Mendocino County Today: Tuesday, May 31, 2022

Warming | AVHS Prom | Regulate Rentals | Bailey Praise | Photography Class | Remember 2010 | Book Sale | Hemingway House | Tiny Noyo | Fereira Clan | Food Costs | GP Computer | Ed Notes | Yesterday's Catch | Ukraine | Windfall Tax | Class Warfare | Fairy Tales | Debs Essay | Threat Response | Mass Shootings | School Shootings | Memorial Mayhem | Downtown Melburne | Poco Animales | Gun Deaths | Hegemon Menace | Mikhail Bakunin | Sako History | Jetty Dynamite | Violent Place | Mendo Cafe | Gun Abortion | Davos Reset | Twisted Limbs | Ukiah Life | Totalitarian Hypnosis

A WARMING TREND will continue through Wednesday for the interior as high pressure shifts toward the West Coast. Widespread rain is looking more likely this weekend as a large trough approaches. (NWS)

LIFE GOES ON. Superintendent Simson: “The kids were so thrilled with the prom last weekend. It was a beautifully hometown celebration. Coming from larger places where they rent hotels, having a simple dance in the gym was lovely. My son went to a small school where they set up the prom in the rotunda and the teachers cooked and served the dinner, and I thought I’d never see anything like that again. But then I got to Anderson Valley, and here we go. It was really sweet. (And the kids were relatively well behaved last week because nobody wanted to miss the privilege!)”

PETITION TO REGULATE SHORT-TERM RENTALS

To: Mendocino County Board of Supervisors

The undersigned residents of Mendocino County ask the Board of Supervisors to immediately create a Short-Term Rental (STR) Ordinance that preserves long-term housing by licensing and limiting STRs.

The ordinance should not limit the number of Primary-Residence STR licenses because renting out rooms, or one’s home for finite periods, does not affect housing availability.

The ordinance should restrict the number of licenses for STRs owned by individuals that do not reside full-time on the property. These STRs should not be licensed when they are more than 2% of area housing; when below the 2% threshold, more may be licensed.

Existing STRs in good standing may remain operational but must become licensed. All licenses should be non-transferrable and expire upon sale or transfer of the property to gradually return houses to long-term housing and improve availability over time.

We urge the Board of Supervisors to approve a Short-Term Rental Ordinance before the end of 2022.

Find And Sign The Petition at https://form.jotform.com/220743047595055

HAT'S OFF TO ONE OF THE GOOD GUYS: 

In my long career as a journalist, I watched cops up close. I knew police chiefs, county sheriffs, and the officers on patrol. I was always awed by how they suited up and went to work, sometimes at grisly crime scenes in the middle of the night. Typically, they are honorable, hard-working public servants, dedicated to their profession and the communities where they live and work. Yes, there always are a few bad examples as in any profession or workplace. But there are more examples of those who stand out, and Kevin Bailey, the retiring chief investigator for the Mendocino County District Attorney’s Office, is among them. Our paths crossed in 2010 when I went to work in the DA’s office as the public information officer after a 40-year career in the newspaper business. Kevin and I at first eyed each other warily. I was suspicious of his ‘straight as an arrow’ reputation. Kevin certainly looked askance at some of my private political pronouncements. Over time, however, we became trusted colleagues and personal friends. I grew to admire Kevin’s dedication to his profession, his personal honesty, his care and compassion for his co-workers, and the integrity of the office. Outside work, it was clear Kevin’s wife Jamie Spackman Bailey, and son Tyler are the center of his world. I wish the three of them the best in Kevin’s well-deserved retirement. 

Congratulations to Andy Alvarado who is succeeding Kevin as the DA's Chief Investigator.

— Mike Geniella

A COAST READER, commenting on Kevin Bailey’s 2010 denunciation of hypocrticial supervisors Kendall Smith and David Colfax who voted to impose cuts on employees while refusing to take a cut themselves, prompted the following response: “From what I'm reading here, the pay cuts didn't happen. I don't remember even hearing about a proposed pay cut in 2010. Glad it didn't happen.”

We replied: Oh, it happened. There were pay cuts, layoffs, voluntary and later mandatory time off, service and hour reductions (de facto pay cuts), and more. Colfax and Smith were truly awful, steadfastly refusing to take the cuts they imposted on their employees. And they were pompous and ridiculous in the process. For a snapshot you can get a taste of what was being done by reviewing my coverage of the June 2010 board meeting. (Sometimes I wonder if our archive is the only decent source of county/supervisors history. You certainly can't research these things anywhere else I know of. Self serving remarks from those involved at the time are famously off and unreliable.) There's more if you want to poke around in our archive around that time period of 2010. It was a difficult and tense time, made much worse by Smith and Colfax. Investigator Bailey deserves everyone's thanks for his bold and bracing rebuke of the Board and Colfax and Smith in particular. Thanks for this opportunity to help clarify the record.

