Mendocino County Today: Monday 4/22/24

Warm | Orr Springs | Retroactive Contracts | FFA Ribbons | Comptche AVA | Spay/Neuter | Gas Prices | Skate Nights | Boonville Establishments | 1870 Ranch | Goodbye Print | Dispatcher Appreciation | Cisper Art | Rhododendron Show | Sutley Memorials | Decaled | Palace Ghosts | Broiler Steakhouse | Lodge Love | Yesterday's Catch | Folk Show | Convalescing Clogg | Real Christian | Melania's Trials | Test Day | Google News | City Fog | Shipping Containers | Boat Deck | Digital Democracy | Women's Rights | Synanon Kids | Eyeglass Testing | Modern Diet | Hoeing | Fortnight | 1970 Nostalgia | Homelessness Case | Damage Done | Cough Syrup | Another Kick | Clyde & Bonnie | Water Rights | Bar Amenities | Revolutionary Struggle | Aunt Jemima | Gaza Children | The Custers | Advance Warning | Home Scientist | New World

DRY WEATHER with above normal temperatures are expected to continue today. Isolated thunderstorms are possible for mostly Trinity county on Tuesday as daytime temperatures begin to trend down. Much cooler temperatures, a chance for rain and high mountain snow will return Thursday through Friday. (NWS)

STEPHEN DUNLAP (Fort Bragg): On the coast this Monday morning I have a partly cloudy 47F. This week we will have cooling temps daily into a chance of showers Thursday & Friday. Once again the rain amounts are changed downwards from yesterday. You know the next 2 words.

MENDO’S ‘EVERYBODY DOES IT’ EXCUSE

by Mark Scaramella

In October of 2017 then-CEO Carmel Angelo wrote:

“Retroactive Start Date Contracts Require Board Approval.— On September 27, 2017, a memo was sent out to all Elected Officials and Department Heads reminding them that all contracts must adhere to Mendocino County's Purchasing, Leasing & Contracting Policy, Policy No. 1. Effective immediately, any contract that has a retroactive start date will need Board of Supervisors' approval, regardless of the dollar amount of the contract; and requires noting ‘Retroactive’ on the top of the routing sheet.”

Thus began the County’s first acknowledgement of and attempt to improve the problem of retroactive, i.e., rubberstamping after the fact, contracts. But of course, putting the word “retroactive” on the routing sheet didn’t change anything. The problem only got worse.

In February of 2021 Supervisor Williams asked then-CEO Angelo what she thought about those pesky retroactive contracts that were routinely presented to the Board for rubberstamping.

In her response then-CEO Carmel Angelo replied: 

“When you get a retroactive contract essentially you — you know, you basically just rubberstamp it because the contract is already in place. A large contract, let's just say like RCS (Camille Schraeder’s Redwood Community Serivces), that has provided services for over 20 years, something like that may take a little longer to negotiate and it comes in retroactively, but we know that they will still get the contract because they are the only service provider. It would be a good idea to focus on what a retroactive contract is and why it's retroactive, what that means, and are there ways to mitigate that. … For the next meeting, I would like to bring in a small group of department heads that consistently have multiple contracts that are retroactive. I want to make it clear though that there are ways to approach this. This is not a public shaming of the department heads because they have a retroactive contract. Let me be real clear. There are times that something happens and you just can't help it. You get money or whatever.”

“You get money or whatever…”

Then-Deputy CEO (now CEO) Darcie Antle added:

“We are always going to have retro [sic] contracts. But also the workload that has been placed on the department, and in particular HHSA this year [during covid], we are seeing a few more retros in that area. We worked really hard last year to clean it up [demonstrably false] but the pandemic has caused some more delays this year but I think we can get back on track.”

At least CEO Angelo was blunt in her response, admitting that the Schraeders are the main beneficiaries of retroactive contracts and that retroactive contracts are simply “rubberstamping.” But there was no follow up to this discussion; no department heads were brought in, no follow-up on later agendas. Retroactive contracts continued to be “approved” on the consent calendar without question.

That was, until Supervisor Ted Williams brought it up again a couple of weeks ago when he compared Mendo’s huge number of retroactive contracts (over 600 since 2018) to Sonoma County’s none. At the end of that aimless discussion Interim County Counsel James Ross said that he had “spot checked” Sonoma County’s agenda and he thought that Sonoma County avoided the problem by not including the word “retroactive” in their agenda items.

After the usual blather, er, discussion, CEO Antle agreed to look into the applicable policies and talk to the applicable officials. History shows that none of that will happen and nothing will change. 

However, in an overt attempt to make sure that nothing changes, without explanation or reference to Supervisor Williams’ recent complaint, CEO Antle (and we assume Interim County Counsel James Ross) inserted an extensively researched “summary” into this week’s otherwise info-free CEO Report entitled “Overview of Retroactive Agreements in Selected California Counties.” 

Antle and Ross went to a lot of time and trouble to research the agendas in Humboldt County, Lake County, Marin County, Nevada County, and Sonoma County. Not only did they count the retroactive items in each county, but they actually asked for and obtained explanations from each of those counties, pointing out that in most cases the only way to identify them would be to compare the contract dates with the agenda item dates.

In effect, Antle and Ross are saying, 1) everybody does it; and 2) Mendo does it better because Mendo puts the word “retroactive” in the agenda title.

* * *

Besides CEO Angelo’s refreshingly blunt comment noting that the retroactive approvals are nothing but rubberstampings and that Schraeders are the main beneficiary of the practice, the best independent explanation we’ve heard for Mendo’s gross overuse of retroactive items was offered back in 2021 by former Environmental Health Director David Jensen: 

“To really understand the issue of retroactive contracts, look closely at the County’s byzantine contract development and approval process. Track the inexplicable time from initiation to approval. There you will find the real problem. They use canned language with fill-in-the-blanks entries for names and numbers. Then comes the glacial review process. As Environmental Health Director, I would wait for contracts to be approved, then have to resubmit them for reprocessing because the effective date had passed, hence it had become “retroactive.” Approval by County Counsel was the purgatory where they lingered longest. If the process is not corrected, the problem will continue.”

Jensen is right. And that probably explains why CEO Antle and County Counsel Ross went to such great lengths to prepare and document their “everybody does it” excuse: the problem is in the totally unaccountable County Counsel’s office itself.

AV FFA had their first Grapevine Judging team compete at the Fresno State Field Day. 

These 4 freshman young ladies have been practicing with Mr. Bauista. It was a great day! The team placed 7th in the state. The team placed 4th in two different classes of vine judging and giving oral reasons. Emily placed 4th high individual in one class of judging. Jennifer placed 5th in another class of vine judging. Great job Vanessa, Aliya, Emily, Jennifer, and Mr. Bautista!

— Beth Swehla

THE COMPTCHE AVA: FINALLY

The United States newest American Viticulture Area is “Comptche.”

The United States Department of the Treasury published its decision in the Federal Register on April 8, 2024 citing unique features that distinguish Comptche from the other wine-growing areas of California.

Comptche, a small valley completely surrounded by an immense redwood forest, has perfect elements, a cool foggy climate, moderately fertile soils, pristine air and water. Comptche's three vineyards, Costa, Oppenlander and Peterson, have been quietly growing gold medal-winning pinot noir grapes for more than 20 years. Comptche grapes sell for premium prices to wineries as far away as San Francisco.

The vineyards are on family homesteads dating from the 1870s and still farmed by fifth generations. Michael Nolan, the originator of the AVA, said he did so to fulfill a promise made 25 years ago to Bill Shandel, owner of Oppenlander Vineyard. Nolan rashly promised Bill, “If you can grow high-quality wine grapes in Comptche, we will be eligible for an AVA and I will do that part.” The 2023 pinot noir from Comptche, perhaps the vintage of a lifetime, can be labeled “Comptche.” At last.

— Michael Nolan

MIKE GENIELLA:

SPIKING GAS PRICES—How many times have we read this story and the grab bag of excuses why Californians are the hardest hit? The season of gasoline blends and summer traveling, the state's distance from southern refineries, mechanical malfunctions, and on and on. Oh, did I forget price gouging?

From the San Jose Mercury News:

California gas prices are spiking again, what’s going on?

Pain at the pump: Bay Area gas prices at least $2 more per gallon than national average

By Kristin j. Bender

It just might be time to buy an electric vehicle. Or a bike.

Gas prices are spiking again in the Bay Area — as much as 20 to 30 cents a gallon higher than the California average and at least $2 a gallon more than the rest of the country, according to the latest data from the American Automobile Association (AAA).

The national average on Friday was $3.67 a gallon, compared to the Golden State’s $5.45, the highest in the U.S., according to AAA.

Bay Area drivers who are sometimes stuck paying close to $6 a gallon said they are suffering and finding alternate ways to get around.

Frank Auguston filled his tank at a Chevron gas station in Danville where prices spilled over $6 a gallon Wednesday.

“Gas is stupid expensive,” he said.

Linda Franklin was similarly annoyed.

“I’m seriously thinking about buying an EV,” she said while putting gas in her Mazda at a Chevron station in San Jose on Wednesday. “I can’t afford these prices with my commute to Walnut Creek.”

But why does opening your wallet at the gas station become more painful during certain times of the year, and what is driving the recent fuel spike?

“Gasoline prices tend to rise in the spring, just like they dip in the fall and the winter, usually due to demand. As the weather gets nicer and the days longer in the spring heading into summer, gasoline prices tend to rise as more people hit the road,” said Andrew Gross, AAA spokesperson in an email.

