Mendocino County Today: Wednesday 4/10/24

WARM AND DRY conditions for today and Thursday, then a short and a bit damp cool down for Friday and into the weekend, then back to a warmer and dry conditions for the next work week. (NWS)

STEPHEN DUNLAP (Fort Bragg): On the coast this Wednesday morning I have 43F under mostly clear skies. Some high clouds are passing over & there is a large fog bank to our south currently. Dry skies are forecast thru Thursday then Friday & Saturday are looking wet with clearing on Sunday.

BILL BRADD, poet, pal, “Ten MileRiver” neighbor in 1970’s passed tonight in his cabin at the mouth of Ten Mile. Bill was a few days short of 89. (Don Shanley)

BIG FIGHT AT UKIAH SKATE PARK

On 04/05/2024, Ukiah Police Department (UPD) Officers were dispatched to the Ukiah Skate Park located at 1041 Low Gap Road, regarding a physical fight between large groups of juveniles. It was reported that some of the juveniles were using baseball bats and potentially knives as weapons. UPD Officers responded using emergency lights and sirens and requested assistance from the Mendocino County Sheriff’s Office (MCSO).

Upon arrival, UPD Officers were told that a group of juveniles ran southeast through the east side of Low Gap Park. A MCSO Unmanned Aerial System (UAS) was deployed and found several juveniles running southeast across the river and continued toward the golf course and soccer fields near the Pomolita Middle School track. UPD Officers and MCSO Deputies responded to that area to search for suspects. They ultimately detained several juveniles who were suspected of being involved.

UPD Officers contacted a 17-year-old male victim at the skate park. The victim had wounds to his head, face, and shoulder area. It was learned that the victim suffered several blows to the head, face, and back from a metal baseball bat and personal body weapons. He was transported to the emergency room at Adventist Health Ukiah Valley (AHUV) for treatment.

UPD Officers searched the area and found a small, metal, youth-sized Louisville Slugger baseball bat that was thrown in the high weeds just east of the skate park. UPD Officers also located a homemade spear fashioned out of a metal wrought iron fence picket. The spear was approximately 3 feet long with a 3.5-inch double-bladed dagger attached to one end. Nobody in the incident at the Ukiah Skate Park was stabbed or cut.

The juveniles that were detained early in this investigation were either released or arrested on charges unrelated to this incident. One juvenile was arrested for an outstanding warrant. A second juvenile was arrested for a probation violation.

After an in-depth investigation, this case was determined to be gang-related. This is an ongoing investigation and anyone with information regarding this incident is encouraged to call the Ukiah Police Department and speak to an officer.

The Ukiah Police Department would like to thank the Mendocino County Sheriff’s Office for their assistance.

As always, UPD’s mission is to make Ukiah as safe as possible. If you would like to know more about crime in your neighborhood, you can sign up for telephone, cellphone, and email notifications by clicking the Nixle button on our website; www.ukiahpolice.com.

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ON-LINE COMMENT: Gang related: A gang of punks beat up a kid with a baseball bat, lucky to be alive, youth violence aggressive strength and no brains equals serious problems. People who are scared use weapons and need a “gang of fools” to back them up.

It’s no wonder then. You drive around Ukiah and see the lawlessness and complete anarchy from Walmart to the entire South End of Ukiah. It’s an open air drug market! Druggy scrounges and drug induced mentally ill, people in wheelchairs from taking tranq which is fentanyl mixed with horse tranquilizer.

View near Robinson Creek, West of Rt 253 (Jeff Goll)

HWY 101 COMPLETELY CLOSED In Northern Mendocino County Tuesday Morning Following Semi Truck Overturning

by Kym Kemp

All four lanes of Highway 101 have been brought to a complete standstill between Laytonville and Willits, in the Longvale area of Mendocino County. A semi-truck with a box trailer overturned at approximately 9:15 a.m.

According to an official statement from the Caltrans District 1 Facebook page, ”U.S. 101 is FULLY CLOSED in Mendocino County at the Route 162/Covelo Road junction (PM 59.8 ) due to an overturned vehicle. Currently, there is no estimated time of reopening. Please check https://quickmap.dot.ca.gov/ or the QuickMap app for the latest road conditions.” The closest realistic detours available for the major north-south artery in California are 299 (though 36 is workable) from the north and Hwy 20 from the south.

The overturned semi, weighing approximately 80,000 pounds, is resting on its side, making it impossible to implement one-way controlled traffic, a common practice in managing incidents of this nature on highways. Efforts to manage the traffic flow around the incident have been hampered by the sheer size and position of the vehicle.

The driver of the semi-truck, thankfully, managed to exit the vehicle following the accident and has declined medical assistance, indicating no severe injuries. This is a fortunate outcome considering the potential for significant harm in such incidents.

According to a report on the California Highway Patrol (CHP) Traffic Incident Information Page, Caltrans is going to attempt to push the semi, according to a report on the CHP Traffic Incident Information Page.

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UPDATE: The Highway was reopened about 10:30 Tuesday morning.

STORM CONSIDERED 'REALLY STRONG FOR APRIL' POISED TO SOAK CALIFORNIA YET AGAIN

California is expected to experience what some meteorologists are calling “weather whiplash” this week with a brief spell of warm weather during the work week followed by a wet weekend from yet another unusually cold storm.

Inland areas up and down the state are predicted to soar into the 80s mid-week, with high pressure building and bringing clear, sunny skies, the National Weather Service said. The warmup won’t last long, with Mother Nature expected to take the Golden State on a weather roller coaster, delivering a low-pressure system that will bring chillier temperatures and a chance for rain starting Friday and continuing into Saturday. While high pressure is associated with warming, low pressure brings cold, wet weather.

The mercury is likely to take another dive on Sunday before temperatures are forecast to creep back up near normal on Monday.…

sfgate.com/weather/article/california-april-strong-storm-forecast-19393793.php

CALTRANS VISITS AV UNIFIED

Anderson Valley Unified staff were delighted to welcome Caltrans visitors Preston Allen, Tyler Egerer, and Brian Weekly to the site of the new Clean California Track and Field funded by Caltrans at the Anderson Valley Junior Senior High School.

The project team journeyed to Boonville to review the site and the plans, which are expected to be submitted to DSA on April 19.

We remain incredibly grateful to Caltrans and their staff for the support and funding for this community amenity that will transform the recreational opportunities for students and residents!

Sincerely yours,

Louise Simson, Superintendent

AV Unified School District

GROUNDWATER STUDY OF COASTAL MENDOCINO COUNTY BEGINS

Mendocino County Department of Planning and Building Services (County) has initiated a study of groundwater conditions along the Mendocino coast after approximately 40 wells were reported as dry during recent drought years (2021 and 2022). Responding to this issue, the County secured funds from the California Coastal Commission to complete a comprehensive coastal groundwater study. The study aims to enhance understanding of coastal groundwater hydrology and identify the factors contributing to well outages. The last groundwater assessment for coastal Mendocino County occurred in 1982, and subsequent development has intensified pressure on the groundwater resource. This study will propose updated procedures for testing well adequacy and offer development density recommendations to support the County’s Local Coastal Program land use planning update.

To conduct this study, the County has engaged a team of consulting firms led by Larry Walker Associates, with subconsultants Todd Groundwater, Daniel B. Stevens & Associates, and Will Lewis Consulting. With a project budget of $300,000, this study is scheduled to continue through June 2025.

Gus Yates, senior hydrologist at Todd Groundwater, encourages local well owners to participate in the project by measuring water levels in their wells throughout the year. “We need water level data from many wells over the course of the year to best predict whether a well is at risk of going dry. The only cost-effective way to obtain that much data is to have well owners measure wells themselves.” To respect the privacy of well owners, unique well identifiers will be removed when presenting data in the project report.

The study will yield additional products, including an online, map-based database of wells and groundwater information in the coastal area, delineations of marine terrace deposits that create small groundwater “basins”, estimates of groundwater recharge for various land use categories, and an evaluation of climate change effects on groundwater supply. Groundwater level data collection is vital for identifying predictive factors for well outages. Volunteers will receive water-level measuring equipment and instructions. Those interested in participating can contact Gus Yates at gyates@toddgroundwater.com or 510-849-4412. For inquiries about the project, Julia Krog, Director of Planning and Building Services for Mendocino County can be reached at krogj@mendocinocounty.gov or 707-234-6650.

IRANIAN FUGITIVE CAUGHT AND CONVICTED IN MENDO

A 30-year plus fugitive hiding from the U.S. Marshals but caught by local authorities in Ukiah last year was convicted by plea Monday morning … minutes before jury selection was to get underway in the criminal case being pursued by local prosecutors.

Instead of proceeding with the jury trial he had demanded, defendant Kourosh Sadeghi, age 62, a citizen of Iran but living more recently in the Laytonville area of Mendocino County, “threw in the towel” and entered no contest pleas to the three pending criminal charges: false impersonation of another, a felony; driving a motor vehicle under the influence of alcohol, a misdemeanor, and driving a motor vehicle with a blood alcohol .08 or greater, a misdemeanor.

In addition to admitting criminal responsibility on all three charges to resolve his case, the defendant also stipulated to a state prison sentence of 24 months.

The 24-month sentence will be formally imposed at a sentencing hearing scheduled for May 1, 2024 at 9 o’clock in the morning in Department B in the Ukiah Courthouse.

Arrested last September for DUI by the Ukiah Police Department, the defendant presented the officer an expired California driver’s license as his identification. It later turned out that that expired CDL belonged to a former Bay Area acquaintance of the defendant.

While Sadeghi was initially booked into the county jail under the false I.D. and name, follow-up by jail personnel revealed the defendant’s true identity.

Defendant Sadeghi was previously convicted in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of California (San Diego) for having robbed the Great American First Savings Bank in 1984. Once arrested and convicted, he was sentenced to and served 8 years in federal prison for that crime.

After being released on supervised parole, the defendant violated terms of his parole and the federal judge issued a warrant in 1990 for Sadeghi’s arrest.

In 1991, federal law enforcement agents located and attempted to arrest Sadeghi, but he eluded them in a vehicle and foot pursuit.

Defendant Sadeghi was later arrested in San Francisco in 1997 and again in 1998 on drug sales charges. In both cases he used – and was convicted under — false names that were not detected as false names by the San Francisco authorities.

Defendant Sadeghi was also arrested in Fullerton in 2008 for DUI and, again, convicted under a false name that was not caught by the Los Angeles County authorities.

The law enforcement agencies that developed the evidence that was going to be used at this week’s Mendocino County trial were the Ukiah Police Department, the California Department of Justice crime laboratory, the U.S. Marshal Service, and the District Attorney’s own Bureau of Investigations.

The prosecutor who is handling this case is District Attorney David Eyster.

Mendocino County Superior Court Judge Victoria Shanahan accepted the defendant’s no contest pleas and will impose the stipulated sentence at the May hearing.

It is expected that defendant Sadeghi will have additional court appearances and proceedings sometime after May in the San Francisco County Superior Court and the U.S. District Court in San Diego.

(DA Presser)

COUNTY NOTES

by Mark Scaramella

MOST OF Public Expression at the beginning of Tuesday’s Supervisors meeting consisted of about a dozen locals asking the Board for a resolution calling for a Ceasefire in Gaza. Supervisor Williams said he was all for peace, but he wanted the people in the room — a couple of whom objected to the idea because it would be “divisive” — to get together and draft a resolution. Supervisor John Haschak said he would be writing a personal letter “for humanitarian aid and hostage return” and invited others to join him. Nobody proposed a resolution, nobody volunteered to draft one.

