Mendocino County Today: Saturday, Feb. 10, 2024

By AVA News Service on February 10, 2024

MILD, MOSTLY CALM WEATHER will continue through the weekend with night time valley fog. Light rain is possible along the coast mid next week. (NWS)

STEPHEN DUNLAP (Fort Bragg): 41F under clear skies this Saturday morning on the coast. Clear & cool for the weekend then increasing clouds for early next week. Looks like a lot more rain returns later next week. Hints of another big one are kicking around but nothing firm yet.

BALLOT GLITCH Q&A

by Mendocino County Elections Office

Frequently Asked Questions

This is intended to provide answers to questions the Elections Office believes you might have about the printing error that occurred in the ballots for the March 5, 2024, Presidential Primary election. As you can imagine, the Elections Office’s primary focus has been on remedying the error so that everyone has the ability to cast their ballot in March. The following responses are based on the information available as of February 9, 2024.

What is the source of the ballot error?

The Mendocino County Registrar of Voters engaged Integrated Voting Systems to provide ballot compilation, printing and mailing services. Every county in the state contracts out these services. There are strict regulations about which companies can perform these services and the Secretary of State must approve a company before a county uses the company. Integrated Voting Systems is one of 12 ballot print vendors approved by the Secretary of State. In this case, the Registrar of Voters was informed of the errors Wednesday, February 7. After learning of the errors, the Registrar of Voters contacted Integrated Voting Systems and was informed that Integrated Voting Systems utilized a third-party vendor to assist them in the process and that the third-party vendor sent an incorrect data file to Integrated Voting Systems for printing and mailing. The third-party vendor was selected and hired by Integrated Voting Systems without involvement by the County. The Secretary of State’s Office has been informed about this error and the County has been informed that it is conducting its own investigation.

What is the process for checking ballots for errors?

The process for checking ballots for errors involves numerous checks and balances. In this case, the ballots were proofread by the Mendocino Elections Office and approved for printing. The Mendocino Elections Office informed Integrated Voting Systems that the ballots were correct and ready to be printed and mailed. We are informed that the third-party vendor sent Integrated Voting Systems an incorrect data file for printing and mailing, after the ballot images were reviewed and approved by the Mendocino Elections Office.

Is the ballot printing and mailing completely handled by outside company?

No. There are numerous steps in the ballot compilation, printing, and mailing process. The Mendicino Elections Office is involved in many of the steps and proofreads the ballots before they were transmitted to Integrated Voting Systems to be printed and mailed. In this case, the Mendocino Elections Office approved correct ballots. The error occurred when the third-party vendor used by Integrated Voting Systems transmitted an incorrect data file to it to print and mail.

What is the protocol for checking ballots?

The Secretary of State has oversight responsibilities for the conduct of elections and sets forth rules and procedures that each county must comply with. Section 20200 et seq. of Title 2 of the California Code of Regulations sets forth many of these regulations. There are also other provisions of law that govern this process. Mendocino County complied with the regulations for checking ballots.

How did this ballot printing error occur?

Based on what we know at this time, this appears to be an unfortunate case of a simple human error at the last steps of the process.

How long has the County had a relationship with this ballot printing vendor?

Mendocino County used Integrated Voting Systems for approximately 15 years, until approximately 2 years ago. After utilizing a different vendor for a short time, the County returned to using Integrated Voting Systems in Fall 2023 because it felt that Integrated Voting System was more responsive.

Who vetted the ballot printing vendor? What are the requirements for a vendor to manage an entire county's election materials?

The vendor is one of 12 vendors approved by the California Secretary of State for ballot printing. Chapter 4, Title 2 of the California Code of Regulations governs ballot printing, including certification of ballot printers.

What are the errors in the ballots for the actual Republican voters in the First District?

The County is concerned that there may be errors on even the ballots for those individuals registered as Republican in the First District that could cause the ballots to be read incorrectly. In an abundance of caution the County is asking that all ballots be reprinted, and that voters use the reprinted ballots, to ensure that all ballots are processed without error.

How do you know the overseas and military ballots were not affected?

The Elections Office prints and mails the overseas and military ballots.

When did the Elections Office learn about the ballot error?

On February 7, 2024, the Elections Office began receiving reports that some voters had received incorrect ballots. That evening the Elections Office determined that all voters in the County had received a ballot with the same ballot image. The County immediately began working to determine the best way to remedy the error and notify the public.

How will the County ensure that every registered voter can vote?

The Elections Office is working with our ballot printing vendor to get correct ballots mailed out to every active registered voter. Voters will receive corrected ballots with sufficient time to submit ballots by mail or in person. The Elections Office also has procedures in place to identify incorrect ballots that are submitted and to provide voters with an opportunity to submit correct ballots.

How will the County ensure that no one votes in a primary election for which a person is not permitted to vote?

If the Elections Office receives any of the incorrect ballots mailed that have been filled out, the Elections Office will attempt to contact the voter to ensure that the voter fills out a corrected ballot. The Elections Office will not count votes cast for any election in which the individual casting the vote is not permitted to vote.

How will the County ensure that no one is able to vote more than once?

When Elections Office receives a ballot the privacy label is removed, the addressed scanned and the file is uploaded into the elections management system. If a challenge code comes up in the election management system, the ballot is put aside for the elections official to review.

Additionally, Elections Office staff check the signature on each ballot envelope by hand. If there is a discrepancy in the signature it is challenged in the elections management system and brought to the Elections Official for signature verification. If the Elections Official verifies the signature, the challenge is removed, and the ballot is filed by precinct to be opened and counted. If the signature does not match the Elections Office contacts the voter to re-sign and/or complete a new registration form (a person’s signature may change over time).

If a voter sends in one ballot and then sends in a second ballot, the system will recognize that the person has already voted and challenge the second ballot. Elections staff will research to verify the reasons for any subsequent ballot. If the reason is a result of the mailing of incorrect ballots, the incorrect ballot will be voided.

Is this error being reviewed by any outside agency?

The County has been in contact with the California Secretary of State regarding this ballot error. The Secretary of State agrees with the process being used by the County to correct the error. Additionally, the County is informed that the California Secretary of State is conducting its own investigation into what occurred. The County is appreciative of the assistance provided by the California Secretary of State regarding how to remedy the error and for its review of this situation.

More about Integrated Voting Systems: "Missing Ballots" (February 26, 2020)

FORT BRAGG CITY COUNCIL RECAP - JANUARY 2024

Here’s a recap of recent City Council meetings and some decisions that may interest you:

On Jan. 8, 2024, City Council approved an amendment to the lease agreement with Mendocino Coast Humane Society to include the operations of the Animal Control Facility previously vacated by the County. Allowing the Humane Society to enhance its animal care services on the coast.

On Jan. 8, 2024, City Council directed City Staff not to expand the short-term vacation rental use into the General Commercial and Highway Visitor Commercial zones. The Council also directed Staff to bring back proposed changes to the code enforcement of these vacation rentals.

On Jan. 8, 2024, the City Council approved funding for the City’s Share of Costs for one Wildland Response Fire Engine and one Rescue Truck of $235,567 funded by the Parcel Tax Fire Fund.

On Jan. 22, 2024, City Council approved the Request for Qualifications (RFQ) scope of services to support the Noyo Harbor planning effort. The California Coastal Commission awarded the City of Fort Bragg $898,900 in Local Coastal Program (LCP) grant funds to support a regional strategy to address climate change in and around Noyo Harbor through blue economy initiatives.

On Jan. 22, 2024, City Council approved the Integration of the C.V. Starr Community Center as a City-Owned and Operated Facility and established a Salary Rate Compensation Plan confirming the Pay Rates/Ranges for C.V. Starr Class of Employees. Effective February 11, 2024.

On Jan. 22, 2024, City Council approved a $20,000 contract amendment to Idea Cooperative to develop a high-level marketing strategy and brand identity concept for the City’s broadband Project funded by LATA Grants.

Isaac Whippy, Fort Bragg City Manager

ERRATIC DRIVING STOP LEADS TO GUNS & DRUGS

On Wednesday, Feb. 7, 2024 at approximately 10am hours a Ukiah Police Department (UPD) Sergeant observed a dark colored pickup truck driving erratically in the 600 block of North Orchard Avenue, Ukiah. The UPD Sergeant also observed multiple California Vehicle Code equipment violations on the pickup truck.

As the pickup truck pulled into the Ross Dress for Less parking lot at 550 East Perkins Street, a traffic enforcement stop was initiated, and the pickup came to a stop in the middle of the parking lot.

The driver, later identified as Jessie Edward Slotte, 39, of Ukiah, rapidly exited the vehicle and began berating the UPD Sergeant. Slotte was ordered back into his vehicle, where he continued to fail to comply with instructions.

Additional UPD Officers arrived to assist, and a records check through UPD Dispatch on Slotte revealed that there was an active warrant for his arrest out of Mendocino County (MCSO) for being a prohibited person in possession of ammunition. Slotte was asked to step out of the vehicle, to which he failed to comply.

After several minutes Slotte was escorted out of the vehicle, and during a subsequent search of his person Slotte was found to be in possession of both suspected methamphetamine and cocaine. A search of Slotte’s vehicle then yielded approximately 12 grams of suspected methamphetamine, approximately eighty (80) rounds of ammunition in a variety of calibers, and a loaded .22 caliber revolver. Slotte was arrested for the above listed charges and booked into the Mendocino County Jail.

‘COMPLAINTS AGAINST A COUNTY OFFICIAL’? LAWSUITS THREATENED? LIABILITY?

by Mark Scaramella

Items 3a and 3b on a special unscheduled closed session agenda for Thursday, February 15 have local supes watchers abuzz with speculation about either two public officials or one public official with two separate “significant” legal complaints:

3a: “Pursuant to Government Code Section 54956.9(d)(2) - Conference with Legal Counsel - Anticipated Litigation: Significant Exposure to Litigation Arising from Complaints Against a County Official: One Case.”

3b: “Pursuant to Government Code Section 54956.9(d)(2) - Conference with Legal Counsel - Anticipated Litigation: Significant Exposure to Litigation Arising from Complaints Against a County Official: One Case.”

Then there’s this intriguing item:

3e: “Pursuant to Government Code Section 54957.6 - Conference with Labor Negotiator - Agency Negotiators: Jon Holtzman; Unrepresented Position: County Executive Officer.”

According to their website, Jonathan Holtzman is a managing partner at the Renne Public Law Group in San Francisco, the same pricy legal outfit that Mendo is paying well over $200k to James Ross as Interim County Counsel for six months. “Jonathan (Jon) Holtzman is a founding partner of Renne Public Law Group, and was previously a founding partner of Renne Sloan Holtzman Sakai LLP. Since 2005, and every year since, Mr. Holtzman has been named a ‘Northern California Super Lawyer’.”

