Mendocino County Today: Tuesday 3/19/24

Mild | Ukiah Valley | Election Issues | Local Couple | Palace Story | Sherwood View | Grape Season | Kendall Impression | Business Workshop | Visit NZ | Winter Oak | Couple Bets | Great Listener | Back Issues | Fairy Slipper | Pinches Knew | Log Load | Ed Notes | Yesterday's Catch | First Baseman | Country Music | Mr Sixties | Lithium Plans | Buy EV | Children Now | Speech Hero | Carol Doda | Gags & Jibes | Food Stamps | Both Ways | iPhoned | Russian Election | Funny Noise | Which Road | Spring Regardless | Night Cafe

UNSEASONABLY MILD WEATHER continues inland for one more day today, while at or near seasonably coastal temperatures with persistent stratus. Unsettled weather and cooler temperatures return late in the week. (NWS)

STEPHEN DUNLAP (Fort Bragg): Spring arrives at 8:06pm this evening. Much like yesterday I do not expect much clearing today as the fog bank is even larger. 51F under foggy skies this Tuesday morning on the coast. More of the same until Friday when rain returns for the weekend & what now looks like much of next week.

HUNDREDS AFFECTED BY BALLOT BLUNDERS, DISTRICT CONFUSION, AND REDISTRICTING ERRORS IN MENDOCINO COUNTY

by Sarah Reith

The numbers of voters affected by the ballot mishaps in the recent election are coming into focus, with 880 ballots returned from the Antoni Lane misprint and 177 who received ballots for the wrong district.

Assessor Clerk Recorder Registrar of Voters Katrina Bartolomie took questions at a meeting of the Inland Mendocino Democratic Club on March 14. She did not provide details about the future of the county’s relationship with Integrated Voting Systems, the ballot contractor whose subcontractor misprinted the first round of ballots. In early February, all registered voters in the county received Republican ballots for the Antoni Lane precinct in the first district.

While she said the State Department told her that re-doing the entire election is “a hard no,” she left open the possibility of re-running the first district supervisorial race, after a voter expressed alarm over the possibility that participation may have been hindered, and results skewed, by the confusion. “If that’s the case, it can be re-run,” Bartolomie said. “ I think it depends on the candidates and everything else. So there’s a chance.”…

mendofever.com/2024/03/19/hundreds-affected-by-ballot-blunders-district-confusion-and-redistricting-errors-in-mendocino-county/

TIP OF THE DAY

Re: Known local couple arrested for child cruelty

A READER WRITES: Emerging story that is the tip of the iceberg. Hopefully if their arrests are publicized more victims will come forward. Jedidiah Wolfe Hunnicutt and Cassandra Green (Jedi and Cassie is what they go by) were arrested March 17 for willful child cruelty (Mendocino county booking logs). 

Both local realtors, Jedi is also a builder/contractor. He has a long past of violence towards women and children, but through the use of lawyers and aliases has buried a lot of what can be found online (his 2015 Ukiah arrest is still easy to find). He has gotten away with so much, and Cassie has been both victim and co-conspirator. It is well known among the community that they are abusers and inflict harm on their children and others but always get away with it. As public-facing professionals they seem to get away with it every time. Hopefully this time is different. There is definitely a story to be told about these people that the public should know about for their own safety. 

MIKE GENIELLA RESPONDS

Editor,

Perhaps Leslie Bartolomei (in yesterday’s MCT) should be reminded of the old saying, “Don't shoot the messenger,” which advises against blaming the bearer of bad news.

I am the unidentified writer from the Ukiah Daily Journal she accuses of “poisoning the waters to stop these investors from retaining their grant.” 

Instead, I am writing about the current application status for public funds to tear down the Palace Hotel.

The fate of the historic Palace Hotel is a divisive community topic. As a veteran journalist and resident with stories of personal experiences at the Palace, I am aware of the sharp differences of opinions about what to do with a three-story brick structure in severe decline. This issue has plagued the city of Ukiah for three decades.

There has been much discussion about who’s to blame and what to do. While I won't delve into that here, I find it crucial to address Bartolomei's apparent support of the proposed buyers' plan to use $6.6 million of taxpayer money to demolish the town’s premier historic landmark, a building listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

Contrary to Bartolomei's claims, the “successful local businessman” she refers to is not in escrow or in the process of purchasing the hotel from the current owner, Jitu Ishwar. The potential buyers are a proposed new partnership, with majority control to be held by the Guidiville Rancheria. This deal is being orchestrated by tribal consultant Michael Derry, restauranteur Matt Talbert, and unidentified private investors. The public spokesman is Talbert, the owner of Lost Coast Restaurant, a business neighbor of Bartolomei’s shop on Standley Street. Deputy City Manager Shannon Riley, a staunch defender of the city’s handling of the current Palace situation, also owns a shop on the block.

Guidiville’s application for special state funding is under scrutiny. Guidiville, in its application for public money, claimed the Palace needed to be demolished so studies of possible ground contamination could be conducted. 

However, the plan to use millions of dollars in taxpayer money to clear the Palace site for private development was derailed when local preservation advocates questioned the need to demolish the building. This prompted a state oversight agency to take a closer look. It declared that whatever contamination studies must be done at the Palace site can be accomplished without a teardown. 

So, the grant is on hold and under state review. 

Bartolomei asks, “Why would anyone undermine a project with the potential to breathe new life into our town?”