"But Plenty of Blah-Blah: Budget Sclerosis" (June 17, 2010)

NORM CLOW AT HEMINGWAY'S HOUSE

I was in my element at the Hemingway House in Key West, where the great writer lived several years in the 1930s penning some of the best Nobel and Pulitzer-worthy works known to mankind, changing American literature for all time. We spent a good hour + there, taking in everything from displays of his life and career to his legacy of 57 6-toed cats and their own cemetery for their predecessors. The photos taken through an iron grill-work are from his second-story writing workshop in a detached building. He wrote daily from six in the morning until noon, putting down as many as 6,000 words a day. It is no longer open to the public. The lighthouse shown in one photo is across the street to the west. The grounds are beautiful. I even found one of his plays in the bookstore that I hadn’t yet read, “The Fifth Column”, set in the Spanish Civil War during the time Hemingway worked as a correspondent for the North American Newspaper Alliance out of Madrid.

We intended to visit the Customs House Historical Museum, complete with more Hemingway displays, back at the port before boarding, but got caught in a rain storm and sat it out at the Ram’s Head Restaurant, and then dawdled too long on the walk back and ran out of time. Eh, next time…

STEPHEN DUNLAP explains his tiny home project near Fort Bragg:

My six homes live in a designated RV Park (Sportsmans RV Park) in Noyo harbor that is only permitted for short term stays. My buddy TJ owns the park nextdoor to mine called Snug Harbor that can do either short or long term, but he chooses to do long term only featuring new tiny homes. I have shown Fort Bragg City officials around both parks to help them understand the process of tiny homes. I have also asked TJ if he wants to do more long term stay places in the area. He would likely do them if the right situation arose. … I am very happy to give ANYONE a tour of my park and the park next door, and help however I can in any manner. Norm has suggested more of an apartment complex on those five acres which is also a good idea.

FROM THE PRESS DEMOCRAT…

The cost of purchasing food for its clients is up by 11% on average for Redwood Empire Food Bank, which is the major supplier of food to seven local pantries in Sonoma County and the largest hunger relief organization in the area.

In March 2020, Redwood Food Empire estimates they served about 23,000 people. In the span of two years the need has almost doubled, reaching an estimated 33,800 clients in March 2022.

Items such as eggs and fresh produce are now harder to get a hold of and more expensive said Jennifer Emery, director of Friends In Service Here, or F.I.S.H., a Santa Rosa-based nonprofit food pantry run by volunteers.

“It’s terrible,” Emery said. “We have to supplement with canned vegetables, and it’s like, who wants that?”

She said in recent months, Redwood Empire Food Bank, which supplies food to the F.I.S.H. pantry, didn’t have enough volunteers to transport a batch of potatoes before they rotted.

“It’s hit and miss with them,” Emery said. “I mean how can you be out of potatoes? It’s like a staple for everybody, and not just for us but for all the other food banks out there.”

In response to an inquiry from Emery about the potatoes, a Redwood Empire Food Bank spokesperson said that produce has been a real challenge. The California Association of Food Banks is struggling to source produce at the levels needed along with insanely high transportation costs.

“It starts all the way with not having enough volunteers, to not having enough of the administrative staff, to not having the drivers, to the farmers, all the way down,” Emery said.

“What we need is volunteers, that’s first and foremost,” Emery said. “It doesn’t matter how much food we have, if we don’t have enough people to distribute them then it doesn’t matter.“

Alison A. Smith, Director of Operations and Supply Chain for Redwood Empire Food Bank, said it has been a challenge in recent months to get necessary items from big box stores due to supply chain issues caused by the pandemic, though she would not specify which stores for “confidentiality reasons.”

Smith said that donations from big box stores have always ebbed and flowed based on their business model, but recently reductions in donations has become more commonplace.

“We appreciate every bit of donation we get from our all of our grocery stores and local manufacturers,” Smith said “We have seen a reduction in donations from some of them.”

“Even items you wouldn’t think of when it comes to food pantry needs are in short supply,” Smith said.

For example, a store that usually donates cornflakes was out of cardboard boxes to put them in because of supply chain issues, and so the food bank was forced to pass on them, Smith said.

The price of food has also gone way up, Emery said. A case of 15 dozen eggs used to be around $20, now it’s over $40.

There’s no way we can justify spending thousands of dollars on eggs when we rely on donations,“ Emery said.

On a recent Friday, Angela Demarcos, 48, of Santa Ana and her friend, Anthony, were sitting in his car waiting in line for the F.I.S.H. pantry to open.

Because of rising gas prices, Demarcos, who is on disability, has partnered with her friend to run errands together for their two families, sharing one vehicle for the day.

“We don’t go out unless we need to, so we as friends have come together to just use one car," Demarcos said. ”It keeps food on the table.“

She’s noticed that the food banks have less meat than before, but she’s thankful for their help.

“It’s a struggle,” she said. “I’m extremely grateful. The food they give to us has been nothing short of a blessing."

