Mendocino County Today: Friday, June 9, 2023

By AVA News Service on June 9, 2023

SHOWERS AND THUNDERSTORMS will occur during the afternoon hours across interior portions of Northwest California through the weekend. Otherwise, seasonable temperatures will be probable across the region during the next seven days. (NWS)

STEPHEN DUNLAP (Fort Bragg): Our next weather maker is off the Mendocino coast making its way to southern Cal much like our last system for a statewide repeat of this week's performance. A foggy 54F on the coast this Friday morning. Continued fog & clouds with possible clearing for the next week at least. A 20% chance of a shower on Sunday.

Route 20 Storm Clouds On Horizon (Jeff Goll)

PANTHERS GRADUATE

The pre-Covid days were back at the Anderson Valley High School graduation Thursday evening. Families filled the seats, graduates sat on the stage behind elegant draperies, and students and staff ran the 75 minute ceremony to honor the 42 graduates. The crowd was celebratory, respectful, and supportive for the students and their families. We are proud of all that they have become!

I don't have a picture of all of the crowds because I was on stage but...

It was a wonderful week of incredible celebration and joy. There are so many parents and guardians that helped with our ceremonies this week. We are grateful for your time and effort for our students. We are grateful to all the staff members who supported the students in preparing for the ceremonies.

We hope you have a safe and relaxing summer.

Please remember that any family member with a student one year or older in the district may enjoy a breakfast or lunch during summer school even if they are not attending summer school. The State has done a good job of making food security available through our school lunch programs. I would like to thank both cafeteria staffs for their care and work for our students.

Take care,

Louise Simson, Superintendent

Anderson Valley Unified School District

707-684-1017

AVARTS ART SCHOLARSHIPS AWARDED TO TWO AVJ&SHS GRADUATES!

Anderson Valley Arts (AVArts) awarded two Arts Scholarships for Graduating Seniors at the Anderson Valley Junior & Senior High School (AVJ&SHS) June 5th Senior Awards Night. AVArts member Cathleen Micheaels presented the scholarship awards to the two very deserving graduates:

• an award of $500 to Rocio Alvarez-Villegasto support her attendance at Santa Rosa Junior College to study music; and

• an award of $5,000 to Madalayne Zacapa-Lagunasto support her attendance at the University Of California, Berkeley to study art.

AVArts was impressed with Madalayne’s and Rocio’s dedication to making the arts parts of their futures and wishes them both a year ahead full of discovery, creativity and inspiration!

AVArts is a 501(c)3 non-profit made up of volunteer members dedicated to supporting and promoting the arts in Anderson Valley since 1999. The AVArts Arts Scholarships for Graduating Seniors are made possible by the efforts of the volunteer members and the support of local artists, educators and supporters of the arts in Anderson Valley. In addition to scholarship programs, AVArts also supports bringing diverse, quality supplemental arts programs to Anderson Valley schools that would otherwise not be possible. For more information about AVArts and its programs see www.av-arts.org.

Anderson Valley Arts

Karen Altaras, Peggy Dart, Paula Gray, Cathleen Micheaels and Jody Williams

HAVE A FORT BRAGG SENIOR CENTER LUNCH

Editor,

As I ramp up socializing since the darkest hours of COVID, I’ve returned to lunch at the Redwood Coast Senior Center and was recently accepted as a member of the Senior Center’s Board. Lunch was social and fun. Volunteers drove carts with food and drink about the room, serving plates and bowls filled with good food. We had soup, a choice of salad or cottage cheese with fruit, a main course, and dessert. We were also offered our choice of coffee, tea, or milk. All seemed to me more like dinner than lunch.

I remembered again how meaningful, even crucial, complete meals are to anyone and how many seniors in our community truly need the food services offered by the Redwood Coast Senior Center.

I happily touched base with people I had not seen for quite some time. It was evident that friends meet at the Senior Center, sitting at tables for two and more, chatting away as they eat their lunches. People are fed a complete meal in a supportive and familiar environment and socialize if they care to.

The dining room at the Center is open Monday through Friday from 11:30 to 1:30. If you are under sixty, the price is $8; if you are sixty or over, the suggested donation is $5. At this point in my early seventies, sixty years seems young, and I now understand the benefits of being this age, including our community’s Senior Center.

I hope you check out https://www.rcscenter.org/food, look at the lunch calendar and menus, and consider lunch at the Redwood Coast Senior Center!

Linda Rosengarten

Fort Bragg

REDWOOD VALLEY STRUCTURE FIRE VICTIM IDENTIFIED As Pete Sellmer, Leaves Behind Wife & Adult Children; Gofundme Set Up (Danila Sands)

GIMME SHELTER

Hi all,

I'm looking to relocate sometime soon to a different spot in the valley. I've been a faithful teacher at the high school for 8 years now but I am uncertain about my living situation for this upcoming school year. If anyone's aware of some potential places to rent then I am exploring all options now and would appreciate any and all information that people could provide me.

Thanks,

Matt Bullington

mbullington@avpanthers.org

DR. ROBERT WERRA

Dr. Werra was born May 10,1931 and passed June 2, 2023.

Dr. Werra was born, raised and educated in Wisconsin. He served two years in the Navy in Kodiak, Alaska and completed his family practice training in California. He chose to practice in Ukiah in 1962, caring for his patients from cradle to grave. He has served for the Albertinum, Trinity School, local hospitals and medical society for over 50 years.

In addition, he helped start the first Home Healthcare Agency and the first hospice in Mendocino County.

He has written about Lyme Disease, Restless Leg Syndrome and has been a many decades long supporter of Hospice of Ukiah.

He was honored as California Family Physician of the Year in 2005.

Dr. Werra attributed his success to Marlene, his “trophy wife” of 66 years, mother of their four children, office manager, general advisor and best friend. “She is the wind beneath my wings,” he said.

Dr. Werra never worked a day in his life, as he truly loved his work and was a devoted family man. He is survived by Marlene; daughters, Dr. Kathleen Persky and Christine Werra, and sons, Mike and Richard Werra, along with seven beloved grandchildren.

Services will be held June 8 at 11 am at St. Mary's Church, Oak Street, Ukiah. Reception to follow in the Church Hall. In lieu of flowers donations to Hospice of Ukiah , 620 So. Dora Street, Ukiah, CA, would be appreciated.

Arrangements are under the direction of the Eversole Mortuary.

VELMA'S FARM STAND AT FILIGREEN FARM

We are opening the stand back up for the season this weekend! We will be open this Friday from 2-5pm. For fresh produce we will have: kale, chard, beets, cabbage, pac choi, garlic scapes, sprouting cauliflower, broccoli, fennel, hakurei turnips, herbs, and kohlrabi. We will also have dried fruit, tea blends, olive oil, fresh and dried flower bouquets, and some everlasting wreaths available. Plus some delicious flavors of Wilder Kombucha!

All produce is certified biodynamic and organic. Follow us on Instagram for updates @filigreenfarm or email annie@filigreenfarm.com with any questions. We accept cash, credit card, check, and EBT/SNAP (with Market Match)!

SUPERVISOR JOHN HASCHAK

Frontier Days is coming soon. This is a cherished tradition in the community. Preservation of the history of our County is the role of the County Museum. We are fortunate to have the Museum, Roots of Motive Power, and other historical societies in Mendocino County. Connecting the past to the present and into the future benefits all of us in many ways. The Museum will be open on July 4 and on July 1^st there will be lots of interesting and entertaining activities at the Museum as part of the E. Commercial St. Art Walk.

The County budget is balanced. That is the good news. The bad news is that about $7 million of one time only monies have been used to balance it. This is not good when the ongoing costs have been rising due to inflation while the revenue has been down or flat. Proposals to increase revenues (collect all property taxes, short term rental taxes, increase Transient Occupancy Taxes, etc.) as well as cutting costs (decreasing existing contracts with outside consultants, reducing health care costs, eliminating positions) are on the table.

Cannabis revenues are coming in higher than expected. Some of the changes we have made are benefitting the County and cultivators. The County continues to work well with the State in creating a workable program and pathways to annual licensure.

After being inundated with rain and snow this winter, summer is right around the corner. I am waiting for County Counsel to bring forth the water hauling and extraction for commercial purposes draft ordinance. This will go to the Planning Commission for review. Another item is riparian protections. The County has the capacity to generate maps with areas of rivers, creeks, and streams and wetlands. What has been missing is guidance of appropriate setbacks from waterways. Even though we have water in abundance right now, we have to be prepared for the next drought.

My monthly table talk is on Thursday, June 8, at 10:00 at the Brickhouse Coffee in Willits. Please reach out to me at haschakj@mendocinocounty.org or 707-972-4214.

SIERRA NEVADA WORLD MUSIC FESTIVAL is NEXT WEEKEND, with 12 hours of sweet reggae and world music each day. We're just 2.5 hours from San Francisco and 3 hours from Sacramento. Come for the day or for the weekend! Purchase tickets now while you can! On site camping low ticket alert! Buy your on site camping now before it sells out: snwmf.com

HOW MENDO CAN BALANCE ITS BUDGET & provide a cost of living raise to its employees — if they were serious

by Mark Scaramella

Several readers have asked us how we would handle the County’s financial deficit. The situation requires a full-court press, not the kinds of timid, inconsequential nibbling the Supervisors talked about at their Tuesday budget meeting.

So here are our bullet points of how to address it:

Revenue Improvements:

• Fix the Teeter Plan so that it returns to being a revenue generator.

• Make the State pay for the Jail Expansion overrun, freeing up millions in borrowed money to replenish the general fund.

• Make the Courts pay for all county impacts that the new courthouse will create.

• Impose an increased bed tax rate on Short Term Rentals.

• Make sure all employee healthcare costs are factored into state and federal grants billings.

* * *

Expense Reductions:

• Do a line by line review of outside lawyers and costs.

• Cut executive salaries and benefits including the Supervisors 10% by either a direct pay cut or an hours cut.

