Mendocino County Today: Thursday, Dec. 7, 2023

Cold | Fungus | River Watch | Geraldine Rose | Michele Paul | Methy Lopez | Cut Off | Tree Lighting | Gaska Statements | Last Dinner | Blood Drive | Moss Show | Ed Notes | Orange Mushrooms | Adventist Wealthcare | Visit Bragg | CA Contours | Sako Radio | Hyperbolic Kunstler | Willits Creek | Consider Sweeney | Hopland Bank | AV Roads | Yesterday's Catch | PG&E Advertising | Exhibit 1 | Economic Reality | Herb Caen | Ramen Days | Bullet Bill | Hitcher | Nuclear Cloud | Candlestick | Never Grow Up | Sad Intelligence | Oleaginous Bullshitter | Philip Berrigan | Past Decades | Vacation 1955

RAINFALL (past 24 hours): Leggett 1.48" - Boonville 0.88" - Laytonville 0.88" - Willits 0.79" - Ukiah 0.70" - Covelo 0.67" - Yorkville 0.64" - Hopland 0.50"

SHOWERY CONDITIONS continues across through this evening, with snow levels above 3500 feet MSL. Lingering cold air will promote frost and freezing temperatures tonight across the interior valleys. Dry and warming trend expected heading into Saturday as high pressure builds in. A weak upper trough will approaches the region Sunday into early next week bringing additional precipitation across northern California. (NWS)

STEPHEN DUNLAP (Fort Bragg): A cloudy 49F on the coast this Thursday morning with .58" of new rainfall collected. We can expect scattered showers until early afternoon then clearing into the weekend. Next week starts off dry then forecasts are all over the place after that. We'll see.

HWY 128 MAY FLOOD TONIGHT OR EARLY THURSDAY

by Nick Wilson

I just returned from a look at the Navarro River estuary at Navarro Beach.

Based on past experience, it looks like there will be a few inches of water over the roadway of Hwy. 128 before the night is over The level was only about 6 in. below the edge of the pavement at the 0.18 mile marker just east of the Hwy. 1 bridge. The level has been rising slowly for the past week or so, and the rate of rise increased today.

This is due to backup of the water because of the robust sandbar across the river mouth at Navarro Beach. The bar has been built up higher in recent days due to the very high surf. At high tides the big surf has occasionally washed over the sandbar, sweeping it clean of driftwood and bringing ocean water into the estuary.

CalTrans has coned off the wide shoulder of the road beginning at the 0.18 mile marker and continuing east for a few hundred feet. Flooded signs are in place to warn travelers. For public safety, CHP usually will close the highway during hours of darkness, even when there is only very shallow water over the pavement.

The sandbar will eventually give way when conditions are right, when the estuary level is high enough and there is a high tide, which just occurred within the past half hour. Once the sandbar is breached the water level in the estuary will go down rapidly, ending any backup flooding that may have occurred. Usually you can tell if the sandbar has breached if you go to the NWS Navarro Gauge web link below and see that the river level has dropped sharply.

So, if I'm right about my guesses that the water will reach the pavement tonight, and CHP closes the road overnight, then travelers to and from the coast on 128 will need to use alternate routes such as Flynn Cr. Rd. to Comptche and from there to the coast on Comptche Ukiah Rd., or the Philo Greenwood Rd. from Elk to near Gowan's orchards on 128. For those in Fort Bragg and north, Hwy 20 to Willits is the most likely detour.

Here are some handy info sites:

NWS Navarro River Gauge: https://water.weather.gov/ahps2/hydrograph.php?wfo=eka&gage=nvrc1

Caltrans road info for 128 https://roads.dot.ca.gov/?roadnumber=128&submit=Search

Note that the Caltrans info site is often a few hours behind real time.

Disclaimer: I'm a citizen observer, not an official source. I've been keeping a close eye on the lower Navarro for the past 5 years or more. Sometimes I'm right in my predictions, but sometimes I'm wrong. Use my predictions at your own risk.

[MCN-Announce]

TO FRIENDS OF GERALDINE ROSE:

It is with a sad heart that I share with you that Geraldine has passed away. She had been receiving Hospice care since April and then last week was put on comfort care. She passed away peacefully early this morning. 

We plan to have a memorial service this coming Spring and will advise you of the when and where. Feel free to share this email with other friends of Ger’s.

Please include her in your prayers.

Thank you for being her friend.

Jeanne Boss

* * *

SAFFRON FRASER: “I read on the post office door that Geraldine Rose died on December 5th. I've known Geraldine most of my life. 33 years ago we asked her to officiate our wedding. She took that job very seriously, we had meetings, and ‘counseling.’ She said, sternly, that she had never had a couple that she married divorce, and that we had better not be the first. There's lots more I could say about Geraldine, but I'll leave it there. So, that's why I planted a rose yesterday. I'll see her in my garden for years to come.”

MISSING SONOMA COUNTY WOMAN FOUND DEAD OUTSIDE BOONVILLE

On December 4, 2023 at approximately 12:02 PM, Deputies with the Mendocino County Sheriff's Office received a call for service regarding a suspicious vehicle in the 29000 block of Mountain View Road in Boonville.

The vehicle was located several miles down a dirt road on a large rural property. Deputies responded to the location and were escorted to the vehicle by the reporting party.

Upon Deputies arrival, it was confirmed the vehicle was unoccupied and was registered to Michele Paul who was reported as being an “At Risk” elderly missing person on 11-27-2023 in Sonoma County. At the time of the vehicle's discovery, the Sonoma County Sheriff's Office was conducting the missing person investigation.

Due to the area being comprised of heavily wooded and rugged terrain, Deputies on scene separated and with the assistance of a citizen began a hasty search of the area. Deputies also summoned the assistance of the Mendocino County Search and Rescue Team to respond to assist due to the risk of the missing person being lost or injured.

During the hasty search of the surrounding area, Deputies found the missing person who was deceased.

The Deputies began a death investigation, and no obvious indicators of foul play were discovered. The investigation was subsequently turned over to the Mendocino County Sheriff's Office coroner's division for further investigations connected to medical records collection and potential autopsy.

The Sheriff's Office would like to thank the Point Arena Fire Department and the citizen who assisted in the immediate search for Michele Paul. The Sheriff's Office would also like to thank the Mendocino County Search and Rescue Team for their willingness to respond to assist in the search prior to Michele Paul being located prior to their arrival.

TONY’S SUSPECTED SUBSTANCE

On Sunday, December 3, 2023 at approximately 7:27 P.M., Deputies from the Mendocino County Sheriff's Office were dispatched to the report of a civil problem in the 800 block of Highway 175 in Hopland.

Deputies responded to the area and ultimately contacted Antonio Lopez, 35, of Hopland at his residence. It was learned Lopez was on formal probation out of Mendocino County with terms to include obey all laws and a search waiver.

Deputies conducted a search of Lopez's residence, per his probation terms, and located a suspected controlled substance (methamphetamine).

Deputies ultimately placed Lopez under arrest for possession of controlled substance and probation violation.

Lopez was subsequently booked into the Mendocino County Jail where he was to be held on a No Bail status.

WHISTLING PAST THE BUDGET GAP

by Mark Scaramella

At the beginning of her brief statement to the Supervisors on Tuesday morning, First District Supervisor candidate Carrie Shattuck, asked the Board: “Please bear with me, I may need an additional 15 seconds.”

Here’s a serious candidate for Supervisor trying to make a serious statement to a Board that goes to great lengths to avoid criticism and they refused to even give her 15 extra seconds. 

Receiving no response, Candidate Shattuck began:

“I want to speak for many County residents when I say we are extremely frustrated with the direction of the current County Administration and its lack of leadership.

The reputation ratings of our Officials are extremely low, even negative. Trust has disappeared. Effectiveness has disappeared. The severity of our many County issues does not appear to be a wake up call for this Board as evidenced by your agendas, meeting after meeting. You simply don't tackle big problems. You avoid. You deflect. You defer. 

