Off the Record (Oct. 12, 2022)

“THE ELECTION of the first woman prime minister in a country always represents a break with the past, and that is certainly a good thing.” — Hillary Clinton, on the election of the female Italian fascist, Giorgia Meloni

MORE AND MORE talk that Hillary is going to run again for president, again leaving US with the non-choice between catastrophe and unthinkable.

A WEEK AGO, both Clintons said they were against 'open borders.' The borders aren't open, the southern one is besieged by the even more besieged victims of rolling catastrophes, most of them set in motion by the prosperous West. It seems to be a little known fact that prior to World War One all borders everywhere were open. All you had to do is show up and walk on in with ID and plenty of dough. Of course few people had the means to travel anywhere, and this was before the desperate millions of our hemisphere started walking north. 

THE MURKY DECISION to arrange probation instead of prison for the corrupt Ukiah cop, Kevin Murray, hasn't exactly enhanced faith in the local justice system. The following on-line comment is typical, and there's been a ton of similar opinion:

“Can Murray’s sentencing be appealed? I guess it would be the prosecutors that would be responsible for that, and they are the ones responsible for the light sentencing, so that would be unlikely. Murray must have the dirt on the entire department…And obviously, Murray is not above doing something unsavory. Did he agree to roll on his Chief, who was disciplined, or is being investigated, (I forget how,) for misconduct? Is that how he got the sweetheart deal? Or did he just threaten to roll on his Chief, and the rest of the Department, if he didn’t get a sweetheart deal??? Murray must know where the bodies are buried, so to speak…”

DOUBT that a single deviant cop could move the whole system to get himself a sweetheart deal. We can speculate and speculate, but the answer to Murray's uniquely soft landing is probably nothing more complicated than official sloth with a dollop of palsy-walsy-ism; these people all know each other and are often social buddies. Although Judge Moorman might have put in a little OT coming up with her convoluted, totally unconvincing reasons for letting the guy slide, we'll never know the true reason for the Murray travesty. 

THE COURTHOUSE people work 9-5, and a case like Murray's, a man with the apparent resources to pay a couple of expensive lawyers to defend him, means a lot of work for the prosecution, which, it should go without mentioning, day in and day out process the defenseless, the proverbial fish in a barrel come to life. DA Eyster and his hard-hitting team aren't dealing with master criminals, are they? In the 1990s DA Norm Vroman confessed: “We only catch the dumb ones.” And Murray's case? Nothing complicated about it at all. Haul it before a jury and the guy would have been packed off to the state pen.

AND NORCAL justice is cozy as hell, too. How many times have we heard the judge say versions of, “Well, counselor, if you're going to be on vacation, and Christmas is only two weeks away, and my dog has to go to the vet, and I hear you're taking the kids to DisneyLand, we'll set this matter for the 12th of never.” 

MENDO'S over-large consignment of Judges dick off all the time for reasons that would get most salaried people laughed at if they sprang them on the boss. But our judges have no boss, and an office of capable women whose job it is to run interference for them. When I used to pop into courtrooms regularly, I have heard lawyers say, “Your honor I'm not prepared…” Never have I heard a local judge reply, “Why the hell aren't you prepared?” Connected defendants can have their “matter” put over for so long the “matter” simply disappears. (cf the Black Bart bandit; that case is 3 years old and counting. The guy long ago admitted guilt, then he was packed off for therapy, and drug rehab, and and and…

TO SUMMARIZE, CLASS, we have a large group of royally compensated, publicly paid lawyers and judges who don't serve us particularly well. They put themselves first, as in their tacit, silent support for a new county courthouse that no one but them wants. We've been swindled all the way back to when our Mendo system of justice maintained simple, no frills courts in all areas of the county. Of course that was in the days the justice system existed to serve the public, not feast on it. We used to have convenient local courts in Point Arena; Covelo; Laytonville; Hopland; Ukiah; Boonville; Fort Bragg, with just two (count 'em) superior court judges presiding over some things in Ukiah. Small claims, bar fights, traffic stuff was handled in these local justice courts. Instead of all of us going to the nine of them, they came to us, which is as it should be.