Gross said spring is also the time where gasoline is switched from winter blend to summer blend, which is more expensive to refine but helps keep air quality cleaner.

“And then you have to take into account location. The West Coast is what many consider an oil island in that it is far from the main oil production centers of Texas, Oklahoma and the Gulf Coast and those mega refineries down there as well,” Gross said. “And west of the Rockies it’s more challenging to build pipelines, so you tend to move product by rail and truck more than say east of the Rockies. So you also have higher distribution cost that factor in as well.”

While California saw record gas prices in the fall of 2022 when the state average was $6.42 a gallon, the California Energy Commission said the price of crude oil, which is the biggest driver of gas prices, is higher than at any other point this year.

But there’s more to the story.

Tom Klosa, the head of energy analysis at the Oil Price Information Service, said the Bay Area is ground zero when it comes to supply and demand, which has been impacted by recent refinery closures.

In 2020, Marathon closed its refinery in the Bay Area, and over the last year Phillips 66 stopped processing crude oil at Arroyo Grande in San Luis Obispo and Rodeo in Contra Costa County, Klosa said.

“Both companies idled their refineries and are concentrating on supplying renewable fuels such as renewable diesel and sustainable aviation fuel. Neither is making gasoline, and that leaves the area without a safety net. Should one of the remaining refineries (Chevron Richmond, Valero Benicia or PBF Martinez) have issues, supply can become very challenging,” Klosa said.

Another component of high fuel prices is the state’s high gas tax.

California has the highest gas tax in the country at 68 cents per gallon, compared to 39 cents for the national average, according to the American Energy Alliance.

The state also has a cap-and-trade program and low-carbon fuel standard that adds roughly another 46 cents a gallon, according to the group.

Last spring, the state promised Californians some protection at the pump when the California Gas Price Gouging and Transparency Law was signed into law by Gov. Gavin Newsom. The governor said it would protect Californians from gas price gouging by creating an independent watchdog to root out potential gouging and authorizing the California Energy Commission to penalize the oil industry for wrongdoings.

Newsom in November accused “Big Oil” of raking in “huge profits” last summer while gas prices spiked and said that “we’re continuing to hold them accountable with the new tools from our gas price gouging law.” But it remains to be seen how the new Division of Petroleum Market Oversight will affect gas prices.

California Energy Commission spokeswoman Lindsay Buckley said the division is investigating market activity and refinery maintenance schedules and that the commission this year will consider a profit cap to moderate price spikes. She attributed recent gas price spikes to refinery maintenance and spot market activity.

San Jose resident Moses Jackson, who was walking near San Jose’s Rose Garden on Wednesday, said that he now does his errands on foot because fueling up his Chevy truck is just too costly.

“I walk two to three miles a day because of high gas prices,” he said. “When is it going to end? People are hurting. I’m hurting.”

SO I'M 90: WHAT'S NEXT? The Country Store and The Boonville Hotel!

In my article on Rebooting Boont Berry I mentioned other places of commerce as a contrast and a friend of mine noted I left out “The Country Store” and at first I thought she meant Emil Rossi's Hardware Store - which I had included. I puzzled a bit and realized she was referencing a place I'd forgotten about (across from the Boonville Hotel!) which was also an eatery: My oversight needs correcting.

So sometime later I went in and talked to Favi then to her sister Laura. While there I noticed a steady stream of customers and pleasant exchanges common amongst repeat customers. Laura said when they took over about five years ago, it took some considerable time and effort [and an extensive menu] to build their clientele. So I returned a couple days later and had a very enjoyable breakfast with toast that seemed to be “pan fried.” (I'll need to ask about that). The bread and the entire breakfast was delicious. As with Mosswood Market, they had a Latino orientation and enjoy a family connection with the Food Truck which can be seen parked in the Fairgrounds Lot adjacent to the Rodeo/Football stands.

It's not that I had never been there, but it was during the days when Glad (David Severn's daughter) and her partner were where Mosswood now holds forth and Boont Berry was down the street. 

Now a little bit of historical narrative comes to mind. It turns out that Burt at Boont Berry and Glad at Glad's were trying to make ends meet so to speak and one of Burt's employees (and his partner) rented the place The General Store now occupies and went into competition with my two friends which didn't seem right to me. It was hard on all three of them. After that couple left someone else came in for a while, then five years ago Laura and her family came in, but my habit had been firmly established between Boont Berry and Mosswood.

While I was there I was able to see the folks worked well together. When finished, I crossed the street and went to the Boonville Hotel and Restaurant where I've had some even longer associations (decades). Without mentioning names I was called in to help the several owners prepare for what became the sale of the building. I had never been inside, and upon my first entry I was greeted by a very long bar that looked to be from a movie set (that feature no longer exists). Even though the place while captivating it seemed to be in bad repair.

Since then the hotel has been restored. I've eaten there with spouse and family, friends numerous times, either for a meal or simple beverage (beer). I've also enjoyed their pre-Christmas benefit and seen the Hotel become one of our admired places of comfort. For the last nearly forty years (38) Johnny Schmitt has been the owner and current founder. Through his diligent efforts the Hotel has become a centerpiece of our community. It now has 17 rooms and according to the very kind receptionist (whose name escapes me as my deadline approaches) said of the hotel: “It's about people, food, drink and a well-made bed.” I Believe accommodations are available Thursday-Monday with a bar menu 4-6 p.m.

GOODBYE AVA

Editor,

This is the end, the paper edition of the Mighty AVA is going down, and with a thousand subscribers and casual buyers of the paper here and there, a whole lot of people might have read my essays and stories here over the years. (What really got me going was when I begged the Editor to put me on the masthead in 2020, which then compelled me to send in one a week for about a year, my dream gig.)

The first one was in 2003 called “Butterfly Bombs at Reggae,” for which I received a check for $25, the photocopy of which is still pinned to my wall proving I am a professional writer. (Although the publication of that story here in Southern Humboldt’s environmental hotbed pretty much ensured I’d never get laid in this town again.) 

I could say thank you readers, you could also say thank you Paul, though I’m pretty sure my actual impact on your life was zero. Who are you people? (I have a subpoena wending its way through the courts attempting to get your names and addresses from the AVA so I can thank you personally, but Bruce sent Mark to fight it as once again the Major does the dirty work.)

Locally a few friends and neighbors gave me the thumbs up over the years, including JD, a naturalist with flying squirrels gliding around his parking lot, who misses Jerry Philbrick’s rants most of all. (He distinguished himself by inviting me to dinner one night to meet an amazing goddess with big issues, disproving my theory that people will give you anything, except their home-canned goods or a woman. Thanks again JD, and I’m still waiting for round two, buddy.)

Proud, remembered for his exuberant and joyous smile while dancing at the hippie boogies back in the day, is another local subscriber who told me he liked a story once, as well as Richard Geinger, the resolute environmentalist known as a “hard core hippie” in the seventies for refusing to receive any government assistance, not even food stamps. 

And then there is Rod, another avid reader of the AVA, who saw my SSI advice column and started to apply and I hope he’s getting his well-deserved alternative retirement pay by now. (I guess I won’t see Dave as much, proprietor at Redway Liquors with that skeptical grin, where I picked up three extras whenever I got a story in, and have collated a hundred into a couple copies of a homemade book.)

I did get a few reactions on the website over the years: there was one semi-embarrassing comment from a woman, who I had mentioned meeting at “The Farm” in Tennessee in 1977, in one of my favorite stories called “The Hundred Dollar Car.” (I had referred to her as “slightly obnoxious,” and her daughter Persephone, still living in Mendo, spotted the reference and notified Mama Rita, who called me out on that callous comment.) 

Soon after that an ex-lover from Texas, circa 1993, found me at theava.com, made a few poignant comments, and then disappeared. (Bonnie was my genius girlfriend who had looked at me in annoyance whenever I tried to offer my non-genius suggestions about how to construct the straw bale house we were planning to build on her hundred acres of scrublands outside Lockhart. That rundown town, her house had holes in the floor, as well as others in Central Texas, has since been invaded and gentrified by young refugees who can’t afford nearby Austin anymore.)

So the paper edition of the AVA is leaving us, as well as the beloved eighty-four year old SoHum icon Ed Denson, who died with his boots on at home last week in Alderpoint.

On the plus side it was actually some work to get through the whole thing before the next issue arrived the following week, especially when already engrossed by a good book, which was most of the time so the pressure’s off now. (If there’s a long story I want to read on the website I’ll do what I already do with interesting-looking online articles: print it off and read it at my leisure.)

The AVA will finally catch up with the 21st century, go completely online, and leave us old-timers behind. Well, I still have a sub till the end of the year, the AVA will keep chugging along, but if Major Mark Scaramella ever stops covering Mendocino government does that mean it’s no longer dysfunctional?

I’m waiting for the tears, what, not even one? (And I was in what I called “The Crying Cult,” for a while back in ‘73 when I was nineteen and that was a story: I had met Pam in Cambridge, we hitchhiked to “The Center For The Living Force” in upstate New York, when we got there a game of naked volleyball was going on in the front yard, and we joined right in.)

Congratulations Editor Bruce Anderson: I just read your mission statement from the first issue forty years ago and, by God, you kept to it all the way. (Maybe something interesting and unexpected will happen.)

