Mendocino County Today: Thursday 5/16/24

Cooling | Gloria Abbott | Boil Water | Eigenman Gathering | Biker Weekend | Fire Season | Department Merger | Mosplaining | Polypody Ferns | BOS Legacy | Hospital Meeting | Impact Report | Ed Notes | Dewdrops | Eysters Eyes | Coast Clownin | Unhinged Individual | Horsetail Fern | Crooked City | Yesterday's Catch | Early Pride | Huffman Beseiged | Lego Cops | Lasagna Love | Humboldt Investigation | Years Later | Water Issues | Laziest Boy | AI Journalism | Casette Surgery | Anti-Tax Measure | Like Cohen | Debatable Decision | Hellbound | Left-Handed Wrench | Stay Gone | Drawing Comparisons | Sam Tears | Genocidal Policy | Capone Kitchen | AR-15 | Joe Brady | Chain Bull

TEMPERATURES WILL COOL into the weekend with gusty north wind pushing onshore in the afternoon. Coastal stratus and fog will most likely return along much of the coast each night through Friday. (NWS)

STEPHEN DUNLAP (Fort Bragg): A foggy 51F on the coast this Thursday morning. Minimal clearing yesterday, never know what the fog will do? Our forecast has foggier days & sunnier days.

GLORIA ABBOTT

It is with a heavy heart that I announce the passing of Gloria Faye Abbott (Ornbaun). Gloria passed away peacefully in her sleep on Monday, May 13th, after a long battle of Dementia. There will be no service at this time. Condolences can be sent to Shirley Hulbert at P.O. Box 521, Boonville, CA 95415.

THE COUNTY issued a Boil Water Notice (BWN) affecting 21 of 21 service connections in the POINT CABRILLO HIGHLANDS water system. Cause: Wind caused break of main line. Expected resolution May 14, 2024 at noon. The Order is signed by “Jenine Miller, Public Health Director.”

THE COUNTY issued a Precautionary Boil Water Notice (pBWN) affecting 17 of 17 service connections in the PACIFIC REEFS WATER DISTRICT water system. Cause: routine maintenance and repairs. Expected resolution: May 16, 2024 at noon.

A CELEBRATION OF THE LIFE OF CAROLYN EIGENMAN will be held Saturday, May 18 from 1-4pm at the little red school house in Boonville.

AV FIRE CHIEF Andres Avila: The winter burning season is coming to an end and fire season is beginning, meaning that any burn permits will have to be issued through CalFire. The CalFire station is also open and staffed which is helpful.

MENDOCINO COUNTY SUPERVISORS GRAPPLE OVER HEALTH SERVICES MERGER Amid Employee Pressure

A narrow majority of county supervisors last week asked for details before they agreed to formally combine a director position for two key departments: Public Health and Behavioral Health and Recovery Services. Dr. Jenine Miller, who is currently the head of Behavioral Health and Recovery Services, would be in charge of the newly configured entity, called Health Services.…

mendofever.com/2024/05/16/mendocino-county-supervisors-grapple-over-health-services-merger-amid-employee-pressure

SUPERVISOR MULHEREN: In an effort to be more informative about policies and what happens at meetings I thought I’d share a little bit about what goes in to a Department Head review in Closed Session. Of course reviews are confidential personnel matters but this new process through which Board Members engage in reviews (we started that since I’ve been on the Board) offers Board members an opportunity to give more direct feedback to Department Heads. Let me know if you have questions.

A READER WRITES: “The Board of Supervisors could at least acknowledge that by balancing the current budget using reserves, people like Carmel Angelo and John Pinches should be thanked. Angelo took the job when the County had no such reserves, no such tricks to pull out of a hat. She and Pinches had the moxy to actually take on Sheriff Allman to balance the budget and they made him sweat and probably contributed to his eventual heart attack. The current group has done nothing but throw Angelo under the bus, all of them. At least with Pinches they just pretend like the guy never existed. They have taken a lot of flack for it, but the solutions being used today are Angelo and Pinches' legacy the current Board now uses to cover their ass while making not one single hard decision.”

MARK SCARAMELLA NOTES: The reader is correct that Angelo and Pinches (and to some extent John McCowen) took on the task of making budget cuts department by department excluding none of them to balance the budget back in 2009 and 2010 in the wake of the Great Recession. We wrote about this last November including a summary of our coverage of the budget cut meetings at the time: When The CEO Proposed Slashing The Sheriff’s Budget.

It’s also true that Sheriff Allman didn’t like it and threatened to sue the County. But he never did because the Supervisors do have authority to set the Sheriff’s budget, just not to tell him how to spend it. (Theoretically, the Supervisors are liable to suffer politically if they cut too much and undermine public safety to the point that they lose political support.) We would dispute the claim that the Board is using Angelo’ and Pinches’ “legacy” to balance the budget because 1. Angelo and Pinches didn’t have one-time covid money and PG&E settlement money with which to postpone the inevitable. And 2. During the Angelo-Pinches tenure there was a reasonably well functioning tax collector’s office. Angelo’s meat ax approach, which included across the board budget cuts, (semi-)voluntary time off followed by mandatory time off, office hour and office day reductions, salary reductions, hard hiring freezes, and a few other drastic decrees, was effective in balancing the budget while pissing off several department heads and quite a few members of the affected public. As an elected official, Pinches in particular took the budget personally and was strong-minded and politically popular enough to absorb the predictable pushback. But this board has declared that they have no idea what to do to close the budget gap nor any intention of cutting law enforcement budgets or “revenue generating positions,” while granting salary increases without knowing the budget impact, thus painting themselves into a corner which could translate into even more drastic cuts in the remaining departments. None of the drastic Angelo options have been even mentioned by this board, much less proposed, probably because none of them were around when that last budget crunch hit. Or perhaps because they are too inexperienced and wimpy to even bring them up. Instead, as the reader says, they have not made “one single hard decision.” And each day they don’t, the budget gap increases.

