HEADLINE of the week from the Fort Bragg Advocate in January of ’97: “Workers OK Layoff Package.” Like they had a choice? The story is about Georgia-Pacific’s announcement of a pending lay-off of somewhere between 65 and 72 workers at its doomed mill in Fort Bragg, among them a suspiciously large number of union people. “It seems like we’re salami, and we keep getting cut,” as one guy deftly summed up not only his position in the corporate firmament but the position of all wage workers everywhere in that same sky.
MASONITE, about the same time in ’97, was one of Ukiah’s biggest private sector employers when it announced it was laying off 192 workers, 169 hourly people, and 23 salaried workers, average pay $13 an hour. Masonite made molded doors and siding in Ukiah and employed a total of 376 people. The company said it can’t compete with West Virginia, Malaysia and Australia where the same products are made cheaper.
MY LATE COMRADE, Alexander Cockburn, was once accused by Michael Moore of being out of touch with working people, that Cockburn ought to go bowling to get in touch. Unless you live in Limo Land, where Moore himself has resided for many years, one is in touch all day every day. Second, it’s patronizing — to put it mildly — and a cartoon caricature to assume bowlers or any other group of Americans with annual incomes under fifty thousand need a “leftist” to interpret currents events for them. The UPS drivers of Mendocino County had it all figured out before we wrote about their strike in the AVA, but three of them went out of their way to tell me how much they’d appreciated Cockburn’s stuff on the strike and the AVA’s support during it. So who’s out of touch? Finally, what the limo libs always leave out of the discussion is the fact that during Moore’s formative years in Flint in the 40s and 50s, and every other place in America at the time except for the truly ruling class enclaves, there weren’t the huge differences in income there are now; wage workers often lived in the same neighborhoods and earned roughly the same kind of money as so-called professionals. Moore didn’t grow up any more gloriously blue collar than anybody else. My neighborhood, for instance, contained a family of mostly unassimilated White Russians supported by an old lady who worked as a seamstress, recent Sicilian immigrants who kept cows in their backyard, a warehouseman, a telephone lineman, the owner of a small grocery, two prison guards, a school principal, a barber, a bartender, and a couple of white collar workers. The Italians called the Russians “Molotov” and the Russians called the Italians “Mussolini.” Everyone got along pretty well, but nobody went on ski vacations or much of any place else because the funny money hadn’t kicked in yet. But nobody was hungry either and most parents wanted their children to go to college because, “You can get an easy job and make a lot of money if you go to college,” was the way I often heard the reason for higher education explained.
THIS APPARENT need in essentially secure middleclass American “radicals” to claim blue collar origins seems to me a pathetic yearning for authenticity, and if you feel the need for authenticity you’ve got some head probs you should work out before you head for the bowling alleys to lecture the working class.
I REMEMBER WHEN Mike Thompson, then a state senator, stopped in Ukiah for a photo op to shore up his mythical environmentalism. He posed with a locally-manufactured electric car at a time — middle 1990s — when Mexico City’s compressed-air-powered vehicles were being developed, and I’m wondering why I’ve never heard of compressed air vehicles in this country? I quote from the Brit Guardian: “Mexico City’s decision to replace its 87,000 taxis with compressed-air-powered vehicles is hopefully not only the beginning of the end for the internal-combustion engine in urban transport, but the end for that white elephant, the electric car. Batteries are heavy, inefficient and the most consistently unreliable component in any car. About half the energy put into a battery never comes out again. The car itself may be zero-pollutant, but upstream lies an appalling energy loss. Compressed air, by contrast, is a beautifully efficient and reliable means of storing and using energy.”
SAY IT ISN’T SO. Adam ‘Shifty’ Schiff is the frontrunner to replace Diane Feinstein in the U.S. Senate. Having spent almost two years claiming that Trump was a Russian agent, when it was established even to the satisfaction of Democrats that Trump wasn’t a Russian agent, Schiff hasn’t apologized for his wrong crusade, he’s simply gone silent on the subject. Of course Trump is still claiming Biden’s election was crooked, which hasn’t prevented him from being the odds-on fave for re-election among Republicans.