Lestia Garcia, 27, was in line with her son. Because of rising gas and food prices, she finds herself using the food pantry more often to feed her family while her husband continues his job as a field worker. to support her family while her husband works in the agricultural fields.

Garcia said they used to get two dozen eggs, but they’ve been receiving half-cartons lately, and definitely less meat.

ED NOTES

TODAY'S SIGN THE APOCALYPSE NEARS: Three HUMCO third-graders are hospitalized after eating cannabis candy handed out by classmate during recess. The student who brought the gummies to Jacoby Creek Elementary School on Thursday claimed that he did not know that the candy was marijuana-infused.

JOHN FORD is Fort Bragg's new city manager. The guy has got to be relieved to be escaping Humboldt County where he was denounced regularly on that area's chat lines for administering HumCo's collapsed marijuana industry. Ryan Burns of the essential Lost Coast Outpost, comments: “Well, now we know where Ford is headed. Looks like the City of Fort Bragg is getting back at Humboldt for taking its former city manager, Tabatha Miller, who was hired last year as Humboldt County’s assistant county administrative officer and chief financial officer....” 

I WAS PLEASED to spot this recent headline in the Press Democrat: “Sonoma County Has A New AVA.” The more the better, I say.

INTERESTING, and maybe ironic, that Bernie Sanders was the second choice for president for lots of Trumpers. At the core of Sanders' campaign is the notion that everyone should have access to universal healthcare. His plan is designed to cost more than $6 trillion less than the current system over the next 10 years.

SANDERS' plan would create a federally administered, single-payer healthcare program. His proposal would run the gamut from preventative to emergency care. The idea is that patients will have the option to choose providers without having to worry about whether they're in-network, or how much it will cost to use their services. In fact, under Sanders' plan, co-pays and deductibles will be eliminated.

HOW TO PAY FOR IT?

• 37% on income between $250,000 and $500,000
• 43% on income between $500,000 and $2 million
• 48% on income between $2 million and $10 million
• 52% on income above $10 million

ONLY A TRUE ATHEIST could foul Lake Tahoe, but over the past year, recreational scuba divers have removed more than 25,000 pounds of trash from the famous shoreline. Nearly 200 dives later, they have picked up just about every piece of trash imaginable, from plastic bags and glass bottles to spent firework tubes and boomboxes.

CATCH OF THE DAY, May 30, 2022

MELISSA BECK, Ukiah. Arson causing bodily injury, arson during state of emergency.

TONY MCELROY, Ukiah. Assault with deadly weapon not a gun, vandalism. (Frequent flyer.)

BRENIS PENABAQUIS, Houston, Texas/Ukiah. DUI.

YVETTE ROCKEY, Willits. Domestic battery, false imprisonment.

JERRY RUSH, Rogue River, Oregon/Willits. Controlled substance, concealed weapon in vehicle, suspended license.

ALICIA SEALUND, Santa Rosa/Ukiah. DUI.

UKRAINE, MONDAY, MAY 30

Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan has held talks with Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelenskyy and Russia’s Vladimir Putin, offering to facilitate the reopening of Ukrainian ports.

The Kremlin says Putin told Erdogan that Russia is ready to facilitate the unhindered export of grain from Ukrainian ports in coordination with Turkey.

France announces the opening of a war crimes probe into the killing of journalist Frederic Leclerc-Imhoff, French media outlets have reported.

Charles Michel, president of the European Council, announces an agreement among EU countries to ban most Russian oil imports.

CLASS WARFARE, two on-line comments:

(1) “Let them eat cake”. Marie Antoinette never actually said that, but by that point it no longer mattered. We all know what happened to her. By then the people had suffered enough, and “there is always a way, when the rich are too rich and the poor are too poor”. The excesses of the French Revolution become clearer to me day by day, just hope I’m around long enough to see the return of the guillotine. I’ve got my knitting handy. I never used to feel this enraged or bloodthirsty. I’ve changed. I’m seeing too much suffering, and it’s only just beginning. A bas les aristos!

(2) Imagine if political parties were divided by rich and poor, instead of these fake moral issues like guns abortion and immigration…when the richest are too greedy, you get Bolshevism. When they realize they can live quite well on less you get European style Socialism, where there is less income disparity, and a healthy middle class.

EUGENE V. DEBS, Socialist Internationalism vs. Capitalist nationalism.

This Memorial Day, we should rededicate ourselves to fighting the horrors of war. So here’s a 1916 Eugene Debs piece, never before republished, about why internationalism is at the heart of socialist politics.

jacobinmag.com/2022/05/eugene-v-debs-socialist-internationalism-capitalist-nationalism

THE FLORIDA SHERIFF who arrested an elementary school student for allegedly threatening a mass shooting defended publicly exposing the minor by saying “a child pulling a trigger equals the same aftermath.” Daniel Issac Marquez, 10, was charged with making a written threat to conduct a mass shooting after sending a text about Patriot Elementary School in Cape Coral. The boy's alleged text read: “I scammed my friend” and included a Google image of money, according to his arrest report. “I bought this,” he added a few seconds later, and included an image of four assault rifles. Marquez then stated: “Get ready for water day.” Lee County Sheriff Carmine Marceno, addressing the arrest during a radio interview Monday, argued that anyone who threatens Florida's children, teachers or schools would be punished. “Every single threat is real. Every threat is real until you prove not,” Marceno said. 