WHENEVER THE BOARD discusses County finances they have an unfortunate tendency to descend into the usual jumble of jargon, acronyms, brightly colored but pathetic org charts and diagrams and vague free association without ever simply addressing basic departmental budget versus actual reports or specific budget numbers. When they occasionally stumble into asking a good question, staff is ill prepared to reply, sometimes offering a cautious but imprecise guess, promising to answer the question later, but later seldom comes because no record is kept of the questions and the board always has new jumbles to dive into.

SUPERVISOR Ted Williams began the meeting by complaining about the overuse of retroactive agenda items on the consent calendar. By his analysis he and his colleagues have approved over 600 of them since he was elected. Board Chair/Supervisor Mulheren interrupted saying the agenda items always have the reasons for the retroactive items. Williams continued. He said that in the same period of time Sonoma County and Lake County had not had a single retroactive agenda item. This caused a long, rambling discussion about the reasons for the retroactive items. Grant deadlines were cited as a major reason since staff sometimes has to get going on a grant requirement via a private vendor (mainly the Schraeders) before the County can process the applicable formal contract through its various offices, notably the County Counsel’s office. As usual, everyone agreed to look into the applicable policies and processes. At the end of the discussion interim County Counsel James Ross suggested to the Board that Sonoma and Lake counties may not be putting the word “retroactive” in their agenda items when they are retroactive.

THE MEASURE B loan repayment plan item was similarly mushy. The County does not plan to start repaying the $7 million they authorized to be borrowed from the Measure B sales tax revenues until after the jail expansion is complete to allow time to add up all the costs and see how much Measure B borrowing is actually necessary. Staff recommended a ten-year payback plan of about $800k/year with a 2.5% interest rate. Somebody suggested asking the Measure B Committee for input (Hashack?) but that went nowhere, of course. Nobody cares what the Measure B Committee thinks, probably including the Measure B Committee. There’s some consideration being given to repaying the loan over a shorter period of time with the funds now being allocated annually to paying back a pension obligation bond which is finally ending in mid-2026. In the end the Board asked staff to bring back a draft repayment resolution with the intent that the repaid money might someday be used for mental health and drug treatment services required by the text of Measure B. So far not one nickel has been spent on treatment services and even under the most optimistic scenario, whatever is repaid won’t even start being spent for those purposes until 2026. And then only if they have any money left after covering the overpriced jail expansion overrun and overpriced Psychiatric Health Facility which will also probably overrun. There are so many plates wobbling on their fragile poles in this frantic juggling act of borrowing and paybacks and cost overruns and possible grant funds and artificial deadlines that there’s not much point trying to pin down a specific payback plan.

SUPERVISOR DAN GJERDE asked for a monthly tally of properties that have been added to the tax rolls via “discovery” — i.e., not just via routine office assessments, but by assessors actually going out and assessing new properties. These would be over and above the County’s ordinary permitting and assessment processes, when someone adds or improves a structure without a permit. Response? Staff doesn’t trust the reports they get out of their fancy new computerized assessment system. So no “tally” can be generated. Instead, all reports from the new system must be “verified” before they can be provided to the Board and the public. Gjerde guessed that there might be $4-$5 million in additional county revenue if they could bring a lot of the (estimated) thousands of unpermitted buildings some say are out there on to the tax rolls. When Supervisor John Haschak said a few dozen properties had recently received permits under the County’s “amnesty” program (where penalties are waived, but permit fees must still be paid), Gjerde replied that those — if they were indeed added to the tax rolls (nobody knows) — 1.) do not count as “discovery,” and 2.) they only represent “a drop in the bucket.” Gjerde did not even mention that the majority of the uncollected revenue represents a significant loss to local school and special districts. Staff said they’d look into it.

THIS YEAR’S BUDGET DEFICIT (for the fiscal year ending in June of 2024) has been reduced to under $1 million according to CEO Darcy Antle who has been scraping up every available unspent nickel. This this dubious achievement was accomplished mainly by using “one-time” funds such as unspent PG&E settlement money, left over covid money, and some capital project delays. But next year (July 2024 to June 2025) the deficit will be much bigger, in the range of $5.5 million to maybe $10 million or more. So far, nobody knows how big that gap will really be or how it will be closed since the one-time funds are, well, one-time only.

DURING PUBLIC COMMENT, coast resident Peter McNamee said that the Skunk Train had built a large new visitor serving facility near his home apparently without a permit and therefore it has not been assessed or taxed. Supervisor Williams said that if they built such a facility they would have had to have gone through planning and building and environmental health and therefore it must be on the tax rolls. Staff said they’d look into it.

THE FLOODGATE BUILDING in Philo will re-open as La Mexicana Market #2 on April 15 serving the Deepend of the Valley. Proprietress Rosa Portillo Valle already operates the popular La Mexicana Market #1 in Fort Bragg. #2 in Philo will offer similar fare, primarily Mexican themed (but not exclusively) groceries, produce and associated household items. No cooking or deli on premises.

15TH ANNUAL EARTH DAY CELEBRATION APRIL 20 FEATURES

…great food, earth-friendly activities, plant sale, lively entertainment

Noyo Food Forest’s 15th Annual Earth Day Festival will be held Saturday, April 20 from 12-4pm at The Learning Garden on the Fort Bragg High School campus at 300 Dana Street. Join us for this FREE, fun family event. This year’s festival will include live entertainment with Circus Mecca, Gwyneth Moreland and Morgan Daniel (of Foxglove), and 2nd Hand Grass featuring Gene Parsons. Also join us for a plant sale, hands-on environmental activities, earth-friendly artisan crafts, local nonprofit booths, delicious food, upcycled T-shirt press, and our famous bicycle-powered smoothies… all with a focus on regenerative gardening and community farming.

Earth Day, founded in 1970, is an international celebration of the planet and environmental teach-in. Our multicultural, multi-generational event brings together people and organizations from all across our community. The Earth Day Festival has been the signature benefit event for Noyo Food Forest since it was founded in 2006. This FREE event is open to all (adult donations encouraged). Please observe school campus rules: no dogs, no alcohol or drugs, and no smoking. More information at noyofoodforest.org.

ED NOTES

GOT one of those “365 Ways to Live to 100” calendars for Christmas. Every day I get either an errant piece of advice therefrom. Sunday's instruction was, “If you must boil fresh vegetables, don't throw the water away. Cool it and drink it as a vitamin tonic.” I'll stick with V-8, thank you.

On Monday I was advised to go for an “evening walk because an evening walk can prevent prostate cancer, but you need to walk at least forty miles a week.”

As I understand this particular affliction, it and most others are prevented by sticking pretty much to unprocessed foods and regular exercise. Besides which, fear of a stranger exploring one's rectum tends to keep one at the salad bar.

Tuesday, my calendar advised, “Gerontologists believe that people who really engage in life usually live longer than others. So get out there and live. It's not just more fun, it's actually keeping you alive.” Or dead, depending on the nature of your engagement and the people you're engaging with, but don't most of us know that life hangs by a thread and is an arbitrary business no matter how you live or with whom you live?

Having just experienced two surgeries advertised as life-saving, I'm trying to re-gain at least a semblance of my prior energy. It's slow going. I get winded about 30 minutes into my morning walk. When I paused this morning in mid-shuffle, a nice lady asked me if I was “ok.”

Since I can't talk I fumbled for my notepad to reply, Thank you but I'm fine. Recovering from a throat re-build. “Oh,” the nice lady replied, “but I was talking to my dog. Good luck to you.”

Which is what I get for assuming it's all about me, me, me.

My flat, lengthy street is heavy with walkers, and more effete dogs than I thought possible for a relatively small population heavy on effete people.

And I like dogs, kinda, thinking of my old dog, Rosco, the gift of a relative. Rosco, who came in at around 60 pounds, wouldn't fit in here. Too aggressive, too wild. Half Pit who looked like a fully, he'd flunked obedience school. Twice. And he was a terrible racist, lunging at dark-skinned passersby who must have assumed that I was some sort of Klan-symp for owning a dog like Rosco.

Outrageous as he could be, Rosco was good company, downright fun when he had room to roam like he did in Boonville. But he was unmanageable in Frisco and its suburbs. I think now that I could have been a better master, but I never had the time to be other than a low maintenance owner. Rosco's lack of social skills was totally my fault.

Mistletoe Eclipse, Lake Mendocino (Jeff Goll)

JOHN REDDING: Does anyone know if the Adventist Health hospital gives preferential treatment to non-whites? As in making white people wait longer so others can see the doctor first. This would be consistent with DEI which AH fully embraces. Indeed, Judy Leach, the president of the Fort Bragg hospital is an invited speaker at DEI in Medicine conferences where she is seen as an expert. Seems like that's more important to AH than improving the below and failing hospital here. Please let me know if you have experienced this or know of someone who has.

ED REPLY: We're going to need some proof here, John — names, dates of those pale faces discriminated against in this way, and we'd definitely like to hear from Ms. Leach.

UKIAH'S PREMIER LEISURE CLASS CITIZEN

Woke up at Building Bridges Homeless Resource Center late morning, and following the usual ablutions, ambled out to the Ukiah Co-op for a Caprese Panini sandwich and the Song Bird Guatemalan coffee. Later, took the MTA bus to SuperCuts. Newly shorn, bussed up to School Street in the heart of downtown Ukiah, visiting It’s Time for a cold can of Japanese green tea to perk up; spurred me on to the library to read three issues of the New York Times. Had a coughing fit in the middle of reading about the horrors of everyday life, and stepped outside for a couple of puffs of Albuterol, then returned to read the arts section. Will soon walk to Safeway for an evening food purchase, taking advantage of the 50% off manager’s specials of course. Will eventually walk back to the homeless resource center to sleep. It’s so simple. Stop identifying with the body and the mind! Identify with the Immortal Self, or Divine Absolute, or ParaBrahman, or God, or whatever you wish to call your true nature, and hold fast to the constant. You are free!

Craig Louis Stehr

TOO LATE TO SAVE?

Dear AVA Editors and Readers,

I think that we should collectively look into ways to save the print AVA.

As I mentioned in my "Goodbye to the Paper-Paper" piece, I once proposed to Bruce Anderson that I hold down the editorship if he was incapacitated (like now) or take over most of those duties when he and Mark Scaramella passed on to emeritus status. A post-Anderson-Scaramella paper may be heresy, but they could still be a presence from the beyond, just like Cockburn and Caen are now. Is it possible to assemble a team? We'd need a Circulation Manager to pick up from the printer, drop off at the shops, and deal with the post office—thankless jobs, it's true. We'd need someone to write Valley People and handle local news—either the same person that did the circulation, or someone else. We might need a separate webmaster too.

I could handle Off the Record and general editor duties. I'm not Bruce Anderson, but I'm as close as we're going to get, an editor/publisher with just as many years of experience. I could corral the current crew while bringing in some who are new, and expand national distribution through my own networks.

Impossible shoes to fill? Sure. But the AVA is a community paper, and we're a community of sorts. It could be done, with Bruce Anderson and Mark Scaramella remaining at the helm for hopefully years to come, but them delegating some of their duties and the rest of us rolling up our sleeves to help, and eventually stepping up.

Aaron, Cometbus Magazine

New York

ED REPLY: We appreciate your sentiment, J, but it's not doable or we would have done it.

THE SCAM THAT KEEPS ON GIVING

Who's Crazy (Off the Record, August 29, 2001)

by Bruce Anderson

As their October court date draws nearer, the Bari-Cherney scam's interchangeable fundraising and propaganda arms — Redwood Summer Justice Project, the Mendocino Environment Center, KMUD, KPFA and KZYX — seem to be in full panic mode. Because their case consists almost entirely of crudely drafted rhetoric claiming that Judi Bari was targeted by extractive capitalism and its enforcement arm, the FBI, for assassination. Bari, you see, represented that big a threat to the system. Bari herself dictated this implausible reason for her bombing to her lame brain attorney, Dennis Cunningham, to divert attention from the person who did it, her ex-husband, Mike Sweeney.

