Mendocino County Today: Saturday 5/25/24

By AVA News Service on May 25, 2024

UNSEASONABLY COOL TEMPERATURES continue today across the interior. Coastal clouds are expected to clear back to the coast this afternoon. Warming temperatures are expected across the interior Sunday and Monday while the coast continues to see cool temperatures and periods of fog and low clouds. Some cooling is expected Tuesday through Thursday before another warming trend starts Friday. (NWS)

STEPHEN DUNLAP (Fort Bragg): On the coast this Saturday morning I have a foggy 49F. The NWS has brought the fog back thru Tuesday. Foggy mornings & clearing skies for the holiday weekend. Clearing skies later next week they say.

INVESTIGATORS TESTIFY IN TRIAL OF UKIAH MAN CHARGED WITH STARTING HOPKINS FIRE

by Colin Atagi

Devin Lamar Johnson is charged with arson in the September 2021 fire in Mendocino County. His trial is happening in Marin County so he could have a fair trial.

A California Highway Patrol officer was guiding evacuees during Mendocino County’s Hopkins Fire on Sept. 12, 2021, when he briefly encountered the man accused of starting the blaze, he testified Thursday.

CHP Officer Michael McFadden said most evacuees were animated and rushed to escape. The suspect, later identified as Devin Johnson, appeared “lethargic” and stopped to observe the fire.

“That, to me, was a little unusual,” McFadden told a Marin County Superior Court jury of four men and eight women in San Rafael.

He was one of the prosecution’s first witnesses to testify Thursday during the first full day of testimony in Johnson’s criminal trial.

Johnson is charged with arson in the 257-acre fire that destroyed about 30 homes in 2021 in the Mendocino County town of Calpella, north of Ukiah.

Fueled by light winds and 90-degree temperatures, the Hopkins Fire raged through a portion of this community, before reaching a hillside bordering the Russian River and Lake Mendocino. About 200 people were evacuated from area homes. No injuries were reported.

Johnson, 23, could be sentenced to 10 years to life in prison, if convicted as charged.

Criminal proceedings originated in Mendocino County following Johnson’s arrest two days after the fire began, but his attorney successfully argued for a venue change last year to ensure Johnson receives a fair trial since most Ukiah area residents were familiar with the fire.

Proceedings are now overseen by Marin County Superior Court Judge Kelly Simmons. The trial is expected to last into early June.

After a jury was selected Wednesday afternoon, Mendocino County Deputy District Attorney Heidi Larson delivered an opening statement offering a general overview of the case.

Dana Liberatore, Johnson’s attorney with the Mendocino County Public Defender’s Office, said he waived his opening statement.

On Thursday, Larson showed jurors surveillance footage from a local business, McFarland Trucking. In the footage, investigators said, Johnson is seen starting the fire in a heavily wooded area on a trail.

Jolene Shanahan, who sat in the audience during testimony, wiped away tears as the prosecution played footage of the fire as it destroyed her home.

Before testimony began Thursday, Shanahan told The Press Democrat her family was preparing to celebrate her 11-year-old nephew’s birthday when the fire began.

The blaze wiped out their four-bedroom home along Eastside Calpella Road in front of their eyes. It wasn’t the only destruction they witnessed.

“We were there when our neighbor’s house burned because we were trying to help everyone get out,” said Shanahan, 49.

Her family now lives in Upper Lake in Lake County and the loss has impacted their finances.

“We were above water. Now we’re drowning,” Shanahan said, emphasizing that she wants people to know what happened.

Ukiah Valley Fire Authority Battalion Chief Justin Buckingham testified investigators ruled out numerous potential causes, such as lightning, gunfire and cigarettes.

The fire’s point of origin was identified and arson “was the only hypothesis I was unable to rule out,” he said.

Investigators were led to Johnson after he appeared in a photo taken by a local photographer. In the photo, according to investigators, Johnson is seen standing on the Moore Street Bridge watching smoke rise from the flames on the day of the blaze.

The photographer, Peter Armstrong, was Larson’s first witness Thursday. The photo was presented to jurors and he briefly testified to verify its authenticity.

Buckingham said investigators interviewed Johnson the day after the fire. He verified he appeared in the photo but denied starting the fire.