We can’t tell what Item 3e might really mean. Has Mendo hired a “super lawyer” at hundreds of dollars an hour to negotiate a new contract with CEO Darcie Antle? Is newly employed County Counsel Mr. Ross involved with determining who in his own law firm is hired as the Board’s negotiator with their own CEO and at what pay rate? Is this an abuse of closed session? (Oh, never mind, we’re sure all the super lawyers involved are doing everything on the up and up and all the money will be very well spent.)

AV UNIFIED NEWS

Dear Anderson Valley Community,

Just a reminder, if you signed up your student for the elementary Saturday Adventure School, please make sure they attend TOMORROW. Ms Triplett has an amazing program planned for the students with all kinds of activities. Don’t miss it!

Families of seniors, please note two very important announcements that went out on Parent Square. The first one is to make sure you mark your calendar to attend the senior trip meeting on Thursday, February 21 in the high school library at 5:30 p.m. The second event is to please RSVP in the office for our FAFSA application evening on Thursday, February 26. The FAFSA is a beast and we are bringing in help to support your Students’ application. Please make a reservation for our dinner and come. You need to bring your tax ID number or your 2022 tax return in order to complete the application. The district does not see this information, it is for your student’s financial aid application. This starts at 5:30 p.m. in the high school cafeteria. We have heard across the state there are difficulties with the new website. PLEASE don’t leave this to the last minute or your student could be very negatively affected.

Every year, we participate in a survey module. Students in selected grades are surveyed, staff, and parents are also surveyed. Here are the links to the surveys for the parents/guardians. They translate into Spanish at the top of the second opening window. Please take four or five minutes and give us your feedback. We really do look at it.

Elementary Parent/Guardian Survey

Anderson Valley Junior Senior High School Parent Survey

In other news, students at the Junior and Senior High School were able to touch a $1 million check. We received the advance payment for the track from Caltrans and enjoyed a fun ceremony and photo to mark the occasion. We took the soil samples this week and final design work is in process.

The painting of the interior of the elementary school continues. I know it looks a little disjointed right now with the flooring still in place. The flooring will be replaced in June and the front parking lot and bus pick up area also will be repaired and resealed.

Progress reports come out for the Junior and Senior High school this week. I want to remind parents once again about the difference between a D minus and an F, as far as credit deficiency. This is not a system I advocate for, but your student loses five full credits for every F they receive. If they get a D- they get all five credits. We are doing everything possible to support students in their learning with drop in tutoring support in the library all day and also after school every day for an hour with Mrs. Malfavon. It is important that our families communicate to their students that they need to use the services when they struggle. I think we’ve had a trend in our national culture where parenting has turned into friendship and what students really need when they struggle is boundaries and communication and expectation. Please help us help your kids.

We continue to focus on attendance. Every day a kid is gone is a day they miss their learning and they also negatively impact their cohort as instruction needs to be made up. If your student truly is sick, of course, keep them home. Otherwise, fight the fight and get them to school. If you need a ride, call the office. There are studies out there that show that students that missed 10 days or more of school every year are less likely to graduate. We are here to support. Call the sites, if you need help.

Sincerely yours,

Louise Simson, Superintendent

Anderson Valley Unified School District

HELENE ROUVIER:

Dear Anderson Valley Advertiser,

I am sharing the below link to an article that just ran in the LA Progressive discussing the Assembly District 2 race here on the North Coast. Please let me know if you would like additional information. Thank you for covering this critical election.

"Funny Business at the California Democratic Party"

SUPERVISOR JOHN HASCHAK:

Our State Senator Mike McGuire was sworn in on Feb. 5 as President of the Senate. This is the first time in 147 years that the Senate President will come from this district. I have known Senator McGuire for many years and he has always been extremely supportive of me and my work for Mendocino County. Since California is usually dominated by Southern California interests, this will be an opportunity to have a good friend who knows the North Coast in a position of power.

County Museum staff will present to the Board new models of operation including non-profit administration. Karen Mattson will present ideas on how to create more efficiencies, revenue generation, and strengthen community partnerships. Some of the benefits of going to a non-profit model are that salaries and benefits are less, insurance costs go down, maintenance and landscaping jobs will be more timely and efficient, and there will be more opportunities for fundraising. I am committed to making sure that any transition is successful in keeping the museum open and running well. This will require continued support, though less than the current amount, from the County.

In January, the Board passed round 2 of streamlining the cannabis ordinance. It came from the General Government Standing Committee which I chair. The general feeling is that the cannabis department is now running smoothly and is on track to get applicants transitioned to their state annual licenses. This has been a real turnaround. My approach has been that government oversees this industry and we must be as efficient and effective as possible. Last year the department cost the General Fund a million dollars. This year it will be much less and cannabis tax revenue was budgeted at $1.5 million and came in at $3.1 million. Those are some bright data points.

There will be no Talk with the Supervisor this Thursday. I will be at the CalCOG annual conference talking about transportation issues. I am available by email haschakj@mendocinocounty.org or phone 707-972-4214.

UKIAH CONSTRUCTION UPDATES FOR THE WEEK OF FEBRUARY 12:

Work is temporarily done on the south side between Gobbi and Cherry, until it’s time to pave. Joint trench work will continue between Mill and Gobbi, which will run along the west side of the street and contain underground electric and communication lines.

On the north side (Norton to Henry), crews continue concrete work and installing new street lights, weather permitting. In most parts of this section, on-street parking has been restored. The on-street parking is not very intuitive, because the orange delineators (cone-thingies) must remain in place to keep vehicles traveling in a single lane. However, it IS okay, unless there are barricades in place that state otherwise, to park inside (to the right of) those delineators.

Note: Work is progressing slowly due to the weather. During the winter, if there are weeks where there are no significant changes to the projected work, we may not deliver a flyer. An email WILL be sent out each week, however. See instructions at the bottom of this page to have your name added to our email list.

Have a safe weekend!

Thanks,

Shannon Riley

Deputy City Manager

Email: sriley@cityofukiah.com

WATER FOR MENDO

To the Editor,

Regarding the upcoming election there are five candidates running for the House of Representatives in the 2nd Congressional District. Personally, I would have said anyone but Huffman because he doesn't seem to be our friend or advocate in maintaining the water that has been diverted from the Eel to the Russian for over 100 years but I must add to that list Tief Gibbs because of her statements in her letter in the MendoFever. First she accuses Chris Coulombe of "politicizing the issue", then states we should be "celebrating that they have found a way to ditch the dam and restore the Eel". She goes on to say that "the rest of the world has moved on and that all parties have agreed that the lake should be eliminated". I find the letter that Chris wrote articulate and addressing my concerns and many others I converse with.

When I first became alarmed about the potential loss of our water I watched the documentary that can be seen on YouTube "A Rivers Last Chance". This problem started in the 1850's because of over logging and fishing, floods, droughts, and most currently cannabis water diversions. Locally, we are being scapegoated for the distorted ideal of another dam destruction. There are at minimum 600,000 people in Mendocino, Lake, Sonoma, and Marin counties who rely on this water for drinking, fire fighting, agriculture, recreation and tourism. There are many educated, selfless citizens, organizations and committees who have been working tirelessly for many years to hopefully find a solution to this extremely complicated issue so that we who live in the Russian River watershed will not be ignored. Who in their right mind quits their job before they find another one, or tears down their house until the new one is built.

I hope that the local citizenry will realize that this is an imminent danger and loss that requires us to get involved with the same passion that motivates some to go sit in a tree or chain themselves to gates and equipment to save our redwoods. We need to be stirred now, before it is too late, and demand of our representatives on all levels of our government from our supervisors to congress that new infrastructure must be designed, funded and built before the old is destroyed leaving us in a worse condition than we are in now.

Thankful to live in Mendocino county,

Randy Dorn

Redwood Valley

DAM REMOVAL DANGERS

Dear Editor—

As plans for the full and expedited removal of the Scott and Cape Horn Dam on the Eel River, Potter Valley move forward, our natural resources are in danger. The larger Scott Dam is located where water is stored at Lake Pillsbury, and the smaller Cape Horn Dam constitutes the creation of the Van Arsdale Reservoir.

District 2 Congressional candidates Tief Gibbs & Jared Huffman have touted their support for providing an upgraded fish passageway while completely disregarding the impact on stakeholders.

According to their congressional opponent, Chris Coluombe, the dam removal will cost the taxpayers an estimated $500M, constituents and firefighters will face further fire risk due to reduced water availability, and agricultural producers will face the impact of starving our land of water.

The bulk of tribal voices aside from James Russ, President of the Round Valley Indian Tribes Council have been ignored since the inception of Huffman’s Potter Valley Project Ad-Hoc Committee. Per Redheaded Blackbelt: ‘On June 17, 2019 the Wiyot Tribe and Round Valley Indian Tribes walked out of an ad hoc committee meeting in solidarity with the Bear River after Bear River, a federally recognized tribe, was asked to leave by Congressman Huffman’s staff’.

Prior to the formation of the Eel-Russian JPA, the Russian River Water Forum represented interests in Sonoma, Mendocino, Lake, and Humboldt Counties. The group’s consultant, Kearns & West includes PG&E, FERC, NOAA and an excessive number of local, state and federal government agencies within their client portfolio.

Following the Tubbs Fire, California’s elected officials lobbied $2M for PG&E with monies intended for the fire victims via Rebuild North Bay. Being that PG&E funds Congressman Huffman’s campaign, is the decision to move forward with the dam removal monetarily influenced and have these business dealings been fully transparent?

Thanks!

Kindest Regards,

Adina Flores

Potter Valley

AGAIN: FLUSHABLE WIPES ARE BAD FOR PLUMBING

Many homeowners and some commercial establishments commonly take for granted one of most efficient mechanisms for removing human waste byproducts, namely the Toilet. When one considers the simple, yet intricate pipe works, the holding tank, the pumps, and the working effect of gravity, it is important to note that this is an appliance that we cannot safely live without.

The care and maintenance of wastewater disposal toilets and the connecting downstream collection system is straightforward if pursued with regular inspection and observance is paid to what is disposed of “down the drain”. A toilet is not a solid waste disposal unit and items other than human waste and toilet paper can place the system in peril and a need for corrective action becomes immediately a critical component in one’s daily routine.

Gualala Community Services District (GCSD) maintains the wastewater collection and treatment system that serves the town of Gualala along the Highway 1 corridor. GCSD utilizes what is known as a STEP (Septic Tank Effluent Pumping) collection system. Each customer of GCSD has a septic tank on their property. Routine maintenance of pumps, septic tanks and pipelines are performed on a routine schedule. Experience has shown that the major impediment to a fully functioning waste disposal system is the disposal of baby wipes, cosmetic wipes, paper towels, toilet wipes, antibacterial cleansing wipes, “Q-Tips, and other non-biodegradable products.