If the feds had bombed her, she, Cherney and half of Oakland would have died at the scene. Governments don't kill people with cockamamie pipe bombs, but the Bari-ites have always pegged their non-case to the assumption that, in the slack-jawed, pot-soaked, hum and strum circles they travel in, all that's necessary is the assertion and the choir shouts back, "Amen!"

Because Bari's lying, mercenary, cult-like heirs have no case of their own, the suspiciously indulgent presiding judge having allowed them to change the retarded version set for trial next month an unprecedented eight times, they are nevertheless terrified that the truth of the bombing might somehow be revealed if a dissident is magically called to testify.

I don't think the Bari-Cherney shakedown team has anything to worry about in the truth department; I think the fix is in.

But fix or no fix, the Bari-ites are pulling out all the last-minute stops to protect the bomber, Mike Sweeney, from the consequences of his act 11 years ago, consequences that included the slow-motion murder of his ex-wife, Judi Bari. The Bari-ites simpleminded attorney, Cunningham, will ask the judge this Friday to declare critics of the Bari case insane, hoping thereby that the critics will be precluded from appearances in the witness box where, with a unanimity of opinion generally not associated with the deranged, they would say that Judi Bari's ex-husband bombed her, not the FBI.

For years now, the great speakers-of-truth-to-power, as the KPFA-Bari-ite Axis modestly describe themselves, has tried to shut down discussion of the case. Friday, in the federal court in Oakland, they're trying to shut down dissent again. Kinda makes a guy yearn for the commies of yesteryear, don't it? Whatever else you might say about them, they weren't chickenshit. These people, their attorneys included, are pure chickenshit.

Motions "in limine" are arguments for restricting certain areas of evidence in advance of trial. (American law is replete with dog Latin-isms because early on the profession figured out that a little Latin razzle dazzle made them appear learned and, therefore, was useful in bamboozling the general public.)

Part 5 of the Cunningham in limine motion reads,

“5. Testimony by obsessed persons with fixations against plaintiffs.

“There are a number of variously disgruntled, disturbed or deranged individuals in the north counties area who in recent years have repeatedly made and published various wild and scurrilous charges, allegations and declamations against plaintiffs, or one or the other of them, their associates, their lawyers, their lawsuit, their families or ancestry, their plans and intentions &tc. Without attempting any long, involved and pointless description and analysis of the feelings harbored by these people, or their motives or pathologies, plaintiffs state that none of them have any evidence relevant to the case, and each of them has 'an axe to grind.' Any testimony by or about the actions or beliefs of any of them would be irrelevant, distracting and highly prejudicial, and should be excluded. Therefore if any testimony by or concerning Bruce Anderson, Andy Caffrey, Mary Moore, Ed Gehrman, Jim Martin or Don Foster, is proposed, plaintiffs ask that the Court require an Offer of Proof, and make a determination on relevance and prejudice, under Rules 401, 403 and 701, Federal Rules of Evidence, before it is allowed or even mentioned before the Jury.”

Cunningham says we're "obsessive" and "deranged." I'll cop to obsessive, although I prefer to call my highly disciplined work habits "tenacity," but deranged? Well, golly, how does one assert one's sanity in a context ranging from Darryl Cherney to Stanford Maoists? Put us alleged crazies in Cherney-Chairman Mao nexus I'd say we're far from rubber room-ready. But I'll sit down any time with mental health professionals to match my sanity with that of any of the sticky-fingered nut cases on the other side of this one.

The reason the Bari-ites want us out — and so far as I know we're not in to begin with — is that both the Bari-ites and the FBI, now deep into as committed a mutual dependency as any cranker and his dealer, want to avoid the question of Who Bombed Judi Bari. Neither side can afford to answer that question.

Bari-Ite attorney Cunningham is also asking the judge to ignore the spikes recovered from Darryl Cherney's van back in 1990, Cherney's appearance on national television where he announced he'd wire himself up as a human bomb for the sake of the trees if he had terminal cancer, the bag of dope recovered from Judi Bari's Subaru, and every thing else that portrays Bari and Cherney as they then were at the time of the bombing — self-aggrandizing, neo-hippie monkeywrenchers with show biz-type ambitions to whom the redwoods were mostly a stage prop.

Cunningham’s request of the federal judge to declare the critics of his transparently implausible and badly written case is to eliminate any and all testimony about what really happened because what really happened is that Judi Bari's ex-husband, Mike Sweeney, apparently took advantage of his privileged status with the FBI to knock off his ex-wife. There's no other way to explain Sweeney's exemption from number one suspect status. But he's exempt; never been asked a single question about the bombing by a single cop, local or federal, so far as anybody knows.

The October Bari-Cherney federal case seems to be shaping up as the narrowest possible consideration of Bari-related events, meaning who did it isn't likely to be addressed whether or not Cunningham persuades Judge Wilkin that critics of his cretinous case are all crazy. Even by today's degraded judicial standards I'd be surprised that any judge would agree with a blanket condemnation of a bunch of people she knows nothing about, but then this case has been a big pile of murk from the get-go, and the judge, a Clinton appointment, seems to me as suspect as everyone else involved here. The fact is, a month before the show in Oakland begins, neither the City of Oakland nor the Justice Department has deposed or subpoenaed any of us alleged crazies.

A telling omission from the Bari-ites crazy person list is Steve Talbot, the famous documentary filmmaker. Talbot's the craziest dissident of us all, Professor Foster included, because his bona fides are the strongest. And Talbot knows a lot more about Who Bombed Judi Bari than Bari-ite attorney Cunningham seems to know, if his preposterous brief is any gage of his info bank. Talbot thinks Mike Sweeney should, at a minimum, be considered Suspect Numero Uno in the bombing of his ex. He made a perspicacious film about his suspicions for KQED, a film the Bari-ites prefer remain off-screen. Unfortunately, it only appeared once in the Bay Area. Few people have seen it, but it remains the definitive wrap on Bari-related events. And Talbot knows a lot more about what happened than he was able to jam into an hour-long documentary.

Neither the feds nor the Bari-ites want Talbot on the stand, just as neither side wants any of us alleged nut pies to testify because the Bari-ites and the FBI don't want a federal jury to consider the most obvious questions about the case, which is why none of us, including Talbot, have been deposed or subpoenaed to appear. The Bari-ites are lying about it, of course, because several of them know Sweeney did it, and the FBI is protecting Sweeney because he was their primary informant and dirty tricks guy during Redwood Summer. I can't explain Sweeney's exemption any other way.

Cunningham, by the way, got the Bari-Cherney case because Susan Jordan, who's a lot smarter than poor ol' Den-Den, was dumped by Judi Bari because Jordan kept asking Bari, "What about your ex-husband? What about Mike Sweeney?"

Wrong question, Sue, bring on Milquetoast esq. and his Wiccan assistant. Bill Simpich. The two of them could be depended on to write down whatever Mommy wanted them to say, and that's what happened, and here we are eleven years and a million falsely raised dollars later, the money having been fraudulently raised on the national Ed Asner-Utah Phillips-Greek Seaman's Cap Circuit.

One of the recent fundraising letters I've got asks the Asner Brigades to send money to Karen Pickett at her house in Canyon. Karen will then see to it that the money is spent to save buffaloes in Yellowstone, support a tree sit in Indiana, to stop genetic food experiments in North Carolina, to support another tree sit in Oregon, fund a banner "for the redwoods near Charles Hurwitz's home," and to support the bogus Bari Bombing case in Oakland. The more money Karen gets, the more good she'll do, and if you believe that you probably also believe that the government tried to kill Judi Bari.

Among other criminal acts un-investigated in the Bari case, count the Bari-ites' flagrant abuse of their tax exempt status as, of all things, a charity. Or several charities. The Bari scam also operates partially as the Trees Foundation, also as an educational fund for the two children of the late Bari and her killer ex-husband, Mike Sweeney, and also variously as other tax-exempt entities. (Both the Sweeney and Bari families are quite well to do, but the two girls, who still appear as small children in fundraising appeals although one is an adult and the other is a senior in high school, are trotted out as sandbox-era visuals to bilk the credulous.)

The Redwood Summer Justice Project, and their pals at the Trees Foundation, function as a combination jobs program and funding conduit for dubious persons belonging to or anointed by the Bari-Cherney Axis. Neither has anything to do with justice or tree preservation. Everywhere one looks among the self-certified activists of the Northcoast one sees the dead hand of the Bari Bombing Scam reaching up out of the grave for more, always more.

I think the Bari Bombing case has gotten as far as it has because most people don't know or care anything about it, a fact corporate media like the Press Democrat exploit to say — off the record, of course — that they don't write about it because no one's interested. Call me naive, but I thought the media was in the business of creating interest in wrongdoing. Not in Ecotopia, they aren't. Except for the commercial KSRO Radio in Santa Rosa where the intrepid Pat Thurston holds forth every weekday afternoon, having once been silenced by pressure from the perp's well-connected father. Pat's it for audio. Print? The Mendocino County Observer out of Laytonville, the AVA, and the Northcoast Journal out of Arcata, the Bari Bombing has freely discussed the case for years. The self-advertised free speech stalwarts at tax-exempt, partially tax-supported KPFA, KMUD and KZYX, do not allow dissident views on this case, and refuse to allow on-air time to dissidents on many other issues as well.

By the way, the true reason the PD and it's inert army of reporters and editors don't do long stories is because long stories take up ad space and get in the way of big color photos of toddlers running through summer sprinklers with their dogs. If the PD's going to go long, they go long and lurid, like Mike Geniella's recent fiction about Mexican gangsters and their keester plots allegedly mounted from iso-cells at Pelican Bay.

So there's not a mention in any large-circulation Northcoast media that the federal judge in the looming Bari-Cherney case has tossed Howard Zinn and what the Bari-ites had hoped would become Zinn on the stand describing the unsavory history of the FBI. The judge has also tossed the rest of the tired rhetorical denunciations of the feds Cunningham had hoped to present in lieu of try-able facts.

But, as October approaches, the Bay Area media seem to be stirring. There are two stories in preparation that I know of, both of them highly skeptical of the Bari-ite case. A guy called the other day to ask me a few questions, asking me at one point, "Do you know what Mike Sweeney says about you?"

No, I Said, but I can guess. I'll bet Mikey said that my own brother doesn't like me and that I made up an interview once with Congressman Bosco.

The reporter laughed. "That's exactly what Sweeney said."

Sweeney's been saying that for several years now; he'd rather lay off questions about his attempt to murder his ex-wife on my many and obvious personality defects. Sweeney also threatens to sue anybody who says he bombed his ex, but he never sues anybody. And jiminey, Mr. Reporter, do you have to be reminded that deflecting crucial questions via the perceived shortcomings of the questioner is a sure sign that the questioner is on to the truth?

All the Bari-ites can do is hope that their primitive non-responses to the issues us crazies have raised are accepted at face value. They'd be home free if everyone in the world outside was as credulous as their Northcoast cadre is, but the outside world is full of smart, skeptical people, few of whom are likely to do anything but laugh at the Bari-Cunningham tale of the Blue Meanies and the tree huggers. But I've got to hand it to the male bomber and his all-female harem of full-time liars; they've pretty much kept dissident views of the case off the national Asner Circuit, and they've closed it down completely on "free speech" KPFA, KZYX and KMUD. Unfortunately for them and their dance partners at the FBI, however, nobody with any brains is buying it.