• Eliminate the tourism subsidy.

• Postpone the water agency (which has not proposed any actual water storage of conservation projects anyway.)

• Reduce work/office hours in certain general fund departments.

• Eliminate the expensive labor negotiator lawyers who do nothing but say no anyway.

• Close juvenile hall and join a regional juvenile hall facility.

• Eliminate three of the five unnecessary and redundant dispatch centers and reduce them from 5 to 2 as proposed by former Sheriff Allman years ago. (Mendo has a CHP dispatch operation, a Willits Dispatch operation, a Ukiah/Fort Bragg Dispatch operation, a Sheriff’s Dispatch operation, and a CalFire non-law enforcement dispatch center.)

• Abandon the “giant waste of dollars” (per Supervisor Gjerde) for the never to be implemented Joint Powers Authority for inland ambulances.

* * *

Better Financial Management:

• Nail down the actual dollar amount of budget savings from vacancies department by department for next fiscal year.

• Get monthly reports on the status of tax collection efforts.

• Set up a Budget Task Force to stay on top of these efforts and report on status and success monthly.

* * *

Use Reserves Prudently

And finally, after all those are done, borrow from the General Fund as needed to provide at least a 3% COLA for employees, scaled so that a larger COLA increase goes to non-supervisory line staff.

As of the end of 2022, the General Fund Reserve was reported to be about $28 million, There has only been a half million of that allocated, and only for additional tax collection services/staff.

The General Fund is around $90 million. So the general fund reserve rate is around 31%.

A normal general fund reserve would be 10%-12%. That means there’s around $21 million available if the County ran a conventional reserve percentage.

In Sonoma County they maintain a comfortable 12% reserve and they have a policy that says that when it is used there should be a plan to replenish it over time in the following years. They do not “spend” the reserves without an accompanying replenishment/payback plan.

* * *

Unless and until these measures are implemented, the County will continue its downward spiral of reduced revenues, escalating costs, staff loss, delays and reductions in work output, deteriorating facilities, and overall malaise in local government.

With Mendo’s current cast of unimaginative and lethargic characters — for example, does anyone seriously think that reducing vehicle mileage or turning out the lights earlier will make a noticeable dent in the deficit? — we are not holding our breath.

ED NOTES

EYES ONLY, LOCALS. Marshall Newman writes:

RE: Ray’s Road (in the Editor’s note on OneTaste). I believe Ray’s Road was named for Avon Ray, who founded Ray’s Resort (now River’s Bend Retreat Center) in the 1930s. Avon’s second wife was Leonore Falleri (previously married to Frank Falleri) which may be where the confusion started.

Avon Ray’s first wife was Edna Van Zandt, whose brother Don Van Zandt founded Van Zandt’s Redwood View Resort, also off Ray’s Road.

Bill Kimberlin should be able to shed light on this name issue.

ED REPLY: I'm sure you're correct, Marshall. I'll leave the final word to Mr. Kimberlin. When I knew the Falleris, I assumed Leonore and Frank were a couple and that, if memory serves and it's hit and miss these day, they were together one day when I visited them at what was then Ray's Resort. The highlight of that visit for me was watching Frank feed the catfish he maintained in a pond across the road from the main house, creating an impressive feeding frenzy as what seemed to be a whole school of very big fish that lept high in the water for the chunks of hamburger Frank was tossing them. I have a dimmer memory of Leonore lamenting that her heirs and assignees intended to log the redwoods on the far bank of the Navarro.

DELIVERING BOONVILLE'S beloved weekly this morning, a groovy guy — porkpie hat, pony tail, neatly trimmed gray beard — approached me outside the Navarro Store. “Are you Bruce Anderson?” Most of the time, I replied. “Jesus! I thought you were dead!,” Groovy Guy exclaimed. Looks can be deceiving, I said. “Congratulations,” Groovy Guy said, smiling like he'd said something funny. I stared at him without saying anything. I try to disconcert people I don't like. Give 'em the old passo-aggresso. And it was early. “Well, I gotta go,” he said, like I was detaining him. “Good seeing you.”

BUDWEISER BEER is suffering what the media claim is an effective boycott for their sin of putting a changeling in its advertising, a fundamental mis-read of their market, heavy as that market is on manly men.

But asking around the markets of the Anderson Valley no one at any of the cash registers reported the slightest fall-off in Bud sales.

IF YOU'LL EXCUSE a trite statement of the obvious, but wouldn't you think, in a country of 330 million people, millions of them brilliant, honest and even photogenic, that we could come up with better national candidates for president than the clown crew the Republicans are putting up? The Democrats? They say that President Elder Abuse is good to go for another four years! But look at the Democrat's bullpen. No one. Maybe Newsom, but beyond him? Not a nada one.

LIGHTNING FAILS TO STRIKE TWICE FOR DUI DEFENDANT

Defendant Julayne A. Ringstrom, age 36, of Ukiah was convicted by jury late Wednesday morning of driving a motor vehicle with a blood alcohol .08 or greater, a misdemeanor. This was defendant Ringstrom's second trial on the same charge. The court declared a mistrial in early May when the May jury informed the court that the 12 jurors were hopelessly deadlocked 11 for guilt to 1. The law enforcement agencies responsible for investigating the crime were the Ukiah Police Department and the California Department of Justice crime laboratory. Deputy District Attorney Nathan Mamo is the deputy prosecutor who presented the People's evidence at both the May trial and again this week. Mendocino County Superior Court Judge Carly Dolan was the bench officer who presided over both trials.

MC FIRE SAFE COUNCIL FUNDS LOCAL SAFETY PROJECTS

Neighborhood groups and fire departments receive Micro-Grants for wildfire safety

In fulfillment of its mission to improve wildfire safety throughout the county, the Mendocino County Fire Safe Council (MCFSC) is pleased to announce this year’s Micro-Grant awards.

Micro-Grants of $2,000–8,000 are being given to selected local Fire Departments and affiliated Neighborhood Fire Safe Councils who organized to determine their highest priority risks, and proposed solutions to improve community wildfire safety.

Local organizing is one of our most effective strategies of all for identifying and reducing hazards to our communities. Fueled with a bit of Micro-Grants funding, our local communities can achieve small but key strategic projects and help replace fear and danger in our local communities with proactive planning and action. The PG&E Corporation Foundation agreed, and matched MCFSC’s $50,000 funding, to double the amount available this year.

This year’s Micro-Grants total nearly $104,300 — more than twice as much as last year’s! — to implement 16 projects throughout the county. They will pay for all or part of these inspiring wildfire-safety purchases and projects:

• Anderson Valley Fire Department is purchasing an equipment trailer to store and transport tools and equipment for prescribed burns.

• Black Bart Fire Safe Council is working to clear brush along its roads, to slow wildfire and make evacuation and first-responder access faster and safer.

• Hopland Fire Prevention District is installing water tanks at either side of its service area.

Hulls Valley Fire Safe Council (north of Covelo) is also purchasing a water tank and pump equipment.

• Long Valley Fire Protection District (Laytonville) is providing defensible-space home assessments, to help individual homeowners know how to be best prepared.

• McNab Ranch Fire Safe Council (south of Ukiah) will get new road signs and reflective address signs, after roads were re-named and parcels re-numbered.

• Navarro Fire Safe Council is installing a tank for 10,000 gallons of additional emergency water feeding a new hydrant system.

• Point Arena Fire Safe Council is training Fire Safe Ambassadors, printing outreach materials, and presenting a wildfire-safety component at a community event.

• Redwood Coast Fire Protection District is purchasing a commercial-grade thermal-imaging drone, including certification training for its operators, for uses such as fire detection, scouting rural roads and terrain, and mapping.

• Ridgewood Ranch Volunteer Fire Department (south of Willits) is purchasing and refurbishing a used fire engine.

• South Coast Fire Protection District will purchase Knox Locks and Knox Boxes to facilitate emergency access through locked gates.

• String Creek and Tartar Canyon Fire Safe Council (outside Willits) is installing a water tank.

Westport Fire Safe Council is collaborating with several groups to accomplish roadside clearing and other fuel-reduction projects.

• Whale Gulch Fire Safe Council (North Coast) is focusing on clean-up from winter storms, to clear downed trees and brush encroaching on access roads.

• Wildwood Fire Safe Council (Laytonville) will purchase new water tanks and re-locate existing ones to more accessible locations.

• Yorkville Fire Safe Council received funds in support of the Galbreath Wildlands Preserve’s Prescribed Burn education, outreach and planning project.

Most of the Micro-Grant proposals include an additional match consisting of volunteer time, donations, other funding, or donated supplies or equipment to round out the budget to get more done through cooperative effort from multiple sources. Matching contributions, collaborations with other like-minded groups, and thorough preparation and motivation tended to help the proposals score higher in the ratings.

Where possible, the Mendocino County Fire Safe Council will continue to work with groups whose proposals were not funded, either to strengthen future applications or to help find other ways to achieve their goals. MCFSC strives to assist any local group motivated toward meeting its own locally identified fire-safety needs, and encourages local organizers to ask about projects that require extra assistance or funding.

If your neighborhood was not prepared to participate in this round of funding, now is a good time to start planning for future projects and ideas! MCFSC wants to help your neighborhood become as prepared for wildfire as possible.

Find out how to join or organize a Fire Safe Council in your area by visiting the MCFSC website at https://firesafemendocino.org/ and looking in the “Prepare your Neighborhood” menu tab. Or, if you become an MCFSC member (see the “Join Us” tab), you will receive important updates, alerts and information in MCFSC’s monthly email newsletters, among other benefits.

Funding for MCFSC’s 2023 Micro-Grant Program was supplied in equal parts by a grant from Pacific Gas and Electric Company and matching funds from the Mendocino County Fire Safe Council.

For information on Micro-Grant funding parameters, visit https://firesafemendocino.org/2023-micro-grant/, or contact the Mendocino County Fire Safe Council at 707-462-3662 or admin@firesafemendocino.org.