That question would be better put to Ishwar and his partners. Ishwar rejected proposals from two potential buyers with experience in tax credit and private financing for reconstructing buildings. Ishwar, intent on being “made whole” for his 2019 investment in the Palace, chose instead to deal on the side with Guidiville, Talbert, and the group in what a former court-appointed receiver of the Palace described as a “real estate play.” 

Ishwar, Derry, Talbert, and others connected to the Guidiville proposal have repeatedly declined to answer questions about their plans or offer public explanations.

Mike Geniella

Ukiah

NORTH COAST WINE INDUSTRY CAUTIOUSLY OPTIMISTIC AS 2024 GRAPE SEASON STARTS

Wine grape growers and vintners are cautiously optimistic as the 2024 season gets underway for the North Coast crop.

by Jeff Quackenbush

Wine grape growers and vintners are cautiously optimistic as the 2024 season gets underway for the North Coast crop, which amounted to $1.8 billion in fruit sales last year.

Early signs of budbreak — when shoots emerge from chardonnay vines after their winter naps — have emerged in warmer parts of Sonoma and Napa counties, while Mendocino and Lake counties are typically a week or two behind because of historically cooler conditions. It’s mostly normal timing for budbreak in the areas. Winter rains have left adequate soil moisture and pond levels.

“This year is the first time in four or five years for a normal start to the season,” said Christian Klier, a North Coast grape dealer for Turrentine Brokerage.

Last year’s downpours and cool temperatures followed three years of drought and led to a late season start and late harvest. Despite record tonnage for North Coast sauvignon blanc and Napa County cabernet sauvignon, some pinot noir grapes in the region didn’t get picked because wineries didn’t have the space for tons in excess of contract amounts, Klier said.

While the growing conditions look favorable so far, uncertainty looms about consumers’ thirst for wine amid inflation and other economic unease. Wineries are taking a cautious approach to contracting grapes beyond core varietals like Sonoma County chardonnay and Napa Valley cabernet sauvignon.

Glenn Proctor, partner of wine and grape brokerage Ciatti Company, said inventories of wine available for sale in bulk are currently larger than at this time last year, leading some wineries to wait on purchasing grapes until they have a clearer picture of sales projections. This is especially true for red varietals, where demand has softened.

Proctor noted that overall sales of wine have seen slower growth in recent years, and that’s challenging the supply situation more than in previous business cycles. From the early 1990s up to about five years ago, U.S. wine sales were expanding around 2.5%–3% annually. That allowed the market to more easily absorb excess grape supply from larger harvests.

However, with weaker sales growth in premium wines in recent years, there is less demand to absorb the extra supply. That’s leading to tough conversations throughout the state and even in areas of the North Coast about the financial return of vineyards with lower yield per acre.

“We’re in a market where money is not inexpensive with interest rates very high, and banks are taking a harder look at the numbers,” Proctor said.

On the bright side, wineries are eagerly sourcing white varietals, particularly sauvignon blanc and chardonnay from Sonoma and Napa counties, supplemented by Lake and Mendocino counties. A consumer shift toward white wines is driving demand, Klier said.

Labor availability could get some relief this season. With the decline in cannabis production, more workers appear to be returning to vineyard work, Klier said.

And some growers also plan to reduce their reliance on the federal H-2A guest worker program, according to Francisco Araujo, who oversees technical winegrowing operations for Napa-based Atlas Vineyard Management, which operates throughout the North Coast. That has allowed for more hands to do prep work to get the vineyards ready for the new crop.

“We have all the engines idling, ready to start,” Araujo said.

With budbreak and vine shoot growth set to accelerate with clearer, warmer days forecast through the end of March, the next way marker for the season will be bloom, when vine flowers self-pollinate. If weather holds, bloom typically comes in mid-May, but the colder, wetter season last year pushed that into mid-June.

Bloom is a stage of the season that brings worry that strong winds or rain can disrupt this critical stage for “setting” grape berries in the cluster for further development, an unwanted outcome called “shatter.”

(North Bay Business Journal)

FORT BRAGG CDBG Business Assistance and Microenterprise Financial Assistance Workshop

The City of Fort Bragg is offering a Community Development Block Grant (CDBG) Business Assistance and Microenterprise Financial Assistance workshop for local businesses on Thursday, April 4, from 5:30 PM to 6:30 PM at Town Hall, located at 363 N. Main Street.

BETTER THAN NO ARREST

Editor,

A Shock But Not Totally Unexpected…

I came late to the front page headline of the week before last's AVA announcing that the country's “last newspaper” will subsequently be online. That's still a bit of a shock since I always anticipate the great pleasure of holding and reading the real paper as opposed to doing so on line and I consequently waited until I go to town to pick it up at the COOP or Mendo Books. But I guess on line is what it will have to be.

I've been reading, as well as writing for the AVA since well before I moved up here from the City where I used to buy it at City Lights or somewhere on 24th Street and while I long since abandoned the paper edition of the NY Times and every version of the Chronicle, the pleasure of reading the AVA which kept getting better in recent years, was undiminished. In recent months and years — when you reach a certain age you can't be sure which is which — I seem to have personal connections to so many of the characters that appear in my old pal Hinckle's pieces and those of Freddie Gardner and Jonah Raskin, as well as your own, that I have had to suppress my urge to write my own experiences with the likes of Jane Fonda, for example, for whom I have few complimentary words to say.