— Daily Mail

MASS SHOOTINGS might often prompt cries of “never again,” but unfortunately that ship has already sailed. The Washington Post reports that this Memorial Day weekend alone has seen at least 11 mass shootings, defined by the Gun Violence Archive as incidents in which four or more people are shot or killed, not including the shooter. At least seven people were killed and 49 injured this weekend. In one incident, a 16-year-old girl and a 21-year-old woman were killed at a Philadelphia party. Guns are now the leading cause of death among young people in the U.S., and the number continues to steadily climb, NPR reports. Since the massacre at Uvalde, Texas’s Robb Elementary School that killed 19 children and two teachers last Tuesday, the U.S. has seen at least 14 mass shootings, which have killed at least 10 people and wounded 61 others.

ON LINE COMMENT OF THE DAY

Four days into the long Memorial Day weekend and only one additional major shooting, a mere dustup in Oklahoma City OK, led by one apparently disgruntled shooter, killing one and injuring 7. Not to be outdone, out of the way Lincoln NE got in on some vehicular action, with a traffic accident spilling into a crowd of downtown spectators. Two dead, both in one of the vehicles, and 19 injured. Good efforts, but not nearly enough to gain entry into the mass shooting/killing playoffs, tentatively scheduled for late August. Come on now America, we can and must do better than this!

THE HUNDRED DOLLAR CAR

by Paul Modic

How often does it happen that you write what you want on a piece of paper, tack it up on a notice board outside a grocery store, and get a telephone call a day or two later offering exactly what you're looking for? It was 1977, I was back in Indiana to visit my family, and looking for a Plymouth Valiant or Dodge Dart station wagon, the Whale Gulch special.

After a short drive into the country the old man opened his barn door and there she was, a pale blue '63 three-speed with rust around the edges.

“A hundred bucks,” he said. I took it for a test drive on the barely-trafficked snowy country roads and it drove great. It was such a deal I probably should have bought it just on principle but the day before someone else had answered my ad and I was already in proud possession of a dark blue '65 Dodge Dart station wagon, hallowed slant six engine included. But I still had to go out there and look at that hundred dollar car.

I drove out to an auction on a cold wintry day where a house and farm on ten acres bordering a river down the hill went for twenty grand and I successfully bid twenty five dollars for a very nice Singer treadle sewing machine which I planned to resell in California for a hundred. I took it apart and put the two pieces in the back of the Dart for the trip down to Mexico.

Heading south out of town I stopped at The Farm in Tennessee, following founder and leader Stephen Gaskin's big touring bus the last few miles in, where I met a sort of obnoxious woman with a sly grin, around my age of twenty-two, and I was lonely and my standards weren't very high. (I caught up with her later in California, moved her and her little boy into my small ocean-view squatters cabin, and am surprised we even made two months or maybe it was three weeks. She ended up getting together with a neighbor down the hill and having a kid. Jeez, where are all those people today?)

I left The Farm in tears, bawling in my Dodge Dart parked just past the gate and can't remember why I was so upset. I could be an out-of-control and frenzied youth in those days, the transition to alleged adulthood was shaky, and it was probably because there were people and structure at The Farm while I was returning to my cabin in the middle of nowhere in the hills of Mendocino.

Then it was on to Mexico to which I had already hitchhiked two or three times since that first trip down with my grandfather back in '71 when I was seventeen. 

After staying at my friend's place in Matehuala for a few days the urge to find some peyote hit and we drove deep into the desert on washed out and rutted dirt roads guided by an Italian guy using a white house in the distance off to the left as a focus to find that good patch of buttons. I lost a piece of trim from the side of the Dart I noticed when we finally stopped. (Italian guys are still guiding peyote tourists from Real de Catorce down to the desert.)

At the end of the road we hiked even deeper into the endless cactus glancing constantly beneath little shrubs on each side as the peyote liked to grow in shade. When we found it growing abundantly we cut off the little green buttons on top and all got a good supply. Back in town I sliced up some oranges and ate about fourteen buttons walking around the doctor's large field behind Humberto's house which is now filled with hundreds of little low cost houses and streets with names of European countries like Belgia.

My stomach felt queasy and I barfed up the load, returned to the towering music of Mozart on the patio, smoked a joint, and achieved the clarity of mind to realize I had lice, scabies, and probably crabs and needed to do something about it. 

I found Humberto and said, “I'm infested!” 

He wrote me out a sarcastic little note (I probably still have it somewhere) to take to the farmacia which referred to “poco animales.” When I returned I remembered a woman back in Whitethorn called Kerosene Kathy who had lice a lot and I went looking for a bottle of petrolio which I was soon covered with and once again my experience with psychedelics was a freakout. 