Paul Modic

Redway

This week is National Dispatcher Appreciation Week. We want to take the time to recognize and honor the hard work and dedication of our dispatchers who play a crucial role in emergency response and public safety. Their tireless efforts behind the scenes often go unnoticed, but they are truly the heartbeat of getting help to those in need.

This year we provided our dispatchers with a "Dispatcher Survival Kit'! 

Lifesavers for all the times they had to be one, Starburst for all the times they need a little burst of energy, Gum for all the times we have to stick together, Tootsie Rolls for all the times they have to "roll with the punches", Peppermint Patties for all the times they have to keep their cool, Starbucks cards because coffee is life, and Laffy Taffy because laughter is a great stress reliever!

"NEW ONE'S" ART SHOW CLOSING PARTY

Friday April 26th 5-7 pm

@ Cobalt Gallery

430-432 N Main St

Fort Bragg

Stop by and take a last look at my show before it comes down at the end of April, say hello and enjoy some light refreshments and live music by Christopher Cisper.

All original oil pastel paintings, ceramics, acrylic paintings on redwood roofing shingles and handmade patchwork cloaks.

Hope to see lots of you there!

— Jacquelyn Cisper

45th ANNUAL RHODO SHOW

Back for its 45th year, the John Druecker Memorial Rhododendron Show is happening May 4 and 5 at Mendocino Coast Botanic Garden. 

This juried show is quite possibly the largest in California with a typical show displaying more than 800 entries and filling the big tent with cascades of color and fragrance.

Regular admission rates apply the days of the show. Tour the gardens to see their own collection of over 124 species, and over 1,000 blooming plants from May thru June.

NEW, UPDATED AND CORRECTED INFORMATION ON CHAIRMAN IRV SUTLEY MEMORIALS

Sisters and Brothers,

A Zoom gathering celebrating the life of Chairman Irv Sutley will be held on Sunday, April 28 (not Saturday, as I previously wrote), starting at 11 am Pacific time. Here is a new link to the Zoom meeting: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/84953582433

A gathering for Irv's friends and comrades will be held on Saturday, May 18, at Finley Community Park, 2060 West College Avenue, Santa Rosa, from 1 to 4 pm. A map is available at the legacy site under events for Irv (link below), where you can also see photos, read an obituary written by Toni Novak, and post stories and photos. https://everloved.com/life-of/irv-sutley

TIME WAITS FOR NO ONE; PALACE RE-OPENS 

by Tommy Wayne Kramer

Nostalgia and sentiment are grand emotions and I suspect most people devoted to the Bring Back the Palace movement are deep in the throes of rosy memories of lovely days gone by. I get it. 

But our well-meaning friends forget that if the hotel doors were to swing wide for a Grande Reopening it would only solve one problem, and the lesser one at that: You’d still be old. 

Yes, a refurbished Palace might look fresh, shiny and new but you certainly won’t, unless you think the last 40 years haven’t aged you. (Advice: wait 40 more years before you look in the mirror again.) 

Let’s pretend the Palace has re-opened and old friends have arrived at the front door for an evening of memories and, of course, dinner. 

The visitors are LUNA and STONEY, back-to-the-landers who in 1976 built part of a chicken coop and grew some tomato bushes before fleeing to town and becoming school teachers. They have fond memories of the Palace since they last visited it in 1984.

The conversation:

LUNA: Oh my! Everything looks so nice, just like I remember it. I hope the night manager came back now that it’s re-opened. Kenny. Wasn’t it Kenny Parcell?

STONEY: Huh? Only one I remember is the cute waitress, Karen-something. Remember Karen?

LUNA: You’re thinking of Karen Cassette. And that handsome French Maitre de? George d’Monsieur I think. Wait! What happened to the mirror that was over there? Where’d the mirror go?

STONEY: And the moose head above the bar. That was my favorite thing in the whole place.

LUNA: Now dear, the moose is at the Bluebird down in Hopland.

STONEY: Is that music? They should turn it up. I can hardly hear it. And oh excuse me, but is there a Depends dispenser in the men’s room? Oops sorry pal, thought you worked here.

WAITER arrives: May I bring drinks to the table while you look at the menu?

LUNA: I’ll have a Harvey Wallbanger.

STONEY: And how about a pint of Red Tail Ale for me?

WAITER: Uhhh Harry Wall-what? And didn’t Red Tail go out of business? Like back when I was going to Frank Zeek?

LUNA: Oh.

STONEY: Right. Maybe just a couple wine coolers? Bartles & Jaymes?

WAITER: I can check, but . . . . (departs)

LUNA: So what are you thinking?

STONEY Mmm, the steak I guess. Got a coupon in my wallet, should save us some money. Might be we both have to order steaks to get the discount. Lemme look. (Reaches for wallet, begins rifling through it). 

WAITER returns, says wine coolers unavailable.

LUNA: Well then how about sweet red wine in some Sprite?

STONEY: Here it is! Got it! From the old Mendocino Grapevine; I cut it out a few years ago. (Presents old yellowed clipping it to waiter.)

WAITER: What’s this? What’s the Grapevine? Umm, it says here it’s for The Broiler and you get half-off a steak when you buy the first one full price. Wow: $8.95 for a steak, baked potato and salad. What’s a baked potato?

STONEY: Oh my God! The noise! Ouch!! Oh my aching hearing aids! What’s all that racket?

WAITER: The band. We have live music back in the Annie Oakley Room. It’s an oldies group. 

LUNA: Oldies? Oh I love classic rock. Do they play Eagles and Neil Diamond. We can boogie!

STONEY: We can do some coke on the bar, ha ha. 

WAITER: Actually it’s AFI. I don’t think they do stuff by the Eagles. It's a Ukiah band from back around 2010 or even longer. My sister used to like AFI when I was little.

STONEY: Hey kid, pssst! My wife has a Zig Zag tattoo, but you’ll never guess where.

LUNA: Oh don’t you start, Stoney! That was 50 years ago! It looks like Lake Michigan now. Just be quiet!

STONEY: Yeahhh, maybe we should go. Sorry. How about The Broiler? I’ve got the coupon and it won’t be so noisy. Have a couple wine coolers. We’ll stop home first so I can change trousers, pick up some Depends.

LUNA: Let’s just stay home. I gotta get out of this lousy bra. 

LOVE AT THE BOONVILLE LODGE

She was standing on a barstool

Her big brown eyes bugged out

Hey, you with the cowboy hat

I clearly heard her shout

.

My knees began to tremble

When I realized that

I was the only one in the bar

Wearing a cowboy hat

.

I took a closer look at her

Which just made worse my fear

Her only two teeth didn't match up

And she was missing half an ear

.

Her nose hid her upper lip

Her forehead was wide and flat

Her giant breasts rested nicely

On three big rolls of fat

.

Underslung is the only word

I could find to describe her ass

The hair groing on her legs

Was like a field of unmowed grass

.

Her hair was stiff and scraggly

The color of moldy hay

I stepped back through the open door 

And turned to run away

.

She must have anticipated

That I would try to leave

She left her stool and in two long strides

Had ahold of my shirt sleeve

.

Where do you think you're going

My little lover boy

The night is young and for the next few hours

You're going to be my toy

.

I'd like to help you out dear girl

But ut wouldn't be quite fair

You see, I ve got these little bugs 

Living in my pubic hair

.

She said, don't worry baby

As she dragged me to the bar

I've got a big old can of bug spray

Right out in my car

— Ernie Pardini

CATCH OF THE DAY, Sunday, April 21, 2024

GILBERT ALFORD, Covelo. Battery, parole violation.

ROMAN ALVAREZ-ESPINOZA, Boonville. DUI. 

JULIE BOND, Ukiah. Paraphernalia, probation revocation.

ANGEL CABALLERO-GARCIA, Gualala. Protective order violation.

GUSTAVO CARBAJAL, Cloverdale/Ukiah. DUI.

KENTON COLBERG JR., Willits. Disorderly conduct-alcohol.

LYUBOV GALVIN, San Francisco/Ukiah. Trespassing, resisting.

JEFFERY HOCKETT, Fort Bragg. Failure to register as transient, failure to appear.

MICHAEL MARTIN, Fort Bragg. DUI-alcohol&drugs, reckless driving, child neglect.

GERARDO MARTINEZ-AGUSTIN, Fort Bragg. Leaving scene of accident with property damage, resisting, failure to appear.

NICOLAS MARTINEZ-LOPEZ, Ukiah. Domestic abuse.

DEBRA SEELEY, Redwood Valley. Grand theft, acquiring access card without consent with intent to sell.

MITCH CLOGG:

I'm in a nursing home in Pacifica until the surgeon saving my foot has done her work and cleared me to go back to Mendocino. I see her weekly or bi-weekly and spend the rest of my time here. Plus we have covid, so I'm confined to my bed. Notice how I don't use bad words to say my frustration, nor to complain that this borrowed computer has just a teensy bit of difference in keyboard layout and in the infinite ways it does stuff compared to my 20th-century Dell. Must be something in the meds they serve me, morning, noon and night, morning, noon and motherfucking night. Ahem. Covid makes me cough occasionally.

Were I a young stud, who drove his late son's Audi TT like a race-car driver, I would surely drive the 200 miles between here and home. Had I my long-ago airplane--Lord!