At the Board meeting January 4, 2022 I said, quote

‘This county cannot afford its budget. The county is the second largest employer in this county. How does that make sense? The cannabis industry here has collapsed. What do you think next year’s budget is going to look like when we are not a business friendly county, already having lost 21% of businesses between January and July of 2021. When the lack of cannabis funds, that have been the backbone of this county, finally catches up, it’s going to be catastrophic.’ 

Close quote.

And here we are, almost two years later and there’s talk of a $10-$17 million dollar budget deficit upon us. We don't even know exactly how big the deficit is. Aren’t you embarrassed that you still don't know how bad our budget deficit is?

The cannabis department: that’s another embarrassment. So far this budget year, in five months, has a total department revenue of $33,865.41. I’m told that the larger portion of this income will be received in April. And yet, with a budget revenue projection of $990,000, I severely doubt the cannabis department will even come close to reaching this amount of revenue. 

Cannabis was supposed to be our budget savior, yet we made the regulations and cost so burdensome and lengthy that most have abandoned the industry altogether. 

How many of these abandoned properties have uncollected taxes on the tax rolls? Thousands, I’m sure. Not to mention the amount of environmental impact they have caused, leaving behind thousands of hoops, plastic, vehicles and trash and even the cannabis still hanging. Our mountain sides are now littered beyond belief. What’s the plan to clean those up? 

This Board continues to play the role of innocent scapegoat. But you are not.

All the lack of budget reporting was blamed on Ms. Cubbison. She’s been removed from office for 48 days now. Have you received the reports you were so eager to get? Has the 2022-23 budget been closed? What’s the update on the state audit? If this Board truly wanted to support its elected officials, why wasn’t Ms. Pierce sent over to the Auditor's office sooner? Why, through all of this chaos has the CEO not been held to task? 

This County runs on taxes and when we are behind in collecting and assessing, our budget looks the way it does now, in the red by millions. 

I have a simple question by way of example that this Board knows nothing: When is the next default property tax auction? We haven’t done an auction since 2019. 

To sum up, the trend of consolidating more power under the CEO’s office only goes to show the Board’s lack of vision…”

Board Chair Glenn McGourty: “Your time is up.” 

(Shattuck’s mic was shut off but she continued to comment for a few more seconds.)

McGourty: “No. No. Three minutes is the limit here.”

(More silent seconds from Shattuck.)

McGourty: “Ok.”

(A few more seconds of silent reading…)

McGourty: “Carrie? Carrie?! Please stop.”

Shattuck finished and stepped away.

But Ms. Shattuck sent us her statement which concluded:

… transparency and accountability.

A mess is being left for our future generations.

I want to help restore the reputation of this County’s administration. That is why I have attended, in person, all of these meetings for over a year and half now, sincerely trying to figure out exactly what you all are doing or not doing, as may be the case.

Who’s leading this train wreck? 

Why doesn’t anyone seem to know anything?

Thank you.”

The public hadn’t heard the conclusion, but the Board did.

Supervisor John Haschak responded that the Cannabis budget wasn’t as bad as Shattuck had portrayed it.

According to Shattuck, after the morning break, Supervisor Haschak approached Shattuck and commented that her remarks were “pretty rough.” 

Obviously, this Board has no idea how they appear to many of their constituents and employees. Haschak seemed shocked that anyone would disapprove of their honors. But Shattuck summarized the view of many Mendolanders who see this board as ineffective and oblivious to the very problems they themselves bemoan at every meeting. 

Shattuck also pointed out that Haschak’s attempt to minimize the pot budget deficit was based on the County applying some of last year’s revenue to this year because last year was “higher than expected.”

But, added Shattuck, that still leaves the Cannabis department with a $900k deficit and in the present depressed cannabis market the likelihood that that much will come in by June of 2024 is “far reaching.”

* * *

Before the meeting, Haschak had given Mendocino Observer Editor Jim Shields an impression that a large deficit reduction proposal would be considered during Acting Auditor-Controller/Treasurer-Tax Collector Sara Pierce’s “information only” agenda item. 

But, of course, no such proposal arose. Instead, Pierce simply said they were working on various bookkeeping tasks that were still months from being completed. Nor did Pierce mention any new efforts to collect current and past due taxes. 

County Assessor-Clerk-Recorder Katrina Bartolemie gave an informal update of her office’s efforts to update assessments. But, besides repeating her report from last month that about $14 million in new assessments had been processed and sent to the Tax Collector (which represents about $50k of potential new annual revenue for the County, if it’s collected, some day — 1% of $14 mil is $140k, the majority of which goes to schools and special districts), she had no new specific information to offer. This is a drop in the bucket of uncollected, overdue and underassessed taxes.

Close readers will recall that back in June of 2023 the Board “directed” that they be given a monthly report on the status of new assessments and supplemental assessments (new home purchases, upgrades, corrections, etc.) 

From the minutes of the June 20, 2023 Board meeting:

“Board Directive: General Consensus of the Board to direct staff to publish a progress indicator on how many parcels have been assessed, total dollar amount assessed, and staffing levels of appraisers in each Edition of the CEO Report with a goal of closing the gap and reaching 85 percent (currently at or around 70 percent) over the next 24 months.”

Of course, nobody knew what the “current” unassessed parcel percentage was or what would be a decent goal, but that’s what they asked for. Nevertheless, after six months, neither Bartolomie nor the CEO have yet to “publish” a single report. Instead, Bartolemie appears during public expression and casually talks about the situation and the problems and the delays and the software problems and the time involved, etc. And nobody much cares that there’s no report.

Board Chair McGourty asked Bartolemie if she wanted to be on a regular agenda item. Bartolemie shrugged and said no, she prefers to make a few casual remarks during public expression with no format or obligation. The Board accepted this answer and didn’t remind her of their June “directive” that they get monthly reports via the CEO report. 

Which brings us back to Ms. Shattuck’s concluding questions that were rudely cut off by McGourty: “Who’s leading this train wreck? Why doesn't anyone seem to know anything?”

Part of the answer is that Haschak (and his colleagues) can’t tolerate even the slightest criticism or negativity, dismissing it off-handedly as “pretty rough.”

Later in the meeting McGourty described the Board’s current multi-million dollar budget gap as a “trough,” part of the normal ups and downs that appear out of nowhere now and then, which will magically disappear in three or four years. As if all they have to do is sit back and wait it out — until at least two of them, including McGourty, are off the Board.

(PS. What are the chances that any other local media will even mention Ms. Shattuck’s on-point remarks or the fact that she was rudely cut off?)

ADAM GASKA:

The state funded the Ukiah Valley Basin Groundwater Sustainability Plan and that’s it. Currently the GSA is being funded by URRWA (Upper Russian River Water Agency, a JPA of Redwood Valley, Calpella, Millview and Willow water districts), City of Ukiah, County of Mendocino, Russian River Flood Control. We scrape together about $300,000 to pay for the monitoring and reports to keep the state happy.

Our Groundwater Sustainability Plan was accepted by Department of Water Resources but they recommended we do a lot of studies. The consultant would like us to assess “fee’s” to collect $2 million annually to pay for said fees. Technically it is not considered a tax because it is a government agency created by a state mandate so it’s a fee which means voters don’t get to vote. They will be given a chance to protest once we decide the fee schedule and method. If 50%+1 don’t protest, the fee goes forward.

I am pushing back to only budget the minimum well monitoring and reports. My proposal is for the water districts to continue to pay $10-15 annually based on service connections which is a little less than we pay now. Then we would assess a fee on property within the basin which includes Redwood Valley, Ukiah and all points in between. That would be about $10 per acre per year if it was a flat acre fee but a parcel fee would likely be easier. I want to cap our budget at $300,000-400,000 per year. Shaking $2 million out of the community is crazy.