THE JUSTICE COURTS were abandoned because the lawyers sitting as state legislators — the legislature is almost all lawyers — magically decided that only lawyers were capable of justice, and here they came running out of the hills of Mendocino County, hippies with law degrees forever more to be addressed as “Your Honor.” And every minor outback legal thing went to Ukiah.

MARINA ROSE ZEKLEY: As I drive around Mendocino county, every time I’m on the straightway on Comptche Ukiah or driving up Rd 409 I constantly am stressed by the massive thick undergrowth and brush on folks’ property. Is or will there ever be a county (or maybe I guess state?) incentive or program to encourage folks to take action? I know sometimes there are brush programs etc but this is a bit more than just that I think? This one person on Comptche Ukiah really cleared up their property (right after the straightaway) and GOSH it looks so safe!

BIG PRIZES go to the most fashionably didactic lit these days, which may or may not be actual lit. These three “debut novels” were among the five National Book Award fiction finalists announced on Tuesday:

“All This Could be Different,” by Sarah Thankam Mathews, follows a young, queer immigrant from India. (Of course the immigrant has to be queer.) Tess Gunty’s “The Rabbit Hutch“ takes place over the course of one week in an affordable housing complex in Indiana. (Of which there is no such thing) And in Alejandro Varela’s “The Town of Babylon,” a queer Latinx professor moves back to suburban Long Island to take care of his parents. (Two outta three for the “gay community.”)

The other two fiction finalists are “The Haunting of Hajji Hotak and Other Stories,“ by Jamil Jan Kochai, which follows characters in Afghanistan and in the Afghan diaspora (a murderous onslaught of a primitive society by the Bush Gang, which will be unmentioned in the stories) and “The Birdcatcher,” by Gayl Jones, which is about a group of Black American artists in Ibiza, including a sculptor whose husband tries to institutionalize her repeatedly for trying to kill him. (That poor woman. Why didn't he just let her kill him?)

JUST SAYIN' but the National Book Award winners in 1960, to pick a random year BEFORE THE FALL, were, like, real literature: Goodbye Columbus, by Phillip Roth; Ellway's biography of James Joyce; Life Studies by Robert Lowell; and the uniquely weird Henderson the Rain King by Saul Bellow.

WHEN OVER-INDULGED children from Everyone Gets A Trophy High Schools get to college: An NYU organic chemistry professor has been fired because 82 students signed petition to get rid of him for making the subject “too hard.” 

MONDAY NIGHT FOOTBALL always averts its eyes when things get violent (sic). Player fights, fights in the stands, fights between players on the same team, players screaming at coaches and most visuals that don't come with the game. During the Niners vs. the Rams a week ago Sunday night, a skinny animal rights activist named Alex Taylor of a group called “Direct Action Everywhere,” ran onto the field with a purple flare to draw attention to his Utah comrades who got arrested for freeing pigs destined to becoming bacon. Viewers were told the game was delayed because “someone had run onto the field,” but that was all. No visuals. We learned the details Tuesday morning amidst a lot of gloating chuckles about the kid being body slammed by LA Rams linebacker Bobby Wagner. The most overrated coach in football, 49ers coach Kyle Shanahan, said after the game, “I saw Bobby Wagner take somebody out. That was kind of cool to see.”

THE FAN who ran onto the field during the Los Angeles Rams-San Francisco 49ers game has filed a police report against linebacker Bobby Wagner who threw him to the turf.

AS A LEFT-LIB PUBLICATION, we get a lot of dupes writing in with versions of — Putin was provoked into invading Ukraine and that the Russians are winning the war, or are playing a kind of military rope-a-dope prior to winning the war and taking over all of Ukraine.

TO SWALLOW this false re-write of recent history, you've got to also believe that Putin isn't a nationalist dictator but a legitimate head of state obligated to defend Mother Russia from US and NATO imperialism, and that every international media, from Al Jazeera to USA Today, is lying about Ukraine's battlefield successes.

YES, US and NATO imperialism would like to defang Putin and include Ukraine and Russia in mindless consumption of the type ascendant in the rest of Europe, but that doesn't justify Putin's murderous invasion of Ukraine, let alone his moving the needle ever closer to nuclear war.

