KGO TV ran a major feature story about the folly of the Willits bypass on their evening news Friday night. Bypass opponents are thrilled by the blunt tone of the high-profile report which made the simple point that the entire project is a Giant Waste of Money. Here’s the transcript of the show from the KGO-TV website:
"If you live in the Bay Area, you know how bad traffic can be. There are thousands of cars backed up in the same spots day after day. Many of those communities could make good use of $200 million of taxpayer money to improve their highways. Instead, that money is going north to a little town where traffic is actually going down.
There have been angry protests, tree sitters, and senior citizens begging to be arrested over this issue. It is happening in the normally quiet town of Willits where residents are at odds over a massive highway bypass that will cost at least $210 million.
“It's insane to put this much money into a project that isn't necessary,” said one protester.
Willits is 135 miles north of San Francisco on Highway 101. It is the major route through Mendocino County and north to Eureka. Just south of Willits, Highway 101 is a four-lane freeway, but when it comes into town 101 turns into Main Street with five traffic lights. So Caltrans wants to build a freeway to bypass Willits.
“To improve inter-regional traffic along 101. 101 is a very important corridor for commerce and for just people going on vacation,” said Phil Frisbie, a Caltrans spokesman.
After two decades of planning, Caltrans is starting to cut trees and put up fences around the construction area. The plan calls a four-lane freeway six-miles long. Only two lanes will be built in the first phase, but crews will clear a roadbed wide enough for four lanes. Environmentalists are suing saying a much smaller project could do the job with less damage.
“It's going to involve cutting down 100-year-old oak trees, filling in acres and acres of wetlands, endangering threatened salmon and steelhead,” said Aruna Prabhala, an environmental attorney.
The impact will be so significant Caltrans is required to do $50 million worth of environmental improvements to compensate. An online video shows their plan and Caltrans is standing by it. The case goes to trial next month.
In the meantime, critics are asking a more basic question: does Willits even need a bypass? Caltrans says yes and they've already got most of the money for the first phase.
“The actual construction costs, about $136 million, are funded by California’s voter approved Proposition 1-B which is designed for congestion relief,” said Frisbie.
That bond money is going to Willits, but it could go to any congested traffic area around the state. It will be paid back with your tax dollars, including interest. So what will you actually be getting for your money?
The major problem area is the south end of Willits where traffic often backs up. Thirteen years ago Caltrans projected traffic would increase, but their own figures show traffic has actually gone down. Even so, Frisbie told us via Skype they still need a four lane freeway.
“To make sure we weren't building a project that was going to be basically obsolete in 20 years,” said Frisbie.
We asked to see the new growth numbers that justify their findings, but Caltrans could not produce them. They do have documents that show about 70% of the traffic at the south end of town is local. That means most of the cars stuck in traffic there would not even use the bypass.
To get an idea of who would drive on the bypass, we took a look at photos from Caltrans' traffic cameras on 101 north of town. Caltrans data shows most of the vehicles on that part of 101 are driving through Willits, so the level of traffic there is closer to the level of traffic that might be expected on the bypass. The photos are taken once an hour. We recorded them for a week. Many showed no cars at all, or just one or two vehicles. But Caltrans says it's hard to get a true understanding of traffic with still pictures.
“Especially on a two-lane facility because traffic tends to get bunched up behind slow moving vehicles,” said Frisbie.
Actually. we did see that — once. Many locals told us these photos are a good indicator of traffic most days.
“We're paving paradise and putting up an empty concrete freeway,” said Willits City Councilmember Madge Strong.
Plenty of people in Willits do want the bypass, including City Councilmember Bruce Burton, owner of a local saw mill.
“It's not the perfect project, but it will be a big improvement to the safety of downtown,” said Burton.
But opponents don't plan to give up.
“You have a lot of congestion in the Bay Area that you could probably use the money from this bypass to fix,” said Willits resident Naomi Wagner. (Written and produced by Jennifer Olney.)
COMMENTING ON the KGO TV story on the Coast Listserve, Supervisor Dan Hamburg said, “I was told by a good source that one of the main reasons for the outrageous amount of spending on the Willits Bypass was that the California Transportation Commission felt that northern California was ‘owed’ a big ticket item. In my opinion (and presumably that of Supervisor Gjerde), we could certainly have done without it. The damage to the environment of Little Lake Valley will be irreparable.”
THE WILLITS NEWS recently posted a picture of a Caltrans truck (or a Caltrans bypass contractor’s truck) with the caption: “Testing, testing,” followed by “This drill rig was boring test holes Thursday (May 9) in the area north of Hearst-Willits Road. CalTrans is expected to begin pile-driving in six test areas along the bypass corridor starting as early as next Wednesday and completing tests within two weeks, according to CalTrans spokesman Phil Frisbie.)
TESTING? Why? According to Caltrans own bypass plans and bid package documents, the ground upon which the massive project will rest has been tested to death by professional geologists. The results always read the same. "Gravelly silt,” followed by “gravelly clay with sand,” then “sandy clay,” “Clayey sand with gravel,” “clayey gravel with sand,” “clay (firm to very stiff),” “Clayey sand with gravel,” “clayey gravel with sand,” “sandy clay with gravel,” “clay with sand,” “clay with sand and gravel,” and so on.
THIS IS THE “GROUND” that the bypass will be built on. About two miles in the middle will be on elevated pylons sunk about five feet into this silt, clay, sand, and gravel. Over which 18 wheelers will bounce along at freeway speeds.
SO NOW they’re testing again. Ring a ding ding go the alarm bells. They don’t trust the prior tests? Or they weren’t complete enough? Or the contractor is doing their own? Whichever “reason” they may have for doing this again is yet more proof that the ground under the bypass is going to settle; Caltrans makes that quite clear. The question is how much and where? And guess what happens when settling occurs after the bypass is built? (Hint: it’s expensive.)