It was New Years Eve and I had planned to go out with Jimi Hendrix's tall fancy sisters but I was so messed up and distraught, one errant match away from immolation, that I didn't get the girl once again though lived to tell the tale forty-five years later.

I wonder what happened to that hundred dollar car?

THE SOURCE OF CONFLICT in the world is not found in Russia, China, and Iran. The source of conflict is, as I have reported for years, the neoconservative ideology of Washington’s hegemony over the world. The doctrine, as penned by the neoconservatives themselves, states: “Our first objective is to prevent the re-emergence of a new rival, either on the territory of the former Soviet Union or elsewhere, that poses a threat on the order of that posed formerly by the Soviet Union. This is a dominant consideration underlying the new regional defense strategy and requires that we endeavor to prevent any hostile power from dominating a region whose resources would, under consolidated control, be sufficient to generate global power.” Putin told the neoconservatives in 2007 at the Munich Security Conference that he accepted no such limits on Russian sovereignty. China and Iran have also rejected Washington’s hegemony. It is the neoconservatives’ unwillingness to accept a multi-polar world that is the cause of conflict. If the neoconservatives are not dethroned, they will bring about nuclear Armageddon. 

— Paul Craig Roberts 

‘BASHING’?

To the Editor:

This is what I mean by deflecting, blaming, and shaming, Bruce. You attack me when you should be looking at real corruption and real mismanagement in the county.

You especially have a blind spot for the good ole boys in command positions in local law enforcement. Rather than take on the real issues at the SO, like you have done with the County CEO's Office (laudable), you recycle the same old rumors about me. Deflecting is symptomatic a sociopathic tendency. I learned a lot at Dr. Rosoff's side. 

My recommendation? Start with yourself. Look in the mirror. Owning a newspaper does not free you from living a self-examined life.

For the last time, I left the SO to work for the Swiss bank, UBS. I had worked on Wall Street for years before moving to Mendocino County, so returning to the financial services industry was the natural thing for me to do. I worked too much overtime at the SO, under conditions in the Ad-Seg Unit (Bldg 2, Wing 4) that were too stressful (Dr. Rosoff left too), and for too little pay. 

The grand jury? I served three years and left during the fourth. The grand jury was weak with perennial foreman, Kathy Wylie, who protected the county, especially her friend, Carmel Angelo. 

I cohabit with two women? Yes, Shannon, with whom I have been with since 1996 and raised two sons, and Mary, our tenant, who is the cohost of my radio show.

About Laurie Booras? I wrote to you on May 27. I'll reprint it here. Booras was a racist. She insulted Latinos, including her colleagues on the Appellate Court. She insulted Native Americans. And she was in the pocket of oil and gas interests. She laughed at climate science. She prejudged a case bought by Latino and Native American kids on behalf of all the country's youth, even unborn generations. 

She was a monster.

Doing my part in removing this monster from the bench was perhaps the hardest thing I've ever done in my life. I represented myself, pro se, every step of the way until the Colorado Supreme Court unanimously removed Booras from the bench and publicly censored her.

I didn't ruin Booras. She self-destructed.

I wrote you the following on May 27, 2022: 

Something else, Bruce.

When the Colorado Supreme Court unanimously removed disgraced Appellate Court Judge Laurie Booras from the bench, and unanimously censured her, the safe climate movement achieved a huge victory. Why? Because Booras had recklessly and irresponsibly ruled on a widely followed anti-fracking case that was setting precedent.

Booras was not only a racist, but she was also an anti-environmentalist.

I’ll explain.

In 2017, Booras had ruled in favor of the Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission and the Colorado Department of Natural Resources, and ruled against Native American and Latino youth, in a landmark constitutional climate change lawsuit.

On March 23, a three-judge appellate panel issued a split decision in Martinez v. Colo. Oil and Gas Conservation Commission, 2017 COA 37, with two of the three Judges rejecting the COGCC’s assertion that its role under the Oil and Gas Conservation Act (Colo. Rev. Stat. §§ 34-60-101 to -130) (the “Act”), is to balance oil and gas development, and economic development, against the public interests of public health, safety, and welfare.

Judge Booras dissented, finding that the quoted language from the Act signifies the need for a balancing process, as the COGCC had argued, not the elevation of one interest over all others. She also noted that this language is located in the legislative declaration to the Act, which is generally only used to interpret an ambiguous statute and cannot “override the language of a statute.”

Instead, Booras pointed to the COGCC’s “actual” statutory authority, located in Colo. Rev. Stat. § 34-60-106(2)(d), which provides that “[t]he commission has the authority to regulate . . . [o]il and gas operations so as to prevent and mitigate significant adverse environmental impacts on any air, water, soil, or biological resource resulting from oil and gas operations to the extent necessary to protect public health, safety, and welfare, including protection of the environment and wildlife resources, taking into consideration cost-effectiveness and technical feasibility.”