These items do not readily decompose and is the number one reason GCSD is called out after hours. When these items enter the waste stream, they can cause damage to pumps, cause pipes to clog, or possibly cause a sewer spill. GCSD is usually notified by the customer or notification can be accomplished with system alarms. Upon arrival to a reported issue, the wastewater operators will survey the area and if necessary, will pump down the septic tank and inspect the pipe and pumps within the tank. This call out effort is costly to the district, and when considering that the situation could have possibly been avoided with proper customer disposal practices.

Gualala Community Services District is considering creating an ordinance to determine a method of cost recovery for time and materials from property owners who are determined to dispose of these types of products down the drain, which necessitates the district to send a wastewater operator to respond and take corrective action unnecessarily. If you would like more information or to discuss any issue, please contact the General Manager at (707) 785-2331.

* * *

I propose that the next time at 3 am when we get a call, you put on all prophylactic rain gear and come out with us to unclog a system of a house with 10 occupants to reach down and pull wipes and diapers from a pump. This is “everyday work” for a water waste operator, but if not attended to is a town-wide problem. But if you would like to attend an after hours call out for wipes or diapers, let us know.

Randy Burke, Registered Environmental Healt Specialist, waste water operator, water treatment operator, MPH (Master of Public Health), and Gualala Community Services District board member.

MENDO’S NEXT POET LAUREATE

The Mendocino County Poet Laureate Committee is currently seeking nominations for the first Poet Laureate of Mendocino County. The deadline for nominations is February 29th. Nominees will need to submit applications in March and be interviewed in April. This is an official honorary position in which the Poet Laureate will serve for a term of 2 years. The Poet Laureate would be expected to appear at some public functions, and hopefully engage with not only the poetry community but the broader literary, Arts, political, and educational communities. How the Poet Laureate will do this will be defined by that person’s own creative process.

Anyone living in Mendocino County can nominate a potential Poet Laureate and a poet can nominate herself or himself. Some of you may not know that we already have a Youth Poet Laureate in Mendocino County. The Poet Laureate Committee believes that Mendocino County also deserves to have an adult Poet Laureate and that the establishment of this position will help enhance the art of poetry making here and inspire all of our citizens about the value and joy of creative literary expression.

For more information on how to apply or nominate for this position go to http://mendocinopoetlaureate.mymcn.org. If you do not have access to the internet you can send snail mail to: Mendocino County Poet Laureate Program, P.O. Box 67, Willits, CA, 95490.

THE OLDEST PERSON IN THE U.S. LIVES IN CALIF.

by Jillian D'Onfro

Edith Ceccarelli, the oldest known person in the United States at 116 years old, hails from the NorCal town of Willits – and the Historical Society of Mendocino County still has a copy of her senior high school yearbook.

In celebration of Ceccarelli’s birthday on Feb. 5, the historical society created a video showcasing stills from the 1927 “Mistletoe” yearbook for Willits High School, many of which feature Ceccarelli née Edie Recagno.

Ceccarelli was born in 1908 in Willits and has lived there for much of her life. She still resides there today at a residential care home (though she lived independently until 107 years old).

The yearbook pictures serve as both a fascinating time capsule and a fun reminder of how little the yearbook format has changed in the past 100 years: Sports and club pictures abound, as do memories and jokes from the senior class.

There are, of course, also the amusing contrasts between the 1927 yearbook and a modern version: The featured faculty members don nice-looking suits and frilly collars and an article attributed to Ceccarelli about “girls’ athletics” describes them as “regarded as but a side issue” (though perhaps that attitude is not as outdated as it should be).

"There used to be a lot more poetry and students' creative writing," Alyssa Ballard, archivist at the Mendocino County historical society tells SFGATE of the local yearbooks she's seen (the group stores publications that date all the way back to 1904).

Ceccarelli appears in shots of the basketball team, concert orchestra and senior play (they put on “Nothing But The Truth”). A poem highlights her musical talents: “Edith is our class’s songbird / With the sweetest voice you’ve ever heard.”

She has continued to love the arts throughout her life, attending dances at the senior center in her later years and even soliciting a new partner for “a beautiful waltz or two-step” in the local paper when she was 104 years old. Willits has regarded her as a “local celebrity” since her 100th birthday, the mayor told The New York Times, and holds public parties for her birthday, including parades or lunches.

Her secret to a long life, according to The Times? “Have a couple of fingers of red wine with your dinner, and mind your own business.”

Maybe she should have also mentioned having California roots: The only person in the world known to be older than Ceccarelli is Maria Branyas Morera, who was born in San Francisco on March 4, 1907, though she now lives in Spain.

The Mendocino County Historical Society didn’t respond to questions about the yearbook by press time.

ED NOTES

THE 56th California International Antiquarian Book Fair kicked off Friday on Pier 27 and runs through Sunday. Sponsored by the Antiquarian Booksellers’ Association of America, the three-day event is interesting not only to bibliophiles, but to anyone interested in collecting stuff, and most of us collect stuff.

I HAVEN'T attended for years, but the last time I did I always vowed to come back because it's a fascinating event. Everything on display was, and still is, way, way out of my financial league, and frustrating as hell because I see books I once owned, and you probably did, too, now going for $300 to $500. I did manage to persuade the missus to cough up $20 for a mint condition, February 1950 copy of Horizon magazine devoted entirely to Mary McCarthy’s novella, ’The Oasis.’ It was the only Horizon the guy had and, never having seen another actual Horizon, and being a big fan of editor Cyril Connolly, and a big admirer of Mary McCarthy’s essays but less big on her fiction, I forked over, as the little lady wondered out loud, “You wanted twenty dollars for that?”

IT'S a huge show. Five long aisles worth. I spotted many books I once owned — sold for a pittance in times of desperation — and here they were 60 years later going for hundreds of dollars. The most ordinary lit is priced extortionately high. First edition Salman Rushdie for $75. Already? Impossible. Ridiculous. And there must have been 50 booths selling first editions of ‘Catcher In The Rye’ for $3,500. Probably half the senior citizens in Mendo owned first editions of that one.

IF you’ve never been, go, but it's frustrating, walking around beating back acquisitive desires, and my aim with books these days is less not more. But it’s always been a terrible struggle to resist more. I probably have about a thousand books left in my collection after selling thousands more over the years. Most of mine are on California history, the most valuable is probably the Mendo classic, ‘Genocide and Vendetta’ whose title neatly encapsulates the entire early history of Mendocino County. Last time I checked, it was going for upwards of $1,000, if you can find a copy.

AT A MEMORABLE garage sale in San Francisco on Page just off Fillmore I bought almost an entire set of old Horizons for 25¢ each! Remember Horizon, the expensively rendered, eclectic quarterly? Things of beauty, my friends, and prized relics of that long-gone time when there was a market for artful words presented in artfully-wrought packages. No more, no more. It’s all gone, and soon even the few people who remember literature’s last gasp will be gone, vanished into hand held telephones.

ANYBODY ELSE AGREE that the late Phil Baldwin was the first and last genuinely, consistently progressive person to hold elective office in Mendocino County? As a Ukiah City Councilman, Baldwin, proposed to ban cell phones from public buildings, theaters, restaurants, supermarkets, and classrooms. And he wanted to ban jet skis from Lake Mendocino, which are merely commonsense measures turned down by his elected colleagues, but Phil was always good on the big issues, too, like war and peace, like equal pay for equal work, like justice everywhere and comprehensively.

HAS IT BEEN that long ago that I debated Measure G, the Green Party’s advisory pot initiative? Yep, about a quarter century ago at the Ukiah Civic Center. I represented the No On G position along with the Superintendent of the Ukiah Schools, Gary Brawley, against Cowboy John Pinches and Doc Keegan who argued the Yes position. (Keegan turned out not to be a good advertisement for marijuana. A few years later he bludgeoned his wife Susan to death.)

I WASN'T USED to finding myself aligned with a public school person on much of anything in those days, let alone a Ukiah school superintendent. I thought school administrators of the day should have been required to smoke pot to save them from the embalming fluid they seemed to be addicted to. But I agreed with Brawley and everyone else who said that marijuana is not good for young people because it’s an insidiously stupefying energy drain that can permanently derail young people if they smoke it young and often.

SUPERINTENDENT BRAWLEY didn't see Measure G like I did beyond agreeing it was bad for the young. I saw it this way: Considering the grim facts of life in Mendocino County for an ever-larger number of our fellow citizens, what on Gaia’s Green Earth did progressive people think they were doing to make the world a better place by investing a lot of time and effort into a purely advisory measure about any issue, let alone one as frivolously self-indulgent as cop-free pot for them?

ESPECIALLY in county where seasonal vineyard workers camped out because several hundred of them had no shelter; where private-sector working people pay about half their annual incomes for the leaky roofs over their heads (when they can find them); where an estimated 25% of the children live in conditions of poverty; where public money is invested in distant money markets rather than here in the county in such amenities as affordable housing; where the county had to be sued because it doesn’t have so much as an elementary grading ordinance to protect itself against the environmental rampages of the wine industry; whose mentally ill people are mostly confined to the County Jail because there’s no other place to keep the vulnerable safe from themselves and the battalion of real predators out there; and on and on.

SO WHAT DID the county's “progressives” do? Worked a half year on an inane advisory measure that resulted in the depiction of Mendocino County in the national media as some kind of officially-sanctioned doper’s paradise. Obviously the pot laws then were unjust to the persons who ran afoul of them, but as a priority social prob the absurdities of the pot laws should not be anywhere near even the top ten of any self-respecting progressive person’s list of social/political priorities.

MEASURE G was being yukked up all over the national media. An AP Wire story appeared in papers all over the country featuring 82-year-old Ann Dierup, a Mendocino woman who was washed down the stairs of SF's City Hall by fire hoses protesting the McCarthy hearings in 1960. Ann, fully recovered from her valiant stand against McCarthy, appeared in a living color photo, saying, “I’m not into the thing. I don’t grow it. I don’t smoke it. But I don’t think it’s as dangerous as alcohol.”

PLEASE, ANN, I begged, invidious comparisons of fundamentally different hazardous substances is hardly an argument for one over the other. “I am not into the thing,” she said. I wasn't either, but I loved the other thing — booze.

THE MEDIA were again fastened on Mendo big time. Then-supervisor Michael Delbar popped up on national television talking about how pot has led to perdition in Potter Valley. The New York Times featured Mendo’s Measure G. Then-Sheriff Tony Craver told me that CNN had just interviewed him although AP had already “made me out to be Sheriff Bob Marley!”

ALTHOUGH it was already way, way too late, Craver had never even come close to saying he was pro-marijuana. DA Norm Vroman, made it clear that whatever the outcome of Measure G, state and federal dope law superseded whatever Mendo’s pot brigades might come up with in the way of advisory initiatives. Those were the days when illegal marijuana brought lots of money into the county, and right here in Boonville, at harvest time, little kids had to be sent home from school to change clothes because they reeked of the love drug.