THE THREE ARRESTS Monday at the Willits Bypass included Ellen Faulkner, 73, of Redwood Valley who has now been arrested four times at the Bypass; Robert Chevalier, 68, presently of Willits; and Sara Grusky, 57, of Willits who have also been arrested several times at the site's south end. Chevalier chained himself to an excavator Monday and had to be cut free before he was packed off to the County Jail. The three arrest machines were among a small group of people who walked onto the site carrying a banner which read: “Caltrans: Hands Off Our Little Lake Valley!”
A CALLER REMINDS us that there was (of course) a Northcoast connection between the Guatamalan dictator, Rios Montt, freshly convicted of crimes against humanity, and Eureka. Steve Talbot, the PBS filmmaker, and the same guy who made the definitive Who Bombed Judi Bari for KQED, is recalled in Hank Sims' 2012 story on the Eureka-Rios Mont connection: "Almost 30 years after the end of his brutal military reign, 85-year-old Efraín Ríos Montt will appear in a Guatemala City court tomorrow to answer charges that he ordered the genocide of tens of thousands of his countrymen of Mayan descent during his year-and-a-half long tenure as dictator of that country. (Coverage: Los Angeles Times, New York Times, The Guardian.) The court case begins less than a week after Ríos Montt lost the immunity from prosecution that he enjoyed as a state official. After being deposed in a coup in 1983, Ríos Montt embarked on a semi-legitimate political career that culminated in a failed presidential bid in 2003 and eventual election to the legislature in 2007. Sometimes noted in the current round of coverage is the fact that Ríos Montt is an ordained minister with the Iglesia del Verbo (Church of the Word). This is a Latin American offshoot of the Eureka-based Gospel Outreach, a Christian denomination that has its roots in the old Lighthouse Ranch Jesus commune on Table Bluff. (Eureka) But Ríos Montt was much more than a casual member of the church. In 1974, the School of the Americas-trained military officer lost a disputed presidential election. Shortly afterward, he left Catholicism and found his way to California, where he hooked up with Gospel Outreach founder and spiritual leader Jim Durkin. In Unfinished Conquest: The Guatemalan Tragedy, a 1995 history of the Guatemalan civil wars by journalists Victor Perera and Daniel Chauche, the authors write that “Ríos Montt is fond of boasting that he purged his soul of old grudges by cleaning toilets in the Eureka-based [Gospel Outreach] mission.” When he returned to Guatemala, Gospel Outreach went with him. Durkin remained his spiritual advisor before, during and after the 1982 coup in which he gained power. As recounted in this Peter Schrag column from 1983 — well after Montt had ramped up the murder of indigenous citizens — researchers from The Nation magazine showed that Gospel Outreach promoted Montt’s cause, raising money among its growing organization to promote their church member as a bastion against the spread of Communism in Latin America. Church leaders were promoted to high governmental positions. A few years after Montt was thrown out for the first time, a documentary by Bay Area filmmakers Steve Talbot and Elizabeth Farnsworth, showed that the church acted as the good cop to Montt’s bad in the infamous “Beans and Bullets” program, in which hundreds of indigenous villages were razed. These days, Gospel Outreach has an open compound — a large church, plus several homes — just off Harris Avenue, about halfway between Safeway and Redwood Acres.
ACCORDING TO THE ASSOCIATED PRESS, the Justice Department secretly obtained two months of telephone records of reporters and editors for The Associated Press in what the news cooperative's top executive called a "massive and unprecedented intrusion" into how news organizations gather the news. The records obtained by the Justice Department listed outgoing calls for the work and personal phone numbers of individual reporters, for general AP office numbers in New York, Washington and Hartford, Conn., and for the main number for the AP in the House of Representatives press gallery, according to attorneys for the AP.
ON MONDAY, AP President and Chief Executive Officer Gary Pruitt said the government sought and obtained information far beyond anything that could be justified by any specific investigation. He demanded the return of the phone records and destruction of all copies. "There can be no possible justification for such an overbroad collection of the telephone communications of The Associated Press and its reporters. These records potentially reveal communications with confidential sources across all of the newsgathering activities undertaken by the AP during a two-month period, provide a road map to AP's newsgathering operations and disclose information about AP's activities and operations that the government has no conceivable right to know," Pruitt said.
WHY THE JUSTICE DEPARTMENT would be busting in on AP borders on the bizarre. AP? What's next, all-out surveillance of the Press Democrat? Senior Centers? There are now so many so-called intelligence agencies "keeping us from harm's way" they've become as large a menace to the freedoms of our fine, fat people as our alleged enemies.
FOR YOUR NO SHAME FILES. Darryl Cherney has broadcast this pathetic (and false) appeal, an appeal that leaves out the fact that he said his hagiographic movie was packing them in and not only packing them in but was up for an Academy Award. The appeal also ignores the fact that Cherney owns two valuable pieces of property in Humboldt County and he won nearly a million dollars in his successful libel suit. The guy's loaded. Anybody who sends him money is even a bigger sap than the cult-brains who believe his phony Bari narrative.
“DARRYL CHERNEY/In Memory Of Judi Bari — Who Bombed Judi Bari? is broke & has $5000 of upcoming expenses — music licensing, closed captioning, etc. in prep for digital, Netflix. etc. DVD's are out and you can buy a signed one for $20 or a t-shirt or just make a nice donation through our paypal or via regular mail. And encourage libraries and schools to buy it! Thanks for your support.”