If DWR wants us to do studies, they can provide us some funding.

* * *

I do address more than just water but water is what I actually have some influence on currently. I farm for a living and do that as a full time job. I also have two kids and a wife. In my spare time, I educate myself on things other than water and often write about them. Today, I went to an open house at New Life Clinic in Ukiah, a dual diagnosis/treatment center. It was very informative.

I am not OK with the dam closures. It will be devastating as I often say. IWPC couldn’t pull together the $18 million to do the studies the government mandated to relicense the PVP. It’s PG&E’s private property. They didn’t want to keep paying for all the BS the government wants to keep it going. Studies, fish ladders, maintenance of the dam itself all add up. No one can force them to maintain it or relicense. If Lake County wants to keep Pilsbury, they should approach PG&E about buying it. Mendo and Sonoma would be very interested in buying water. The new infrastructure is going to cost $50 million alone. All the new storage necessary to actually put the 27,000 AF they estimate would continue to be diverted is probably going to cost half a billion dollars.

BLOOD DRIVE AT MENDOCINO FIRE DEPARTMENT Dec 19, 1-5pm

The Mendocino Fire Protection District will be hosting a blood drive at the firehouse at 44700 Little Lake Road on Tuesday, December 19th, from 1 to 5 pm. There is currently a severe shortage of blood across the US and donors of all blood types are urgently needed.

This drive is part of the 18th Annual Bucket Brigade, a friendly competition among local fire departments to see which can host the largest blood drive. Every donor will receive Bucket Brigade T-shirt as a thank you.

The blood drive will be managed by Vitalant, a non-profit that supplies blood and special services to patients in about 900 hospitals in the US. Vitalant recommends making an appointment time for your donation to minimize the wait time. You can call them at 877-258-4825 or visit Vitalant.org to make your appointment online. 

Walk-ins are also welcome.

This holiday season, give the gift of life. We hope to see you there.

Sandy Schmidt

Administrative Assistant

Mendocino Fire

ED NOTES

WHAT YOU DON'T HEAR about the Gazan slaughter by the Israeli Likud Party is that many Israelis are as shocked and appalled as the rest of the world is. The extent of the grand slaughters of World War Two weren't widely known until after the War, but the all-out blitz of the trapped Gazan population is available for viewing, live, with every night's television news. Our government's pathetic bleatings that “We've urged the Israelis to avoid civilian casualties” is so transparently feeble that makes it even more obvious that the Biden Administration is a co-conspirator in this huge crime.

AND AS THIS ATROCITY in the Middle East is underway, we're still funding the proxy war in Ukraine because the Biden Administration has no plan to end it, let alone the diplomatic ability to get it done even if there was a plan. Sending Blinken and his inept crew to cool out the world's hotspots is like sending Kim Kardashian out there. You know in your bones that the rest of the world just laughs at the Biden team and shakes their collective head. You see news clips of global gangsterdom looking on disbelieving while Biden slurs his way through his big print platitudes. The only question of the Middle East now is how far will the catastrophe spread, how disastrous will it be when the guns finally cease fire.

REWRITING HISTORY: Martin Luther King’s birthday is still a month away (January 15) but I know we are unlikely to hear a true word about the guy, the last truly progressive national figure our odd country has produced. The waves of pure mawk coming at me from the television set and (of course) pseudo-public radio KZYX, will remind me of a world that never existed, that everyone was for the civil rights movement of the 1960s, no one supported the war on Vietnam, and Martin Luther King simply wanted people of different races to be nice to each other. 

IN FACT, by the time King was murdered in Nashville, the mass media had turned against him big time and had never been too keen on him in the first place because he was connecting too many social-economic dots for too many people. He was aggressively opposed to the war on Vietnam, pointing out it was the latest chapter in a long history of imperial murder of non-white peoples, that he was for democratic socialism and had even gone so far as to speak the forbidden S-word on national television. 

SO LONG as King stuck to preaching racial harmony even the closet Klan types of the rightwing of the Republican Party couldn’t denounce King who, after all, was certainly preferable to the scowling leather lungs in dark glasses and leather jackets who were thrilling the white suburbs with a lot of wild talk about how, with a few photogenic bad boys out front, 12% of the population was going to off on the national pig. 

AS GREAT WAVES of pure bullshit rolled over America in 1968, Martin Luther King was calmly pointing out that a few basic social guarantees would make America a much less violent country and a far more ethnically harmonious country, that if people were guaranteed food, shelter, work, health care, and education they would be less inclined to, uh, lash out. Once achieving social and economic justice, America would be at internal peace. Martin Luther King was murdered for preaching basic Christianity, not that much of anybody seems to remember the most important two-thirds of his message. 

YOU’LL never hear it said by the kind of weepy liberals who dominate the national and local media, but it was Jock World and the Armed Services where the greatest advances in race relations were made in this country. It was at the ball game and in boot camp where lasting and loyal cross-ethnic friendships were first cemented. Since, as a trip to any downtown area in any town in America makes obvious, millions of Americans of all races enjoy loyal and affectionate relations where virtually none existed in 1950. 

RACE RELATIONS aren’t bad at all considering that we’ve moved in less than 80 years from wholesale lynchings and a nearly South African-quality apartheid to unharassed inter-marriage and generally non-lethal relations among America’s rainbow family. What isn’t better are economic relations, caused by wildly unfair taxation and the blank check for an incompetent military presently enjoying the two proxy wars we're funding, not that you’d know it from most of the media. 

AVERAGE INCOME citizens find it harder and harder to get by in what is universally billed as capitalism’s finest hour, with magic money everywhere except where much of the real work gets done. And “liberals” of the Biden-Harris Democratic Party type, have managed to exacerbate race relations by defining people as “oppressed” whose grievances hardly amount to oppression in any historical, global sense of the term while they fund two wars on two continents. Doubt that MLK would be on board for all this, but all the people doing it will be certain to embrace his memory. 

* * *

JAMES MARMON: I'm proud of myself for making Adam Gaska tell us who he really is and his politics.

ED REPLY: Me, too. I know he's a nice guy, hardworking, self-supporting, moderate Democrat. Got it.

MARMON: We don't need another Carrie Brown.

ED REPLY: No worries there. Gaska's a boy, Carrie's a girl.

WHY CAN'T our cemetery district absorb the unconscionably abandoned Ruddock Cemetery? It was completely overgrown when I visited the ancient Philo burial ground last, which was at least a decade ago, and it was in bad shape then, a nearly impenetrable mass of brush and blackberry. The Ruddock is hidden away up a little grade between what is now Maggie Hawk Winery and the Domaine Anderson Winery. It is not visible from either establishment. Ruddock is eternal home to some of Anderson Valley's pioneers.

ADVENTIST WEALTHCARE

JOHN REDDING: From Becker's Hospital Review on the failed negotiations between Adventist Health and Blue Shield: "The two organizations said they remain open to contract discussions but cut ties Dec. 1 for all patients covered by commercial, Medicare Advantage and managed Medicaid health plans." If you have any of those plans, you are now out of network. Which means you can still get care at AH but at a much higher cost. Wonder if that was part of the thinking. Unaffected is Adventist Loma Linda, the main hospital in the network. The logic escapes me.

LINDA PITMAN: Part of the thinking was taking advantage of a county where a large part of the population lives below the national poverty line. That hospital cares about nothing but money. They do not care about the patients. Most of the doctors who do specialized Care have left town and I imagine money is the reason, but I would bet anything that the administrative staff makes a very good salary. I don't know if board members are paid or not but I wouldn't doubt it. The County Board of Supervisors make a hell of a lot of money, some I imagine are making six figures now. Clearly there's a problem when people can't get good health care, but the people running the damn county and the hospital are living The Good Life.