MAZIE MALONE: Saw the RCS impact report posted today. Disturbing not surprising of course not even touching the problems we have.

As we reflect on the past year, I am filled with gratitude for your unwavering commitment to Redwood Community Services. Your support has been instrumental in our mission of empowering communities for long term success.

Our commitment to community wellness has never wavered. From mental health services to foster youth to individuals and families, we have strived to create vibrant, healthy, and compassionate communities. Our partnerships with local organizations and county government agencies have allowed us to address critical needs toward developing well and healthy communities.

Passion drives our work. Our teams love what they do, and it shows. Whether it's a late-night crisis intervention or a community event, their dedication shines through. We celebrate each other's victories, support one another during setbacks, and find joy in making a difference together.

I am honored to present this Impact Report that highlights the accomplishments across every program at our Agency. I hope you enjoy reading this report and are inspired and filled with optimism about the outcomes we’ve achieved together.

View our Impact Report by visiting www.redwoodcommunityservices.org/impact

Best,

Victoria Kelly, LCSW

Chief Executive Officer

ED NOTES

THE ARREST OF GREG COX in the aftermath of a likely drug-addled melee in Leggett — and what other kind of robbery could there be in Leggett? — took me back to his several years as a 49er in the early 90's, one of which was a Super Bowl team with Steve Young at quarterback. Cox was a special teams demon, a human rocket downfield ahead of everyone else, a special teams guy who fans still remember for his thrilling open field tackles.

IN MATT LAFEVER'S otherwise accurate account of Cox's unhappy post-football life, Feve writes, “We have learned that after an unsubstantiated rape charge ended his NFL career, Cox has a documented trail of alleged criminal exploits over the last two decades the most recent of which happened in Mendocino County.”

COX was found innocent of that charge; his release by the Niners was purely football-related.

DURING his Leggett adventure, it was apparently Cox's girlfriend who's accused of shooting the vic in the hand, but Cox has been around trouble ever since his days as just about the most exciting special teams player in the NFL. The guy's now 59. You'd think his outlaw days would be behind him, not that we have anything like a clear idea of what really happened up there at Confusion Hill and the Drive-Thru Redwood.

A GUY NAMED DON EMBLEM was once named Sonoma County’s poet laureate, but for my money the best poet down there was and is Brian Boldt, whose wonderful book, “One Never Knows, Do One?” I read in a gulp, and went back and read it in another gulp, and I say this as a guy who reads a lot of poetry, most of which just doesn’t grab me. Too academic, too much about nothing much at all, too precious, too effete, too insincere, I’d say. I do like like Charles Simic, Sharon Olds, some of Merrill, a guy named Edward Hirsch, Ferlinghetti, early Corso, some of Ginsburg, some of Snyder, some of Hirschman, some of Sharon Doubiago, some of Leonard Cirino, some of Steve Kessler, Bill Bradd, Kate Dougherty, and even an occasional line of Gordy Black’s. (Gordy's gone, and I wish I'd told him he got better and better as a poet, and near his end was quite good.) But spare me Ashberry, Miloz, Hahn, and the rest of the Library of Congress gang. Brian Boldt, who I hope is still with us, is as good a poet as there is anywhere, and of all the poetry journals to come and go in the last forty years his Green Fuse is the only one I really miss.

WHILE we’re on lit crit, I laughed out loud the other day when I spotted “A Beginner’s Guide to Charles Bukowski.” Something to puzzle out there?

IT ALMOST GOES WITHOUT SAYING, that here in Mendocino County, magically viewed by the rest of the country as some kind of progressive shangri-la, the social worker-judicial nexus is a sinkhole of offhand cruelty and gross self-interest. Dependent children, for instance, are funneled into a Sonoma County-based non-profit called TLC prior to being consigned to the foster home system. TLC, for allegedly training foster parents and offering them nebulous “professional” back-up services, takes a nice piece of the monthly stipend paid to foster parents. In other words, another layer of parasites gets its acquisitive hands into the dependent child funding, and every one of those dependent funding units a sad, defenseless victim of class warfare.

THERE’S A PERENNIAL shortage of foster homes because many prospective foster parents rightly prefer not to subject themselves to unreasonable layers of helping bureaucracies and to the intrusive presence in their lives of people who, in my experience, tended not to be persons of understanding. Judges have the authority to place dependent children directly into suitable homes but, at least as the non-system works here in Mendocino County, the judges seem to consider the helping bureaucracies as extensions of their good offices.

I'VE SEEN MANY “professionally” rendered assessments of families and their children that were so poorly done, so generally implausible, that any self-respecting officer of the court, not to mention a judge, would refuse to accept them into the record. Judicial rejection of a social service or probation recommendation has never happened in Mendocino County, so far as I’m aware.

SAN ANSELMO just might be America's dog capitol. Pedestrians without a dog seem in the minority. This dog mania seems one more consequence of affluence, of more dollars than cents in the country where excess is a way of life. As a kid, I don't remember many dogs in my neighborhood, and I don't recall ever seeing a dog in a car. Now they're everywhere.

ONE DOG is enough. Two dogs is pushing it, three dogs indicates a need for mental health counseling, four or more and you and the dogs ought to be carted off. In San Francisco the dog people are so far out of control that the authorities have to negotiate with them to keep them and their beasts out of the re-seeded areas of the Presidio!

IN SAN ANSELMO, dog people and their “fur babies” (gag me) are all over children's playgrounds. Fortunately, for San Anselmo, the town is light on pit bulls and the larger, more dangerous breeds. The Hub City's dogs run heavily to small, white and fluffy, kind of like their owners, come to think of it.

IN SF, I never walked past Hippie Hill in Golden Gate Park without keeping a wary eye on a least one unleashed pit bull roaming among the drug and alcohol casualties flaked out on the park’s grass.

