LINDA BAILEY COMMENTS: Re: County Budget: Watching Williams and McGourty at last week’s BOS discussion of financial and budgetary matters brought to mind Charles Fraizer’s line in Cold Mountain: “They call this war a cloud over the land. But they made the weather and then they stand in the rain and say ‘Shit, it’s raining’."
“McLAUGHLIN retires as Publisher of Independent Coast Observer,” by J. Stephen McLaughlin.” Steve and Co have been at it a long time. He started in the business under his formidable mom, Joanna McLaughlin, who founded the weekly in 1969, which she also printed on the premises, placing the entire operation under one roof. She was kind enough to give me a tour one day when I stopped in without an appointment, explaining how the combined print shop and newspaper operated. I'd always wanted to emulate the ICO operating model but never had the capital for my own printing press.
THE ICO will now operate under the auspices of a non-profit — which newspapers have been for about twenty years now anyway — but this ICO non-profit will be operated by a committee of locals who want the paper to survive. Newspaper by committee? The horror, the horror! But Steve, I'm sure, will still ride herd and, given the soft context of “MendoNoma” journalism, as the South Coast's commercial titans call the Gualala area, a committee of equivalently deluded people who believe “Advertising is oxygen for local journalism” rather than its death will keep the ICO afloat.
FROM FRIENDS OF THE EEL: “We are thrilled to share that the Eel River has been selected by American Rivers as one of America's Most Endangered Rivers®! The list features ten rivers at a crossroads with upcoming opportunities to address serious threats.”
“THRILLED”? The battered Eel is about finished as a fishery and serves mostly as a water diversion for the most undeserving people possible — a handful of Potter Valley “ranchers” and, even more undeserving, Mendocino and Sonoma County grape growers.
DONALD CRUSER ON ABBIE HOFFMAN: Just a few words about my two distant encounters with Abbie Hoffman. When I graduated from college in 1969 I went to Chicago to spend a year working as a Volunteer In Service To America (VISTA). It was an exciting time to be in Chicago since among other things it was a year after the riots at the Democratic Party convention and the trial of some of the demonstrators was going on. The trial was a circus with such things happening as the handcuffing and gagging of Black Panther leader Bobbie Seale. Abbie Hoffman was a defendant.
My first encounter with Abbie was when I went down to a small concert hall to see and hear the great old blues singer Howling Wolf. During one of his breaks Abbie got up to speak, or I should say “try to speak.”? He was so messed up on drugs that he was incapable or uttering a coherent sentence. This was the 60’s after all.
The second contact came when I got it into my head that it would be interesting to watch the trial for a day as a spectator. My girlfriend and I got up at 4 am and were down there standing in line by 5:30. Even at that we were 11th and 12th in line with only 12 seats available. But we were in so we stood there in line until just before 9 or 10 when they were scheduled to let us into the courtroom. Then Abbie showed up to go in and for some reason was allowed to bring in two of his friends. This bumped me and my friend out of the gallery. I never went back since it wouldn’t have been wise to jump the barrier and kick Abbie’s ass right there in the courtroom.
ERNIE BRANSCOMB: Until and unless they bring back State mental hospitals nothing can be done. It is sad that the standard for deciding that someone is mentally competent is if they know their name.
Allowing folks with drug or mental problems to the point of incompetence should not be allowed to roam freely in a civilized society. It is cruelty beyond belief. Not only can they not care for themselves. They spread trash and disease, foul the creeks, watersheds and wetlands. They cause many fires, and many of the first responder calls are because of the needs of the mentally incompetent and homeless.
Being old enough to have seen how well mental hospitals worked I know what is possible. When faced with cleaning up their lives or getting to be incarcerated until they do got a lot of lives back on track and become productive people again.
A lot of mental problems can be relieved with proper drugs, but they need to be kept in a facility until they can handle reality.
I normally don’t comment on these kind of subjects, but having been a first responder for 39 years and having had family members helped in the state hospital back in the day. I feel that I have a very valid opinion.
WILLITS RESIDENT JOHN MEYER came close to bankruptcy resisting Mendocino Railway's attempt to take his property by eminent domain. Last week, he won his case in court. "The court concludes that MR has failed to meet its burden of establishing that its attempt to acquire Meyer’s property through eminent domain is supported by constitutional and statutory powers. The court finds in favor of Meyer." — Jade Tippett
FURTHER EVIDENCE that our nation is doomed is… Biden, 80, to “announce his run for president on Tuesday”: White House aides, not daring to put the ancient grifter on live, are planning to release video confirming Biden’s 2024 campaign despite questions over his age, performance and dire approval ratings.
