art of the Bay Area is evident in his twin projects. Calabi believes firmly that Bay Area museums are ignoring "the gems in their own backyard," an imbalance his Santa Rosa gallery is dedicated to righting. The listing of artists whose works Calabi Gallery has carried mingles the global and famous--Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse-- with the local and overlooked, including Mary Fuller McChesney, Robert Pearson McChesney, Paul Beattie, and Karl Kasten. 

Calabi is also "a huge fan" of Grace Hudson's work, noting that "she showed people as they really were in a very empathetic way." She did not indulge in stereotyped or romanticized views of Native people as other Western painters of the era did, but rather portrayed "the way they actually dressed and lived." Her 1912 painting "The Wi-Ly"illustrates this beautifully. A young woman gazes off curiously to her left. More importantly, she is adorned in a headdress and other regalia worn for a specific Pomo dance. 

Calabi describes conservation work as incredibly painstaking. Varnishes on oil paintings turn yellow in about ten years; they have to be stripped and replaced. Oil paint can take 400 years to dry completely. If a painting has been badly damaged, which many of them have, the restorer may be faced with the choice of repairing it to the point "where it's more your painting than the artist's." Despite these daunting challenges, a small but steady stream of art conservators are turned out every year, by three Masters programs in the country that each accept ten people yearly.

As for forgeries, Calabi has found "huge numbers" over the course of his long career. Some have removed the artist's original signature and replaced it with their own; some don't bother at all with a signature. Thomas Hill, a well-known California painter, was in competition with his own son over forgeries of his paintings. Calabi, whose years of experience enables him to spot fakes quickly, will tell this and other stories of misadventures in the art world, along with advice on how and why to collect and conserve art. His most basic advice is what he's been living by for 52 years: "Really study and really look. Only buy good paintings. The quality tells the story."

For a link to this virtual event, click here or go to the Grace Hudson website at https://www.gracehudsonmuseum.org/ and scroll down to the event. 

"The Art of Collecting: New Additions to the Grace Hudson Museum"will be on display until May 8. For more information, call the Museum at (707) 467-2836.

JOHN PODHORETZ, YOU SUCK

Neoconservatives think they've been vindicated by Ukraine, and their new Democratic allies agree. On America's most improbable and undeserved political comeback

by Matt Taibbi

Neoconservative intellectual, former Reagan speechwriter, and onetime Jeopardy champ John Podhoretz penned a triumphant column the other day. Titled, “Neoconservatism: A Vindication,” the Commentary piece declared architects of the War on Terror like himself back on top, world events having proven them correct about everything from community policing to war. Not only are they back on top, they’ve conquered their primary “hip liberal” foes, leaving just one pocket of dissenters remaining:

The key foes the neoconservatives face when it comes to the moral frame of deterrence—the idea that America is and should be a force for good—are no longer hip liberals but rather “traditional conservatives” who have taken their place as the leading anti-American voices of our time.

Anti-American. Let the sheer balls of that sink in. Podhoretz and the rest of the overgrown Risk-playing lunatics in his neocon treehouse — people like Paul Wolfowitz, Elliot Abrams, Richard Perle, Bill Kristol, Max Boot, David Frum, and Robert Kagan, husband to Joe Biden’s current Undersecretary of Global Dominance Victoria Nuland — spent most of the last twenty years trying to set the Bill of Rights on fire, over the objections of the very people he now decries as “foes” to the American way. In a just world he’d be wedged naked in an innertube and dropped in the Bering Strait just for allowing himself to think he gets to decide who is and isn’t American, much less publishing the idea.

Liberals and peace activists, look at the face at the top of this page and summon a memory of the Bush years: this emissary from the past just called you his bitch. To the eternal shame of anyone who’s ever held a Nation subscription or read a Carlos Castaneda novel, he’s right, as many onetime Iraq war opponents are now locking arms behind Podhoretz and his pals. If you’re a “traditional conservative” — meaning someone who probably voted for neoconservative policies most of your life — he’s fingering you as the last “anti-Americans” in the population needing taming. Haughty stuff, from the mouthpiece of a niche crew of armchair hawks who’ve been deader than Tupac politically since Iraq, a country Podhoretz conveniently neglects to mention in his “Vindication” tale.