PLEASE DON'T misunderstand me. I get it. Dogs are fun, more tolerable companions than most people. I owned a dog once that I became very fond of, although he was dumb even by dog standards, having twice flunked obedience school.. He also took an occasional nip at me at no provocation. And he was a terrible racist, lunging at passing black and brown people who probably assumed that I, a liberal and I can prove it!, was another closet Klan case. But really, how about some proportion, even here in the country of no limits? Hasn't this dog mania gotten way outta hand?

DAVID EYSTER:

One Tuesday Morning in Santa Rosa …

Following a referral made here in Ukiah by Dr. Adkins, L and I went to an appointment this morning in Santa Rosa with North Bay Vitreoretinal Consultants.

This is a large, extremely busy medical office that has patient care dialed in.

The medical team we interacted with was excellent across the board. They exude confidence and are highly professional, starting at scheduling, to the intake reception, to the doctor’s assistant who ran tests and took incredibly detailed pictures of my eyes, to the consulting MD, in my case, Dr. Powers. Everybody knew their job and did them efficiently and well.

Somehow I have experienced two newer tears in my right retina (with some bleeding) and possibly an older tear in my left retina. After everything was explained during a show-and-tell, Dr. Powers said to not worry, that he could fix these problems. He said the sooner the fix the better so "let's get the two in your right eye fixed this morning.”

Okay. I signed a release.

Both eyes were numbed with drops early in the appointment and also dilated. Later, more numbing drops were added to the right eye.

Apparently I received numbing shots in the right eye, according to L who was sitting nearby and watching. I knew something was happening but didn’t see a needle and didn’t feel pain. I did taste a bitter taste in my mouth afterwards. L commended me for being "brave."

After waiting for full numbing to take place, we were ushered into an exam room with a laser setup. One more numbing drop was administered. Dr. Powers geared up, darkened the room, manipulated my right eye, and directed a laser to seal off the tears. I knew he was off to my left but I couldn't see him; he had a head light on that I saw coming in from the left.

Pretty doggone wild and/or weird … repeated blasts of blinding white light as he lasered around and sealed off the right tears. No pain with only slight discomfort. That said, I still think I was pretty tense.

In short order, the light blasts are disorienting, kind of like a honeycomb of very intense light with perhaps a pattern of veins in the light. When the pulses increased in speed and number, I couldn't tell if my right eye was looking where he was directing me to look. It was like I was deeply lost in the light with no true sense of direction. There were pauses/locational resets and eventually we were done.

Given the visual impact on the single eye, I understand why Dr. Powers chose to schedule the fix of the left eye tear for another visit a couple of weeks from now down the road.

Sunglasses were a must when all was done, having a caring partner and reliable driver like L along is a must and a blessing, and taking a longer nap once home worked really well for me and my eye.

Quite the day. So far so good ….

GOOD MORNING FROM FENTANYL STREET

Good Afternoon Postmodern America (May 15th, '24 @ 4:25 p.m.)

Awoke mid-morning at the Building Bridges Homeless Resource Center in sunny Ukiah, California on the assigned bottom bunk bed. Kept the eye shade on, and watched thoughts for awhile. Identified with the witness, impassively watched the thoughts crawl by, mostly thoughts about the stupidity of American politics and the fact that the American experiment with freedom and democracy has failed, due to unchecked greed, a modicum of hatred amongst the citizens, and a tad of illusion. Aside from the fact that it is no longer affordable to live beyond survival for most in the USA, the quality of life has deteriorated to such an extent that narcotics is now a necessity for millions in order to just get through the week. Following ablutions and getting dressed, went over to the Express Mart near Fentanyl Corner (South State Street and Observatory Way). An unhinged individual approached with a big smile and high fived me, and then asked for seven dollars for gasoline. I replied that I was tapped out. He asked then why was I going into the market if I had no money. I explained that I was checking my LOTTO ticket, and was not making a purchase. While inside checking the LOTTO ticket, the unhinged individual entered, went over to the refrigerated case, and selected a bottle of red wine. Cutting in front of me to pay, he was informed by the Nepali cashier that he had to go to the end of the property to consume it. He agreed, and strode out headed for the corner of South State Street and Observatory Way. He must have sold his vehicle following the exchange with me, because he did not buy any gasoline.

Ambled on to the Ukiah Food Co-op for a nosh and coffee. Always a wonderful experience being in the co-op cafe. Took the MTA bus to School Street, visiting Mendocino Books and then went to the bank to get some money. Now at the Mendocino Public Library on computer #5 tap, tap tapping away. I am not identified with the body. I am not identified with the mind. I am identified with ParaBrahman, or the divine blissful absolute which makes use of this body-mind instrument. Feel free to contact me.

Craig Louis Stehr

c/o Building Bridges Homeless Resource Center

1045 South State Street, Ukiah, CA 95482

Email: craiglouisstehr@gmail.com

MURDER IN CALIFORNIA'S EMERALD TRIANGLE

by Katrina Schwartz & Sasha Khokha

On a cold day in November 2016, a man with long, blond locks and grungy blue overalls stumbled out of the woods. He had been living up in the mountains above Laytonville, in Mendocino County, and had walked eight hours into town in search of the police. He had found the body of a man he knew, Jeff Settler. And it looked like murder.

On the other side of the country, in New Jersey, Sam Anderson had just moved back home to live with his parents. The people he grew up with were all buzzing about the lead suspect in a murder thousands of miles away: a kid they’d gone to high school with, Zachary Wuester. Wuester went out to California to make some money working on pot farms. Now it seemed he’d gotten caught up in something his friends back home couldn’t fathom.

“The idea of [Wuester] being accused of murder was just absolutely insane,” Anderson told California Report host Sasha Khokha. “And I knew that finding out his involvement would be a window into this world: the Emerald Triangle.”

---

Crooked City: The Emerald Triangle premiered in November.