Scott Cratty <director@firesafemendocino.org>

STEPHEN DUNLAP REPORTS from Noyo Harbor that this beast pulled in on its way north needing 800 gallons of fuel.

ALTHOUGH NOT MUCH CAN shock us regarding Mendocino County news these days, we have to admit that the following paragraph in a lengthy article by the usually cautious Karen Rifkin in Thursday’s Ukiah Daily Journal was, well, shocking:

“The following is from a recent interview with Dennis Crean, concerned citizen; Pinky Kushner, citizen activist; Alan Nicholson, architect and former member of the city’s Design Review Board for over 15 years; and Linda Sanders, former city planning commissioner for 12 years who retired in 2020. … Nicholson has been involved in community input to the Ukiah Valley Area Plan, the Mendocino County General Plan, the Ukiah City General Plan and the zoning code. ‘This project [an ordinary proposal to put a Redwood Credit Union office in the old abandoned Savings Bank building in Pear Tree Center] is of interest to me because it’s right in the middle of a new downtown neighborhood — the development of the $450,000,000 courthouse by the railroad tracks that will significantly change the shape of Ukiah for the future.”

WHATEVER ONE’S OPINION of the Redwood Credit Union proposal (which sounds fine to us), where in the hell did an alleged architect get a number like $450 million for the new courthouse? And why aren’t they up in arms about that, instead of the relatively ordinary proposal by Redwood Credit Union?

CHANGE TO WHAT?

To the Editor:

I am madder than hell!

It's shocking to think that Nicole Daedone and Rachel Cherwitz of One Taste in Philo were allowed to "reinvent" themselves as "chaplains" and ended up leading workshops and writing to inmates in the Mendocino County Jail in a program known as The Unconditional Freedom Project.

Look at them now.

The FBI just announced the arrests of Nicole Daedone and Rachel Cherwitz.. Their arrests are reminiscent of Keith Raniere, Jeffrey Epstein, Harvey Weinstein, to name just a few.

Mendocino County is a moral and ethical sewer. Raw sewerage floats to the top. We have no leadership. No leaders. No visionaries. It all starts at the top.

What Mendocino County does have is public corruption, cronyism, insider politics, incompetence, indifference or just plain ignorance, at the top.

And they are all vastly overpaid. The County CEO, County Counsel, and Ukiah's City Manager have total compensation packages of $350,000 each.

Yes, $350,000!

The County Board of Supervisors each get about $150,000 in pay and benefits.

They all need to be replaced. Vote for change in 2024.

John Sakowicz

Ukiah

NO GOLD IN THESE HERE HILLS

by Katy Tahja

To the average browser looking at a shelf of used books on Western Americana at Grassroots Books in Reno it wasn’t much. A weathered old publication called California Journal of Mines and Geology, Volume 49, October 1953 caught my eye because it featured an article by J.C. O’Brien titled “Mines and Mineral Resources of Mendocino County.” For $3.99 I got 50 pages of information on our mineral resources, big fold-out maps included.

The geologic history of Mendocino County is rather ho-hum: no gold, no silver, mineral claims that produced few results, and yet some citizens just kept digging up rocks. Mineral sales from 1880 to 1950 had earned only $4 million. The big mining money maker was sand and gravel for concrete aggregate used in building and road repair. The second biggest mineral money earner was surprising: natural carbon dioxide gas wells that supplied dry ice manufacturing facilities in Hopland at the Cal Dri Ice Company. The gas was cooled, can-pressed, formed into 10 x 10 x 12 inch cakes, and shipped in refrigerated trucks to the Bay Area.

During World War I, manganese had been mined, but a lack of roads and the long distance to markets were problems when there wasn’t a pressing need. Mineral waters were bottled in the county from 1890-1909. Coal beds were found east of Dos Rios, but hard to access. The Redwood Copper Queen mine near Yorkville tried to be profitable, but struggled. Graphite was mined, and jade could be found at Leech Lake, but it was an 11-mile horse pack trip to reach the site.

Some 23 pages of the 1953 journal list mines, their owners, and locations. There are also remarks, mostly sad ones: “Idle, nearly inaccessible, undeveloped, no production, dismantled, no ore of shipping grade.…” The fold-out maps show the location of every mine mentioned. For your information, the Redwood Copper Queen Mine was along Pardaloe Creek a mile east of old Ornbaun Hot Springs west of Yorkville off Fish Rock Road.

I’ll turn this wonderful resource over to the Kelley House Museum Archives. It can be shared with the public by appointment with the museum.

Photo: The Cal Dri Ice Corporation plant near Hopland. Image from the California Journal of Mines and Geology, Vol. 49, October 1953.

THAT WAS COOL - SOME KIDS DON’T WANT TO LEAVE THEIR HOMETOWN

by Justine Frederiksen

At a high school graduation one year, I was talking with a teacher about the kids who don’t want to move away. While so many of their classmates can’t wait to leave, some kids are happy to stay right where they are. “They’re minimalists,” he said.

That was cool.

And it got me thinking that maybe the kids who stay will be happier than the kids like me who left their hometown as soon as they could.

Why? Many reasons:

• They must be easygoing.

Someone who wants to stay in their hometown likely gets along with their parents, and most everyone else. I figure they aren’t easily annoyed by people. And even if they are, they don’t hold grudges.

“Living in a small town taught me a lot about forgiveness,” a friend told me after moving to her husband’s hometown. “If someone pisses you off, but you know you’re going to keep running into them at the grocery store or your kids’ soccer games, it’s a lot easier to just let stuff go.”

It took a lot of time and effort for me to learn to let things go. I have to imagine that people who could always do that have had a lot more fun and gotten a lot more sleep in their lives.

• They likely have a built-in support system.

One of the hardest things about moving to a new city is not having anyone else to call for help, even for the really small things. You wake up without creamer for your coffee or get halfway through a batch of cookies before you realize you don’t have enough flour. If you’re where you grew up, those things are likely just a couple of doors down.

And so is someone to help you bring home new furniture and take the old furniture away, take care of your animals when you go out of town and drive you home from a medical appointment.

And when you have a baby, you likely have a babysitter you already trust. You also don’t need to spend all your vacation time dragging a grumpy toddler along with its car seat and stroller onto a plane to see their grandparents. Or your child’s grandparents don’t have to spend their retirement fund flying to see you.

Starting over in a new city can be exhilarating. But when you get a cold and you pull the soup pot from the top cupboard and the thick ceramic plate you forgot was on top of it lands on your head, you realize that having someone nearby who could bring you soup is pretty great, too.

• They have a built-in sense of belonging.

All humans want to feel understood and appreciated. Not feeling like they belong is a reason why many people leave their hometowns, especially those not wanting to suffer emotional or physical abuse for just being themselves.

So imagine how nice it would be to have that feeling from day one. To spend all stages of your life in a place with the same people, who know all the cool things and accept all the dumb things you’ve done. And later it’s really nice to have people around who remember what you were like before all the wrinkles and gray hair.

Every day would feel like how one Ukiah High graduate described returning home to work on a television set with her family, her childhood friends and her teachers.

“Growing up I was always focused on going elsewhere to work, but getting to come home and work in my hometown with the community that raised me was something really special. My second-grade teacher was there with us all week, girls I grew up doing ballet with were there, and my mom and brother were there.”

For kids who stayed in their hometown, days like that aren’t special events. They happen all the time.

• They have simple needs.

Wherever you go, there you are. And unless you’re experiencing torture or deprivation, if you can’t make yourself reasonably happy wherever you are right now, there’s a good chance you will never be happy.

And that’s not to say we don’t need people with the desire to explore and achieve, to invent and discover. We certainly do. But when it comes to being happy, I think the people who have always been content with who and where they are have the best odds.

(Ukiah Daily Journal)

CATCH OF THE DAY, Thursday, June 8, 2023

JEDAIAH BLACK, Ukiah. Controlled substance, paraphernalia, protective order violation.

BRIDGETTE FRANK, Covelo. Stolen vehicle, probation revocation.

ALEXANDER JACKSON, Ukiah. Suspended license for DUI & for refusing chemical alcohol test.

ANNETTA LEMMONS, Fort Worth, Texas/Ukiah. Disorderly conduct-alcohol&drugs.

BRAYDON LESLIE, Ukiah. Vandalism.

RYAN OKERSTROM, Willits. Disorderly conduct-alcohol&drugs.

WILLIAM OWENS, Ukiah. Parole violation. (Frequent flyer.)

TIFFANY WASHBURN, Ukiah. Under influence, paraphernalia, resisting.

ON-LINE COMMENT OF THE DAY

Re One Taste: There are a lot of scammers in the wellness, spiritual community, everyone claims they know how to heal past traumas, and charges a lot of money to do it. I fell victim to some of these scams also, I have had my energy cleaned, endless healing ceremonies, healing bowls (which should be changed to relaxing bowls for just that moment). Looking back it was all the placebo effect, everything helped for only a short period of time. You are the only one that can change who you are, and what you do not like about yourself, no energy work, healing ceremonies, or magic bowls are going to do it for you, it will just drain your bank account.