Podhoretz the younger is probably best known (as the Chapo Traphouse crew pointed out) for being the slob who used Twitter to complain his Schnipper’s hamburger delivery was late. Visually he’s an uncanny cross of Eric “Butterbean” Esch and the McDonaldland character Grimace, who like the neocons also went through many a forgotten makeover. In 1971 McDonald’s rolled out “Evil” Grimace, a gluttonous purple mass who used an extra pair of arms to steal milkshakes, only to be stopped at Filet-O-Fish lake by Ronald McDonald. A year later Grimace was reintroduced as a good guy, allowed in 1974 to downsize to a single set of arms, and eventually given a family history, beginning with Uncle O’Grimacey, who coincidentally arrived once a year today, on St. Patrick’s Day, to deliver Shamrock Shakes.

Neoconservatism is also a family business. Many were originally disaffected ex-Marxists and Democrats, who defected to Ronald Reagan’s GOP, among other things in protest over Jimmy Carter’s détente policy. Neocons then and now pitched themselves as a “defiantly unfashionable” minority blessed with the gift of moral leadership — a vanguard if you will, who’d steer conservatives away from what Podhoretz calls the “Failure of Nerve” that cursed Democrats after Vietnam. The key figures were Podhoretz’s father Norman, and Bill Kristol’s father Irving, who posed for a 1979 Esquire cover story called “The Godfather of Neoconservatism.”

The group was distinguished by belief in a binary universe broken down into “good” and “evil” poles. On the world stage they lauded Reagan for aggressive confrontation with the “evil empire,” and on the streets, theorists like James Q. Wilson unleashed constitutionally dubious “Broken Windows” policing on criminals.

Wilson in 1993 wrote a book called “The Moral Sense” that argued “ordinary men and women” probably “knew better” than intellectuals because “they relied on moral sentiments instead of changeable academic fads such as multiculturalist relativism, feminism or critical race theory.” This argument was used to push for stiffer prison sentences, opposition to gay marriage, and other conservative causes. There would be a huge irony in this later on.

In 1996, in the July/August edition of Foreign Affairs, Robert Kagan and Bill Kristol published a seminal article entitled, “Toward a Neo-Reaganite Foreign Policy.” They argued the collapse of the Soviet Union did not mean the United States could abandon “vast responsibilities” globally to enjoy a “peace dividend” at home. Instead, it needed to project enough force to “make clear that it is futile to compete with American power,” and achieve “benevolent hegemony.” Your basic world domination plan, which relied on preserving/expanding NATO and eschewing any policy permitting the long-term survival of nations not under de facto U.S. control. This not only meant America had to topple “rogue” states like Iraq, but would also eventually need to “change the regime in Beijing.”

After 9/11, 40 neocons — practically all of them, I think — signed a letter to George W. Bush, arguing that “even if evidence does not link Iraq directly to the attack… American military force should be used” to depose Saddam Hussein. They then spent much of the 2000s arguing for mass suspension of American constitutional ideals in pursuit of such “evildoers.”

Kristol and Kagan birthed thousands of future centrist Twitter memes when they poo-poohed those who said we should focus on bin Laden before going after Iraq, saying, “The United States can, after all, walk and chew gum at the same time.” They called the ACLU “Al Qaeda’s Civil Liberties Union” for seeking due process for Gitmo detainees and said their real desire to “disseminate propaganda on behalf of our jihadist enemies.” As Glenn Greenwald just pointed out, now-beloved mainstream figure Rick Wilson spent part of the War on Terror producing a campaign ad that morphed bin Laden’s face onto that of Democrat Max Cleland, who lost three limbs in Vietnam, claiming he lacked “the courage” to lead.

When the Iraq invasion turned to shit precisely as everyone with half a brain knew it would, with Iraqis quickly coming to view us as insane, godless torturers competent at nothing beyond inspiring converts to al-Qaeda, Podhoretz sputtered excuses. In 2006 he argued the West was unfairly constrained in war, that both Israel and the United States were perhaps “too nice to win,” that no country forced to concern itself with trivialities like civilian deaths could prevail. “Could World War II have been won by Britain and the United States,” he whined, “if the two countries did not have it in them to firebomb Dresden and nuke Hiroshima and Nagasaki?” Remember: this from the same person now decrying “bad conduct” in Ukraine.

