YOU KNOW how to tell a Boonville guy? By his moral clarity. Hence Ukiah City Council member Juan Orozco's vote, as a second in support of Ukiah mayor Susan Sher, that the Council should come out against the continuing mass murders in Gaza. “We all want this to stop, don’t we?” Orozco said. "We don’t want any more atrocities happening on one side or the other. We see people out there suffering on both sides. We want that to stop. That’s what I believe the people are here to say. They want this to stop. And I do, too.”
EXCUSE my little irony about Boonville as a center of moral clarity, but it is good to see a guy like Orozco, raised up and schooled in Boonville, see this terrible issue clearly. Turned out, though, he and Sher were in the minority. After hours of talk, Ukiah is on the record as not on the record against even the tiniest responsibility for the U.S. funded and support for the attack on the two million trapped people of Gaza, 32,000 of whom, including thousands of children, have been randomly murdered as the Israelis carry out the pursuit of Hamas, slaughtering thousands of innocent Gazans as they go.
DR. ANDY COREN, as quoted by Sara Reith: “You are our elected representatives,” he reminded the Council. “You speak for us. And this is a horrible thing going on…All of these people have come out because it’s so important to us. So to table it would be such an insult to all these people. And, in my opinion, it would not be doing your jobs as elected representatives.”
WITH HER USUAL un-clarity, Ukiah council member Mari Rodin wanted the issue tabled, to go away: “I think the argument about opening a can of worms is also a really legitimate issue,” she said. “When are we going to say no to international issues? We’ve been here since 4:00 in the afternoon, and we haven’t even gotten to our agenda. And I honestly don’t think our resolution is going to make an iota of difference in this war.”
DEAR MS. RODIN: As a citizen of the country co-sponsoring the Gazan atrocity you are correct that your vote doesn't matter in the big pic, a position I daresay you would not take in Trump vs. Biden, but as Americans we have a special responsibility in this one because without our government's support the slaughter of two million trapped Gazans could not continue, and now that starvation has set in among those tragic people it is more urgent than ever to demand a ceasefire, the release of hostages, unimpeded aid to all of Gaza.
A UKIAH READER WRITES: Ukiah was a nice town from 1950 to about 1980. Affordable homes, TWO hospitals, (these two items alone caused doctors to stay here), lots of activities like bowling alley, skating rinks, swimming pool, park, safe streets, sport activities. Only a fraction of these are here now. We need over a hundred new medium priced homes, another hospital, and a new movie theater. The city and county needs to install super high speed Internet to encourage work at home people to move here in the needed homes. This will increase the tax base long term, enabling more modern services.
CAN EYSTER BE STOPPED? Our lead law enforcement officer, presenting zero evidence of wrongdoing, removes our elected Auditor, Ms. Chamise Cubbison, from office, getting a big assist from our insensate supervisors who couldn't even manage to ask why Cubbison was being removed. “Golly gee, DA Dave, if you say so.”
THIS IN-HOUSE COUP by Eyster could not have happened without the spine-free supervisors, and the always passive offices of the CEO and County Counsel.
EYSTER ORIGINALLY SAID he'd prosecute the case himself, although he still hasn't revealed what his case is against Cubbison and her collateral clerical damage, the unfortunate Ms. Kennedy, a grandmother of retirement age. “Thank you for your service, Ms. Kennedy, and here's a subpoena to warm your golden years with.”
ALL THIS has already cost Mendo's hard-pressed taxpayers a lot of public money and public time, not counting Ms. Cubbison's slam dunk case against the County for her breathtakingly illegal removal from office. And almost a year in, we haven't even got to a preliminary hearing where the DA would have to reveal his case. It was two weeks away, but now…
BUT NOW, with the news that Eyster has hired a Sonoma County lawyer to take over his prosecution of Cubbison, the new lawyer will need “to get up to speed” at $450 an hour, give or take a few public bucks, so the prelim will again be delayed for however long it takes the SoCo legal speed reader “get up to speed,” i.e., improvise more or less plausible charges against Cubbison and Kennedy, which is obviously going to take some fancy conjuring.