COMMENT OF THE DAY: "There is one thing that we know for sure in this strange period when bankers have tried to manage reality in the absence of truth: that advanced industrial-technological economies designed to run on $20-a-barrel oil can't run on $100-a-barrel oil, and that is why the US economy was subject to financialization in the first place — to offset declining productive activity by an attempt to get something for nothing. Notice that this macro-trend coincided exactly with the rise of legalized gambling all over America. That is how the idea that you could get something for nothing got to be normal. The world is about to find out that you really can't get something for nothing. It will be a harsh lesson." — James Kunstler
LAKES MENDOCINO AND SONOMA are on high alert for mussels, the invasive, destructive type, which, left unsuppressed can totally gum up the water works by clustering in such numbers at crucial points in a given system that water flow is cut. The tiny beasts are steadily making their way north and have been discovered in harmful infestations in San Benito County. Specially trained dogs can sniff them out for early eradication, and it's a labrador that will be doing the sniffing this summer at Lake Mendocino and Lake Sonoma.
LESS THAN A YEAR after giving their popular (and competent) CEO Ray Hino the boot, seemingly for Hino's valiant efforts in trying to avoid bankruptcy, the Coast Hospital Board is now looking for a “permanent replacement” for Hino. Wayne Allen, the Hospital's Chief Financial Officer, took over for Hino and promptly filed for bankruptcy. According to the agenda notice for the Hospital Board’s Wednesday, May 8, meeting, “Closed Personnel Session pursuant to Government Code §54957 to consider interview process/appointment of candidates for the position of permanent CEO of the District.” It will be interesting to see who applies for CEO of Mendocino County's only publicly-owned, a hospital in bankruptcy proceedings. The fear is that all of this is leading to Coast Hospital's absorption by an outside, for-profit chain. Or an in-County for-profit chain like Adventist which, boiled down, means higher profits to the hospital chain and insurance companies, ever higher costs for all of us who periodically need hospital services.
IN OTHER FORT BRAGG news, Heidi Kraut has been elected to the Fort Bragg City Council to replace Dan Gjerde, now a Mendocino County supervisor. Less than a third of FB's registered voters bothered to return their ballots in a special election conducted by mail. Mrs. Kraut garnered 510 votes, runner-up Madeline Melo 406, Derek Hoyle 109. The three candidates were alike on the issues, those being to get development going on the abandoned mill site and the promotion of small business. Liberals generally supported Mrs. Kraut and Mr. Hoyle, Fort Bragg's old guard went for Mrs. Melo, widow of long-time councilman Jere Melo who was murdered by Aaron Bassler two summers ago.
FAMED PHYSICIST Stephen Hawking announced Wednesday that he would not attend a major international conference in Israel in June. Hawking said he was acting to respect a Palestinian plea to boycott contacts with Israeli academics. The University of Cambridge released a statement Wednesday which said that Hawking had told the Israelis last week that he would not be attending “based on advice from Palestinian academics that he should respect the boycott.” The boycott is in protest of Israel's treatment of Palestinians which, we should know by now, has its more contemporary origins in the 1967 war during which Israel captured the Palestinian West Bank, Gaza and east Jerusalem. Since the appropriation of these territories, Israel has settled more than half a million of its citizens in the West Bank and east Jerusalem and has governed the trapped Palestinian populations along the lines of the former South African apartheid state.
PRESIDENT OBAMA seems to approve of an FBI plan that will allow the G-Men to wiretap you over the internet. The internet spy apparatus is among sweeping FBI proposals to overhaul surveillance laws making it easier for the feds to wiretap people communicating via the internet rather than by traditional phone services. Since 2010 the FBI has pushed for a legal mandate requiring companies like Facebook and Google to build into their instant-messaging and other such systems a capacity to comply with wiretap orders. The FBI says tougher laws are necessary to combat threats to US security such as last month's bombing of the Boston Marathon. The White House is currently reviewing a revised version of the FBI’s proposal which focuses on fining companies that do not comply with wiretap orders. Lawyers for the technology sector are warning that the laws will make communications less secure and more open to hackers and that technology innovators may go abroad because of too stringent laws. According to the FBI, the proposal is aimed only at preserving law enforcement officials’ longstanding ability to investigate suspected criminals, spies and terrorists subject to a court’s permission. The new proposal would enable judges to fine communications providers $25,000 a day who fail to comply with FBI requests for access to user's information.
I RECEIVED an indignant call from a person I barely know wanting to know why I wouldn't "friend" him on Facebook or some other cyber-pest the techno-corps have gulled us into believing are somehow necessary to human happiness. Call me old fashioned, but my idea of happiness is silence and a book. I'd unplug altogether if I didn't have to use a computer for my work. "Nothing personal, Bub," I said, "but simply staying on top of my e-mail is kinda like having a telephone that never stops ringing. Seems to me all this electronic stuff is more intrusion than this old boy wants to indulge." The guy seemed mollified, but I'd had to explain myself, explain that it wasn't him I didn't want to "friend," I'd had to explain it was the totality of GizmoLandia I objected to.
ALFREDO LOPEZ says it better in Social Networking and the Death of the Internet: “Social Networking displays information about you as an individual while restraining your ability to contribute information and thinking about the rest of the world. In fact, its structure often makes that contribution more difficult. With Twitter, for example, you have 140 characters to make your statement. How much thinking can you communicate in 140 characters? Twitter feels like a room in which a large number of people are shouting single sentences — a lot of noise, even a few ideas but mainly just individualized statements bereft of context, knowledge or the need to exchange perspectives with anyone. Facebook carries so many one-sentence statements that writing anything longer seems strange and even rude. The incremental ‘take-over’ of the Internet by these programs has one other, even more serious, impact: it’s oppressing people, particularly young people, by repressing their thinking and communication, the very benefits the Web has given us.”