What the Bari case really means is, and you can call me crazy, and you can even ban me from the next full moon MEC boogie, (1) there's no left in America (2) what there is of a left is cowardly, stupid, star-struck, cult-ridden, tenured, and bought off (3) lots of progressives, especially those in Sonoma, Mendocino and Humboldt counties, can't read and therefore have no adult critical abilities, as the careers of Starhawk, Julia Butterfly, Cherney, Dennis Bernstein, KZYX, the Press Democrat etc. prove on a daily basis (4) three NorCal public radio stations — KPFA, KMUD and KZYX are enemies of free speech and (4) sociopaths tricked out as environmentalists can get away with murder.

CATCH OF THE DAY, Tuesday, April 9, 2024

RACHEL DALTON, Palo Alto/Willits. Domestic battery, controlled substance, protective order violation.

MALE EARP, Eureka/Ukiah. Controlled substance, resisting.

VANESSA ELIZABETH, Ukiah. Petty theft, drinking in public, probation violation. (Frequent flyer.)

ALEJANDRO OROZCO, Santa Rosa/Ukiah. DUI.

ROBERTO RODRIGUEZ, Windsor/Ukiah. DUI-alcohol&drugs, addict driving vehicle.

ADRAIN VALLE, Ukiah. Concealed dirk-dagger, resisting.

HOLLAND VANHORN, Willits. Narcotics for sale, failure to appear.

DEVLIN VINING, Palo Alto/Willits. Protective order violation.

HOW CAN WE NOT HELP YOU?

Editor:

The following is my experience with changes at the Social Security office in Santa Rosa. I took a day off work to drive my mother from Cloverdale to the Santa Rosa office to obtain a replacement Social Security card. We took a number and waited for about two and a half hours. We were finally called up to a window. We were then told that effective the previous Friday we can no longer walk in but rather need an appointment for this two-minute interview. Long story short, after pleading and explaining my situation, I will be taking another day off work to bring my mom to the office with the same documents for our two-minute interview. Please do not let this happen to you.

Monica Gomez

Cloverdale

PG&EGREGIOUS

Editor,

Once again, the California Public Utility Commission is doing the bidding of investor-owned utilities by proposing yet another increase in electric power rates. Now a monthly flat fee of $24 per customer, more than double the national average. The fee is uncapped and could rise to $80 per month at any time.

The commission has been in the pocket of utilities for so long now that the state legislature had to introduce AB 2054 to block retired commissioners from working for the utilities for ten years.

What can you do to stop this latest utility fee? Tell your legislators to vote for AB1999, which would cap it it at $10 per month.

Sandy White

Fremont

PG&E’S FAULTY PLAN

Editor,

Regarding California’s proposal for a $24 flat fee on utility bills in exchange for lower electricity prices. The subtext of this proposal should have been: Change will increase the electricity bills of most customers.

The California Public Utilities Commission’s proposal calls for a monthly fixed charge of $24 while decreasing the cost per kilowatt hour by five to seven cents. Simple math says this only benefits those who consume large amounts of electricity. The commission’s table on page 229 of its proposal shows that the average single family customer (non-low-income, consuming 850 kilowatt hours per month) will pay $6.45 more per month. The increase is worse for those who consume less: $16.73 per month more for 400 kilowatt hours consumption and $20 higher for 250 kilowatt hours consumption.

To have no change or save on your monthly electricity bill under this proposal, you would have to consume at least 1,134 kilowatt hours per month.

This proposal benefits utility companies and high-consumption users, not the average customer. Surely the commission can do better than this.

Todd Silverstein

San Rafael

Laffing Sal, was a beloved resident of Playland at the Beach from 1940 to 1972. She now greets visitors from her glass case near the entrance of the Musee Mechanique.

J. TONY SERRA, CRIMINAL DEFENSE LAWYER & THE AUTHOR OF RAT

by Jonah Raskin

Tony Serra is a legend in courtrooms all over California and especially everywhere that marijuana growers and dealers have gone on trial. Now, he’s the author of a new book, mostly written by him, but also with words by Mendocino County’s own legendary cannabis activist, Pebbles Trippet, who thinks he might be “the greatest criminal defense lawyer of the 20th century.” That could be. I’m certainly not going to argue with Pebbles.

I recently caught up with Serra in San Francisco where he sat behind a desk and autographed dozens and dozens of copies of the 74-page book titled Rat, and subtitled "Informants are Ruining the Sixth Amendment." Wearing a tie-dyed t-shirt and still very much a hippie, Serra gave away all the copies that he autographed with the same words: “Tony hates rats!” and that he signed with a flourish, “J. Tony Serra.” His act of generosity made perfect sense; after all, he took a vow of poverty years ago and has kept to it ever since, rejecting property, ownership and stuff.

For those who don't remember, the Sixth Amendment guarantees the right to a fair trial, a lofty idea which was denied the Italian anarchists, Sacco and Vanzetti, the Black defendants known as “The Scottsboro Boys,” and Ethel and Julius Rosenberg who died in the electric chair in 1953 as convicted Russian spies, plus union men and women who went on strike and organized the unorganized into trade unions.

The launch for Rat took place on April 1, 2024, April Fool's Day, but the free books were not meant to be a prank or a bit of foolishness. Serra is no one's fool and never has been. On the cusp of 90 and in poor health that has forced him to stay off his feet, he looks back at a long and distinguished legal career that spans 50 years. He has defended Black Panthers, White Panthers, Hells Angels, American Indians such as Bear Lincoln, members of the Symbionese Liberation Army, Raymond "Shrimp" Boy Chow, plus environmentalists and cannabis cultivators and activists including Brownie Mary and Pebbles Trippet. Weed has long been his drug of choice, though he once liked to use LSD and wander the streets of San Francisco.

"He's an actor in addition to being an attorney," former San Francisco DA Terrence Hallinan says. In fact, Serra provided the inspiration for the celluloid lawyer in the 1989 movie True Believer starring Hollywood actor, James Woods. Today, April Fool’s Day, Serra is his real self, and he’s also a veteran actor performing before a live audience of admirers and fans on the second floor of an old building on Townsend Street in the city where he has lived much of his life. His mother committed suicide by walking into the Pacific at Ocean Beach in San Francisco, an event that he has compared to novelist Virginia Woolf’s suicide. Woolf filled her coat pockets with stones, walked into the River Ouse in England in March 1941 and drowned herself.

The highlight of Serra’s performance on April Fool’s Day had to have been his spirited delivery of Dylan Thomas’ signature poem, "Do not go gentle into that good night," that has become an anthem and theme song. It features the lines, “Old age should burn and rave at close of day;/ Rage, rage against the dying of the light.” He’s still raging but he knows that his raging days are numbered. "At some point I'm gonna die," he tells the audience. Not easy for Serra the fighter to admit.

Rat is a kind of last will and raging testament in a life highlighted with memorable moments, including the time he served in the federal prison at Lompoc because he refused to pay income tax. He was not disbarred and in fact continued to practice law when he was behind bars. Henry David Thoreau, one of the fathers of civil disobedience, would have cheered.

To this day, Serra doesn't have a cell phone, a bank account or a credit card. But to hell with money: that's his philosophy. He has legions of friends and fellow lawyers, such as Stuart Hanlon and Omar Figueroa— who were in the audience, along with a handful of ex-cons and fugitives, when he talked about the noxious role of rats, snitches and informants in the American legal system, perhaps more accurately known as the American system of injustice.

The whole time that Serra talked and read from his book—a good hour—he sat. He's no longer able to stand for more than a few moments. The sedentary life doesn't suit him. Serra was always at his best standing, pacing in a courtroom and cross-examining snitches who sat on the witness stand.

Now, Rat — a thin book with a big punch and with an image of a long-tailed rat on the red and black cover—speaks loudly and clearly for him. "I hate snitches," he bellows as he reads the opening sentence. He adds, "Snitches are polluting our system. They destroy the fabric of the judicial process.” A snitch, Serra explains "is a person who cooperates with enforcement to have a suspect (real or imagined) arrested and convicted."

He adds, “Informants are sometimes not even charged with a crime; sometimes they are given great leniency in their own pending cases, and other times they are given monetary rewards, new identities, removal to another location and extensive immunities for crimes they admit to committing.”

For decades, Serra has tangled with rats and snitches in courtrooms, though when he thinks of the archetypal snitch he thinks of Judas, who is said to have betrayed Jesus for thirty pieces of silver which led to his crucifixion. The gospels according to Mark, Matthew, Luke and John offer different accounts and interpretations of Judas’ role. Take your pick.

Today, snitches often play crucial roles during trials, but they are less visible than judges, lawyers, bailiffs and defendants. Call them secret weapons for prosecutors. “Rats are omnipresent in our criminal judicial process,” Serra says. He adds, “In marijuna prosecution, beware as informants come from every milieu!...From neighbors, from the property owner, even from the buyers and users of marijuana.” On the last page of Rat, he writes, "we are in a war...the war on drugs, the war on terror."

Serra is certainly not the only person who hates snitches. "A rat,” he explains at the launch for his book, “is despised by inmates, has no friends and is estranged and alienated from friends, family and children.” Indeed, kids learn early in life to abhor "tattletales." I first heard about snitches in the 1950s at about the same time that I heard about the “goons and ginks and company finks” that Woody Guthrie sings about in “Union Maid.” Growing up in an old left family, I knew which side I was on.

Yes, Serra hates snitches, but he also expresses a kind of empathy for them. "They develop psychological disorders," he says. In a way, they condemn themselves to a kind of solitary confinement in a society that abhors them.

San Francisco criminal defense lawyer, Michael Stepanian, dredges up a gruesome image to describe what Serra has done to snitches: "He's been crawling up the rectum of snitches and rats his entire career, working his way through the warmest part of the body until he gets to the heart and then he destroys the beast." Dirty but necessary work.

For Serra, a snitch is an envoy from the world of totalitarianism who infiltrates and pollutes the American legal system and undermines democracy. For Michael J. Monson, Serra's editor and publisher at Grizzly Pulp Press, (grizzlypulp.com) a snitch is perhaps the most indelible character in the darkest American novels and films. "There's always a snitch in pulp fiction and pulp cinema," Monson says. “There's no one more pulp than a rat." Slimy and loathsome, they're nobody's friend.

(Jonah Raskin is the author of Beat Blues: San Francisco, 1955.)

POWER IS NEVER HAVING TO SAY ‘NO.’ How California Democrats Kill Bills Without Voting Against Them

by Ryan Sabalow & Julie Watts

Mike Fong has cast more than 6,000 votes since he joined the state Assembly in 2022 and never once voted “no.” Pilar Schiavo is newer to the Assembly, but she has yet to vote “no” after more than 2,000 opportunities.

Remarkably, their Democratic colleagues in the Legislature are not much different. Using our new Digital Democracy database, CalMatters examined more than 1 million votes cast by current legislators since 2017 and found Democrats vote “no” on average less than 1% of the time.

Why? It’s not something they want to talk about. Democrats have had super-majorities in both legislative chambers since 2019, so most votes involve bills from their political colleagues. But the legislative leaders and lawmakers contacted by CalMatters declined repeated requests to explain a pattern that might appear like a rubber stamp for deals made out of public view. And it seems to be sanctioned by leaders.

“There’s only two fucking buttons on your desk: There’s a green button, and there’s a red button,” then-Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon told the California Labor Federation last year in remarks reported by Politico. “Ninety-nine percent of the time, the green button is the labor button. Ninety-nine percent of the time, the green button means you’re doing the right thing, and the red button means that you’re an asshole.”

Rendon’s office declined to comment or make him available for an interview.