FORT BRAGG SEEKS INTERESTED INDIVIDUALS TO SERVE ON VISIT FORT BRAGG COMMITTEE

The City of Fort Bragg is seeking individuals with an interest and experience in the promotion and marketing of the Fort Bragg area. The Visit Fort Bragg Committee consists of five to seven community members and two City Councilmembers.

Visit Fort Bragg’s mission is to inspire visitors to enjoy Fort Bragg through comprehensive and collaborative outreach ultimately increasing visitor spending and stimulating the local economy.

Preference will be given to applicants representing Fort Bragg’s tourism sector. Committee members are not required to reside within City limits. If interested, please complete and submit an application form, which can be found on the City website’s home page: https://city.fortbragg.com/ or click https://www.city.fortbragg.com/.../4979/638373839132384748

Applications are due no later than December 22, 2023. Please submit completed applications to Cristal Munoz, cmunoz@fortbragg.com.

OUR CHRISTMAS SHOW FROM BETHLEHEM

On KMUD, Thursday, December 7, at 9 a.m., Pacific Time, we bring you an important show about Israel's war against Palestine. 

OUR SHOW

Our first guest, Professor Mazin Butros Qumsiyeh, will be calling in from Bethlehem in Palestine.

Qumsiyeh is the founder and director of the Palestine Museum of Natural History (PMNH) and the Palestine Institute for Biodiversity and Sustainability (PIBS) at Bethlehem University. His books include Sharing the Land of Canaan. 

Our second guest is Kathy Kelly. 

Kelly is board president of World BEYOND War and a co-coordinator of the Merchants of Death War Crimes Tribunal.

KMUD

Our show, "Heroes and Patriots Radio", airs live on KMUD, on the first and fifth Thursdays of every month, at 9 AM, Pacific Time.

We simulcast our programming on two full power FM stations: KMUE 88.1 in Eureka and KLAI 90.3 in Laytonville. It also maintains a translator at 99.5 FM in Shelter Cove, California.

We also stream live from the web at https://kmud.org/

Speak with our guests live and on-the-air at: KMUD Studio (707) 923-3911. Please call in.

— John Sakowicz

JEFF GOLL: Bruce, AVA, one of these days my auto will be ready to go for more photo explorations but meanwhile, a photo of Willits Creek for today.  Good photo of Jack Hirschman (looks like Kurt Vonnegut there) and his 90th birthday celebration at City Lights.  James Kunstler seems hyperbolic but the overall point he's trying to make is that;  With societal economic inequality greater than ever, and the stock indexes rise and stay high for the "stakeholders," inflation and further debt for the 99% erodes their wealth.  It's a class war for control of the "Whole Enchilada" and the political class are minions of the Davos crowd, WEF etc.  Bread and Circuses are a deflection until serious calamity strikes many, and then there will be "Order out of Chaos."

TALES FROM THE CRYPT, ONE NIGHT LONG AGO AT THE MATEEL COMMUNITY CENTER

by Bruce Anderson

I mentioned to a friend that I’d tried to get the Mateel Community Center to rent me space to present the Who Bombed Judi Bari Road Show in 1999, then in its third month of growing audiences but mixed reviews. He laughed. “You have about as much chance of getting into the Taj Mateel as a liberal would have had getting into a German beer garden in 1936 to argue against Hitler.”

He was right; the Taj never called.

So I rang up the Garberville Vets’ Hall. Mr. John Haines promptly called back and said I could have it for $50 for two hours and proof of insurance. I immediately forged a Farmer’s Insurance policy rider, faxed it to Mr. Haines, on whom I’d also dropped my Marine Corps ID number and 0300 mos as “rifleman, basic” to firm up my renter's bona fides.

“And the subject of your talk, Mr. Anderson?” inquired Mr. Haines in the calm tones of a man expecting a response like, “How To Slow Smoke Salmon,” not so much as pausing when I said, “Who Bombed Judi Bari and Who’s Bombing Her Now.”

Mr. Haines, a Vietnam Vet and a man who has been in uncomfortable proximity to explosions and related military mayhem said, “Meet me at 6pm on the night of the event and I’ll give you the key.”

Promptly at six I was in front of the hall. A very large woman wrapped in several acres of tie-dye waddled past. (Garberville was the last place in America at the time where self-identified hippies still thrived in a sort of open air Smithsonian exhibit.)

The imposing woman, Mrs. Falstaff I’ll call her, bellowed, “If I have to disrupt this bastard’s speech all by myself I’ll do it.”

Uh, oh. This might be a long night.

Bari Cultists had been on KMUD urging their believers to appear at the Vets’ Hall to disrupt whatever my team had to say, but they'd already made a tactical error; never rally the troops unless you have the troops. Ground zero Ecotopia — Garberville-Redway — didn't show up in anything resembling force.

Before we kicked off, a “witch” passed a note around the room promising the righteous among the audience — between 50 and 60 friendly and open-minded people, as it turned out — that I’d have a fatal accident on my way back to Boonville.

I’ll pause here to say that I’m forever inspired by the truly awesome depths of the humanity of Northcoast Earth First! Has a more generous, more compassionate, dare I say more loving, group of people ever walked among God’s disappearing creatures in His clearcut forests since the Prince of Peace Himself strode the lush gardens of Babylon?

As Irv Sutley, falsely maligned for years as the agent of Judi Bari’s destruction, introduced himself, “My name is Irv Sutley,” Ms. Falstaff shouted out, “So what?”

Mr. Haines of the Vets’ Hall, who had stuck around to hear the presentation, explained to everyone that Ms. Falstaff was a well-known Garberville outdoors personality whom he would now lead out of the room until she agreed to behave herself. Which he did. She returned, mostly chastened. She only spoke out of turn one more time when something Sutley said caused her to exclaim, “Deep cover!”

Other than Ms. Falstaff, the only other consistently rude person in the room was Naomi Wagner who smirked and interrupted various speakers for the entire two hours with uninformed and implausible versions of Bari-related events. One much younger woman, also from the exhibitionist, shout-them-down branch of “activism” prevalent on the Northcoast, shrieked, “I didn’t give anybody permission to film me!” She snatched the knit cap off her head and held it in front of her face as if she were Greta Garbo emerging from a limo at Cannes. I pointed out that since I’d rented the hall she was in my livingroom, and if she didn’t want to be filmed or recorded she was welcome to leave.

There's a certain subspecies of “activist” who glom on to what's left of the left to conflate their personal misery and what they seem to think is cutting-edge politics. The archetypes present that night.

The wackies didn’t wreck the discussion as they’d hoped, while Ms. Falstaff did just fine as comic relief, and even a young woman with a Brit accent who stood up to say I’d “been attacking the women of the Northcoast for years, including an especially vicious personal attack on me” smiled when I said I was happy to see that she appeared to have escaped permanent injury.

The vicious personal attack? She complained that I’d said she “chirped like a little British bird.” Ms. Falstaff was nonplussed at the alleged insult. “Hell, that ain’t so bad,” the hard-living Garberville street personality observed. “I’ve been called a lot worse than that.”

I’d never seen or heard of the Brit bird before, and I doubt very much if I’d ever said anything at all about her, let alone something that lame. I still wish when people claim they’ve been viciously attacked by me they’d produce some evidence to back it up.

A young man, with a great big Gotcha Look on his face, stood to quote from a back issue of the AVA. “Right here, Mr. Anderson, from your own newspaper,” he began — he’d obviously been lying in wait for days to raise me to the roof beams by my own petard, whatever a petard is — “in an article by Mark Heimann in your own paper, Mr. Anderson .....” and on into the story about a Humboldt County logging family with ties to crank, criminals, crackpot Aryan belief systems, fundamentalism, and so on. The guy wanted to know why I seemed so intent on “bashing Mike Sweeney” [Bari's ex-husband] when there were these uninvestigated scumdogs out there.

Why indeed?