“The question was ‘You’re either our best witness or our best suspect,” Buckingham testified.

Thursday’s proceedings wrapped up at noon and testimony was scheduled to commence at 9:30 a.m. Friday.

(Santa Rosa Press Democrat)

HIGHWAY 253

A southeast view by the brilliant Jeff Goll, who captures in this one shot a vista us locals can never get enough of.

AV UNIFIED NEWS

Dear Anderson Valley Community,

It was a very busy week, indeed. What a great way to start a Friday with the Walk to School Day at the elementary! Thank you to all of the staff and families that came out to support it.

At the high school, I’m going to start with the congratulations to the senior class for their senior project presentations. I judged three and they were very well done and were projects that were personally important to the student. The amount of time and energy to create all portions of this activity for all students is significant. Many collaborating mentoring agencies were involved, including the fire department, our wildlife partnership with Wild Things, and other professionals in businesses and organizations that share their time with students. The project is just one component and there are many other portions of the final grade including the research paper, personal statement, and the detailed planning guide. All of these items are designed to prepare students for life beyond high school as they tackle projects in their future jobs or college careers. A shout out to Stefani Ewing, Chris Howard, and Matt Bullington for their work in the senior seminar this year. Next year that course will be taught by Casey Farber.

Achievement blossomed at the elementary school during the open house. It was terrific to see all of the learning examples on display. It is so much fun to watch a kid all excited to show their family something that they feel proud about creating. They were also incredible art projects facilitated by the gifted instruction of Cathleen Micheaels.

The preschool graduation under the direction of Anita Mendoza, Guadalupe Espinoza, and Monica Alvarez was a stellar send-off to students that will be moving to the big school next year. The students marched out on the stage, received their diplomas, and then enjoyed some cupcakes and juice. It was wonderful, and I appreciate everyone helping gather up the chairs afterwards. Our mighty maintenance staff is maxed out at this time of year with so much going on. Your support for cleaning up the chairs makes a difference and more importantly, shows them you care and support them.

I want to update you also on the hiring process that is on-going for our site leaders. Today, we interviewed a strong candidate and we expect to have a positive announcement on Tuesday for the Junior Senior High School principal position. We have two interviews scheduled for next week for the elementary principal. One is fairly local and the other one is from out of state. We will continue to keep you posted on those outcomes.

A huge thank you to Alexys Bautista for planning the dance tonight with the Junior High Leadership team! The kids are so excited!

Please remember no school Monday. Upcoming dates:

Junior Senior High Exhibition May 29 at 3:30 p.m. - 6:00 p.m.

FFA Awards Night Dinner May 30 5:00 p.m.

6th Grade Promotion June 4 at 6:00 p.m.

8th Grade Promotion June 5 at 6:00 p.m.

12th Grade Graduation June 6 at 7:00 p.m.

Have a safe and happy weekend!

Louise Simson, Superintendent

AV Unified School District

PROCESS CORRECTED, MERGER NOT SO MUCH

by Jim Shields

While I’m pleased to report that I was successful in resolving the Brown Act mess relative to a confusing proposed administrative merger of Public Health and Behavioral Health (formally Mental Health) under a single Director, this issue needs careful reflection before implementation.

The Supes’ unanimous decision at their May 21 meeting to do what should have been done in the first place, i.e., discuss and take action in open session where the public will be allowed to participate in the process. This is obviously a huge step in the right direction. Presumably, this corrective action will occur at the June 4, 2024 meeting where the issue(s) will be posted on the regular, open session agenda.

At this week’s meeting, Board Chair Maureen Mulheren, who admitted at the May 7 BOS meeting, that the Public Health merger had been discussed during at least one closed session “personnel” meeting, issued an apology: “You know I was really caught off guard at the last meeting [June 7]. This was a discussion and I got a little flabbergasted by the process … I attend a lot of meetings and sometimes I forget which meeting where I‘ve heard the review of the meetings and when they happened and what they discussed. What was helpful for me also as I reflected [on] that I personally toured Public Health and was working actively related to the VSO conversation (reference to the forced relocation of the Veterans Service Organization), and so you know it was a challenging conversation, and so I learned a lot.