May I suggest, after the paper is exclusively on line, you take a trip to New Zealand and finish off your chase of Michael Sweeney who might just suffer a cardiac arrest on seeing you at his front door. I guess one might say at this point a cardiac arrest is better than no arrest at all.

Cheers,

Jeff Blankfort

Ukiah

RESPECT

Editor!

You joke about your wife being “long suffering.” That is funny, but I’ll bet you a dollar it is just not true. I’ll bet you $2 that she loves you very much and enjoys her time with you. I like you very much also.

I’ve been beat up by law enforcement mulitple times and yours is the only newspaper that has been willing to share my side of the story. I have great respect for you and wish you well.

Your friend,

James Joseph “Oaky Joe” Munson

Forestville

DAVID JENSEN: 

Why I miss John Pinches.

When I was Program Manager of the Environmental Health Land Use team (wells and septics), John and I would occasionally find ourselves alone together in the men’s restroom, an oddly conducive location for meaningful discussions. At that time HHSA management (my boss) did not allow us to speak to the Board, so this was my one chance to be heard. John was a great listener, and a sense of trust grew between us. He was interested in the problems my staff faced, and when one of his constituents was having problems, the three of us would meet to resolve the issues. I don’t think that any other Supe at that time knew who I was.

A READER WRITES: Regarding the end of the print edition of the AVA: I need to think it over before making a decision about the on-line version. I already spend too much time in front of a screen. What I will do in the meantime is catch up on back issues of the AVA. Those are fine for people who don’t live in Mendocino County. The AVA really is more my ideal of a non-fiction novel than ‘In Cold Blood.’ It is impressive how many weeks I read the Anderson Valley Advertiser cover to cover. Recent years have been the best, especially since you generously expanded to twelve pages. George Orwell wrote somewhere that some books become part of the furniture of one’s life. That has been my experience of the AVA.

PINCHES KNEW

To the Editor:

I love Johnny Pinches.

Back when I served on four different county grand juries during the decade of roughly 2005-2015, I spent a lot of time in the county office building on Low Gap. As a grand juror, it was often my responsibility to monitor the Board of Supervisors. I went to their meetings, summarized them, and reported back to the grand jury. Consequently, I got to know the individual Supervisors quite well, Johnny Pinches chief among them.

After a while, Johnny started to take me out to lunch. We became friends. Sometimes, we would jump into his big old truck and take a ride somewhere.

Once I asked, “Hey, Johnny, we seem to have water resources with the Eel River, South Fork, the Russian River and Gualala River. Also, Lake Pillsbury, Lake Mendocino, Howard Lake, Mill Creek Lake, Hammerhorn Lake, and all. So where does all our water go? Why does Mendocino County declare drought emergencies every summer?”

Johnny replied, “Let’s find out!”

And just like that, we drove to the Sonoma County Water Agency on Aviation Blvd. in Santa Rosa, and I got what Johnny used to call an “education.”

He was the best.

Another thing. Johnny Pinches saw County CEO Carmel Angelo for who she really was.

Johnny foresaw the disaster County CEO Carmel Angelo was creating by consolidating her power by taking over county departments, like she did with general services, risk management and IT, or privatizing departments, like she did with mental health.

“Boss” Angelo further consolidated power by taking over the responsibilities of Clerk of the Board. She started developing the agenda for BOS meetings and, in time, locked them out of that process.

She hoarded financial information or otherwise completely withheld it from the BOS. She controlled the budget process. In every way possible, the BOS was marginalized by Angelo, including, at the very end of Supervisor John McCowen’s tenure, locking him out of his office and falsely accusing him of stealing county property.

We now know Angelo hid the county’s structural deficit. Also, we will soon be in the midst of a water crisis with recent PG&E decisions that took our county by surprised and unprepared. Our county’s wildfire response will be no better than it was for the last wildfire. Our unfunded pension liability is ballooning. Our county’s clunky computer system and non-existent financial reporting by department continues without end, keeping the BOS in the dark, as always.

In short, Mendocino County is in a survival mode. Johnny Pinches saw it all coming.

John Sakowicz

Ukiah

ED NOTES

TRUMP'S BLOODBATH: “Let me tell you something, to China, if you're listening, President Xi, and you and I are friends, but he understands the way I deal, those big monster car manufacturing plants that you're building in Mexico right now. And you think you're going to get that, you're going to not hire Americans and you're going to sell the cars to us, no. We're going to put a 100% tariff on every single car that comes across the line and you're not going to be able to sell those cars if I get elected. Now if I don't get elected, it's gonna be a bloodbath for the whole — that's gonna be the least of it. It's going to be a bloodbath for the country. That will be the least of it.”

TRUMP'S always semi-coherent. Parsing meaning out of his meandering remarks is never easy. I agree with the Magas that his bloodbath reference was to the auto industry, not a prediction of mayhem if he loses another election. 

But Trump also gets it both ways. Bloodbath, as Trump invokes it here, can apply to import strictures and mass violence, which the Magas always seem to be up for, perhaps falling asleep at night to bloody visions of mowing down legions of three-foot transvestites. 

So, yeah, bloodbath was both a ref to vehicle imports and also a ref to mass violence. A definite rhetorical twofer for Orange Man.

CATCH OF THE DAY, Monday, March 18, 2024

FOLEY AZBILL, Covelo. Controlled substance, probation revocation.