This language, Booras concluded, further supported the COGCC’s interpretation of the Act as on the whole requiring a balancing of numerous competing interests.

Unfortunately, Booras had her mind made up about the case, even before hearing arguments. She admitted as much in emails to me. The emails were the smoking gun.

The rest is history. Booras was fired and censured, the appellate court decision was tainted, and the case is now in federal court. It is the most important climate lawsuit in history.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juliana_v._United_States

Juliana v. the United States, was filed in 2015 by 21 youth plaintiffs from around the U.S. The case against the federal government targets national fossil fuel programs, claiming that ignoring the harmful impact of fossil fuels on climate change is a violation of the constitutional rights of children and future generations of children, and a failure to protect public trust resources.

Among the plaintiffs are Kelsey Juliana of Chernaik v. Brown (22) and Xiuhtezcatl Martinez (18), the youth director of Earth Guardians. Both Brown and Martineze were also plaintiffs in Colorado.

Removing Booras from the bench did more for the safe climate movement than a thousand Mendocino County Climate Action Committees.

I’m happy I played a part in removing Booras. It wasn’t easy. Arguing my complaint, pro se, before a panel of special masters appointed by the Colorado Commission on Judicial Discipline, then consideration by the seven justices of the Colorado Supreme Court, is one of the most difficult things I have done in my life.

But the kids who are the plaintiffs inspired me. Read about them here at Our Childrens Trust: https://www.ourchildrenstrust.org/

John Sakowicz 

Ukiah

---

ED REPLY: I promise this is my last response to Sako. The guy's whoppers get longer and longer. Please cite a single line that could be construed even by an hysteric like yourself as “bashing” Trent James, and please explain your uninformed bashing of Sheriff Kendall. And while you're explaining things, please tell us about your own departures from both the Sheriff's Department and the Mendocino County Grand Jury, two axes you're still grinding. You might also add a para or two about how you presently cohabit with two women, one of whom you call your “dog walker” after your prior life as a self-declared gay man on the East Coast. And how about that judge in Colorado you met while cyber-cruising for your next vic whose life you proceeded to ruin? I know that Mendo suffers an incurable mass case of amnesia, but even for a place where every day history starts all over again and you are whatever you say you are, you're an extreme case of re-invention.

VIOLENCE IN AMERICA: IT’S NOT JUST ABOUT GUNS

by Patrick Cockburn

In 1993 I was living in a house in Kenyon Street in the Mount Pleasant neighbourhood of Washington DC when a gunman started shooting pedestrians from his car nearby. Over an eight-week period, he killed four people and seriously wounded five others in 14 attacks in a 10-block area encompassing partly gentrified Mount Pleasant and much poorer Columbia Heights.

The police paid little attention initially because the first person to be seriously wounded was a young black male in Columbia Heights. The police dismissed this as a “normal” crime for the area, stemming from disputes over control of the local drugs trade.

Only when the killer started shooting people in the leafy streets of Mount Pleasant did the police move massively but ineffectually to try to find him – or so they said, though I never saw many police where I lived.

The serial killer was only caught when an off-duty policeman getting his car washed saw a car run a red light and pursued it. When the driver stopped, the policeman noticed a shotgun in the back seat of his car which turned out to have been recently used to kill a woman.

Inability of the police

The shooter was named as James E Swann Jr, who had heard voices telling him to kill people in this part of Washington and was later found not guilty of murder by reason of insanity and confined to a psychiatric hospital.

I went to where Swann had once lived on the other side of Washington and asked his former neighbours if they had noticed anything strange about him. One told me that “he would go into the woods with his shotgun and once I heard him shout ‘I’ll kill you, I’ll kill you all,’ but I thought he was talking about squirrels.”

I was struck by the inability of the DC police to keep people safe and their failure in poor black areas even to try to do so. The killings reinforced my sense America was a peculiarly violent country for complex reasons of which the availability of guns was only one.

I had been thinking a lot about the American propensity for violence long before Swann targeted our neighborhood because the murder rate in Washington had peaked in 1991 with 482 murders in a city of 600,000 inhabitants. The main cause for the surge in killings appeared to be territorial disputes between local drug bosses. The sites of the killings were tightly bunched around places where drugs were sold.

Insufficiently corrupt

But this raised the question of why the people running the drug trade in Washington so swiftly resorted to extreme violence, more frequently than they did in comparable cities. One intriguing answer was given to me by a criminologist named William Chambliss who argued that “the problem is that the DC police are not corrupt enough. In other cities where the drug trade is rife but the police corrupt, a drug dealer eliminates competitors intruding on his territory by calling the local precinct and getting the police to arrest him.”

But the DC police were insufficiently corrupt to make such cozy and remunerative arrangements, so the drug bosses had no alternative but to defend their territory by sending out gunmen to murder ambitious rivals.

These two very different stories emphasize the complicated causes of gun violence in America which vary markedly from the simple-minded explanation that it is the wide availability of firearms that is at the heart of the problem. Many observers, have expressed this view with furious sincerity since the murder this week of 19 children and two teachers in a school in Uvalde, Texas.