“And there was a friend that said, ‘You know there’s no playbook for this.’ And sometimes things come up we’re not prepared for, so I apologize for any misdirection that I may have given [at the May 7 meeting].”

Evidently, she’s saying because she attends so many meetings and deals with so many issues, she sometimes forgets what occurs at different meetings and in different settings. So that led to her May 7 meeting “misdirection” about what may or may not have occurred regarding the Public Health merger proposal and whether it was discussed or not in closed session.

Ultimately, the record speaks for itself and I’ll just leave it at that. Mulheren’s June 21 revelation and apology were the right thing for her to do given the circumstances surrounding this matter.

On the substantive side of this issue, recently retired Julie Beardsley, who served in government for over 30 years, and was the Mendocino County Senior Public Health Analyst (acting as the Epidemiologist) for 8 years, did an excellent job of summarizing this puzzling proposal:

“The Board of Supervisors is debating once again whether to combine Public Health and Behavioral Health into one department. Having a ‘Health Department’ may make sense in our small community and could save money. But as things stand now, Behavioral Health staff are running Public Health, despite the fact that they have no expertise or knowledge of how a Public Health department should function. Our Mendocino County Public Health does not run hospitals like some larger counties do. Public Health does provide some treatment modalities, for example, treating tuberculosis patients. They run vaccine clinics at times. Public Health Nursing provides home visiting for families at risk for child abuse or neglect. It provides education and information about oral health, tobacco use, and nutrition. The Women’s Infant’s and Children’s (WIC) program and Environmental Health are also a part of Public Health. Public Health also monitors children in foster care and children with special needs. The decision to create a ‘Health Department’ is fine and may be appropriate for our county. But to have BHRS overseeing Public Health is not appropriate. BHRS staff are not trained in the science of Public Health modalities or its functions. Trying to force BHRS policies and procedures on Public Health department functioning is not appropriate and is counter-productive to the functioning of the Public Health department.

Combining the two departments may be an okay idea, but the tail should not wag the dog. BHRS should be under Public Health, and not the other way around. There may be someone who could manage both departments, but honestly, it is not Jenine Miller and her staff. They lack the training and knowledge necessary to fulfill the core functions of a Public Health department. I urge the Supervisors to look for someone who has the qualifications to oversee both departments, OR to resist the temptation to act suddenly without a real plan.”

GLOSSING OVER INCOMPETENCE

by Mark Scaramella

KZYX’S Sarah Reith usually gets the essential elements of County issues in her regular, albeit brief, KZYX County reports. But when the essentials are trimmed down into misleading sound bites, the impression that’s left is the reverse of what’s going on. In her Friday report, Ms. Reith glossed over so much that Reith is at risk of being seen as part of the Ukiah City Council staff or County administration, not an independent reporter.

Speaking of the Palace Hotel demo permit, Reith remarked that the deal Ms. Minal Shankar offered to Palace property owner Mr. Ishwar “fell through.” Oops! No mention of why. To find that out you have to read Mike Geniella’s extensive coverage of the Palace hotel issue. Shankar’s deal didn’t “fall through,” it was declined by Jitu Ishwar at the last minute when he discovered that he might be able to make more money by entering into a “scheme” with the Guidiville Indians and some other shady-investors, thus depriving the City of Ukiah of an opportunity to make the Palace into an attractive downtown magnet. And, with Ukiah’s recent hands-off approval Ishwar’s demo permit, the City has essentially ensured that almost an entire downtown city block will be flattened and left that way.

Reith noted that the County has hired Ag Commissioner Angela Godwin from Ventura County for $258k per year including a large hiring bonus as if it was some kind of accomplishment. Farm Bureau rep Devin Boer was quoted as telling the Supervisors that “several projects” were underway that required an Ag Commissioner. But the only “project” mentioned was the 2022-23 Crop Report. Godwin told the Board that she was “enthusiastic about working on the crop report.” There was no mention of the high turnover in the office for years and years, the still-pending wrongful termination lawsuit of former Ag Commissioner Mr. Grewal, or why the Farm Bureau thinks that the Crop Report or unspecified “other projects” are so important that the County needs to congratulated for paying $258k per year for an Ag Commissioner to get them done. (We suspect that the lack of an Ag Commissioner is somehow affecting the wine industry which is why the Farm Bureau is pleased that the “other projects” are now being attended to. Otherwise, why would the Farm Bureau congratulate the Board for finally finding an Ag Commissioner for such a high salary?)