KENNETH DEWITT JR., Ukiah. Assault weapon, controlled substance, paraphernalia.

ERICK FLORES-RODRIGUEZ, Covelo. Conspiracy.

DAVID JOAQUIN SR., Covelo. Paraphernalia, probation revocation.

KIMBERLY JONES, Ukiah. Tear gas, probation revocation.

MONICA MCDONALD, Ukiah. Disorderly conduct-alcohol.

JASMIN NUNEZ, Ukiah. DUI.

JEDIDIAH TODD, Potter Valley. DUI-alcohol&drugs.

JALAHN TRAVIS, Ukiah. Petty theft with priors, probation violation. (Frequent flyer.)

GARVEY’S BONA FIDES

Editor: 

I just finished reading a column by Jim Newton about the California GOP and mentioning Steve Garvey (“California needs a competitive GOP”). In the column, Newton says that Garvey was “a better than average ballplayer.” For your information, the following is a list of Garvey’s accolades: 10-time major league all-star and four-time Gold Glove winner. He holds the record for the highest career fielding percentage by a first baseman and is the only player in the history of baseball to have an errorless season at first base. Maybe better than average was a poor choice of words?

Michael Hoevel

Healdsburg

LINDY PETERS: Bob Dylan is NOT rock music. Come on Tommy!! Here’s what really happened. Rock n’ roll went and hid in Country Music back when AC/DC’s music producer Mutt Lang produced Shania Twain’s first album. And so it is. Rock n’ Roll is still hiding there in the guitar of Keith Urban and the music of Big Country. Don’t kid yourself. Rock is not dead. Now they call it Country Music and the listeners are rebels all right. In fact, a bunch of them stormed the Capitol back on January 6, 2021!!

HELL’S KITCHEN

by Jay Owens

In February, Controlled Thermal Resources (CTR) broke ground on the Hell’s Kitchen Lithium and Power project, an integrated geothermal power plant and lithium production facility on the coast of the Salton Sea in Imperial County, Southern California. It should produce enough lithium to make six million car batteries a year, powered by renewable energy and promising near-zero carbon emissions. General Motors is one of the investors. The US government’s taking an interest too: “Lithium is vital to decarbonizing the economy and achieving President Biden’s climate goals,” Jeff Marootian from the Department of Energy said at the opening ceremony, “which include 50 per cent electric vehicle adoption by 2030.” The United States currently has “limited capabilities for domestically sourced lithium,” he noted, so the Hell’s Kitchen project is an opportunity “to supercharge the domestic supply chain” for electric vehicle batteries.

The Salton Sea lies in a closed or endorheic drainage basin: water flows in, but none flows out; it just evaporates into the desert air. Over the millennia, the sea has come and gone at least four times, refilling most recently in 1905, when spring floods overwhelmed an irrigation canal off the Colorado River. For a while in the 1940s and 1950s it was a holiday resort, marketed as the “Salton Riviera,” where Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin raced speedboats, and politicians and celebrities came to play in the desert. But the water got sick, the fish began to die, the place started to smell and tourism duly collapsed. For years the crisped skins of dead pupfish and the birds that fed on them would wash up on the shore. The last time I visited, in July 2023, the carcasses were gone and the air was a little clearer: no more fish left to die, the park ranger said.

Endorheic lakes are pollution traps. Streams, rivers and groundwater pick up the residue of everything that happens across thousands of square miles of watershed – pesticides and fertilizers from agriculture, chemicals from industrial discharge, heavy metals from mining waste – and carry it to the lowest point in the basin, where the water evaporates and what’s left is muck. The contaminants aren’t only human-made, however. Water also dissolves minerals in the soil and rock it passes through, picking up metals such as sodium, potassium and calcium, even cadmium and arsenic – and, at the Salton Sea, an enormous amount of lithium, dissolved out of the rock during the Pleistocene epoch by heat from the San Andreas Fault. 

According to a recent study for the Department of Energy, the brine aquifer below the Salton Sea could produce as much as 3.4 million tons of lithium, “enough to support over 375 million batteries for electric vehicles – more than the total number of vehicles currently on US roads.”

Lithium is about the thirtieth most abundant element on Earth (rarer than copper, more common than lead) but industrial supply is highly concentrated: most is extracted at fourteen sites in Australia, China and South America. It’s estimated that demand will more than quadruple from 2022 to 2030 and supply will fail to keep up, even if all lithium projects currently in the pipeline are developed “aggressively.”

The salars of the Altiplano lead global extraction but the subsequent refining process is dominated by China. To ensure their supply of raw materials, Chinese companies have recently bought stakes in nearly 20 lithium mines, mostly in Latin America and Africa, and at one point the Chinese firm Ganfeng was the largest shareholder of Lithium Americas, which owns the Thacker Pass lithium project in Nevada. You can see why a vertically integrated, all-American operation at the Salton Sea has such political appeal.

The Salton Sea also offers the potential for clean lithium. Conventional production methods – hard-rock mining or hydrocarbon-fuelled brine pumps and evaporation ponds – are highly polluting: they emit CO2 and consume significant quantities of groundwater in desert environments, damaging ecosystems and harming local and Indigenous ways of life.