I am not young. When drowsy I may fall asleep without warning--so much as a yawn--and the deer-struck Audi declines under a leaky tarp awaiting the ten Grand it would take anyway. I'd probably fly because autopilot keeps you going till you run out of gas, and I'd wake up before that. Our present rolling stock is a car that runs mostly and a likewise truck, neither competent to shuttle me back and forth.

So here I stay, on the VA's dime. It would be cheaper for them to Uber me up and down, but gummint AI ain't there yet.

Anyway, this situation offers tons of stories, but I'm keeping it short. Getting here was like the labors of Hercules. It feels like a tenuous connection. I wanna push Post and see what happens.

MELANIA’S TRIALS

by Maureen Dowd

Outside my office, there is a picture of the Slovenian Sphinx visiting the Egyptian Sphinx, taken during a 2018 photo shoot in Giza, nine months after Melania Trump was blindsided by the steamy news about her husband and Stormy Daniels.

The pairing evokes the riddle of Melania: How much can she put up with from a husband who betrayed and humiliated her in the basest possible ways?

As Donald Trump’s hush-money trial begins, we’ll be reminded of what a heel he is. And like Hillary before her, Melania will have to hold her head high as she stands by her Lothario. Melania will also put political and personal prospects above mere resentment. (She doesn’t want Donald broke and in jail.)

As her White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham wrote in her memoir, Melania wanted no Hillary comparisons. When the Other Women stories broke, Melania told Grisham she wanted to drive to Air Force One ahead of Trump.

“I do not want to be like Hillary Clinton, do you understand what I mean?” Melania said, according to Grisham. “She walked to Marine One holding the hands with her husband after Monica news and it did not look good.”

Hillary was able to use her husband’s infidelities to redefine herself with a more sympathetic aura and slingshot to a Senate seat.

This trial may help cement Melania’s image as a Trump, a loyal citizen of Trumplandia who thinks the system is rigged against her husband, and who will stand with Donald as he tries to regain the Oval — no matter his perfidies toward her and others.

As Katie Rogers wrote in The Times, Melania shares Donald’s view that the trial is unfair and the prosecution is a disgrace, engaging in a proceeding that is, itself, tantamount to election interference.

When the Stormy story broke, Grisham thought Melania would storm.

But the presence of anger was conveyed by absence. Melania, who rarely visited her East Wing office anyhow, holed up in her suite and at the spa in Mar-a-Lago, a satiny confinement. This most elusive of first ladies became even more elusive, skipping dinners with her husband on the patio; striking references to him and avoiding the word “wife” in tweets; dropping her plan to accompany Donald to Davos; posting a photo of herself on the arm of a handsome military aide; taking a separate car to her husband’s first State of the Union address.

Melania must have grit her perfect teeth through Stormy’s “Make America Horny Again” strip tour, her tell-all in In Touch magazine saying she could describe Donald’s anatomy, and a cringey “60 Minutes” interview.

Stormy, a star of “Sexbots: Programmed for Pleasure” and the director of “Lust on the Prairie,” told Anderson Cooper that she had asked about Melania during her condom-free liaison at a celebrity golf tournament at Lake Tahoe in 2006: “And she brushed it aside, said: ‘Oh yeah, yeah, you know, don’t worry about that. We don’t even —. We have separate rooms and stuff’.”

Lovely.

So far, Melania has not deigned to play Maureen Dean, sitting behind her man in court every day for support. (Ivanka has shunned the courtroom, too.) Melania has long called Stormy “Donald’s problem,” noting to Grisham: “He got himself into this mess. He can fix it by himself.”

She is, by all accounts, angry that she has to be dragged through this X-rated circus again, especially while she is still mourning the death of her mother.

What could be more absurd and hypocritical than the putative Republican nominee selling Bibles and promoting an America with draconian abortion laws during his trial over a $130,000 payment to keep a porn star from telling voters about their dalliance?

Melania surely recoils from the prospect of testifying, which Justice Juan Merchan suggested may happen. He has also ruled that jurors may hear about Trump’s affair with Karen McDougal, but not about how it continued while Melania was pregnant.

The former first lady, who is helping her son prepare for college, perhaps at New York University, does not want Barron’s name thrown around in a New York court. Trump made Barron an issue, asking for a day off for his son’s high school graduation.

Signaling that she will be part of the campaign, Melania is headlining a Log Cabin Republican event at Mar-a-Lago this weekend. In an interview with Fox News Digital previewing her remarks before that L.G.B.T. group, Melania said that America “must unite.” It’s not the first time her message has been at odds with her husband’s behavior.

As first lady, Melania clearly styled herself after Jackie Kennedy, wearing high-fashion clothes that seemed to be not only art but also armor and maintaining poise through a parade of indignities.

“Like Jackie, Melania foregrounded her role as mother, and that enabled her to keep a degree of distance,” Dawn Tripp, the author of the upcoming novel “Jackie,” told me. “Both had that guarded, sphinx-like quality. But Jackie used that quality to maintain her independence from her husband’s administration and used her power in public and private ways. Melania often simply seems complicit in Trump’s irresponsibility.”

Complicit, to borrow from the “S.N.L.” skit about Ivanka, the perfume of Trump women.

GOOGLE TACTICS SHOW ITS REAL PURPOSE

Google’s announcement that it will test the removal of links to news sites for some California users is a shameful attempt to fend off legislation that would force the search giant to pay for the news content that fuels its business.

Assembly Bill 886, also known as the California Journalism Preservation Act, would require Google to pay news publishers for using news content on its platform. The bill passed the Assembly last year and is currently being considered by the state Senate Judiciary Committee. 

In a blog post, Google calls the CJPA a “link tax” that would require Google to pay for “simply connecting Californians to news article.” Google also claims that over the past two decades it has “provided substantial support to help news publishers navigate the changing digital landscape and innovate.” 

No one should be fooled by this. 

Google made more than $300 billion last year, most of it from advertising it sells using content it did not create or pay for. In its early days, Google sent lots of traffic for news publishers, but in recent years not so much as it seeks to keep people on its site where Google makes the money. 

This is why Google’s revenue keeps growing while news publishers — and not just print newspapers — can barely keep the lights on. In fact, according to data from SimilarWeb, more than half of Google searches for top news terms end without a link being clicked. In other words, more than half the time, Google doesn’t actually connect anyone to the actual source of the news. 

While Google seems to believe that news should be free — at least to Google — we in the news business are painfully aware that professional news gathering is expensive. And to be clear: News is a business. Google may not want to acknowledge it, but it’s big business for Google. That’s why news was the first thing that Google launched after search and why “news” is the first tab after “all” on the search results page. 

It’s why Google is testing what would happen if it removed links to news from its site for some California users. For the record, Google tested removing the news tab altogether in February but apparently didn’t like the results, announcing that it would not be removing the news tab for all users. 

Maybe that’s because news is a big part of Google’s business. 

According to a recent study, a fair payment from Google for its use of U.S. news content would be $10 billion to $12 billion a year. 

Google obviously does not want to pay that. 

In a Senate hearing in December, Google’s representative said that news publishers earn $2 billion a year in advertising revenue from traffic Google refers to those publishers. That begs the question as to whether Google itself should actually pay anything at all for the content upon which it has built its extremely lucrative advertising business. 

Of course, Google’s stranglehold on digital advertising is the subject of an antitrust case filed by the U.S. Department of Justice and a coalition of states, which allege Google has a monopoly on digital advertising and has used its control of the market to steer advertisers to its own services and sites while depressing the revenues of publishers by manipulating pricing. 

The announcement that Google will suppress news for some Californians comes from the same playbook. Here is Google using its command of search — it controls 91.5 percent of the global search market, according to Semrush — to intimidate publishers and the public alike by threatening to withhold news. 

Make no mistake about it: Content, especially news, is the cornerstone of Google’s business model, and Google’s criticism of legislation that would force it to pay for the materials it uses is a naked attempt to preserve its revenue streams by intimidating not only the media but also the public that wants to be connected to news online. 

This kind of anticompetitive behavior is exactly why legislation like the CJPA is needed.

(Ukiah Daily Journal Editorial)

THE USE AND MISUSE OF A "CAN"

by David Bacon

Shipping containers have deep meaning for the working people of the San Francisco Bay Area. First and foremost, they're the material basis of the work of the longshore. From miles away, you can see the container cranes on the Oakland waterfront. The unions for the waterside workers, Locals 10 and 34 of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union, just won a long battle to keep one of San Francisco's legendary, or notorious, families, John Fisher (think, The Gap) from turning the Oakland waterfront into a huge condo development with a ballpark on the side. The union and its allies argues that without the room for the containers and cranes, the waterfront would die, and with it, the economic life of the city.

The containers have historic meaning as well, which makes the workers' defense of them a kind of bitter irony. In the days before the containers and cranes, cargo was loaded and unloaded using many, many workers for each ship. Even today the union's symbol is the cargo hook, used then to catch the cargo net and swing it into place. In the 1960s, however, the union agreed that the containerization of the waterfront couldn't be stopped, and that it had no choice but to bargain for the terms under which it would take place. Workers got a pay guarantee, and they still are so important to the movement of cargo that if they stop, the whole shipping system shudders to a halt. But the price was jobs, and the container meant that only a tenth of the workers who worked the docks then now work them today.

