Mendocino County Today: Friday, June 16, 2023

Sunny Warm | Bumble Bee | Strawberry Afternoon | School Sale | Art Walk | Housing Proposal | Sword Fern | P Concern | Customer Appreciation | Ed Notes | Rail Line | Little Thing | New Therapist | Yesterday's Catch | Fossil Fueling | Our Crap | Home Insurance | Bright Light | Where Next | Farmworkers Strike | No Signs | Ukraine | Profit v Income | Marching On | Inuit Lesson

MOSTLY CLEAR skies and the warmest temperatures of the week are expected in most areas today. Tonight and into the weekend dramatic cooling is expected across the interior with highs only the 60s by Monday. Frost is possible in some of the colder valleys Monday and Tuesday mornings. A slight chance of showers or thunderstorms is also expected Monday. (NWS)

STEPHEN DUNLAP (Fort Bragg): 48F with clear skies this Friday morning on the coast. Today & tomorrow are looking lovely then a really cool & breezy system drops in on Sunday & sticking around well into next week. The fog has returned to just offshore, we might see some this morning?

6am UPDATE : I have foggy skies now

BOONVILLE BARN COLLECTIVE

At the end of May we spent 10 days planting 4 acres of chiles and 3.5 acres of dry beans, splitting our days to plant in the mornings and evenings so we wouldn’t have to be out in the heat of the day.

Compared to other farms, we grow our starts in the greenhouse for a pretty long time. This year we planted seeds at the end of January and focused on developing incredibly healthy roots before planting the ground in late May. They look a bit lanky when first planted but they have already developed more of their leaves and are starting to thrive! 

We also planted a LOT more beans than we have previously and I’m so stoked about it. My 93-year-old grandma was in town during planting and she came on out and helped us plant a small section of Tigers Eye beans. While one variety we planted didn’t germinate, we hope to have solid harvests of the other 9 varieties(!) of beans we sowed.

And we will be ready for them come harvest time with our new bean thresher that we imported from Turkey! I think Alejandro might be most excited about the thresher since he spent the most time riding our bike-powered bean thresher last year.

This machine will *hopefully* take about 3 weeks of work and complete it in a day, maybe even in a few hours of time! Threshers are used to clean beans from their shells which sounds like an easy task but when you are trying to produce over a ton of beans, you really don’t want to do it by hand. We’ll share more about the thresher once we get to use it in September!

Did we also mention that it is also strawberry season? Here on the farm we have 4,500 Seascape Strawberry plants. Once they begin to fruit, they don’t stop until the fall (or we start to run out of water and prioritize the chiles). We’ve been known to walk outside and snack on strawberries well into October and even November.

We sell the majority of our strawberries to the Philo Apple Farm for their strawberry jam, while the rest of the berries head out to restaurants and individuals here in the valley. On Fridays when we have a big harvest of berries, our plan is to sell them on the side of the road in front of Lichen Estate (right next to the farm at 11001 CR 151 in Boonville) in the afternoons. Like I said before, we’ve been busy!

MEMO OF THE WEEK

Ukiah Unified School District Superintendent’s Office

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE — June 14, 2023

Contact: Debra Kubin, Superintendent

(707) 472-5002 / dkubin@uusd.net

Ukiah Unified Trustees Declare Intent to Sell Redwood Valley Elementary School Property

Ukiah, CA — Ukiah Unified Trustees unanimously voted to approve Resolution 30 2022-23 at their meeting on June 13, 2023, declaring their intent to sell the Redwood Valley Elementary School (RVES) property. The property totals approximately 12.4 acres and is located at 700 School Street, which is in an unincorporated area of Mendocino County, Assessor's Parcel Numbers 163-060-15 and 163-060-35.

Approval of this resolution puts the property up for sale through a two-phased bidding process. The minimum bid must be at least $900,000. Sealed bids must be submitted prior to the Board's next regularly-scheduled meeting on Thursday, August 10th, 2023, and will be opened during the public portion of the meeting. At that point, interested parties may bid on the property during the Board meeting, whether or not they submitted a written bid. Any subsequent bids must be at least 5% higher than the highest bid, and if no bids have been received, must be at least $900,000.