At the Salton Sea, however, CTR plans to build a hybrid plant that combines geothermal power with a new process known as direct lithium extraction: Hell’s Kitchen will be one of the first sites to operate it at commercial scale. The brines are already being brought to the surface by geothermal power stations that have been operating since the 1980s. The plan is to extract the lithium using ion-exchange technology rather than evaporation: it should be faster and more productive, as well as using up much less water and land. It will be more energy-intensive, but the geothermal power for that is already in place.

Hell’s Kitchen promises a lot: the world’s greenest lithium, 480 construction jobs and, eventually, at least 58,000 clean energy jobs paying around $80,000 a year – the local average is currently $21,000 – as lithium refining and battery production plants are established. “It’s great to see the benefit the community is going to get,” Michael Dea of the Laborers International Union of North America said at the groundbreaking ceremony. “We have local hire provisions, apprenticeship standards, everything to come out here and learn construction. It’s going to be a great partnership.”

But local community organizations are appealing against Imperial County’s decision to approve the Hell’s Kitchen project. Luis Olmedo, the executive director of Comite Civico del Valle, says they will “fight for our community up to the highest court of the land if we must.” The problem is water.

Last November, Comite Civico del Valle and Earthworks released a report analysing the potential impacts of direct lithium extraction in the Imperial Valley. According to the numbers that the companies provided to Imperial County’s planning department, the Hell’s Kitchen project will consume 6700 acre-feet (more than eight million cubic meters) of water per year just for the first stage of development: it takes 70m3 of water to produce one ton of lithium. Constructing the plant, scaling up production, and further stages of lithium refining and battery manufacture will all require more water – as will the two new geothermal lithium plants proposed by other companies.

Brawley (population 25,000) gets an average of three inches of rain a year. Freshwater comes from the Colorado River, from which the Imperial Irrigation District holds the rights to 3.1 million acre-feet of water per year. Almost all of this is used for farming (the region’s lettuce crop is worth $200 million a year), with only 25,000 acre-feet reserved for non-agricultural industrial use. At best, this is enough to support barely one-third of the lithium extraction ultimately proposed at Hell’s Kitchen. But the south-western United States is going through a twenty-year megadrought and water usage from the Colorado River must be cut drastically, and soon. If it isn’t, Lake Mead, the reservoir behind the Hoover Dam, may reach “dead pool” levels as early as 2025, and then no water will flow at all.

There aren’t straightforward solutions. Agricultural water can’t simply be diverted to lithium production because, polluted though it is, its run-off feeds the Salton Sea. Without this water the sea will recede further, and the exposed lakebed will emit even more toxic dust, high in cadmium, copper and selenium. The air in Imperial Valley is bad already: childhood asthma rates are twice the California norm.

CCV are also concerned about the environmental and health impacts of the hydrogen chloride used in direct lithium extraction, CTR’s plans for hazardous waste storage and seismic risks from the expansion of geothermal power. “The Imperial Valley has persistently failed to meet federal standards that have consequences in our public health, low-income and disadvantaged communities,” Olmedo told a public meeting on 22 January. He doesn’t trust the Department of Energy’s claim that local lithium development will have “minimal to no impact” on water, air quality or environmental contamination. “CCV holds that these findings need additional vetting from third party and independent academic experts that reflect real and on the ground community experience.”

But CTR got their permits from the county on 23 January. ‘When an opportunity comes our way that will exponentially increase our opportunities for our kids, for our grandkids,’ the planning board chairman said, ‘it’s very hard to turn a cold shoulder.’

CTR knows they need to make radical efficiencies. They plan to use condensed steam from the geothermal power plant rather than groundwater, and recycle each gallon at least eight times. Other firms report water recovery rates of 90 per cent or more in direct lithium extraction pilot projects. “Getting it down to maybe five or ten or fifteen metric tons of freshwater per ton of lithium is kind of where you want to be,” the CEO of EnergyX, Teague Egan, told a conference last September. Twenty per cent of California’s lithium extraction tax is allocated to Salton Sea restoration projects, so there should at least be the money (if not the water) to restore habitats and mitigate the dust hazard.

Many in the valley want Hell’s Kitchen to work: CCV and other community organizations aren’t naive to the benefits it would bring. “We have a real opportunity right here in Imperial to create a whole new industry standard,” Olmedo told the Desert Sun in 2022, “the gold standard for future development that is more equitable, and more just, that can be replicated across this entire country, and perhaps even the globe.”

But Imperial Valley, Olmedo says, “cannot be a sacrifice zone for the clean energy revolution.” That’s the bottom line. Pollution kills as surely as heat, famine or drought. We have to find a way to get the twenty million tons of lithium required for the energy transition without wrecking the planet we’re trying to save.

(London Review of Books)

THE CHILDREN NOW LOVE LUXURY. They have bad manners, contempt for authority, they show disrespect to their elders. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and are tyrants over their teachers.

— Socrates

ON DON LEMON

by Matt Taibbi

The New York Post reported on the deal former CNN anchor reportedly sought from Elon Musk and X:

Among the asks were a $5 million upfront payment on top of an $8 million salary, and an equity stake in the social media platform. Lemon also apparently insisted on a free Tesla Cybertruck, a private jet to Las Vegas complete with a suite for him and his fiance. And that the company pay for their day drinking and massages. Lemon didn’t respond to the Post’s request for comment. The mainstream press that just a year ago power-crapped on Lemon after his hilarious departure from CNN are now holding him up as a speech hero, because of course they must, with Elon Musk involved.