JOHN PILGER on the same subject: “The medley of voices on the internet has dented monopoly media power, though the same monopolies are now consuming the web. Social media are largely introverted, a look-at-me peep show for the digitally besotted.”
OREGONIANS TALK GUNS. This from the front page of the Monday Oregonian, an "occasional" series called Oregonians Talk Guns. These are the words of one Trevor Leejack Francois, 18 yrs. old, of Gresham:
“…I feel powerful with my guns. My dad doesn't like me keeping them in my room, but I can't live without them. I feel lost when they are not with me. We live in a crazy world, and I guess the guns help me feel safe… I think it's important that people who are mentally unstable be kept away from guns, but sometimes you can't control it, you know? No matter what the laws are, you just can't control it."
Any questions? — Jeff Costello
TODD WALTON WRITES: "June is fast approaching when my novel Inside Moves will be reissued by Pharos Editions in a handsome paperback edition with a flattering introduction by the marvelous Sherman Alexie. Simultaneously, and for the first time ever, Inside Moves will be released in all e-book formats (without the Alexie introduction.) Copies may be pre-ordered now at your favorite local bookstore or from online booksellers. Of course I'd love for you to purchase a copy or three (summer reading, early Christmas shopping), but I'd also be most appreciative if you would share this news with a friend or seven and urge your local bookseller to stock some copies. Inside Moves has been out-of-print for over 30 years and will now have a new life for a time. I recently read the book again for the first time in thirty years while making the audio version for Audible, and I was fascinated by this creation from the young me, a me I barely remember. I enjoyed the book immensely and could see why the story caused such a sensation when it first came out in 1978."
SAY YOU NEED A HIP REPLACEMENT. Based on data collected by the federal Heath and Human Services Agency, the average amount that Ukiah Valley Medical Center would charge Medicare would be the highly inflated amount of about $88,000. Medicare, in turn, would pay UVMC about $17,000 baed the crazy payment rates Medicare uses. Then you’d probably have to pay about 20% of that if you were 65 or over (as most hip replacement patients are) and didn’t have MediGap insurance, or about $3,400. By comparison, the same procedure at Santa Rosa Memorial would be about $207,000 for which Medicare would pay $30,000. In fact, it looks like Ukiah Valley’s charges on most of the procedures in the HHS report are substantially less than for hospitals to our immediate south in Sonoma and Marin Counties. Treatment for poisoning and toxic effects of drugs ran from a nominal charge of about $15k at Ukiah Valley Medical Center to about $40k at Marin General Hospital. Medicare ended up paying an average of $4,800 to Ukiah Valley and about $11k to Marin General, according to the data.
BUT SUCH COMPARISONS don’t mean much, because you can’t effectively shop for emergency procedures such as heart attacks, strokes, and poisonings (although you probably could shop for hip replacements). In addition, the level of rip-off also depends on other things such as “the market,” overhead, the negotiating ability of the hospital with both Medicare and their suppliers, whether the procedure is an assembly line type operation or a specialty at a given hospital, length of in-hospital stay (we tend to think UVMC goes to great lengths to push you out the front door as quickly as possible), etc. At present we haven’t been able to find the comparative pricing data for Coast Hospital in Fort Bragg. But stay tuned.
DOGGED INVESTIGATIONS by Frank Hartzell of the Fort Bragg Advocate reveal that a mega-bucks Florida man named Jeff Greene has bought and will re-open the Heritage House, the once glorious inn just south of Mendocino. In anticipation of his restoration effort, Greene has purchased a liquor license owned by the Carvajal family of Point Arena who’d operated the Arena Cove Bar and Grill at the Point Arena Pier.
ACCORDING TO HARTZELL, “parties unknown paid $8 million for six parcels of Heritage House property on March 27, 2012, county records say, then another $470,000 to add a new parcel next door.” Those parties unknown seem to consist solely of Greene. According to its website, Heritage House will reopen this summer.
JODEAN ‘JOE’ MAYBERRY, former Fort Bragg Police chief, has died at the age of 85. Born in Acme, Texas, Mayberry grew up in Willows and returned to Willows when he retired as Fort Bragg’s chief. Scott Mayberry, a veteran policeman who worked in other areas of the state prior to returning to Fort Bragg to succeed his father as the town’s chief, has held the position for several years now.
JOE MAYBERRY never got the credit he deserved for his department’s excellent work on the Fort Bragg Fires of 1987, during which, in one spectacular night of brazen arsons, the Piedmont Hotel, Ten Mile Justice Court and the Fort Bragg Library went up in flames. There were several related arson fires prior to these committed by the same men, which also were never solved. Mayberry’s officers knew within days who’d set the fires, and they knew the logistics man for the arsons, and they knew in whose interests the fires were probably set. A small army of FBI and the ATF agents soon shouldered aside the local cops who’d done the basic work on the case, which, as we know, came to naught when then-DA Susan Massini failed to prosecute the responsibles before the statute of limitations ran out. I've always thought it was beyond suspicious that Massini never prosecuted the men responsible for the fires, but convenient amnesia has been a fact of Mendo life for so many years now I'm not surprised the case disappeared.
THE LOGISTICS man for the arsons of '87 was a 400-pound corpse robber from San Mateo named Durrigan. He'd been fired from his San Mateo job retrieving the bodies of the departed when he and some colleagues were caught helping themselves to cash, watches and other items of value no longer needed, the thinking probably went, by the deceased. Durrigan testified against his partners in crime to elude jail time and relocated north to, where else? Mendocino County where he started up a late-night janitorial service that included cocaine distribution and cans of gasoline to men attempting to burn each other out of the restaurant business. I've always enjoyed the image of this busy fat guy driving up and down Fort Bragg's Main Street, his janitorial truck stuffed with dope and pyro-necessities, dropping off dope at this bar, more dope at that bar, cans of gasoline at the back doors of restaurants for the torches. Only in Mendocino County!