CURATOR TALK AND QUILTMAKERS MEETING: Feb. 17 at Grace Hudson

Crossing the Boundaries: Artist and curator Barbara Kibbe discusses interaction of art forms in Museum's current exhibit

by Roberta Werdinger

On Saturday, February 17, Barbara Kibbe will present a talk and gallery tour of the Grace Hudson Museum's current exhibit, "Printed & Stitched." The talk will be part of the Studio Art Quilt Associates (California/Nevada Regions) regional meeting, which starts at 11 a.m. and runs to 1 p.m. Kibbe's talk will begin after members' introductions, and all are welcome to attend the meeting. A co-curator of the exhibit, past chair of the regional exhibitions committee for Studio Art Quilt Associates (SAQA), a lawyer with extensive experience in the nonprofit arts world, and a printmaker and textile artist herself, Kibbe is well positioned to comment on and create an exhibit that presents an intriguing interplay between two artistic disciplines.

Growing up in New York, Barbara Kibbe became interested in artmaking early, encouraged by a high school teacher. "I realized how soothing and healing artmaking could be," she recalls. "It's a place to engage different parts of your brain and heart." She went on to earn a degree in art with a focus on printmaking, yet "I was always making quilts and hanging them on the walls," exploring the two forms and synthesizing the results. She later got a law degree, moving to San Francisco in 1978 to work for Bay Area Lawyers for the Arts, as executive director for that organization and later serving other nonprofit and arts foundations. "I went from being an artist to someone who helped artists," Kibbe, who still provides executive coaching to nonprofit and arts workers, reflects. Ten years ago, she decided "I want to be back on that path," and re-established herself as a printmaker and painter.

Happy to be back in the studio full-time after a productive career in philanthropy, Kibbe still feels the same range of emotions as when she started out as an art student at age 22. "When making an artwork or print," she comments, "there's excitement, anticipation, anxiety, then resolution; then you do it all over again.

"People say artists are problem-solvers," she continues, "but we, the people who create the art, also create the problems we then have to solve." This is true, but an artist's creation of problems is not merely self-indulgent. It often presents a foray into a new way of perceiving, experiencing, and working. Artists take their respective disciplines seriously; it can often take a lifetime to master even one form. And yet, printmaking and art-quilting have long been gesturing toward each other. As the description for the exhibit states, "Printmakers often reference fiber and stitching, while textile artists/art quilters incorporate printed elements into their work. At their confluence there is pigment and pressure, woven layers, and borders sewn with fiber ... Textile and print go hand in hand, and the combinations are constantly being reinvented."

It is this confluence that Kibbe spotted and which prompted her to approach the California Society of Printmakers with a proposal for an exhibit. Together, SAQA and CSP created a curatorial team. The result was, to Kibbe's mind, "a wonderful survey of technique." As examples of boundary-crossing, she cites two works in the show: First, "Embedded" by Kate Deak, whom Kibbe describes as "a printmaker who really went for it." The artwork features a balanced, yellow wash of color, which uses dry-point etching, collage, and bold embroidery stitches which extend beyond the bottom of the picture frame, creating "a whole new compositional element." Then there's Susan Gibson Kelly's artwork, "Doodle," printed fabric pieced together into a quilt collage. The result "looks like something a printmaker would make with a calligraphic plate," Kibbe comments.

Thus, Kibbe notes, Deak's work "was stretching from printmaking into stitching," while Kelly's was "was stretching from quiltmaking into printing to make her own printed fabric." This notion of stretching may be one means of problem-solving artists use: all efforts can fail-- including, Kibbe admits, some of her own artwork. Even so, she reflects, "It's a journey. You did one thing and it may never work, but there is some aspect that will take it in a different direction."

"Printed & Stitched" closes on Feb. 18, the day after Kibbe's talk, so this is a good opportunity to walk the gallery and take a deeper dive into the artwork with one of its originators. Tickets to the event are free with Museum admission: $5 general; $12 per family; $4 for students and seniors; and always free to members, Native Americans, and standing military personnel. For more information please go to www.gracehudsonmuseum.org or call (707) 467-2836.

HEY, WE'RE THIRTY AUT SICKS, a punk band from Boonville, California!

We are interested in playing the Redwood Punkfest this year. here is a link to our songs that we believe represents our sound rather well:

https://thirtyautsicks.bandcamp.com/.../japanese-whore...

https://thirtyautsicks.bandcamp.com/track/nothing-to-lose

I hope we can make the cut!

SUSTAINABLE SEAFOOD AND CRAFT BEER

Thursday, February 29 | 6 p.m.

$125 per person

North Coast Brewing Company, Sequoia Room

444 N. Main St., Fort Bragg

A Night of Incredible Flavors to Benefit the Noyo Center for Marine Science

Join us at North Coast Brewing Company's restaurant in the Sequoia Room for an unforgettably delicious night featuring a five-course sustainable seafood dinner. Each dish will have an NCBC beer paired with it as an element in the dish. Brewmaster Chuck Martins will be on hand to guide you through the pairings. This will be one of the culinary highlights of 2024 and a memorable way to kick off Whale Fest for March!

Our deepest thank you to North Coast Brewing Company for hosting and presenting this special night. The dinner is a fundraiser for the Noyo Center for Marine Science. A portion of the ticket sales will help support our education programs, which inspire future generations of marine scientists, conservationists, and ocean enthusiasts.

100 YEARS AGO TODAY: Rodney Phillips died in Berkeley. He had been a prominent citizen of Cuffey's Cove and Greenwood and I grew up in his house.

Rodney Forseth Phillips was born in Maine on 18 December 1844. At 22 he married Mary Gaspar and together they had nine children. The first four were born in Surry, Maine between 1867 and 1876. The rest were born in California, likely in Mendocino County.

By 1875 Rodney and brother Millard Fillmore Phillips and the Welle brothers were operating a shingle mill in Laurel Gulch a short walk from Cuffey's Cove. His product was moved to the chutes there by rail car on a narrow gauge track, drawn by horses. Four men incorporated the Mendocino Railroad that year and extended the tracks down the coast and two miles up Donahue Creek where a sawmill was being built by Fred Helmke. A locomotive was brought ashore for this longer run and a competing shingle mill was built adjacent to Helmke's mill. His shingle mill did not prosper but when Lorenzo E. White came to town he offered Phillips the superintendent position of his new lumber company.

Rodney Phillips was one of the first to move from Cuffey's Cove to Greenwood. There he built a large home on the west side of the coast road, just south of Strawberry Gulch. He planted a row of cypress as a windbreak. The last of those trees was removed in about 1960. In May 1887 a post office was established inside the lumber company store. Rodney Phillips became the first postmaster of the "Elk Post Office, Greenwood California." Although he was running Greenwood and Whitesboro, he does not seem to have stayed there very long. In 1891 we find him running the woods for Fort Bragg Redwood Co. In 1897 he is living in Mendocino. By 1898 he is running tie operations, again for LEWLCo at Rollerville. Mr. and Mrs. Phillips left the coast shortly after the turn of the century and moved to East Bay, with thoughts of locating in San Diego. He retired from active life in 1914 and spent his last years quietly at home there. Between 1892 and 1894 the two-story house he built was jacked up, dragged across the street by donkey engines, and placed at the north end of the Company Hotel. Connecting structure was built between them and it became "the Annex" to that hotel. It burned in 1956.

(Chuck Ross)

CATCH OF THE DAY, Friday, February 9, 2024

MICHAEL BARNES, Willits. Concealed dirk-dagger, failure to appear, probation revocation.

JESSE CHAVEZ, Ukiah. Failure to appear.

ALEJANDRO DELAGUILA-CHAVEZ, Willits. Suspended license for DUI.

ANGELINA DELOSSANTOS, Willits. DUI-alcohol&drugs, suspended license, failure to appear.

SCOTT FABER, Ukiah. Burglary.

BRIAN HURTADO, Willits. Parole violation.

PABLO MARTINEZ, Covelo. Controlled substance, paraphernalia, failure to appear.

AMY PARRY, Ukiah. DUI causing bodily injury.

PATRICK SCHUETZ, Ukiah. Vandalism.

JACQUELINE SHEPHERD, Redwood Valley. Resisting or threatening peace officer.

JASON SIKES, Laytonville. Criminal threats, resisting.

RIORDAN WILHELMI, Mendocino. Kidnapping, vandalism, controlled substance, paraphernalia, failure to appear.

THE SEA RANCH READER’S GUIDE TO GUIDES TO THE SEA RANCH

(This is funny.)

https://thesearancher.com/2024/01/07/the-guide-to-guides/

JOHN REDDING:

For the last 40+ days I have been in real physical pain 95% of the time. So, do you think I will be giving up something for Lent this year? Hey! Fuggedaboutit. lol

PS. Some tips for Adventist Health on how to run a successful business.

If a patient makes an appointment, put that information in the patient portal. And send the patient a reminder by email, text or phone message.

When there is confusion regarding the date of the appointment, which transpired with me today, call the patient! Yikes! Yes, call the patient. My appointment was last Friday but I show up this Friday. Ok, my bad even though I checked the patient portal. Call and say we were expecting to see you today. Sorry it didn't work out. Would you like to reschedule your appointment?

This is a classic business mistake that I have seen a few times. These small cuts in cost can result in large losses of revenue. AH, do you know that you can make gobs of money on imaging services?

RICHARD WOLTERS:

My goodness. A kidney stone, then an obstructed kidney stone requiring two painful surgeries to remove, after which I was struck in the right rib causing my back to convulse for a week, After which I woke up with caked blood down the side of my face emanating from a knot on my head (rib was reinjured) and finally (fingers crossed) after all that I tore left side pectoral muscles. A show that has run non-stop since Dec. 23rd. The Good Lord has graciously taken the matter of my Lenten Penance into his own hands. lol

TRIBAL CHIEF LUCY THOMPSON (1856-1956)

Tribal Chief Lucy Thompson was an influential figure in the history of the Yurok tribe. Born in Northern California, she became the first person to document the history and culture of the Yurok people. Raised in tribal traditions, she learned English, worked at a paper mill, and began recording Yurok stories.

Despite her responsibilities as a wife and mother, Thompson continued writing about Yurok history and culture. Her book, "To the American Indian: Reminiscences of a Yurok Woman," is a significant contribution to Yurok heritage.

Thompson dedicated herself to preserving and promoting Yurok culture, sharing it with the world. She is celebrated as one of the tribe's greatest chiefs and writers. Her work plays a crucial role in preserving Yurok traditions and history for future generations.

MEMO OF THE AIR: Good Night Radio show all night tonight!