On our side, we all said what we’ve always said: We wanted an investigation of the Bari Bombing no matter who it begins with or where it leads. But the Bari-ites tried to shut down the discussion before it began, and that’s the first difference we had with them.

I received three letters from people who were present, the three of them similar to this one: “I thought your presentation last night at the Vets’ Hall in Garberville went very well and all on the panel were sincere and articulate. It’s difficult to understand how an intelligent woman like Naomi can’t see that her behavior is counterproductive to her cause, such as it is. There were a number of politically active people in the audience and they almost all seemed sympathetic to your case for considering Sweeney as a suspect. I hope Michael Jacinto is able to arrange a debate with Cherney on KMUD where you’ll reach a considerable audience.”

KMUD’s coverage of the Garberville event was, I understand, fair and as balanced as it’s possible to be in an overheated political context. Gordy Johnson covered it for KMUD, afterwards taking statements from me, Naomi Wagner and Alexander Cockburn. It was the first fair and equal coverage we’ve received from any Northern California public radio station. (Larry Bensky did host an hour on KPFA with me.)

An agreeable fellow named Owl, who hosted, and maybe still does, a Friday morning talk show on KMUD was gracious enough to give me a few minutes to outline our side of the dispute, but when I approached program guy Jacinto for more time to respond to the unchallenged hours KMUD had allowed Darryl Cherney, Jacinto said, “Maybe some time in February when Darryl’s back in town.”

Never happened, of course.

And here we are, years later. The Bari-Cherney scammers got millions from the feds, Cherney bought a dope farm north of Garberville, the perp went off to live in New Zealand, and the FBI declared “Case Closed.”

SAVINGS BANK, HOPLAND

…erected before America went blind.

ANDERSON VALLEY ROADS

by Maurice Tindall (1952)

The old county road now known as Anderson Valley Way ran from the wooden bridge north of Boonville past fields and by the big pepperwood. In later years in the field to the west the extensive highway yards have been built, also several homes.

On the east by the bridge was about three acres or less that Jeff Vestal used for a garden and later the Carl Prather home was built next to the bridge. The Freeway took the home and part of the garden plus several rows of orchard from the Schoenahl property which extends for nearly a half mile along the Highway.

The headquarters of the Schoenahls was the Conrad Ranch and their property includes the McAbee place and orchard of Grove Williams which goes back to the story about the Berry place and the Lawson subdivision. It is very casy to get involved over these varying ownerships.

The McAbees were among the first settlers and joining them was the extensive Donnelly Ranch owned for many years by Bill and Mary Ann Donnelly. This property as well as others nearby extends clear to the top of the mountain and joined the Singley lands.

The ‘Way’ became separated from the Freeway and ran on in front of the Rose place past some fields and then past the junction of the Brown's Mill Road. On the northwest comer was the home of Mr. and Mrs. Billy Lemonager and we can infer that it was part of the Fry lands.

In a comer next to the Fry house was the home of Dan Jeans and his son George, Negroes and highly re- spected men. Dan Jeans was one of the early settlers and came with some of the first. The place is now owned by Phil and Delitha Clark and is given over to flowers and garden.

Next was the home of Mary Jane Fry and a field, part of the June property. There was a fence along the road, brier-grown and ancient, but having on the top board signs like “Dr. Pierce’s Prescription” or “Chew Star Tobacco” and others.

On the east side of the road was the Ern Fitch ranch which extended back and up on the hill. Then the Ball land and then the Ingram property. They all ran east and west and took in some range land on the hills.

After that was the Evergreen Cemetery which is on a slight knoll and between the Way and the Freeway. The original owners are unknown to this writer. There was a small wooden bridge across the gulch and it sloped southward with the land.

Above the bridge on the east was the Ted Ingram place and some orchard; there is more orchard joining land owned by the Schoenahls along with property north of the next gulch which had belonged to Bill Witherell. Across the road was the Hartley home built many years ago and rebuilt and occupied by Frankie Hartley Slater.

Across the gulch was land owned by Mr. Wallach Sr. The property extended across Anderson Creck and that part is now owned by the June Ranch. Mr. Wallach raised some very fine watermelons there as well as other gardens. He watered it with a small hand pump. The Wallach home is set back from the road and is owned by Dr. L.E. Banks. It is an old-time multistoried building and has been kept in good repair over the many years.

On the east side of the road was the Wm. Witherell land partly in orchard and next to it was the Conn Creek schoolhouse. This school has been turned around from facing the County road to face northerly and parallel to the Freeway. There is a junction there. The building has been renovated and painted red. The grounds are pleasing and well maintained. Many of our foremost people attended that “Little Red School” and it is very “old-time.”

On the west is the old high school and the newer grammar school, all on land once owned by Mr. Wallach.

Next place was the home of Tony Dell Acqua, a well- known and liked man. On the bank of Conn Creek was the home of Charlie St. John; an old time settler who with his brother Bill settled on land on the North Fork of Indian Creek.

On the south of Conn Creek and east of the road was the Hoag Ranch, owned and operated for many years by Mr. Hoag, Sr. It was quite a sizable ranch with considerable range as well as farming land and some orchard.

The property extended up Conn Creek to join the Rawles range on the southwest and took in the peak known as Tarwater Hill. It seems that some of the Tarwaters settled the land in the first place. The Peachland Road to the Indian Creek country went through Mr. Hoag's barnyard. The property was later bought by I.C. ‘Ike’ Burke and his brother Pink.

There was a wooden bridge (as most all were then) across Conn Creek and this bridge in later years was the scene of an unusual truck accident. One of the first, for at that time there were but a few trucks in operation.

Matthew Del Fatti, a nephew of Tony Dell Acqua, was crossing it with a load of laths or lumber and just as he crossed the bridge it collapsed in the center. The truck rolled back into the bottom, load and all. No particular harm was done to the truck and the driver was shaken up but uninjured. The bridge was finished as all the stringers were broken. When hauling by truck became everyday it was found that the wooden bridges that had served so long wouldn't carry the loads or stand the vibration. Many of the bridges were replaced, the smaller ones by culverts and fills.

CATCH OF THE DAY, Wednesday, December 6, 2023

JOSEPH CHRISTMAN, Mendocino. Domestic abuse, assault with deadly weapon not a gun, false imprisonment.

DAVID CHURCHILL, Fort Bragg. Probation violation.

JARED EAGLESMITH, Willits. Domestic battery. 

EVERARDO GRANILLO, Ukiah. Controlled substance for sale, probation revocation.

ROBERT KLICH, Eugene, Oregon/Ukiah. Marijuana sales.

ANTONIO LOPEZ, Hopland. Controlled substance, probation revocation.

JULIA POWERS, Fort Bragg. Disorderly conduct-alcohol.

CODY RYDEN, Ukiah. Failure to appear.

NICOLE SANDERSON, Branscomb. Failure to appear.

PG&E'S ONGOING RIPOFF

Editor: 

PG&E is a monopoly; no competition to hold the service at an affordable price. PG&E most recently asked for a 26% rate increase, and was given roughly 13%.

A monopoly enterprise is supported by customers needing the utility. Every home, business and government entity needs service and pays the way. Changing the organizational structure includes buying out shareholders and eliminating the need to spend millions of dollars on a flood of advertising. One only has to watch a few minutes of TV or open an email on one’s phone to observe the continuous stream of ads. With a nonprofit, this could be handled with a biannual flyer included with monthly bills.

I would like to know the total amount spent by PG&E on advertising. I could use any help possible with the nearly $700 monthly PG&E bill.

Ronald f. Prushko

Glen Ellen

ECONOMIC REALITY BITES AS NEWSOM FACES A BIG CALIFORNIA BUDGET PROBLEM

by Dan Walters

During his much ballyhooed, nationally televised debate with Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis last week, California Gov. Gavin Newsom boasted that the state’s economy is “booming” and leads the nation.

