Mendocino County Today: Wednesday, June 14, 2023

Warming | Quinn Greene | Orchid | AVUSD Hiring | Park Help | Boonquiz | Ocean's Edge | Daedone Appears | Ten Mile | Ed Notes | Boonville Station | Listserve Decision | Sharkey Painting | Back Stories | She/Her | I Yam | Solstice Celebration | Cello Concert | Housing Navigator | Yesterday's Catch | Shopping Centre | Opening Day | Larger Crimes | Patrol Boat | Fed Mood | Fritz Cat | Patient Zero | Unabomber Birdhouse | End Plan | Cowboy Experience | Assessing Technology | 1974 Fillup | Expanding Consciousness | Cormac McCarthy

BREEZY NORTH WINDS are expected to develop along the coast and up the coastal river valleys this afternoon through Friday. A gradual warming trend is expected across the interior through Friday. A cooling trend will begin Saturday with significantly cooler temperatures expected Sunday and into early next week. Early next week some light rain is possible mainly north of Hwy 36. (NWS)

STEPHEN DUNLAP (Fort Bragg): 52F with fog this Wednesday morning on the coast. The fog should clear soon & this might be the last gasp of it for a while, but you just never know. The NWS forecast uses the word "sunny" a lot more than "clouds" in the next 7 days.

QUINN THOMAS GREENE

On June 10, 2023 at around 8:15 PM, Mendocino County Sheriff's Deputies, along with California State Parks Rangers and the Mendocino Volunteer Fire Department, were dispatched to a cliff fall victim in the area of Big River Beach, near the Township of Mendocino. Deputies and allied agencies arrived and contacted a witness, who reported that he had witnessed an adult male, whom Deputies believe to be Quinn Thomas Greene, 38, of Mendocino, fall a great distance from the cliff and land in the Pacific Ocean below. Greene was last seen floating face down in the ocean and appeared unresponsive.

The Mendocino Volunteer Fire Department launched their small watercraft and began searching the area and were later joined by a US Coast Guard Station Noyo River 47' Motor Lifeboat and a HH-65 Helicopter from US Coast Guard Airstation Humboldt Bay. Greene was not located and search efforts were suspended, due to darkness.

On the morning of 06-11-2023, Mendocino County Sheriff's Search and Rescue volunteers arrived in the area and resumed searching for Greene. A Search and Rescue (SAR) Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (drone) was used to check multiple coves and crevasses that were impossible to access by SAR ground searchers. The US Coast Guard also continued their aerial search with an HH-65 Helicopter from US Coast Guard Airstation Humboldt Bay. At around 3:00 PM, after checking and clearing the coastline from the Point Cabrillo Lighthouse to Van Damme State Park, Greene was not located and search efforts were suspended.

TEX SAWYER: My latest orchid — bought at the dead-plant sale at Friedman's for $5.00. First time it has bloomed. I had no idea what color it would be.

AVUSD NEWS from Superintendent Simson

Help Wanted: We need to hire a couple of aides at the high school. If you know anyone, can you please refer them to me or Sara Hayward at 707-895-3774. All that is required is a basic skills test or college units apply. This is a great gig to be on your students’ schedule, so if you know any parent/guardians who are seeking a job, please refer them to us. We also have a special ed teaching position available that we can work with someone who has a bachelor's degree to get them set up.

CCAP Grant: We are delighted to share we received a $100,000 CCAP grant to support our college dual enrollment pathways including transportation for our students to Mendocino College.  This dual enrollment wave is an important achievement path for our students that we need to develop to ensure they are competitive with other high school students in the State.  We are deeply grateful to Dr. Amanda Xu at Mendocino College for her support and advocacy of our students' achievement and opportunity.

MUSCLE POWER NEEDED

Elizabeth Jensen: Our AV Community Park has 4 beautiful new redwood picnic tables we need help moving into place and relocating the others. Anyone available this week (maybe Wed 12-3pm or Thu 2-5pm) to help me? 

Interested in getting more involved in supporting improvements at our local park, please reach out to me via DM or call/text: 415-713-3833 and join us in bringing some remarkable new developments. It Takes A Valley!

BOONVILE QUIZ THURSDAY NIGHT

Dear Brainiacs, This Thursday, June 15th, is the third one in June and then we have a 4th and 5th Thursday without a Quiz on either. Therefore the next time following this week’s evening of fun-filled frivolity will not be until the 1st Thursday of next month - July 6th. Hope to see you this Thursday. Cheers, Steve Sparks, The Quizmaster

JEFF GOLL: Sad to hear about the guy who drowned in Mendocino Bay. Monday, as I was travelling South to the Navarro River area, I stopped by Harvest Market and the cashier ladies were talking about the event. One said that she knew the guy since grade school and said he was fond of walking along the Headlands wearing flip-flops. I'm on Ocean's edge often while taking photos and wear "wide size" tennis shoes (like Gulls feet). Can't ever take the Ocean or its cliffs casually — every step is a new one with awareness and caution. Even though Navarro Beach was clouded-in, the river is doing well making it out to Sea. Here's Navarro River and Navarro River Mouth. Also photo of Columbus Ave South while waiting in traffic. 