Tonight (Friday night) will be my 1,348th Memo of the Air show. 1348 is an important Angel Number, whatever that means. In the Hebrew Lexicon-Concordance, 1348 is the word/number of a rising up of smoke or a swelling of sea, and something about geuth, which means majesty, if I'm reading this right, so there's that. Also 1348 was the year the Black Death reached England. Busy number. Soft deadline to email your writing is 6:30 or 7pm. If you can't make that today, that's okay, send it whenever it's done and I'll read it on the radio next week.

Memo of the Air: Good Night Radio is every Friday, 9pm to 5am PST on 107.7fm KNYO-LP Fort Bragg and KNYO.org. The first hour of the show is simulcast on KAKX 89.3fm Mendocino.

You can always go to https://MemoOfTheAir.wordpress.com and hear last week's MOTA show. By Saturday night I'll put up the recording of tonight's show. Also there you'll find a fresh hillside of wonders to slalom down until showtime, or any time, such as:

A compendium of words and phrases referring to dogs. https://www.metaphordogs.org/index.html

"In the next few seconds everything within roughly a mile of the ballpark is leveled and a firestorm engulfs the surrounding city." https://theawesomer.com/if-you-could-throw-a-baseball-near-light-speed/730141/meter

And the oldest person in the U.S. lives practically around the corner. Edith C., a national treasure in Willits, City of Light, City of Magic. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/07/us/edith-ceccarelli-116-years-willits-california.html

Marco McClean, memo@mcn.org, www.MemoOfTheAir.wordpress.com

WHY CUT THIS?

Editor:

Older people don’t get much help or carry much weight in today’s social and political scheme. And now, Sonoma County's establishment should hang their heads. A program offered only at our farmers markets, which gave $40 a month to low-income seniors to be spent at the market and only for fresh fruits and veggies, is ending. For no discernible reason.

All the piles and piles of coupons that were already printed are headed to the trash. The EBT 20 bucks market match for food stamps, used only for fruits and vegetables at farmers markets, will likely also be trashed in 2025.

Rents, food, gas and utilities are over the top, and those of us who have raised our kids and worked all our lives are under the gun and knee deep in you know what.

There’s no senior “lobby,” so who cares about our vote? All low-income populations everywhere are getting shafted. But the stock market is strong, so too bad for us. I would only hope people will rally for our measly 40 bucks a month and an extra 20 bucks for EBT. It’s food, for the love of God.

Barbara Iannoli

Sebastopol

WE’RE NUMBER SIX!

The 2023 Foot Traffic Survey

by Smart Growth America

Most walkable cities

1. New York

2. Boston

3. Washington, D.C.

4. Seattle

5. Portland

6. San Francisco

7. Chicago

8. Los Angeles

9. Pittsburgh

10. Philadelphia

COLORFULLY PAINTED VICTORIAN HOUSES in the Haight-Ashbury District of San Francisco, USA

San Francisco is well known for its iconic architecture, from the imposing Golden Gate Bridge to the grandiose Palace of Fine Arts, however, the most impressive structures are its beautiful and numerous Victorian buildings.

An estimated 48,000 houses were built in San Francisco during the Victorian and Edwardian period (between 1849 and 1915), with many being tragically lost to the 1906 fire. It was a period of many styles, from Gothic Revival and Italianate, to Stick and Second Empire, and finally the Queen Anne style. Although these styles differed, most are characterized by ornate details and bright colours, all of which was a reflection of the prosperity brought to the city by the Gold Rush.

(Credit to Myra Clergé)

A READER WRITES:

My day started at Brenda's French Soul Food on Polk Street in San Francisco. This may be the best breakfast place outside of New Orleans if you like Southern French style. It is in a rough neighborhood as far as street people are concerned, but as one reviewer wrote, "this place doesn't belong in a tidy upscale neighborhood". I learned early on that photographing food takes some technique not available in a documentary setting. I worked right alongside Moulin Studios in S.F. who specialized in food advertising and when they photographed soup, they first filled the bowl with marbles and then covered them with the soup. Looked great, but I was short on marbles. Everything at Brenda's seemed so simple...until you tasted it.

MARIE TOBIAS:

We are at a particularly interesting time in human history. With breakthroughs in molecular gerontology, and a steady explosion of new information regarding the nature and process of aging (and even how to reverse it.) We are confronted by a graying populace with the experience, wisdom, and creativity to make a real difference (particularly when you consider they've stopped participating in the baby making obsession of youth.)

And instead of celebrating this auspicious surplus of human understanding and experience (appearing right when we need it most!)... The younger folks want the older to get busy dying off, so they can get their inheritance now! Dammit! A 40 - something person gets cancer, the oncologist moves heaven and earth to try and save them. A 60 something gets cancer, and the oncologist is at best lukewarm about treatment. And if the person who gets cancer is 80... even if caught early and the cancer is completely treatable... Eh, palliative care, mak'em warm and fuzzy as they punch out. By all means, treat people dealing with end of life respectfully, but stop assuming everyone over 80 is a walking corpse looking for someplace to lay down.

CELEBRATING the birthday of an old pal today, Neal Cassady.

Denise Kaufman knew Neal well during her days as Mary Microgram "on the bus" with Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters. Neal was a major figure of the Beat movement in the 1950s and served as the model for the character Dean Moriarty in Jack Kerouac's iconic novel On The Road. In the 1960s, Neal earned his prankster name "Speed Limit" as the bus driver on the Furthur bus.

— Allen Ginsberg

ON-LINE COMMENT OF THE DAY

Americans are not a righteous nor a sane group of people. Television and movies, in my opinion, have devastated our society. Causing people to have false belief in lies and fakery over truth and honesty.

Just walk through the store and you’ll see what America has become. People are typically obese. Dressed in their pajamas. Covered in tattoos. Degeneracy abounds in all of its forms. Drug and alcohol use is out of control. Sexual perversion permeates society. Illiteracy, ignorance and intolerance are the norms now while time honored traditions of family and love are quashed. Women butcher and murder their own children and then have altars in their homes where they worship the remains of their children.

How can we expect a people this lost to reclaim its government?

THE SUPER BOWL OF GAMBLING

The gambling industry has consumed the sports world, so of course, the Super Bowl is in Las Vegas.

by Dave Zirin

The number is staggering: The American Gaming Association expects $23 billion to be spent on legal gambling during this year's Super Bowl. That is a 44 percent jump from last year’s $16 billion. The deliriously happy gambling industry projects 67.8 million people—26 percent of all American adults!—to bet on the game. (The actual number of gamblers is almost certainly higher as young people are surely betting through online apps with the help of older friends or parents.)

These trends aren’t going anywhere. A-list celebrities and even journalists relentlessly promote betting during broadcasts. Gambling analyst Chris Grove told Jay Ginsbach at Forbes, “There’s a good chance that every Super Bowl for the next 10 or so years will be the most bet Super Bowl thanks to the underlying growth of regulated sports betting in the US.”

Gambling is no longer on an illegal sideline of the sports world or in an ancillary, but legal, area run by casinos and offshore betting accounts: It is the sports world. It is the economic blood that flows through the corpus; it keeps sports leagues upright and functioning. Super Bowl ads are no longer dominated by products like cars or even beer. The ads are for companies picking the meat off our bones. Gambling has become a regressive tax placed upon the addictions of the consumer. The industry is creating a feeling that the only way to fully enjoy watching sports is to have some skin in the game.

Fittingly, this year's Super Bowl is in the country’s gambling capital, Las Vegas. Tell a person in 1990 that the Super Bowl would be in Sin City, they would have insisted upon a drug test. For most of sports history, Vegas might as well have been radioactive. Any connection to gambling, it was believed, would sully the one thing that makes sports different from every other culture product: an undetermined outcome. The fear was that if the audience started looking at sports as if it was “sports entertainment,” like professional wrestling, the audience would head for the exits.

It is why examples had to be made of "Shoeless" Joe Jackson and Pete Rose, all-time baseball greats kept out of the Hall of Fame. It was to remind the players—and the fans—that gambling has no legal place in sports. Meanwhile, in the intervening years, Pete Rose has spent more time in Las Vegas than Wayne Newton with a lucrative hustle signing baseballs and telling stories. The sports world now quietly sees Rose as more prophet than pariah.

The supremacy of gambling in sports means that Rose is no longer a warning sign to athletes. Leagues can crack down on players and referees who are caught online gambling, but obviously it is impossible to track every bet when done through third, fourth, or fifth parties. It strains credulity that the athletes, executives, coaches, and refs who make up the sports world, some of the most competitive people on earth, aren’t placing bets while Roger Goodell and the assorted complicit commissioners look the other way. The influence of the gambling industry has eroded the trust that people have in sports. It’s no wonder so many people think that the Taylor Swift Super Bowl is some sort of NFL master plan, liberal psyop, or grand design of the betting concerns.

Then there is reality that the NFL and the other sports leagues are now parties to what is becoming an epidemic of addiction. Gambling, according to the American Psychiatric Association, affects the functioning of the brain, leading to “substantial distress or impairment.” This problem in high schools, where the still developing brain is particularly vulnerable, is severe and under discussed. People would be shocked to know how easy it is for teenagers to get into these apps and fall into debt before they even have a job. It is true that at the end of these gambling ads, featuring famous actors telling you how much fun it is to bet on the games, there is the equivalent of a surgeon-general warning informing people if they have a problem, they can call 1-800-Gambler. To say that this is the fine print is an insult to fine print. You practically need a magnifying glass to spot it.

This is the sports world acting like the venture capitalists who are now gobbling up teams from the old family companies. In a time of war and social decay, it is not surprising that people are looking for escape. But this is an anti-worker escape that leaves people destitute—in need of more help than society is willing to provide. This is also the underbelly of Las Vegas, where the house always wins, and it’s the underbelly of the Super Bowl. The collision of the two, once unthinkable, is now merely more corporate “synergy.”

WHY DO WE FORCE 99% OF AMERICANS WITH A 401K TO INVEST IN OIL AND GAS?

by Bill McKibben & Alex Wright-Gladstein

When it comes to retirement plans, putting money into an industry in decline that destroys the planet just doesn’t make sense.

The oil and gas sector had the lowest returns of any sector in the U.S. economy in the past decade. It also had the highest volatility. Finance students are taught that investors trade off higher risk for better returns. Why does anyone invest in a sector that offers neither?

The answer lies in the fact that most people today invest via index funds. These funds let investors ride the growth and relative stability of the economy at large, rather than having to place a bet on a specific fund manager. So much data has shown that past performance has no correlation to future results that active fund managers are falling out of favor.

More and more Americans rely on index funds like the S&P 500.

The problem with this picture is that the historical market dynamics that led to today’s mix of top 500 companies are not a good predictor of which ones will dominate the economy in the future. We are investing in today’s 500 biggest companies even though it is clear that the makeup of that top 500 list will be quite different moving forward. Nowhere is that more true than in the energy sector.