ONE OF THE FEW things I agreed with Trump about is pulling the US out of NATO, many of whose members don't pay their fair share of the mostly USA-funded military defense of Europe. It was probably inevitable we got sucked into funding Ukraine, or mostly funding Ukraine, but considering the defense of Ukraine as a priority while our own country slides down the tubes is not defensible. But without US, Ukraine is done for. In the circumstances, I think we should be helping Ukraine while demanding Ukraine make a ceasefire a priority or lose US support.

WHERE'S McCOWEN? The garrulous former supervisor, and descendent of Mendocino County's pioneer Indian killers, a remark he once threatened to sue me for making if I repeated it, has gone silent. Nothing on his facebook page, no response to repeat e-mail demands — “Where you at, McCowen?” 

THE GUY'S a bachelor who lives alone in Ukiah where he spends a lot of time cleaning up homeless camps. The bush dwellers all know him and, to put it mildly, don't like him. Time for someone to do a welfare check. BTW. It still rankles us that McCowen was not only not honored with the usual Whereas Proclamation lauding his years as a public servant because he'd fallen out with CEO Mommy Dearest, she and his liver-ish supervisorial colleagues accused McCowen of stealing County property! Which wasn't true, but it'll be a cold day in a homeless camp before he gets an apology.

SPEAKING of Indian killers, the premier Mendo Indian killer, Serranus Hastings, are suing the state and the University of California for removing Hastings' name from the law school, unperturbed that another Hastings descendent, sitting as one of the law school's trustees, was among the trustees voting to remove great grandpap.

IF YOU came in late, Hastings was California's first state supreme court chief justice. He left a hundred thou in gold pieces to the university to establish the law school at the dawn of the 20th century. The contemporary Hastings bringing the suit want their money back, pre-rated of course to a couple of billion or so in today's inflated currency.

THERE'S NO INDICATION that the Hastings descendants have read the well-documented history of their murderous patriarch. From his perch as California’s first chief justice, Hastings easily persuaded the savage state legislature of 1850 to fund a year-long, state-sponsored campaign to kill all the Indians in the entire Eel River basin.

IT'S LESS KNOWN that Hastings wanted the Indians gone because it was Eden Valley Indians who were cheated out of payment for hauling Hastings' belongings from the Mendocino Coast to his new home in Eden Valley (between Laytonville and Covelo). In retaliation, the cheated Indians killed Hastings' prize brood stallion, and the rest is history. The lawsuit by Hastings' opportunistic descendants is like Hitler's descendants suing modern historians for defamation. 

FOR YEARS on top of years I've been eating at a wonderful little place in Fairfax called the Barefoot Cafe, but it wasn't until I read Anthony Bourdain's Medium Raw that it occurred to me how narrow my dining experiences, la di da, have been. I eat mostly at home because my wife is an excellent cook and eating out is expensive for us. So it isn't as if restaurants are an integral part of what we do as a family, because what we do as a family is Friday and Saturday night in-house family dinners, partly motivated but unstated, as fond memory anchors for the little ones.

BOURDAIN describes meals I've never heard of, let alone experienced, at places like the famous French Laundry, meals whose ingredients are also unknown to me. Reading Bourdain, it has gradually dawned on me that the unpretentious little Fairfax restaurant, the Barefoot Cafe, also offers specials beyond my peasant culinary expeditions, that at least one of the Cafe's cooks is a fully credentialed chef whose specials I've waived on by for the familiar fish and chips or BLTs, that the guy slaving away grilling cheeseburgers is like having an NFL quarterback playing for a semi-pro weekend team out of Stockton. Next time, I'm having one of his specials so the unsung hero of the Barefoot kitchen can get proper recognition from this repentant diner.

KH WRITES: "I’m frequently surprised by the topics that bring the most [on-line] comments. Today it is the topic of Ukraine, a country 6400 miles away from Mendocino County.

I feel able to offer little insight on Ukraine. My opinions about it are meaningless. It’s concerning, don’t get me wrong. Surely it will affect our world in large and small ways, but there is nothing I can do to change the outcome from here.

I have to focus on issues closer to home. Has anyone been arrested for stealing from the Botanical Garden? And what are people’s thoughts about the Patterson matter?"