FOUNDER OF SEX-COMMUNE OneTaste, which has Santa Rosa business address and ties to Mendocino County retreat, surrenders in federal court

Nicole Daedone, who served as the CEO of OneTaste until 2017, was indicted last week on conspiracy charges linked to alleged abuse of employees.

by Martin Espinoza

The founder of a sexual-wellness company with ties to the North Coast turned herself in at a New York City federal courthouse Tuesday, a week after being indicted on forced labor charges.

Nicole Daedone, who until 2017 served as the CEO of OneTaste — known for promoting “orgasmic meditation” and the subject of a 2022 Netflix documentary — is accused of conspiring to profit from a cult-like operation that took advantage of its employees and volunteers.

The abuse, federal prosecutors say, was multi-fold: economic, sexual, emotional and psychological. It also included surveillance, indoctrination, and intimidation, according to court records.

OneTaste’s former head of sales, Rachel Cherwitz, also was indicted June 6 on the same charges. Cherwitz, who lives in Philo, Mendocino County, was released on $100,000 bail after appearing in a federal court in San Francisco last week. She is scheduled to appear in federal court in New York City next week.

Daedone appeared in court in Brooklyn on Tuesday afternoon, where her attorney entered a not guilty plea on her behalf, according to a spokesman for the U.S. Attorney’s Office in the Eastern District of New York.

Her attorney could not be reached for comment Tuesday afternoon.

Neither of the women remain connected to OneTaste, which has a business address in Santa Rosa and is tied with a retreat center in Philo that is owned by one of the OneTaste co-owners.

That three-member ownership group contends the charges against Daedone and Cherwitz are “unfounded” and the cloud over OneTaste unwarranted.

“We have cooperated with the (Eastern District of New York) throughout the investigation,” OneTaste owners Anjuli Ayer, Amanda Dunham and Austin Ayer wrote in a letter posted on the company’s website.

The charges against Daedone, they contend, stem from what they called an “error-riddled” Bloomberg Businessweek article.

“We are appalled by the outcome of what seems to be a long-term, misogynistic endeavor designed to tear down a feminine empowerment project and the women who built it,” the owners wrote in the posted letter.

Federal prosecutors asked Magistrate Judge Diane Gujarati to grant a “substantial bond secured by property with an equity value of approximately $1 million” because Daedone was considered a flight risk, according to a letter filed in court Tuesday by Eastern District U.S. Attorney Breon Peace detailing requested conditions for release.

The request was granted and Daedone was released Tuesday on a $1 million bond. The prosecutor’s letter details many of the allegations made in last week’s indictment.

It states that “OneTaste was best known for offering “hands-on classes on ‘orgasmic meditation’ (’OM’), a partnered practice typically involving the methodical stroking of a woman’s genitals for a period of fifteen minutes. OneTaste generated revenue by providing courses, coaching and events related to OM and other wellness practices, in exchange for a fee. Many OneTaste members lived in residential warehouses where they participated in OM courses and experimented sexually.”

The U.S. Attorney’s Office has accused Daedone and Cherwitz of promoting a “philosophy and ethos” centered on the worship of “orgasm,” with Daedone playing a key role. Prosecutors claim that after securing OneTaste members’ allegiance, Daedone and Cherwitz engaged in abusive employment practices, including failing to pay OneTaste members wages they had been promised.

“Cherwitz, Daedone, and other leaders in the OneTaste community demanded absolute commitment to Daedone, including by exalting Daedone’s teachings and ideology,” Peace said in the letter.

Federal prosecutors said Daedone and Cherwitz targeted prospective customers who had suffered prior trauma, claiming that OneTaste’s courses and teachings could heal past sexual trauma and dysfunction.

“If the members could not afford the courses — which ranged from hundreds to tens of thousands of dollars each — Cherwitz, together with others, induced the OneTaste members to incur debt, and at times directly assisted the OneTaste members in opening new credit cards, to pay for them,” Peace said in the letter.

As recently as March, OneTaste advertised on its Instagram account its retreat center The Eros Monastery at The Land in Philo. Amanda Dunham, one of the three current OneTaste owners, is listed as CEO of The Land Sanctuary, Inc., according to records filed with the California Secretary of State’s Office.

Dunham, reached Tuesday by The Press Democrat, said she purchased the retreat center in November 2020.

“My vision for The Land has always been separate but connected to my passion for the teachings of OneTaste, of which I am a co-owner,” she wrote in an email. “I have always wanted to create a space for people to come and reflect, restore, and contribute to something greater than themselves.

“The Land is open to private events of all kinds, and anybody who wants to experience a retreat, with or without anything to do with OneTaste," she wrote.

On its website OneTaste lists its business location as a 4th Street address in Santa Rosa that is a mail center.

There is no phone number listed on OneTaste’s website. An email message sent by a Press Democrat reporter was not returned Tuesday.

(pressdemocrat.com)

ED NOTES

DARRYL CHERNEY ON FACEBOOK: "I could use a quick infusion of cash." Wait here, Darryl, I'll get my checkbook.

CHERNEY won almost a million dollars in the bogus Bari-Cherney federal libel lawsuit. After raising money throughout the U.S. on the promise that if they won the suit they'd do good things for the environment, Cherney bought a dope farm north of Garberville, Bari's $2 mil went to her two already wealthy daughters.

YOU KNOW you’re famous when you become a Jeopardy question. But David and Micki Colfax qualify because their renown as homeschoolers three of whose children went off to Harvard, was not only a recent question on the show, a couple of contestants immediately identified them. Those three, not-so-incidentally, have done very well, despite the public school lobby worrying that being homeschooled they wouldn't be fully socialized. Two doctors and a judge, all three fully socialized.