Critics of America’s failure to restrict gun ownership make the unanswerable point that enraged or deranged individuals can easily purchase enough firepower to carry out a massacre. This is something they could not do in other advanced countries.

Howls of protest

Yet one certainty about these howls of protest over the sale of guns in America is that they will achieve nothing. It is not only because of the well-funded opposition of pro-gun lobbyists like the National Rifle Association, but because voters in many states, and not just in the Republican South, will vote down any politician hinting at the regulation of gun sales.

One Republican hopeful who had been a military helicopter pilot in the Middle East, had his political prospects blasted when he was accused of having made a speech long ago that could be interpreted as anti-gun, though he protested unavailingly that he had been speaking about guns in Somalia.

There are, in fact, prohibitions including heavy prison terms for the carrying of illegal or concealed weapons in many mostly Democrat-controlled states. But the evidence is that this does not do much good since there are already 400 million firearms held by 330 million Americans. It is too late to turn off the tap and many Democrats are now backing away a little from fruitlessly advocating gun control legislation to demand more police focus on illegal gun possession. An abiding American myth on all sides of the political divide is that they can punish their way out of violence.

Panaceas like this which promise solutions to complex problems are attractive to politicians, but there is little sign that they work. They may have a negative impact by side-lining more limited but practical reforms.

Cultural confrontations

A fascinating report called “The 100 Shootings Review Committee Report” about gun crime in Philadelphia, where there were 559 homicides in 2021, gives a highly informed account of the realities of gun crime. The reformist District Attorney Larry Krasner argues that “focusing so many resources on removing guns from the street while a constant supply of new guns is available is unlikely to stop gun violence.”

Over 20 years between 1999 and 2019, 200 guns were sold every day in Philadelphia and 1,600 in Pennsylvania. Krasner says that obsession with seeking illegally held guns prevents the successful investigation of killings and woundings by guns. He proposes instead clearing up more shooting cases, protecting witnesses and getting police officers, witnesses and victims to turn up in court. At the moment, four-fifths of non-fatal shootings in Philadelphia are unsolved.

Gun violence in America is rooted in centuries-old racial and cultural confrontations. Differing beliefs on guns, abortion, religion, race, civil rights and almost everything else slot easily into place on either side of this great divide. The slaughter of the children in Uvalde is only the latest proof of the truth of the old saying that “violence is as American as cherry pie.”

Cockburn’s Picks

My friend Dervla Murphy died in her home town of Lismore in county Waterford in Ireland last Sunday. She had been ill but it still came as a shock as we had been talking on the phone three or four weeks earlier and she had sounded as engaged with current events as ever.

Our conversations every few weeks were mostly about political developments on which we were usually in agreement, but she was interesting and intelligent on every issue. The same was true of her books that remain as fresh as when they were written. I would particularly recommend A Place Apart, her book on Northern Ireland and I reread recently her first book, Full Tilt, an account of her bicycle ride through the Balkans and Middle East, and her memoir Wheels within Wheels.

CAREENING TOWARDS GRACE

by James Kunstler

They screwed-the-pooch on the Covid-19 caper and now the data is biting Klaus and Company on the ass…

The World Economic Forum (WEF), a.k.a. the Davos Gang, held its 2022 schmoozefest in that tidy Swiss alpine village last week, after a nearly three-year hiatus on account of the coronavirus pandemic they generously arranged for the rest of us. These are the self-defined leaders of the Great Re-set — Klaus Schwab, Bill Gates, and Klaus’s scaly majordomo, Dr. Yuval Noah Harari, the inverse reincarnation of Adolf Eichmann, famous for declaring that “humans are hackable animals.” Did he mean, like, with a meat cleaver?

Who do these schnitzel-scarfing, Krug-guzzling punks think they are? Or, to paraphrase the immortal words of one Pete Hogwallop, who elected them boss of this outfit?

Nobody, that’s who, on this whole, wide, ever-turning world, which they literally aim to take over. Actually, from the way they talk, it already looks like they’ve hijacked the sucker and us “worthless” and “useless” humans on it, as Dr. Harari has labeled the multitudes riding the planet in economy class. Kind of looks like we’re in for a rough landing.

As first hallucinated in Herr Doktor Schwab’s pulsating brain, apparently many years ago, the Great Re-set was initially scheduled for 2050, a sort of leisurely stroll-in-the-park to the shimmering gates of transhumanism. Then the gang got nervous and pushed it up to 2030 (climate change, and all). When that retrograde monster of US politics, Donald Trump, came on the scene, they panicked and re-set their Re-set for 2023. Now, despite the surface decorum of this year’s Davos meet-up, it looks like they are — as we say here in the old New World — losing their shit.