ED NOTE: We all pay taxes that our government too often puts to evil purpose. We're responsible for what that government does at home and abroad, imo. Putin vs. Ukraine threatens life on earth, pardon the grandiosity. Lots of lib-left people are being misled about Ukraine by Russkie disinfo. No one has yet been arrested for stealing stuff from the Botanical Gardens, and my thoughts on the Patterson matter consist of one thought — it's unfair to the people working in government to bombard them with tons of Gotcha demands for docs. I hope an intelligent young guy like Patterson will see the error of his ways. The only mismanaged governments in this county are (1) Ukiah and (2) county government under a bumbling board of supervisors and the former CEO. The new CEO may be an improvement over the old CEO. It's too early to tell.

DEATH WATCH: Mendocino’s Dog Kennels are full. We cannot accept any dogs at this time. Unfortunately, due to the dog owners and keepers failing them the Animal Shelter has become overcrowded. This has placed Animal Care Services in the very tough position of having to euthanize dogs due not having any available kennel space. The dogs pictured in the below link are scheduled to be euthanized on Friday, October 14, 2022 if not adopted. These dogs are “free.” The only charge is $25 for a dog license.

Due to many stray dogs being picked up by the Animal Protection Unit and dropped off by citizens recently our dog kennels are full.

We need dog owners that know their dog(s) are here to come to the Animal Shelter to reclaim their lost dogs ASAP.

We ask that citizens who find a stray dog(s) to please attempt to locate the owner. 

Citizens can also send us their contact info, a picture of the lost dog, the location the dog was found to the below link and we can post the lost dog(s) picture & information on our Facebook page.

If there is no reduction in the high population of dogs at the Animal Shelter then there is a high probability that euthanasia for space will occur. If this was to occur there would be up to approximately (10) dogs that would be euthanized. 

We encourage anyone that is wanting to adopt a dog to go to the below link and fill out an adoption application. 

We have reduced our adoption prices by 50%. These prices have been in place for over six months to entice more adoptions. 

Adoption Application

Any assistance that we can get from the community would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you.

Mendocino County Animal Care Services

WHO SAID THIS, AND WHAT WAS HE REFERRING TO?

“Secrecy keeps mistakes secret. Secrecy is a disease. It causes a hardening of the arteries of the mind.”

It was Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan. He was not referring to the secrecy around “a personnel matter,” or “juveniles” or “health information,” or “pending litigation,” or “labor and property negotiations,” or “attorney work product,” or private contractors doing public work claiming that their public data is proprietary, or law enforcement disciplinary records, or things that are “under investigation” seemingly forever, or “it’s still being drafted,” or useful material buried in reams of trivialities, or self-selected bureaucratic reporting, or unintelligible gibberish, or the many other obstacles to the kind of “transparency” that our local politicians like to genuflect in front of. No. Moynihan was referring to the CIA back in the 1980s when he suggested that the agency be abolished because of their failure to anticipate the collapse of the Soviet Union. Moynihan thought the CIA’s info gathering functions should be turned over to the State Department. (Spoiler Alert: We still have the CIA.)

(Mark Scaramella)

A FEW WORDS in defense of disappeared Ukiah Police chief, Waidelich, based on what we understand is behind his peremptory firing for no stated reason. Waidelich is married. Not the kind of guy who seemed like a babe magnet, the chief apparently strayed from his marriage to the embrace of a woman who demanded he leave his wife for her. But Waidelich said he was sticking with his marriage, and his spurned lover then complained to well-placed inland policemen that Waidelich had abused her. Those well-placed inland policemen went to Ukiah's city manager, Seldom Seen Sage Sangiacomo who, given his troubled police department's recent fiscal drain on the City, first placed Waidelich on leave, then fired him. 

IRONIC, isn't it, that in libertine times like these a man can be destroyed on the basis of the dubious claim by the losing vertex of a love triangle, a claim that has taken nearly three months for Santa Rosa investigators to sort out and still haven't sorted out? If the charges against the former Ukiah police chief by the jilted woman is unsubstantiated Waidelich should be reinstated, but he won't be because, well, ethical immorality is as prevalent these days as the other kind.