CAROL DODA WAS NO FEMINIST PIONEER. She was something else altogether.

by Mick LaSalle

It was 1985, and I was interviewing for a job at the Chronicle (this one, the one I still have). As part of the process, I was sent out to do an assignment in the North Beach neighborhood. At first I thought I’d write about “Beach Blanket Babylon,” the famed musical revue, but I didn’t catch any of the San Francisco references. It was just a bunch of big hats as far as I was concerned. 

So instead I wandered into the Condor Club and caught Doda’s act. 

Carol Doda, at this point, was famous for being one of the first-ever public topless dancers in the United States. She was a San Francisco celebrity that everybody in the Bay Area assumed was internationally famous, but really, she was a local phenomenon. She had started out as a waitress at the Condor, then started dancing, then started dancing topless, and then got silicone injections, followed by more silicone injections, and more after that. By the time I saw her, she had been at this for more than 20 years.

After her performance, I told her I’d soon be working for the Chronicle, and we sat and talked for about five or 10 minutes. She struck me as a nice, rather guarded person. It might sound like a bad pun to say this about someone who was mainly known for taking off her clothes, but she seemed like someone with no cover. She had to be reserved, because she didn’t know how to be phony. And she depended on the press, but the press often made fun of her. 

Doda, who died at age 78 in 2015, is now the subject of a new documentary, “Carol Doda Topless at the Condor,” which posits the exotic dancer as a trail-blazing, sex-positive feminist who single-handedly defeated Puritanism and all but created the 1960s.

As someone who caught the tail-end of Doda’s career, I have to disagree with that assertion. Doda did not bring about the 1960s. Doda was, rather, the last gasp of the 1950s. I see her as the successor to Marilyn Monroe and Jayne Mansfield, the end of a line of open-hearted women, whose ambition and good nature led to their cooperating in their own exploitation.

The mid-1960s photos and footage seen in the documentary look like creepy tableaux from the ’50s or from Hugh Hefner’s old TV show, “Playboy After Dark,” where only the men get to be full human beings and the women are consigned to being objects of amusement. 

The crucial difference between Doda and Monroe and Mansfield is that Doda lived past the age of 36, which means she had to adjust to life as an aging sex symbol. 

A year after the Condor show, I saw Doda — who was born the same year as my mother — performing at a benefit where, to my distress, she took off all her clothes and did a fan dance.

“Carol Doda does not have to take her clothes off anymore,” I sagely wrote at age 27. “No matter how good she looks, when a woman reaches a certain age, you start feeling like you’re watching your mother up there.” At least I did.

The following year, Doda started fronting a heavy metal band called Carol Doda and the Lucky Stiffs. That didn’t last long. (My September 1987 review for the Chronicle, headlined “Doda’s full metal racket,” appears in the documentary.) 

Then in 1991, I was on the same bill with Doda in a celebration of Cole Porter at the Great American Music Hall. Doda seemed to have found her niche as a kind of comedy chanteuse performing the great American songbook. She was funny and engaging, and the only thing she took off were her gloves. 

That night, after warming up the crowd, she left the stage to Bay Area actress and cabaret star Maureen McVerry and me, and we sang “But in the Morning, No” (my one and only stage appearance).

These days, when I think of Carol Doda, I prefer to regard her as a nice woman who did the best she could with the opportunities available. We don’t have to pretend that she was a feminist pioneer just to make ourselves feel less sad about her difficult burden — having to be a good sport all her life.

(SF Chronicle)

* * *

The Myth of Carol Doda: https://theava.com/archives/50048

GAGS & JIBES

by James Kunstler

“My law firm is currently in court fighting for free and fair elections in 52 cases across 19 states.” — Marc Elias, DNC Lawfare Ninja, punking voters

Have you noticed how quickly our Ukraine problem went away, vanished, phhhhttttt? At least from the top of US news media websites. The original idea, as cooked-up by departed State Department strategist Victoria Nuland, was to make Ukraine a problem for Russia, but instead we made it a problem for everybody else, especially ourselves in the USA, since it looked like an attempt to kick-start World War Three. Now she is gone, but the plans she laid apparently live on.

Our Congress so far has resisted coughing up another $60-billion for the Ukraine project — most of it to be laundered through Raytheon (RTX), General Dynamics, and Lockheed Martin — so instead “Joe Biden” sent Ukraine’s President Zelensky a few reels of Laurel and Hardy movies. The result was last week’s prank: four groups of mixed Ukraine troops and mercenaries drawn from sundry NATO members snuck across the border into Russia’s Belgorod region to capture a nuclear weapon storage facility while Russia held its presidential election. I suppose it looked good on the war-gaming screen.

Alas, the raid was a fiasco. Russian intel was on it like white-on-rice. The raiders met ferocious resistance and retreated into a Russian mine-field — this was the frontier, you understand, between Kharkov (Ukr) and Belgorod (Rus) — where they were annihilated. The Russian election concluded Sunday without further incident. V.V. Putin, running against three other candidates from fractional parties, won with 87 percent of the vote. He’s apparently quite popular.

“Joe Biden,” not so much here, where he is pretending to run for reelection with a party pretending to go along with the gag. Ukraine is lined up to become Afghanistan Two, another gross embarrassment for the US foreign policy establishment and “JB” personally. So, how long do you think V. Zelensky will be bopping around Kiev like Al Pacino in Scarface?