R.D. BEACON:

Over the generations the country folks and kept the fabric of the neighborhood a lot, occasionally people from cities would come and visit for whatever reason and then they go home hopefully not to come back until another major vacation, most of us enjoyed their money and listing details and stories of their existence, but always hoping they would leave soon not to disturb the fabric harbor of our existence, but some not very smart realtor out of the city decided to weasel their way into our fabric and bring their disgusting bad manners with them, I remember the days in this county was the only crime it might've been some small kids stealing a stick of gum out of the grocery store, not a capital offense but today we have to locker doors and sleep very likely with a shotgun next to the bed to protect ourselves from people who might break in and do bodily harm to us, no more the days where you leave your house unlocked and even your car and know that everything would be there in the morning when you woke up, with the city people have done is not good if brought to bad manners and their bad business habits with them, no more the days that are long since gone shaking your neighbors and as a business deal would transpire, today you must need a large cart to pack huge documents where you had to notarize each page to keep from being sued by somebody who's less than honest from the big city, but even looking down the road remembering our trips at Christmas time to San Francisco and Union Square and felt safe no longer of those days around anymore, because trashes found its way in from the East Coast and even people out of South America with less manners and a rattlesnake, every day the condescending ill mannered incredibly stupid people from the city's come up and think they're so smart some of them come from the east as far away as Colorado and even further like New York thinking they are superior, to our way of thinking yet we used to have a crime to you free County and even better than that would only see a murder every hundred years what happened did somebody failed badly to chase these bad people out of town, driving up the coast toward Fort Bragg real estate signs every quarter-mile and you find the bulk of the realtors are also city folks that have no manners for the locals only thinking of fattening up their pocketbook and running back to their former life on the backs of the locals that are worked hard for over 100 years, the only saving grace is a bad winter will chase them out of town, but usually the new folks at move-in as bad as the ones we chased out, when going through the town of Mendocino if you look around hardly any of it is owned by anybody who was born and raised in Mendocino County let alone California, corporate interests from all over the nation own the bulk of our County now from the great vineyards vastly spread out over Anderson Valley replacing perfectly good land that was used for raising livestock, to the environmental groups that are anti-loggers and timber owner and would like to have it all in parts, they do nothing for the fabric of the neighborhood is of the for every dime they could get out of it, then there's the folks should come to California for the free medical care the buckets of money people get for doing absolutely nothing, our state is broken along with our County, your work county employees actually were born in the state? Let alone California's great County of Mendocino how many of them actually were born here, not many times have become so bad in the state most of our citizens are bailed and moved away due to the fact that it's too expensive to live here only the poor can afford it because the government is paying them for their vote, with little is County gets in return for all of the craziness that we now put up with it is not in my opinion an equal trade we should invite the city folks to move back to the city and take the bad manners, and the condescending attitude with them , what you local businesses are left in the old days they would be happy to see local slope, their business was a were the ones that kept him alive during the winter, there are a few local hotels and Inn’s when you show up for dinner they could care less about you yet they fall over themselves for the tourist city people who sold her soul down the river and made their choice to chase the locals out of the bar or restaurant, in favor of the new people I had a favorite spot near Mendocino that every Sunday I would go for eggs Benedict and be able to talk to longtime friends while eating at the bar, those days are gone the owners chase the locals out in favor of the city folks certainly not the intent of the original creators, but as things change instead of the owners marrying into local people they pick city folks as their mates and the city idea brought forth the old manners and bad business tactics, another favorite I had was the Mendocino Hotel and when Mr. Peterson overhauled it and had good management even though he was himself from the Southern California, his great-grandparents lived in the town of Mendocino and built small ships and big River, this reason he bought the hotel and made it a fine place to come and stay drink and eat, illness took him away to some of his family turned it over to somebody who did not know what they were doing over the years they buried it in debt just like other properties that acquired today it's barely opened, this is true with a lot of the old time places to stay and have dinner no more is the feeling of going out to dinner and it's like going home, although there is one restaurant on the coast, it gives you a feeling of welcome that would be the Ledford house great food friendly people, if you really goes ovale north of Ukiah in the broiler steakhouse would be the best place between Willits and Ukiah too many, of our local restaurants of become a revolving door you go in one day in the next week is under new ownership and the food is changed drastically most of this has to do with city influence people to go into the restaurant or hotel business that don't know what they're doing and did eat them up financially, a friend told me one time how do you make a small fortune in the hotel or restaurant business, start out with a large fortune and watch it all go away and prepare to leave town in the dark of night.

ESTHER MOBLEY; WHAT I'M READING:

San Francisco Mayor London Breed apparently can’t think of any bar, restaurant or entertainment venue to recommend to tourists, according to remarks she made at a gathering this week of nightlife-industry folks. The comments … did not go over well. The Chronicle’s Lily Janiak has more.

Another wine publication has launched! I’m looking forward to following the New Wine Review, which has bylines from many familiar names.

Apple’s newest OS is called “Sonoma.” In TechCrunch, Haje Jan Kamps wonders why they didn’t go with “Napa.” (Personally, I’m good with Sonoma!)

In VinePair, Evan Rail speculates about what might happen if a big wine corporation were to peddle some industrial plonk as natural wine. Elsewhere in VinePair, Sedale McCall questions whether wine certifications — such as those conferred by the Court of Master Sommeliers — are really necessary for those pursuing a career in the industry.

(SFgate)

THE “TRUMP LITE” TRAGEDY? “Today, on the 55th anniversary of the death of Bobby Kennedy, it is especially painful to read about his son's long spiral into darkness. One terrible fact we can't overlook is that he is taking many people with him - who believe him - because of his name and the idealism once associated with the Kennedys.”

(As his living relatives decry him and his dead ones spin / RFK Jr. cashes in).

(Steve Heilig)

LARRY LIVERMORE: The most shocking thing about this PGA business has been learning I have friends who actually care about golf.

IT IS FAR TOO LATE: HA HA HA.

by Jonah Raskin

A Yippie Review of Not Too Late

Dr. Strangelove or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb arrived at the right moment: soon after the Cuban Missile Crisis when nearly everyone around the world was worrying about a nuclear apocalypse. Stanley Kubrick, Peter Sellers, Sterling Hayden, Slim Pickens and screenwriter Terry Southern figured out how to make a dark comedy out of the deepest of human fears. Someday soon I hope someone will write a comedy about the “climate change story” as Rebecca Solnit and Thelma Lutunatabua call it in the subtitle to the new book they’ve edited and to which they contribute potent essays. There is no comedy in Not Too Late (Haymarket; $16.95), and no laughter, either, as far as I can tell after reading the book twice and digesting it. There is plenty of handwringing, cheerleading and railing of the faithful foot soldiers in the cause. I don’t know the target audience that Solnit and Lutunatabua have in mind, though I don’t doubt that there are people who inhabit the world of “despair” when it comes to the subject of climate.

From the point of view of the editors, these despairing souls have to be told to be hopeful, to emerge from their own cocoons and silos, join together with others and to act. Specifically to consume less, downsize and conserve, don’t eat meat, don’t fly and leave the smallest of footprints. All good advice. Probably because I was and still am a Yippie at heart I believe that laughter, satire and even slapstick comedy can prod and inspire people to revolt, resist and rebel. I wish that the contributors to Not Too Late had been a tad less serious, less dire, less overwhelmed and had injected some elements of goofiness and playfulness in their essays, and also had added more fantasy and fewer facts and figures.

There are more than two-dozen separate pieces in Not Too Late. After reading just half-a-dozen of them I grew weary of the sermonizing and preaching to the choir. Perhaps some will think that the perspective expressed here is heretical and that climate change is too serious a subject to joke about. I beg to disagree. The world as we’ve known it is fast ending. There is no turning back the hands on the clock. We’re not going to return to the way it was in 1968 or 1988, so we might as well go over the edge with grace and laughter rather than crying and hoping against hope.

If I read, accurately, Solnit’s contributions to this volume she has shifted her perspective. For years she has emphasized the need to be hopeful and not wallow in despair. She hasn’t given up hoping, but she seems to have fallen back on faith. We don’t know the outcome, she explains. We can’t read the future, but we have to act anyway, she insists, even if we don’t know for sure the result of our actions. It is, indeed, possible that human beings will take steps that will mitigate disaster.

Still, my own universe doesn’t have much room for faith or for hope. It does have room for courage, clowning and the kind of guerrilla theater that the Yippies practiced when they ran a pig for president, levitated the Pentagon and threw money on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. The Yippies didn’t overthrow the military, the American political system, or capitalism, but they persuaded citizens to laugh at what was known as the “establishment,” and to be empowered. That was worth doing.

Is there anyone out there ready to follow in the footsteps of Abbie Hoffman, Paul Krassner, Terry Southern and Judy Gumbo? And are there provocateurs and pranksters who aren’t so-called “experts” of the kind who contribute to Not Too Late. I read phrases like “climate communicators,” “climate facilitators” and “climate policy experts,” and I think, save me from the experts and the so-called professionals. Experts are among the last group of people to know what is happening and how to change direction.

Couldn’t Solnit and Lutunatabua have found non-experts on the ground who could have described what it’s actually like to live in the brave new world of climate change in Iceland, Ireland, Argentina and Afghanistan? On the last page of their book the authors write “we are here to fortify people to fase and to try to change it.” I don’t want to be fortified, thank you. And I don’t want to “try” to change it. I just want to Do It!” I wouldn’t mind a revolution for the hell out of it.

ISHI (c1861 – March 25, 1916) was the last known member of the Native American Yahi people from the present-day state of California in the United States. The rest of the Yahi (as well as many members of their parent tribe, the Yana) were killed in the California genocide in the 19th century. Ishi, who was widely acclaimed as the "last wild Indian" in the United States, lived most of his life isolated from modern North American culture. In 1911, aged 50, he emerged at a barn and corral, 2 mi (3.2 km) from downtown Oroville, California.

Ishi, which means "man" in the Yana language, is an adopted name. The anthropologist Alfred Kroeber gave him this name because, in the Yahi culture, tradition demanded that he not speak his own name until formally introduced by another Yahi. When asked his name, he said: "I have none, because there were no people to name me," meaning that there was no other Yahi to speak his name on his behalf.

Ishi was taken in by anthropologists at the University of California, Berkeley, who both studied him and hired him as a janitor. He lived most of his remaining five years in a university building in San Francisco. His life was depicted and discussed in multiple films and books, notably the biographical account Ishi in Two Worlds published by Theodora Kroeber in 1961.