THE DISAPPEARANCE of KGO from the am radio dial is like the death of an old friend. KGO had a huge listening audience right here in Mendocino County where there's a dearth, nay absence, of talk radio felt keenly in restive times with millions of people seething to blast their opinions beyond their kitchen tables. My all-time fave KGO people were Jim Dunbar and Ted Weigand, who moved the conversation along with aplomb and great wit. They were a delight to listen to. And there was the AVA-friendly Pat Thurston, smart, well-informed, funny, who stayed friendly with us even though we were responsible for getting her fired when she starred at KSRO out of Santa Rosa. Long story short, Pat had me on to talk about the Bari bombing. The bomber's daddy, a pal of the station owner, got his pal the station owner to fire Pat, who went on to KGO, a step up for her.

RADIO generally goes steadily downhill. Locally, of course, we have round the clock audio soma at KZYX, good news for happy people, where talk tedium is a way of life. The rest of Mendo audio is canned muzak-quality cowboy yawps relieved only by the always timely morning news by Joe Regelski out of Fort Bragg, the only radio news in the county apart from government national news from NPR piped in by KZYX. True community radio hangs on at KMUD in Garberville, and some locals who can get the signal still listen to KPFA, even though the last intelligent programmer at Pacifica, Larry Bensky, threw up his hands several years ago. And the absolute best talk guy in the Bay Area (and a very good writer, too), Michael Krasny, retired, leaving us stranded in an audio desert.

WHEN KGO RADIO HOST PAT THURSTON was at KSRO in Santa Rosa she interviewed KQED Journalist Steve Talbot about his 1991 Documentary “Who Bombed Judi Bari?” It seems appropriate to revisit that interview now that KGO and Thurston have gone off the air: "Talbot Talks, And So Does Mary Moore"

In that interview Talbot refers to an article he was writing for Salon.com which appeared a few weeks later: salon.com/2002/05/23/judibari/

THE MANY THOUSANDS OF DACA IMMIGRANTS — Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals — have always lived anxiety-ridden lives, and DACA is again under legal assault from the forces of darkness. There are many DACA childhood arrivals in Mendocino County, and plenty of undocumented people apart from DACA youngsters. The undocumented live lives of constant anxiety, but DACA arrivals have assumed that eventually their status as American citizens would be confirmed. But their anxiety levels have been torqued upwards by both legal challenges to their precarious status and by the constant scapegoating of immigrants by Republicans, tacitly aided by the Biden administration's failure to bring order to the southern border of the United States. 

BLAMING BIDEN for anything almost amounts to elder abuse. He's barely functioning, but when his puppeteers claim there's nothing he can do about gas prices they deliberately overlook the historical invocation of wage and price controls. if I were, ahem, president, I'd nationalize the fuel corporations, roll back gas prices to the basic cost of production, confiscate the huge profits the industry has rolled up over the past three years, and jail the industry's top executives.

GEORGE PACKER'S observation, “Like most of us, he outlived his understanding of the world,” resonates with me big time. When the death of a rapper called Coolio was front page news recently, it was the first time I'd heard of him, but every day some alleged celebrity is in the news for a dubious or bogus achievement that reminds me the culture of this country has indeed passed me by, and I can't tell you how pleased I am that it has.

ON JOHN LENNON'S BIRTHDAY, a Few Words About War

John Lennon was born October 9, 1940. He would have been 82 today. In 1972, South Carolina Senator Strom Thurmond sent a letter to the office of Attorney General John Mitchell, suggesting Lennon be deported. Thurmond believed Lennon’s antiwar and anti-Nixon views would spread in rock concerts and festivals, and cited a “confidential source” in saying, “if Lennon’s visa is terminated it would be a strategy counter-measure.” Mitchell’s deputy sent a letter to the Immigration Commissioner asking if there was “any basis” to deport Lennon. A court battle ended with a Judge named Irving Kaufman striking down his deportation, writing: Lennon’s four-year battle to remain in our country is a testimony to his faith in this American dream. Though I’m more a fan of Strawberry Fields than kumbaya anthems like “Imagine” and “Give Peace a Chance,” I figured someone ought to say a word or two in defense of nonviolence on John Lennon’s birthday... 