The number of oil and gas companies that qualify to be in the S&P 500 has been on the decline: In 2011 there were 45 fossil fuel companies in the index, and by 2020 there were only 19. As the cost of solar, wind and batteries combined has become less expensive than fossil fuel power generation, and the popularity of electric cars has taken off, the oil and gas industry has been on the decline. And yet, we continue to invest in it because we continue to invest in index funds.

Nowhere is this more true than in 401(k) plans.

As one of us experienced when running a technology company, it took over three years and a lot of persistence to get a single climate-friendly investment option on our 401(k) plan. That meant for over three years, we were requiring all of our employees to invest in ExxonMobil and Chevron.

It turns out we weren’t alone. There are entire social movements of employees at big tech firms, including Apple, Microsoft and Google, who have been asking for climate-friendly investment options in their retirement plans for years. They have sent hundreds of letters to their human resources teams. They have gotten thousands of signatures on petitions.

Why has it been so hard for employees to get an investment option that makes a lot of financial sense and also increases the likelihood that they will have a livable planet to retire on?

In 401(k)s and 403(b)s, generally called defined contribution plans, there is a lively culture of class-action lawsuits that puts pressure on employers to offer the types of rock-bottom prices and benchmark-correlated returns that only index funds can provide. The result is that anyone who invests via a corporate retirement plan has to invest about 5% of their savings in the oil and gas industry, the worst-performing and most risky sector in the economy.

We believe it is time to question that status quo. While index funds like the S&P 500 have served us well in reducing costs, they now prevent us from protecting our life savings from the decline of the fossil fuel industry.

In the past few years, several products have come on the market that make it possible for employers to offer low-price, benchmark-correlated funds that are climate-friendly. Those options have grown in popularity as employees have requested them.

Fossil fuel companies have noticed. In the past year, they have poured money into a new anti-ESG (environmental, social and governance investing) campaign that has resulted in the House and Senate voting to pass a bill that outlaws climate-friendly investing in 401(k)s, and 18 red states passed laws outlawing climate-friendly investing in state pension plans. The 401(k) bill was only prevented from becoming law by the first veto of President Joe Biden’s career.

Ironically, these bills that fossil-fuel-industry-funded politicians frame as putting investment returns ahead of values-based decision-making have threatened to cost hundreds of millions of dollars to state agencies and pensioners, and have forced investment managers to choose between making the right decision as fiduciaries and breaking the law. In one of those 18 red states, the Oklahoma Public Employees Retirement System decided to break the new anti-ESG law rather than risk losing $10 million of pensioner money. Where the fossil fuel industry would like to frame the problem as choosing between investing with progressive values or investing for good returns, the data shows that those “progressive values” and good returns often go hand-in-hand.

When it comes to long-term retirement investing, requiring Americans to put their hard-earned savings into an industry in decline just doesn’t make sense. If politicians required Americans to invest in the horse-and-buggy industry 100 years ago when automobiles were on the rise, we would see that as insanity. We should wake up to the fact that the same is true for oil and gas companies today.

Everyone should have the option to avoid investing in oil and gas, especially in retirement plans.

(Bill McKibben is the Schumann Distinguished Scholar at Middlebury College and founder of the climate campaign groups 350.org and Third Act. Alex Wright-Gladstein is the founder of Sphere and the Sphere 500 Fossil Free Index and a creator of RetireBigOil.org.)

MAUREEN CALLAHAN: It's no longer up for debate: Joe Biden has got to go. In a hastily called press conference Thursday night, President Biden was, for the first time, questioned relentlessly by the White House press pool about his age, cognition, and fitness to serve. Finally! The ostensible headline was meant to be that the Department of Justice report had cleared Biden of mishandling classified documents. But the real headline was contained in the special counsel Robert Hur's reasoning. He wrote that a jury would be unlikely to convict because Biden, 81, is 'a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory' suffering 'diminished faculties in advancing age'. Biden told investigators that he could not recall when his term as vice president ended. 'If it was 2013 - when did I stop being vice president?' he asked. Oh dear.

KENNEDY: Undeniable evidence of Joe Biden's startling mental decline is accumulating faster than naked selfies in Hunter's laptop. The Special Counsel investigating Biden's mishandling of classified documents found he 'willfully retained and disclosed classified materials after his vice presidency when he was a private citizen.' But - get this hot load of malarkey - Joe won't be charged. Why? Because his own Justice Department has concluded that a jury would find him to be 'a well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.' Translation: No juror would throw their poor old grandpa in the clink, so the DOJ is not going to bother prosecuting. And it gets worse. Call the cops! It's official. America's top law enforcement department thinks Biden's brains have turned to mashed potatoes.

THE DEMOCRATS now have the perfect excuse for Biden betraying nearly every promise he made during his 2020 campaign, unfortunately for them it will prove fatal to his reelection: he doesn’t remember making them. According to the Special Counsel’s report on Biden’s mishandling of classified documents, Biden is “an elderly man with a poor memory.” And the “significant” problems with his memory got “worse” over the course of the investigation to the point where Biden “did not remember when he was vice president” or “even within several years, when his son Beau died.”

“In his interview with our office, Mr. Biden’s memory was worse. He did not remember when he was vice president, forgetting on the first day of the interview when his term ended (“If it was 2013 — when did I stop being Vice President?”), and forgetting on the second day of the interview when his term began (“In 2009, am I still Vice President?”). He did not remember, even within several years, when his son Beau died. And his memory appeared hazy when describing the Afghanistan debate that was once so important to him. Among other things, he mistakenly said he “had a real difference” of opinion with General Karl Eikenberry, when, in fact, Eikenberry was an ally whom Mr. Biden cited approvingly in his Thanksgiving memo to President Obama.”

+ The reasons set forth by the Special Counsel’s report for declining to prosecute Biden for illegally retaining classified documents on Afghanistan (.ie., “diminished faculties”) are far more devastating to him–and the Democrats who continue to support him–than an indictment would have been. (Still, it’s worth noting that few other people are granted this kind of leniency when they have been caught with stolen material and over the course of his own political career, much of it spent writing punitive crime laws, Biden himself has rarely shown any.)

+ Even in his “diminished” condition, Biden still may have more political (if not mental) “faculties” than Harris, who spreads confusion wherever she goes, which may be why they haven’t tried to invoke the 25th Amendment…

+ Biden is learning that it’s never a good thing politically when people begin to speak of you in the past tense while you’re still alive. But fortunately for him he’ll have forgotten this morbid lesson by tomorrow morning.

+ Ginsburg, Feinstein, Pelosi, Clyburn, Biden…the most selfish generation in American politics? They clung to power longer than the segregationist Democrats Biden so admired.

+ Ladies and gentlemen, the President of the United States….

(Jeffrey St. Clair)

Floyd Patterson after knocking out Ingemar Johansson to reclaim the heavyweight title in 1960.

JEFF BLANKFORT

This post today from Jodi Rudoren, former NY Times correspondent and now the editor of the NY Jewish publication, Forward, the oldest Jewish paper in the US (now only online), is interesting, if only that with all the Jewish crying and wailing about the hostages, she writes about a Gazan and his family and what has happened to him, not a typical Gazan but a Gazan none the less:

"Jawdat Khoudary’s home and garden was not just the loveliest place I ever visited in the Gaza Strip, it was one of the most serene — and surreal — spots I’ve ever seen anywhere.

Khoudary, a construction mogul whose family dates back nine generations in Gaza, had created a 100,000-square-foot oasis amid the coastal enclave’s dense concrete mazes. Mosaic paths laced through lush, colorful legions of native and imported plants. Greenhouses covered tens of thousands of tiny cactuses from around the world that he was trying to cross-cultivate. Inside, ornate columns and chandeliers surrounded his beloved history books and collections of local antiquities.

Now, remnants of those columns are surrounded by rubble, according to a video Khoudary sent me, everything else having been destroyed in this horrible Israel-Hamas war.

“Can you imagine? They didn’t leave one plant or one tree,” sighed Khoudary, 64, who fled to Cairo in December. “They broke my heart.”

I met Khoudary nearly a dozen years ago, on the seventh day of the eight-day Gaza war of 2012 that in retrospect feels like a schoolyard fistfight compared to the past four months of death, destruction and displacement.

As I wrote then in The New York Times, he experienced that mini-war, in which Israeli airstrikes killed 174 Palestinians in Gaza, from a perch of extraordinary privilege. A guard from Khoudary’s construction company brought him enough Marlboro Reds to last three weeks, and a butler served us fresh-picked clementines as we chatted. He was a “soft bear of a man in sweats and sandals,” as I put it, and had spent the week learning to use Facebook from the youngest of his five children, Hamza, then 14.

But even they were not immune to the sounds of bombing at night.

Khoudary had shuttered the hotel he then owned, Al-Mathaf, and the adjacent antiquities museum he’d opened in 2008, because they were in a neighborhood facing heavy bombing. He’d halted work on the two hospitals he was building in Gaza, but kept paying his 60 employees, he told me, because “we have to show the people we are committed to them.”

Two years later, amid the intense 51-day war of 2014 that killed some 2,200 Palestinians in Gaza, Khoudary, now fluent in Facebook, posted bits of poetry and relevant history to the site. A new seaport was being discussed in truce talks, so he wrote of Anthedon, a 7th-century B.C.E. Gaza port that served as a main trade conduit between the Middle East, Europe and Asia Minor.

I returned to the Khoudary compound during a brief ceasefire that summer; Jawdat was in the West Bank on business, so I sat with his wife, Faten; their two daughters, who had recently graduated from the American University in Cairo; and Hamza. We munched green grapes from the garden and supped coffee with cardamom.

Again, their experience of the fighting was anything but typical. One daughter, 24-year-old Yasmeen, told me she’d read Lolita, Kafka on the Shore and a Pakistani comedic novel, A Case of Exploding Mangoes, during the war. Hamza, then in 10th grade, had been watching Harry Potter movies. But Yasmeen also spoke about the nightmares she had after seeing “headless fighters” in the streets where Israel bombed Hamas tunnels.

Weeks before that war broke out, the family had fulfilled one of their dreams, an exhibit and sale in Gaza of the succulents they so carefully cultivated. Jawdat had taught me that the Arabic word for cactus, sabr, also meant patience.

“This is what we need in Gaza,” he’d said in 2012, “to be patient.” During our 2014 visit, Faten showed off her favorite, a hybrid of eight species, grown over seven years to be taller than her.

“The bigger they are, the more beautiful they are,” she told me. “The more care you give them, the more they give you.”

“I’m 64. I don’t have plenty of time left in my life to rebuild it.”