Three Northern California counties — Humboldt, Mendocino and Trinity — make up what is known as the Emerald Triangle. In these mountainous regions, illegal pot farms have flourished. People come from all over to make quick money cultivating and trimming the marijuana. California legalized marijuana in 2016, but black market grows still operate, shipping their product to states where weed is still illegal and the profits are higher.

As he read more about the arrest, Anderson became fascinated with the Emerald Triangle and its outlaw culture. He packed up his car and drove out to Mendocino to try to uncover what really happened in the murder case. He showed up in Laytonville, known to be hostile to outsiders, asking questions about the illegal pot growing industry.

Over five years, Anderson would befriend local characters, get caught up in some scary situations and learn how to be an investigative journalist. He had to earn the trust of people close to the victim and the accused, all while living and working out of a tent, which became his “office” as he reported. Ultimately, he stumbled upon recordings of the police investigation, which helped crack open the case.

Listen to Sasha’s interview with Anderson about the reporting process and what it was like to try to break into an insular community, all the while with a microphone in hand. Anderson did ultimately uncover some satisfying answers about Jeff Settler’s murder. Along the way he learned a lot about the conditions for workers in California’s black market weed industry.

Check out Anderson's 10-part podcast, Crooked City: The Emerald Triangle, to find out whether his friend Zach Wuester really was involved in the murder, and catch a glimpse of life among the outlaws in one of California’s most remote, mysterious regions.

CATCH OF THE DAY, Wednesday, May 15, 2024

RAMONA BILLY, Hopland. Disorderly conduct-alcohol, resisting.

JULIE BOND, Ukiah. Paraphernalia, probation revocation.

BEN GOMES, Ukiah. Disorderly conduct-alcohol&drugs.

FRANCISCO GONZALEZ, Ukiah. Controlled substance, county parole violation.

MANUEL GONZALEZ, Ukiah. DUI-alcohol&drugs, more than an ounce of pot, probation revocation.

DOROTHEA PARDIDA, Hopland. DUI.

EMIL REDZIC, Ukiah. Paraphernalia, county parole violation.

ISIAH SILVA-FONNEST, Willits. DUI-alcohol&drugs, leaving scene of accident with property damage, controlled substance, paraphernalia, disorderly conduct-alcohol.

DIANNA SOUSA, Petaluma/Ukiah. DUI.

JUSTIN WILLIAMSON, Ukiah. Disorderly conduct-alcohol, failure to appear.

HUFFMAN BESEIGED

On Monday, May 13, I drove down to the Lagunitas Brewery compound on No McDowell in Petaluma where, beginning at 6 pm and for more than two hours, about 150 people, young and old in every color, sex and size, waving Palestinian flags and placards, were very loudly letting Congressman Jared Huffman, with his supporters inside the main hall, know that his ongoing support of Israel’s destruction of Gaza and its people, will follow him whenever and wherever he appears in public between now and November.

The Petaluma Police allowed the protesters to completely block the wide driveway into the brewery which forced those attending, including some who tried (and failed) to appear very cool, to park some distance away and find their way to the entrance in full view of the crowd. The protest had been organized by Roots Action and its head, political writer Norman Solomon who Huffman defeated in the Democrat primary half a dozen or so years ago. It wasn’t the disrict’s voters first wrong decision and we know it won’t be their last.

Jeff Blankfort
Ukiah

LASAGNA LOVE FOR GAZA

The most exasperating issue of the day is the starving masses in Gaza. And while there may not be much we can do to dull the sharp-toothed hunger there, we can do something about it locally. A global movement called Lasagna Love has come to the Bay Area and volunteers want to expand the project to include Rossmoor in the East Bay.

"The aim of the global movement is to impact communities positively by connecting neighbors through gestures of kindness and support. Not only to help the incredible rise in food insecurity among families, but also to provide a simple act of love and kindness when it is needed most." Lasagna Love's mission to feed families, spread kindness, strengthen communities, seems particularly appropriate in today's global and local political turmoil.

Bruce McEwen

CAL POLY HUMBOLDT UNIVERSITY SENATE CALLS FOR DROPPING CHARGES, INVESTIGATION INTO PROTEST RESPONSE

by Sage Alexander

At the first University Senate meeting after hundreds of riot police broke up the occupation of Siemens Hall, Cal Poly Humboldt senators called on District Attorney Stacey Eads to drop all charges against students and faculty in the protests, with 21 voting yes, 1 no and 4 abstaining on the resolution.

The Senate also voted to call for a full, independent investigation into the decision-making process after the April 22 occupation, with one abstaining.

Tim Miller, vice chair of the Senate, said the aim was to communicate “there is not consensus in this university that the students should have been arrested in the first place.”

Approved resolution

The resolution details the history of student-led protest movements at Cal Poly Humboldt, and notes even in cases of sit-ins of the very same building that protesters occupied for a little over a week in April, police in the past were not called to break them up.

The resolution directly questions the practice of bringing in the police by the university’s administration. Swarms of police first arrived on April 22, leading to a clash between protesters and police wearing riot gear in the building’s entrance with reported injuries. Another police response about a week later brought hundreds from law enforcement agencies across the state descending on the occupation, breaking down barricades and arresting a group of people with linked arms sitting on the quad without reported injuries.

It’s still unclear which charges will be pursued for the 32 arrested protesters on April 30.

Eads said in an email to the Times-Standard Wednesday that she has still yet to receive police reports for those arrested. The arrests were made on suspicion of resisting arrest, refusing to comply with police enforcing trespassing laws, remaining present at the place of an unlawful assembly and trespassing, according to the booking sheet.

“If we want there to be accountability, if we want there to be some sort of a restorative justice perspective to this, that is something that can be done through our campus disciplinary campus,” said Miller, not the court system.

Suspensions

Many students were sent interim suspension notices amid the protest, barring them from campus, with a count of around 70 students noted at the meeting by Humboldt’s Cal Faculty Association president. The single faculty member who was arrested has been suspended from their job as well.