Reith reported that the County has been unable to find a Public Health Officer, quoting Deputy CEO and acting Human Resources Manager Cherie Johnson saying that although thousands of requests have been posted “no applications have been received so far.” However, Reith didn’t mention that for the last two board meetings CEO Darcie Antle’s boyfriend Dr. Theron Chan has been on the consent calendar for appointment as Public Health Officer only to be withdrawn at the last minute. Did he not submit an application?

Reith also reported that Point Arena Librarian Melissa Hannum is now the County Librarian. Supervisor Haschak was quoted saying that the Library was “formerly part of Cultural Services Agency:” which, Haschak noted, was “widely opposed” when it was created a few years ago. Then the CSA Director was fired last year for what Reith described as a “free speech dust-up.” (The CSA Director was essentially fired after she illegally told employees that they would be fired for publicly pointing out her many management deficiencies.) Months later Haschak and a board colleague got around to forming an “ad hoc committee” which magically declared that the CSA director position which was “widely opposed” could be eliminated for a $125k per year savings. A savings! (Wasting money on the widely opposed position filled by an incompetent manager for two years went unmentioned.) Haschak was quoted saying that not continuing to waste $125k a year on a widely opposed consolidation was “a better way to go.” (Like the guy who thought that not banging his head into a wall was a better way to go than banging his head into a wall because it felt so good when he stopped.) Haschak conveniently ignored the fact that — like every other consolidation the Supervisors have dreamed up — the CSA consolidation and the creation of the unnecessary senior position and the years of wasted money was a worse way to go.

If all you did was listen to KZYX’s Supervisors coverage, you’d never know how ridiculous all this is.

ED NOTES

OLD but not quite destitute, we make our economies, one of which was almost my long-time subscription to The New Yorker magazine. I've always thought of it as a one-in-three mag, meaning one-in-three issues there's something I wanted to read. Lately, and I'll concede the culture has passed me by, I seldom see anything that grabs me for more than a paragraph amid lots of articles about social phenomena and trendo-groove-o people I'd go out of my way not to know if I miraculously found myself in their orbit. But then there's a short story by Richard Ford or Thomas McGuane, and I'm glad I renewed my subscription just in time for a truly memorable story in the current issue by McGuane called, ‘Thataway,’ which captures perfectly the current zeitgeist as only a writer of McGuane's years can capture because he was formed in the America that went Thataway around '67.

FROM THATAWAY:

“The moment that Bonny turned onto the frontage road, he opened his mouth and gripped the seat with clammy hands. The water tower emblazoned with the name of the town emerged from the skyline. Cooper looked away.

“Bonny said, ‘Seems like a nice little place to me. Tree-shaded streets, well-kept homes, angry fat people.

‘What makes you think I'd enjoy this? I was a friendless loser here, o.k.? From a loser family, you follow?’ She wanted to say that she would put her losers up against his any day, including her druggy waif of a mother.”

THANKS to the fine reporting of Mike Geniella we have a complete history of the Palace Hotel debacle. Considered whole, it's as if Ukiah city manager, Sage Sangiacomo, had deliberately set out to so thoroughly complicate resolution of the once gracious, long abandoned old hotel that sits a'moulderin' in the center of Ukiah, a relic of a once graceful and proportionate little town, that it can never be un-complicated.

WHAT other municipality could fumble an offer from a person with the means and the desire, and a brilliant plan, to restore the Palace beyond its original glories? The latest, as Geniella reports, is a decision, tentative it seems, by a nebulous bunch of opaque individuals and dubious entities, to tear down the Palace, leaving in its place, eventually, a parking lot for vanished visitors. It's all an amazing story of pure, civic incompetence presided over by a guy who makes close to $350,000 a year with benefits.

$350,000 a year? Who makes that kind of money in Mendocino County? I doubt Charlie Mannon pulls $400 grand out of his Savings Bank in an average year of prudent usury. But looking around Mendo we see the best paid people are invariably employed by the taxpayers, not free enterprise.