THE COUNTY’S recent, and hopefully not futile, clean-up of illegal dump sites along Mountain View Road yielded not only the usual hundreds of burst household garbage bags and discarded refrigerators, but one spot even produced a 6-foot bank-like safe, its remains showing evidence of a blow torch entry. I didn’t know our local crooks thought this big.

THE UNABOMBER was a fount of reactionary opinions, but he was right in step with the Sierra Club’s ongoing debate as to whether or not to endorse a virtual halt to immigration as a means of slowing environmental degradation. A Sierra Clubber asks, “How can we protect America’s anything, but certainly the things we’re concerned with, if we don’t deal with the rapidly growing U.S. population?” 

THE TYPICAL SIERRA CLUBBER? A 2.5 Stanford family with $5,000 bikes, ski vacations, 8,000-square-foot homes raised on fruit and vegetables organically grown in Chile, Guatamalan maids. If the entire membership of the Sierra Club signed over their collective assets to the Catholic Workers then committed mass suicide, pressures on the environment would be eased at least 30%. 

AS A YOUNGER old timer in Mendocino County, and the proprietor of Boonville’s beloved weekly, which long ago blossomed as a county-wide paper, with a few hundred thrill seekers in the Bay Area also subscribing, I occasionally get asked questions about past events. The other day, a woman now in her 30s asked me, “What was the Bear Lincoln case all about?” Lapsing into garrulous old coot mode, I began:

OLD COVELO FAMILY FEUDS had erupted earlier in the day of April 14th, 1995 when Arylis Peters shot Gene Britton in the parking lot of Round Valley High School. Later that night commenced the Bear Lincoln saga.

A JUROR would describe the Lincoln case as a “tragic accident,” which it clearly was and which assessment I’ve always seconded. I hustled out to the site of the shootings the day after, and then again a few days later, and I’ve gone over the evidence as presented in court many times, and I’ve discussed the case endlessly with all kinds of doubters. 

IN BRIEF, on the evening of the 14th, Bear Lincoln and Leonard Peters, both armed in anticipation of a Britton family counter-attack and ambush, were walking up the hill from the Lincoln home when Leonard Peters was shot and killed by two Sheriff’s deputies, firing at Peters from the top of the hill overlooking the road. 

LINCOLN AND PETERS assumed they were being shot at by members of the Britton family. They did not know that two deputies, Dennis Miller and Robert Davis, were at the top of the hill but out of sight on the north bank above the roadbed.

PETERS was a few yards ahead of Lincoln when he was shot. The terrain, and the darkness of the April night prevented Lincoln from hearing the two officers’ identify themselves. 

THE INITIAL EXCHANGES of gun fire happened in total darkness. Deputies Miller and Davis shot Peters because they thought Peters was either about to shoot at them or had shot at them because Lincoln, seeing Peters drop twenty or so feet in front of him up the hill, had already moved to the south side of the road and returned fire, shooting blindly up the hill, unaware that he was shooting at police officers. 

LINCOLN THEN RETREATED back down the hill then, but a few minutes later, made his way back up the hill in search of Peters but staying out of sight of the road to the side of the grade, at which point there was another exchange of fire during which deputy Davis was killed.

THE MURDER CASE against Lincoln was not accompanied by supporting forensic evidence. And the prosecution of Lincoln was presented in a garbled manner by an assistant DA, the DA herself having ducked it. It really came down to this: Did Bear Lincoln, on his second trip up the hill to check on Peters (lying dead in the road) know he was exchanging fire with deputies?

I’D say probably not, because the two deputies had placed themselves on a tactically obscure knoll overlooking this one seldom traveled road to the Lincoln property. Bear Lincoln would naturally have thought he and Peters were being shot at by the Brittons, not the cops. 

DEPUTY MILLER was not believable on the stand because his first account of the shootings was fundamentally different from his second account, and both accounts raised more questions than they answered. Lincoln’s account never varied and squared perfectly with the terrain and scant physical evidence recovered from the scene. I don’t think Miller knows what happened. Nor did I think he was an “Indian killer” or a “racist” or a “nut,” as the more hysterical libs accused him of being. Lincoln told the truth right from the start, but the cops (apart from Miller) came across to the jury and everyone else as a collection of arrogant clowns — every civilian’s nightmare, in other words. The jury knew where the truth lay and took no time at all tossing the case.

(I’D KNOWN MILLER when he Anderson Valley’s resident deputy. I’d heard one account of how he allegedly shot an allegedly harmless dog after the dog bit him, one account of how he allegedly kicked a lady’s door in to confiscate three marijuana plants, general beefs from several pot growers alleging that he was over-zealous in the pursuit of weed, and several complaints from liberals alleging that he singled out Mexicans for special attention. There were never many complaints about Miller. The few times I encountered him after the Lincoln affair he was cordial, which surprised me, actually, because the AVA had been right out front from the week of the shootings as lead skeptics of the official version of that sad series of events.

THE UNABOMBER was a fount of reactionary opinions, but he was right in step with the Sierra Club’s ongoing debate as to whether or not to endorse a virtual halt to immigration as a means of slowing environmental degradation. A Sierra Clubber asks, “How can we protect America’s anything, but certainly the things we’re concerned with, if we don’t deal with the rapidly growing U.S. population?” 