After the formation of a 7-11 Committee and a series of public meetings, the District accepted the 7-11 Committee's recommendation to close RVES at the end of the 2009-10 school year on February 9, 2010. A second 7-11 Committee was formed in 2016, and after another series of public meetings, the Committee ultimately recommended to the Board on December 14, 2017, that the property should be declared surplus. The Board accepted this recommendation. Between December 2017 and April 2020, a variety of transactions were explored, and community input was sought. In April 2020, the Board directed Ukiah Unified Administration to enter into a property exchange agreement with GMB Realty. This exchange agreement expired in June 2022.

Given legislative amendments that were enacted after the Board’s December 14, 2017, surplus declaration, the Board approved Resolution No. 6, 2022-23, declaring the RVES “Exempt Surplus Land” and directing staff to proceed with statutory offers on October 13, 2022. Based on this resolution, Ukiah Unified offered the property for sale or lease to certain public agencies, such as city and county parks and recreation entities, as well as to additional public agencies, such as the Department of General Services, California universities, and the city and county in which the surplus property is located. Ukiah Unified was not able to sell or lease the property to any of these entities during this process.

Follow this link to view Resolution 30 2022-23, the requirements to bid on the property, and supporting documents. https://www.uusd.net/apps/pages/RVES

If you have questions about the property or the process, please contact Ukiah Unified Communications Officer Doug Shald at 707-472-5005 or dshald@uusd.net.

SUPERVISOR WILLIAMS: Tuesday morning, BOS, June 20, item 4d:

Discussion and Possible Action Including Direction to Staff to Initiate Plan to Double Allowable Residential Structures within Inland Zoning and Allow Subdivision to One-half Current Minimums Where Water and Sewer Support

(Sponsor: Supervisor Williams)

Summary of Request: 

During the April 25, 2023, regular meeting, Supervisor Gjerde asked Supervisor Williams how he would address the housing shortage in Mendocino County. Supervisor Williams would exercise local land use to increase the buildable parcels because, under current regulations, most of the “easy” parcels have already been developed. By allowing residential development on parcels with adequate water and sewer capacity, and subdivision, construction will be catalyzed without government handouts. The development would facilitate the County in meeting its Housing Element.

Senate Bill 9, also called the California Housing Opportunity and More Efficiency (“HOME”) Act, was the product of a multi-year effort to develop solutions to address our state’s housing crisis. SB 9 altered the municipal review process for two-unit housing developments on single-family lots and for the subdivision of property. The state has already identified one of the controllable obstacles impeding housing supply. The county does not control the cost of labor, materials or building code compliance, but it does control zoning and land use.

Supervisor Williams sees primary housing possibilities for Mendocino County as:

● Allow greater density throughout the unincorporated

● Allow greater density in certain areas (get ready for lengthy NIMBY “discussions”)

● Do nothing; live with the status quo

The housing shortage is the direct result of government policy. We have the opportunity to shift course. Without greater economic activity, our county government will be unable to meet mandates and expectations. Economic growth will not evolve without an increase in housing stock. Housing stock is primarily created by private industry, throttled by government policy. Taxing the people to subsidized housing for the people is not a solution.

MEASURE P AT RISK?

by Mark Scaramella

Local Fire Services are very nervous about an upcoming state ballot measure that could retroactively rescind Measure P, the “Essential Services Sales Tax” measure approved by voters last year by a fairly narrow margin last year of 51.2 % to 48.8%. The Supervisors passed an accompanying resolution promising that the proceeds would go to fire services and fire prevention. Normally ballot measures for fire services these days pass with a much larger percentage. But the public doesn’t have much faith in this board of Supervisors, so the vote was close. Nevertheless, the Supervisors have since included the allocation of the proceeds, estimated at around $2 million a year, in the 2023-2024 budget, although they are not legally bound to do that. (The board could revise or rescind their resolution at any time, especially if money becomes even tighter than it already is.)

Even Measure O, November 2022’s popular dedicated library tax passed by only 58.5% to 41.5%, less than two-thirds, indicating that there’s a significant underlying opposition even to relatively popular taxes that are designated for a specific popular purpose.

This Latest Threat to Measure P comes in the form of a ballot measure likely to be on the state ballot in November of 2024 which would retroactively rescind any new general sales tax approved after January of 2022 and require it to be re-voted on with a 2/3 majority requirement. The Measure is being advanced by California’s “Business Roundtable,” which is an anti-tax outfit. So far the Measure has received little attention and nothing is official since the filing deadline is still months off. 

We were surprised that a ballot measure could be retroactive, but so far there are no legal challenges to that provision in the proposed measure, tentatively entitled the “Taxpayer Protection and Government Accountability Act.” 