With so many containers, or cans, as the workers call them, floating through the Bay Area, it didn't take long to see them put to other purposes as well. A lawyer friend has his office in a pile of containers not far from the port, welded together to make a building. Around the corner from my house is the home of an architect couple, who put two containers in their back yard for their home office. When I visited longshore workers in Basra not long after the U.S. occupation started, I saw containers used by workers for housing in the wake of the enormous destruction. Containers for housing is an idea floated in this country too, as a way to give shelter to people living on the sidewalk.

This year Berkeley administrators of the University of California gave the shipping container an entirely new meaning - the wall. Two years ago the community in and around People's Park had repulsed the University's previous attempt to expel the public and grab back the city block on which the Park stands. But activists pushed down a chain link fence, and then disabled the huge construction vehicles brought in to reduce trees and structures to dirt and rubble. This year the University would not be defeated so easily. On _____, in the dead of night, police reoccupied People's Park. After the people living in the park were removed, trucks brought in dozens of cans, and a wall of containers, stacked double high, was erected around the park.

Perhaps the University can name the wall the James Rector Memorial. Or since they say they intend to build student housing on the site, it can be called the James Rector Dormitory. Either way, the University can acknowledge, for the first time, that the price of taking the land for the community in 1972 was Rector's death. As cops from the state and surrounding cities fought students and community activists who wanted the land for a park, and tear gas filled Telegraph Avenue in the heart of the student ghetto, one of them trained his sights on Rector, as he stood on a building roof watching the battle going on below. He fired, and Rector died.

There is no James Rector Hall. But today there are many buildings on the UC campus named after rich people and those who serve them well. Giannini Hall memorializes AP Giannini, California's premier financier and founder of the Bank of America, while the Hearst Memorial Mining Building honors the ultra-wealthy newspaper owner. According to author Tony Platt, former UC President Benjamin Ide Wheeler argued for suppressing the birthrate of "inferior" peoples, and his name now graces Wheeler Hall. The Lawrence laboratory, where research helped produce the first atom bomb, is named for the scientist who headed that catastrophic project. Gordon Sproul, as UC President, oversaw the McCarthy loyalty oath purge that led to firing 40 professors and got his name attached to Sproul Hall, where 800 students (myself among them) were arrested in 1964's Free Speech Movement.

Since the university's reoccupation of People's Park, a group of active opponents marches from a local junion high school to the container wall every week. Seeing their banners beneath the towering cans, the marchers can seem small by comparison. But out in the port, where the containers have their true value and usage, people moving them also seem small. Yet there is a power in work and protest that comes from human endeavor, and can bend a container to its will. The marchers may yet overcome the scandalous use UC President ______ has put to these objects, whose tradition and dignity she has ignored.

The People's Park Council (https://www.peoplespark.org/wp/) "calls on the University to honor the recognition of People's Park as a nationally significant site, included on the National Register of Historic Places [and] to acknowledge the cultural and environmental importance of the park, returning it to the community that maintains it ... People's Park stands as a beacon of community empowerment, environmental stewardship, and social justice. To fight climate chaos, we need all the green space we can find."

OPENING A WINDOW INTO OPAQUE STATE GOVERNMENT 

by Dan Walters

When I began covering California politics 49 years ago, digital technology was in its infancy and the Capitol ran on paper.

If you wanted to know what was on the Legislature’s agenda, you visited the “bill room” in the Capitol basement and asked for the daily files of each legislative house. If you spotted a bill you wanted to read, it meant another trip to the bill room. If you wanted a committee analysis that explained a bill in plain English rather than legalese, you walked into the committee office and ask for a copy.

If you wanted to see what was happening to the bill in committee, you went to the hearing room, waited for the bill to be taken up, watched the proceedings and noted the vote. If the bill was “on call,” meaning the voting process was suspended until later, you had to wait for the final tally.

If you wanted to know what was happening to a bill on the Assembly and Senate floors, you sat in the back of the chambers, waited for it to be announced and then listened to the debate and the vote, which also could be “on call” for hours.

If you wanted to know what money interest groups involved in the bill were donating to legislators, you had to traipse to the secretary of state’s offices and leaf through reams of paper financial reports.

Monitoring all of these aspects of the lawmaking process — and more — consumed immense amounts of time, which limited how deeply journalists could delve into thousands of bills each year.

Fortunately, technology finally — albeit slowly — penetrated the Capitol. Bills and other bits of paper became available online. Some committee hearings and floor debates could be monitored via “Cal Channel,” financed by cable television companies, but only one meeting at the time. The Legislature controlled what would be televised and sometimes blacked out controversial issues.

Cal Channel disappeared a few years ago, creating a void. But the Legislature did make its meetings accessible by internet video and audio feeds with archives that could be tapped. Campaign finance and lobbyist activity reports in the secretary of state’s office could also be accessed online, although the system is clunky and sorely needs an upgrade.

This month, digital access to California politics took a quantum leap. CalMatters, my employer, launched Digital Democracy, an immense, constantly updated and user-friendly gold mine of political data. It uses the latest technology and artificial intelligence to make available “every word spoken in hearings, every dollar donated and every vote cast in a database that informs our journalism and profiles each of the state’s 120 legislators.”

It is immensely useful to CalMatters journalists. CalMatters recently published an article delving into a million votes cast by legislators over the years and revealed that very few “no” votes are ever recorded. It would have been impossible without the Digital Democracy archive.

However, Digital Democracy is not ours alone. It can be used, free of charge, not only by journalists for other outlets but members of the public. Dave Lesher, the founding editor of CalMatters, stepped down from that position last year to lead the Digital Democracy project.

“As a journalist who has been watching the California state government for nearly 30 years,” Lesher says, “it’s clear to me that the politicians and the decision-making process have become more opaque.

“The transparency created by Digital Democracy is about how the people we elect are weighing the special interests and the public interest when they make important decisions about our education, environment, health care, housing, transportation, prisons, taxes and more.”

Amen.

(CalMatters.org)

HOW A BAY AREA FAMILY SAVED THE CHILDREN OF SYNANON

by Katie Dowd

The children often arrived in the early morning, hungry, afraid and tired after the long hike over the West Marin hills to the Gambonini ranch. They came with stories of beatings and rotten food, some so extreme that they strained credulity.

“I couldn’t believe it, what the kids were saying,” Doris Gambonini said in 1984, “until Alvin was beaten.”

For five years, the Gambonini family’s lives were upended by their new neighbors: the drug rehab-turned-violent cult Synanon. Its hundreds of members turned the quiet rural area around Tomales Bay into a war zone in the 1970s. 

Synanon was the brainchild of Chuck Dederich, an alcoholic and one-time member of Alcoholics Anonymous. Using some of the principles he learned in AA, he started Synanon in Santa Monica in the late 1950s. At the time, it was revolutionary: Very few, if any, facilities existed for people with drug addiction — let alone a place where people could live full time. 

For a while, it seemed to work. People got sober, and word started to spread, leading to glowing news coverage of the nonprofit. But as Dederich’s power began to grow, so did his dictatorial control of the group. A key component of Synanon was what Dederich dubbed the “Game.” Members were forced each week to participate in a screaming match where people were told to air out their grievances without censoring. The Game became immensely popular, even gaining celebrity participants. Synanon grew farther from its mission as a rehab center — drawing scrutiny about its nonprofit status as it took on members without addiction issues.

The results of the Game were hurtful and traumatic, particularly when children were forced to participate. And its primary boundary, that no physical violence was allowed, loosened over time. Through the Game, Dederich coerced married couples into divorcing and pressured men to get vasectomies and women to get abortions.

Like many cult leaders, Dederich also wanted to isolate his followers. In 1964, Synanon began building facilities around the old Marconi wireless radio station in Marshall. Much to the displeasure of locals, who were primarily working-class ranchers, hundreds of people moved in. They added an airstrip, firehouse, clinic and school with the goal of being completely self-sufficient. At its height, half of Synanon’s worldwide membership of 1,500 people lived in Marin County.

The remote 3,000-acre ranch soon became the center of some of Synanon’s worst abuses. In the docuseries “The Synanon Fix,” airing on HBO, adult survivors of the cult explained how they were taken from their parents and sent to Marshall.

“By 1971, it had been decided that the kids should go into the school at seven months so that they wouldn’t attach to the parents,” Jady Dederich Montgomery, daughter of Chuck Dederich, said on the show.

“One minute, you were a happy-go-lucky kid,” recounted Josh Silvers, who grew up in Synanon, “and then you were in the military.”

Now-adult survivors of Synanon’s schools told “The Synanon Fix” that beatings, verbal abuse and intense physical labor were commonplace. Because of Synanon’s positive reputation with the general public, some juvenile court judges sent more children to the group for “rehabilitation.” It’s been cited as the beginning of “troubled teen” centers, a multibillion-dollar industry rife with abuse.

For some, the trauma irreparably changed them. Former member Norm Johnson watched as his nephew became a shell of himself. “He was so brutalized that by the time he left, he could not fit into society,” Johnson told the show. His nephew later died of an intentional heroin overdose.

“And that’s the result of Synanon,” Johnson said.

As physical violence escalated in Tomales Bay, children began escaping. When they climbed over the hill, the first ranch they hit belonged to Alvin and Doris Gambonini. The Gamboninis were born and raised in the area, and they were well-known and well-loved in the community, often hosting dances in their barn. At first, the family had a cordial relationship with their Synanon neighbors. But soon, things turned frosty. When children reached the Gambonini farm, the family provided them with food, a phone to call loved ones and money to buy bus tickets home. This infuriated the Synanon leadership. 