MATT TAIBBI, at much greater length and irrefutably, has pointed out that our Big Lib media — The NYT, CNN, NPR, MSNBC and so on, and that our alleged national security agencies have become an extension of the Democratic Party — but all that's really needed to prove their perfidy is their refusal to even speculate that Biden is past it, wayyyyyyy past it.
THE ANTIOCH POLICE DEPARTMENT is rightly in the Bay Area news for harboring at least forty cops who were dumb enough to e-mail racist messages to each other. How many times have cops been caught out the same way — indelible written proof of their evident unfitness to do their work. But, scrolling through the messages that have become public, it's also obvious that many of the email exchanges are bad attempts at humor, as in one cop emailing another, “I'm just out here as usual violating civil rights.” Which made me laugh but, in the context of the Antioch PD, not very amusing, especially when you also have cops joking about kicking a black kid's head “like a football.”
WAXING BIG THINK, considering that the operating context of American cops is dealing with brutalized and brutalizing people in a brutalizing popular culture celebrating brutalization, it's not surprising that too many brutal people find their way into police work. Here in Mendo? For our small police presence in a population of only 90,000 people the Ukiah Police Department has obviously been brutal-tolerant, but other than Ukiah, a small town featuring brutalizing architecture and the tolerance of aberrant public behavior that brutalizes its entire population, criminals and honest citizens alike, Mendo cops go about their work in a reputable manner.
THE PROBLEM presented by Covelo, a community that eats its young, isn't so much the bloody history of Round Valley as it is too many bad people with bad attitudes in one small population. Some of us will remember when Covelo was a small school sports powerhouse where everyone graduated from high school and went out into the world expecting to lead conventional lives, then… drugs, the celebration of thug culture, too many young people shuffled in and out of prison, ancient grudges, no jobs — pick one.
A ROSELAND (Santa Rosa) school board member, addressing a proposed day camp “for queer youth and allies age 9-14,” has apologized for this statement of the obvious: “Rather than focusing on a certain age group why ALL children? I’m sorry this seems totally inappropriate, these are babies 9-14? I can understand 14-18? But Really? These are babies still.” I, too, can understand post-pubes, 14-18, but agree that pre-pubes should be excluded, but such is the perceived power of a sliver of what's left of sensible society the school board trustee was forced to issue a groveling apology for “not understanding,” etc.
RIGHT HERE it's necessary to cite Caitlin Johnson's statement of the obvious: “On every issue that affects the interests of real power the parties are effectively in total alignment, while all the intense emotional debate gets steered toward issues the powerful don't care about one way or the other. Only an idiot would believe this happened by coincidence. To quote Chomsky, ‘The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum’.”
AND I DIDN'T know that if you turn your face to a hundred mile an hour wind your breath will be blown back down your throat. Or so I learned from David Grann's gripping tale of shipwreck, mutiny and murder, “The Wager,” a book more than gripping but a truly scarifying account of the 1742 voyage of a modest flotilla of British warships in the quest of a probably mythical rich Spanish galleon. To intercept the galleon it's necessary to waylay it in the Pacific via the hellish seas of Cape Horn, which isn't the half of it. To put the ensuing catastrophes in context, the prevention of scurvy was still unknown (ligaments melt one's limbs separate from their sockets), typhoid reigned on many ships of the time, living conditions for almost everyone on board weren't endurable by any civilized standard, and even a suspicion of mutiny could get a crewman decapitated. The men and boys — some as young as six, many under the age of 14 — who set out in pursuit of Spanish spoils signed on because they thought they could retire off the profits.
GRANN, by the way, is also the author of the rightly acclaimed “Killers of the Flower Moon,” soon to be a movie by Martin Scorcese, which means at least an intelligent treatment of the Comanches of the Plains, the only American Indians to live entirely on whatever they could take from settled tribes and settlers. The Comanches would make a beautiful series of visuals for sure, as they circled up on a full moon night and headed out for an evening of rape, pillage and plunder.