This time, poor beleaguered Ukraine won’t need America’s help plotting a coup. When that happens, as it must, since Mr. Z has nearly destroyed his country, and money from the USA for government salaries and pensions did not arrive on-time, there will be peace talks between his successors and Mr. Putin’s envoys. The optimum result for all concerned — including NATO, whether the alliance knows it or not — will be a demilitarized Ukraine, allowed to try being a nation again, though in a much-reduced condition than prior to its becoming a US bear-poking stick. It will be on a short leash within Russia’s sphere-of-influence, where it has, in fact, resided for centuries, and life will go on. Thus, has Russia at considerable cost, had to reestablish the status quo.

Meanwhile, Saturday night, “Joe Biden” turned up at the annual Gridiron dinner thrown by the White House [News] Correspondents’ Association, where he told the ballroom of Intel Community quislings: “You make it possible for ordinary citizens to question authority without fear or intimidation.” The dinner, you see, is traditionally a venue for jokes and jibes. So, this must have been a gag, right? Try to imagine The New York Times questioning authority. For instance, the authority of the DOJ, the FBI, the DHS, and the DC Federal District court. Instant hilarity, right?

As it happens, though, today, Monday, March 18, 2024, attorneys for the State of Missouri (and other parties) in a lawsuit against “Joe Biden” (and other parties) will argue in the Supreme Court that those government agencies above, plus the US State Department, with assistance from the White House (and most of the White House press corps, too), were busy for years trying to prevent ordinary citizens from questioning authority. For instance, questioning the DOD’s Covid-19 prank, the CDC’s vaccination op, the DNC’s 2020 election fraud caper, the CIA’s Frankenstein experiments in Ukraine, the J6 “insurrection,” and sundry other trips laid on the ordinary citizens of the USA.

Specifically, Missouri v. Biden is about the government’s efforts to coerce social media into censoring any and all voices that question official dogma. The case is about birthing the new concept — new to America, anyway — known as “misinformation” — that is, truth about what our government is doing that cannot be allowed to enter the public arena, making it very difficult for ordinary citizens to question authority. The government will apparently argue that they were not coercing, they were just trying to persuade the social media execs to do this or that.

Maybe one of the justices might ask how it came to be that a Chief Counsel of the FBI, James Baker, after a brief rest-stop at a DC think tank, happened to take the job as Chief Counsel at Twitter in 2020. That was a mighty strange switcheroo, don’t you think? And ordinary citizens were not generally informed of it until the fall of 2022, when Elon Musk bought Twitter and delved into its workings.

TOO LITTLE, TOO LATE

by Michael Hager

After five months of doubling down with Israel against Palestinians in Gaza, the Biden administration now finds itself walking in two directions. On the one hand, it continues to supply U.S. bombs that fall indiscriminately on both northern and southern Gaza. At the same time, it air drops food parcels for the hungry. While President Biden now acknowledges that the Israeli response to the October 7 massacre is “over the top,” last weekend he reaffirmed his unconditional support of Israel, declaring: “I am never going to leave Israel.”

In response to the October 7 massacre, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced his plan to eliminate Hamas through an exterminating war of retribution against Gaza. When Biden endorsed that plan on October 10 and promised more weapons, he must have known that Hamas could not really be eliminated so long as the Israeli oppression continued. He must have known that a scorched earth campaign in the densely populated Gaza Strip would be a war on the Palestinian population, not just Hamas. He must have known that in aiding Israel his administration would be condemning innocent Palestinians to extreme suffering and death.

Not only did the Israeli war cabinet launch a relentless bombing campaign in Gaza, but it also barred the entry of food, clean water, fuel, and other human necessities from entering the Gaza Strip. As its starvation war tactic pushed Gazans to the brink of famine, Israel began to allow some humanitarian aid, but it has fallen far short of what is required to meet the needs of more than two million war-traumatized population.

By early January, UN officials and academic experts were warning that Gaza was “on the brink of famine.” Yet Israeli plans to invade Rafah (where more than a million Palestinians had sought refuge), “day after” issues, and unsuccessful hostage negotiations were the stories favored by the press. Almost nothing about famine in the major journals. Meanwhile, Israel has continued to bomb and attack targets in both north and south Gaza, raising the death toll to more than 31,000.

Only in February did the Biden administration wake up to the possibility of widespread famine. In various diplomatic meetings, it urged Israel to allow more food trucks to enter Gaza and to take steps to reduce civilian casualties. The IDF responded with bombardments of Rafah and targeted attacks on hungry Gazans surrounding food trucks. Both Israeli citizens and some soldiers have blocked aid convoys at some entry points.

Instead of withholding arms, restricting them, or breaking relations with Netanyahu, the Biden team came up with two unilateral schemes that were designed more to allay concerns of constituents than to meet the immediate needs of hungry Palestinians. The first was to deliver parcels by air, an inefficient and costly method as compared with deliveries by truck convoys. The air drops have proved to be dangerous as well, killing some on the ground when parachutes fail to inflate. The second is to construct a floating pier that can receive food deliveries by sea.

The pier idea may have been a good one two or three months ago. Now it appears as a cruel joke because thousands of intended beneficiaries will likely die of starvation before the pier is operational two months from now. From the outside, Biden’s policy is manifestly inconsistent. It calls for humanitarian assistance while allowing U.S. bombs and bullets to kill Gazans. What is Biden’s goal?