JUDGES, MENDO BRANCH. There are too many of them and, in an opinion I share with many others, they’re lazy and weak, allowing trial delays just for the asking and permitting unprepared attorneys to get away with being unprepared. And they make way too much money for what amount to life sinecures. Remote from public pressure because they’re rarely opposed for re-election by the wuss-posse of County lawyers, and by the absence of a mostly disappeared media that allows them to work in the dark, our judges go un-evaluated by the public they allegedly serve.
NOW THE OVERPAID, under-worked 9 are foisting off a new County Courthouse on Mendocino County that no one but them wants, and which will house only them. And count on a major eyesore arising at the foot of West Perkins courtesy of the Superior Court of Mendocino County in an area replete with existing eyesores.
NOT A PEEP of concern about the new County Courthouse from our bumbling Board of Supervisors or the Ukiah City Council, a JV team of elected bumblers, although the new monstrosity will seriously disrupt County business and deal another serious blow to downtown Ukiah.
ADDING to my long list of grievances with the Superior Court of Mendocino County, ever more remote from the people it allegedly serves, is the Court's new portal. Used to be simple and direct to read the day's docket for each courtroom. No more. For the incompetent cyber-user like me I couldn't access the court calendars at all without the patient instruction of the young woman at the County Courthouse Law Library, and it's still a lengthy process that I've written down so I can do it again.
WHEN our gifted court reporter, Bruce McEwen, climbed aboard the SS Love Boat and sailed south with his new bride the lovely Ms Davi we lost, and Mendo lost, a true picture of how justice is dispensed in Mendocino County beyond. McEwen, a former Marine, was temperamentally perfect for the job because he could not be intimidated by the Black Robes, the lawyers or anybody from the Defendant Community, and several of the last regularly threatened McEwen with ultra-vi.
AS NEWSPAPERS DISAPPEAR, and even when they were thriving, few papers could afford a full-time court reporter; consequently only the most lurid cases got and get attention. Now, with literally millions of bloggers, not a one of them in Mendo covers the courts, although there are some excellent true crime reporters and investigators at work on-line in other parts of the country. But the Mendo courts operate in the dark, and with their new portal the Mendocino County judges make it very, very difficult even to see who is in which court and what they're charged with.
DOWN MEMORY LANE: Apropos of nothing at all, but I was thinking about how false the flattering descriptives are of today’s political leaders. I almost fell out of my chair the other night when a talking head referred to Biden as “studious” and “a real constitutional scholar.”
THE OFFSHORE OIL HEARINGS in Fort Bragg in February 1988 drew a bunch of upper-level career officeholders, who showed up for photo ops posed against the blue Pacific behind what was then Rachel’s Inn just south of Mendocino. They were attempting to solidify their non-existent credentials as environmentalists.
THE DEMOCRATS managed to parlay opposition to offshore oil drilling into a lifetime job for a guy named Richard Charter who got paid a bunch to annually spare the Mendocino Coast from offshore oil development. The Democrats have saved the ocean off the coast for going on fifty years now.
THE STATE BIGWIGS DROVE up separately in big black town cars, among them Gray Davis, who loomed up out of the fog like some kind of Men’s Warehouse sea wraith, prompting many in the crowd to versions of this comment, “Jeez, he really is gray!” Thin and gray, and every hair in place. If you were casting a horror movie and needed someone who looked like a mortician’s assistant suspected of those telltale denture prints on the corpses, Gray Davis would be perfect.