By 2008, the force-first fanatics in this little scout troop were universally derided as the dumbest people on earth. Consider just this: they ran a Murdoch-backed conservative media outlet that couldn’t make money in America during the Obama years. Even other Republicans thought they were pathetic. The newsroom of the Washington Times is said to have read Podhoretz columns aloud, to laugh at his “shortcomings as a writer, thinker, and human being,” in a tradition called Podenfreude. The Weekly Standard suffered double-digit declines to its subscriber base in every year between 2013 and its closure in 2018, and somehow lost between $2-$4 million a year during a period when Republicanism in general was on the march everywhere, famously gaining a thousand legislative seats during Obama’s two terms.

This is nearly impossible to pull off, unless your contributors self-describe as imperious elites while offering wisdom like this line from Weekly Standard Columnist Fred Barnes:

I'd like to see one other thing in Iraq, an outbreak of gratitude for the greatest act of benevolence one country has ever done for another.

The neocons’ War on Terror tear-down of everything from habeas corpus to due process to the Geneva Convention to prohibitions against illegal searches and seizures, cruel and unusual punishment, and assassination not only doomed Republicans but ruined Hillary Clinton’s 2008 chances. Democrats that year voted en masse for a constitutional lawyer named Barack Obama specifically hoping (in vain, as it turned out) he would undo years of neoconservative assaults on American values. The stench of the neocons’ influence persisted across the next eight years, long enough that they helped elect the next president, too.

In 2016, the likes of Podhoretz were horrified when Donald Trump ridiculed their Iraq war as a “Big, fat mistake” and even took the heretical position of pledging to be “a neutral guy” in the Israel-Palestine conflict. Neocons declared Trump the #1 threat to American national security, and people like Kagan swore that if Republican voters didn’t snap out of it right now and nominate someone they approved of like Marco Rubio, their “only choice” would be to vote for Hillary Clinton. Go ahead and see if they wouldn’t do it! Republicans ignored them and voted Trump in.

The post-invasion ingratitude of Iraqis was one thing, but the mass rejection of their ideas in 2016 by a red-state lumpenproletariat that had been ordered for years on Fox to revere their giant brains was a betrayal neocons would never forget.

After being booted out of Trump’s GOP, the Podhoretz sect raced to publicly self-flagellate, in a desperate effort to set themselves up as useful courtier-appendages to the Democratic Party, the last bastion of the non-populist establishment. True, they’d botched every actual policy initiative they’d ever tried, and defamed the last party they’d advised to the point where 60 million of its voters fled to a game show host who was trying to lose, but they were at least willing to ram their tongues all the way up the right places.

Gelatinous mediocrity Max Boot laid out the template in an amazing 2017 Foreign Policy article entitled, “2017 Was the Year I Learned About My White Privilege.” From a man whose book Out of Orderargued that judges got the desegregation ruling in Brown v. Board of Education wrong, and said Miranda just “set the guilty free,” it was rich stuff.

“He just saw how easy it would be to launder his reputation,” says writer Wesley Yang, “by writing this column about how after Charlottesville, he’s been introspecting and realizes he’s a privileged white man.”

Tens of neocon peers followed Boot in showing fealty to new masters, usually by denouncing former Republican allies in required lingo. Bill Kristol saying Trumpian sex scandals are “bringing out my inner feminist” or calling Steve King a “white supremacist” hit correct notes, as did former Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson, the man who coined the “soft bigotry of low expectations” phrase, writing a Washington Post column called, “The GOP is now just the party of white grievance.”

Democrat-friendly media reciprocated with fawning portraits of “Woke Bill Kristol” (in an inspired homage to cross-species friendship videos, MSNBC showed “Woke” Bill out on the town with Fat Joe) as well as ballwashing paeans to once-hated George W. Bush as a symbol of lost “norms.” Mother Jones went so far as to lionize “hero” Liz Cheney, forgiving her for having once called DOJ lawyers who represented Gitmo detainees the “Al Qaeda Seven,” and even for having sought “to undermine bedrock Democratic institutions like the rule of law.”

The frictionlessness of the new woke-neocon alliance was predictable. Both groups are fundamentally hostile to civil liberties and see the world as an endless conflict between pure good and all-encompassing evil: “marginalized groups” versus “whiteness” on the new left, “freedom” versus communism terrorism autocracy for neocons. The inevitable synthesis was obvious: social justice at home plus neocon interventionism abroad equals woke militarism everywhere. Interrogating whiteness, but with bombs! Putin, Canadian truckers, Tucker Carlson, Tulsi Gabbard, the “dirtbag left,” the unvaccinated, “de-escalationists” in both the red (Mike Braun) and blue (Ilhan Omar) congressional caucuses, Jill Stein, Bernie Sanders, and countless others are all now part of the same fascist-enabling matrix.