The divide on campus has been clear for weeks, as faculty groups quickly pushed back on the use of riot police on students on April 22 and the closure of the entirety of campus. While a May 1 statement from President Tom Jackson and eight other administrators said this can “never happen again,” faculty groups and Miller said they were in support of protests and students voicing their dissent.

“Isn’t higher ed a place where we come and know that young people are going to push? They’re going to push against the systems that we know aren’t working, and we’re going to work with them? Because if we resisted and didn’t want that push, wouldn’t we be in elementary schools?” asked Meridith Oram, an academic advisor during the meeting’s open forum.

The resolution noted that in 1970, a week-long student strike on campus to protest the Vietnam War was supported by then-president Cornelius Siemens, who wrote a letter to President Nixon to encourage the president to listen to students. This is in stark contrast to current President Tom Jackson, who told the Times-Standard, “those who are staying in there are not staying in there for noble causes. They’re criminals.”

At Tuesday afternoon’s meeting — in the Arcata Community Center because campus remains closed — the senators suspended formal rules around 4 p.m. and hosted an open forum, facilitated by ombudsman staff, for a few minutes on their thoughts. In a period of about two and a half hours, those there spoke, many noting Israeli tanks has rolled into Rafah earlier that day. They aired their reflections two weeks after students began an occupation to protest the Israel-Hamas war, in solidarity with Palestinians and nationwide encampments at universities. The main thread among speakers, largely employees or students of the university, was dissatisfaction with upper management’s response to the occupation.

“We are evaluated as faculty for creating a safe environment, who is being evaluated in this university for creating a safe environment? Because right now, it’s hostile,” asked Marisol Ruiz, CFA president and senator.

A big question — aired by Ruiz and others — was why the campus remains closed weeks later, with classes moved online and police blocking entry to faculty, students and others. A campus news release Tuesday said that tagging and efforts to reoccupy buildings on campus have continued since the arrests which is why campus has yet to be reopened.

Potential to reopen

Sherie Gordon, Vice President for Administration and Finance, said that a soft opening is planned as early as Monday (which includes opening faculty access to offices and a hybrid option for staff). She said the week of the May 20 will see a broader opening and alleviating some soft barriers across campus. On May 28, she said there are goals for a wider opening.

When asked what the police presence is now, she said, “It’s really our police department and a security workforce,” and a few from local agencies on a case-by-case basis.

Loren Cannon, from the CFA, said the organization is drafting an unfair practice PERB charge on the university for not consulting with union staff in the closure of the campus. Instructors must be escorted to their offices if they need to pick something up and faculty reported being threatened with arrest for going on campus, part of the university’s “hard closure” policy.

“The lack of trust in faculty to be on campus safely, while contractors and IT are freely working on campus is abhorrent in my opinion,” said Jenny Cappuccio, an associate professor of chemistry (adding the discomfort she’s facing pales compared to her students).

Early on, Mark Johnson, who was there in proxy for Tom Jackson, explained there were legitimate concerns for Jackson’s personal safety when asked why Jackson wasn’t there.

Protesters and faculty have repeatedly asked why Jackson hadn’t shown up, with his first commentary on the situation an interview with the Times-Standard and later a released May 1 letter signed by eight other people. Some at the meeting accused Jackson of meeting with police but not protesters. A group of 320 faculty and staff have called on Jackson and Johnson to resign. Johnson was followed in the building by a woman yelling at him to resign and recording him on her phone.

(times-standard.com)

SOLAR FARMING

Editor:

Columnist Dan Walters wrote about issues we are facing trying to protect valuable but limited groundwater. I agree this is a critical problem that needs addressing. He says some farmers will have to convert their land to solar farms, a benefit for climate problems.

I have no doubt that there is some ground that would be better served farming solar than traditional crops. But I am concerned about another side to this complicated issue. Walters mentions “the state’s declared intent to reduce the share of water devoted to agriculture.” Historically, half of this nation’s fresh fruit and vegetables have come from California. Food grows where water flows, and I am concerned about becoming a country dependent on imports for our food supply. Consider not only the security issue and economic impact, but also the climate impacts of, for example, shipping avocados from Mexico and grapes from Chile.

Water issues are as old as this state. Trying to tackle one part of it (such as groundwater) without looking at it comprehensively (including surface water) and considering all impacts is foolish.

Mary Tupa

Petaluma

AI IS HELPING TO DESTROY LOCAL JOURNALISM

by Nuala Bishari

Hoodline’s devolution from community journalism to farmed AI content raises existential questions about how we get I got my first job in journalism in 2013 as a reporter for the hyperlocal news site Hoodline. The site had just launched by merging three small neighborhood blogs under one umbrella, and our mission was to publish stories that skated under the radar of larger publications — a mural going up on the wall of a local pizzeria or a rogue garden planted outside the DMV.

This approach proved successful at finding an audience. San Franciscans, it turned out, really wanted to know what was happening in their neighborhoods, not just in the city at large.

I found my stories by walking around my neighborhood each day. I befriended shop owners, attended neighborhood association meetings and chatted with neighbors in the dog park. Through developing valuable face-to-face relationships, my colleagues and I often landed big scoops before our larger counterparts. As our team grew over the next couple of years, so did our coverage of the city.

It was a thrilling time. Using grassroots community journalism, Hoodline managed to elbow its way into a crowded news scene.

Unfortunately, it didn’t last.

I quit Hoodline when it was sold to Ripple News in 2016. Nextdoor then acquired the site, and Impress3, which owns SFist, purchased it in 2020.

Now, it seems, Hoodline has started using artificial intelligence to produce most of its stories, which are aggregated from other news sites like the Chronicle. While CEO Zack Chen maintained to the Chronicle that humans still manage much of the content, there’s a catch. Leticia Ruiz, whose byline is featured at the top of a story about the weather, isn’t a real person. Nor is Nina Singh-Hudson, who authors a lot of stories about traffic collisions, or Tony Ng, who has a penchant for police chases.