DENIS ROUSE WRITES: Glad you read Moorehead's terrific bio of Martha Gellhorn, and hope you get a hold of the big volume of Gellhorn's novellas which pair with the bio to paint a fairly complete picture of a remarkable woman who never got her literary due because of her brief marriage to Hemingway. I assume you caught it in the bio that the one area of human conflict she was absolutely one-sided about was (is) the Israel/Palestine issue that's white hot as I write this. When I was interviewing Chomsky years ago I said I thought it was remarkable that people who were once loaded in boxcars could treat neighboring people in such fashion as has been recorded for too many years, but Martha had no compassion whatsoever for the Palestinians, she wasn't really fond of the Germans either. Whoever said truth is the first casualty in war, might have added, in politics as well. Yer partner in push-ups, D.M.Rouse.
ED NOTE: Given Gellhorn’s right-on-ness on most issues, I, too, was surprised by her vehemence against the Palestinians, and although her shots at the Germans, all Germans, were very funny, they, too, were oddly broad brush for such an intelligent person. The bio, nevertheless, is fascinating, and a terrific picture of the world from 1925 on. At a family 4th of July dinner, I extorted promises from four young women that they'd read the bio (the young men regard books as a form of kryptonite), and Gellhorn's other books, too. Back to her unsympathetic views of the Palestinians, she apparently did spend hours debating the issue with a parade of Brit heavy hitters none of whom were able to persuade her to reconsider. We all have our blind spots, but unfounded biases in smart people are always surprising.
A COAST READER WRITES: An interesting article might be an expose of the recent spate of international corporations buying up Mendocino area B&Bs and hotels. I’ve heard that the Albion River Inn, three inns in Little River, the Mendocino Hotel on Main Street in Mendocino, the Gray Whale Inn in Fort Bragg, Three “victorian” B&Bs on Main Street in Fort Bragg and who knows what else have all been scooped up. The demographics on the coast are changing; ownership of these properties is from outside the area. We are circling the drain as a society, and as a community. But you already know that.
PS. I just read great book, ‘Sixpence House: Lost in a town of Books’ by Paul Collins. Every word was good. He writes in the style of Bill Bryson. Have you heard of it or read it? If not, I will be glad to mail it to you.
MARK SCARAMELLA: The next question would be: have their property assessments been upgraded according to the Prop 13 rules? The County is very far behind in transaction assessments and these new owners may be getting a de facto tax holiday until Mendo gets around to increasing their assessments, if ever.
THE WAR IN UKRAINE. The Department of Defense announced Friday that it's sending cluster bombs to Ukraine. Cluster bombs explode and disperse a series of smaller bombs over a wide area, often killing civilians. More than 100 nations have signed a 15-year-old treaty banning their use, but Ukraine and Russia have both deployed them — and Ukraine's supplies of all types of ammunition are dwindling. The use of the weapons was once labelled a potential “war crime” by former White House press secretary Jen Psaki. These terrible munitions are one more indication that the Russians are so well dug in, thus stalling the Ukrainian counterattacks, that this mostly banned weapon must be used to dislodge them.
ANOTHER SIGN we're in the End of Days. To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf will now be published with a “trigger warning” over concerns about the “attitudes” portrayed in the 1927 book. The account of one family's summer vacations will include a disclaimer for American readers warning them about the contents of the book.
PREDICTABLY DELUSIONAL, TRUMP, at a Moms for Liberty summit in Philadelphia vowed to “liberate our children from the Marxist lunatics and perverts who have infested our educational system.” Trump went on to promise to cut funding for programs that he deemed to be “pushing critical race theory, transgender, and other inappropriate racial, sexual, or political content” if he were elected again in 2024. At one point Trump remarked: “Don't mess with America's moms. Our beloved nation is teetering on the edge of tyranny.”
POLICE CONVERGED ON LAYTONVILLE Saturday Night to Calm a Hostile Crowd Accusing a Man of Sex Crimes Against a Minor by Matt LaFever
An altercation involving at least 20 people at Laytonville High School this past evening prompted an emergency law enforcement response.