All neocons needed to regain leading roles fighting the new “Axis of Evil” was an event that would allow everyone to forget the many legacies they’d bestowed on the world, from stop-and-frisk to the Islamic State to Trump’s conquest of the GOP. Now that they have it in the form of the Ukraine war, they can’t wait to start denouncing old foes as traitors again.

“The neocons hate American populism more than they hate Putin. It’s not even close,” says Carlson, who’s become their public enemy #1. “Wars are the perfect moment to settle scores, and they plan to.”

Podhoretz’s “Vindication” column rewrites history as a catalogue of all the times neocons were right and their enemies underestimated the pure evil of, say, the Soviet Union. The only way to beat the U.S.S.R. was to “deter its ambitions,” he says. “You could not do so by entering into agreements with it.” Moreover:

If they invade Afghanistan, you arm the Afghan rebels. If they seek beachheads in the Americas, you arm the Nicaraguan rebels even as you support the El Salvadorean government against their Communist rebels.

He uses the term “Afghan rebels” so as to excise memory of the “Arab Afghans” who also received assistance and training in that war, including a Saudi adventurer named Osama bin Laden. He uses “Nicaraguan rebels” instead of “Contras” because the latter term awakens memories of murders of non-combatants, kidnapping of civilians, torture of prisoners, and other horrors. As for El Salvador, where 75,000 were killed in the civil war, better to forget that according to the U.N., “more than 85 percent of the killings, kidnappings, and torture” were “the work of government forces, which included paramilitaries, death squads, and army units trained by the United States.”

Podhoretz wants the world to believe that being “American” means using force to “defend and protect our liberties, at home and abroad.” He would have you believe that “hip liberals” like me hate America because we’re reluctant to use force to expand our “benevolent hegemony” around the world. 

He has it backwards. Precisely because I love this country, or at least the idea of it — due process, rights, democracy — I don’t think you can expand the “American way” through torture, kidnapping, civilian massacres, mass spying, algorithmic assassination, bombing hospitals and weddings (yes, we did it, too), and arming dictatorships like the U.A.E. I was in Iraq and saw what the neocon vision of spreading “benevolence” looked like: an archipelago of super-armed garrisons, where the reputation of Americans was degraded to the point where any citizen or “third-country national” who stepped Kevlar-free out of a Forward Operating Base expected to be skeletonized in seconds by furious locals. In Afghanistan, “collaborators” are still being hunted down. But sure, neoconservatism is vindicated.

The neocons’ resurgence is one of the great inside plays of all time. A microscopic group of verbose pinheads with zero popular support and an unbroken record of spectacular failure regaining influence this quickly is nothing to sneeze at. But watch: disbelief in “live and let live” politics means they won’t stop with opposing Putin in Ukraine or tweeting the odd accusation of treason. They’ll push for regime change in Moscow and sooner or later seek a more permanent solution to “ingratitude” at home, probably by tearing out the chunks of the constitution they missed the last time.

Apart from certainty that they belong at the seat of power in a unipolar world, these people have no beliefs, or none they wouldn’t be willing to shed in a heartbeat in order to maintain influence. This makes them repulsive, but hardier than mold. If you didn’t like the first movie, brace yourself. The sequel is here.

OLIGARCHS HAVE SHAPED OUR VIEW OF RUSSIA, But It’s Putin’s Corrupt Elite That Has Hobbled Him In Ukraine War

by Patrick Cockburn

Painted Russian wooden dolls of decreasing size one inside the other used to be a symbol of Russia as a mysterious and menacing place. This was the unmistakable message carried by the dolls in the opening credits of the original television version of John Le Carre’s Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy.

But this symbol of Russia is now being replaced by a picture in which an oligarch’s giant yacht rides at anchor off some Mediterranean resort. This provides an easily recognisable visual sign of the vast wealth obtained by the oligarchs, often corruptly acquired through looting the Soviet state of its most valuable assets after its collapse in 1991.

Putting their great fortunes so blatantly on display in the shape of yachts, mansions and football teams reflects a need on the part of the Russian super-rich to highlight their elite status, while obscuring the semi-criminal means by which they acquired their wealth.