As pro-Palestinian protests (largely ignored by the media) erupt around the world, the U.S. President has moderated somewhat his adamant pro-Israel position and even endorsed Senator Schumer’s criticisms of Netanyahu. Yet his actions to support Israel speak louder than his calls for Israeli moderation. Indeed, his words and actions are both too little and too late.

If President Biden really wants to stop the killing in Gaza, here is what he could do:

–Suspend all military aid and weapons transfers.

–Accept the UN Security Council’s call for a ceasefire.

–Threaten to break diplomatic relations.

–Impose sanctions on War Cabinet members.

–Negotiate a temporary refuge for Gazans in Egypt.

–Support legal accountability for war crimes.

Sadly, none of these steps are likely to occur in the current administration; and even if carried out would be too little and too late to save the many thousands who have already perished from Israeli bombings. Yet they are better than nothing to protect those who still live.

(L. Michael Hager is cofounder and former Director General, International Development Law Organization, Rome. CounterPunch.org)

STRUCTURES OF FORCE

by Sadakat Kadri

Yulia Navalnaya’s call for protest votes and spoiled ballots in Russia’s presidential election was heeded by thousands. Outside the Russian Embassy in London yesterday, a queue stretched for almost a mile along Bayswater Road throughout the afternoon. It’s unlikely that many had given up their Sunday to contribute to Vladimir Putin’s 87 per cent share of the vote.

A duller campaign could hardly have been scripted. The three non-entities allowed to compete for second place didn’t once criticise Putin, and he barely acknowledged their existence. And yet, to achieve a result preordained by the Kremlin, loyalists pulled out all the stops. State employees and United Russia party members were given quotas of voters to mobilise. Apps, QR codes and two extra election days made it easier than ever to conform. At some polling stations, residents were lured by raffles; at others, they were rewarded with pancakes, porridge or free blood tests.

Even sceptics know that Putin commands support in Russia – so why try so hard? Herding a population is a show of strength, but that’s circular logic. Like an old joke about the Soviet Union – its citizens pretended to work while the government pretended to pay – it says nothing significant about popular beliefs. Though plenty of Russians voted, a state-sanctioned poll reported last month that only one in a hundred expressed actual interest in the election.

Putin’s motives will always be mysterious, but he’s probably aware at some level that his triumph is a duplicitous charade. Vitaly Mansky’s documentary Putin’s Witnesses, released in 2018, is made from footage the director shot in the Kremlin at the turn of the millennium. Putin, preparing to take over from Boris Yeltsin, was still working on the badass persona he’s now perfected, and he seems quite reflective. Ensconced in a limousine, gliding through Moscow in the dark, he explains why it’s better to serve as a president than to rule as a king:

It provides an opportunity of living a normal life after having performed your official duties, after the end of your term. It is necessary to understand that ... everything you do with the state and society today you will have to face in a few years as an ordinary citizen. This is ... probably the essence of the advantages provided by democracy ... It’s one of the reasons democracy and democracies are more resilient and effective.

Within months of that interview, Putin turned on the oligarchs who were hoping for a pliant dictator, but at the same time weakened safeguards against abuses of power. A self-perpetuating securocracy, known in Russian as ‘the structures of force’, has been silencing journalists, suppressing NGOs and liquidating opponents ever since. Far from respecting presidential term limits, Putin pushed through a constitutional amendment in 2020 that reset them. He has already ruled Russia for longer than anyone since Stalin.

He’s hardly the first authoritarian ruler to cling to office. Latin American dictators pioneered the dismantling of term limits, a strategy known as continuismo, and it’s been tried almost a hundred times since 1945. Overweening ambition invites failure though. In countries where checks and balances are weak, according to Alexander Baturo in The Politics of Presidential Term Limits (2019), leaders have failed to see out their extended terms more than half the time. Twenty-seven were forced from office, nine stepped down, twelve died naturally and nine were assassinated. Premature exits are dramatically less common among power-hungry leaders in settled democracies.

Putin’s fate, like his legacy, remains to be seen. Again, however, history is suggestive. The only Soviet ruler to leave office alive was Nikita Khrushchev, and he sounded almost proud to be ousted as Stalin’s successor. ‘Could anyone have dreamed of telling Stalin that he didn’t suit us any more and suggesting he retire?’ he asked a confidant in October 1964. ‘Not even a wet spot would have remained where we had been standing. Now everything is different ... That is my contribution.’ As Yulia Navalnaya could tell you, there’s no shortage of wet spots in Putin’s Russia.

ONE DAY Alice came to a fork in the road and saw a Cheshire cat in a tree. “Which road do I take?” she asked. His response was a question: “Where do you want to go?” “I don't know,” Alice answered. “Then,” said the cat, “it doesn't matter.”

— Lewis Carroll

MARCH

Every time I feel close
to understanding the world
the white kettle on my stove sounds
and I rise, attending to it
with annoyance and the pleasure
of the unmade cup of tea.
This is what it's like to live in March
or perhaps always, an unconvincing word
in any context. Blue-gold on night's branches
what part do we take in the play?
Whose turn is it to perform competence
and knowledge in the absence of both?
Unable to feel anything against the wind
I know it is spring. Time tells me so.
Never (equally as unconvincing)
have I been someone with faith in order
and human law. Love is unpredictable.
Spring arrives regardless.

— Alex Dimitrov