FOR THOSE OF US looking on aghast at all this it seems that DA Eyster, gone full autocrat in office, has a blank draw on Mendo's empty public purse. Where does he get the authority to appointment an expensive, outside special counsel? Of course there's a whole office full of County lawyers out on Low Gap, but uh, well, you see, all they can do is sign off on whatever DA Dave wants.
AS THE COSTS for this unending fiasco mount, it's more and more obvious that it's beyond Mendo's tenuous authority — never more tenuous than it is today — to undo, let alone halt.
AND TO THINK it all started when Ms. Cubbison, conscientiously going about her duties as County bean counter and protector of the County's public purse, challenged Eyster's spending several thousand public dollars for a big staff Christmas party at the Broiler Steak House, which he disguised as a “training.”
JANICE ENGLAND: I was surprised and saddened that the AVA will soon only be accessible on line. I will miss holding the printed page. I send my loving, healing thoughts to Bruce Anderson during his health “challenges.” Through it all he has kept his sense of humor. I was recently hospitalized and strongly relate to his experience of being woken up at all times during the night, poked, prodded, injections, pills… Oy! I look forward to reading that he’s home. Thanks to all for putting out a paper that continues to fan the flames of discontent.
WAVY GRAVY has been irritating me for a long, long time. What's amusing about this guy? For that matter, what was amusing about the 60s, or the eternally self-congratulatory hippie royal family that arose from that murderous decade? Woodstock? A half-million stoned morons paying small fortunes to wallow in a sea of mud over an entire hepatitis weekend while Gravy and his dope-dealing collective served up vats of inedible slop in between sales. Having cleaned up in the drug biz, the Hog Farm, Laytonville, just like the Mafia, recycled its tax-free dough in legit businesses, among them the grand ranch just north of Laytonville where they now throw lucrative concerts for a new generation of lemmings. Looked at objectively, the hippie interlude was hugely destructive and ought to be nationally mourned rather than viewed nostalgically via big Frisco celeb parties for a smarmy, tie-dyed crook. Charles Manson is that decade's representative figure.
THE TRUE HEROES of the 60s were people like Pat Kovner of Laytonville and Frank Cieciorka of Alderpoint. They were in Mississippi in 1964, Pat as a Freedom Rider, Frank as a SNCC field worker. My brother Rob and my cousin Jim were already in federal prison for refusing to register for the draft, among the first young people to say No to the War On Vietnam. Where's the party for these people?
GRAVY GROOVY WAVY WAHOO is another example of how just about any old media savvy yob can bamboozle his way to fame and fortune. (Why anybody would want fame without fortune beats me, but there seems to be no end of candidates.) The mythologizers of the late Judi Bari, who had the media at her feet in her last years, were in high media mode in the aftermath of her husband’s bombing in Oakland because of their bogus case in October of 2001. The Redwood Justice Project's fundraising appeal was even blurbed by Alice Walker, the late David Brower and Tom Hayden, none of whom had anything at all to do with Judi Bari or Redwood Summer until Judi's former husband, Mike Sweeney, blew her up in front of Oakland High School back in 1990. Nor did any of the famous people who have since endorsed the Bari-ites attempt to shakedown the federal government for $20 million have anything at all to do with Judi Bari during the Redwood Summer period. She could have used a few big shot allies then, but the big shots were off on other photo ops, I guess, because they were no-shows at that mini-show down. The only famous person involved in Redwood Summer during Redwood Summer was Alexander Cockburn, the sole in-country left intellectual I'm aware of who's willing to put himself up front in situations where the outcome might be unpleasant. The only elected local official to lend his name and his bod to the Redwood Summer effort was David Colfax.
SUPERVISOR MULHEREN, as is her habit, cheerfully posted a Caltrans notice announcing “California Investing Nearly $1 Billion in Bicycle and Pedestrian Infrastructure Over Next Four Years. More than 250 projects throughout the state will incorporate at least one new bicycle or pedestrian infrastructure improvement in their scope of work…”
A Ukiah commenter calling himself “Concrete Pete Construction” immediately commented: “Can’t they please just fix the horrible condition of our roadways first and then do this other stuff later?”