OTHER UNPROSECUTED Mendo crimes include the murders of Ukiah’s Susan Keegan and Fort Bragg’s Katlyn Long, and the car bombing of the late Judi Bari, an attack that abbreviated Bari’s life. Keegan’s death has been officially declared a homicide, a homicide that occurred with one other person in the home at the time — Dr. Keegan. Katlyn Long’s killer, a well-connected young Fort Bragg man named Matson who has not only not been arrested, let alone charged, he’s never even been questioned by the police. The Bari case can be resolved by existing dna evidence but local authority, oblivious from the beginnings of the 1990 event, and federal authorities, specifically the FBI, announced years ago that since “no one” would talk to them, they were giving up. The primary suspect in the attack on Bari remains Mike Sweeney, a self-reinvented Maoist now functioning as Mendocino County's top garbage bureaucrat, Mendocino County where everyone is whatever they say they are, and history starts all over again every morning.
MENDOCINO COUNTY’S AIDS/Viral Hepatitis Network says about 1 in 12 residents of the County suffer from infectious Hepatitis C, which is ordinarily transmitted blood-to-blood via needle sharing among dopers. If that statistic is true, Mendocino County has just about the highest Hep C infection rate in the state.
A HUGE MANHUNT has commenced and, as of late Tuesday continues, on the Lost Coast near Petrolia for Shane Miller, 45, of Shingletown, Shasta County. Miller shot and killed his wife and two little girls on Tuesday and fled west to the Mattole Valley where his Dodge truck was subsequently discovered. The fugitive apparently is familiar with the Lost Coast from his days as a marijuana producer. Some 60 law enforcement personnel from a variety of local police departments led by the HumCo Sheriff's Department reinforced by police from the Shasta County Sheriff’s Office and the US Marshal’s Service from the North Coast and Sacramento offices, are on the hunt for Miller. Sheriff Downey of Humboldt County said the 2011 Mendocino County manhunt for suspected killer Aaron Bassler is very much on his mind. In each case, the suspect — assumed to be armed and very dangerous — was intimately familiar with the backwoods in which he took shelter. Downey, however, pointed out that the mostly uninhabited Lost Coast is much larger than the Jackson State Forest region where Bassler eluded police for a month before being shot and killed by a Sacramento swat team.
FROM THE HUMCO Sheriff: "The search for Shane Franklin Miller continues today (05-13-2013). Search efforts continue in the King Range Area by SWAT members from several law enforcement agencies. The area where Miller’s vehicle was located was searched extensively over the weekend with no info gathered to direct law enforcement to a specific area.
The Mendocino Sheriff’s Office has dedicated a 12 member SWAT Team to assist for the search of Miller, who arrived early this morning. SWAT members will continue to search the King Range Conservation Area by foot with the assistance of air assets (helicopters) from the California Highway Patrol and the Kern County Sheriff’s Office. Ground search efforts will also be expanded today to include door to door residential searches. Enforcement actions during these door to door searches are limited to the apprehension of the triple homicide suspect, Shane Miller. Area schools remain open with a law enforcement presence near by. Fixed roadway check points (north and south) of the search area remain in place. There remains a staffing level of over seventy (70) law enforcement officers in the Petrolia/King Range area. Twelve (12) United States Marshals are expected to arrive at the search area by Tuesday (05-14-2013) to compliment the twelve (12) United States Marshals that are currently at the search area. A Community Meeting was held on Sunday (05-12-2013) at the Petrolia Community Center, where representatives from the Shasta County Sheriff’s Office and Humboldt County Sheriff’s Office answered questions and addressed concerns from the community. The meeting was well attended and lasted for two (2) hours. A second Community Meeting is scheduled at the Honeydew School on Wednesday May 15, 2013 at 5:00 PM. Detectives and Investigators from the Humboldt County Sheriff’s Office and Shasta County Sheriff’s Office continue to work together in an attempt to uncover information that might lead to the location of Miller. Anyone who witnesses any suspicious behavior or anything that appears to be out of the ordinary, is encouraged to call the Humboldt County Sheriff’s Office at 707-445-7251, or 911 in an emergency. The King Range remains closed to the public, a temporary closure instituted by the Bureau of Land Management, until further notice.
MORON ALERT! An AP story claims there is growing concern among health professionals that Whip-Its — small canisters filled with nitrous oxide (intended as whip cream canister refills) that can be used as a recreational drug — are making a comeback among teenagers and young adults across the country. "What makes them really popular is they're easily accessible," said William Oswald, founder of the Summit Malibu drug treatment center. "You can get them at a head shop, you can get it out of a whipped cream bottle."
THE MANHUNT for Shane Miller continued Friday. As of late Friday afternoon there had been no reported sightings of the Shasta County man who shot and killed his wife and two young daughters Tuesday and fled to the Mattole Valley where his Dodge truck was found Wednesday. There are some 50 police, from a range of agencies, presently in the Mattole looking for Miller who, it is presumed, has disappeared in the wild vastness of the King Range and what is called the Lost Coast. Miller, 45, grew up in Humboldt County where he’d grown marijuana in the Petrolia area.
IN 2002, MILLER was arrested and charged in San Francisco with making and selling marijuana for distribution, being a felon in possession of a firearm, possessing a machine gun and money laundering. He pleaded guilty to being a felon in possession of a gun and was sentenced to three years and 10 months in state prison. He was released in May 2007, according to the federal Bureau of Prisons.