It is extraordinary that they should have got away with mass theft for so long. After all, the allegations about how people like Roman Abramovich acquired their billions are nothing new – as is now being shown by a well-sourced documentary on the BBC’s Panorama programme. Abramovich’s lawyers deny he amassed very substantial wealth through corruption or criminality.

Litigation by oligarchs was one way of keeping such allegations out of the public eye, but a deeper motive was a desire in the West not to admit that Soviet communism had been replaced by a sort of bandit capitalism that resembled the anti-capitalist caricatures published in the early days after the Russian revolution.

Since the invasion of Ukraine began on 24 February, questions are now being asked about Russian oligarchs that should have been asked 30 years ago.

Nestor Makhno, the rural anarchist whose movement established its rule over a large part of Ukraine during the Russian Revolution, has hardly been a name to conjure with in recent decades. But this Monday a group of activists called the London Makhnovists stormed the £50m London mansion said to be owned by Oleg Deripaska, the aluminium magnate. He denies owning it and says it belongs to members of his family.

It is comic to watch those in London and other Western capitals who until a few weeks ago were profiting hugely from meeting every whim of some Russian oligarch but are now running for cover, expressing shock as they go at actions of the evil regime in Moscow.

Deeply satisfying it may be to see yachts, palaces and other assets belonging to the Russian super-rich being seized in Europe and the US. But this will not necessarily do serious or terminal damage to Vladimir Putin’s regime because, just as the power of the oligarchs used to be underestimated, it is now often exaggerated. Ever since Putin took power more than 20 years ago, it is the siloviki – the “people of force” or “strongmen” – drawn like Putin from the old KGB – who have controlled the Russian state.

Like the oligarchs, the siloviki have stolen a great deal of money and have their palatial villas in the Mediterranean and elsewhere. A French activist this week broke into the €4.5m villa in Biarritz, with marble bathrooms and eight bedrooms, belonging to Putin’s daughter Katerina Tikhonova. As with other takeovers of properties owned by the Russian super-rich, videos of the luxurious furnishings and paintings are likely to do them a lot of damage.

The corruption of the Russian state has received wall-to-wall coverage in the Western media over the last few weeks to the point that it would appear that criminalised elites are a distinctly Russian phenomenon. In reality, the state as a looting machine has put down deep roots across the world, particularly in resource-rich countries where the politically well-connected can secure control of oil, gas, metals and other natural resources.

The mechanics of this are well-covered by Tom Burgis in his book The Looting Machine: Warlords, Tycoons, Smugglers and the Systematic Theft of Africa’s Wealth. Much the same is true of the oil states of the Middle East, which are all looting machines on behalf of a parasitic elite to a greater or lesser extent. The only difference between countries is how far a ruling class syphons off all the money or distributes part of it in jobs and services. I well remember once being caught in a grey-brown flood of sewage and rain water in Baghdad because there was no drainage system, though the municipality had supposedly spent $7 billion installing a new one.

This is further reason why the Russian oligarchs got away with their mass thefts for so long – they were part of a phenomenon that had become an accepted part of the international landscape. Too many well-connected snouts were stuck in too many troughs for anything to be done about it.

In these looting-machine-type states, there is deep popular anger against the predatory elites, which in times of peace can be suppressed. But the governments of such places suffer from hubris and ignorance that may hide from them one imperative: that they should never go to war, and this is for two reasons.

The first reason is that corruption will not have stopped at the steps of their defence ministry, and in a real war their generals will find that many expensive weapons do not work, have not been maintained, or do not exist. A survey by Russian newspaper Novaya Gazeta some years ago showed that, against stiff competition, the defence ministry was the most corrupt department of the Russian government. This may be one reason why the Russian army has so far performed so poorly in Ukraine.

The second reason why the leaders of a state as corrupt as Russia should hesitate before going to war is that their soldiers may be averse to getting themselves killed on behalf of a ruling elite with mansions in Belgravia and yachts in the Cote d’Azur.

Patrick Cockburn is the author of War in the Age of Trump (Verso). Courtesy, CounterPunch,org)

UKRAINE ON FILM

Curious about what’s behind Russia's invasion of Ukraine? Below are 6 documentaries about Ukraine’s struggles for democracy during the past 20 years, listed in order of when they were made, oldest first. Invaluable background info for today’s events there.