The measure states that any tax adopted after January 2022 and that fails to meet the requirements of the initiative would be deemed void 12 months after the act's effective date unless the tax is reenacted in compliance with the new measure. These include a clearly stated duration for the tax and a statement for how the revenues would be used.

According to the proponents, the proposed measure aims to “ensure that taxpayers have the right and ability to effectively balance new or increased taxes and other charges with the rapidly increasing costs Californians are already paying for housing, food, childcare, gasoline, energy, health care, education and other basic costs of living.”

The initiative would, among other things, explicitly prohibit advisory measures similar to the Measure P resolution that indicate that "the revenue from the general tax will, could, or should be used for a specific purpose."

Local government agencies around the state have started to gear up to oppose the initiative, but we haven’t seen any legal arguments about the very dubious retroactive provision in the proposed measure. 

ANDERSON VALLEY FARM SUPPLY’S CUSTOMER APPRECIATION DAY

Saturday, June 24, 2023 at 11 am

ED NOTES

IF THIS IS EL NINO, let it never end. A winter of hard rain followed by a week of pre-industrial air, golden days, bracing nights — all so perfect that one wants to put aside everything else and roil around in the embracing beauty of it! But duty tugs at one’s sleeve and it’s back to the vicious personal attacks, half-truths, cruel innuendos, random libels, and Unity Club meetings that comprise your local newspaper. I dispute it all, the whole litany, but there it is.

VISITING the ava Thursday were Mr. and Mrs. Michael DeLang, and further confirmation that the Boonville weekly has always drawn more visitors to the Anderson Valley and Mendocino County than the tax supported boondoggle called Visit Mendocino. Yes, sir, the welcome mat is always out at the AVA. 

JUNE BEING gay pride month Eric Von Gehrig, aka Swoop, wasn’t the first gay person in Boonville, and he certainly wasn’t the only gay, but he was certainly the most memorable. He’s been gone for 30 years, but lots of people remember him because he was very, very funny and, in a way unique in the then Boonville experience, very, very brave because he was unabashedly gay in a night time context — the Boonville Lodge — which wasn’t exactly a center of genteel tolerance at the time. Swoop memorably danced on the bar in a mini-skirt one raucous New Year’s Eve, circa 1974. The guy was a one-man rural gay liberation front. 

NOT ONE to let perhaps lethal homophobia stand between him and the bar, Swoop was so outlandish, so hilariously charming he disarmed the most volatile hetero, soon becoming a permanent fixture in a milieu where fists, bottles and pool balls frequently flew. Boonville is a pretty tame place these days, but when Swoop first showed up in the early 70s, it was the kind of place where tough guys from miles around showed up weekend nights for recreational combat. But Swoop was a psychological tough guy — he was who he was and so what was his attitude — but I always had the feeling he wouldn’t hesitate to throw punches if it came to it, and that he could and would defend himself if he had to. 

WHEN he first arrived in Boonville Swoop lived about two miles south of town on the old Minor Ranch. A light-haired man of about forty, built like a running back, Swoop commuted to the Lodge from his home on foot. Nobody “fagged” him back then, and I never heard of anybody “fagging” him later on as he became part of The Valley’s always vivid peoplescape. 

I’D OCCASIONALLY give him a lift somewhere and try to get some of his history out of him, but he always deflected these probes with one of his raspy-voiced jokes. He wouldn’t even tell me why he was called Swoop. He was a mystery man. Some people said he was orphaned as a child and grew up hard, others said he was from a family of aristocrats who’d disowned him. If he’d grown up hard, he wasn’t mean from the experience. He appeared out of nowhere, and was gone as suddenly as he’d arrived. I understand Swoop’s liver finally gave out. Better to wear out than rust out, the wild people say, and Swoop put in a lot of real hours before he wore out.

MY WEEKLY pamphlet from the Jehovah’s Witnesses is titled, “Will People Ever Love One Another?” I’d say people are pretty much unteachable, but bless the Witnesses for trying. 

FORGOT to add to my yesterday’s item about then-DA Massini firing now-DA Eyster, that as one of his last acts in Mendo, Eyster filed a wrongful termination suit against his hair-triggered boss, which he won to the tune of $18,000. And after years in Sacramento exile, Eyster returned to take the boss job himself.