Instead of voting “no,” the data, video and transcripts in CalMatters’ Digital Democracy project reveals that legislators will often decline to cast a vote. Lawmakers widely use the tactic as a courtesy to avoid irking fellow legislators who’d get upset if they vote “no” on their bills, but it’s a controversial practice that critics say allows them to avoid accountability.

“There are a lot of people who abstain and who years later will claim, ‘Oh, I was in the bathroom,’ or ‘I was gone,’ or ‘I was in a meeting,’” said Mike Gatto, a former Democratic Assemblymember from Los Angeles. “It provides them an excuse after the fact to claim that they were not there. I always thought that was cowardly, the opposite of courageous.”

Last year, at least 15 bills died due to lack of votes instead of lawmakers actually voting “no” to kill them.The most notorious example was when a bill to increase penalties for child sex trafficking died in the Assembly Public Safety Committee because Democrats did not vote. After widespread condemnation, Gov. Gavin Newsom got involved, prompting some committee Democrats to apologize and re-vote on the measure that Newsom later signed.

At least three fentanyl-related bills also died last year due to Democrats refusing to vote on them, infuriating Regina Chavez, who advocated for the legislation. Her 15-year-old daughter, Jewels Marie Wolf, died from the drug in 2022.

“I personally am insulted, because I think everything should be on the record when you hold a state title,” she said. “That is what they signed up for to represent us.”

Chavez along with a group of mothers of youth who died from fentanyl learned about the prevalence of non-votes by exploring the Digital Democracy database.

In a glaring example they found, a bill had 22 bipartisan cosponsors and would likely pass if it reached the Senate floor, but it died in the Senate Public Safety Committee when the four Democrats — Nancy Skinner, Steven Bradford, Aisha Wahab and Scott Wiener — declined to vote by staying silent during the roll call. None of them responded to interview requests.

The bill, called “Alexandra’s Law” for a young woman who died from the drug, would have required judges to read a warning to defendants who’d been convicted of dealing fentanyl that if they dealt the drugs again, they could be charged with murder if someone died after taking their fentanyl.

More than 100 people testified in the hearing, almost all in support of the bill and many sharing their own experiences with fentanyl deaths. Some of the Democrats who did not vote had a lengthy discussion with the bill’s author, Sen. Tom Umberg, a Democrat and former federal prosecutor. (This link to Digital Democracy includes information about the bill, SB 44, as well as video and transcripts of the hearing).

“It’s beyond frustrating,” said Laura Didier, who has testified several times in Sacramento about fentanyl legislation and whose 17-year-old son, Zach, died from the drug in 2020 (See video and transcripts of all Laura Didier’s testimony).

Didier said it took an enormous amount of work to assemble the bipartisan group of bill sponsors and the supporters who testified. “To me, it just makes no sense that … people, by withholding their vote, can kill that momentum. You know, it’s very, very frustrating.”

In another example last year, the former chairperson of the Assembly Public Safety Committee cast a “no” vote to kill a bill, AB 367, that would have led to longer prison sentences for fentanyl dealers. Seconds later, he withdrew his vote after all five of his fellow Democrats on the committee killed the bill by not voting.

The then-chairperson, Reggie Jones-Sawyer, a Los Angeles Democrat who is running for Los Angeles City Council when his term expires this year, didn’t return a message from CalMatters.He told the committee last spring that he was a mortician during the crack cocaine epidemic, so he empathized with families who lost loved ones to fentanyl, but he sided with activists who testified that people of color have unfairly and disproportionately borne the brunt of harsh sentences for drug crimes.“Our communities were decimated by the War on Drugs,” he said.

Digital Democracy’s analysis

The CalMatters data analysis included more than 1 million votes currently sitting lawmakers have taken since 2017 in committees and on the Senate or Assembly floors. The analysis only included votes on actual bills. Routine resolutions were not included. The data was collected by Digital Democracy from the Legislature’s official bill-tracking website.The site records each lawmaker’s “aye,” and “no” votes. If a lawmaker does not vote on a bill, it’s listed as “NVR,” short for “No Vote Recorded.” The online system does not distinguish between a vote to abstain, an absence or when the legislator is present but no vote is cast.

Assemblymember Evan Low speaks with fellow lawmaker Phillip Chen at the Capitol on March 27, 2023. Photo by Miguel Gutierrez Jr., CalMatters

The CalMatters analysis reveals that 38 of the 94 members of the Democratic caucus have voted “no” 20 or fewer times since 2017. This, despite each senator and Assemblymember having thousands of opportunities to vote. Some of those lawmakers have served since 2017.

While all Democrats rarely vote “no,” some members stand out in the analysis.

They include Assemblymember Jesse Gabriel of Encino. He’s been in office since 2018 and has cast more than 12,000 “aye” votes. He’s voted “no” just nine times. Lisa Calderon of City of Industry has served in the Assembly since 2020 and cast nearly 9,000 “aye” votes. She’s voted “no” once.

Assemblymember Eduardo Garcia of Coachella has cast more than 15,000 “aye” votes since 2017. He’s only voted “no” eight times. Assemblymembers Schiavo of Santa Clarita Valley and Fong of Los Angeles are the two current members who have never voted “no.”

None of those lawmakers responded to CalMatters’ interview requests

Meanwhile, the Digital Democracy analysis showed wide discrepancies in not voting. Garcia, the Assemblymember from Coachella, had more than 2,000 NVRs, the most of any of his Democratic colleagues since 2017.

Fong, who serves on the powerful Appropriations Committee, stood out for another reason other than never voting “no.” As of last week, he only had 25 NVRs, the lowest abstention or absence rate of any lawmaker.Robert Rivas, who became speaker of the Assembly last year, has only voted “no” nine out of 12,308 times since he joined the Assembly in 2018. He abstained or was absent from voting 673 times during that period.

From left, Assemblymember Mike Fong and Speaker of the Assembly Robert Rivas. Photos by Richard Pedroncelli, AP Photo and Miguel Gutierrez Jr., CalMatters

“The Speaker will not be available for your story,” his press secretary, Cynthia Moreno, said in an emailed response to CalMatters’ request to discuss his voting record and the records of his fellow Democratic lawmakers.

Republicans and the red button

It’s no surprise that vastly outnumbered Republicans in the Legislature regularly vote “no” on Democratic bills. They do so on average 21% of the time. But CalMatters’ analysis shows they tend not to vote on bills at higher rates than Democrats.

The average Republican “No Vote Recorded” rate is around 12%. The average rate for Democrats is 4.5%.

James Gallagher, the Assembly’s minority leader, said it’s due to Democrats largely cutting the Republicans out of bill discussions, leading to situations where Republicans might not oppose a bill’s intent, but they don’t feel comfortable voting for language they can’t change.

“That (bill) might be at a place where you sort of agree with where they’re trying to go with it,” said Gallagher, a Republican from Chico. “But you’re just not really sure that the policy is really right and it’s taking into account all the different unintended consequences.”Gallagher has voted “no” 3,236 times since 2017, and he’s been listed as a “No Vote Recorded” 1,708 times.

Gallagher said he’d support making the process more transparent by requiring lawmakers to officially declare an abstention instead of the way it’s reported now, where the public has no easy way of knowing whether a member was actually absent or just declined to vote on a bill.

Bill Essayli, a Corona Republican who’s served in the Assembly since 2022, has the highest percentage of NVRs in the Legislature. Twenty-three percent of his votes are NVRs.

Essayli said he learned it’s better to abstain on some bills instead of voting “no” to avoid retaliation from Democrats. He said Democrats are “very sensitive” and punish legislators of both parties when they vote “no.”

He noted that last year, Democrats briefly stripped Bakersfield Democratic Assemblymember Jasmeet Bains of a committee assignment after she sided with Republicans and cast the lone Democratic “no” vote against Gov. Newsom’s gas-price windfall tax bill.

Essayli said he’s taken to abstaining from votes on bills he doesn’t support when he’s not trying to make a strong political statement. “Not voting is a polite ‘no,’” he said. “And then hitting the red button is like an ‘F no.’”

Essayli said Democrats have targeted him after voting “no.” The California Democratic Party put up a billboard in his district, accusing him of voting against fentanyl victims. He said it was retaliation for him voting “no” on legislation that contained a fentanyl provision that he supported buried in a large budget bill that he did not.

Former Assemblymember Gatto has heard all of the excuses about why lawmakers choose not to vote. Sometimes, lawmakers abstain to avoid an activist group or political opponent using their vote against them. Other times, they don’t want to irk a colleague who might feel passionately about a bill that a lawmaker doesn’t particularly care for. Other times, Gatto said, a non-vote is a lawmaker’s way of saying, “Court me. I want you to gather around my desk and promise me something I want.

”He said it’s better to just cast a “no” vote, when a lawmaker doesn’t support legislation.

“When people talk about how a very strange or poorly conceived proposal made it all the way through the Legislature, the answer is because very few people stood up and said, ‘This is bunk.’” he said. “When people do, and they do it with something as clear and unambiguous as a ‘no’ vote, it encourages other people to have the same courage to tell a lawmaker, politely, that this idea might not be the best one.”

(CalMatters.org)

ERNIE PARDINI: We could end homelessness in this country with $20 billion. Yet we provide Israel with $18 billion worth of weapons to fight a war and our homeless remain homeless. Israel has universal healthcare and zero homelessnes. We've sunk billions of tax dollars into providing support for Ukraine, yet our own infrastructure is a mess and our politicians tell us there just isn't enough money to fix it. We pay taxes on the money we make and then pay more taxes when we make a purchase. Yet we have millions of hungry children right here in our own country. We have all sorts of restrictions on the use of fossil fuels to prevent global warming yet we are supporting two wars overseas that are burning trillions of gallons of fossil fuel. I am sick of paying taxes so that the military-industrial complex can profit at the expense of our own citizens. They reap the profits while the American working class foots the bill. That is why I've changed my voter registration to “we the people” and will be voting for RFK Jr. in the next election. And it feels right as opposed to voting for the lesser of two evils which is unfortunately the only other choice.

AN OLD MAN’S ADVICE

Walk very softly
Carry a big glass of wine
And do anything

— Jim Luther

ON-LINE COMMENT OF THE DAY

Since it is obvious that peaceful settlements of the world’s conflicts (Middle East, South China Sea/Taiwan, Ukraine, etc.) are not likely, then it seems to me that the things to be worried about are: 1) where are you going to be when the hard rain starts falling, and 2) what will be your plea to your Maker?

The rest is just crazy-talk.

I’VE BEEN AT NPR FOR 25 YEARS. Here’s How We Lost America’s Trust.

by Uri Berliner

Uri Berliner, a senior business editor at NPR, says he started sounding the alarm internally when he noticed a bias creep into the network’s coverage. (Pete Kiehart for *The Free Press*)

You know the stereotype of the NPR listener: an EV-driving, Wordle-playing, tote bag-carrying coastal elite. It doesn’t precisely describe me, but it’s not far off. I’m Sarah Lawrence-educated, was raised by a lesbian peace activist mother, I drive a Subaru, and Spotify says my listening habits are most similar to people in Berkeley.

I fit the NPR mold. I’ll cop to that.

So when I got a job here 25 years ago, I never looked back. As a senior editor on the business desk where news is always breaking, we’ve covered upheavals in the workplace, supermarket prices, social media, and AI.

It’s true NPR has always had a liberal bent, but during most of my tenure here, an open-minded, curious culture prevailed. We were nerdy, but not knee-jerk, activist, or scolding.

In recent years, however, that has changed. Today, those who listen to NPR or read its coverage online find something different: the distilled worldview of a very small segment of the U.S. population.

If you are conservative, you will read this and say, duh, it’s always been this way.

But it hasn’t.