MALCOLM MACDONALD: The headline here: Two new members of the Mendocino Coast Health Care District Board of Directors, who ran last fall on a promise of bringing transparency to that body, have engaged in exactly the opposite, withholding crucial information from fellow board members and the public.
First, let's go back to how we got to such a juncture. Last August a slate of candidates, Lee Finney, Susan Savage, and Jade Tippett, filed for the November election to fill three vacant seats on the Mendocino Coast Health Care District Board of Directors. Simply put, their mission was to unseat one member of the then current board running for re-election, John Redding.
Redding had served three and a half years on the MCHCD Board at that point. He was coming off a failed campaign to unseat Fifth District Supervisor Ted Williams in June. To say failed puts it mildly. Redding barely garnered a double digit percentage against Williams. Much of his tenure on the MCHCD Board was spent as the treasurer. However, in mid-October 2022, with his performance openly challenged by a majority of his board colleagues, Redding resigned as treasurer. He didn't help his campaign for re-election to the MCHCD Board by making social media comments like, “The three women Board members have failed the community with their unserious, irresponsible approach to their jobs.”
A few days later Redding followed up with his version of an explanation for his resignation as board treasurer, “I grew weary of dealing with the three psychos on the Board.”
With those three board members working to untangle the financial mess Redding left (draining one of the district's main bank accounts without notifying the rest of the board is one example), the slate of Finney, Tippett, and Savage coasted into the three MCHCD Board of Directors (BOD) seats. By the first week in December their election was certified, but they chose to bypass any meetings of the board that month.
Ignoring advice from multiple people to keep their initial meeting simple, in the first days of 2023 an MCHCD agenda popped up with twenty Discussion/Action items on it plus a fifteen minute organizational presentation. According to the layout of the agenda, this was all supposed to take place within a two hour time slot. One of the bigger storms of the winter prevented that meeting from occurring.
I was one of those advising new board member Lee Finney to keep their first meeting a simple affair. On January 9th a new agenda appeared. New in that a few words had been changed and one agenda item swapped for another, but still twenty action items and the fifteen minute extra discussion.
I sent a text to Finney, “So, essentially the same agenda..?!”
Finney responded, “It's been pared down some per your advice.”
MM: “That's bogus.” As noted, virtually nothing had been changed. I listed many of the items that appeared unnecessary, yet were still in the agenda for a January 12th meeting.
Finney replied, apparently referring to the MCHCD website where the agenda was posted, “This is the wrong document – many changes made. I will see about getting correct Agenda posted.”
Come January 12th, that same twenty item document was still the working agenda for the meeting. When the agenda was questioned that evening, Finney defended it and voted to approve it. Director Sara Spring, the one holdover from the previous board, was the lone dissenter.
One item on the stormed-out agenda was dropped, a report from the prior board chair. Something had happened that apparently made the prior chair reluctant to participate with the new board. Somewhat innocuously placed in the middle of the January 12th agenda was a Discussion/Action item titled, “Manager of Office 365 accounts.”
Of course, the new board got nowhere near close to completing their overly ambitious agenda on January 12th. Far beyond the allotted time and as the hour grew late, a few items deemed time sensitive were bumped up in the agenda to be discussed and acted on before adjournment. The “Manager of Office 365 accounts” was not one of these. Remember that detail. It is going to come into play later.
On January 26th, the new board at MCHCD held a fifteen item agenda. It contained that “Manager of Office 365 accounts” item again, but once more lateness of the hour shortened the meeting and the “Office 365” item was not deemed important enough to be considered in the waning minutes, though other items were.
A Microsoft Office 365 account allows an organization such as the board of directors of the Mendocino Coast Health Care District to store all of their emails in one place. When the new board held a special meeting on February 8th it became apparent that a majority of the prior board were reluctant to hand over their emails without protective measures being taken. Former board member Amy McColley spoke, via Zoom, at the February 8th meeting. In essence she advised that the prior board would archive their emails, the new board could open a 365 account of their own, and the emails of the prior board could be accessed as needed from the old 365 archived account. McColley emphasized that the prior board's emails should be carefully vetted before opening because of HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability Act of 1996 created to protect sensitive patient health information) precautions.
Alexander Henson, the attorney Finney, Savage, and Tippett insisted on retaining at a January meeting, made a statement to the effect that there was no reason for any of the prior board to have HIPAA information in their emails. Apparently, Henson chose between not paying attention, utter ignorance, or doing no research whatsoever in making that statement. Two of the members of the prior board have worked in the medical world, with patients, on almost a daily basis for years.