Things came to a head on June 9, 1975. The Gamboninis and their children Robert and Alvina were returning to their ranch when they were met by a mob of Synanon members on Marshall-Petaluma Road. At least 30 people began banging on their vehicle, trying to pull Alvin out of the driver’s seat. “I wrapped my arm around the steering wheel, and they couldn’t get me out,” Alvin said in a TV interview after the attack. 

“I can still see it to this day,” son Robert Gambonini, then 15, told “The Synanon Fix.” “Looking back, it was a sea of people. People with flashlights and posts and whatever they were carrying were just trying to get into the car.”

Robert took off running to the nearest neighbor, who called the police. It took agonizingly long for sheriff’s deputies to make it out to the remote farm, however, and the Synanon members managed to push the car into a ditch with the Gamboninis inside. Finally, after nearly an hour, deputies arrived to find Synanon members blocking off both ends of Marshall-Petaluma Road. Three people were arrested and charged with assaulting Alvin, who suffered facial and dental injuries from being repeatedly punched.

“Doris screamed all night, the kids screamed all night,” Alvin told the Petaluma Argus-Courier in 1984. “It was like a nightmare.”

Despite the assault, the Gamboninis didn’t stop helping escapees. They estimated they had helped 40 children flee the cult over a five-year period. 

Synanon’s turn to violence and intimidation was its downfall. In 1978, members placed a live rattlesnake in the mailbox of a lawyer pursuing action against the cult. The lawyer was bitten, and only a timely dose of antidote saved his life. Later that year, Chuck Dederich was arrested on suspicion of conspiring to kill the lawyer, effectively marking the end of his chokehold on Synanon. By 1991, the group had dissolved entirely.

The former Synanon compound is now part of the California State Parks system. You can even stay on-site at the Lodge at Marconi, an “upscale coastal retreat” with 45 rooms.

Alvin died in 2005, followed by his wife Doris in 2014. The family still keeps letters written to the couple by children who found them in their darkest moment.

“Dear Mr. Gambonini,” reads one. “Thank you for helping me get home. Thank you for the hospitality of your family. You are the nicest man I ever met.”

SOMETIMES PEOPLE DON'T LIKE TO HEAR THE TRUTH…

I remember when I first starting digging into food and specifically how food is grown. What I found was that much of our modern diet, from the grocery store anyway, comes from the equivalent of an agricultural grow op. Fruits and vegetables grown and bred to be shipped across the world and to appear pretty, not be healthy.

What's happened as a result has been devastating to our food systems and resulted in subsequent sweeping food insecurity across the Western world.. The fruits and veg our grand parents ate growing up aren't what we eat now! There's a reason many of us are constantly seeking a snack or needing an afternoon bump to keep us feeling full. Our food just isn't as nutritionally dense as it used it be.

I hate saying that any fresh fruit and veg are "bad" but the fact of the matter is that our food is quantifiable LESS nutritionally dense than it was years ago. We're not getting the micro and phytonutrients that our bodies need - yes, believe it or not, you need more than macros: carbs, protein, and fat..

Unfortunately, what we're seeing simultaneously as our food system has degraded is a rise in corporate greed that's putting an even greater barrier (in some stores literal barriers, i think you know who I'm taking about...) between people and proper nutrition. And it's no secret that price plays a huge role as well, when a box of Kraft Dinner is the same price or a fraction of the price of a single fruit or veg something is terribly wrong.

But what's the answer? If the problem is systemic it means we need an overhaul and some people are doing just that.. Overhauling the system. If every, and I mean EVERY, community had a small farm or small gardens that we all shared with a community greenhouse how quickly could we eliminate the need for much of our imported foods from around the world? How quickly could be eliminate greedy grocery stores?

Sure we might need to ACTUALLY eat with the seasons - shocking I know! (yes that means no citrus and strawberries in December, if you're from our neck of the woods anyway!). But if people learn food preservation (freezing and canning) and how to store food like in a root cellar, again, like our grand parents did, we'll be one step closer to food sovereignty here in the west.

FORTNITE

by Taylor Swift

I was supposed to be sent away

But they forgot to come and get me

I was a functioning alcoholic

'Til nobody noticed my new aesthetic

All of this to say I hope you're okay

But you're the reason

And no one here's to blame

But what about your quiet treason?

.

Chorus:

And for a fortnight there, we were forever

Run into you sometimes, ask about the weather

Now you're in my backyard, turned into good neighbors

Your wife waters flowers, I wanna kill her

.

All my mornings are Mondays stuck in an endless February

I took the miracle move-on drug, the effects were temporary

And I love you, it's ruining my life

I love you, it's ruining my life

I touched you for only a fortnight

I touched you, but I touched you

.

Chorus:

And for a fortnight there, we were forever

Run into you sometimes, ask about the weather

Now you're in my backyard, turned into good neighbors

Your wife waters flowers, I wanna kill her

And for a fortnight there, we were together

Run into you sometimes, comment on my sweater

Now you're at the mailbox, turned into good neighbors

My husband is cheating, I wanna kill him

.

Bridge:

I love you, it's ruining my life

I love you, it's ruining my life

I touched you for only a fortnight

I touched you, I touched you

I love you, it's ruining my life

I love you, it's ruining my life

I touched you for only a fortnight

I touched you, I touched you

.

Thought of callin' ya, but you won't pick up

'Nother fortnight lost in America

Move to Florida, buy the car you want

But it won't start up 'til you touch, touch, touch me

Thought of calling ya, but you won't pick up

'Nother fortnight lost in America

Move to Florida, buy the car you want

But it won't start up 'til I touch, touch, touch you

A BEACH IN 1970

There are no tattoos, no plastic surgery, etc.

There are also no beds on the beach, umbrellas, sunglasses, and self-tanning creams...

There are no cell phones, so people talk to each other.

There is nothing, but there is everything in reality!

It was the good old days...

WHAT THE SUPREME COURT CASE ON TENT ENCAMPMENTS COULD MEAN FOR HOMELESS PEOPLE

by Rachel M. Cohen

On Monday, the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments for the most consequential case in decades concerning the rights of people experiencing homelessness.

In Grants Pass v. Johnson, the Supreme Court will decide whether it constitutes cruel and unusual punishment to fine, ticket, or jail someone for sleeping outside on public property if they have nowhere else to go. A ruling in favor of the plaintiffs would make it easier for communities to clear out homeless people’s tent encampments, even if no available housing or shelter exists.…

vox.com/scotus/24123323/grants-pass-scotus-supreme-court-homeless-tent-encampments

RICHARD DURR: Crazy how Tik-Tok is limited and throttle back usage in China for their youth with mostly educational content while here we have off the hook content 24/7. I also would have to say with CV-19 restrictions we have a youth and adult population wondering what the heck happened? Everybody has a story of either isolation or health problems concerning those times. When liquor stores and pot dispensaries were labeled essential and churches or group gatherings of any kind were forbidden. So much damage done.

DIARY OF KINDNESS

I mowed the lawn today, and after doing so

I sat down and had a cold beer.

The day was really quite beautiful, and the drink facilitated some deep thinking.

My wife walked by and asked me what I was doing,

and I said, "Nothing."

The reason I said "nothing" instead of saying "just thinking" is because she then would have asked, "About what?"

At that moment, I would have needed to clarify that men ponder deeply on diverse subjects, sparking further inquiries.

Finally I pondered an age old question: Is giving birth more painful than getting kicked in the nuts?

Women always maintain that giving birth is way more painful than a guy getting kicked in the nuts, but how could they know?

Well, after another beer, and some more heavy deductive thinking, I have come up with an answer to that question.

Getting kicked in the nuts is more painful than having a baby, and even though I obviously couldn't really know, here is the reason for my conclusion:

A year or so after giving birth, a woman will often say, "It might be nice to have another child."

But you never hear a guy say, "You know, I think I would like another kick in the nuts."

I rest my case.

Time for another beer. Then maybe a nap.

(via Everett Liljeburg)

LAWSUIT DEMANDS WATER BOARD ACTION ON OUTDATED DWR WATER RIGHTS BEFORE DELTA TUNNEL APPROVAL

by Dan Bacher

As salmon, steelhead and other fish species move closer to extinction and the Delta smelt is now functionally extinct in the wild, a coalition of environmental groups and the Central Delta Water Agency are demanding that the State Water Board take action on outdated DWR water rights before the approval of the Delta Tunnel is even considered.

After waiting 14 years, water rights protestants to a 2009 proceeding have filed a complaint against the State Water Resources Control Board alleging it has given preferential treatment to the Department of Water Resources (DWR) regarding what they call “antiquated water rights claims.”

They also said the board “failed to implement state laws requiring the reasonable and equitable development of water diversions and the protection of water resources in the State.”

“DWR is still relying on water rights permits for the development of the controversial Delta Conveyance Project that were issued in 1955 and 1972, despite dramatic changes in the population size of California and in the hydrological cycle due to climate change,” according to a press release from Central Delta Water Agency, California Water Impact Network (C-WIN), California Sportfishing Protection Alliance, and AquAlliance.

The complaint alleges that DWR has “failed to comply with state water rights law requiring water rights be timely put to full beneficial use; the purpose of this requirement is to safeguard the public interest.”

*Key issues included in the Complaint are:*

1. “DWR’s Petition for Extension of Time has unreasonably delayed following development timelines dating back to 1955 and 1972 that required construction by 1980 and use by 1990; then construction by 2000, and use by 2009.