Reports from the scene indicated a crowd of adults and teenagers had gathered to confront a Laytonville man with accusations that he had committed sexual crimes against a young community member and told him they would hold him there until law enforcement arrived.
The man, later reported to be Trevor Wilson, 19, of Laytonville reportedly began to make suicidal statements after being confronted with the unproven allegations and attempted to flee the area. The crowd intervened and kept him detained until law enforcement arrived on the scene.
Mendocino County Sheriff’s Office, California Highway Patrol, and Fish and Wildlife deployed to the situation with full lights and sirens. Upon arrival, officers quickly calmed the crowd and as of 11:09 p.m. are processing the scene and taking statements.
Wilson was booked into the County Jail on charges of kidnapping for robbery & rape, contact with intent to commit lewd act with a minor, and lewd/lascivious acts with child under 14 with force. Bail was set $250,000.
RFK Jr. has admitted that he uses testosterone replacement therapy (TRT), which some doctors describe as “legal steroids.”
Kennedy says he is on an “anti-aging” protocol prescribed by his doctor that includes TRT, a hormone treatment that can cause an increased risk of blood clots, heart attacks and strokes in some cases. For a guy synonymous with anti-vaxx views, including the claim that vaccines cause autism and kill more children than they protect, que pasa with his use of steroids? The ’roid he’s on must be pretty strong stuff to transform the flabby physique of a 69-year-old man to that of an NFL running back, and you better believe I can't wait to get me some of that stuff from the Boonville Health Center to see what it will do for me.
AOC has gone all the way non-pwog with her endorsement of Biden's bid for reelection in 2024. It seems beyond evident that Biden is barely functioning, and not functioning at all as el presidente. How naked does he have to get before the Democrats admit he's down to his skivvies? More than half the country, and not just the Magas, believe the evidence of their eyes, that Biden is ga-ga. And here's a smart person like AOC pretending he isn't.
BILL HATCH: Developers and their politicians say there is a crisis of housing in California and that building affordable housing will address the problem of homelessness, But how many people sleeping in doorways or in tents on sidewalks will be able to afford this new "affordable" housing? With the typical social sensitivity for which developers, chambers of commerce and local governments are famous, doesn't this just add a new level of insult to the injuries already suffered by the homeless?
ON-LINE COMMENTS OF THE WEEK
[1] Last year, I was pulling what was thought to be a bit of an unknown weed out of my garden when this year, I found out what it was– wood sorrel– and so have been leaving it to grow, which it is doing very well. So that adds to my other garden crops on the go.
How are all your gardens growing?
The rhubarb root I planted not too long ago is also growing amazingly well. But something is eating my strawberries. I’m thinking it might be slugs which are often found in the middle of the night when I make random surprise visits. I might eat the slugs to get my strawberries back and in honor of France and its escargots and riots.
[2] With most people, there is not much more to their mental processes than repeating the last thing they heard–whether it was on TV or from their acquaintances. Their brains are recording and playback devices, and of course many of the last things they heard were that certain sources of information are to be disregarded or vilified. Part of the reason for this is because they were trained that way in school, and part of it is laziness and immaturity.
Most people in our society never mature mentally, and education and work experience (especially government work) discourages mental maturation, due to lack of accountability. If they had to make a living by running a small business, or even just by working in any situation that involved accountability, even the dullest of them would smarten up fast. I do have one former neighbor who was “riden’ with Biden” before the election. He had to get a job for perhaps the first time in his life, after his wife lost her high-paying job, and he has ever since been bitter about the necessity for employment–and the fact that no one will pay a 55-year-old guy with no skills or work experience a “living wage.”