“California has no peers,” Newsom declared. “California dominates.”

About 18 hours later, reality reared its ugly head. The Legislative Analyst’s Office revealed that state tax revenues are running tens of billions of dollars behind expectations due to a slowing economy, creating a monumental budget headache.

The dilemma became apparent when the November income tax filing deadline – seven months later than the original date – passed, and tax receipts for 2022 could finally be counted.

“With the recent receipt of various postponed tax payments, the impact of recent economic weakness and last year’s financial market distress on state revenues has become clearer,” the LAO authors said in a preliminary report on the state’s fiscal situation. “The postponed payments came in much weaker than anticipated.”

LAO analysts Brian Uhler, Chas Alamo and economist Seth Kerstein estimated that 2022-23 revenues are $26 billion under projections and “our updated revenue outlook anticipates collections to come in $58 billion below Budget Act projections across 2022-23 to 2024-25.”

California, they said, started seeing an economic downturn in 2022 as the Federal Reserve System raised interest rates to tame inflation.

“The number of unemployed workers in California has risen nearly 200,000 since the summer of 2022,” they added. “This has resulted in a jump in the state’s unemployment rate from 3.8 percent to 4.8 percent. Similarly, inflation-adjusted incomes posted five straight quarters of year-over-year declines from the first quarter of 2022 to the first quarter 2023.”

When Newsom and legislators finalized a 2023-24 budget in June, they knew that revenue estimates were shaky due to the postponed filing deadline, but assumed that they had a $30-plus billion gap to bridge. They now know that the hole was much larger. As Newsom finalizes his proposed 2024-25 budget to be unveiled in January, it must account for the current shortfall plus one of similar proportions for the next fiscal year.

Automatic spending reductions triggered by a slowing economy, such as a lower mandatory levels of K-12 education support, would – on paper at least – cover some of the gap. But they do little to solve the political dilemma confronting Newsom and legislators as they face pressure to maintain school spending and billions of dollars in other commitments made when the state treasury seemed to be overflowing.

They could tap the state’s reserves, currently more than $30 billion. That’s what the so-called “rainy day fund” is supposed to do when revenues flatten. However, the two-year problem is likely in the $40-50 billion range, which would quickly absorb reserves and still leave a big problem.

They could do what the state has done in decades past when periodic recessions have hammered revenues, particularly income taxes: run deficits and cover them with on- and off-the-books loans, such as temporarily cutting school aid or draining special funds.

Finally, they could do what those in the Democratic Party’s left wing have wanted to do for years: jack up personal and corporate income tax rates or impose new taxes on personal wealth.

Newsom is the political figure caught in the middle. By word and deed, he wants to concentrate on becoming a major figure in national politics, starting with being an effective surrogate for President Joe Biden’s re-election campaign.

“I’m here to tell the truth about the Biden-Harris record,” Newsom declared early in the debate.

Now, however, Newsom faces what could be a budget deficit of historic proportions because the economy he touted as “booming” is faltering. How he performs could define his political future.

(CalMatters.org)

ON-LINE COMMENT OF THE DAY

How’s the economy doing? Let’s just say that even in college I did not eat Ramen noodles. Now as a grown ass adult I have started the practice. Actually, with the variety of flavors they have, it is a nice warm meal for these colder pre-winter days. It is a shelf stable product, and the price per meal is dirt cheap too.

NOVEL APPROACH TO PREVENTING MASS SHOOTINGS

Dear Editor,

Following the latest mass shooting deaths of 18 persons in Lewiston, Maine, E.J. Dione, Jr’s column, “Two senators hope to turn the tide on gun safety,” is timely and possibly very significant. This bill was recently co-authored by Sen. Angus King, I MN and Martin Heinrich, D New Mexico.

Their bill would limit the number of bullets which manufacturers put into their built-in magazines. The bill would include voluntary gun buybacks together with preventing gun owners from converting their guns into more deadly automatic rifles.

So far, at least, no congressional Republicans have stepped up to co-sponsor the law, but time will tell. Of course, the NRA couln’t wait to condemn it, but recently the gun lobby may be losing its stranglehold on death preventing gun legislation. There is hope that this bill might break the current freeze on live-saving national gun laws.

Frank H. Baumgardner, III 

Santa Rosa

HOW THE U.S. HAS DARKENED THE NUCLEAR CLOUD OVER HUMANITY

by Norman Solomon

Forty years ago, across a dozen pages of *The Nation *magazine, I was in a debate with the English historian E. P. Thompson about the U.S.-Soviet nuclear arms race, the relative culpability of both governments, and how activists should approach it all. At the time, Cold War hostility was rampant. In a March 1983 speech to an audience of evangelicals, President Ronald Reagan declared that the Soviet Union was an “evil empire” and, for good measure, “the focus of evil in the modern world.” Weeks later, Soviet leader Yuri Andropov accused the United States of pursuing an arms buildup to win a nuclear war; in his words, “not just irresponsible, it is insane.” Both countries were gunning their military-industrial engines in a feverish drive for more advanced nuclear arsenals.

Such was the frightening distemper of the times. But a grassroots movement calling for a bilateral freeze on nuclear weapons had quickly gained wide support and political momentum since Reagan took office. In April 1982, he responded to the growing upsurge of alarm with a radio address that tried to reassure. “Today, I know there are a great many people who are pointing to the unimaginable horror of nuclear war. I welcome that concern,” Reagan said. He added that “a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.”

Two months later, not mollified by soothing words, 1 million people gathered in New York’s Central Park at a demonstration for nuclear disarmament and peace. That protest was part of a transatlantic uprising against reckless escalation of the arms race. Activists struggled to challenge a spiraling arms contest propelled by two nations with very different political systems but mutual reliance on brandishing huge quantities of nuclear weaponry.

Deeply unsettling as that era was, the specter of omnicide now looms much larger. Inflamed tensions between Washington and Moscow while the Ukraine war rages -- as well as between the U.S. and China, over Taiwan and the East China and South China seas -- are making a nuclear conflagration plausible via any one of numerous scenarios. Meanwhile, disagreements over how to view relations between the U.S. and Russia are roiling peace groups and much of the left here at home. Fears of being perceived, if not smeared, as pro-Putin or sympathetic to Russia are palpable, with ongoing constraints on advocacy.

We hear next to nothing about the crying need to reinstate the Open Skies and Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) treaties canceled by President Trump or the Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty canceled by President George W. Bush, while the absence of those pacts today makes a nuclear war with Russia more likely. Neither Barack Obama nor Joe Biden tried to revive those agreements snuffed out by their Republican predecessors.

For his part, beginning with the Ukraine invasion, Putin has done much to boost atomic tensions. His threats to use nuclear weapons said the usually untrumpeted doctrine out loud. Both Russia (except for an eleven-year hiatus and the United States have always been on record as asserting the option to be the first to use nuclear weapons in a conflict.

The war in Ukraine has thrown the world closer to a thermonuclear precipice than ever. And, while daily horrors are being inflicted on Ukrainian people by Russia’s warfare, the prevailing attitude in the U.S. is that Putin isn’t worthy of negotiations over much of anything.

But if efforts for détente and arms control should be backburnered when a superpower is making horrific war on a country after an illegal invasion, neither Soviet Premier Alexei Kosygin nor President Ronald Reagan got the memo. In 1967, while the U.S. government was escalating the Vietnam War, Kosygin met with President Lyndon Johnson in direct talks that lasted for more than a dozen hours at the Glassboro Summit in New Jersey. Twenty years later, Reagan met with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev at the White House, where they signed the INF treaty; at the time, Soviet troops were continuing their war in Afghanistan, which took an estimated 100,000 Afghan lives, while the CIA provided military aid worth billions of dollars to mujahadeen resistance fighters.