– Jawdat Khoudary, 64

Khoudary was never stuck in Gaza like the vast majority of its 2.1 million residents. When we first met in 2012, he was traveling monthly to or through Israel and had visited more than 40 countries around the world. But he was deeply attached to Gaza — his family had lived there for more than two centuries — and said the year he’d spent living in Cairo was “maybe the worst in my life,” due to homesickness.

Now he is not sure when he’ll go back or whether he’ll stay.

“The IDF has destroyed all Gaza, Gaza will not be a place to live — now we are looking for any business opportunities in Egypt,” Khoudary told me when we spoke this week.

“I’m 64. I don’t have plenty of time left in my life to rebuild it,” he added of the house and garden he began building on his family’s citrus farm in the 1990s. “It needs 30 or 40 years to be like before.”

Khoudary, now a grandfather of eight, does not know when, how, or why the house was hit. He left it about four days after the war began in response to the Hamas terror attack on Israel Oct. 7, moving to another house he owns, in Gaza’s old city, because it seemed safer.

But 50 days later, he said, under pressure from his children — now ages 24 to 34, the girls married and living in London and Germany, the boys mostly working in the family business in Gaza — the family used Faten’s Egyptian passport to exit through the Rafah border.

“It was the most black day of my life to decide to leave Gaza,” Khoudary said.

Until last week. Israeli forces had withdrawn from the area of Gaza City where the compound sat, making it accessible to Gazans for the first time in months. A friend went to check on Khoudary’s house, and sent the video of it in ruins.

Khoudary said the chocolate factory his sons opened in Gaza two years ago was also destroyed in the war; they are looking to revive the business in Cairo instead. He is unsure what has become of the antiquities museum.

He — and I — know there are many people in Gaza suffering much more than the loss of a business or a home. The Palestinian death toll is nearing 28,000 in this war that President Joe Biden last night called “over the top.” Entire families have been wiped out; famine is on the horizon. And truce talks that might have freed the 100-plus remaining hostages fell apart this week over Hamas’ insistence on remaining in power.

When I first wrote about Khoudary a dozen years ago, I called him “one of Gaza’s wealthiest men and one of its boldest dreamers.” His dreams have died in this war.

“They are creating hate, Israel is creating hate,” he told me. “This war, it was not against Hamas, it was against the whole people of Gaza. Killing, destruction, is the main purpose, for the whole people, no differentiation.”

I reminded Khoudary of what he’d taught me when we first met about the cactus and patience. It seems both are gone.

“They didn’t leave one cactus,” he said. “They have destroyed the patience.”

WHEN NOBODY WAKES YOU UP in the morning, and when nobody waits for you at night, and when you can do whatever you want. What do you call it, freedom or loneliness?

— Charles Bukowski

A BOTTLE, A GLASS, & ME.

Only one of us has anything to say, but the glass craves to be full when empty and to be emptied when full. The bottle is indifferent. I am the cause, the glass, the vessel, and the bottle — a silent passive holder of a substance that becomes my spirit.

Bars. There are so many places to buy a drink. The rundown backstreet corner boozers suit me best. Places where I can hide in the dull light amongst dust and sticky tables. I’ve been hiding from life, at least I think that’s what it is, for a long time now, years in fact.

The thing about bars is that you pay as you go. No pay no liqueur. That’s the story of my life. I never had any money, so I have always had to find money to drink. That’s where the trouble started. I’m not sure if it’s the begging and stealing for drink that has got me into trouble or the drinking itself. For me, a drink is a gateway out of pain, yet a revolving door that lands me straight back in trouble.

Mine is a marriage of solutions that are insoluble. My sort are never in one place for long. We have to keep on moving in order to keep on drinking. In between towns, there are nights on the road where a bottle of whisky in the woods on a summer’s night is the best company to lighten the darkness.

Having walked all day, a wash in a stream or lake, a fire and a little simple food, all accompanied by whiskey, as the evening light fades, deepening the colours of the woods, a level light that makes the grasses appear like they are little people talking amongst themselves. I listen to them as they speak in elegant rivers flowing like winds blowing. Each seed head full of babies yet to be born in a timeless flow or regeneration.

These are the times that I am most careless, as I drink my full to leave one world and enter another through drifting lines that merge feelings with visions and sounds, immersing me in a lake of peace and tranquility. Perhaps it is me that fades into a place where the contents of a glass bottle protects me from a harsher reality.

Can you imagine the beauty that pours out of those bottles? The colours of leaves and the harsh contours of tree bark conceal hidden faces that can only be free when I see them through a glass.

Drink is a man’s companion. It warms his soul and softens his mind once the preliminary stages are traversed. First comes the sadness of a lonely man, then the anger at an indifferent world. Lastly, the immobilisation and acceptance of a careless mind that fades into the stupor of a death-like sleep where demons come tormenting. All to be forgotten when the next awakening dawn arrives.

For me the passage of seasons merges and each that has passed or is yet to come is like a different universe, always far away. It is only now that matters and the now is always better with alcohol in my blood-warming, rotting gut.

Summer is best although the English summer can be wetter than a six-month-cold bath. Winter carries weapons which pain me and I need more of my saviour out of a bottle to resist her cruelty. The angelic fluid makes me strong although it is my weakness.

I started drinking as a child. My father gave me sippers from his glass in the local boozer. Later, I stole from his bottle of spirit and topped it up with water. The local off-licence (as we called the wine and spirits shop) didn’t seem to mind selling to me when I was twelve. That’s when I first needed money and that’s when my troubles started.

I drank my way through my twenties in the clubs and bars of London’s West End. I drowned myself in drink through my thirties in pubs in the outskirts of the city and literally swam across my forties. I can barely remember a thing.

My fifties are like my sixties — a staple of drinking for peace and moving on with regrets. Now in my seventies, I drift like a boat without a sail and wonder what the hell I’ve done with my time, the lonely time in which my only true company was the seasons and drink.

Seventy-six, tired and dirty. Penniless and afflicted with rheumatics. I have had enough having lasted this long. I am alone with those trees and stars that have always come to me as my companions. There are no grasses to talk to in this early February.

I have walked this way before from one Hertfordshire town to another. I have a litre of gin, shoplifted from a small store. I like gin. It is as clear as a mountain stream and the world always seems more beautiful with gin. A litre of the stuff is enough to preserve the beauty forever. I hope to take it with me.

Im sorry, mum, that I never came home, but it is beautiful now that the spirit is in me, and that’s how it’s going to remain. I embrace tomorrow because the next town is Hertford and I know it well, I grew up there. Knowing the town so well means that it doesn’t matter that I shan’t get there.

Cheers to you, stars. I raise my glass to you because you never let me down. Now I shall join you and just maybe I can be part of the beauty through one last drink.

(Colin’s Jumps & Other stories)

VD DAY POEM/POISON ARROW

Take a dive with me

Deep beneath the flesh

Aiming for the glory that resides in the chest

I direct my dart with a pull, my arm holding taut the bow

Ready set fire

Catapult

The rocket shoots out really fast

Flying through the sky

Straight for it’s destination

No hesitation or change of trajectory

For the weapon has it’s destiny

The arrow is poisoned

Intentionally

Carefully filled with pain and agony

A missile on a mission to impale it’s victim

Dead Center behind the ribs and a little to the left

The poison arrow lands the lethal blow

The target falls to the floor

Not sure what hit him

Confused

Alive and well

He stands in awe of what happened

Quickly realizing the spear was enchanted

Now he is doomed

Love just bloomed

— Mazie Malone

34 Comments

Chuck Dunbar February 10, 2024

ED NOTES–On the Dying of a Culture

“AT A MEMORABLE garage sale in San Francisco on Page just off Fillmore I bought almost an entire set of old Horizons for 25¢ each! Remember Horizon, the expensively rendered, eclectic quarterly? Things of beauty, my friends, and prized relics of that long-gone time when there was a market for artful words presented in artfully-wrought packages. No more, no more. It’s all gone, and soon even the few people who remember literature’s last gasp will be gone, vanished into hand held telephones.”

Oh so well-said by our dear editor.

Reply
Kirk Vodopals February 10, 2024

Re: Adventist Health…. you can’t call yourself a hospital if you don’t provide one of the most basic services that defines such an institution: DELIVERING BABIES. Once emergency services are abandoned then it is just an Outpatient Clinic

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Eric Sunswheat February 10, 2024

Garnet Yam orange flesh photo
RE: Japanese Sweet Potato (not pictured, mislabeled)
—> March 6, 2019
When I talk about Japanese sweet potatoes, I’m referring specifically to the Murasaki variety (available at Trader Joe’s!), which have a deep magenta skin and white flesh.
https://www.bonappetit.com/story/japanese-sweet-potatoes

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- BRICK IN THE WALL February 10, 2024
  
  Adventist health sucks.
  
  Reply
Kirk Vodopals February 10, 2024

Great reporting last week from Daniel Mintz on KMUD regarding Potter Valley and Eel River flows. Mintz covered the HumCo supervisors discussion of the decommissioning project. Supervisor Rex Bohn, who represents the lower Eel basin and being the polar opposite of a Marin County liberal, said he is very concerned that the proposed regulations of only taking winter-time high water flows would actually happen. As an example, look at what Mexico receives from the Colorado River once Nevada, Arizona and California suck up their “shares”.
It’s becoming quite obvious that Mendo County is a bit player compared to Humboldt and Sonoma in the battle for Eel River water. Mendo is like Donny from The Big Lebowski.

Reply
- Bruce McEwen February 10, 2024
  
  Like they used to say in SoHum, “We don’t care how you do it in Mendo…!”
  
  Reply
- Eric Sunswheat February 10, 2024
  
  Marin reservoirs are full., partly because Mount Tamalpais range, scrapes extra water from the passing storms.
  
  Sonoma County had to cut back dry seasonal flow on the Russian River from Lake Mendocino, years ago, as fruition of Biological Study opinion to protect salmonid habitat, so now Lake Mendocino has less water storage value to Sonoma Water, including expansion possibly.
  
  Reply
  - George Hollister February 10, 2024
    
    Call it what it is, Marin dams blocking fish have reservoirs behind them that are full. Remind Jared Huffman, he lives there.
    
    Reply
    - Kirk Vodopals February 10, 2024
      
      The habitat provided for salmonids in Marin County is orders of magnitude less than that of the Eel River. Does that give Marin the right to maintain their dams? Not necessarily, but tearing down Marin dams will have much less of an impact on fisheries. Your argument is logical in terms of politics, but not really in terms of fisheries restoration. Plus, as you keep stating Mr Hollister, it’s all about ocean conditions, right?
      
      Reply
      - George Hollister February 10, 2024
        
        My point is the hypocrisy of it. Not that in either case it makes any difference with regard to how many Coho Salmon adults can return to spawn. Taking dams out on the Eel, or in Marin won’t make a squat bit of difference.
        
        Reply
        
        Harvey Reading February 10, 2024
        
        Is this an election year at the local Farm Bureau? You’re peddling more BS than is usual, even for you!
        