THE TYPICAL SIERRA CLUBBER? A 2.5 Stanford family with $5,000 bikes, ski vacations, 8,000-square-foot homes on fruit and vegetables organically grown in Chile, Guatamalan maids. If the entire membership of the Sierra Club signed over their collective assets to the Catholic Workers then committed mass suicide, pressures on the environment would be eased at least 30%. 

LEAVE THE CHAT LINE ALONE

Marco McClean here. I'm writing to the school board to urge you to take no action on Item 9.4. MCN Listserves

It's very important that the MCN Announce listserv and the MCN Discussion listserv remain open forums for announcements and discussions, free from being "moderated" by a private party who would rather people and issues he personally dislikes be eliminated not just from his sight but from everyone else's. No-one should have that power. The listservs are working well. Let them work.

The main person I see complaining and wanting a change in this matter, David Gurney, has his own demons and anger issues to work out, that he relentlessly projects on others, He swears at people and belittles people and tries to hurt others' feelings as he imagines people are trying to hurt his and repeatedly demands that everyone leave him alone. He's a member of the community too, and that's fine; that's how he chooses to participate when he's at that place in his cycle; and regarding him and the very few others who have similar problems, this is generally understood.

Reading or not reading the work of any writer is under the control of individual readers, just like in any other public archive or any library or bulletin board.

For seven years starting in 1990, before most people had internet access, I edited the Mendocino Commentary newspaper and then published Memo, printing everything sent in, and distributing it throughout the county. Then I did the same thing on my radio show on countywide KMFB until 2011, and from 2012 through the present on KNYO and, for awhile, on KMEC too. I have a great deal of experience with people throwing a tantrum because someone they don't like wrote or said something they don't like, and it isn't enough for them to not read it, or to change the channel, they want to stop everyone else from seeing and reading and thinking about it too. It's never good to give censors a little power. Leave it up to the individual to choose what reading matter pleases him.

Every week an hour of the material for my current eight-hour Friday night radio show on KNYO comes directly from the Announce listserv, verbatim. MCN's policy regarding the listservs is perfect the way it is; please leave it the way it is.

VIRGINIA SHARKEY: Happy that “Infinity Aspect” has a new home. It’s so wonderful to get paintings sold and adopted. 

This one was commissioned by collectors who gave only the size —26” x 38” as a parameter. Supreme faith and trust! I told them if they don’t like it on completion they don’t have to buy it but it all went well and they as happy as I am. Kind of one of those long lost hand shake agreements although this had even less of a commitment— just trust: imagine!

JOHN REDDING:

File this under: "Dine Early, Stay for the Show."

After being released from hospital Board prison last December, I have been busy creating a one-man musical show called Back Stories. I tell the back story for some of the most popular songs of the last 75 years, including interesting facts about the song. I then perform the song using voice, guitar, kick drum and foot cymbals. (I am giving thought to adding a capuchin monkey to the show.) 

For example, did you know that Bob Dylan wrote ‘Don't Think Twice, It's All Right’ in order to reimagine that he broke up with Suzi Rotolo when in fact she dumped him?

Add to this the songs I have been composing about life on the Mendocino Coast. My latest are called Highway 128 and Song of the Ocean. 

I have performed this show twice now and people have found it to be quite entertaining. See for yourself. I will be presenting the show again this Friday at Good Bones in Caspar. From 7:00 pm onward. Dine early, stay for the show.

NO, MARY, NO! NOT YOU! 

You can reach Staff Writer Mary Callahan (she/her) at 707-521-5249 or mary.callahan@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @MaryCallahanB.

‘BACK TO THE GARDEN’: Summer solstice celebrated back-to-the-land style at Grace Hudson

On Saturday, June 17, from noon to 4 p.m., the Grace Hudson Museum will hold a Summer Solstice Celebration in the spirit of the back-to-the-land movement. Popular local band Redbud will play rousing music, featuring Bob Dress, Tobin Hendricks, and Yoli Rose. Visitors will have a hand at playing Communeopoly, a game from venerable Greenfield Ranch; and crafts projects including tie-dye with Laura Fogg and macrame with Ann Maglinte and Debra McCarthy will be available. There will also be a woodworking demonstration from John Cunnan, and informational panels from the Counterculture Museum and Archives based in Willits. To top it all off, vegetarian treats from nearby Taste Buds restaurant will be offered. 

This free daytime event (including Museum admission) will be a perfect time to visit the Museum's current exhibit, "Something's Happening Here: Artistic Reflections on the Back-to-the-Land Movement," a collection of artworks by over 30 members of this movement which began in the late 1960s and brought deep and long-lasting changes to Mendocino County, and to the entire world. "Something's Happening Here" will be on display until Oct. 15, with more panels and events planned for this summer.

The Grace Hudson Museum is at 431 S. Main St. in Ukiah. The Museum is open Wednesday through Saturday from 10 a.m. to 4:30 p.m., and Sunday from noon to 4:30 p.m. For more information please go to www.gracehudsonmuseum.org or call (707) 467-2836.

MOTHER KALI SAYS, "YOU'RE A NATCH FOR MENDO, CRAIG"

Seeking to Move to Subsidized Housing in a Spiritual Enlightened Left-Radical Community

Warmest spiritual greetings, 

This morning, the housing navigator at the Building Bridges Homeless Resource Center in Ukiah, California informed me that the current situation, is that because I have been a resident of Mendocino County for over one year, that I may now transfer my federal housing voucher anywhere in the USA which has the funding and rent anywhere which is willing to accept my voucher.