SURE ENOUGH,
right here in Ukiah…
"On April 25th at about 5:30 PM Ukiah Police Officers were conducting patrol in the WalMart parking lot, 1155 Airport Park Boulevard, due to repeated problems with subjects drinking alcohol, fighting, panhandling, and failing to properly control their animals. An officer observed 23 year old Amanda Theresa Northrup, of Grass Valley, standing in the open driver’s door of her parked vehicle.
There were several subjects standing and seated in the vicinity, and there was a “boom box” playing loud music atop the vehicle. Upon seeing the approaching officer, Northrup quickly placed something onto the driver’s seat of the vehicle, closed the door and stepped away slightly. Suspecting Northrup had tried to conceal something the officer looked into the vehicle and saw an open box of nitrous oxide containers, known as “whip-its”, on the seat and a device used for inhaling the gas, known as a “cracker”. Because there was a vicious dog inside the vehicle the officer asked Northrup to retrieve items, which she did. The officer determined there was a balloon connected to the cracker, and that some of the subjects in the vicinity had been openly inhaling nitrous oxide gas from the “whip-its” to experience a temporary “high”. Northrup was arrested for possessing nitrous oxide gas with the intent to inhale." (— Ukiah Police Department Press Release)
MANBEATER OF THE WEEK: Monica Michelle Valdez.Ms. Valdez was arrested in Ukiah last week for assault on her sig other. Her height is listed as 2 feet and an inch, which, if it isn't a typo, means our Mendo Man Beaters are getting smaller and our wimps are getting bigger.
THERE ARE GOOD JOBS OUT THERE, but you have to pass a drug test, a reader writes:
"I took a trip to Oregon in the middle of last month with my 17 year old son to visit Oregon State. We also toured a couple of mills. The mills, a Boise Cascade plywood-veneer operation in Medford and a traditional saw mill in Monroe, were both worth the trip.
The most striking aspect of the mill tours was how much the work place has changed in the last 20 years. What we are seeing in the workplace, is not a drug and alcohol free environment, but a drug and alcohol intolerant environment. This is not like it was 30 years ago, when people worked at the GP mill in Fort Bragg while under the influence of alcohol, pot, or crank. Drug and alcohol use at work was against the rules then, but the rules were broken with few repercussions. It is the way it was.
The Boise mill requires a drug test for new hires which includes a hair sample. The general manager, an impressive young guy who grew up just outside of Manhattan, New York, explained Boise is hiring. The need workers. The starting pay is $13 an hour, plus medical, dental, and an automatic 9% put into a 401k. Requirements? Show up, be ready to work, and pass the drug test. Routinely, Boise will start with 75 people who are interested in being hired. After explaining to everyone about the drug test, making the appointment to take the drug test, and the results of the drug test; the 75 potential new hires are down to 25. These are potential hires that need nothing more than a high school diploma and a willingness to work. It was also explained that the chip bins were overflowing and there were piles of chips next to the bins, because the trucking company that hauls the chips is six drivers short. Why? Because the trucking company can’t find drivers who can pass a drug test.
The other mill we visited, in Monroe, was a much smaller operation that has successfully positioned itself in the specialty market of doug fir beams. They hire people with the intent of keeping people for the long term. The long time forester for the company explained that people don’t get fired or laid off from the company, unless they fail a random drug test.
The lesson in all this is there are opportunities out there for young Americans. But drug use in incompatible with employment. The military is where this started, after the Vietnam War. Drug and alcohol intolerance has spread in the American work place. There is good reason for this too. In a work environment where people can easily hurt themselves and others, a sharp mind is a requirement. The cost of workplace accidents is too high.
It has also occurred to me that the “divide” in America is being defined by those who have substance use issues and those who do not. I also expect drug and alcohol intolerance to increasingly spread in the American work environment. We might see vocational schools start to require drug testing as well. And eventually drug testing will spread to welfare recipients, the working public will demand it. How many people in Detroit, Michigan who are not working could pass a drug test to work in an automobile factory?
But where are our schools on this? A significant portion of my son's friends are substance users. Are they aware of the doors in their futures that are closed as a result of this? I do not think so. The schools talk about the health affects of abuse, but not the loss of opportunity from use.
My oldest son is in the Air Force, and I remember his recruiter asking him if he smoked pot. My son said, “no.” The recruiter reminded him, “remember if you are using drugs, eventually you will be caught,” and then it is an automatic discharge. To some extent or another, this is the way it is going to be in America.
And how is Boise in Medford doing as far as accidents go? They have not had a lost time accident in six years. This is in a work environment that is dynamic and dangerous. A sharp mind is a requirement."