𝐄𝐚𝐫𝐥𝐲 𝐥𝐢𝐟𝐞

In 1865, Ishi and his family were attacked in the Three Knolls Massacre, in which 40 of their tribesmen were killed. Although 33 Yahi survived to escape, cattlemen killed about half of the survivors. The last survivors, including Ishi and his family, went into hiding for the next 44 years. Their tribe was popularly believed to be extinct. Prior to the California Gold Rush of 1848–1855, the Yahi population numbered 404 in California, but the total Yana in the larger region numbered 2,997.

The gold rush brought tens of thousands of miners and settlers to northern California, putting pressure on native populations. Gold mining damaged water supplies and killed fish; the deer left the area. The settlers brought new infectious diseases such as smallpox and measles. The northern Yana group became extinct while the central and southern groups (who later became part of Redding Rancheria) and Yahi populations dropped dramatically. Searching for food, they came into conflict with settlers, who set bounties of 50 cents per scalp and 5 dollars per head on the natives. In 1865, the settlers attacked the Yahi while they were still asleep.

𝐑𝐢𝐜𝐡𝐚𝐫𝐝 𝐁𝐮𝐫𝐫𝐢𝐥𝐥 𝐰𝐫𝐨𝐭𝐞, 𝐢𝐧 𝐈𝐬𝐡𝐢 𝐑𝐞𝐝𝐢𝐬𝐜𝐨𝐯𝐞𝐫𝐞𝐝:

"In 1865, near the Yahi's special place, Black Rock, the waters of Mill Creek turned red at the Three Knolls Massacre. 'Sixteen' or 'seventeen' Indian fighters killed about forty Yahi, as part of a retaliatory attack for two white women and a man killed at the Workman's household on Lower Concow Creek near Oroville. Eleven of the Indian fighters that day were Robert A. Anderson, Harmon (Hi) Good, Sim Moak, Hardy Thomasson, Jack Houser, Henry Curtis, his brother Frank Curtis, as well as Tom Gore, Bill Matthews, and William Merithew. W. J. Seagraves visited the site, too, but some time after the battle had been fought.

Robert Anderson wrote, "Into the stream they leapt, but few got out alive. Instead many dead bodies floated down the rapid current." One captive Indian woman named Mariah from Big Meadows (Lake Almanor today), was one of those who did escape. The Three Knolls massacre is also described in Theodora Kroeber's Ishi in Two Worlds.

Since then more has been learned. It is estimated that with this massacre, Ishi's entire cultural group, the Yana/Yahi, may have been reduced to about sixty individuals. From 1859 to 1911, Ishi's remote band became more and more infiltrated by non-Yahi Indian representatives, such as Wintun, Nomlaki, and Pit River individuals.

In 1879, the federal government started Indian boarding schools in California. Some men from the reservations became renegades in the hills. Volunteers among the settlers and military troops carried out additional campaigns against the northern California Indian tribes during that period.

In late 1908, a group of surveyors came across the camp inhabited by two men, a middle-aged woman, and an elderly woman. These were Ishi, his uncle, his younger sister, and his mother, respectively. The former three fled while the latter hid in blankets to avoid detection, as she was sick and unable to flee. The surveyors ransacked the camp, and Ishi's mother died soon after his return. His sister and uncle never returned, possibly drowning in a nearby river.

𝐀𝐫𝐫𝐢𝐯𝐚𝐥 𝐢𝐧𝐭𝐨 𝐄𝐮𝐫𝐨𝐩𝐞𝐚𝐧 𝐀𝐦𝐞𝐫𝐢𝐜𝐚𝐧 𝐒𝐨𝐜𝐢𝐞𝐭𝐲

After the 1908 encounter, Ishi spent three more years alone in the wilderness. Starving and with nowhere to go, Ishi, at around the age of 50, emerged on August 29, 1911, at the Charles Ward slaughterhouse back corral near Oroville, California, after forest fires in the area. He was found pre-sunset by Floyd Hefner, son of the next-door dairy owner (who was in town), who was "hanging out", and who went to harness the horses to the wagon for the ride back to Oroville, for the workers and meat deliveries. Witnessing slaughterhouse workers included Lewis "Diamond Dick" Cassings, a "drugstore cowboy". Later, after Sheriff J.B. Webber arrived, the Sheriff directed Adolph Kessler, a nineteen-year-old slaughterhouse worker, to handcuff Ishi, who smiled and complied.

The "wild man" caught the imagination and attention of thousands of onlookers and curiosity seekers. University of California, Berkeley anthropology professors read about him and "brought him" to the Affiliated Colleges Museum (1903—1931), in an old law school building on the University of California's Affiliated Colleges campus on Parnassus Heights, San Francisco. Studied at the university, Ishi also worked as a janitor and lived at the museum for most of the remaining five years of his life.

In October 1911, Ishi, Sam Batwi, T. T. Waterman, and A. L. Kroeber, went to the Orpheum Opera House in San Francisco to see Lily Lena (Alice Mary Ann Mathilda Archer, born 1877) the "London Songbird," known for "kaleidoscopic" costume changes. Lena gave Ishi a piece of gum as a token.

On May 13, 1914, Ishi, T. T. Waterman, A.L. Kroeber, Dr Saxton Pope, and Saxton Pope Jr. (11 years old), took Southern Pacific's Cascade Limited overnight train, from the Oakland Mole and Pier to Vina, California, on a trek in the homelands of the Deer Creek area of Tehama county, researching and mapping for the University of California, fleeing on May 30, 1914, during the Lassen Peak volcano eruption.

Waterman and A.L. Kroeber, director of the museum, studied Ishi closely over the years and interviewed him at length in an effort to reconstruct Yahi culture. He described family units, naming patterns, and the ceremonies that he knew. Many traditions had already been lost when he was growing up, as there were few older survivors in his group. He identified material items and showed the techniques by which they were made.

In February 1915, during Panama–Pacific International Exposition, Ishi was filmed in the Sutro Forest with the actress Grace Darling for Hearst-Selig News Pictorial, No. 30.

𝐃𝐞𝐚𝐭𝐡

Lacking acquired immunity to common diseases, Ishi was often ill. He was treated by Saxton T. Pope, a professor of medicine at UCSF. Pope became a close friend of Ishi and learned from him how to make bows and arrows in the Yahi way. He and Ishi often hunted together. Ishi died of tuberculosis on March 25, 1916. It is said that his last words were, "You stay. I go." His friends at the university tried to prevent an autopsy on Ishi's body since Yahi tradition called for the body to remain intact. However, the doctors at the University of California medical school performed an autopsy before Waterman could prevent it.

Ishi's brain was preserved and his body was cremated. His friends placed grave goods with his remains before cremation: "one of his bows, five arrows, a basket of acorn meal, a box full of shell bead money, a purse full of tobacco, three rings, and some obsidian flakes." Ishi's remains were interred at Mount Olivet Cemetery in Colma, California, near San Francisco. Kroeber put Ishi's preserved brain in a deerskin-wrapped Pueblo Indian pottery jar and sent it to the Smithsonian Institution in 1917. It was held there until August 10, 2000, when the Smithsonian repatriated it to the descendants of the Redding Rancheria and Pit River tribes. This was in accordance with the National Museum of the American Indian Act of 1989 (NMAI). According to Robert Fri, director of the National Museum of Natural History, "Contrary to commonly-held belief, Ishi was not the last of his kind. In carrying out the repatriation process, we learned that as a Yahi–Yana Indian his closest living descendants are the Yana people of northern California." His remains were also returned from Colma, and the tribal members intended to bury them in a secret place.

(Ishi, Deer Creek Indian; The Wild Man. From ‘Ishi In Two Worlds: A biography of the Last Wild Indian in North America.)

JOAN DIDION, THE DEATH OF R.F.K. AND THE SOLUTION TO A DECADES-OLD MYSTERY

by Timothy Denevi

There’s a well-known passage in the title essay of Joan Didion’s 1979 collection “The White Album” that begins with a litany of 1960s tragedies, including the massacre at My Lai, a harrowing story of child abandonment and a very brief and cryptic mention of Robert Kennedy’s assassination: “I watched Robert Kennedy’s funeral on a veranda at the Royal Hawaiian Hotel in Honolulu.” The section concludes with a personal revelation: In June of 1968, Ms. Didion experienced “an attack of vertigo, nausea and a feeling that she was going to pass out,” for which she underwent an extensive psychiatric evaluation and was prescribed amitriptyline, an antidepressant. “By way of comment,” she wrote, “I offer only that an attack of vertigo and nausea does not now seem to me an inappropriate response to the summer of 1968.”

Over 40 years later, “The White Album” is regarded as a masterpiece of nonfiction and a pre-eminent account of the ’60s as a cultural era. The essay opens with what is perhaps Ms. Didion’s most famous line — “We tell ourselves stories in order to live” — then explores what happens when those shared narratives start to unravel.

But many of the specific stories she alludes to in the essay have remained maddeningly opaque. Precisely what prompted her physical breakdown, as well as her terse reference to Kennedy’s funeral, has long been the subject of speculation for Didionologists. “What was she doing at the Royal Hawaiian Hotel during Robert Kennedy’s funeral?” Tracy Daugherty wrote in “The Last Love Song,” his 2015 biography of Ms. Didion. “Was she alone? Did a crowd gather before a television set to watch the ceremony in sorrow? Was the TV propped on a wrought-iron table in the sun? What is the point of teasing us with the hotel if not to deliberately disorient the reader?”

Now we finally know the answer.

In a recording dated to 1971, Ms. Didion and her husband, John Gregory Dunne, sat down for an interview with the writer Jean Stein, who was working on a new edition of an oral history about Robert Kennedy. The interview didn’t appear in the final manuscript, and only in the past year has the audio been made available through the archives department at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, which houses Ms. Stein’s research from the project. (A transcript, processed in 2019, can also be found in the New York City Public Library’s collection of Ms. Stein’s papers.)