That means that I may move!! As ever, I am identified with the "Divine Absolute", or "Eternal Witness", or whatever you wish to call it, and I am not identified with the body nor the mind. I am hard left in politics, i.e. Earth First!, and appreciative of such as the scripturally defined role of the Avatar, which is to destroy the demonic and return this world to righteousness. Also, the great goddess is an inspiration. Jai Mother Kali. It's simple, really. 

Yours for Self Realization,

Craig Louis Stehr

CATCH OF THE DAY, Tuesday, June 13, 2023

ILEANA AMRULL, Ukiah. Failure to appear.

ROBERT AVERY II, Emeryville/Ukiah. Failure to appear.

TERRY HOUSER, Eureka/Ukiah. Mandatory supervision violation.

VANCE MADSEN, Willits. Vandalism.

JONATHAN MARTINEZ, Fort Bragg. Pot sales, organic drug sales, probation revocation.

MICHAEL OLVERA-CAMPOS, Ukiah. Parole violation.

JOSE ORTIZ-MENDOZA, Gilroy/Willits. DUI-alcohol&drugs while on probation, suspended license, habitual traffic offender, 4th or more offense within ten years, failure to appear.

MICHELL PERRY, Lakeport/Ukiah. County parole violation.

JULIO RODRIGUEZ-CHAVARIA, Ukiah. Robbery, criminal threats, disorderly conduct-alcohol&drugs, paraphernalia, resisting, unspecified offense. 

GREGORY SWANSON, Kelseyville/Ukiah. Conspiracy.

“FOR MORE THAN 20 YEARS, Westfield has proudly and successfully operated San Francisco Centre, investing significantly over that time in the vitality of the property,” the company said in a statement provided to SFGATE. “Given the challenging operating conditions in downtown San Francisco, which have led to declines in sales, occupancy and foot traffic, we have made the difficult decision to begin the process to transfer management of the shopping center to our lender to allow them to appoint a receiver to operate the property going forward. San Francisco Centre’s debt is non-recourse and this action has no impact on the rest of [Unibail-Rodamco-Westfield's] debt.”

ALL THE WAY BACK TO WATERGATE: DEMS ALWAYS AVOID THE WORST CRIMES

by Mark Scaramella

The Democratic Party has a history of going after their Republican opponents for relatively minor offenses because most of the major offenses are either bipartisan affairs or with the complicity or knowledge of the top Democrats. 

As a long-time student of Watergate and its aftermath, it has always amazed me that the articles of impeachment against Nixon were for a minor break-in of a Democrat operative’s office and the subsequent cover-up, not for the secret and clearly illegal bombing of Cambodia, for example, which killed millions of people in addition to the millions already “legally” bombed in Vietnam — the very definition of war crimes. You have to dig into some very obscure legal archives to even get a hint at the reasons that the secret, illegal bombing of Cambodia — the most egregious of Nixon’s many crimes — was excluded from the list of impeachment articles against Nixon. And then, decades after the fact. 

We got our first hint at the main reason the real crimes were excluded from reading Jerry Zeifman’s little known but fascinating 1995 book “Without Honor: Crimes of Camelot and the Impeachment of Richard Nixon.”

Publisher’s Weekly (1996):

“The House Judiciary Committee's recommendation in 1974 that Nixon be impeached, which led to his resignation, was nearly thwarted by a sham congressional inquiry, according to this blistering expose. Zeifman, now a lawyer in private practice, was chief counsel to the committee during the impeachment inquiry, and excerpts from the diary he kept during the proceedings are interpolated with his pointed analysis. He charges that John Doar, special counsel to the inquiry (and formerly a key figure in Robert Kennedy's Justice Department), intentionally orchestrated a charade because he (Doar) feared that a thorough investigation of the Nixon administration's government-sponsored crimes would let out of the bag about Kennedy-era wiretaps, burglaries and sanctioned murders carried out in the name of national security. Zeifman further contends that Doar and committee chairman Peter Rodino (D.-N.J.) attempted to keep Nixon in office until the end of his term to improve the odds of electing Ted Kennedy president in 1976. Finally, Zeifman maintains that Doar aide Hillary Rodham (now the First Lady) and her fellow staffer Bernard Nussbaum (who recently resigned as Clinton's chief White House counsel) helped Doar and Marshall gain control over the investigation through unethical tricks and faulty legal opinions. Zeifman has written a complex yet cogent blockbuster that traces a legacy of deceit to Whitewater.”

From an on-line review by J. Adams:

“Zeifman was the majority counsel to the Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee during the Nixon impeachment hearings. This book is an interesting peek into the political considerations that overrode any attempt at justice in the hanging of Richard Nixon. Zeifman is a long-time liberal Democrat who kept a detailed diary of events leading up to Nixon's resignation, and of course what he discovered in that job should have been made public at the time. Now that most liberals have adopted the theory of what Nixon did in the Watergate fiasco was worthy of his removal from office, it should come as no surprise that those same people still view JFK as a paragon of virtue when in fact the crimes he committed while in office were far worse than anything that Nixon did.