Regardless, the Finney, Tippett, Savage slate voted to take over control of the prior board's Office 365 emails with Chair Finney as administrator. Kerfuffle seemingly over.
Something didn't add up. I filed a public records request for any emails sent by current board members to Rackspace, the parent company for the 365 email account.
When the request was honored, I received a half dozen copies of emails between board member Tippett and Rackspace along with a Tippet email to the prior board chair on February 7th in which Tippett wrote, “I need the log-in credentials for the Rackspace account.”
The prior chair responded that same afternoon, “I do not know them. I never had them.”
The emails between Tippett and Rackspace show him taking control of the prior board's Office 365 email account on February 7th, the day before the MCHCD Board would discuss and possibly take action concerning the 365 email account. At the February 8th MCHCD Board meeting, neither Tippett nor Finney told their fellow board members or the public in attendance that they had already taken the action the day before on the “Action” item the board discussed and acted on a day later.
That is not how elected officials display an affinity for transparent action.
Along with the email exchange between Tippett and Rackspace, the response to the public records request included a 3 ¼ page, single-spaced, narrative authored by Tippett. Who does that? The request was simply for emails between Rackspace and the new board members.
Tippett's narrative reads like a defensive excuse. At that February 8th meeting other board members made comments or asked questions that clearly required responses from Tippett or Finney to reveal/announce that they already had control of the prior board's Office 365 email account, but neither even hinted that this was the case. So the Tippett narrative looks like an excuse to cover that utter lack of transparency. He states that he and Finney had “several conversations of concern about the security of the Office 365 resource.”
If that was, indeed, true why didn't Finney or Tippett, say as much at the February 8th meeting. At one point during that meeting Director Savage asked a question of Finney about safeguarding the email account of the prior board. Finney hemmed and hawed for a couple of seconds then said it would be problematic if anything happened to the email account, letting Savage, the rest, of the board, and the public think that the email account was not yet secured.
Let's go back to reiterate that one of the main reasons the slate of Finney, Tippett, and Savage promulgated for running for the MCHCD Board seats was to achieve a greater sense of transparency than they perceived in the prior board.
Savage has stated that she knew nothing about the 365 email account deceit, but she votes in lock step with Finney and Tippett time after time. In further disregard to transparency, Savage, Finney, and Tippett have engaged in three-way emails about MCHCD Board agenda items without any apparent concern for adhering to the Brown Act which precludes such communications of a majority of an elected body outside of a public meeting.
As treasurer of the board, Tippett more or less demanded the rest of the board approve a transfer of $4 million dollars to Adventist Health at a February 23rd meeting without any supporting documentation for the transfer because from his point of view it would wreck his relationship with an Adventist Health employee if the transfer was not made more or less immediately. Similar to the proposed transfers of large sums at the March 30th MCHCD Board meeting, Tippett has not yet provided the supporting documentation for that $4 million transfer though he acknowledged such need back in February. It would appear that Finney, Savage, and Finney only bandy the term “transparency when it suits them and ignore it the rest of the time.
A READER WRITES: Re recent mentions of Martha Gellhorn — her life, writing, etc. Read the brilliant and detailed biography: Gellhorn: A Twentieth-Century Life by Caroline Moorhead. Supposedly Moorhead was the daughter of one of Martha’s closest friends. From the back jacket blurb: “Drawn from extensive interviews and exclusive access to Gellhorn’s papers and correspondence, this seminal biography spans half the globe and almost an entire century to offer an exhilarating, intimate portrait of one of the defining women of our times.” Wikipedia has more info, but its list of her writings seems lacking.
WARRIORS FORWARD DRAYMOND GREEN is almost alone among professional athletes to never go corporate. He always says what's on his mind in post-game interviews while everyone else blands down their serial cliches. Not to be too much of a front-runner, I think the Kings are all-round better than the Warriors, not that I'm abandoning The City for Sacramento.