THE FEDERAL HIGHWAY administration has always maintained, and still maintains, that the sparse traffic on the unpaved 50 or so miles winding over Mendocino Pass between Covelo and the Sacramento Valley does not merit a large investment in pavement. At best, surveys have indicated, perhaps 280 vehicles a day might use Forest Highway 7 if it were paved. But it doesn’t appear as if it will be although merchants in Covelo think a better road between Covelo and inland I-5 would bring more people to their businesses in Round Valley, and lots of people, maybe, to the least visited national forest in the United States, which Forest Highway 7 traverses. Proponents also argue that the road crews a paved road would require would provide a few of the well-paying jobs lost recently to Covelo when Caltrans closed its yard and the Forest Service cut back on its permanent staff.

A BOONVILLE old-timer called to ask if we knew anything about an article about Amelia Earhart which appeared several weeks ago in the Ukiah Daily Journal. He specifically wanted to know how to reach the archaeologist/author to find out if he had any information about alternative theories as to Ms. Earhart’s disappearance and possible whereabouts. The old-timer says he worked for a couple of years at a ranch in the Sacramento valley in the 40s. The woman who ran the place had a maiden name of Crittendon and a married name of Smith, explained the old-timer, and she was a dead ringer for Earhart. On top of that, there was an untouched plane kept under canvas in a barn which the old-timer says was just like the tri-motor Fokker that Earhart flew. People at the ranch were told to stay away from the barn. According to the old-timer, Earhart may have been a pre-WW2 spy whose cover had something to do with her flying adventures, and who, according to this theory, might have undergone an identity change via her government sponsors. Her spook-sponsors concocted a story about her “around the world flight” during which she was “lost at sea.” All she would have had to have done, according to our source, was take off from California, head west for a while, and then turn right around tand land at the ranch near Sacramento. Interestingly, Earhart is known to have learned to fly in California after serving a two-year stint in a Canadian nursing corps before she moved back to Boston from which she flew her initial 1928 Atlantic crossing with pilot Wilmer Stutz and mechanic Lou Gordon. Later, she flew her more famous solo flights, and in 1937 at the age of 39 her plane was declared “lost” near the extremely remote and tiny Howland Island in the Pacific.

WHEN YOU CAN’T FIX THE BIG THINGS…

by Marilyn Davin

California, percentage-wise, has the most human beings living in poverty of all 50 states. Its economy is foundering as techies search ever more fruitlessly for toe holds in an economy based substantially on fanciful, clickable online nonessentials. The State’s environmental disasters are stacking up: wildfires (locking many rural residents out of the home insurance market), dwindling fish stock, a looming energy shortfall (suppressed by EV manufacturing interests eager to sell their expensive, soon-to-be-unchargeable products), crumbling infrastructure, and unsustainable water consumption. On the social side, homeless residents clog our city streets while the wealthiest among us buy second homes that stand empty for most or part of the year, and many if not most of our students can’t tell you the name of the Vice President or describe anything about the Bill of Rights.

So many pressing problems, how can we possibly decide which one to tackle first? Aha! Got it: Let’s change Fort Bragg’s name! Not the city’s homeless problem or the crime/drug problem, not even the education problem. We’re woke and Confederate General Braxton Bragg (like virtually all white Americans of his generation and class) was a racist dude — he must be erased from our history: Poof! This may be a comic distraction, but is in its essence a sad waste of civic energy that could be redirected to something that actually improves the lives of residents. 

Most California cities and towns were named in the 1800s —my grandmother’s mother’s time. They reflect the lives of our ancestors at that moment in time and are irreplaceable roadmaps of our history. The folly of thinking that we can rewrite our shared history, of pretending it was other than the bloody, lawless, discriminatory free-for-all it actually was, is a fool’s errand. We can’t change history, so who cares a fig what people long dead named their cities and towns? All we can do is learn from it and not repeat it. A tragic victim of this foolishness is actual knowledge of our history rather than its changing interpretation by vested interests at both ends of today’s political spectrum. This in turn has cast doubt on provable fact, an existential threat as its adherents move increasingly into governance.