* * * 

Midway through 1983, at the end of the published exchanges between E. P. Thompson and me, *The* *Nation* told readers that “the debate ventilates important issues, tactical and philosophical, confronting the antiwar movements in this country and in Europe.” Echoes of those important issues are with us now, and the stakes could not be higher.

Renowned as a social historian, Thompson was also a prominent leader of the European disarmament movement during the 1980s. He warned against “sleepwalkers in the peace movement” of the West who, he contended, were toeing the Soviet line while blaming the arms race on the United States. “Neither moralism nor fellow-traveling sentimentalism,” he wrote, “can be of any service in guiding the peace movement in its difficult relations with the Communist states.” The rulers of those states “are the ideological look-alikes of their opposite numbers in the West, thinking in the same terms of ‘balance’ and security through ‘strength.’”

In my view, the history of the nuclear arms race remained significant, with the United States as always in the lead. The fact that the U.S. was a country with far more freedom had not made its government more trustworthy in terms of nuclear weapons. As the Soviet dissident historians Roy and Zhores Medvedev had written a year earlier in *The Nation*, “despite the more open character of American society . . . the role of successive U.S. administrations has been, and continues to be, more provocative and less predictable than the Soviet Union’s in the global interrelationship between East and West.” They added: “Military-industrial complexes exist in all modern industrial societies, but they are under much less responsible control in the United States than in the USSR.”

At the close of our debate, I expressed doubt that the U.S. movement for disarmament and peace was in danger of being insufficiently critical of the Soviet Union. “A far greater danger is that, eager for respectability and fearful of finding itself in the line of fire of our nation’s powerful Red-baiting artilleries, it may unwittingly reinforce chronic American-Soviet antipathies… We cannot reduce our society’s Cold War fervor by adding to it.”

* * * 

In the summer of 1985, Gorbachev announced a unilateral moratorium on nuclear test explosions, and he invited the United States to follow suit. If reciprocated, the move would pave the way for both countries to end their underground detonations of nuclear warheads, closing an intentional loophole that had been left by the Limited Test Ban Treaty of 1963. But major U.S. news media were on guard. In the first *CBS Evening News* report on Gorbachev’s initiative, correspondent Lesley Stahl used the word “propaganda” four times. Influential newspapers were no less dismissive. A *New York Times* editorial called the moratorium “a cynical propaganda blast.”

Although the U.S. refused to reciprocate, Russia kept renewing its moratorium. In December 1985, when reporting news of an extension, CBS anchor Dan Rather began by saying: “Well, a little pre-Christmas propaganda in the air, a new arms-control offer from Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev.” The Kremlin’s unrequited moratorium went on for nineteen months, while the Nevada Test Site shook with twenty-five nuclear explosions beneath the desert floor.

Later in the decade, the cumulative impacts of grassroots organizing and political pressure helped shift Reagan’s attitude enough to bring about some U.S.-Russian reproachment and genuine diplomacy. A stellar result was the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces treaty, signed by Reagan and Gorbachev in December 1987. It was a triumph for activists and a wide array of other outspoken advocates who over the previous years had grown accustomed to epithets like “Kremlin dupes” and “Russia apologists.”

* * * 

Four decades later, such epithets are again common. American society’s Cold War fervor is somewhere near an all-time high. It doesn’t take much these days to be called pro-Putin; merely urging a ceasefire in Ukraine or substantive diplomacy can suffice.

“I think Putin is not only thrilled by the divide over whether we continue and at what levels to fund Ukraine, I think he is fomenting it as well,” Hillary Clinton said during a PBS NewsHour interview in October. She added: “When I see people parroting Russian talking points that first showed up on *Russia Today *or first showed up in a speech from a Russian official, that’s a big point scored for Putin.”

Such smeary tactics aim to paralyze discourse and prevent on-the-merits discussions. The techniques are timeworn. Twenty years ago, opponents of the impending U.S. invasion of Iraq were often accused of parroting Iraqi talking points and serving the interests of Saddam Hussein. Now, in the prevalent media and political environments, the kinds of “talking points” that Clinton meant to defame include just about any assertion challenging the idea that the U.S. government should provide open-ended military aid to Ukraine while refusing to urge a ceasefire or engage in substantive diplomacy.

* * * 

During Reagan’s first term, the *Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists* set its Doomsday Clock at between three and four minutes to apocalyptic midnight. It is now ninety seconds away, the closest ever.

Crucial lessons that President John Kennedy drew from the Cuban Missile Crisis, which he articulated eight months later in his June 1963 speech at American University, are now in the dumpster at the Biden White House: “Above all, while defending our own vital interests, nuclear powers must avert those confrontations which bring an adversary to a choice of either a humiliating retreat or a nuclear war. To adopt that kind of course in the nuclear age would be evidence only of the bankruptcy of our policy -- or of a collective death-wish for the world.”

But no matter how dangerous Biden’s policies toward Ukraine and Russia are, most sizable arms-control and disarmament groups in the United States have bypassed dissent. Few have pushed for serious negotiations to find a peaceful resolution. Many have, in effect, gone along with treating “diplomacy” as a dirty word. Such stances are particularly striking from organizations with an avowed mission to reduce the risks of nuclear war -- even though the longer the war in Ukraine persists and the more it escalates, the greater the chances that those risks will turn into global nuclear annihilation.

* * *

We can’t know E. P. Thompson’s outlook on the 21st century events that led to the current nuclear peril -- he died in 1993 -- but the core of his seminal 1980 essay “Protest and Survive” resonates now as a chilling wake-up shout to rouse us from habitual evasion. “I have come to the view that a general nuclear war is not only possible but probable, and that its probability is increasing,” he wrote. “We may indeed be approaching a point of no-return when the existing tendency or disposition towards this outcome becomes irreversible.” And yet, Thompson went on, “I am reluctant to accept that this determinism is absolute. But if my arguments are correct, then we cannot put off the matter any longer. We must throw whatever resources still exist in human culture across the path of this degenerative logic. We must protest if we are to survive. Protest is the only realistic form of civil defense.”

The essay quickly became the opening chapter in an anthology also titled Protest and Survive. Daniel Ellsberg wrote in the book’s introduction that “we must take our stand where we live, and act to protect our home and our family: the earth and all living beings.”

What Martin Luther King Jr. called “the madness of militarism” finds its supreme expression in the routine of nuclear weapons policies, which rely on an extreme shortage of countervailing outcry and activism. The ultimate madness thrives on our daily accommodation to it.

(Norman Solomon is national director of RootsAction.org and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. He is the author of many books including War Made Easy. His latest book, War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine, was published in summer 2023 by The New Press.)

FOR ALL YOU AVA SWIFTIES....

Never Grow Up

Your little hand's wrapped around my finger
And it's so quiet in the world tonight
Your little eyelids flutter 'cause you're dreaming
So I tuck you in, turn on your favourite nightlight

To you, everything's funny
You got nothing to regret
I'd give all I have, honey
If you could stay like that

Oh, darling, don't you ever grow up
Don't you ever grow up, just stay this little
Oh, darling, don't you ever grow up
Don't you ever grow up, it could stay this simple
I won't let nobody hurt you
Won't let no one break your heart
And no one will desert you
Just try to never grow up

Never grow up

You're in the car, on the way to the movies
And you're mortified your mom's dropping you off
At fourteen, there's just so much you can't do
And you can't wait to move out someday and call your own shots

But don't make her drop you off around the block
Remember that she's gettin' older, too
And don't lose the way that you dance around
In your PJs getting ready for school

Oh, darling, don't you ever grow up
Don't you ever grow up, just stay this little
Oh, darling, don't you ever grow up
Don't you ever grow up, it could stay this simple
No one's ever burned you
Nothing's ever left you scarred
And even though you want to
Just try to never grow up

Take pictures in your mind of your childhood room
Memorize what it sounded like when your dad gets home
Remember the footsteps, remember the words said
And all your little brother's favorite songs
I just realized everything I have is, someday, gonna be gone