        Reply
      - Eli Maddock February 10, 2024
        
        Millions of tons of sediment are expected to wash out to sea. Let’s see how that shakes out on the Klamath. My money says not too well. And I’ll put the same odds on any rise in numbers of fish that return to spawn.
        
        Reply
- George Hollister February 10, 2024
  
  Lake County is where Lake Pillsbury is, and as far as Lake is concerned, that lake water is theirs, from their watershed.
  
  Reply
  - Kirk Vodopals February 10, 2024
    
    A drop of water doesn’t care which county its falling in. It rolls downhill
    
    Reply
Mazie Malone February 10, 2024

Happy Saturday…..

A Bottle A Glass & Me…… ❤️

Profound !!!

mm 💕

Reply
- Craig Stehr February 10, 2024
  
  Visited the Forest Club Friday afternoon, taking advantage of the $4 draft beer. Played all of the blues on the juke box. Had a shot of the Woodford Reserve rye. Moved on to the Ukiah Brewing Company for a Noyo Harbor IPA and a steak entree. Called for a taxi just to be on the safe side, to return to the Building Bridges Homeless Resource Center. The driver didn’t have appropriate change for a twenty dollar bill, so she just didn’t bother to charge me. Indeed, received a free cab ride! Awoke late and took care of morning ablutions and then checked the AVA online to be sure that I am informed about local matters. Gotta get off of the common room computer now and go to the Ukiah Food Co-op for a nosh and coffee. Then it’s time to mail in the election ballot, before going to the Ukiah Public Library. Will eventually shop at Safeway tonight for food for the locker, and then retire early to bed. This is all a prelude to Super Bowl Sunday, for which I have no plans. Everything is profound! ;-))
  
  Reply
  - Bruce Anderson February 10, 2024
    
    The description of your day, Craig, doesn’t sound like the regimen of a heart patient. I thought you Hindus were into vegetarianism and a general austerity.
    
    Reply
    - Craig Stehr February 10, 2024
      
      Seriously Bruce, I have redefined yoga for postmodern times. Am sittng in front of computer #1 at the Ukiah Public Library, having deposited my ballot in the drop box located in front of the Ukiah Civic Center. All thoughts since waking up today have been witnessed, ensuring that I do not rot in the quagmire of samsara. Am otherwise not a Hindu, but I do appreciate Integral Yoga. I have never thought of vegetarianism as anything particularly spiritual. Is there something bad about eating fish, eggs, and occasional meat (for the red blood cells)? And beer is loaded with vitamin B, because it is made from cereal grains and yeast. Am feeling comfortable in my own skin right this very moment. ;-))
      
      Reply
      - Gary Smith February 11, 2024
        
        I thought all the Mendo ballots were faulty. Did you vote with a faulty ballot?
        
        Reply
- BRICK IN THE WALL February 10, 2024
  
  Yep, you are totally equipped to understand our prib l em. What a waste of cogniscentife our life brings with etoh.
  
  Reply
Harvey Reading February 10, 2024

I hope to live long enough to hear that Eel River salmonid populations have been restored, thanks to removal of the dams…and that wine farmers and other diverters have gone completely bust. The public does NOT owe those bums a dime, and all the bellowing of lies about “conditions in the ocean” being the reason for salmonid population declines is pure hogwash!

Reply
- peter boudoures February 10, 2024
  
  5 acre feet/acre (AF/ac) of irrigation water is applied to a rice field during the growing season. Looks like you’re a water waster. Please stop.
  
  Reply
  - Harvey Reading February 10, 2024
    
    How much of that water came from salmon streams, perfesser? Pinto beans are grown mainly in the Midwest and plains states if I recall correctly.
    
    Reply
    - peter boudoures February 10, 2024
      
      Low blow! Sacramento River. Pinto beans Colorado River
      
      Reply
      - Harvey Reading February 10, 2024
        
        You should look at a map showing the course of the Colorado River, which is NOT a salmon stream, by the way. Most of the rice grows in the South. Most of the beans in the Midwest and plains states.
        
        Don’t feel bad. Hollister and you would make a comical team!
        
        Reply
  - Harvey Reading February 10, 2024
    
    CA grows about 20 percent of the national rice supply, so the odds of my buying CA rice, grown using diverted water from salmon streams, is about 1 in 5, probably less, given that I live nearly 1,000 miles from CA. Get off your high horse! Take out the dams!
    
    Reply
- George Hollister February 10, 2024
  
  1.5 acre feet of water is used to grow an acre of dry beans in one season. Wine grapes need a little more, 2 acre feet/ per year. So, Harv, for a long conscious free life waiting for a return to the old salmon days will mean finding something else other than beans to eat. Acorns might be a good substitute, along with dried mushrooms, wild berries, etc. For meat, there is squirrel, deer, opossum, skunk, raccoon, turkey, grouse, etc. But it is also good to look and see how much water is used in the manufacture of gun powder, etc. There is obsidian, and material for a bow and arrow.
  
  Reply
  - Harvey Reading February 10, 2024
    
    You and your buddies will peddle any amount of BS to be in the good graces of your kaputalist farmer buddies who love their essentially free diverted salmon water, and to hell with the fish that depend on it. You would have been great cheerleaders for the welfare queens of big ag. Y’all sound like a bunch of consultants, who peddle whatever BS your customers want to hear. Save it for the uninformed. At least for today, you seem not to peddling any “the ocean is the cause” BS.
    
    Reply
  - Harvey Reading February 10, 2024
    
    I ask you the same question asked above of your fellow ag consultant, Mr. boudoures…
    
    You two make a great pair…of con artists!
    
    Reply
MAGA Marmon February 10, 2024

BREAKING: While in Moscow to interview Vladimir Putin, Tucker Carlson ALSO met with NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden and Joe Biden rape accuser Tara Reade.

This could just be the beginning of things…

MAGA Marmon

Reply
- Harvey Reading February 10, 2024
  
  Or the end, hopefully, of phonies like Carlson.
  
  Reply
- Chuck Dunbar February 10, 2024
  
  RELATED BREAKING NEWS: Carlson Was In Over His Head–Bad, Boring Interview
  
  Here’s a brief excerpt from one critic’s review of the interview:
  
  “What Putin Saw When He Was Interviewed by Tucker Carlson:
  
  Here was an easy mark. Carlson meekly tried to interrupt Putin a couple of times, to ask a question he seemed stuck on: Why hadn’t all this history and these territorial issues come up when Putin first became President, in 2000? It was an ill-informed question—Putin has trafficked in historical revisionism from the start and became increasingly obsessed with Ukraine after the Orange Revolution, in 2004—and an easy one for Putin to ignore. It seemed to show that Carlson was less well briefed than Putin, who dropped biographical trivia about Carlson into the conversation, a trademark intimidation tactic of a K.G.B. agent. He mentioned, for example, that Carlson had unsuccessfully tried to join the C.I.A.
  
  Carlson didn’t interrupt or challenge Putin on the many—too many to count—occasions when Putin told falsehoods about the history of Ukraine, the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the relationship between Russia and NATO, probably his conversations with former U.S. leaders, and, perhaps most egregiously of all, the Russian Army’s withdrawal from the suburbs of Kyiv after a month of invasion in 2022. Putin claimed that this was a gesture of good will aimed at achieving a speedy negotiated peace; in fact, it was a military defeat. This would also have been a good moment for Carlson to ask Putin about the well-documented war crimes Russian soldiers allegedly committed during that month of occupation. He passed up this opportunity.”
  
  “Tucker Carlson Promised an Unedited Putin. The Result Was Boring.”
  By Masha Gessen
  THE NEW YORKER DIGITAL EDITION
  February 9, 2024
  
  Reply
Betsy Cawn February 10, 2024

County “culture” conflicts: Similar to the City of Ft. Bragg’s contentious arguments over changing the name of the city, in Lake County there is a long-standing desire to change the name of Kelseyville. Families and friends of students at the school district successfully campaigned to change the name of the high school’s sports teams from “Indians” to “Knights,” after a many-year effort, with impassioned supporters persuading the school board to acknowledge the demeaning impacts on their many Native American students.

Likewise, the effort to change the name of the area and town from Kelseyville to Konocti (a campaign that was endorsed, at least tacitly, by the former Economic Development department’s “rebranding” ideas used by the former Lake County Visitors Center and marketeering vendors circa 2010), has met with significant opposition from the Anglo-American patriots who are active or retired agency leaders — aiming to stop the multi-cultural organization “Citizens for Healing” (www.citizensforhealing.org).

In 1998, when I was visiting the county for the first time, I ventured to the county courthouse with an eye toward learning about the county’s public works and water resources (on the third floor).

Standing at the counter waiting for assistance, I listened to a conversation between one of the desk-bound secretaries visible to the public and an unseen but clearly audible conversant in the adjacent doorway. “What was that all about?” the unseen speaker asked, after the secretary hung up on what sounded like an annoying caller. “Oh,” said the secretary, “just one of those idiots asking about changing the name of Kelseyville. Why don’t these people just get over it?”

Indeed, why do our insistent redneck recalcitrants insist that the name of the earliest “European Settlers” — who raped, tortured, and murdered their “Indian” slaves — should be preserved? Locally famous archaeologist Dr. John Parker explains in this lecture: “The Kelsey Brothers: A California Disaster”; “Learn about the two Native American Massacres in Lake County and what lead [sic] up to them.”:

I don’t know the word for something worse than irony, but in a recent Facebook post by one of the community’s highly revered firefighters, the public is asked to send emails “expressing your opposition to the change” to each of the county Supervisors — two of whom are respected Tribal leaders. The opponents of the name change can be emailed at “savekelseyville@gmail.com.”

The late 1800s “Bloody Island Massacre” was “one of many government-sanctioned slaughters of Native Americans under California’s official policy to exterminate Native Americans.” [https://www.aclunc.org/sites/goldchains/explore/bloody-island.html]

We’ve come a long way since the beginning of the 21st Century, but not far enough for the White fathers, who appear to be completely unsympathetic to the anguish of our Native American citizens and their supporters. Speak now or forever hold your piece.

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Chuck Dunbar February 10, 2024

BALLOT GLITCH Q&A

by Mendocino County Elections Office

“Frequently Asked Questions”

For once the County—here in the form of the Elections Office—does a thorough review of a serious problem that affects much of the citizenry. It’s a clear and understandable piece of information that tell us what went wrong, how it will be fixed, who is affected, how ballots will be checked, etc. An excellent memo to the public. Good job folks.

I’ll end saying that I and many others would appreciate this kind of memo regarding the many issues that arise where we get little or no clear, formal information from the County. Good governance surely includes clear (not a memo written in bureaucratic jargon), and timely information for the public on important issues.

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Mendocino County Today: Saturday, Feb. 10, 2024

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