It’s particularly cringeworthy that many of these fake bylines imply the authors are people of color. Creating personas from thin air makes a mockery of the effort to improve racial diversity problems in journalism.

Seeing my old job replaced by AI is surreal, and in this context, feels particularly ironic. Old-fashioned shoe-leather reporting has been replaced by fake people who’ve never set foot in any of the neighborhoods they write about — because they don’t have feet.

But beyond the collapse of a trusted news source, Hoodline’s devolution raises larger, existential questions about news and how we receive it.

On the one hand, AI has the potential to streamline some of the most tedious and time-consuming parts of journalism. I use an AI transcription software program that saves me hundreds of hours each year; AI can crunch data and write headlines. These tools can potentially help broaden a story’s impact beyond what a small number of journalists are capable of on their own.

That said, AI is also poised to capture more of the shrinking pot of revenue that used to go to real journalists.

Nearly 75% of Americans believe local news is at least somewhat important to the health of their local communities, according to a Pew Research Center report released this week. Despite this uplifting statistic, only 15% of Americans polled say they pay for local news, yet 63% said they believe local news organizations are doing well financially.

They’re not.

By the end of 2024, the United States have a third fewer newspapers than it had in 2005, according to a 2023 report from Northwestern University. Any news publications left standing will be operating with one-third of the journalists they had that same year.

The business model for the kind of intimate community journalism that so many San Franciscans dearly love collapsed even before the advent of AI. At Hoodline, all of us struggled to figure out how to make it profitable. There was no illusion that ads from local businesses alone were ever going to make it work — especially with tech giants like Google and Meta eating up most of the pie.

We need bigger, systemic solutions.

New legislation is popping up to address some of the challenges newsrooms face. The California Journalism Preservation Act would mandate that large tech companies like Google pay news organizations for profiting off their journalism. News publishers would be obligated to use at least 70% of the money to pay journalists. A second bill recently introduced by state Sen. Steve Glazer, D-Orinda, would allocate $500 million in taxes from tech giants to local journalism.

It’s an uphill battle. Google has pledged to remove links to news websites in California in protest of these bills.

But without a big shift, journalism as we know it will continue to sputter out. And it isn’t just tiny outlets like Hoodline that are in danger of going extinct or being zombified by AI.

During the past 10 years, San Francisco has lost alt weeklies SF Weekly and the Bay Guardian, and small neighborhood blogs like Mission Mission and Uptown Almanac. San Francisco Magazine no longer employs investigative journalists to produce rich, important features. Even as new publications like the San Francisco Standard pop up, sustainable financial models are elusive.

The impact on local communities cannot be overstated. Pew states that “an overwhelming majority of adults say it is at least somewhat important for journalists to understand their community’s history (85%) and to be personally engaged with their local area (81%).”

That is only possible when real human journalists embed themselves in the cities they cover. AI can never replicate that.

(SF Chronicle)

WILL CALIFORNIA SUPREME COURT KNOCK ANTI-TAX MEASURE OFF THE BALLOT?

by Dan Walters

When California’s voters 46 years ago passed Proposition 13, its iconic property tax limit, they ignited a perpetual conflict over how much tax money state and local governments need and who should supply it.

Since 1978, public employee unions and other beneficiaries of government spending have repeatedly tried to repeal Prop. 13’s barriers and make it easier to enact new taxes.

At the same time, business interests and anti-tax groups such as the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association, named for Prop. 13’s chief sponsor, have backed additional ballot measures to make new taxes more difficult.

As the conflict raged, pro-tax interests became dominant in the Capitol and in local governments, but the anti-tax faction mostly prevailed in post-Prop. 13 ballot battles. In 2020, for example, voters rejected a union-sponsored ballot measure that would have changed Prop. 13 to allow higher taxes on commercial real estate.

Concurrently, California courts have eroded some of the taxation barriers the anti-tax forces erected. In 2020, the state Supreme Court made raising local taxes easier by declaring that tax measures proposed by initiative needed only simple majority voter approval, rather than two-thirds.

The nearly half-century of skirmishing over taxation is reaching a climax of sorts this year in the form of a ballot measure, backed by the California Business Roundtable, that would require voter approval of new state taxes, increase the threshold of voter approval for taxes to two-thirds, and reclassify many fees as taxes needing voter approval.

It shapes up as the mother-of-all taxation battles with deep-pocketed interests on both sides — but only if it actually appears on the ballot.

Gov. Gavin Newsom, the Legislature’s Democratic leaders and local government officials want the state Supreme Court to declare that the measure is not a constitutional amendment, as its sponsors claim, but rather is so sweeping that it constitutes a constitutional revision that cannot be placed before voters via initiative petition.

On Wednesday, lawyers made their arguments to the court’s seven justices, who must decide whether the measure can appear on the ballot by June 27, the deadline for preparing ballots and other material for the November election.

Margaret Prinzing, an Oakland attorney representing Newsom and other opponents, argued that the measure would strip the Legislature of its constitutional power to raise taxes and the governor of authority to enact fees, thus making fundamental changes in California’s system of government that qualify it as a constitutional revision.

Thomas Hiltachk, a Sacramento attorney who specializes in ballot measures with a conservative bent, countered that the Constitution recognizes voters as the ultimate political authority and the proposed measure merely underscores that primacy. He told the court that it could review its constitutionality after the election if it passes, rather than short-circuit the process by knocking it off the ballot.

The justices questioned both attorneys sharply on the dividing line between a constitutional amendment and a revision, but gave little indication of how they are likely to rule. They probably lean against the measure personally, given the court’s dominance by appointees of Democratic governors, but in past cases have tended to uphold the initiative process.

Allowing the measure to proceed would merely shift the battle to the electoral arena but that has its own complications. The Legislature has also placed a constitutional amendment on the ballot that would, if it gets more votes than the anti-tax measure, raise the threshold for passage of the latter to two-thirds — the same margin proposed for taxes.