ON-LINE COMMENTS OF THE WEEK
[1] DRAYMOND
[a] This season started - and it looks like it's going to end - with Draymond Green's brutish behavior hurting the entire team. Given how Green abuses the referees on a regular basis, why would the League give him the benefit of the doubt? There are many NBA players who play with passion and intensity. Green apparently can't differentiate between playing with passion & intensity, and inflicting all-about-me tantrums and brutishness that accomplish nothing but hurting the team. He has become an embarrassment and an obstacle to the team's fortunes. I really hope Bob Myers doesn't host Green in the stands during Game 3 like he did in 2016 when Green's suspension cost the Warriors a championship. This season began with a Green buzz-kill, and now it's ending with a Green buzz-kill. I hope he opts for free agency.
[b] It's quite possible grabbing someone's ankle as he is trying to run could cause a bad sprain or even a broken bone. If that had happened, it would be a completely different narrative ... wouldn't it? I've seen games where someone yanked an elbow on purpose and injured a player. As the league said: Green is also getting punished NOT just for this one incident ... but, for a HISTORY of behaviors. Interesting.
[c] Apparently Green did have an X-ray after the game ... to determine if the pain in his ankle was a sprain. Bet y'all didn't know THAT!
[d] What was Sabonas even thinking? “Uh, sorry, Mr. Green, I was only joking. You know, pulling your leg?”
[2] COVELO: Nothing justifies the tragic, brutal and senseless murder of this young lady or the young man who recently suffered an equally tragic, brutal and senseless murder. As painful as it is, it’s time to ask: is this the result of the example we’re setting for our children? Covelo has a tragic history of genocide, oppression, seven Tribes with different beliefs and practices herded together, exploited and marginalized, inter and intra Tribal rivalries, family vendettas, alcoholism, domestic violence, outlaw dope culture and economic hardship and much more. It’s all too tragically true.
But Covelo is at a crossroads where it’s either going to become completely unlivable with everyone leaving who can – or everyone needs to put aside recriminations for past wrongs and begin building trust and setting an example of how to work together in the here and now. Yes, easier said than done but what’s the alternative?
[3] Kid: ‘Daddy? Why are there rich people?’
Dad: ‘What do you mean by rich? You mean like in spirit?’
Kid: ‘No-o-o-o-o… Like they have lots of big houses and cars and money!’
Dad: ‘Ohhh, you mean those kinds. Well, you see, sweetie, our society allows some people to make more money than other people, working no harder than anyone else. Society then allows those with more money to acquire more land than others. Over time, this creates the dynamic for most, if not all, problems we have in society today, from landlessness, homelessness and poverty, to social unrest, war and civilizational collapse.’
Kid: ‘Why does society allow that?!’
Dad: ‘Corruption. [embedded/systemic] Society uses force to uphold rules they call laws that say that one person with more money can have more land than another with less money.’
Kid: ‘Why can’t we stop that!?’
Dad: ‘Corruption again: This setup is upheld by people with guns and weapons, or access to them, like police, security guards and military people– people who often don’t understand this basic and very simple immoral core of our society.’
Kid: [Smiley Face]
Dad: ‘ Ya [Smiley Face]
[4] Back in the 50’s when we were small children, we’d play unsupervised games in mixed company – like playing doctor – when adults weren’t around. Yes, back in the old days, sometimes groups of 4, 5, and 6 year olds were running around loose and feral in semi-suburban areas that included large vacant lots, wooded acreage, old barns, and abandoned chicken houses. Some of the older kids had BB guns. We all had bicycles (some with training wheels), and we traveled faster than we could have walking. About the closest most people today will ever get to young living experiences like that would be to watch the ancient “Our Gang” movies or “Little Rascals”. You’d be seeing groups of children moving about on their own with no adults watching or in control.
We played our own games that time, and with a few of our games, we all figured out at around age 5 and up what the differences were between the sexes and what sex each of us was. And us boyz also had our own exclusive clubs and games that excluded any girlz. Were the girls *that* interested in us? Not exactly. They (girls) also had their favorite activities and games that didn’t include bicycle wrecks, getting stung by wasps, fighting and throwing dirt clods and rotten apples at each other etc. Leave kids alone and they’ll come by it all naturally. They won’t be confused about their sexual identity or about who they are.
The woke culture is the final end result of an idiotic suburban lifestyle that treats all children everywhere as prisoners under constant 24 hour adult watch. Every single goddamn thing a child does has to be controlled or managed by an adult. And so your society loses contact with reality.
But reality will eventually win. Suburbia will fail in such a catastrophic way that the survivors will all agree among themselves to never again construct such an absurd syphillization.
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