Fact: California contains 58 counties and 482 municipalities, many if not most named after individual persons. Imagine the civic chaos, to say nothing of the expense, if more California cities and towns chose to follow the foolish trail being blazed by a handful of Fort Bragg woke true believers. Let’s consider just a handful, starting at the top. The origin of the name California itself is commonly believed to be an imaginary island paradise described in a Spanish romance novel written in 1510. Nobody appears to object to this, possibly because this is such a fitting description after some 500 years. Should the residents of the East Bay City of Hercules adopt a Fort Bragg-like path, that city’s name should go on the chopping block even though its name comes from a thing instead of a person — namely a dynamite manufacturing outfit that touted its product’s potency as “Hercules Powder.” Community leaders (who were also former plant managers) chose the Hercules name back in 1900. Surely the manufacturers of the explosive material that fuels guns, bombs, and other explosive materials should be high up on a list of names needing public erasure. But all seems calm there, nary an anti-war protester in sight. Then there’s San Francisco, beacon of woke liberalism named for the Catholic Church that condemns homosexuality, sex before marriage, birth control, abortion, and other social issues diametrically opposed to everything the City and County of San Francisco stands for. I was there just this week and all was calm, though designer coffee lines looked longer amid the boarded-up ruins of Market Street. And what about Orange County’s Ronald Reagan International Airport, named after the American President who led the charge to dismantle progressive tax reforms begun by President Woodrow Wilson in 1913? 

As far as U.S. presidents go, what about third U.S. President Thomas Jefferson, condemned for fathering a child with a black slave? A contemporary historian wrote of Jefferson’s fall from woke grace that the real question is not whether or not Jefferson owned slaves (everyone in his class did), but rather how he came to believe passionately that it was wrong. This conclusion unfortunately requires context and philosophical thought, both in short supply these days. And what about the Father of our Country, the one-and-only George Washington himself, who owned 56 slaves yet also came to believe, like Jefferson, that it was wrong, freeing all of his slaves in his will. So how did the fact that both men owned slaves eclipse their enormous contributions to our history? Which is more relevant to the actual history of this country? And, practically speaking, how could they be erased? Blast their likenesses out of Mount Rushmore? Bomb the Washington and Jefferson memorials? Rename the state of Washington and Washington D.C.? The wider the net, the more ridiculous and foolish its path.

This rejiggering of history has even infected books and events. Years ago when I did a brief stint as a writing/language instructor, my black co-trainer and I browsed a colleague’s bookcase at one of our group parties. I felt her stiffen before pointing to a worn copy of Margaret Mitchell’s novel Gone with the Wind. “That’s a terrible book and should be banned,” she declared, eyes flashing. I studied her for a moment before replying, “How else would you expect the great-granddaughter of a slave-owning plantation owner to remember the antebellum South? And changing hearts and minds isn’t easy or even always possible, anyway. In Savannah, Georgia, a few years ago I went into a local bookstore and asked the owner where I might find books on the Civil War. “We don’t have anything on a civil war,” she sniffed. “Books on the War of Northern Aggression are along the back wall.”

Over the years I’ve seen many Confederate statues and other types of memorials in several states. My first thought was gratitude; those memorials were powerful visual reminders that slavery no longer exists in our country. The past is to learn from so, theoretically at least, we can craft a more just and equitable future world.

MCHC EXPANDS ACCESS TO BEHAVIORAL HEALTH WITH ADDITIONAL PROVIDER

Ukiah, CA - MCHC Health Centers welcomes its newest behavioral health provider, Amber Bengston, who will see patients at Hillside Health Center in Ukiah. Bengston is no stranger to healthcare, having worked as a dental assistant and a medical assistant before completing her master’s degree in social work to become a therapist. She is also deeply familiar with Mendocino County, where her roots go back several generations.

Bengston works with children and adults, and she recommends therapy for anyone facing a mental health challenge that interferes with their ability to live the life they want.

She says she understands why some people are reluctant to seek support. Although the stigma of seeing a therapist is far less than it used to be — and much less common among younger generations — it can be hard to overcome the fear of others’ judgement (or to overcome one’s own self-judgement). And in small communities, it’s essential to understand and respect the therapeutic relationship and boundaries.

Bengston’s particular areas of interest are substance use disorder (addiction) and developmental trauma. She understands the ups and downs that come with the healing journey, and she helps patients understand the nature of recovery so they do not get discouraged, even if they temporarily revert to old behaviors.

“People are the experts of their own lives. I’m here to support them,” she said. She said that when people are suffering and they want to try something different, it can be really helpful to work with someone trained to listen and provide guidance and encouragement.

“Maybe you have social anxiety and you can’t get yourself to go to a party or maybe you feel shame about past experiences or current behaviors, or maybe you need help processing a traumatic event — whatever it is, you don’t have to do it alone,” she said.