“Zeifman goes into great detail about how the Democrats were terrified of having to put Watergate figures on the stand as they would have had to testify how JFK and the CIA were guilty not only of illegal wiretapping of their political enemies, but also of the CIA's involvement in JFK instigated assassination attempts on Castro, and the Kennedy's involvement in ordering the death of South Vietnamese leaders.

“Much of this was recently published in Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA and was the reason I bought this book. Another little insight into Hillary comes from this book where Zeifman actually fired her for repeatedly lying and stealing records that were essential to a fair trial of Nixon because the documents implicated Democrats in illegal actions during the Camelot years.

“A really interesting book, but I can see why it went nowhere since it showed that Nixon was a petty crook compared to JFK for doing far worse things than ever occurred during the Watergate fiasco.”

Nixon was certainly much worse than “a petty crook,” but the on-line reviewer’s other remarks are on target.

The book referred to by the reviewer is Tim Weiner’s masterful “Legacy of Ashes,” a highly recommended history of national cover stories and false narratives based on the CIA’s own recently declassified documents and interviews, by the former New York Times National Security reporter.

Former House Speaker Tip O’Neil was reported to have agreed that morally the Democrats should have included the secret bombing of Cambodia in their list of impeachment articles but that including it would have been voted down by about 400 to 20. John Conyers tried to include it a few months later but “While no one challenged the veracity of the allegations contained in the article, it failed,” Conyers later observed, because “condemning the Cambodian bombing would also have required us to indict previous administrations and to admit that the Congress has failed to fully meet its own constitutional obligations.”

“Those opposed to including the article raised compelling arguments, pointing out that key congressional leaders of both political parties had been privy to the information and had neither said anything to the rest of Congress nor done anything about it, contending that the president's actions had been appropriate uses of his power as Commander-in-chief, and noting that this particular congressional-authority versus presidential-authority dispute had already been addressed by the War Powers Resolution (passed over Nixon's veto one year earlier). Another factor working against the proposal was the realization that putting the Cambodia article before the full House would interject the volatile issue of the role of the U.S. military in the Vietnam War into the impeachment debate.”

* * *

Now, here’s Donald Trump being charged with keeping boxes full of secret documents. Previously the Democrats charged him with the January 6 allegations and the cover-up of hush money payments to a former porn star, and attempting to jigger the Georgia election results. None of which have gone anywhere so far.

What you will probably never see in the current barrage of highly orchestrated news coverage of the latest Trump indictments and charges is any mention of the much larger crimes that the Democrats have privately decided to exclude because, just like with Watergate, the Democrats don’t want to get into messy stuff that they were either part of, participated in, approved of in advance, or knew about and did nothing.

THE FED'S MOOD

Editor,

Ever wonder what it might be like to be a member of the Federal Reserve Board?

Analyzing reams of economic data might not lend itself to producing a whole lot of grins around lunch or dinner tables. Imagine the chairman as, he or she, sits down to a steak dinner with all the trimmings to decide whether or not to goose the FED rate another quarter, or even half a point, or perhaps just to keep the existing rate as it is now. Maybe there’s a new hook in the Phillips Curve? What can improve the T-bill yield?

Could there be some bump up in the price of soybeans or pork bellies? Oil prices? Commodities? Something might happen to the demand for houses in Des Moines, San Francisco, Reno, Newark or Chicago. Perhaps prices of chicken eggs could skyrocket again like it did earlier this year when all the poor chickens got sick.

Is there any wonder that members of the FED don’t smile or emerge from their meetings in all smiles too often? I only hope they have some better luck if they ever venture forth to Vegas or to Churchill Downs. If it’s still open, that is.

Frank Baumgardner, III 

Santa Rosa

ON TODAY'S EXPLOSIVE CORONAVIRUS STORY

by Matt Taibbi

Michael Shellenberger’s Public today released a blockbuster story, “First Person Sickened By COVID-19 Was Chinese Scientist Who Oversaw 'Gain Of Function' Research That Created Virus,” which generously credits Racket. The story cites three government officials in naming scientist Ben Hu, who was in charge of “gain-of-function” research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, as the “patient zero” of the Covid-19 pandemic.

This is a major story, contradicting early official explanations pointing to zoonotic cross-species “spillover” at the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in Wuhan, colloquially known as the Wuhan wet market. The mystery bat or pangolin suspected of transmitting the disease to humans at that market was never found. The Public story for the first time asserts the source of contamination: a Wuhan Institute scientist fell ill after exposure to a virus engineered at his place of work.

The implications of this are enormous and represent a major problem for the federal health bureaucracy, several intelligence agencies, and the news media, to say nothing of politicians in both parties (but particularly those on the Democratic side) who’ve deflected public interest from the Wuhan Institute and gain-of-function research. The secrets of both the pandemic’s origin and the reason for America’s at-best-sluggish investigation of same have become the mother of all political footballs, and today’s news is likely to be just the first in a series of loud surprises.

The bulk of this investigation was done by Michael and the Public team, who’ve been digging into this matter with impressive ferocity for a while now. My part was more incidental, and I’m a bit hamstrung in talking about the nature of it, except to say that in addition to the material Michael dug up in today’s article, numerous federal agencies appear to have designed their probes of Covid-19’s origins so as to discount the possibility of lab origin in advance.

We were told, for instance, that despite longstanding interest in the Wuhan Institute as a potential security concern, at least one intelligence agency overruled a majority of its in-house investigators to produce a report on the pandemic’s origin discounting the lab-leak hypothesis.