2. DWR is trying to resurrect these “expired” rights to serve the Delta Tunnel without having perfected them according to the State Water Board’s ordered development schedule.

3. The Water Board is giving preferential treatment to another State agency by ignoring these protests and allowing DWR to flout its permit requirements while holding other applicants responsible for meeting the water development timelines in their permits.

4. Since the millions of acre-feet of water DWR claims it has rights to divert into the Delta Tunnel have never been applied to full beneficial use and cannot be reliably delivered, it is courts have sometimes termed ‘paper water’ which exists as an accounting tool but is ‘worth little more than a wish and a prayer.’”

Four environmental groups and a Delta water agency are asking the court in Fresno County Superior Court to compel the State Board to address these claims. The complaint alleges that the Water Board normally cancels the rights of other water rights applicants that don’t use water or “put water to beneficial use” within the development period in their permit.

Failure to follow this ‘diligence’ requirement would result in massive social and environmental impacts on the Sacramento River and the Delta, and existing legal uses and users of water, according to the coalition.

The lawsuit explains that the State Water Board is charged with the orderly development of water supplies in the state, which are increasingly scarce with the demands from 39 million people. Notably, when DWR’s water rights were filed in 1955 and 1972, the state’s population was 13 million and 20.5 million, respectively. In the decades since, the coalition noted.

“DWR has made no progress towards completing the application of water to beneficial use. The State has changed dramatically in that period, requiring a fresh look at the availability of water for projects like the Delta Tunnel that would remove significant amounts of water from the Sacramento River and Delta. Alarmingly, the water DWR proposes to divert water from the Sacramento River into the Tunnel under its antiquated permits that may no longer be available due to climate change and other events over the last 50 plus years,” the groups stated.

The complaint alleges that “instead of returning DWR’s petitions for lack of diligence and referring the permits to the licensing section to license amounts actually put to beneficial use during the permits’ valid development period, the SWRCB continues to issue notices of changes to DWR’s expired permits, most recently on February 29, 2024 when it commenced the Delta Conveyance proceedings.”

“With the recreational and commercial salmon season canceled for the second year in a row, the State Board needs to implement due diligence requirements evenhandedly,” explained Attorney Osha Meserve, representing the Central Delta Water Agency. ”Here, the State Board has given DWR preferential treatment and is letting DWR cut in line ahead of thousands of other water rights holders as well as water uses necessary to keep the California Delta, its communities and its fisheries healthy.”

Roger Moore, attorney for the California Water Impact Network, noted that “during the 14 years these protests have been unlawfully allowed to languish, authoritative reports, including the State Water Board’s own, have confirmed the Delta watershed is heavily oversubscribed. Enabling DWR’s addiction to ‘paper water’ is a bet against our future that will shortchange California’s fisheries, economy, and environment.”

Barbara Vlamis, Executive Director of AquAlliance, said she was “proud to be part of a strong coalition that is determined to protect the source waters in the Sacramento River watershed by enforcing bedrock water rights principles.”

Chris Shutes, the Executive Director of the California Sportfishing Protection Alliance, concluded: “The State Water Board has let DWR slide for over a decade. We hope the court will agree that it is past time for the State Water Board to make DWR play by the same rules as everyone else.”

* * *

Salmon, Steelhead And Delta Smelt Continue On Path To Extinction

 California salmon, steelhead and other fisheries are in their worst crisis ever as Governor Newsom forges ahead with the Delta Tunnel and Sites Reservoir projects and the voluntary agreements.

California salmon fishing was closed in 2023 and will be closed this year also. The 2024 stock abundance forecast for Sacramento River Fall Chinook, often the most abundant stock in the ocean fishery, is only 213,600 adults. Meanwhile, abundance of Klamath River Fall Chinook is forecast at 180,700 adults. “These abundance forecasts are well below average,” according to the CDFW.

Endangered Sacramento River spring and winter-run Chinook also continue their march towards extinction. The spawning escapement of Sacramento River Spring Chinooks (SRSC) in 2023 totaled 1,479 fish (jacks and adults), with an estimated return of 106 to upper Sacramento River tributaries and the remaining 1,391 fish returning to the Feather River Hatchery.

The return to Butte Creek of just 100 fish was the lowest ever. In 2021, an estimated 19,773 out of the more than 21,580 fish total that returned to spawn in the Butte County stream perished before spawning

Nor did the winter run, listed under the state and federal Endangered Species Act, do well. Spawner escapement of endangered Sacramento River Winter Chinook (SRWC) in 2023 was estimated to be 2,447 adults and 54 jacks, according to PFMC data.

A group of us, including the late conservationist and Fish Sniffer magazine publisher Hal Bonslett, successfully pushed the state and federal governments to list the winter run under the state and federal Endangered Species Acts starting in 1990-91 because we were so alarmed that the fish population had crashed to 2,000 fish.

Then in 1992 the run declined to less than 200 fish. Even after Shasta Dam was built, the winter run escapement to the Sacramento River was 117,000 in 1969!

Now we are back to approximately the same low number of winter-run Chinooks that spurred us to push for the listing of the fish as endangered under state and federal law over 30 years ago.

Even more chilling, for the sixth year in a row, zero Delta Smelt were collected in the California Department of Fish and Wildlife’s Fall Midwater Trawl (FMWT) Survey in the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta from September through December 2023.

Once the most abundant species in the entire estuary, the Delta Smelt has declined to the point that it has become functionally extinct in the wild. The 2 to 3 inch fish, found only in the Delta, is an “indicator species” that shows the relative health of the San Francisco Bay/Delta ecosystem.

Meanwhile, the other pelagic species collected in the survey — striped bass, Longfin Smelt, Sacramento Splittail and threadfin shad — continued their dramatic decline since 1967 when the State Water Project went into effect. Only the American shad shows a less precipitous decline.

ON THE OCCASION OF THE DEATH OF "THE LEADING LEFT COMMUNIST IN THE UNITED STATES"

Left communism, or ultra-left Marxism, is a form of 20th century radical politics that opposes the ideas and practices of Marxist-Leninists, social democrats and anarchist subculture ding-a-lings from what its partisans maintain to be an aggressive and authentically Marxist perspective. Loren Goldner was often referred to as "the leading left communist in the United States." Goldner, age 76, died at his home in Philadelphia, PA this past April 12.

In the immediate aftermath of the September 11, 2001 attacks, Loren Goldner, “the leading left communist in the United States” initiated a series of meetings of some supposed ultra-left Marxists in Berkeley. I took part. My understanding was that we would act fast, come up with an analysis of the 9/11 events, and make our analysis public in a high-profile way. 9/11 was the first major battle of the twenty-first century, it was the first time that US government-style mass civilian casualty attacks had been inflicted on civilians in the US, and it was a horrific consequence of decades of malignant antics by the United States in Afghanistan. My memory is that the normally voluble San Francisco Bay Area protest ghetto was uniformly and uncharacteristically silent - people were understandably too floored to say anything. It was a unique moment in history - and it was a unique historical opportunity.

Politics is about communication. It was time to communicate. My preferred low-budget mass communications method takes the form of posters on walls - this may be a function of the limits of my imagination but posters had been very effective in the recent past. With this in mind I acquired a paperback book with a color image of Ronald Reagan and his jack-o’-lantern grin on its cover. A recent cover of Time or Newsweek had a photo-shopped image of both World Trade Center towers going up in explosive flames, and my thought was to do 11 x 17-inch color posters of Reagan’s smiling visage in front of the burning and collapsing buildings, captioned in big yellow letters with red lines around them: ‘If you want to find the man responsible for 9/11, go to Bel Air and wake him from his nap!’ - highlighting the fact that the 9/11 attacks were blowback from Reagan and Jimmy Carter’s efforts to get armed Islamic fundamentalism up and running in Afghanistan in the 1970s and 1980s. It was just a gesture and since it said nothing about capitalist exploitation and working-class self-activity it was not terribly radical, but it was simple, it could be done quickly, and it was very much to the point. If anyone had come up with anything better we could have gone with that instead. Time was of the essence in this matter - we had to act fast.

The group met and talked. We talked and met. In compulsively inadequate ultra-left Marxist style we met and talked some more. Nothing happened. Grad student pedantry and incapacity were in a neck-and-neck race here. Our talk had drifted to plans for a Capital reading group by the time I stopped attending the meetings; apparently those who can, do, and those who can’t form Capital reading groups. Even this inwardly directed proposal went nowhere. The group folded. A unique historical moment had come and gone and with it a significant opportunity was squandered. This failure to act is consistent with all experiences I have ever had with people who like to call themselves ultra-left Marxists in the US going back to the beginning of the Reagan era.

In my encounters with “the leading left communist in the United States” I was struck less by Loren Goldner’s voluminous abstract erudition than I was by his complete lack of the practical political smarts that we are forced to develop when we assert unusual ideas in the complex world outside of our comfort zone. Loren had been a left communist for 30-plus years and all he had to show for it was a collection of his writings that are equally unreadable in seven languages on a website. In the 20-plus years since our 9/11 group’s belly button fingering sessions he continued to dabble in his harmless hobby in the form of a website called Insurgent Notes, whose identity with a nebulous “revolutionary left,” clarion calls for “building a radical left in the age of Trump” and paucity of accounts of sustained real-world action add up to a politics of Lite Rock Trotskyism. A few fiery ultra-left “positions” on unions, nationalism and the Bolsheviks after Brest-Litovsk don’t elevate Insurgent Notes out of and away from the harmless left fringe of academia. These putative ultra-leftists don’t even appear to be decisively opposed to electoral politics, in the country that leads the industrialized world in mass abstention from voting and where mass abstention is in effect the number one vote-getter in every Presidential election.