So, here I am in my new apartment
In a big city, they just dropped me off
It's so much colder than I thought it would be
So I tuck myself in and turn my nightlight on

Wish I'd never grown up
I wish I'd never grown up
Oh, I don't wanna grow up
Wish I'd never grown up, I could still be little
Oh, I don't wanna grow up
Wish I'd never grown up, it could still be simple
Oh, darling, don't you ever grow up
Don't you ever grow up, just stay this little
Oh, darlin', don't you ever grow up
Don't you ever grow up, it could stay this simple
I won't let nobody hurt you (Never grow up)
Won't let no one break your heart
And even though you want to
Please, try to never grow up

Oh, oh (Never grow up)
Don't you ever grow up
Oh (Never grow up)
Just never grow up

— Taylor Swift

E-MAIL SOLVES POVERTY!

by Alexander Cockburn (Dec. 1999)

Bill Clinton said as much last week to a group of bigwigs collected by Jesse Jackson and his Wall Street Project at the Sheraton Towers Hotel in NYC: “I went to Hudson County, New Jersey, which has a lot of first-generation immigrants, in a school that had so many problems it was almost closed by the state. And then the principal of this high school not only started making sure all the immigrant kids whose first language was not English were trained on the computer, they started putting computers in the parents' home and showing them how to do it — so that all these low-income working people could e-mail their parents, teachers, and their principals every day. The dropout rate went way down and the performance of these kids in a low-income neighborhood, most of them immigrant kids, rose above the state average of New Jersey. We can do this if we close the digital divide.” (Applause.)

Was there ever such an oleaginous bullshitter as Bill? His greatest achievement has been to downscale the Presidency to the status of a second-tier talk show. Reading this particular clip about the digital divide, I felt a preliminary surge of nostalgia. This time next year we’ll be watching a new president — probably Al Gore, if I had to bet right now — getting up on his hind legs to make his first State of the Union. Why go to all the trouble and expense of electing a new Chief Executive when weve got eight years worth of the Bill Show already in the can? The nation could survive on re-runs till a decent replacement shows up ten years or so down the road.

Clinton recently went on Roger Ebert’s movie show and announced that his favorite movie is Casablanca, explaining that “Hillary and I did a moot court case about that film.” Last year Bill said his favorite movie was High Noon, reflecting his impeachment troubles at the time, or maybe his fights with HRC. Ebert asked him about current films and Clinton praised Hurricane, the bio of Reuben Hurricane Carter, the black boxer wrongly convicted of murder and put away for 16 years until he proved his innocence and was released. An odd choice for Bill, who’s presided over the incarceration of more black men than anyone since Jefferson Davis.

It’s less than a decade since the federal government’s National Institute of Mental Health proposed a $50 million grant for a federal “violence initiative,” aimed at drugging black kids by claiming they had a violent gene. This was in l992 when a government shrink, Fred Goodwin, director of the Alchohol, Drug Abuse and Mental Health Administration expounded in a public forum that inner-city youth are like over-sexed aggressive monkeys in the jungle, and have “defective brains with detectable prefrontal changes that may well be predictive of later violence.” There was a modest stink in the press when these remarks surfaced, and Goodwin was “demoted” to directorship of… the NIMH, a position for which he’d already been slated.

They never give up. Now the Center for Mental Health Services at the University of Chicago has announced that violence-prone boys can be identified by their saliva. It seems a four-year study suggests that low levels of the stress hormone cortisol in salvia links with anti-social behavior. Bill Gates should get Gore to propose that proven cortisol deficiency will put you in line for a federal grant for a laptop.

At least Clinton thinks the problem could be cured by computers. There’s probably been no time in the last half century that someone in a research lab somewhere in this country isn’t trying to prove that black people have an innate tendency to poverty and violence and that the best way forward is to sterilize them. You think I exaggerate? Just look at the research grants the feds have handed out. I cited three of them last week. A couple of years after Goodwin got into trouble, NIMH continued funding a 31-year program of research at Harvard, giving $357,116 to study rhesus monkeys being tortured while being given opioids (mind-altering drugs like as methadone or morphine), opioid antagonists (i.e., drugs to counter opioids) or antipsychotic drugs, to see how they react. One objective of the research — bear Goodwin’s l992 talk in mind — has been to determine whether drugs can alter antisocial behavior induced by adverse environmental conditions. 

REMEMBERING FATHER PHILIP BERRIGAN

December 6, 2002. Remembering Philip Berrigan who passed away on this day in Baltimore, Maryland

Berrigan was a Catholic priest and activist in the anti-war movement. He engaged in nonviolent, civil disobedience in the cause of peace and nuclear disarmament.

“War No More” pays tribute to this advocate for peace. Listen here: https://soundcloud.com/hillipsand/catonsville-nine-war-no-more-050117

DECADES: CAN’T LIVE WITH OR WITHOUT THEM

by Jonah Raskin

I’ve been writing about the Sixties again recently and have been finding that there’s always more to be said about that era that’s usually linked to sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll, as well as protest in the streets. The challenge is to get beyond and behind the banner headlines and not to portray the era as the greatest ever. It wasn’t. Not in my book. When I write “The Sixties,” I mean a state of mind as well as a real time and place. Those Sixties began in 1955, with the civil rights movement, and reached a crescendo in 1975, with the end of the war in Vietnam, finally.

My own favorite decade is probably the 1940s, which often gets lost in the tug of war between the 1930s and the 1950s. I love 1940s film noir which I first watched on late night TV in the 1950s and that introduced me to what might be called the dark side of American life and to fictional characters who are devious and capable of betrayal at every turn in the plot. I also have 1940s nostalgia for existentialism which came from France and put down roots in the US.

Sixties euphoria was hard for me to swallow. To this day I have a hard time accepting or even tolerating the starry-eyed environmental activists who claim the human race can still get a handle on climate change and begin to cool down the planet. When was the last time they looked at global temperatures and melting glaciers? But don't give up the fight, even if it is too late to save Earth.

The whole decade thing can get tiresome; after all decades spill over and are rarely boxed-in. Still, I can’t do without the decade thing. My Forties break down into three unequal parts: one, from 1940 to 1942, which were largely a carry over from the 1930s; two, the years of WWII; and then 1946 through 1949, which began, I learned from books and from conversations with GIs, with a sense of elation and that ended with a sense of disillusionment. Fascism had been defeated. GIs came home hoping for peace and prosperity and then the Cold War began and soldiers went into combat again this time with communism, beginning in Korea and spreading around the world. That war has never ended, nor has the war against Reds, liberals and pinkos at home.

I was born in ‘42 and remember “the blackouts"—sitting in darkness to make it difficult for the Germans to bomb us—and I remember the factory where my father worked on a lathe making a small part for airplanes. For the first and the last time in his life, he was patriotic. I sat right there on the lathe. I remember a rally in ‘48—I sat on my father’s shoulders—for Henry Wallace, the so-called progressive candidate who was creamed by Truman. I have no memories of Roosevelt and no memories of the 1930s, though I experienced the Thirties vicariously through my parents who remembered going to sleep hungry at night and waking up hungry in the morning, even in the 1950s when they basked in affluence. 

The 1960s probably began for me with Kennedy’s inauguration, which I watched on TV and when I saw and heard Robert Frost read a poem. A new beginning I thought and then came the Cuban missile crisis and Kennedy’s assassination and the war in Vietnam.

I don’t expect my memories to be shared by AVA readers; memories are local as well as global, personal as well as political. Mendo memories of the Sixties are unlikely to be identical to San Francisco memories of the Sixties, though there are bound to be echoes and mirror images. Still, I do hope that my memories might stir up the memories of others and that those memories will be both comforting and troubling. I wouldn’t want anyone to be lulled into a false sense of security and the past.