A READER WRITES:
I am so glad you are home, Mr. Anderson. I hope you have a quick return to good health.
Permitting in this county… In many cases, food trucks and other cottage businesses are a sign that planning, development and real estate prices have gone too far and are creating net negatives for our towns. Food trucks etc are filling the space that available, small, affordable commercial space used to fill.
No business should be held up for even one day because of the color of the sign hanging outside the storefront.
It should not take 6 months to get an operating permit.
There is no reason a public agency needs a permit from another public board to change a garage door.
Yes, it’s nice to maintain the character of a town. But when restrictions go too far they become detrimental to the whole town. They stifle creativity and strain resources. Taxpayers pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for professional planner salaries. Their work should be focused on complex planning matters, not the color of a store sign.
“Affordability is the fertile soil that lets people take interesting risks: starting businesses, creating art, just being a character, etc. If your city isn’t affordable, the best it can do is dupe interesting people into moving there.” – M. Nolan Gray
Affordability is what made Mendocino such a draw in the first place. Land was cheap, hippies and artists arrived and made the town interesting. Now the Historical Review Board maintains the character of the town so rigidly, there is no opportunity for anyone who isn’t already rich to create something new and vibrant. Only the rich can afford to buy, live and work in Mendocino. Restaurants have suffered, businesses have closed, and people are exhausted by all the stupid pointless paper-shuffling required to get anything done.
The same is true in Ukiah, too. Tons of empty buildings, whole blocks of nothing. If they are for rent, the real estate prices are so ridiculous it’s out of the question for anyone starting a new business. Many aren’t even for rent. They are just sitting empty, not for sale or lease, padding someone’s net worth on paper as their town dries up around them.
THOMAS ROBERDEAU: Gordon Black was a very close friend of mine for about 45 years. In these last few years we spent a lot of time together, and in the intense last weeks of his life. What is personal to me remains so, but I am happy to see the wide and varied connections he made while teaching, while on the radio, and being a poetry event organizer. Such a great number people in Gordon’s world have emerged, signaling that he touched so many lives. This is heartening and reflects a life of such rare beauty and grace.
SAN FRANCISCO is as beautifully serene as it’s always been except for the weird criminal set aside in forty blocks or so of downtown, an area that's always been seedy but before now strictly policed. For the past 30 years or so, crooks of all kinds, dope dealers, the flagrantly mentally ill, and the mopes drawn to all of the above, have discovered they can do whatever they want so long as they confine themselves to The City's downtown free-fire zone.
LOTS OF CITIES, all the way down to rural-retro municipalities like Ukiah, maintain these criminal set asides. (In Ukiah the set aside consists of the entire length of State Street. Stray one inch west into the Westside and here come the cops.)
HOW DID THIS sanctioned lawlessness happen? Philosophically, it began with fake liberalism, cash and carry liberalism, where we pretend to be very, very concerned and very, very compassionate but, hell, there's serious money to be made here.
SO THE FAKE LIBERAL political class sublets the care and feeding of the walking wounded to their pals in Non-Profit Land whose administrators rake off big salaries while enjoying little to no fiscal or moral accountability. This way, the lib politicos and the non-profits can say, with zero plausibility to most of us, “We're doing everything we can for these poor unfortunates.” (You'll never hear any of these grotesquely self-interested fakes even hint that all this human misery is fed by the brutal fact of unchecked capitalism, but let’s keep it simple here, and let’s go on pretending that nothing more can be done than what is now being done.)
THE ABSURD FRISCO SITUATION described below neatly sums up the nothing can be done position more than what us kind, caring, concerned officeholders and non-profit royalty are already doing. Send us more money and we'll do even better.
(ALSO SEE Mr. and Mrs. Schraeder of Ukiah, as typical of the non-profit obstacles to all hope for the ghostly hordes of lost Americans aimlessly shuffling up and down State Street. How much do the Schraeders make for all the good they do? Sorry, bub, we're a private business so we don't have tell you how we spend the annual millions of public dollars we “administer.”)