Revolutionary extremism is what it does: if it does nothing, it is nothing. It must be readily visible in the larger society around us. A measure of its credibility is that it will be taken seriously by friend and foe alike. Ultra-left Marxism is supposedly an intransigent form of revolutionary analysis - and ongoing collective public action - focused on class conflict in advanced capitalist societies. Outside of the United States it sometimes is. The efforts of somewhat related to ultra-left Marxism workers’ inquiry tendencies like Wildcat in Germany, people associated with them in China and India, and comrades I’ve met in Europe and South America are the real deal. But in the United States ultra-left Marxism only attracts cafe militants who should have become tenured professors and who missed their life’s true calling and hobbyists who expect the world to accommodate their timidity and incapacity. They are the easily ignored local expression of a Planck-scale global archipelago of socially maladroit pedants who lack the vision and nerve to establish a readily visible public presence for what they claim to be about.

Many Marxist-Leninist and Trotskyist militants I have known, in particular Trotskyists, offer a striking contrast to this. Members of the “smash-ist-and-fascist,” Stalinist group Progressive Labor and militants of various Trot organizations often get jobs in strategic sectors, as transit system operators, longshore or hospital employees, and spend decades asserting their perspectives among co-workers. They structure their lives around the fight for what they believe in. Their politics are no good, but the long-term personal commitment they display in fighting for their convictions is superb. Far from being “alienated” this “militant attitude” is a wholly admirable and necessary thing. There is no reason that people with better politics than Stalinism and Trotskyism can’t do this as well.

People attracted to ultra-left Marxism in the contemporary United States are incapable of asserting what they claim to be about outside of airless small spaces. Ultra-left Marxist fanboys will hold a meeting, at which they may decide to hold another meeting, and if by that point they haven’t completely run out of energy they may courageously decide to hold another meeting. They and their passively held opinions add up to nothing.

“Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid.”

A vast gulf separates passive spectators from the implacable minority who are hell-bent on imposing their will on the world. What we need requires commitment. It takes nerve. It means taking risks. It requires patience. It takes time. It means trying something new because there is no credible opposition now and new measures are required to build one. People who holler about boredom are bores. Mankind does not seek entertainment - only the American does. The revolutionary struggle can be exhilarating. It can bring us companionship, laughs and joy - but these are fleeting collateral benefits of what must for the most part be ardent effort in the face of setbacks. Thomas Mann defines a fanatic as an individual who, on recognizing the impossibility of his cause, redoubles his efforts. Mann may have a point. An ability to dust yourself off and keep going in the face of endless setbacks may also be the hallmark of a disinterested public spirit; you do what you do not for kicks or to accrue subcultural capital but because you know it must be done.

Kevin Keating

San Francisco

A GREAT WOMAN ERASED FROM HISTORY BY IDIOTS

The branding of the syrup was a tribute to this woman’s gifts and talents. Now future generations will not even know this beautiful woman exsted. What a shame. The world knew her as “Aunt Jemima”, but her given name was Nancy Green and she was a true American success story. She was born a slave in 1834 Montgomery County, KY. and became a wealthy superstar in the advertising world, as its first living trademark. Green was 56-yrs old when she was selected as spokesperson for a new ready-mixed, self-rising pancake flour and made her debut in 1893 at a fair and exposition in Chicago. She demonstrated the pancake mix and served thousands of pancakes, and became an immediate star

She was a good storyteller, her personality was warm and appealing, and her showmanship was exceptional. Her exhibition booth drew so many people that special security personnel were assigned to keep the crowds moving. Nancy Green was signed to a lifetime contract, traveled on promotional tours all over the country, and was extremely well paid. Her financial freedom and stature as a national spokesperson enabled her to become a leading advocate against poverty and in favor of equal rights for all Americans. She maintained her job until her death in 1923, at age 89.

This was a remarkable woman, and sadly she has been ERASED by politics. I wanted you to know and remind you of this cancel culture time period

THE WAR ON CHILDREN GOES ON AND ON

by Mohammad Jahjouh & Samy Magdy

RAFAH, Gaza Strip — Israeli strikes on the southern Gaza city of Rafah overnight killed 22 people, including 18 children, health officials said Sunday, as the United States was on track to approve billions of dollars of additional military aid to Israel, its close ally.

Israel has carried out near-daily air raids on Rafah, where more than half of Gaza's population of 2.3 million has sought refuge from fighting elsewhere. It has also vowed to expand its ground offensive against the Hamas militant group to the city on the border with Egypt despite calls for restraint, including from the U.S.

“In the coming days, we will increase the political and military pressure on Hamas because this is the only way to bring back our hostages and achieve victory. We will land more and painful blows on Hamas — soon," Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in a statement. He didn't give details.

The first Israeli strike in Rafah killed a man, his wife and their 3-year-old child, according to the nearby Kuwaiti Hospital, which received the bodies. The woman was pregnant and the doctors saved the baby, the hospital said. The second strike killed 17 children and two women from an extended family.

“These children were sleeping. What did they do? What was their fault?” asked one relative, Umm Kareem. Mohammed al-Beheiri said that his daughter, Rasha, and her six children, the youngest 18 months old, were among those killed. A woman and three children were still under the rubble.

The Israel-Hamas war has killed more than 34,000 Palestinians, according to local health officials, at least two-thirds of them children and women. It has devastated Gaza's two largest cities and left a swath of destruction. Around 80% of the territory's population have fled to other parts of the besieged coastal enclave.

The $26 billion aid package approved by the U.S. House of Representatives on Saturday includes around $9 billion in humanitarian assistance for Gaza, which experts say is on the brink of famine. The U.S. Senate could pass the package as soon as Tuesday, and President Joe Biden has promised to sign it immediately.

The conflict, now in its seventh month, has sparked regional unrest pitting Israel and the U.S. against Iran and allied militant groups across the Middle East. Israel and Iran traded fire directly this month, raising fears of all-out war.

Tensions have also spiked in the Israeli-occupied West Bank. Israeli troops killed two Palestinians who the military says attacked a checkpoint with a knife and a gun near the southern West Bank town of Hebron early Sunday. The Palestinian Health Ministry said that the two killed were 18 and 19, from the same family. No Israeli forces were wounded, the army said.

Later, the military said its forces shot dead a 43-year-old Palestinian woman after she tried to stab a soldier in the northern West Bank near Beka’ot settlement.

The Palestinian Red Crescent rescue service said that it had recovered 14 bodies from an Israeli raid in the Nur Shams urban refugee camp in the West Bank that began late Thursday. Those killed include three militants from the Islamic Jihad group and a 15-year-old boy. The military said it killed 14 militants and arrested eight suspects. Ten Israeli soldiers and one border police officer were wounded.

In a separate incident in the West Bank, an Israeli man was wounded in an explosion on Sunday, the Magen David Adom rescue service said. A video circulating online shows a man approaching a Palestinian flag planted in a field. When he kicks it, it appears to trigger an explosive device.

At least 469 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli soldiers and settlers in the West Bank since the start of the Israel-Hamas war, according to the Palestinian Health Ministry. Most have been killed during Israeli military raids or in violent protests.

The war was sparked by an unprecedented Oct. 7 raid into southern Israel in which Hamas and other militants killed around 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and abducted around 250 hostages. Israel says militants are still holding around 100 hostages and the remains of more than 30 others.

Thousands of Israelis have taken to the streets to call for a new election to replace Netanyahu and a deal with Hamas to release the hostages. Netanyahu has vowed to continue the war until Hamas is destroyed and all hostages are returned.

The war has killed at least 34,097 Palestinians and wounded another 76,980, according to the Gaza Health Ministry. The ministry doesn't differentiate between combatants and civilians in its count. It says the real toll is likely higher as many bodies are stuck beneath the rubble or in areas that medics can't reach.

(AP)

WE WERE WARNED

Editor: 

No salmon fishing? Insurance rates through the roof? If only we’d had some advance warning! But the first warnings about climate change only came in the 1880s (a bit before Al Gore). And the first warnings about destruction of salmon only in 1875. Perhaps if these warnings had come 100 years earlier we’d have had time to really prepare?

And I’m sure, now that we know, there’s no one in denial about the need to address the issues. Especially no major political parties or presidential candidates. Somewhere in creation there is an advanced technological civilization whose light will shine for a long, long, long time. We are not them.

Philip Tymon

Guerneville

ON LINE COMMENT OF THE DAY

A bunch of Climate Crazies tried to shut down the airport in Boston this morning. Cops cleared them out and arrested some of them. One was shouting about the seas are boiling when she was being dragged away. So I decided to check it out on a site that I found that had weather data going back to 1880, including coastal water temps. Today April 20 the water at the Coast Guard Station on Cape Cod is 46°F. In 1950, on this date, it was 47°F. In 1922 it was 48°F, in 1900 46°F. Back in 1880 the water was a balmy 46°F. See any pattern here? No you don’t. The water was pretty goddam cold in 1880 and it’s cold now. My conclusion is that the seas are not boiling, and people who go into airports and raise hell over this stupid sh#t are delusional and perhaps mentally ill.