For decades, since its founding in 1970, a wide swath of America tuned in to NPR for reliable journalism and gorgeous audio pieces with birds singing in the Amazon. Millions came to us for conversations that exposed us to voices around the country and the world radically different from our own—engaging precisely because they were unguarded and unpredictable. No image generated more pride within NPR than the farmer listening to Morning Edition from his or her tractor at sunrise.

Back in 2011, although NPR’s audience tilted a bit to the left, it still bore a resemblance to America at large. Twenty-six percent of listeners described themselves as conservative, 23 percent as middle of the road, and 37 percent as liberal.

By 2023, the picture was completely different: only 11 percent described themselves as very or somewhat conservative, 21 percent as middle of the road, and 67 percent of listeners said they were very or somewhat liberal. We weren’t just losing conservatives; we were also losing moderates and traditional liberals.

An open-minded spirit no longer exists within NPR, and now, predictably, we don’t have an audience that reflects America.

That wouldn’t be a problem for an openly polemical news outlet serving a niche audience. But for NPR, which purports to consider all things, it’s devastating both for its journalism and its business model.

Like many unfortunate things, the rise of advocacy took off with Donald Trump. As in many newsrooms, his election in 2016 was greeted at NPR with a mixture of disbelief, anger, and despair. (Just to note, I eagerly voted against Trump twice but felt we were obliged to cover him fairly.) But what began as tough, straightforward coverage of a belligerent, truth-impaired president veered toward efforts to damage or topple Trump’s presidency.

Persistent rumors that the Trump campaign colluded with Russia over the election became the catnip that drove reporting. At NPR, we hitched our wagon to Trump’s most visible antagonist, Representative Adam Schiff.

Schiff, who was the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, became NPR’s guiding hand, its ever-present muse. By my count, NPR hosts interviewed Schiff 25 times about Trump and Russia. During many of those conversations, Schiff alluded to purported evidence of collusion. The Schiff talking points became the drumbeat of NPR news reports.

But when the Mueller report found no credible evidence of collusion, NPR’s coverage was notably sparse. Russiagate quietly faded from our programming.

It is one thing to swing and miss on a major story. Unfortunately, it happens. You follow the wrong leads, you get misled by sources you trusted, you’re emotionally invested in a narrative, and bits of circumstantial evidence never add up. It’s bad to blow a big story.

What’s worse is to pretend it never happened, to move on with no mea culpas, no self-reflection. Especially when you expect high standards of transparency from public figures and institutions, but don’t practice those standards yourself. That’s what shatters trust and engenders cynicism about the media.

Russiagate was not NPR’s only miscue.

In October 2020, the *New York Post *published the explosive report about the laptop Hunter Biden abandoned at a Delaware computer shop containing emails about his sordid business dealings. With the election only weeks away, NPR turned a blind eye. Here’s how NPR’s managing editor for news at the time explained the thinking: “We don’t want to waste our time on stories that are not really stories, and we don’t want to waste the listeners’ and readers’ time on stories that are just pure distractions.”

But it wasn’t a pure distraction, or a product of Russian disinformation, as dozens of former and current intelligence officials suggested. The laptop did belong to Hunter Biden. Its contents revealed his connection to the corrupt world of multimillion-dollar influence peddling and its possible implications for his father.

The laptop was newsworthy. But the timeless journalistic instinct of following a hot story lead was being squelched. During a meeting with colleagues, I listened as one of NPR’s best and most fair-minded journalists said it was good we weren’t following the laptop story because it could help Trump.

When the essential facts of the *Post*’s reporting were confirmed and the emails verified independently about a year and a half later, we could have fessed up to our misjudgment. But, like Russia collusion, we didn’t make the hard choice of transparency.

Politics also intruded into NPR’s Covid coverage, most notably in reporting on the origin of the pandemic. One of the most dismal aspects of Covid journalism is how quickly it defaulted to ideological story lines. For example, there was Team Natural Origin—supporting the hypothesis that the virus came from a wild animal market in Wuhan, China. And on the other side, Team Lab Leak, leaning into the idea that the virus escaped from a Wuhan lab.

The lab leak theory came in for rough treatment almost immediately, dismissed as racist or a right-wing conspiracy theory. Anthony Fauci and former NIH head Francis Collins, representing the public health establishment, were its most notable critics. And that was enough for NPR. We became fervent members of Team Natural Origin, even declaring that the lab leak had been debunked by scientists.

But that wasn’t the case.

When word first broke of a mysterious virus in Wuhan, a number of leading virologists immediately suspected it could have leaked from a lab there conducting experiments on bat coronaviruses. This was in January 2020, during calmer moments before a global pandemic had been declared, and before fear spread and politics intruded.

Reporting on a possible lab leak soon became radioactive. Fauci and Collins apparently encouraged the March publication of an influential scientific paper known as “The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2.” Its authors wrote they didn’t believe “any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible.”

But the lab leak hypothesis wouldn’t die. And understandably so. In private, even some of the scientists who penned the article dismissing it sounded a different tune. One of the authors, Andrew Rambaut, an evolutionary biologist from Edinburgh University, wrote to his colleagues, “I literally swivel day by day thinking it is a lab escape or natural.”

Over the course of the pandemic, a number of investigative journalists made compelling, if not conclusive, cases for the lab leak. But at NPR, we weren’t about to swivel or even tiptoe away from the insistence with which we backed the natural origin story. We didn’t budge when the Energy Department—the federal agency with the most expertise about laboratories and biological research—concluded, albeit with low confidence, that a lab leak was the most likely explanation for the emergence of the virus.

Instead, we introduced our coverage of that development on February 28, 2023, by asserting confidently that “the scientific evidence overwhelmingly points to a natural origin for the virus.”

When a colleague on our science desk was asked why they were so dismissive of the lab leak theory, the response was odd. The colleague compared it to the Bush administration’s unfounded argument that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction, apparently meaning we won’t get fooled again. But these two events were not even remotely related. Again, politics were blotting out the curiosity and independence that ought to have been driving our work.

I’m offering three examples of widely followed stories where I believe we faltered. Our coverage is out there in the public domain. Anyone can read or listen for themselves and make their own judgment. But to truly understand how independent journalism suffered at NPR, you need to step inside the organization.

You need to start with former CEO John Lansing. Lansing came to NPR in 2019 from the federally funded agency that oversees Voice of America. Like others who have served in the top job at NPR, he was hired primarily to raise money and to ensure good working relations with hundreds of member stations that acquire NPR’s programming.

After working mostly behind the scenes, Lansing became a more visible and forceful figure after the killing of George Floyd in May 2020. It was an anguished time in the newsroom, personally and professionally so for NPR staffers. Floyd’s murder, captured on video, changed both the conversation and the daily operations at NPR.

Given the circumstances of Floyd’s death, it would have been an ideal moment to tackle a difficult question: Is America, as progressive activists claim, beset by systemic racism in the 2020s—in law enforcement, education, housing, and elsewhere? We happen to have a very powerful tool for answering such questions: journalism. Journalism that lets evidence lead the way.

But the message from the top was very different. America’s infestation with systemic racism was declared loud and clear: it was a given. Our mission was to change it.

“When it comes to identifying and ending systemic racism,” Lansing wrote in a companywide article, “we can be agents of change. Listening and deep reflection are necessary but not enough. They must be followed by constructive and meaningful steps forward. I will hold myself accountable for this.”

And we were told that NPR itself was part of the problem. In confessional language he said the leaders of public media, “starting with me—must be aware of how we ourselves have benefited from white privilege in our careers. We must understand the unconscious bias we bring to our work and interactions. And we must commit ourselves—body and soul—to profound changes in ourselves and our institutions.”

He declared that diversity—on our staff and in our audience—was the overriding mission, the “North Star” of the organization. Phrases like “that’s part of the North Star” became part of meetings and more casual conversation.

Race and identity became paramount in nearly every aspect of the workplace. Journalists were required to ask everyone we interviewed their race, gender, and ethnicity (among other questions), and had to enter it in a centralized tracking system. We were given unconscious bias training sessions. A growing DEI staff offered regular meetings imploring us to “start talking about race.” Monthly dialogues were offered for “women of color” and “men of color.” Nonbinary people of color were included, too.

These initiatives, bolstered by a $1 million grant from the NPR Foundation, came from management, from the top down. Crucially, they were in sync culturally with what was happening at the grassroots—among producers, reporters, and other staffers. Most visible was a burgeoning number of employee resource (or affinity) groups based on identity.

They included MGIPOC (Marginalized Genders and Intersex People of Color mentorship program); Mi Gente (Latinx employees at NPR); NPR Noir (black employees at NPR); Southwest Asians and North Africans at NPR; Ummah (for Muslim-identifying employees); Women, Gender-Expansive, and Transgender People in Technology Throughout Public Media; Khevre (Jewish heritage and culture at NPR); and NPR Pride (LGBTQIA employees at NPR).

All this reflected a broader movement in the culture of people clustering together based on ideology or a characteristic of birth. If, as NPR’s internal website suggested, the groups were simply a “great way to meet like-minded colleagues” and “help new employees feel included,” it would have been one thing.

But the role and standing of affinity groups, including those outside NPR, were more than that. They became a priority for NPR’s union, SAG-AFTRA—an item in collective bargaining. The current contract, in a section on DEI, requires NPR management to “keep up to date with current language and style guidance from journalism affinity groups” and to inform employees if language differs from the diktats of those groups. In such a case, the dispute could go before the DEI Accountability Committee.

In essence, this means the NPR union, of which I am a dues-paying member, has ensured that advocacy groups are given a seat at the table in determining the terms and vocabulary of our news coverage.

Conflicts between workers and bosses, between labor and management, are common in workplaces. NPR has had its share. But what’s notable is the extent to which people at every level of NPR have comfortably coalesced around the progressive worldview.

And this, I believe, is the most damaging development at NPR: the absence of viewpoint diversity.

There’s an unspoken consensus about the stories we should pursue and how they should be framed. It’s frictionless—one story after another about instances of supposed racism, transphobia, signs of the climate apocalypse, Israel doing something bad, and the dire threat of Republican policies. It’s almost like an assembly line.

The mindset prevails in choices about language. In a document called NPR Transgender Coverage Guidance—disseminated by news management—we’re asked to avoid the term *biological sex*. (The editorial guidance was prepared with the help of a former staffer of the National Center for Transgender Equality.) The mindset animates bizarre stories—on how The Beatles and bird names are racially problematic, and others that are alarmingly divisive; justifying looting, with claims that fears about crime are racist; and suggesting that Asian Americans who oppose affirmative action have been manipulated by white conservatives.

More recently, we have approached the Israel-Hamas war and its spillover onto streets and campuses through the “intersectional” lens that has jumped from the faculty lounge to newsrooms. Oppressor versus oppressed. That’s meant highlighting the suffering of Palestinians at almost every turn while downplaying the atrocities of October 7, overlooking how Hamas intentionally puts Palestinian civilians in peril, and giving little weight to the explosion of antisemitic hate around the world.

For nearly all my career, working at NPR has been a source of great pride. It’s a privilege to work in the newsroom at a crown jewel of American journalism. My colleagues are congenial and hardworking.

I can’t count the number of times I would meet someone, describe what I do, and they’d say, “I love NPR!”

And they wouldn’t stop there. They would mention their favorite host or one of those “driveway moments” where a story was so good you’d stay in your car until it finished.

It still happens, but often now the trajectory of the conversation is different. After the initial “I love NPR,” there’s a pause and a person will acknowledge, “I don’t listen as much as I used to.” Or, with some chagrin: “What’s happening there? Why is NPR telling me what to think?”

In recent years I’ve struggled to answer that question. Concerned by the lack of viewpoint diversity, I looked at voter registration for our newsroom. In D.C., where NPR is headquartered and many of us live, I found 87 registered Democrats working in editorial positions and zero Republicans. None.