The “patient zero” report is likely to focus even more attention on stories by publications ranging from the Washington Post to the Intercept to the Wall Street Journal about U.S.-funded “gain-of-function” research, which sources insist is the likely reason many agencies (with the notable exception of the FBI and the Department of Energy, which both pointed at lab origin as a possible explanation) were steered away from the Wuhan Institute as a possible outbreak source.

The Public story should force a hard look at the cost of steering investigators away from the Wuhan Institute. Jamie Metzl, a former member of the World Health Organization expert advisory committee on human genome editing, put it this way in Michael’s story: "Had US government officials including Dr. Fauci stated from day one that a COVID-19 research-related origin was a very real possibility, and made clear that we had little idea what viruses were being held at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, what work was being done there, and who was doing that work, our national and global conversations would have been dramatically different."

The identity of Covid’s “Patient Zero” is a big part of a puzzle that will likely take a while to fully assemble, but there’s reason for optimism this time. Unlike other recent stories that have been ignored, like the Nord Stream explosion, numerous mainstream news organizations either have individual reporters or whole teams assigned to the theme Michael hit first today. Sooner or later, this story is coming out. I.F. Stone famously said all governments lie, but it’s beginning to look like the scale of this one would have shocked even him.

In any case, congratulations to Public, and please stay tuned to this space and theirs for more.

(racket.news)

ON-LINE COMMENT OF THE DAY

I’ve lived a half a century now, my prime is behind me. I won’t endure the “Mad Max” scenario. I will always keep the last round in the chamber of my .357 for myself. I don’t fear death. If there is life after death it will be without a physical body and free of pain, hunger and suffering. If there isn’t life after death then, well, I won’t give a damn anyway. What I do fear is being eaten alive by roving gangs of starving cannibals or being sacrificed to their heathen gods. No, I will fight until there is no longer a reason to fight anymore and then I will exit this world in quiet dignity. That’s my plan anyway.

"ONE DAY, I reviewed my life as a cowboy from every angle and came to the conclusion that all I had gained was experience, and I could not turn that into cash, so I decided I had enough of it, and made up my mind to go home, get married and settle down to farming."

— Franklin Monroe Polk of Luling, Texas in a letter written about 1925. Franklin is standing on the right in this photo. On the left is his brother, who was in the posse that caught up with Billy the Kid. Thanks to Robin Webb-Lucas for sharing this awesome shot!

TECHNOLOGY NEEDS ASSESSMENTS BY CONGRESS, MUNICIPALITIES & LOCAL CIVIC GROUPS

by Ralph Nader

The pace of for-profit technological innovations is accelerating, but to what end beyond corporate sales? The gap between marketing new high-tech products and assessing their intended and unintended consequences has never been greater.

Let’s start with the ballooning of augmented reality inside virtual reality. Facebook’s Oculus Rift escapism has flopped. Trying to improve on this bizarre quest to envelop its customers, Apple plans to release the “Vision Pro”, a “mixed-reality” headset so large that Washington Post columnist Molly Roberts described it as “clunky and creepy” and predicted failure for this $3,499 rip-off.

Do mega-corporation CEOs – who spend company profits on massive stock buybacks for no productive use (Apple plans to spend $90 billion on buybacks this year) – spend any money on the lost practice of technology assessment? Do Facebook and Apple have studies on what fantasy goggles are doing to youngsters’ minds? Are these devices producing anxieties, fears or addictions? Do these corporations have more victims than customers? Do the high-tech CEOs care? If they do, they’re not saying.

Let’s move on to the big stuff! Congress has been spending trillions of your taxpayer dollars on technologies of modern weaponry, chemicals, drugs, medical devices, transportation, the Internet, biotechnology, nanotechnology and fusion energy. Yet the general public remains clueless about the adverse impact of these expenditures. Congress doesn’t even know if many technologies or products work as advertised.

You can thank the bombastic, ignorant Newt Gingrich for hurling our 535 members of Congress into this black void. In 1994 Gingrich orchestrated the Republican takeover of the House of Representatives. And, in 1995, after becoming Speaker of the House, Gingrich and the Republican-controlled Congress eliminated the funding of the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment (OTA). With a small $20 million annual budget, OTA produced scores of assessment reports needed by Congress. (See: https://ota.fas.org/otareports/). Senator Edward Kennedy (D-MA) was one of OTA’s strongest supporters, who with other members of Congress served on its bipartisan board. When Congress was debating the creation of OTA, Kennedy said “without an OTA the role of Congress in national science policy would become more and more perfunctory and more and more dependent on administration facts and figures, with little opportunity for independent Congressional evaluation.” Kennedy was furious about the Republican defunding of OTA, but could not marshal enough of his dejected fellow Democrats to fight to restore funding even after Gingrich resigned in disgrace five years later.

The failure of Democrats to fund OTA when they controlled Congress allowed Gingrich’s demolition to continue the wreckage he launched. Technically unadvised members looked foolish for years in their questioning of Silicon Valley executives at public hearings.

Right after Obama’s victory in 2008, carrying large Democratic majorities in the House and Senate, I organized an effort to refund OTA with Nobel laureates and other scientists on board. For many years, Cong. Rush Holt Jr. (D-NJ) led the effort in the House, only to be undermined by Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who said she didn’t want to give the Republicans an opportunity to accuse her of starting another bureaucracy on Capitol Hill. Truly shocking!