The unearthed conversation reveals the details of Mr. Dunne and Ms. Didion’s trip to Hawaii and illuminates what prompted her breakdown. It also reveals a startling insight she had about the precariousness of the country, as she described to Ms. Stein the exact moment when she could feel the ’60s “snapping.” And her observations help unlock why her meditation on America’s unraveling still feels so resonant today.

On June 5, 1968, Ms. Didion, who was 33, and Mr. Dunne, 36, were driving from Sacramento to San Francisco, where they planned to catch the morning flight to Honolulu, when a news alert came across the radio. Robert Kennedy was in critical condition. He’d been shot in the head at close range. He was undergoing emergency surgery. But before they could learn anything else they departed for Hawaii.

The couple was staying in Waikiki at the Royal Hawaiian Hotel, one of the oldest on the island. It was a favorite spot of theirs, as was Honolulu itself, a metropolis in the middle of the ocean where the national newspapers arrived a day late. When they checked in, the West Coast papers on the newsstand displayed the previous day’s headlines. Their room didn’t have a television in it; according to Ms. Didion, none did.

After listening to the six o’clock news, they decided to head out into the streets of the city, where the restaurants and bars were crowded with vacationers. They spent the first part of that night trying unsuccessfully to find updates on Kennedy’s condition.

That evening, they ducked into Duke Kahanamoku’s, the famous Waikiki venue, where Don Ho was headlining. The place was packed — there was a dry-cleaning convention in town — and salesmen and their wives crowded around the tables. Still, the couple managed to find a spot right up front.

Mr. Ho came out to do his set. The singer, who was born in Honolulu, was best known for his 1966 hit “Tiny Bubbles.” Mr. Dunne and Ms. Didion saw him perform before and noticed that on this night, he seemed notably muted. It wasn’t until the end of his set that they learned why.

“For those of you who don’t know,” Mr. Ho told his audience, “Bob Kennedy passed on this evening at 10:40 local time.”

Mr. Ho had known Kennedy well, campaigning with him in California. He asked one of his musicians to honor the moment by singing the Lord’s Prayer. “Our Father,” the man intoned, “who art in heaven ….”

One of the conventioneers jumped to his feet. “What are they singing a church song for?” he shouted. At his table and those surrounding, the other dry-cleaning salesmen and their wives chimed in: “What’s this church song for? Why a church song?” Clearly, they were drunk. For Ms. Didion the scene was surreal: the women with their big bouffant hairdos and flower leis, the men growing increasingly belligerent. Then she noticed a young sailor nearby. He was sobbing.

Two months earlier, Kennedy gave an impromptu speech to supporters after learning of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s murder. “What we need in the United States is not division,” he said, “but love and wisdom and compassion toward one another.” Now he had been murdered, too. But the convention crowd at Duke Kahanamoku’s refused to acknowledge the tragedy that had just been relayed. “The whole thing,” Ms. Didion told Ms. Stein, “was very charged. It was a great conflict of everything and everybody.”

As for Kennedy, there were no more updates to receive. Everything that could happen, it seemed, had.

It wasn’t until June 8, that Ms. Didion and Mr. Dunne were able to watch a special broadcast on ABC’s Honolulu affiliate, which they described as a three-hour tape that combined footage from throughout the week with scenes from Kennedy’s funeral in New York and burial in Washington. A television had been set up on the Royal Hawaiian’s lanai, a large veranda. When the couple arrived, it was already crowded with viewers, and “The Lawrence Welk Show,” a musical variety program, was playing, its images spilling out as if from a time capsule. “Hollywood Palace” was scheduled to air next, but the evening’s programming was pre-empted by the special news program on Kennedy’s assassination. The lanai crowd wasn’t happy. Some stood up to leave.

The ABC news special, Ms. Didion and Mr. Dunne told Ms. Stein, opened with a rendition, by the actor Hume Cronyn, of William Butler Yeats’s “The Second Coming,” the same poem from which Ms. Didion had drawn the title of her first book of essays, “Slouching Towards Bethlehem,” which was published that May: “And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?”

As the three-hour special wore on, Ms. Didion looked around the veranda and noticed that everyone who was sitting there earlier in the evening had left. A few guests stopped to ask about the program she was watching, but at the reply — Bobby Kennedy — they continued on their way. When a woman lingered to take in a scene from the funeral Mass at St. Patrick’s, the man she was with exclaimed, “We’ll get enough church in the morning!” and hurried her along.

“It was as if they were shutting their minds to it, shutting their eyes,” Mr. Dunne explained to Ms. Stein.

Neither Ms. Didion nor Mr. Dunne considered themselves Kennedy supporters. She voted for Barry Goldwater in the last presidential election, and he was suspicious of the whole Kennedy family. In “Delano,” his 1967 book on Cesar Chavez and the Central Valley grape strike, he characterized Robert Kennedy as “ruthless, arrogant, a predator in the corridors of power.”

But like Ms. Didion, Kennedy started from a more conservative position — on civil rights, on Vietnam — and his personal evolution on the public stage of the 1960s embodied the turmoil that characterized the era. In his brief campaign, he responded to the climate of discord by advocating a national reconciliation through a shared sense of civic responsibility. “When one part of the United States does badly,” he said just before his death, “it also has an effect on the rest of the United States.”

Mr. Dunne and Ms. Didion had spent the previous year publishing “Points West,” a joint column in The Saturday Evening Post that paid them handsomely to report from the front lines of political and cultural tumult. As the Tet offensive raged in Vietnam in the spring of 1968 and President Lyndon Johnson announced he wouldn’t run for another term, Ms. Didion profiled Jim Morrison and Nancy Reagan. After King’s murder and the civil unrest that followed, she wrote about visiting the incarcerated leader of the Black Panthers, Huey Newton, at the Alameda County jail.

In their conversation with Ms. Stein, the couple explained that they found themselves profoundly affected by Robert Kennedy’s murder, to a much greater degree than they’d been by his brother’s. With Jack Kennedy, “there was a kind of haphazard sense,” Mr. Dunne told Ms. Stein. “It was just one of those things that could happen to anyone. The thing about Bobby’s death,” he said, “was there was a pattern. There was something wrong.” He added, “It was the final unraveling of a very dark tapestry.”

“It was, in some ways, a very radicalizing experience for me,” Ms. Didion told Ms. Stein. These tourists from the mainland, she realized, enjoying their Hawaiian vacation as if nothing had happened, were not going to have any part of a national tragedy — even as, on the hotel’s television, Robert Kennedy’s casket was transported by rail to Washington and along the tracks nearly two million people lined up to pay their respects. To Ms. Didion, the contrast between these scenes and the Royal Hawaiian’s conspicuously deserted veranda felt appalling. With Kennedy’s assassination, she said, “it was as if all the disturbances of the whole past couple of years came to a head that night. And here was a whole part of America that wasn’t having it.” As she and Mr. Dunne watched the news coverage, she told Ms. Stein, “it was like something snapping.”

In the past, moments of national trauma provided an opportunity for unity and cohesion. But Ms. Didion found herself confronted with a fractured version of America that’s not too different from the one we’ve come to recognize today. Millions of people are dead from the Covid pandemic. Thousands take to the streets in protest while thousands more gather in the national capital to storm the seat of government. We are at a continual deficit of unity or cohesion. And in the wake of each new cataclysm, we’ve found ourselves farther apart.

“No matter what your political feelings are, if you’re attached to the idea of the nation as a community — if you feel yourself to be part of that community — then obviously something has happened to that community,” Ms. Didion told Ms. Stein. “It seemed as if these people did not count themselves as part of the community. That they came from another America.” They could heckle a praying singer. They could watch “The Lawrence Welk Show” but ignore a political assassination. The same economic system that put these specific Americans in the position to take this vacation — the white-collar stability, the inequality sustaining it — was what allowed them, now, to turn their backs. They didn’t really care about any of it; the broader narrative of patriotism and pride was just an excuse for doing what they wanted — for their self-interest — a narrative they could apply and discard from one situation to the next as they saw fit.

The implications weighed heavily on Ms. Didion: How could this country continue to exist if the people who’d gained the most from it refused to contribute? How long until the dark pattern she and Mr. Dunne saw in Kennedy’s murder reached its natural conclusion? It’s a sense of catastrophe — of that rough beast in the distance slouching closer — that, to many current Americans, feels strikingly familiar.

Watching all of this made her feel the same way she felt during a Hawaii visit a year earlier, when she was rereading George Orwell on the beach: sick. “I’d order a sandwich from room service and couldn’t eat it,” she told Ms. Stein, “and I’d sit there, and I’d have to go in the bathroom and throw up. And this was very much like that in some way.” On June 8, 1968, sitting with her husband on the abandoned veranda, she was likely experiencing the “attack of vertigo and nausea” she referred to in “The White Album.”

“The startling fact was this,” she wrote at the essay’s conclusion. “My body was offering a precise physiological equivalent to what had been going on in my mind.”

“The White Album” was stitched together at different moments over a decade: parts were taken verbatim from her 1967 and ’68 “Points West” columns; other passages, including the brief mention of Kennedy’s funeral, were composed from the vantage point of the 1970s. “We tell ourselves stories in order to live,” she wrote — and, later in the essay, “I was supposed to have a script, and had mislaid it,” recounting “a time when I began to doubt the premises of all the stories I had ever told myself, a common condition but one I found troubling.”

While firmly rooted in the turmoil of the ’60s, “The White Album” clarifies something essential to our current experience: what it’s like to navigate our fractured cultural landscape when it can feel so difficult to talk to one another, because we lack the sense of a shared reality on which such a conversation depends. That sense of “the final unraveling,” as Mr. Dunne described it, often feels as though it’s underway.

For Ms. Didion, there was no overarching narrative we could rely on either to magically put things back together or to predict how it all might fall apart. “Writing has not yet helped me to see what it means,” she wrote in the essay’s final line.