That would probably ignite a post-election clash in the courts, thus extending California’s version of medieval Europe’s Hundred Years War.

(CalMatters)

MITCH CLOGG:

I like Michael Cohen. All the news people feel compelled to say what a rotter he is, but I like him. I like to think that he is that rarity, a truly reformed person. I think he’s a nice guy. I bet he’d be great fun to have around for dinner. I imagine roaring with laughter about practically everything. He has had most of his life, his world view, his values, his activities – exposed, disassembled, condemned and crudely reassembled. He had enough innate strength to make that rickety structure into a new man, and I find him interesting, witty and charming. He's in no way like Roy Cohn.

But I am stupidly naive.

ON-LINE COMMENT OF THE DAY

I recall a Sgt. Bilko episode from back in the ‘50’s wherein Bilko gets what’s-his-name, Muldoon, from Car 54, on the $64,000 Question (which was very hot then). Of course, Bilko being Bilko, tries to fix the game so his person couldn’t help but win. He inserted a tiny device in Muldoon’s ear so Bilko’s team, armed with encyclopedias, could feed his guy all the answers. Remember, this was in the 1950’s.

I bring this up because it’s a little scary that Biden is being allowed to debate Trump. Biden has no mind, so why would the Dems ok this? Unless they have another plan. Something’s up. Well, we’ll see.

GENE BAYNE: True story…When I worked at a major chemical company we had engineering students who were planning to work in industrial manufacturing work for us in the summer so they could become familiar with what actually goes on in a production unit. We had a young man one summer who was a 4.0 or straight A student who was assigned to work in our pilot plant which made test quantities of pesticides. Our pilot plant was a big one having reactors up to 1,000 gallons. One night the maintenance crew was working on some piping and sent him to the shop to get a left handed pipe wrench. He asked the tool guy for one and was handed a pipe wrench with jaws turned to the left. When he brought the wrench to the pipe fitter, the pipe fitter took it from him and turned it the other way and told him that it was a right handed pipe wrench. The third time they sent him they relented and told him he finally got it right. He never did figure it out. He’s probably a plant manager somewhere by now.

“Leaving is not enough. You must stay gone. Train your heart like a dog. Change the locks even on the house he's never visited. You lucky, lucky girl. You have an apartment just your size. A bathtub full of tea. A heart the size of Arizona, but not nearly so arid. Don't wish away your cracked past, your crooked toes, your problems are papier mache puppets you made or bought because the vendor at the market was so compelling you just had to have them. You had to have him. And you did. And now you pull down the bridge between your houses, you make him call before he visits, you take a lover for granted, you take a lover who looks at you like maybe you are magic. Make the first bottle you consume in this place a relic. Place it on whatever altar you fashion with a knife and five cranberries. Don't lose too much weight. Stupid girls are always trying to disappear as revenge. And you are not stupid. You loved a man with more hands than a parade of beggars, and here you stand. Heart like a four-poster bed. Heart like a canvas. Heart leaking something so strong they can smell it in the street.”

— Frida Kahlo to Marty McConnell

WELCOME TO THE NEW NORMAL.

In this parallel reality, Jews who oppose Israel’s genocide in Gaza and America’s complicity in it are antisemites. The House has passed a bill that, among other things, defines antisemitism as “drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis.” This must offer little comfort to Holocaust survivors like 87-year-old Stephen Kapos, who has stated:

What distinguishes the Jewish Holocaust is its industrial scale and industrial methods being applied. And what has been happening in Gaza is similar in that the scale of the bombing and in the indiscriminate nature of the bombing, the complete lack of care about women and children being the majority of the victims amounts to industrial-scale genocide. The painting of the Palestinian people as worthless, almost “animal-like” by the description of some of the leaders of that dehumanization enables the population of Israel to tolerate what’s going on. The way that Palestinian people who were arrested and treated, having to take their clothes off and parading them … it’s part of the humiliation. In the West Bank, the way the checkpoints are organized, the way you are forced to wait for hours for no reason in order to go to school or to go to work, etc. All this amounted to humiliation similar to what we experienced. The sort of determination and consistency with which they are setting about to destroy the whole of Gaza is very similar to the kind of cruelty and determination of the fascist regimes. Some of the actions of the Nazi state in dehumanizing and completely cruel large-scale killings, etc., if it is repeated, I don’t see why you couldn’t make the parallel. It can only be helpful in understanding what’s going on to make the parallel. I don’t think there should be any taboo about that.

(John G. Russell)

ISRAEL AND THE QUESTION OF GENOCIDE

“Saint Augustine argued that the goal of war is not more war, but peace,” writes Aryeh Neier in the New York Review of Books on June 6. “Therefore conducting war in a manner that contributes to the restoration of peace is essential.” By tracing the history of international law from Xerxes and the Spartans to Augustine and finally to the establishment of the Geneva Conventions and, most recently, the International Criminal Court, Neier defines the principles and laws that are supposed to govern the treatment of civilians and combatants. Under those definitions, he writes: “I am now persuaded that Israel is engaged in genocide against Palestinians in Gaza. What has changed my mind is its sustained policy of obstructing the movement of humanitarian assistance into the territory.”

HOW THE AR-15 BECAME THE MOST POPULAR – AND MOST HATED – RIFLE IN AMERICA

by Zusha Elinson

The AR-15 semiautomatic is the most popular rifle in America — and the most hated.

Millions of supporters of the Second Amendment love the lightweight, easy-to-shoot gun — it is estimated that more than 20 million AR-15-style weapons are in civilian hands.

At the same time, millions of gun safety advocates who see it as a tool for mass shootings despise the firearm as a device of evil. We all know why: Las Vegas, Sandy Hook, Parkland, and on and on. Last month, the gun was used by a Charlotte, N.C., man to kill four law enforcement officers who were serving a warrant.