— Matt Taibbi

ON LINE COMMENTS OF THE WEEK

[1] Clearly we have degraded into a nation of mindless idiots (“led” by a brain-dead dotard) if more than a handful of people believe that runaway inflation is going to be stopped by raising interest rates. What a line of crap! Increasing the cost of everything so that consumers stop consuming because they can no longer afford to consume is going to force prices to drop? Duh, how about they will have to go up even further in order to maintain the bottom-line corporate profit margins due to decreased sales? There may be an argument in that direction if there was an over-supply of consumables to be gotten rid of, but in a supply shortage scenario, you know, like the one we are in now, well that’s simply bullshit! We are screwed plain and simple and the scumbags that rule us are going to be screwing us harder and more frequently until everything grinds to a halt. Great Reset my ass, more like a Great Beat Down.

[2] Don’t worry, we’re all doomed anyway after Putin shoots his underwater nuke offshore on us. What’s not to like about a 1,200 foot tsunami? Only thing is, Putin never does what we expect him to. I heard he’s going to drop the big one unexpectedly on northern New Mexico. The sunsets there will be glorious.

[3] Listening to all the PTB on both sides regarding Ukraine. Both sides are talking tactical nukes. Just one damn minute. There is no such thing as tactical nukes, once the red line is crossed, no one will be able to stop the escalation to full strategic exchange. These damned idiots and their “Russia cannot or NATO cannot get away with this or that” are bringing on Armageddon. Forget the land based, the subs have enough power to take out the human races multiple times. The ignoramuses in DC are scaring the hell out of me today. What exactly does NATO think Putin is going to do if he is thwarted or Russia is attacked, including the annexed areas. The Armageddon clock is ticking quickly right now. 

[4] I’ve noticed a pattern: It gets dark then it gets light again. Or you could say, it gets light then it gets dark again, as a vampire might say since he or she has a different base of reference. 

Imagine the terror of the ancients during an eclipse. I experienced a version of that or something similar as a young boy. When it thundered without rain, I felt like it was a cosmic error or that the gods were angry with us. I would become distraught, one time even breaking a window with my hands.

[5] Orwell, Huxley, Babbitt, etc. — they all saw it coming; they lived its early days. Totalitarian democracy. Solzhenitsyn and Havel warned the West. A dozen worms cannot gnaw on the same apple endlessly, to infinity. The earth is finite, Progress cannot be eternal. We are led by maniacs.

[6] Jesus was a hard, tough man who had probably spent a decade or so on the road before he became a wandering preacher. Construction jobs aren’t always happening next to home, and often guys travel to other cities to work on big projects. They do this today and they did this two millenia ago. Jesus wasn’t a pink slipper wearing robed pussy who dreamed of molesting young boys. He didn’t go about with a constipated look on his face holding a soft, pudgy, and faggy pink hand up in the air waving it about to bestow imaginary blessings upon gullible crowds. What if Jesus shows up again and pays a visit to the Vatican? He’ll be asking Himself, “WTF has this got to do with me? I never told anybody to do this!”

[7] When I was six years old, almost the entire area of a major suburb of Munich was within reach of my new bicycle and ready to be explored. The reason I could safely travel about was entirely due to the fact that the car culture hadn’t been rebuilt yet in the Germany of 1955. At this time there were still a few bombed buildings about not yet torn down, and now and then I’d ride by a bomb crater not yet filled in. For a child wanting to explore the world a bit on my own it was paradise. It was unheard of for adults to be out molesting and attacking children in the 50’s. In a sane world, child predators are quickly locked up or even killed.

It’s not paradise today. Adults with their goddamned cars have ruined it all again. But not for much longer. Germany will very quickly be transitioning again to a two wheeled culture. Four wheels will be reserved for buses, garbage trucks, and mail delivery. 

My interest in riding motorcycles started in Germany, and I was a bit upset a few times because I wanted an engine to bolt onto my bike and my mom wouldn’t buy me one. These small two stroke engines running bicycles are still available today, but they are unreliable and poorly made Chinese junk. The Germans made better ones in the 50’s,, and there was a motorbike shop at the end of our street that sold them. They also sold mopeds and small motorbikes. I’d hang out at this shop sometimes, looking at the piles of motors and parts piled up in their garage, asking questions, and making a pest of myself. Once they called my mom and asked her to come down there and make me go home. 

A 250cc small Asian made motorbike that gets around 80 to 90 mpg will be how we’ll get around in the future. Our cars will either be parked or taken by the banks, placed in container ships, and sold to China.