HOW FRISCO DOES IT: “Located midway between the Giants’ stadium and the Chase Center, HomeRise at Mission Bay is a 141-unit, four-story housing project run by the nonprofit HomeRise. It opened in late 2022 to great fanfare, touted as an example of a modern facility in a new, mixed-income neighborhood away from the Tenderloin, the location of most housing projects for the formerly homeless.”
THE COPS spend an inordinate amount of time maintaining order at this insane model aimed, ostensibly, at getting the homeless off the streets. Stuff a whole building with disturbed persons? Great idea, but the non-profit in charge pays their politically connected administrators a pretty penny to pretend the site is a model of “helping professionalism.”
WHAT SHOULD BE DONE? Zero tolerance for lawlessness and all other forms of aberrant public behavior should be the operating assumption. Ten thousand dope heads and criminals should not be able to paralyze whole city blocks of San Francisco.
THE SELF-INTERESTED SAY, “Well, hell, we can't arrest our way outta these problems.” Is it cruelly maga-fascist to permit human misery in its present form everywhere in the land? It's cruel, period, by any objective reckoning.
BUT WHERE'S the candidate who says, “I won't permit it. I will end this sanctioned open-air asylum as a fact of American urban/suburban life, and I will do it by beginning with arrests and the placement of all dependent persons in a revived hospital system like the one we had before America lost its way. And the wealthy will fund the great clean-up.” (Which will be a helluva day, won't it?)
EMMY GOOD: Rosie Radiator was a good friend who gave me her collection of red sequined tap shoes and props some years back. I shared them with a friend in the dance department at the University of California, Santa Barbara. It was such fun dancing down the Main Street of Willits for the 4th of July parade. Bess/Rosie will be dancing in my heart and memories.
PRICE OF OZEMPIC PER MONTH:
USA: Nearly $1,000
Canada: $155
Germany: $59
Cost to Manufacture Ozempic: $5
(Jeffrey St. Clair, CounterPunch
ON-LINE COMMENTS OF THE WEEK
[1] I feel like I am on an island and the tide is rising. I can see it inching ever higher. I know it won’t stop.
I feel a sense of fear of the impending at the same time there is a bit of the thrill of being on a wild ride. There is a feeling of freedom and gratefulness to be alive at a time like no other. How do you feel?
[2] SCRIPTURE, an on-line comment:
Everyday Christianity includes practices that directly contradict the instructions of the Christ.
I grew up a spiritual child in a secular home, so came to the Bible late in life. I have read the standard King James New Testament several times. I also have an Orthodox teaching version of the King James (which tries, & fails, to explain away the contradictions. As if the Christ was an incompetent speaker who needs interpretation, not of metaphor, but very specific, clear statements! I’ve also read a new English version (for its large print) & a version called “The Passion” which includes some Hebrew & Aramaic translations & explanations of differing translations, but also some odd interpretations.
I am now reading a translation direct from Aramaic of the Assyrian Eastern Christian Church. Their Bible was painstakingly & rigorously copied & proofread from the original Aramaic without any intermediate translations. It is arguably the oldest, most correct version we have.
Published in 1933, the author grew up in an isolated community that still spoke Aramaic & lived close to the original culture of the Christ’s time. So Aramaic is his first language & he fully understands the idiom of his native language & culture. Hid advanced education was in the west, so his English very good too.
He appears to have based his work on the King James version, & makes corrections from there, from including missing passages to correcting mistaken translations.
[3] Women have always been the primary victims of war. Women lose their husbands, their fathers, their sons in combat. Women often have to flee from the only homes they have ever known. Women are often the refugees from conflict and sometimes, more frequently in today’s warfare, victims. Women are often left with the responsibility, alone, of raising the children.