So on May 3, 2021, I presented the findings at an all-hands editorial staff meeting. When I suggested we had a diversity problem with a score of 87 Democrats and zero Republicans, the response wasn’t hostile. It was worse. It was met with profound indifference. I got a few messages from surprised, curious colleagues. But the messages were of the “oh wow, that’s weird” variety, as if the lopsided tally was a random anomaly rather than a critical failure of our diversity North Star.

In a follow-up email exchange, a top NPR news executive told me that she had been “skewered” for bringing up diversity of thought when she arrived at NPR. So, she said, “I want to be careful how we discuss this publicly.”

For years, I have been persistent. When I believe our coverage has gone off the rails, I have written regular emails to top news leaders, sometimes even having one-on-one sessions with them. On March 10, 2022, I wrote to a top news executive about the numerous times we described the controversial education bill in Florida as the “Don’t Say Gay” bill when it didn’t even use the word *gay*. I pushed to set the record straight, and wrote another time to ask why we keep using that word that many Hispanics hate—*Latinx*. On March 31, 2022, I was invited to a managers’ meeting to present my observations.

Throughout these exchanges, no one has ever trashed me. That’s not the NPR way. People are polite. But nothing changes. So I’ve become a visible wrong-thinker at a place I love. It’s uncomfortable, sometimes heartbreaking.

Even so, out of frustration, on November 6, 2022, I wrote to the captain of ship North Star—CEO John Lansing—about the lack of viewpoint diversity and asked if we could have a conversation about it. I got no response, so I followed up four days later. He said he would appreciate hearing my perspective and copied his assistant to set up a meeting. On December 15, the morning of the meeting, Lansing’s assistant wrote back to cancel our conversation because he was under the weather. She said he was looking forward to chatting and a new meeting invitation would be sent. But it never came.

I won’t speculate about why our meeting never happened. Being CEO of NPR is a demanding job with lots of constituents and headaches to deal with. But what’s indisputable is that no one in a C-suite or upper management position has chosen to deal with the lack of viewpoint diversity at NPR and how that affects our journalism.

Which is a shame. Because for all the emphasis on our North Star, NPR’s news audience in recent years has become less diverse, not more so. Back in 2011, our audience leaned a bit to the left but roughly reflected America politically; now, the audience is cramped into a smaller, progressive silo.

Despite all the resources we’d devoted to building up our news audience among blacks and Hispanics, the numbers have barely budged. In 2023, according to our demographic research, 6 percent of our news audience was black, far short of the overall U.S. adult population, which is 14.4 percent black. And Hispanics were only 7 percent, compared to the overall Hispanic adult population, around 19 percent. Our news audience doesn’t come close to reflecting America. It’s overwhelmingly white and progressive, and clustered around coastal cities and college towns.

These are perilous times for news organizations. Last year, NPR laid off or bought out 10 percent of its staff and canceled four podcasts following a slump in advertising revenue. Our radio audience is dwindling and our podcast downloads are down from 2020. The digital stories on our website rarely have national impact. They aren’t conversation starters. Our competitive advantage in audio—where for years NPR had no peer—is vanishing. There are plenty of informative and entertaining podcasts to choose from.

Even within our diminished audience, there’s evidence of trouble at the most basic level: trust.

In February, our audience insights team sent an email team proudly announcing that we had a higher trustworthy score than CNN or *The New York Times*. But the research from Harris Poll is hardly reassuring. It found that “3-in-10 audience members familiar with NPR said they associate NPR with the characteristic â˜trustworthy.’ “ Only in a world where media credibility has completely imploded would a 3-in-10 trustworthy score be something to boast about.

With declining ratings, sorry levels of trust, and an audience that has become less diverse over time, the trajectory for NPR is not promising. Two paths seem clear. We can keep doing what we’re doing, hoping it will all work out. Or we could start over, with the basic building blocks of journalism. We could face up to where we’ve gone wrong. News organizations don’t go in for that kind of reckoning. But there’s a good reason for NPR to be the first: we’re the ones with the word *public* in our name.

Despite our missteps at NPR, defunding isn’t the answer. As the country becomes more fractured, there’s still a need for a public institution where stories are told and viewpoints exchanged in good faith. Defunding, as a rebuke from Congress, wouldn’t change the journalism at NPR. That needs to come from within.

A few weeks ago, NPR welcomed a new CEO, Katherine Maher, who’s been a leader in tech. She doesn’t have a news background, which could be an asset given where things stand. I’ll be rooting for her. It’s a tough job. Her first rule could be simple enough: don’t tell people how to think. It could even be the new North Star.

WHAT ORWELL REALLY FEARED

by Stephen Metcalf

In 1946, the George Orwell repaired to the remote Isle of Jura and wrote his masterpiece, 1984. What was he looking for?

The Isle of Jura is a patchwork of bogs and moorland laid across a quartzite slab in Scotland’s Inner Hebrides. Nearly 400 miles from London, rain-lashed, more deer than people: All the reasons not to move there were the reasons George Orwell moved there. Directions to houseguests ran several paragraphs and could include a plane, trains, taxis, a ferry, another ferry, then miles and miles on foot down a decrepit, often impassable rural lane. It’s safe to say the man wanted to get away. From what?

Orwell himself could be sentimental about his longing to escape (“Thinking always of my island in the Hebrides,” he’d once written in his wartime diary) or wonderfully blunt. In the aftermath of Hiroshima, he wrote to a friend:

This stupid war is coming off in about 10-20 years, and this country will be blown off the map whatever else happens. The only hope is to have a home with a few animals in some place not worth a bomb.

It helps also to remember Orwell’s immediate state of mind when he finally fully moved to Jura, in May 1946. Four months before Hiroshima, his wife, Eileen, had died; shortly after the atomic bomb was dropped, Animal Farm was published.

Almost at once, in other words, Orwell became a widower, terrified by the coming postwar reality, and famous—the latter a condition he seems to have regarded as nothing but a bother. His newfound sense of dread was only adding to one he’d felt since 1943, when news of the Tehran Conference broke. The meeting had been ominous to Orwell: It placed in his head the idea of Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin divvying up the postwar world, leading to a global triopoly of super-states. The man can be forgiven for pouring every ounce of his grief, self-pity, paranoia (literary lore had it that he thought Stalin might have an ice pick with his name on it), and embittered egoism into the predicament of his latest protagonist, Winston Smith.

Unsurprisingly, given that it culminated in both his masterpiece and his death, Orwell’s time on the island has been picked over by biographers, but Orwell’s Island: George, Jura and 1984, by Les Wilson, treats it as a subject worthy of stand-alone attention. The book is at odds with our sense of Orwell as an intrepid journalist. It is a portrait of a man jealously guarding his sense of himself as a creature elementally apart, even as he depicts the horrors of a world in which the human capacity for apartness is being hunted down and destroyed.

Wilson is a former political journalist, not a critic, who lives on neighboring Islay, famous for its whiskeys. He is at pains to show how Orwell, on Jura, overcame one of his laziest prejudices: The author went from taking every opportunity to laugh at the Scots for their “burns, braes, kilts, sporrans, claymores, bagpipes” (who is better at the derisive list than Orwell?) to complaining about the relative lack of Gaelic-language radio programming.

Scottish had come to mean something more to him than kailyard kitsch. These were a people holding out against a fully amalgamated identity, beginning with the Kingdom of Great Britain and extending to modernity itself. On Jura at least, crofters and fishermen still lived at a village scale. As to whether Jura represented, as has been suggested, suicide by other means—Orwell was chronically ill, and Barnhill, his cottage, was 25 miles from the island’s one doctor—Wilson brushes this aside. In fact, he argues that Jura was “kinder to Orwell’s ravaged lungs than smog-smothered London,” where inhabitants were burning scavenged wood to stay warm.

At Barnhill, Orwell set up almost a society in miniature, devoting his 16-acre homestead to his ideal of self-sufficiency. Soon after moving there, he was joined by his sister, his 2-year-old adopted son, and a nanny. Amid the general, often biting, austerity of postwar Europe, they enjoyed a private cornucopia, subsisting on, as Wilson says, a diet of “fish, lobster, rabbit, venison and fresh milk and eggs,” and were often warmed by peat that Orwell himself had cut. He intended to live there for the rest of his life, raising his son and relishing an existence as a non-cog in a noncapitalist machine.

He lived without electricity or phone; shot rabbits “for the pot,” as Wilson says; raised geese to be slaughtered and plucked; and fished the surrounding waters in a dinghy. He fashioned a tobacco pouch from animal skin and a mustard spoon out of deer bone, and served his aghast guests a seaweed blancmange. Over time, absconding to Jura and writing 1984 became aspects of a single premonition: a coming world of perpetual engulfment by the forces of bigness. As Orwell’s latest biographer, D. J. Taylor, has pointed out in Orwell: The New Life, Orwell’s novels before Animal Farm followed a common template of a sensitive young person going up against a heartless society, destined to lose. Eileen is the one who helped him—either by suggesting that Animal Farm be told as a fable or by lightening his touch, depending on whom you talk to—find a newly engaging, even playful (in its way), register.

The loss of Eileen and return of the self-pitying Orwell alter ego are certainly linked. And indeed, in 1984 he produces his most Orwellian novel, in both senses—only now both protagonist and situation are presented in the absolute extreme: The young man is the bearer (if we believe his tormentor, O’Brien) of the last shred of human autonomy, in a society both totally corrupt and laying total claim to his being.

What this absolutism produced, of course, was not another fusty neo-Edwardian novel a la Orwell’s earlier Keep the Aspidistra Flying, but a wild, aggrieved tour de force of dystopian erotica. Odd though it may sound, given the novel’s unremitting torments, 1984 quickly became a best seller, in no small part because its first readers, especially in America, found it comforting—a source of the release you might feel, in a darkened theater, when you remember that you yourself are not being chased by a man with a chain saw. The reader could glance up, notice no limitless police powers or kangaroo inquisitions, and say: We are not them.

Such complacency is hard to come by in 2024. Thinking of Orwell, famous though he is for his windowpane prose and the prescience of his essays, as the ultimate sane human being is not so easy either. Rereading 1984 in light of the Jura episode suggests that Orwell was an altogether weirder person, and his last novel an altogether weirder book, than we’ve appreciated.

Conventionally speaking, 1984 is not a good novel; it couldn’t be. Novels are about the conflict between an individual’s inner-generated aims and a prevailing social reality that denies or thwarts them. 1984 is the depiction of the collapse of this paradigm—the collapse of inner and outer in all possible iterations. Of course its protagonist is thinly drawn: Winston’s self lacks a social landscape to give it dimensionality.

In place of anything like a novel proper, we get a would-be bildungsroman breaking through to the surface in disparate fragments. These scraps are Winston’s yearnings, memories, sensual instincts, which have, as yet, somehow gone unmurdered by the regime. The entire state-sponsored enterprise of Pavlovian sadism in Oceania is devoted to snuffing out this remnant interiority.

The facsimile of a life that Winston does enact comes courtesy of a series of private spaces—a derelict church, a clearing in the woods, a room above a junk shop—the last of which is revealed to have been a regime-staged contrivance. The inexorable momentum of the novel is toward the final such private space, Winston’s last line of defense, and the last line of defense in any totalitarian society: the hidden compartment of his mind.

When all else fails, there is the inaccessibility of human mentality to others, a black box in every respect. Uncoincidentally, Winston’s final defense—hiding out in his head—had been Orwell’s first. While he struggled on Jura to finish 1984, Orwell apparently returned to “Such, Such Were the Joys,” his long and excoriating essay about his miserable years at St. Cyprian’s boarding school. He’d been sent there at the age of 8, one of the shabby-genteel boys with brains in what was otherwise a class snob’s paradise. He was a bed wetter to boot, for which, Orwell writes, he was brutally punished. No wonder he found dignity in apartness. Taylor’s biography is brilliant about the connection between Orwell’s childhood reminiscence and 1984.