Ukraine: From Democracy to Chaos (2013) Amazon Prime Video

In 2004, the Orange Revolution saw off Victor Yanukovych's fraudulent bid for power. Ex-businesswoman Yulia Tymoshenko emerged as the muse of the revolution, determined to exorcise the spectre of Russia from Ukrainian politics once and for all. But a decade on, oligarchs are still doing deals with Putin behind the population's back. Will Ukraine ever be free of the Kremlin's vice-like hold?

Winter on Fire: Ukraine's Fight for Freedom (2015) Netflix

A documentary on the unrest in Ukraine during 2013 and 2014, as student demonstrations supporting European integration grew into a violent revolution calling for the resignation of President Viktor F. Yanukovich.

Ukraine: Path to Freedom

<https://www.amazon.com/Ukraine-Path-Freedom-Bill-Arthrell/dp/B073X5GWMH/ref=sr_1_6?crid=2XIX6ZOB8YQ0X&keywords=revealing+ukraine&qid=1647532969&s=instant-video&sprefix=reviling%2Cinstant-video%2C141&sr=1-6>

(2016) Prime Video

Documentary about the events on the Maidan during the Revolution of dignity and subsequent events in Ukraine, during 2013-1015, through the eyes of foreigners. The main character - an American history teacher from Cleveland, who arrived in Ukraine to observe how modern history is created

Ukraine on Fire (2017) Prime Video

Oliver Stone executive-produced this alternative perspective on Ukraine's history. Features interviews with Russian President Vladimir Putin, former Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych, and former Minister Internal Affairs Vitaliy Zakharchenko following the 2014 demonstrations revealing secret efforts by Western clandestine agencies working with rightist forces, that led to regime change.

Breaking Point: The War for Democracy in Ukraine (2018) Prime Video

In 2004, the Orange Revolution saw off Victor Yanukovych's fraudulent bid for power. Ex-businesswoman Yulia Tymoshenko emerged as the muse of the revolution, determined to exorcise the spectre of Russia from Ukrainian politics once and for all. But a decade on, oligarchs are still doing deals with Putin behind the population's back. Will Ukraine ever be free of the Kremlin's vice-like hold?

Revealing Ukraine (2019) Prime Video

"Revealing Ukraine" by Igor Lopatonok continues investigations on of the ongoing Ukrainian crisis following "Ukraine on Fire”.

— Tom Wodetski, Albion

UKRAINE AND THE MEDIA

Make no mistake, the war in the Ukraine is first and foremost a US-Russia proxy war over resources and hegemony that, cynically, the US is willing to fight to the last Ukrainian. “The US has led the Ukraine down the primrose path”, says international relations scholar John Mearsheimer. They have encouraged Ukraine’s leaders to “poke the Russian bear in the eye”, insist on their right to join NATO and ignore Russia’s warnings that they would never allow this to happen. Don’t worry, the US has told them, we have your backs, knowing full well that no American troops would ever come to their rescue. The media are complicit in this macabre charade as they cheerlead Ukrainian citizens fighting with Molotov cocktails against one of the biggest and most highly trained military forces in the world. Standing on the sidelines as these untrained fighters risk being blown to pieces, the US and its NATO allies are pouring billions of dollars of weapons into the Ukraine to prolong an unwinnable war.

None of my criticisms of western media are meant to justify Russia’s monstrous and devastating invasion of the Ukraine. But you’ve got to ask: Could this war have been avoided if our leaders were less intransigent and the public was more informed about its complex causes and America’s role in precipitating the crisis? If there was a better understanding of Russia’s security concerns? If the media had conveyed the warnings of insiders sounding the alarm? If reporters had been less credulous about US State Department talking points and media group think? …

counterpunch.org/2022/03/16/ukraine-and-the-media/

RUSSIA WANTS FORT ROSS BACK

A Reader Writes: They also want Alaska! If Palin was still governor, it might happen. :)
pressdemocrat.com/article/news/russian-lawmakers-demand-for-return-of-fort-ross-raises-old-questions-abou/

Good pictures here-
nypost.com/2022/03/15/putins-spin-doc-wants-reparation-from-u-s-and-alaska-back/

KATHY WYLIE

To the Editor: 

In the four terms I served on the Mendocino County Grand Jury, during the course of an investigation evidence of several crimes was discovered.

When this happens, the protocol is to inform the presiding judge, who then should refer the matter to the district attorney.

In every case, except one, the presiding judge, the Honorable Jeanine Nadel, refused to refer the case to the district attorney.

The one exception was Kendall Smith.