Bengston received her master’s degree at Humboldt State University where the program supported what she calls “cultural humility,” an awareness that cultural norms differ, and each should be respected.

She said, “I don’t like the term ‘cultural competence’ because you really can’t be competent in someone else’s culture. You can approach your work with humility and be open to others’ ways of interpreting the world, though.”

Bengston says she is excited to join the team at MCHC Health Centers because her philosophy aligns with MCHC’s team-based, whole-person care model. She noted that people’s physical and emotional health are interrelated and having a team of healthcare providers who can support all aspects of a patient’s health is “the best kind of care.” She also said she appreciates the teamwork of providers and support staff because this allows her to focus on her area of expertise.

“Having a conversation with another provider, someone you know and trust, is very different than trying to interpret a note from an unknown provider in a patient’s medical record. Patients get better care when providers who care about them collaborate on their behalf” she explained.

Behavioral Health Director Ben Anderson said, “Amber is a great addition to our team. Her collaborative approach with patients to set attainable goals makes her a great fit. It’s also really helpful that she has experience running smoking cessation groups and serving as a case manager within a Medication Assisted Treatment (Suboxone) program.”

Bengston says she hopes people will reach out to get the support they need and reiterated that “nothing changes if nothing changes.”

MCHC Health Centers includes Hillside Health Center and Dora Street Health Center in Ukiah, Little Lake Health Center in Willits, and Lakeview Health Center in Lakeport. It is a community-based and patient-directed organization that provides comprehensive primary healthcare services as well as supportive services such as education and translation that promote access to healthcare.

CATCH OF THE DAY, Thursday, June 15, 2023

EDUARDO ALVAREZ, Ukiah. Protective order violation.

JONATHAN CAMARGO, Ukiah. Failure to appear.

BRYCE CARLILE JR., Willits. Concealed dirk-dagger, suspended license, failure to appear, probation revocation.

SEAN FLINTON, Fort Bragg. Disorderly conduct-alcohol&drugs, probation revocation. (Frequent flyer.)

CHRISTOPHER GUTIERREZ, Willits. DUI-alcohol&drugs.

RAYMOND GRIBALDO, Willits. Obliteration of grave, vault or crypt.

IRAN HOAGLEN III, Covelo. Ammo possession by prohibited person, parole violation.

KIMBERLY LIVINGSTON, Fort Bragg. Failure to appear.

RAMON MACIEL, Ukiah. Disorderly conduct-under influence. (Frequent flyer.)

JEREMY MENDOZA, Willits. Assault with deadly weapon with great bodily injury, battery on peace officer, resisting.

MARK PALLEY, Ukiah. Probation revocation.

MICHAEL PARKER, Ukiah. Protective order violation.

GLORIA RAMIREZ, Manchester. Paraphernalia, failure to appear, probation revocation.

JAIME RODRIGUEZ JR., Redwood Valley. Felon with firearm, ammo possession by prohibited person, parole violation.

JORGE TAFOYA, Ukiah. Probation revocation.

JUAN TOVAR-SEVILLA, Ukiah. Concealed dirk-dagger, probation revocation.

ERROL WASSON, Fort Bragg. DUI, suspended license for DUI.

TELL THE REAL STORY ABOUT THE CLIMATE CRISIS

Dear Editor,

As someone who follows local and national news reports, I must tell you I am worried about the recent extreme heat and wildfires raging across the country. I feel for people who lose their lives and livelihoods to extreme weather, and it’s only a matter of time until it directly hits me and my community.

Seeing headlines in news outlets covering these climate disasters made me realize that most news stories show no connection between them and the main cause: fossil fuels. This is dangerous, because many people will continue to refuse to see that longer, hotter, and deadlier summers are caused and perpetuated by the fossil fuel industry.

The science is clear — the longer we allow fossil fuel companies to dig and burn, the worse the impacts of the climate crisis will be. But the fossil fuel industry continues to ignore these alerts and undermine our chances for a safer future. We all know this is causing the climate crisis, and yet they keep burning and profiting, with zero accountability.

Climate impacts - like the recent wildfires - disproportionately affect people and communities who are already marginalized. People who did the least to cause the climate crisis suffer the worst from its impacts — they lose livelihoods, hope, and worse: their lives — while oil companies continue to hit record profits. This is wrong on so many levels. Media have an important role to play - and a moral obligation to tell the whole truth. It’s time to make one thing about extreme weather very clear: it's not a "crisis" that just happens to us - it's a crime, and the fossil fuel industry is to blame. Media has an important job to do to turn the tide of public opinion, and help the world avoid the worst of the climate impacts. Please tell the REAL story about the climate crisis.