THE GEOGRAPHY OF HATE – a cartographical collection of every geotagged tweet in the continental US between June 2012 and April 2013 in which the words "chink," "gook," "nigger," "wetback," "spic," "dyke" "fag," "homo," "queer" or "cripple" was used in an explicitly negative way. The Racist Map of America: Tweets analyzed for offensive keywords reveal the most bigoted parts of the US and which people are the most hated. The Geography of Hate project was created by cartography students at Humboldt State University who analyzed 150,000 tweets containing hate words sent between June 2012-April 2013. They looked at usage of 10 slurs in three categories: racist, homophobic and disability. Use of offensive term nigger was not concentrated in any single region, but had pockets of concentration in Iowa and Indiana. Racism, homophobia and general intolerance are not unique to any particular region of the US — that is the conclusion that California college students have reached after mapping out hate speech based on Twitter posts. After processing the data aggregated by the DOLLY Project, the team comprised of three students in Dr Monica Stephens’ advance cartography class produced an interactive map as part of the project. They avoided the pitfall of an computer algorithm automatically classifying a tweet as negative if it contains a “hate word” by having students read the entirety of the message for context before deciding if is tweet is in fact hateful. Only words unequivocally deemed as “hate speech” were used in the creation of the map. That way, a phrase like “dykes on bikes,” for example, was left out of the data used in the project because it referred to a gay pride event in San Francisco. To produce the map, all tweets containing each “hate word” were aggregated to the county level and normalized by the total Twitter traffic in each county. Where there is a larger proportion of negative tweets referencing a particular “hate word” the region appears red on the map; where the proportion is moderate, the word was used less and appears a pale blue on the map. Areas without shading indicate places that have a lower proportion of negative tweets relative to the national average. Researchers discovered 41,306 tweets containing the word “n*****,” 95,123 referenced “homo,” among other terms. Tweets that included the slur “n*****” used for African-Americans were not concentrated in any single region in the US; instead, there are a number of pockets of concentration, including East Iowa, where 31 users sent out 41 tweets referencing the word, and Fountain, Indiana, where there were 22 tweets containing the slur. Perhaps the most interesting concentration comes for references to “wetback” — a derogatory term used for illegal Mexican immigrants. Most tweets containing the offensive term came from several parts of Texas, which surprisingly are not even close to the Mexican-American border. Under the category of racism, besides “n*****” and “wetback” students also looked at the usage of such slurs as “chink” and “gook” refering to Chinese and Koreans, respectively, and “spic,” which is an offensive term for Hispanics. The word “chink” was concentrated in Central Minnesota, where 19 users referenced the slurs in a total of 23 tweets.
LAKE COUNTY IS SINKING: Terrain continues to slide beneath some two-dozen houses in the small hillside community of Lakeside Heights. The landslide, which began in late March, has damaged five homes so severely they are too dangerous to live in, while two of those homes are beyond repair and must be torn down. The unstable terrain has led to the evacuation of eight homes and the notice of imminent evacuation of another ten. The Lake County Board of Supervisors officially declared the site a local emergency on April 16. The damage caused by the landslide is forcing the local government to move water and sewer lines, which could cost as much as $500,000, a county supervisor told The Press Democrat. Lake County was shaped by earthquake fault movement and volcanic explosions which helped create the Coast Ranges of California. Many natural hot springs and geysers receded underground in the early 1900s and have since been tapped for geothermal power. Officials say water that has bubbled up to the surface is playing a role in the collapse of the hillside subdivision. One report released by the Lake County government in early April cited a leak in a homeowner's irrigation line as a possible cause for water saturation along the hillside. The irrigation line was shut off to prevent further damage. “Don't do half of the investigation,” Fred Johnson, a local doctor, told state and county officials at a town meeting on April 29, as he held them responsible for finding the underlying cause of the problem. Some residents say the house-sinking dilemma may additionally be due to soil instability, while others are blaming it on “substandard work” by the developers that built the collapsing homes there. The homes in Lakeside that are currently on the market were built as early as 1900 and as late as 2013. Others in Lakeside Heights are voicing fears of temporary evacuations and permanent loss of their houses, which are valued between $200,000 and $250,000, without relief of their monthly mortgage payments. For now, the homeowners impacted by the landslide are being left to absorb their relocation and damage costs without a clear cause to place the blame on. One resident told the Press Democrat that his insurance company said nothing could be done until the source of the problem was determined.
SATURDAY, the sunny 11th of May, a classically trained quartet of trombone players consisting of two women and two men, played La Renaissance at the Post and Powell entrance to Union Square. They were soon drowned out by a Fulan Gong parade complete with a police escort, a hundred piece marching band, several hundred orange-t-shirted Chinese, and a float with a tiny old lady in an even tinier cage next to a bloody, wide awake man on an operating table as a maniacal communist surgeon, a placard informed us, removed his organs for resale. The Chinese have been accused of “organ harvesting” the marketable parts of the many people they execute every year, a grisly practice if true but, on the other hand, it can be argued, a kind of ultimate recycling that gives life to more deserving persons if, of course, you approve of China's promiscuous use of the death penalty. Zippo-bang. A bullet in the back of the head and your kidney is off to India, your lungs to Singapore, your heart to Kuala Lumpur, your spirit to the grieving old folks at home, all for fifty grand hard currency! About a thousand people were participating in the Falun Dafa parade, including a few goofy-looking round-eyes who, this being San Francisco on a sunny Saturday noon, probably just grabbed an orange shirt and joined in. It was World Falun Dafa Day while in Union Square proper it was Celebrate Taiwan, with an energetic dance troupe resembling the Warrior Girls gymnastically exercising on the big stage. Young Taiwanese walked around with signs reading, "Ask Me Anything." Excuse me, Miss, but isn't Taiwan the place where Chiang Kai-shek fled with all the killers and crooks after the Chinese Revolution? No point in burdening the young on a nice day, I thought, looking up at the stately old St. Francis Hotel, summoning up vague childhood recollections of a time when all the women you saw in Union Square wore hats and gloves and the men suits and fedoras. The Square was packed, the downtown was packed and, sartorially considered, it could have been a day at the beach. Back out on Post Street, a banner read, “Falun Dafa is great.” No exclamation point. Another banner summed up the movement's principles, “Truthfulness, Benevolence, Forbearance.” Nothing to argue with there, but rarely practiced anywhere I know of. An elaborate float passed by with attractive young women sitting on budding flowers looking, at a minimum, benevolent at the max like cult bait. It’s all pretty vague in a kind of fuzzy Buddhist or at least Buddhist-like version of, “Dude, Whatever.” The founder lives in SF. He's worshipped as a kind of god, always the tip off that whatever it is parading past in uniforms is likely headed to malevolence. The general idea of Falun Gong, whatever it is, seems to resonate with many Chinese to the point where the motherland has cracked down on it as politically threatening. Of course American Chinese are overwhelmingly hostile to communism, having had bad experiences under The Great Helmsman. But China's insider's only government, with its militarily enforced To Get Rich Is Glorious economic strategy, sends its children to Harvard as its millionaires buy property all over San Francisco and California. It seems a sign of weakness that mighty China would crack down on a Buddhist cult.