In such a light, an attack of vertigo and nausea doesn’t seem an inappropriate response to the 1960s — or the 2020s. This is a country that’s continually breaking apart. But there’s solace in that realization, too. As long as America exists, we’ll be telling ourselves stories in order to live. And we’ll also be doubting the stories we tell ourselves and feeling as if we’ve mislaid the script.

(Timothy Denevi is an associate professor of creative nonfiction writing at George Mason University and the author of “Freak Kingdom: Hunter S. Thompson’s Manic Ten-Year Crusade Against American Fascism.”)

A GREAT PHOTO of a man filling his desert water bag from a hose provided by a gas station as his family waits.

This is not on Route 66. We have never been able to find a photo of someone filling a water bag on Route 66. The photo is, also, interesting in that the two boys and the dog actually have to ride in the open trunk with the mother, baby, and father in the front seat. The desert water bag was hung from a bumper, would cool the water as the car traveled, and would be used most of the time for overheated engines/radiators in these cars and for human consumption if it was needed. Although this family was from Montana they are photographed on a vacation on Route 30 but they do not say where they are for this photo.

This photo was taken on Route 30 in 1948 by Allan Grant. The LIFE Picture Collection.

THE BIGGEST MISCONCEPTION ABOUT POLITICS is that political differences have any meaningful existence at all. Everyone's herded into two mainstream factions who both serve the interests of the powerful, while those few who can't be herded are marginalized into political impotence.

— Caitlin Johnstone

UKRAINE, WEDNESDAY, 7 JUNE

Evacuations continue in Ukrainian-controlled areas of the southern Kherson region as the area reels from flooding brought by the collapse of a major dam Tuesday amid fears of an ecological catastrophe.

Kyiv and Moscow have blamed each other for the breach, which occurred in territory occupied by Russia. The cause remains unclear, and CNN analysis of satellite images shows the dam was damaged just days before it collapsed.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky described the situation in the occupied part of Kherson as "catastrophic" and called for support from the international community.

Meanwhile, Russia’s Belgorod region saw heavy shelling overnight, according to its governor, while Ukraine’s deputy defense minister says fighting around the eastern city of Bakhmut “remains the epicenter of hostilities.”

DOES ANYONE BELIEVE AMERICAN PROPAGANDA ANYMORE?

A new Washington Post article about Nord Stream throws Ukraine overboard and absolves the United States, offering another version of reality we'll have to strain to take seriously

by Matt Taibbi

This is getting silly now.

The Kakhovka dam just exploded in Ukraine, flooding a huge territory and causing another insane ecological disaster. Russia and Ukraine spent yesterday trading accusations, while the U.S. leaked it was “leaning towards Russia as the culprit of the attack.” The synchronicity was uncanny, with the media’s dam freakout coming exactly as public panic about the previous lunatic infrastructure attack came full circle, moving from certainty Russia blew up the Nord Stream pipeline to belated claims we knew all along Ukraine did it. It’s as if officials want the world to take American intelligence assessments more as Gilbert Gottfried routines than truth.

At 10:52 a.m. yesterday, the Washington Post published an exclusive called, “U.S. had intelligence of detailed Ukrainian plan to attack Nord Stream pipeline.” The story contended the United States learned from a “European intelligence service” in June, 2022 that Ukraine was planning a “covert attack” on Nord Stream, using divers who “reported directly to the commander in chief of the Ukrainian armed forces,” General Valery Zaluzhny. Apparently, U.S. and European allies knew about the Ukrainian plan and were impotent to stop a move they worried “risked a severe Russian response.”

The only people in the country who didn’t roll eyes or laugh at these latest anonymous contortions were reporters. “Americans Were Aware of Intelligence Warning of Ukrainian Pipeline Attacks,” wrote the New York Times, while Rolling Stone declared, “The U.S. Knew Ukraine Was Planning to Attack Russia’s Nord Stream Pipelines,” and so on. My favorite was the Godfather-themed header on the site of former Mother Jones writer Kevin Drum, “Ukraine was behind the Nord Stream bombing all along”.

Who blew up Nord Stream? Look at Matt Orfalea’s damning video made last October for a refresher on how absolutely certain we’ve been in these situations before, only to completely change our tune later. If you’re keeping track, this new Nord Stream piece is about the seventh or eighth theory that the Washington Post alone has posted since September, which puts the Kakhovka story in perspective. Recapping:

— On September 27, 2022, in “European leaders blame Russian ‘sabotage’ after Nord Stream explosions,” the Post quoted “Five European officials with direct knowledge of security discussions” and one official who said, “No one on the European side of the ocean is thinking this is anything other than Russian sabotage.”

— September 28, 2022: the Post ran Aaron Blake’s patriotic outburst, “Tucker Carlson’s shoddy case linking U.S. to alleged Nord Stream sabotage.” Blake denounced the Fox host, dismissing as “weak” and “shoddy” his suggestions of U.S. culpability for the explosions. He deemed insignificant factoids like the U.S. president saying of Nord Stream, “We will bring an end to it,” because after all, “Biden did not say we would ‘blow it up.’”

— September 29, 2022: The next day, in a piece one hopes future historians will note as a humorously revolting “Yes, that really happened” low point in this era’s iteration of McCarthyism, Philip Bump’s editorial on Carlson’s iniquity featured a headline railing against “Такер Карлсон” in Cyrillic.

— December 21, 2022: Controversial news is now released by a predictable playbook. Day 1 is the “total BS” angle, lies even officials don’t believe. In weeks that follow, cracks appear in official statements, in this case over the baffling “mystery” of Nord Stream (the Post would later describe an “international Whodunit”). Stage 3 involves the Late Begrudging Concession to the Obvious. Just before Christmas, the Post ran, “No conclusive evidence Russia is behind Nord Stream attack.” Remember the September 27 quotes from European officials about how “no one” was thinking about anything other than Russian culpability? Making the same argument for which Carlson was mocked in September, a European official told the Post, “The rationale that it was Russia [that attacked the pipelines] never made sense to me.”

— February 22, 2023: “Russia, blaming U.S. sabotage, calls for U.N. probe of Nord Stream” repeats the Carlson story, only here, the Post not-so-subtly implied famed investigative reporter Seymour Hersh was a tool of Russia. On February 9th, Hersh published “How America Took Out The Nord Stream Pipeline” on Substack, alleging the Nord Stream operation was undertaken by U.S. Naval Salvage divers based in Florida. The Post ignored the story, but after Russians called for an investigation based on the piece, the paper complained “Moscow cited independent journalist Seymour Hersh’s account… as evidence.”

— March 7, 2023: “Intelligence officials suspect Ukraine partisans behind Nord Stream bombings, rattling Kyiv’s allies,” the Post wrote, citing “intelligence and diplomatic officials in the United States and Europe” who “suspect that pro-Ukraine saboteurs may be responsible for explosions in September.”

— April 3, 2023: “Investigators skeptical of yacht’s role in Nord Stream bombing.” The Post follows up assertions emanating from German reports that a 50-foot yacht called Andromeda was used by Ukraine partisans to conduct the operation. Which nation-state might have aided? “Suspicions turn to Poland and Ukraine,” the Post reported.

— April 12, 2023: In “Trump’s remarkable insinuation about the Nord Stream explosions,” Aaron Blake again jumps off the bench to reject a Trump suggestion of U.S. involvement as illogical, because it would be “an extremely provocative act…regarding our relationships with European allies.” He added that if Trump did know something, “This would amount to his essentially broadcasting highly sensitive information on national TV.”

Did this mean a newspaper, too, should avoid publishing if it happened to “know something” about this? It seemed that way when authorities arrested Air National Guardsman Jack Teixeira in connection with leaked documents that came to be in his possession, and were passed around a Discord forum for Minecraft gamers. The extraordinary twist was that Teixeira was arrested by the FBI and charged with violations of the Espionage Act after authorities apprehended him with the help of both the New York Times and the Washington Post.

Readers may also remember the Post was among the most aggressive of the press outlets portraying Teixeira in the first days of the story as a dangerous fanatic, a “charismatic gun enthusiast” who was “fixated” on guns and “race war,” someone who may even have been preparing to carry out a mass shooting.

Having helped authorities capture Teixeira for possessing what the Post just months ago uncritically described as a “trove of classified information that would be of tremendous value to hostile nation states,” the paper is now printing information from those same documents. The new piece this week by Shane Harris and Souad Mekhennet cites a “European intelligence report” obtained from one of the “online friends” of Teixeira. How’s that for source management? Get a guy turned in, smear him as a dangerous gun-toting lunatic, then use his information.

The new June 6, 2023 piece suggests Ukraine partisans didn’t do Nord Stream, but rather that it was done with the express direction of the most senior Ukrainian military officials, who have begun a Colonel Kurtzian habit of going “too far.”

The Post story doesn’t tell us if the U.S. tried to prevent the attack from happening, or if they did, why they didn’t succeed. Even casual news readers know to be freaked out when such questions aren’t addressed in a story like this: it feels like a jarring and intentional omission.

Editorialists have been telling us since September U.S. involvement was illogical because blowing up Nord Stream would hurt our “closest allies” in Europe. How is U.S. foreknowledge logical now? Who believes Ukraine would do this alone, that Zelensky would be kept out of “the loop,” and the sole U.S. response involved officials having “made clear to Zelensky that they held operatives in his government responsible”? Also, wouldn’t blowing up a major German energy source complicate plans to integrate Ukraine as even a partial member of NATO? None of it makes sense.

In this neo-Soviet information age we’ve sadly learned the third-world habit of reading between-the-lines messaging, like: irrespective of who actually did the Nord Stream attack, the U.S. appears — this week anyway — to be throwing the Ukrainian government overboard. Why? The fact that voters have to wonder is already a strain.

Specialists in “anti-disinformation” insist a goal of foreign fake news artists is to assault the reasoning process itself, making populations distrust once-reliable sources, leaving them susceptible to conspiracy theories. If that’s true, how is it not provably the case that domestic officials are playing the same game, moving goalposts on everything from the origin of the coronavirus to vaccine efficacy to Nord Stream?