For years, former District 5 Supervisor Kendall Smith defrauded the county of many thousands of dollars. Kendall Smith was claiming personal expenses as county business expenses. And she was spending her overnights at a girlfriend’s house but claiming she was in a hotel.

Finely Williams was the foreman at that time. Mr. Williams is excellent.

The problem is this: Kathy Wylie is the other perennial grand jury foreman along with Mr. Williams. They seem to alternate. However, Ms. Wylie has been, and always will be, in the CEO’s pocket. She is a player wannabe. She sucks up to the county's executive office.

She is pathetic.

Here’s an example of how pathetic Ms. Wylie really is. During the 2019-2020 election cycle, Ms. Wylie created Facebook pages for each of the five Board of Supervisor districts. They looked like official pages with the county seal or photos of the respective members of Board, but they were not official pages.

And as the administrator of these pages, Ms. Wylie censored content or blocked people.

Many Facebook readers objected, and objected strongly, calling Ms. Wylie a control freak or worse. Many suggested Ms. Wylie was drunk with power, having been grand jury foreman for so many times.

A few even suggested that Ms. Wylie was mentally ill.

I copied the Anderson Valley Advertiser on some of these online comments at Facebook. And I copied KC Meadows at the Ukiah Daily Journal. I also complained to the Honorable Jeanine Nadel. Ms. Wylie is unfit to serve as a grand juror, much less as foreman.

So far, no word back from Judge Nadel, and that should come as no surprise since Ms. Nadel owes her judgeship to retiring County CEO Carmel Angel, who, in turn, has been protected for years by Kathy Wylie.

Ms. Wylie has since taken her Facebook pages down. Alternative pages were created by honest, well-meaning citizens. These are true “community” pages. No one is censored. No one is blocked. These pages celebrate free speech.

The Mendocino County Grand Jury will never get on track to be a truly effective body -- a grand jury investigating mismanagement, waste, fraud, and corruption in county, city, and district government -- until Kathy Wylie goes.

It's that simple.

John Sakowicz 

Ukiah

ST. PAT'S DAY WITH CRAIG

I Need To Exit The Postmodern American Twilight Zone! Thank You.

Received a ride this morning from the Ukiah Building Bridges staff to a weekly free therapy session. Was able to fully explain my situation, particularly how it is with me spiritually, which the therapist understood. This is greatly appreciated, which lessens the feeling of being some sort of cultural alien in postmodern America. Again, I am not the body nor the mind. I am the Immortal Self, or Eternal Witness only! Indeed, how else would it be possible to watch thoughts? Left the session and went to Plowshares for the free lunch, served today by green attired Catholics celebrating St. Patrick’s Day. Corned beef and cabbage and boiled potatoes topped the menu. Left and walked north to Safeway to stock up on yogurt and fruit for the evening. Took a nap, and awoke to make a cup of Tulsi tea. Tomorrow, will call back the Hillside Clinic to get an appointment to have my teeth cleaned. Regardless, under all conditions I am knowledge, bliss, absolute. If anybody who is also spiritually identified would like to contact me, and maybe actually do something of importance on earth while we are all still here, go ahead! No joke, if you are spiritually the wiser, so act Enlightened. Thank you.

Craig Louis Stehr

THE NYT NOW ADMITS THE BIDEN LAPTOP -- FALSELY CALLED "RUSSIAN DISINFORMATION" -- IS AUTHENTIC

The media outlets which spread this lie from ex-CIA officials never retracted their pre-election falsehoods, ones used by Big Tech to censor reporting on the front-runner.

by Glenn Greenwald

One of the most successful disinformation campaigns in modern American electoral history occurred in the weeks prior to the 2020 presidential election. On October 14, 2020 — less than three weeks before Americans were set to vote — the nation's oldest newspaper, The New York Post, began publishing a series of reports about the business dealings of the Democratic frontrunner Joe Biden and his son, Hunter, in countries in which Biden, as Vice President, wielded considerable influence (including Ukraine and China) and would again if elected president.

The backlash against this reporting was immediate and intense, leading to suppression of the story by U.S. corporate media outlets and censorship of the story by leading Silicon Valley monopolies. The disinformation campaign against this reporting was led by the CIA's all-but-official spokesperson Natasha Bertrand (then of Politico, now with CNN), whose article on October 19 appeared under this headline: “Hunter Biden story is Russian disinfo, dozens of former intel officials say.”…

greenwald.substack.com/p/the-nyt-now-admits-the-biden-laptop