How come? Well, for one thing, we appear to be in a close race between Klaus’s controlled demolition of the global economy and the US midterm elections this November, and perhaps the gang perceives that won’t go so well for them. Their key project in the 2022 offensive, the War in Ukraine, isn’t working out, either. The idea, it seems, was to bog down and humiliate the Russians so as to bring on the defenestration of Mr. Putin, who, believe it or not and despite the tsunamis of aspersion loosed on him by WEF-funded propagandists, is strangely and actually a defender of Western Civ. Yeah, I know, a stunner, right? (God works in mysterious ways — but the Davos Gangsters don’t believe in him / her / they.)

In their cuckoo clock universe, they are too busy counting the teeth on the gears inside because they are the “experts” and that’s what they do. Which brings us to one of the central fallacies of the mechanistic world-view: that if you measure enough things, you will be able to control them. Their beloved data is betraying them as it leaks out of the Pfizer vaults. They screwed-the-pooch on the Covid-19 caper and now the data is biting Klaus and Company on the ass. Especially Oberstleutnant Bill Gates’s ass, who was supposed to be in charge of the vaccine op and is jetting around the world now talking out of said cloacal aperture so recklessly that folks are looking to the lampposts of every country he lands in.

Hence, the desperate attempts at censorship by WEF stooges-in-place all around the world. And see how well that has gone, especially in the USA under WEF-installed “Joe Biden,” the cigar-store-Indian in executive drag, who fronts for a US wrecking-crew cabinet of oafs, losers, and reprobates. Has the world ever seen a more laughable official exercise than the botched appointment of one Nina Jankowicz, the Singing Censor, to the idiotically-conceived Disinformation Governance Board? They might as well have taken out a Jumbotron billboard ad in Times Square screaming Your Government: We Suck in flashing psychedelic pixels.

And yet, that demolition of the global economy proceeds a’pace as, with all demolitions, once things start crashing, nothing will stop it. Supply chains for everything are breaking, with sneaky ramifications. For instance, the ammonia-based chemical additive for diesel fuel used to reduce nitrogen oxide emissions from trucks is getting scarce. New EPA rules require computerized sensors in truck engines that register nitrous oxide levels. If they are too high, the sensors automatically cut the engine. Result: trucks stop running. Further result: nothing gets delivered. Furthest result: you starve.

The WEF worked on its starvation program from other angles, too. The Ukraine-Russian war was engineered to reduce the global wheat supply by a hefty cut, say around 30 percent, as well as to curtail fertilizer exports from the world’s main producers of them: Russia, Ukraine, Belarus. No khobz f’tir for you, peoples of North Africa! (And no Hostess Ding Dongs for you, peoples of Calumet Heights, Illinois!).

Meanwhile, recall the parting admonition of the late eminent virologist Luc Montagnier, discoverer of HIV, the virus behind AIDS, who, just prior to his death predicted that 100-percent of the people injected with mRNA Covid “vaccines” would be dead in two years. Yes, yes, pretty stark stuff, I know. But that was his professional opinion, and he was at the top of his profession. Forgive me for mentioning it, but there it is, like the proverbial turd in the punchbowl.

We’re in for all kinds of interesting surprises — those of us who survive this clusterfuck — but the biggest one of all will be the WEF’s Great Re-set falling on its aforesaid ass as, when the dust settles, their grandiose, totalitarian, and ultimately wicked model of the human project yields to the astounding re-enchantment of a world pregnant with meaning, purpose, and grace. I’m not kidding around. God may be a prankster, as I’ve suggested many times, but he’s also still God, and he doesn’t appreciate wannabe faux-messianic technocrat pricks like Klaus Schwab messing with his glorious creation.

(Support Kunstler’s writing by visiting his Patreon Page.)

THE DAYS GO BY IN UKIAH

Sitting in front of the ACER computer at Building Bridges homeless shelter in Ukiah, California, listening to another excellent excerpt from the talks of the Jnana Yoga master Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pkSOW7ozSDk. The dental appointments are all falling in place, and with perseverance, it looks like all of the work will be done in June, and the insurance will pay for it.

Aside from doing the voluntary chore of bottomlining trash & recycling at Building Bridges, there is nothing for me to do in California. So, the days are spent walking the Mendocino county seat, using the food stamps to get a salad at the Ukiah Co-op, and stock up on Yerba Mate, plus purchase juices and bananas and yogurt for late night snacking.

Lotto is played twice weekly, so that there is a way to receive significant money to perform critical spiritual work on the planet earth. Am assuming that what needs to happen will happen at the proper time. With nothing whatsoever to do here, moment to moment is spent chanting vedic and associated mantrams, and thus not interfering with the Divine Absolute using this body-mind instrument.

Craig Louis Stehr

BREAKING FREE FROM MASS FORMATION

Mattias Desmet is a Professor of Clinical Psychology at Ghent University in Belgium. His theory of mass formation during the coronavirus crisis has become widely known and widely misunderstood since gaining mainstream attention. His new book, The Psychology of Totalitarianism, lays out what mass formation is, how it develops, how it leads to totalitarianism, and what we must do to change the conditions that makes these mass formation events possible.