DOWN THE STREET at Powell and Market a woman was passed out on the sidewalk an inconvenient four feet from The Gap's front door, meaning shoppers exiting the store had to step around her, and would have stepped over the casualty but for a red-jacketed SF ambassador who was standing guard over her, explaining to passersby, the minority concerned enough to ask, “The ambulance is on the way.” I could see the woman's yellow emergency hospital wrist band, meaning she'd gotten out, gotten drunk and here she was again, a guess soon confirmed by a scruffy white guy selling the Street Sheet. “They oughta just prop her up over there; she's gonna wake up. She does this bullshit all the time.” A black cop soon arrived, strolled over to the street casualty where he pulled on a pair of bright blue plastic protective gloves, before jostling the downed woman into a couple of groans. She stirred, rolled over and continued sleeping as a Fire Department truck rolled up and three uniformed fat guys waddled over to have a look while the crew's one lean guy took her pulse prior to all of them loading her on to a gurney and packing her into a King's Ambulance. The basic Frisco policy, which is the same as Mendo's unwritten policy, which is the same as America's unwritten policy, is you can't conk out or go nuts where it's bad for business. This lady was conked out between The Gap and the cable car turnaround, which, if simply ignored, would be bad for the cash registers. Farther down Market in either direction no one would care.
IN OTHER CITY rambles, I packed my bike on the front of Muni's 44 line and debiked at Third and Evans, and from there pedaled on out to Candlestick, now a crumbling, ghostly hulk a few hundred yards west of the most desolate public park in the Bay Area. An inter-racial group of drunks sat at a picnic table as I passed. One of them yelled out, "Goddam man, slow down. You makin' me tired just looking at your gray beard ass." They were the only signs of life, and it's a big park. Not even a shorebird. Back into the Hunter's Point neighborhood, long assumed a no-go zone for palefaces, I find a totally mixed area of black, Asian and Hispanics all the way from Candlestick to the waterfront home of the Giants, the population growing whiter the farther north on Third you go. All the new development between Hunter's Point and the Giants, this so-called South Beach, is awful. Anywhere USA. Stalinist big block architecture, few people, even more desolate than when it was abandoned warehouses and junk-strewn vacant lots. The proposed Warriors Basketball monstrosity — a see-through high rise basketball arena built in the Bay on piers — will plunk itself down just north of the home of the Giants as an eternal eyesore that will eliminate forever another huge view of the Bay. The design resembles a beehive nuclear reactor. And the thing is 14 stories! It's got to be stopped, and why a basketball pavilion has to go on the water remains a total mystery. I went to Warrior's games at the Cow Palace and in what is now called the Bill Graham Auditorium. Basketball fits anywhere except in a viewshed. The Warriors ought to stay in Oakland where they've been faithfully supported for years. But in SF, "progressive" bushwah aside, money has always talked, and anymore it screams.
MENDOCINO SPRING POETRY, Sunday, June 9 — 38th Anniversary of the Mendocino Spring Poetry Celebration at The Hill House in Mendocino on the Coast. This annual event draws poets from the north counties and beyond. All lovers of the lively word are welcome. Two open readings: afternoon and evening. Prepare four minutes for each of the rounds. Noon: sign up and socialize; afternoon reading at 1. Break: enjoy the town, the sea, and the Headlands of the Coast. 6pm: sign up and socialize; evening reading at 7. Refreshments. Music. Open book displays. Contribution requested. All poems considered for broadcast by Dan Roberts on KZYX. (All you poetasters out there, this could be your big chance.) Info: Gordon Black, (707) 937-4107, gblack@mcn.org.
STAN ANDERSON WRITES: "The Mendocino County Republican Central Committee will meet Saturday, May 18, 2013, 10:00 AM – 12:00 Noon at the Little Lumberjack’s Restaurant, 1700 S. Main Street, Willits, CA 95490. For further information contact: Stan Anderson, 707-321-2592. In the meantime, Stan reminds us, we want you, martyred Mendo Republicans, to repeat this mantra (hippie word for prayer): "Stop Hillary. For god's sake, stop her!"
"There is one thing that we know for sure in this strange period when bankers have tried to manage reality in the absence of truth: that advanced industrial-technological economies designed to run on $20-a-barrel oil can't run on $100-a-barrel oil, and that is why the US economy was subject to financialization in the first place — to offset declining productive activity by an attempt to get something for nothing." -JHK
WILLIAM OPHULS, in his bracingly pessimistic book, “Immoderate Greatness: Why Civilizations Fail”, identifies the primary reasons for collapse as: "Ecological Exhaustion, Exponential Growth, Expedited Entropy, Excessive Complexity, Moral Decay and Practical Failure." Ring any bells in your temple of the familiar?
CITY FOLKS with computer probs? The ava recommends Mr. Roger Lin of Smart Computer Service at 3410 Geary, telephone 415 751-1266. Mr. Lin has bailed us out on short notice on several frantic occasions. The guy knows what he's doing, and he makes house calls. Prices quite reasonable.
COUNTRY FOLKS with computer probs? We always steer people to Chuck Wilcher of Comptche. Chuck's bailed us out many times. He's been tending to family matters in the Middle West for the past year, but darned if he didn't respond long distance and instantly to our techno-crisis of just last week which, naturally, occurred on production day. This guy knows his stuff, and we've practically had to beg him to take money for services rendered. Chuck can be reached by e-mail at cwilcher@mcn.org.
Be First to Comment