QUOTES OF THE WEEK
THE MISFITS who are being “bullied” into homicidal rampages, those who find school life unbearable or useless should be permitted to leave at age 14 (as was legal during the immigrant era) to try to live life on their own. Let them return to school when and if they so desire; the presence in the classroom of adult students would infinitely improve both primary and secondary education, since it's grade segregation by age that perpetuates and aggravates the tyranny of social cliques. You say the young are far too immature to survive at 14? Well, that's proof positive that they've been infantilized by their parents in this unctuously caretaking yet flagrantly permissive culture that denies middle-class students adulthood until they are in their 20s and later — long after their bodies are ready to mate and reproduce. The Western career system is institutionalized neurosis, elevating professional training over spiritual development and forcing the young to put emotional and physical satisfaction on painful hold.
— Camille Paglia
HERMAN MELVILLE always remembered that he was an heir of Melvilles and Gansevoorts, and his view of the body politic was fairly conservative. He hated materialism and progress, admired the principles of the Declaration of Independence but doubted that they could work in practice. His ideal society, as sketched in his poem, “The Age of the Antonines,” was the early Roman Empire, when “a pagan gentleman reigned,” when everyone knew his place, there were no demagogues or parvenues, and honor counted for more than money.
In his late, great poem “Clarel” a bluff ex-sailor named Rolfe ventures to suggest that American democracy may be able to avoid the internal conflicts that destroyed all past civilizations. An ex-Confederate soldier named Unger, who, according to literary critic Helen Vendler, presents “Melville's truest insights into the human condition,” replies that America is a mass of “slumberous combustibles sure to explode.” Looking out on the America of the post-Civil War days, with its racial conflicts, industrial strife, crime-ridden inner cities, unchecked corruption in Washington, unchecked greed on Wall Street, uncontrolled immigration and growing gap between rich and poor, Melville had every reason to be pessimistic about his country's future.
— Robert Wernick ,”In Melville's Lifetime, Fame Proved Fickle”
I WAS ONE of those public grade school kids who labored under George Washington’s stern countenance. He must have been god. Or at least god's right hand man. We outgrew this. We know he was just a man. A highly flawed man. Flawed, yes, but also good and lucky. George Washington was America first celebrity. We weren't going to be denied. He lost most of the battles but he did win the Revolutionary War. Actually the British tired of it and lost it. This ultimate politician was not political. In essence he was the only game in town. He had Morris & Hamilton as his spin-meisters, shady land deals & lots of girlfriends. (Beginning to sound familiar?) He looked like a hero, acted like a hero, mostly told the truth although he didn't talk much. He was very brave & loyal especially to the electoral college delegates.
— Historian/humorist Marvin Kitman, on George Washington
NOBODY really expected the initial Internet boom. In the early 1990s, as the city was coming out of a recession, a lot of planners suspected that the next big development boom would be in biomedicine and biotechnology. And nobody predicted how quickly the vast sums of venture capital would flow into San Francisco — or what a profound effect that money would have. To put that avalanche of money in perspective: Calvin Welch, a longtime neighborhood activist who was a close advisor to Mayor Willie Brown between 1995 and 1999, has calculated that the total amount of money that the United States spent between 1941 and 1945 creating the Bay Area's entire wartime infrastructure amounted to about $8 billion in today’s dollars — less than the amount of venture capital that private investors sunk into the region in just three months in 1999. Still, Welch told us, by 1997 it was clear to everyone working in the city-planning arena that a major economic change, with the potential to shift the direction of development in the city, was under way. “At that point,” he said, “the city could have actively intervened and had an impact on what was going to happen.” City planners, for example, could have created strong, effective industrial-protection zones in areas like SoMa and the Mission to prevent dot-com offices from displacing the existing small-business base. Art studios and performance spaces could have been given protected zoning status, so that no developer could displace artists with office workers. Development could have been kept downtown, or directed carefully into areas like the Third Street corridor, where empty space was plentiful and nobody would have been displaced. The city, in short, could have created a real economic plan aimed at preserving a diverse economic base, preventing San Francisco from becoming a high-tech Detroit and reaping the benefits of a somewhat slower, more controlled boom without the downside of the current bust. Instead, Welch said, during the crazy days when the city was being sold off and chopped up, block by block and project by project, “The city planning department was absent without leave.” “This could have played out in a very different way,” he noted. “Bryant Square never needed to happen.”
— Tim Redmond, SF Bay Guardian
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