Everyone has an opinion about the rifle, however, few understand its history and how we got where we are: rutted in a political stalemate over federal gun legislation with states and the two major political parties sharply divided over how to regulate such weapons. Meanwhile, the guns keep selling and Americans of all ages have grown wary of going to schools, movies, concerts, grocery stores, bars or anywhere else people gather.

America needs to stop yelling about AR-15s and start understanding how it became so divisive. Only then can we work to achieve the goal most Americans want no matter how they feel about the AR-15 — a safer country.

The story begins during the Cold War, with an unknown inventor named Eugene Stoner. Without a college education or any formal engineering training, Stoner set out to develop a light rifle for American fighters and their allies battling Communist insurgencies. He began his tinkering while working in Los Angeles’s booming aerospace industry and brought materials applied to aircraft to firearms.

His early ideas were developed in the family garage, but luck, circumstance and Stoner’s determination combined to get the rifle eventually adopted — despite intense bureaucratic resistance — by the Pentagon. This came just in time for the Vietnam War, and the military named its version of the gun the M-16. The gun, made primarily of aluminum and fiberglass, was a revolutionary innovation in the history of firearms. Stoner’s gun has served as a key rifle for American troops for decades — longer than any other rifle in the nation’s history.

But I learned as I researched “American Gun: The True Story of the AR-15” with co-author Cameron McWhirter, that inventors quickly lose control of their inventions, and so it was with Stoner. We opened our book with a quote from Robert Oppenheimer, who led the effort to create the atomic bomb.

“When you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it and you argue about what to do about it only after you have had your technical success,” he said to a government committee reviewing his security status.

Stoner created a revolutionary gun to achieve all the design needs of the military: lightweight so soldiers could carry it long distances with lots of ammunition. It was easy to shoot rapidly and keep on target so fighters could fend off enemies with larger numbers.

But Stoner’s design achievements also made it easy for a teenager to walk into a school and wreak havoc in seconds or allow a disturbed man to shoot up a Fourth of July parade.

The saga of how the gun went from Stoner’s garage to the most controversial weapon in America involves presidents from Eisenhower to Biden, bickering generals, schmoozy businessmen, a renegade spy, bullet-riddled goats, desperate soldiers and Marines in Vietnam fighting with a malfunctioning version of the gun, cult members, partisan senators, a tap dancer turned gunmaker, a gun-obsessed hedge-fund king, mercenary admen, a brigade of lobbyists, disturbed killers and victims. It’s a wild and very American story with profound consequences for today.

Politics plays a major role, from the late 1980s through the federal assault weapons ban of 1994 to Sept. 11, the presidential candidacy of Barack Obama and the political fallout after each horrific mass shooting.

Cultural and political shifts and revamped marketing by gunmakers helped transform the semiautomatic version of Stoner’s rifle, which was once rejected by many hunters and traditional firearm manufacturers, into a financial savior for the gun industry.

In 1993, there were only about 400,000 AR-15s in civilian hands.

Most AR-15 owners aren’t out to hurt anyone, but some disturbed people and political extremists are drawn to the readily available gun in a quest to declare war on American society. On Jan. 6, some waved flags outside the Capitol bearing images of the AR-15 and the ominous phrase: “Come and Take It.”

Efforts to limit the availability of the rifle have fallen flat in the U.S. Congress’ attempt to ban the rifle, led by the late Sen. Dianne Feinstein, helped transform the gun from a niche product into a symbol of Second Amendment rights. Feinstein championed the ban after the horrific 1993 mass shooting at 101 California St. in San Francisco. On paper, the 1994 federal ban prohibited AR-15s and other military-style semiautomatics with large magazines. But in reality, gunmakers just had to alter the way the guns looked to keep selling them because of the way the legislation was worded. Gunmakers sold more AR-15s during the 10 years it was banned than in the three decades before the law went into effect.

Stoner’s technology, for better or for worse, is here to stay. The issue now is how we can take measures — and it will require various approaches — to limit the chance that someone uses the rifle to hurt the country that Stoner wanted to protect.

People need to stop shouting, stop the memes, stop the siloed thinking and start talking across political divides about making us all safer. This begins with understanding the social history of this technology and how it went from a Cold War invention to protect America to the center of our nation’s gun debate, and the most loathed and loved firearm in our nation’s history.

(Zusha Elinson is a veteran Bay Area journalist who co-authored “American Gun: The True Story of the AR-15” with Cameron McWhirter. Elinson will discuss the book at 12:15 p.m. Thursday at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University and 2 p.m. Sunday at Book Passage in the Ferry Building in San Francisco.)

REMEMBERING JOE BRADY

The Irish Revolutionary was hanged in Mountjoy Gaol on May 14th 1883.

Brady was part of the ‘Invincibles’ who assassinated Lord Cavendish and Thomas Burke in The Phoenix Park Dublin.

Ballad of Joe Brady:

I am a bold undaunted youth, Joe Brady is my name,
From the chapel of North Anne Street one Sunday as I came,
All to my surprise who should I espy but Moreno and Cockade;
Says one unto the other: “Here comes our Fenian blade”.

I did not know the reason why they ordered me to stand,
I did not know the reason why they gave me such a command.
But when I saw James Carey there, I knew I was betrayed.
I’ll face death before dishonour and die a Fenian blade.

They marched me up North Anne Street without the least delay,
The people passed me on the path, it filled them with dismay.
My sister cried, “I see you Joe, if old Mallon gives me lave,
Keep up your heart for Ireland like a true-born Fenian Blade.

It happened in the Phoenix Park all in the month of May,
Lord Cavendish and Burke came out for to see the polo play.
James Carey gave the signal and his handkerchief he waved,
Then he gave full information against our Fenian blades.

It was in Kilmainham Prison the Invincibles were hung.
Mrs Kelly she stood there all in mourning for her son.
She threw back her shawl and said to all:
“Though he fills a lime-pit grave,
My son was no informer and he died a Fenian blade.”