In the essay, Orwell portrays his alma mater as an environment that invaded every cranny of its pupils’ lives. Against this, he formed his sense of bearing “at the middle of one’s heart,” as he writes, “an incorruptible inner self” holding out against an autocratic headmistress. As a cop in Burma, a scullion in Paris, an amateur ethnographer in northern England, he was a man who kept his own company, even when in company, and whom others, as a consequence, found by and large inscrutable.

What was this man’s genius, if not taking the petty anxieties of Eric Blair, his given name, and converting them into the moral clarity of George Orwell? Fearful that his own cherished apartness was being co-opted into nonexistence, he projected his fear for himself onto something he called the “autonomous individual,” who, as he said in his 1940 essay “Inside the Whale,” “is going to be stamped out of existence.” To this he added:

The literature of liberalism is coming to an end and the literature of totalitarianism has not yet appeared and is barely imaginable. As for the writer, he is sitting on a melting iceberg; he is merely an anachronism, a hangover from the bourgeois age, as surely doomed as the hippopotamus.

The fate of the autonomous individual, “the writer,” the literature of liberalism—he carried all of it to Jura, where he dumped it onto the head of poor Winston Smith.

Orwell typed for hours upstairs, sitting on his iron bedstead in a tatty dressing gown, chain-smoking shag tobacco. In May 1947, he felt he had a third of a draft, and in November, a completed one. In December, he was in a hospital outside Glasgow, diagnosed with “chronic” tuberculosis—not a death sentence, maybe, but his landlord on Jura suspected that Orwell now knew he was dying.

The following July, after grueling treatments and a stint in a sanatorium, he returned to Jura fitter but by no means cured, and under strict orders to take it easy. His rough draft, however, was a riot of scrawled-over pages. To produce a clean manuscript for the publisher, he would need to hire and closely supervise a typist, but no candidate was willing to trek to Jura, and Orwell was unwilling to leave it. He typed 1984 on his own, having all but spent himself writing it.

“He should have been in bed,” Wilson says, and instead sat “propped up on a sofa” banging out 5,000 words a day. Among all of its gruesome set pieces, culminating in Room 101 in the Ministry of Love, the novel’s most decisive act of torment is a simple glance in the mirror. Winston is sure—it is one of his last consolations, before breaking completely—that some inherent principle exists in the universe to prevent a system based on nothing but cruelty and self-perpetuation from triumphing forever. O’Brien calmly assures Winston that he’s wrong, that he is “the last man,” and to prove it, and the obvious nonexistence of “the human spirit,” he forces Winston to look at himself:

A bowed, greycoloured, skeleton-like thing was coming towards him. Its actual appearance was frightening, and not merely the fact that he knew it to be himself. He moved closer to the glass. The creature’s face seemed to be protruded, because of its bent carriage. A forlorn, jailbird’s face with a nobby forehead running back into a bald scalp, a crooked nose, and battered-looking cheekbones above which his eyes were fierce and watchful. The cheeks were seamed, the mouth had a drawn-in look. Certainly it was his own face, but it seemed to him that it had changed more than he had changed inside. The emotions it registered would be different from the ones he felt.

The final membrane between inner and outer is dissolving. 1984 can read like Orwell’s reverse autobiography, in which, rather than a life being built up, it gets disassembled down to its foundational unit. The body is now wasting; the voice is losing expressive competence. Worse, the face will soon enough have nothing left to express, as the last of his adaptive neurocircuitry becomes property of Oceania.

1984 is Orwell saying goodbye to himself, and an improbably convincing portrait of the erasure of the autonomous individual. He finished typing the novel by early December 1948. His final diary entry on Jura—dated that Christmas Eve—gave the weight of the Christmas goose “before drawing & plucking,” then concluded: “Snowdrops up all over the place. A few tulips showing. Some wall-flowers still trying to flower.” The next month, he was back in a sanatorium; the next year, he was dead. He was 46 years old.

1984 was published 75 years ago. Surprisingly, it immediately surpassed Animal Farm as a critical and commercial success. One by one, Orwell’s contemporaries—V. S. Pritchett, Rebecca West, Bertrand Russell—acknowledged its triumph. A rare dissenter was Evelyn Waugh, who wrote to Orwell to say that he’d found the book morally inert. “You deny the soul’s existence (at least Winston does) and can only contrast matter with reason & will.” The trials of its protagonist consequently failed to make Waugh’s “flesh creep.” What, he implied, was at stake here?

Talk about missing the point. Nowhere in Orwell’s work can one find evidence of anything essential, much less eternal, that makes us human. That’s why Winston, our meager proxy, is available for a thoroughgoing reboot. As the book implies, we’re creatures of contingency all the way down. Even a memory of a memory of freedom, autonomy, self-making, consciousness, and agency—in a word, of ourselves—can disappear, until no loss is felt whatsoever. Hence the terror of being “the last man”: You’re the living terminus, the lone bearer of what will be, soon enough, a dead language.

A precious language, indicating a way of being in the world worth keeping—if you’re George Orwell. From the evidence of Jura and 1984, persisting as his own catawampus self—askew to the world—was a habit he needed to prove he couldn’t possibly kick. He could be the far-off yet rooted man who loved being a father; performing what he deemed “sane” tasks, such as building a henhouse; indulging his grim compulsions (smoking tobacco and writing books). The soul, eternal fabric of God, had no place in that equation.

Waugh wasn’t the only muddled reader of the book. In the aftermath of the Berlin blockade and the creation of NATO, followed by the Soviets’ detonation of their first atomic weapon, readers—Americans, especially—might have been eager for an anti-Stalinist bedtime story. But Orwell had already written an anti-Stalinist bedtime story. If his time on Jura tells us anything, it’s that in 1984, he was exhorting us to beware of concentrated power and pay attention to public language, yes, but above all, guard your solitude against interlopers, Stalinist or otherwise.

In addition to the book’s top-down anxieties about the coming managerial overclass, a bottom-up anxiety about how fragile solitude is—irreducible to an abstract right or a material good—permeates 1984. Paradoxically, Winston’s efforts to hold fast to the bliss of separateness are what give the book its unexpected turns of beauty and humanity. (“The sweet summer air played against his cheek. From somewhere far away there floated the faint shouts of children: in the room itself there was no sound except the insect voice of the clock.”) For all of Orwell’s intrepidness, his physical courage, his clarity of expression, his most resolutely anti-fascist instinct lay here: in his terror at the thought of never being alone.

11 Comments

Mazie Malone April 10, 2024

Re; Catch of the day

Male Earp??… really? ….lol … odd name..

I meant to mention this yesterday. So a few times now arrestees list of crimes has said shopping cart, what exactly does that mean? I am assuming it means they stole it? …but it doesn’t say theft just shopping cart. Curious as always… 😂🌷

mm 💕

- MAGA Marmon April 10, 2024
  
  Ukiah OKs revised ordinance aimed at stolen shopping carts
  
  “The Ukiah City Council Wednesday approved a revised version of an ordinance regulating misuse of shopping carts, which are private property and provided by businesses for temporary use by their customers.
  
  “This is a tool police officers needed; they have to have it,” said Council member Jim Brown, who served on an ad-hoc committee tasked with addressing the “proliferation of stolen and abandoned shopping carts in the city” with Vice-mayor Maureen Mulheren.”
  
  https://www.ukiahdailyjournal.com/2018/03/22/ukiah-oks-revised-ordinance-aimed-at-stolen-shopping-carts/
  
  MAGA Marmon
  
  - Mazie Malone April 10, 2024
    
    Thanks James,
    
    At this point why should I be surprised? Ugghhh rather than addressing the issues of addiction, Serious Mental Illness and Homelessness, which are the core reason for stolen/missing shopping carts it is a misdemeanor crime. Can I reiterate here that Mr. Marbuts advice and recommendations do not take into account the most seriously ill, which is almost all the street homeless folks. Following his advice would be like one of us going our primary doctor and asking them to perform a surgery to remove a cataract!!!! He is an expensive ridiculous band aid.
    
    mm 💕
    
Marshall Newman April 10, 2024

Make an effort to see John Reischman and the Jaybirds at Little River Inn. Great bluegrass.

Cantankerous April 10, 2024

John

“The TRUTH will set you free, but first it will piss you off.” Gloria Steinem

Kind regards

Craig Stehr April 10, 2024

Awoke at noon at Building Bridges Homeless Resource Center on South State Street in sunny Ukiah, CA. Morning ablutions over, will make the bed, remembering to put the OM meditation shawl on top. Ambling over to the Express Mart to check LOTTO tix, then on to the Ukiah Co-op for a nosh and coffee. Furthur we go to the Ukiah Public Library to peruse the New York Times to stay current on the implosion of this world. Not identified with the body nor the mind, Immortal Self I am! Peaceout y’all, and may the force be with you. ;-))
Craig Louis Stehr
Email: craiglouisstehr@gmail.com

Mark Stillman April 10, 2024

About 1970 Tony Serra was hired by my girlfriend at the time to defend her in a cop raid type affair we were involved in. I met him in the courthouse and gave him a hundred bucks as a down payment… I still owe him the rest.

Mike J April 10, 2024

This is an election year so that seems to be a factor in the current “ice age” of attention on the unfolding number one story in all of our history. Yet, various members of Congress, like Oversight committee member Robert Garcia (D-CA), are urging further hearings that apparently would involve testimony from special access programs participants referenced by David Grusch last summer in a hearing:

Congressman Robert Garcia
@RepRobertGarcia
The role of Congress to seek the truth and disclosure about UAPs is a critical responsibility that should be taken seriously. Democrats don’t control the House or the hearing schedule. We continue to ask for more public UAP hearings from the GOP leadership. It’s time.
6:47 AM · Apr 9, 2024
·
63K
Views

The speculation as to why former DOD officials Lue Elizondo ‘s book is being held up by the DOSPR review centers around the factor that this is an election year. Same thing with David Grusch’s op-ed under DOSPR review.

Danny Sheehan is stepping up his New Paradigm Institute’s “Citizens for Disclosure” action network.
https://newparadigminstitute.org/

- Mike J April 10, 2024
  
  One thing that a few members of Congress have recently expressed deep concern about, and which does threaten to heat things up:
  Ross Coulthart
  @rosscoulthart
  “@ChrisKMellon
  is 100% correct. We have an exclusive interview and video with a witness who videoed the mystery objects over Langley AFB in December coming up on REALITY CHECK
  @NewsNation
  . He is certain the multiple objects he saw were not drones or known aircraft. And that’s what he’s told the
  @FBI
  Quote
  Christopher K. Mellon
  @ChrisKMellon
  ·
  5h
  It is very encouraging to see at least one member of Congress aware of and seeking answers to the rather alarming pattern of incursions over restricted military airspace in the US. I hear that the intrusions at Langley, which they are discussing, were so sustained and disruptive… x.com/ddeanjohnson/s…”
  Show more
  
  - Harvey Reading April 11, 2024
    
    Where’s that trade report on talks between ET and the US you peddled oh-so-long ago? I have about as much faith in what you have to say on the subject as I do for what pols and military types have to say on it. It’s pure hokum to distract people from the real world. And, you fall for it!
    
Cantankerous April 10, 2024

The gap, the gulf between peoples gets larger the longer there is inequity, the longer their pleas fall on deaf ears.

Yesterday, my neighbor made a suggestion to me that wasn’t obvious to me. I am thankful.

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