Sincerely,

El Pe

Ukiah

BAD NEWS FOR RURAL DWELLERS, Real Bad News For Hill Muffins

State Farm, which insures more homeowners in California than any other company, said it would stop accepting applications for most types of new insurance policies in the state because of “rapidly growing catastrophe exposure.”

The company said that while it recognized the work of California officials to reduce losses from wildfires, it had to stop writing new policies “to improve the company’s financial strength.” A State Farm spokesman did not respond to a request for comment.

Insurance rates in California jumped after wildfires became more devastating than anyone had anticipated. A series of fires that broke out in 2017, many ignited by sparks from failing utility equipment, exploded in size with the effects of climate change. Some homeowners lost their insurance entirely because insurers refused to cover homes in vulnerable areas.

Michael Soller, a spokesman for the California Department of Insurance, said the agency was working to address the underlying factors that have caused disruption in the insurance industry across the country and around the world, including the biggest one: climate change.

NO SUCH PLACE, CRAIG

Enlightenment, Revolutionary Ecology, Going Back to Godhead

Warmest spiritual greetings, I am seeking a place to live which emphasizes spiritual enlightenment, hard left politics of a radical environmental variety, and appreciates that the last duty on the planet earth for a Jivan Mukta is to destroy the demonic and then go back to Godhead. I have a federal housing voucher. Please contact me for the details, which I will get from the Building Bridges Housing Navigator, who asks not to be contacted directly (and thus avoid an avalanche of telephone calls). I wish to exit the Building Bridges Homeless Resource Center in Ukiah, California, and go forth to again be participating in the revolutionary ecological response to the stupidity which continues to cause the ecological implosion of the planet earth. Thank you very much.

Contact me here: craiglouisstehr@gmail.com

Craig Louis Stehr

FARM WORKERS ON STRIKE AGAINST WISH FARMS

Guadalupe, CA – 13 June 23 - Strawberry workers went on strike against Wish Farms, a large berry grower in Santa Maria and Lompoc, for two days. They demanded that the company stop cutting piece rates, and live up to promises of better pay.

The workers rallied in front of the company office in Guadalupe, a small farmworker town near Santa Maria on the central coast. After trying unsuccessfully to negotiate with the company manager on the phone, they went to a nearby strawberry field and called on the workers there to leave and join the strike. Some did, before the company called the sheriff.

Workers then went back to the company office where they continued meeting. The company eventually agreed to raise the wages, and workers went back to work the following day. They decided to keep organizing a union, which they called Freseros por la Justicia, or Strawberry Workers for Justice.

Most pickers are indigenous Mixtec migrants from Oaxaca and southern Mexico, but who now live in the U.S. The company also brings in contract H-2A contract workers from Mexico. The strike was supported by the Mixteco Indigenous Community Organizing Project. People who want to support the workers can contact Fernando Martinez, (805) 940-5528, fernando.martinez@mixteco.org

Photos copyright David Bacon. Additional photos here: flickr.com/photos/56646659@N05/albums/72177720309076488

UKRAINE, THURSDAY, 15TH JUNE

Russia launched airstrikes across Ukraine overnight, hitting the central city of Kryvyi Rih just two days after it was rocked by a deadly attack, officials said.

Ukrainian forces are claiming some success in their offensives in the south and east, while Russia said its troops repelled Ukrainian offensive operations in the Zaporizhzhia region.

NATO's support for Ukraine is making a difference on the battlefield, the alliance's chief said, as its defense ministers gather in Brussels.

The UN nuclear watchdog's head is visiting the occupied Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant Thursday, Russia said. The plant is upstream from a major dam that collapsed last week and not far from where the Ukrainian offensive is evolving.

OUR ONGOING MARCH INTO DYSTOPIA AND OBLIVION

by Caitlin Johnstone

Lots of fun stuff in the news today.

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), which oversees the spy agencies of the United States, has admitted in a report requested by Senator Ron Wyden that the US intelligence cartel has been circumventing constitutional regulations designed to protect US citizens from government surveillance by simply purchasing information collected by commercial data brokers.