Now it is 2023 and the studied ignorance of Congress fuels the strategically useless F-35 Fighter planes at a $1.5 trillion projected cost. Well over a trillion dollars will be spent upgrading the nuclear bomb arsenal – currently able to blow up the world many times over. The unavoidable ballistic missile so-called defense program soaks up billions of dollars yearly (See: “Why Missile Defense Won’t Work” by MIT Professor Ted Postol. The rave for electric vehicles badly needs a thorough technology assessment for its lifecycle costs and benefits.

An adequately funded OTA would have alerted Congress early about the looming opioid crisis and crimes that have taken a million or more American lives. A similar alert from an OTA report, before Covid-19 struck, could have alerted Congress on the lack of preparedness for coming pandemics. Being part of Congress, OTA can command the attention and credibility from members far more easily than any studies or alarms from citizen groups or civically-minded Think Tanks.

Pressing the issue of funding OTA in the 21^st century’s second decade brought the Democratic Party’s excuse that either one chamber of Congress or the other half was Republican-controlled. I, with Bruce Fein, Joan Claybrook and Claire Nader, explained to Speaker Pelosi in 2020 that the House or Senate can fund OTA without the concurrence of the other simply on the grounds of its prerogative to more fully fund its own institution. No reply.

It took 86-year-old Congressman Bill Pascrell, Jr. (D-NJ) to publicly chastise his colleagues with articles titled: Why is Congress so dumb? (January 11, 2019, Washington Post) and Congress Is Sabotaging Your Post Office (April 7, 2019, Washington Monthly). Still no visible reaction from the tone-deaf congressional solons busily reducing their own significance under the Constitution and spending money unwisely.

The ongoing lack of local technology assessment capabilities leaves Congress without a grassroots infrastructure of fact-based, nonpartisan analysis.

Municipalities do not have formal little OTAs for their infrastructure projects, so the grasping, politically connected vendors take advantage of such ignorance to increase prices and delay projects and continue shoddiness. Think bridges, highways, schools and public buildings projects.

The science and engineering departments of universities are rarely interested in supplying such knowledge or even teaching the ethics of engineering to their students. In 2018 we sponsored a book titled Ethics, Politics, and Whistleblowing in Engineering by Rania Milleron and Nicholas Sakellariou (CRC Press) that delved into how disasters can occur when engineering professionals don’t take their consciences that reflect their expected responsibilities to work. Three times we sent letters to about two dozen Deans and professors of Engineering around the country encouraging them to develop classes on ethics for their students. Not a single reply. (See, January 2, 2019, Letter to Engineering Professors or Department Heads).

In 1998, our community project in Winsted, Connecticut retained an engineer, Susan M. McGoey, as a “community technologist.” She proved her worth manyfold, catching over-reaches by the engineering firm hired to upgrade the town’s drinking water purification plant. She also advised the town on its municipal watershed stewardship, began a natural resources inventory and organized a successful river clean-up along with many other money-saving projects from redesigning traffic lights to improving downtown renovations.

Readers interested in collaborating with the renewed effort to fund the Office of Technology Assessment (OTA) in Congress can contact their members of Congress, and also connect with us at info@nader.org. It is high time to aggregate dedicated public opinion and advocacy on this inexpensive but very important restoration.

AFTER THE 1955 LYNCHING of Emmett Till, his mother made the decision to hold an open-casket funeral to expose the world to the cruelty that black Americans were being subjected to by showing his mutilated body to the public. In that moment it looked like the world was being made more ugly, because an ugliness that had previously gone unseen by many people was being published in papers across the country. But it was later said that "The open-coffin funeral held by Mamie Till Bradley exposed the world to more than her son Emmett Till's bloated, mutilated body. Her decision focused attention on not only American racism and the barbarism of lynching but also the limitations and vulnerabilities of American democracy."

Similarly, the dawn of the internet has turned up a tremendous amount of ugliness and cruelty that had previously gone unseen and unknown to most people. This can lead to the mistaken impression that the internet itself is making people more cruel and ugly than they previously were, but it isn't. It's just turning up humanity's longstanding inner demons that had previously functioned solely in the dark.

It looks ugly, it moves in a sloppy, clumsy, two-steps-forward-one-step-back shamble, but human consciousness is undeniably expanding. We're getting so much better at sharing ideas and information with each other that we've arguably changed more as a species in the last thirty years than we did in the previous thirty centuries. We might outwardly look similar to the way we looked in our grandparents' time, but billions of human brains connected to each other through the internet is something that is wildly unprecedented in the entire history of our species. Nothing like this has ever happened before.

So humanity is indisputably becoming more conscious, as awkward and sloppy as our situation looks right now. We're becoming more and more aware of the problems our species faces, and our rulers are having to do more and more work to pull the wool over our eyes and keep us marching in a way that is convenient to them.

Police brutality. The abuses of Israeli apartheid. The agony of poverty. The ravages of ecocide. The ways we've been deceived and manipulated by the mass media. People are becoming more and more aware of these things than they used to be, because the truth about them is suddenly vastly more visible now than it previously was.

And what's exciting is that we all have the ability to participate in, and facilitate, this expansion of consciousness. We each have the ability to help humanity become more conscious in our own small way, thereby bringing us that much closer to a positive shift in our collective behavior.…

— Caitlin Johnstone