[3] ‘The Blob’ was released in 1958 as part of a drive-in double feature, appearing with ‘I Married a Monster from Outer Space.’ Before my time, but I wish I coulda been there. If nothing else, they had GREAT movie titles back then. I still remember the Iron Claw serials they’d show at the local matinees. “Oh no, it’s the craaaaaw!” Movies were still playful and absurdist. Everyone was in on the joke, which was played dead serious. Vincent Price’s “The Tingler” anyone? Mad scientist Vincent doses the local movie house’s owner’s wife with LSD to make her scream after setting up some stunts to scare the shit out of her and make her scream. All knowing full well that she can’t, because she’s a mute, which causes a laughable rubber lobster (complete with visually obvious puppet strings attached) to grow on her spine and kill her after he mercifully surgically removes it. Complete with electronic tingler devices installed under select theater seats and audience plants who would scream on cue. Simply masterful in all its cheesy glory!
[4] Back in my childhood we were a small town surrounded by a lot of rural and backwoods areas. Small farms dotted the rural landscape and our local grocery stores sold food grown locally. If the big trucks quit running it wouldn’t have affected our food supply that much. The mountain people made themselves famous by turning their big back yard corn patches into whiskey. Many people in the 50’s, and even in suburban areas, still had gardens and chickens. Some of the people that didn’t anymore had done it in the 40’s during WWII and could do it again if need be without much trauma. But not anymore, that’s a lifestyle that’s dead and buried for the most part.
As a nation we changed out of a self-sufficient lifestyle and built modern suburbia instead which depends entirely upon the availability of fossil fuels and very complex technologies.to support it all. This can have the same end result as a serious drug dependency. Remove the substance (oil) that everyone is addicted to and we get very sick and some of us even die. Just as junkies and bad alcoholics can die if suddenly deprived of their “substances”, we now depend utterly on diesel fuel for our food to be available. And unfortunately diesel comes from heavy sour crude, not the very lightweight oil obtained via fracking.
[5] So, I recently returned home from one of those epic American road trips of yore, clocking in over 3,100 driving miles from start to finish. Amazingly, after tallying up my gas receipts, the total came in at only $375.74. Gas prices averaged anywhere from $3.12 to $3.60/gallon, between the Midwest and the Colorado Rockies. I would consider this a bargain, as opposed to flying, having the freedom to move about the country and stop/go where I wanted as I pleased.
Glad I was able to get this trip in. There is no telling when they will pull the plug and such adventures will no longer be feasible.
[6] Departing a grocery store with only a bag in hand, an older gentleman, perhaps in his late 80’s and following behind his equally aged wife, gave me a very wide berth and paused before entering. It was totally unnecessary and as I attributed his act to old-fashioned politeness I paid him a thank you.
Moments later I looked back over my shoulder and there he was putting on his mask before entering.
I felt foolish and a bit egocentric for having thanked him in mistaken belief.
I then felt feelings of annoyance that another codger is a slave to the mask mandate. For life.
But I checked those sentiments, for his life is most likely not much longer, and he still has his wife with him, and he’s out shopping and life is good and normal for him, and if he thinks this prolongs it, who am I to judge?
[7] Students are addicted to their phones. This is an addiction that begins at home. One can hardly go a day without seeing little kids at the grocery store, in the car, at the park, etc. staring at their parent’s phone. Many parents have simply outsourced the responsibility (and joy) of parenting, seemingly uncaring about the damage they are doing.
[8] As far as I know, we don’t yet have artificial intelligence. What we got is some computers with very complicated and detailed programming. Programs are merely electromagnetic instructions that operate on different parts of the computer. They have the intelligence of a rock, but can perform tasks so well that many people think they are intelligent, but they’re not conscious.
Some day we will develop much more advanced neural networks such that it is possible – maybe – that a machine could achieve self-awareness. The jury is out on that.
There’s a next step in development where a non-conscious machine has such advanced programming a person can’t tell whether the machine is self-aware or not. Scientists will have to spend a lot of time and effort to determine if a machine is truly conscious. Testing has been developed to see if a machine is alive (mentally). It is called a Turing Test.
The media has been invested in describing true AI, as anyone can see or read books and novels, but so far it’s all science fiction.
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