In an escalation in surveillance capitalism that should surprise no one but alarm everyone, US intelligence agencies have found that while the Fourth Amendment prohibits their directly wiretapping, hacking or bugging whomever they please without a warrant, there’s nothing stopping them from simply purchasing massive amounts of data harvested by Silicon Valley tech companies which can provide them with similar kinds of information. So that’s what they’ve been doing, because of course it is.

But remember kids, it’s important for you to be very afraid of TikTok because TikTok might harvest your information and give it to an authoritarian surveillance state.

A disturbing new Responsible Statecraft piece by Branko Marcetic notes that the civilian leadership roles in the US government which have historically been responsible for reining in the more dangerous impulses of the US war machine have actually been far more hawkish and aggressive on Ukraine than the Pentagon’s professional warmakers. According to a recent Washington Post report, inside the Biden administration “the Pentagon is considered more cautious than the White House or State Department about sending more sophisticated weaponry to Ukraine.”

If only the war machine is responsible for placing checks on the nuclear brinkmanship of the war machine, that means there are no real checks on the nuclear brinkmanship of the war machine. If JFK had been more hawkish and aggressive than his own generals at the most perilous moments of the last cold war, it’s entirely likely that the world as we know it would not exist today. It is bone-chilling that we are relying on the better angels of the most murderous military on earth to see us through these increasingly close games of nuclear chicken.

As Marcetic discussed in another article last year, the insanely hawkish rhetoric we are seeing from the western political/media class around the subject of nuclear brinkmanship is demonstrably far more oriented toward reckless confrontation than it was during the Cuban Missile Crisis. The people whose job it is to encourage restraint in these situations — the press, the diplomats, and the elected officials — are instead doing the exact opposite.

And the discourse is only getting crazier. The neoconservative think tank American Enterprise Institute is now floating the idea of giving nukes to Ukraine, which is about as evil and demented a foreign policy position as anyone could possibly come up with.

This as influential Russian foreign policy strategist Sergey Karaganov argues that Moscow has “set too high a threshold for the use of nuclear weapons” and that “it is necessary to arouse the instinct of self-preservation that the West has lost” by “lowering the threshold for the use of nuclear weapons” and “moving up the deterrence-escalation ladder.” Karaganov cites the fact that Belarus has begun receiving tactical nukes from Russia to show that Moscow is already moving in this direction.

This looks all the more disquieting in light of Michael Tracey’s observations in a recent Newsweek article titled “The Government Keeps Lying to Us About Ukraine. Where Is the Outrage?” Tracey discusses the way fighters from Ukraine and from NATO member Poland have been ramping up attacks on Russian territory, while the US government and news media deceive the American public about the fact that this is happening and how dangerous it is.

On top of all this you’ve got the empire’s increasingly ridiculous spin about the Nord Stream pipeline bombings. The mass media are now saying that Ukrainian special operations forces perpetrated the attack, and that the CIA had advanced knowledge of their plans, but tried unsuccessfully to tell them not to go through with it.

Which is a narrative that just so happens to fit perfectly into alignment with the information interests of the US empire. It contradicts reporting by Seymour Hersh that the US was directly involved in the attack, it pins culpability on a nation with whom the west highly sympathizes who can be framed as acting in their own defense against Russian invaders, and the US intelligence cartel gets to wash its hands of the whole ordeal by claiming it told the Ukrainians not to attack pipelines used by US ally Germany.

It’s also a narrative that is completely nonsensical. Saying “America didn’t attack Nord Stream, Ukraine did!” is like saying “Will Smith didn’t slap Chris Rock, his hand did!” Ukraine is completely dependent on the will of the US government to continue this war; if the US government draws a hard line and tells them not to do something or risk losing support, it will necessarily have to obey. It’s been public knowledge for a year now that the CIA is intimately involved in activities on the ground in Ukraine, and the CIA has been actively training Ukrainian special operations forces since before this war even began.

So it’s a distinction without a difference to claim that Ukraine and not the US bombed Nord Stream — and that’s pretending for the sake of argument that we know the US wasn’t much more directly involved in the attack than it is admitting. There is currently no logical reason to assume that’s even the case, and there is never any valid reason to take the US intelligence cartel at its word about anything.

We are marching toward dystopia and oblivion, and we are doing it in ways that have no historical precedent. We’re in completely uncharted waters, and things are only getting crazier and crazier.

What a wild world. What a time to be alive.

(caitlinjohnstone.com)