The Nord Stream narrative has now gone from “No one thinks anyone but Russia did it” to “It’s a mystery!” to “There’s no evidence Russia did it” to “pro-Ukraine saboteurs may have done it” to “The U.S. and its allies have known for nearly a year Kyiv did it, but said otherwise the whole time.” What are we supposed to think next time officials make statements after a disaster? Are we supposed to forget all this background?

(racket.news)

19 Comments

Patrick Hickey June 9, 2023

I appreciate Mark Scaramella’s detailed and incisive list that provides the Board of Supervisors with a roadmap of how to get us out of the current mess they have made for themselves and us.

On Tuesday, the Mendocino County Board of Supervisors rushed through a County budget, setting limits on public input, with few questions from Supervisors and very little discussion on the plans for most of the departments, which could well have serious negative impacts on the County’s ability to carry out its mandated services. If we have trouble recruiting sheriff’s deputies now, this budget will make it much worse. If we have 40% vacancies in Child Protective Services and 60% in some parts of the Assessor’s office, this budget will cement those vacancies.

We need more journalists like Mr. Scaramella to call out the Board of Supervisors and the CEOs office out for their lack of leadership and failure to plan and prepare for moving the County forward. The CEO’s office and the Board of Supervisors have been oddly passive and seemingly sitting on their hands as this situation has developed. To many employees they appear to act like deer in the headlights. There are steps they can and should take to make sure that the funding is there to support the necessary staffing for the County. The CEO’s office and the Board should always be projecting a few years out to make sure they are doing what is necessary to fund services. There are resources available to get help. But the Board needs to do more than talk. They need to act. If they identify a funding stream that is not being collected, take the actions necessary to collect it. The Board has been floating ideas as if it is not their job or within their power to make these things happen. The time for excuses is over, County residents expect results.

More and more, the County is finding itself in a dangerous spiral. There are high vacancy rates in some instances because they don’t pay enough. They are slow in collecting revenue or not able to bill for services because of the high vacancy rates, which in turn leads to reduced funds to offer market rate wages. The Board has fretted about this predicament, but done little to address it.

Instead of proposing solutions, the CEO’s office and the Board present excuses. Rural counties throughout California struggle with many of the same challenges that Mendocino faces. There are examples out there about what Mendocino can do. We need the CEO’s office and the Board to put forward a real plan that puts the County on a path of sustainability with market rate positions to carry out the mandated services provided by the County.

Reply
Stephen Dunlap June 9, 2023

it was 800 GALLONS Dear Leader : from my post : According to a lady who said she talked to a deck hand they were getting low on fuel and needed to dock to get some more, 800 gallons worth. It’s owned by a LA corporation and is on its way to Coos Bay. It’s called the Billie J.

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- Bruce Anderson June 9, 2023
  
  Thanks for the correction, Mr. D. Years ago my friend Frank Bender told me that just to get his beautifully restored boat out of Noyo it cost a small fortune in fuel.
  
  Reply
  - Bill Harper June 9, 2023
    
    i saw the newest Ferry is SF bay (Tiburon?) a few years ago fill up at Noyo on its way from Seattle to SF. It could barely turn around.
    
    Bill Harper
    
    Reply
- peter boudoures June 9, 2023
  
  And these are the environmentalists telling everyone to remove the pillsbury dam?
  
  Reply
- John June 9, 2023
  
  Last I knew about the Billie J., it was being used by a private ferry startup in the bay area, I can’t recall the name of the outfit. They might have just been leasing the vessel from someone else. If I remember correctly, it could fit 70 people onboard.
  
  Reply
Marshall Newman June 9, 2023

Re: Ed Notes. As it turned out, Leonore Falleri was correct regarding her heirs and assignees; they very nearly clear-cut the 40 acres on the far side of the river from the main resort in the late 1960s or early 1970s. That piece of ground still showed the damage from that logging when last I walked there four years ago.

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Bill Harper June 9, 2023

Re: Water Bags,

The water bag was hung in front of the radiator. This increased the humidity therefore mass of the water passing through the radiator increasing it’s efficiency in cooling the motor.
If you poured your water into the radiator of an overheated motor you got a steam bath.
Route 66 baby from 1955: Kaiser, Studebaker, Ford Mustang, 50 Dodge truck all with no air conditioning.
Bill Harper Route 66 baby

Reply
- Bill Harper June 9, 2023
  
  …increases the mass and cools the air passing the radiator…
  
  Reply
- Chuck Wilcher June 9, 2023
  
  “If you poured your water into the radiator of an overheated motor you got a steam bath. Route 66 baby from 1955: Kaiser, Studebaker, Ford Mustang, 50 Dodge truck all with no air conditioning. Bill Harper Route 66 baby”
  
  In 1977 I bought a 52′ Dodge Meadowbrook from a doctor in Ohio who got it from one of his patients as payment for services. It still had the original tires and a total of 23k on the odometer. The next day I had a friend change the spark plugs and set off for the drive back to California – one of several I’d make in that car over the next 10 years.
  
  The space in front of the radiator was perfectly suited for a block of ice to cool the engine for a few hundred miles during those long stretches of HWY 50 through Nevada and Utah.
  
  Reply
  - Jim Armstrong June 9, 2023
    
    The cool water in the evaporative bags was used for drinking.
    Nothing was ever put in front of the radiator, even ice, which wouldn’t have helped and just been wasted.
    
    Reply
    - Randy June 9, 2023
      
      They used to have a piped waterfill point on Fishrock road west of Zeni Ranch up until about 2015, as I recall. Those model A’s and T’s that needed a fill up are a thing of the past as well as the piped spring. I definitely remember filling the water bags back in the 50s in Barstow.
      
      Reply
    - Chuck Wilcher June 10, 2023
      
      I noticed a consistent drop in engine temperature every time I placed a block of ice between grill and radiator.
      
      It may not have been designed to do that, but it worked.
      
      Reply
John Kriege June 9, 2023

Re: County Courthouse cost
Maybe mistyped. This website says the budget is $145 million, not $450 million.
https://www.courts.ca.gov/facilities-mendocino.htm

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John Sakowicz June 9, 2023

Change to what?

By “change” I mean, vote the incumbents out. Two of the five seats on the Board of Supervisors — Gjerde and McGourty are retiring — so that’s a good start.

Once we have a new Board of Supervisors, we need to have them fire and replace the County CEO and County Counsel.

Once we have a new Board of Supervisors, they need to implement the budget balancing measures that Mark Scaramella outlines above.

The County Clerk-Assessor and Treasurer-Auditor need to be voted out, too. The County Clerk-Assessor is not collecting property taxes. And our Treasurer-Auditor has made a mess out of our financial reporting.

Ukiah?

Their City Council needs to replace their City Manager. He is a ghost. Whatever “dynamic” is, he’ ain’t it.

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- Mark Scaramella June 9, 2023
  
  “The County Clerk-Assessor is not collecting property taxes.” That’s probably because it’s not her job.
  “Our Treasurer-Auditor has made a mess out of our financial reporting.” I put the blame directly on the CEO and the Board of Supervisors who 1) have never asked for monthly departmental reports, and 2) blew up the offices against all advice to the contrary without even a consolidation plan.
  Lame duck supervisors retiring on their own, probably knowing things are only getting worse, hardly represents a vote for change from a voting public that still seems to think these elected officials are just fine. Supervisor Maureen Mulheren is up for re-election too. So far no one has declared for that seat. Do you have someone in mind who represents even the slightest change? (Hint: It’s not Mari Rodin.)
  There’s no evidence whatsoever that “a new Board of Supervisors” will even be aware of the budget situation they are in, much less of the kinds of budget balancing steps I recommended, all of which are beyond the capacities of our current crop of County leaders.
  By the time the “new Board of Supervisors” is even seated in January of 2025 more damage will be done and the already serious and unaddressed problems will have escalated to an even more unmanageable level, leaving any new board with a very leaky Good Ship Mendo.
  Reminds me of that Sarah Palin line from 2010, two years after Obama was elected, when she asked, “How’s that hopey, changey stuff working out for ya?”
  
  Reply
  - Stephen Rosenthal June 9, 2023
    
    Adam Gaska and Bernie Norvell would be a good start, but Mo’s gotta go. I’m sure she means well, but contributes nothing but continuous vapidity. I liked Soinila (sp?) last time, however as a virtual unknown he had no chance against her name recognition. Maybe try again?
    
    Reply
Craig Louis Stehr June 9, 2023

Self Realization Amidst the Collapse of Planet Earth
Warmest spiritual greetings, Am sitting here listening to Goddess Kali chants on YouTube at the Ukiah Public Library, and tap, tap tapping out this crucial message. Following a chaotic evening at the Building Bridges Homeless Resource Center, which included barking “emotional support” dogs, frantic screaming arguments which brought in the police, the usual stupidity from the junkies and vodka bingers, plus the one night only crowd who don’t give a hoot about the well being and integrity of the place, I got up and attended to morning ablutions, followed by a walk to Plowshares for a free meal courtesy of those dedicated Catholic Workers. Hopped on an MTA bus and went to Mama’s Cafe on State Street for a latte which included two necessary shots of espresso.
Aside from scheduled dental and medical appointments, I am doing nothing of any importance in Mendocino County. I am available for frontline radical environmental and peace & justice direct action. Is there anybody out there in the postmodern American cultural wasteland who is interested in doing anything crucial, and with whom I could hook up for a realistic social situation, so that we might destroy the demonic, and perhaps return this world to righteousness?

Craig Louis Stehr
1045 South State Street, Ukiah, CA 95482
Email: craiglouisstehr@gmail.com
June 8th, 2023 Anno Domini

Reply
Stephen Rosenthal June 9, 2023

We lost a great one in Dr. Werra. Heartfelt condolences to his family.

Reply

Mendocino County Today: Friday, June 9, 2023

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