IF YOUR BRAKES FAIL, good advice from on-line: "One trick: if the left pedal goes to the floor, stop pressing the right pedal. Sometimes if I see a red or yellow light ahead, I actually let up on the go fuel pedal! The car slows on it’s own! Amazing. Truckers cross the USA without ever hitting their brakes. Any time you use your brakes you are wasting motive energy from fuel you bought, and turning it into heat from brake friction. ‘Nother trick: shut the car off with the key. You probably can’t find a left hand floor parking brake quick enough. A center mounted pull lever maybe."

JUST AS I WAS ABOUT to enter a Ukiah shop on School Street last week, I noticed a sign in the window that said, “Hate Free Zone.” Well, I never! I absolutely refuse to patronize any business that discriminates against so many of my fellow citizens, and what the heck is a hate free zone anyway? And down the street at the abandoned Mendocino Environment Center, a veritable blast furnace of white hot hostility in its salad days (or maybe it was just me), a sign in the window says, “Hate Free Community.”

GIVEN the givens of our crowded, collapsing society, it's my experience that people generally remain remarkably hate-free, that I seldom encounter a seether, a frother, the kind of person who immediately launches into unhappy complaints about this or that group of people. On-line is a different matter. All the hobgoblins come rushing out in the safety of anonymity.

UKIAH!

[1] Saying the unspoken part out loud, Ukiah has become such a $hithole that no rational business reason exists to make the very substantial investment required to bring this back. If the property was in healdsburg it would have been done 15 years ago. The failure of the community to repair and keep this landmark is a failure of the whole community more than a failure of the owners, supes, and other interested parties. Ukiah needs to step up and clean up as a community if they want to have “nice things”.

[2] Ukiah is not now nor ever been a S hole. I lived here for over 80 years and I have seen its ups and downs over the years. One problem is our city managers, the last decent one was Lyle Cash. Wonderful man. He was so skilled at attracting business and services to the city. I hope Ukiah can rise up again. At least we have people Doug Crane. I’m hoping the city will fire the present upper management and get a fresh start. The Palace is a separate issue. The lack of business downtown coupled with the lack of parking destroyed its ability to succeed. Now the county wants to build the new courthouse in the worst place possible, Leslie St., on Bosco’s property. Then add in the vacant post office, railroad depot, and empty strore fronts. We need real management.

PS. Regarding the Palace. I forgot to add the following. It failed because. People are not drinking as much as they used to,. The Seven Eleven,, E and B Club, and several other bars are gone. The state hospital closed, Masonite closed, the mills shut down ( we had ten close to town), several small businesses left, like Car electronics, industrial pipe on Orr Springs rd, machine shops closed, we have no decent middle income homes for doctors, nurses, and other professionals, only one hospital, no city wide, reasonable priced, fiber optic internet for work at home folks, but then there are no homes for them anywhere near town. And the list goes on and on. But I’ll stop here. I still love my little Ukiah.

[3] All true. But you did not mention the collapse of the marijuana business. Like it or not, it fueled this county’s economy when all the above went or were going south…

And if I were to place blame, it would be squarely on the past and present Board of Supervisors. And the State also should share some major blame. In hindsight, legalization was a huge mistake for Mendocino County.

[4] A permit issued through Ukiah Planning and Building is either ministerial or discretionary (conditional) it cannot be both.

THE MTA BUS SYSTEM IS PRETTY GOOD BUT ONLY OFFERS SERVICE DURING CERTAIN HOURS.

Check out the awesome new Rideshare program that is sweeping the nation by watching the video on my Facebook page. If you are looking for a job where you can set your own hours, this is a great opportunity for you. This rideshare program could come to Mendo by next month if we get enough people signed up. It would be great for tourist season too! It's free to sign up, so be sure to get signed up & share it with your friends & family.

HAVE A GLASS OF GLYPHOSATE

Editor:

In a May 12 Forum commentary in the Santa Rosa Press Democrat, Karissa Kruse of Sonoma County Winegrowers suggested that the massive use of the pesticide glyphosate, or Roundup, by many growers is a “sustainable” practice. In 2022, the California Department of Pesticide Regulation reported that 56,847 pounds of glyphosate were applied overall in Sonoma County, with 40,691 pounds used exclusively in the region’s 60,000 acres of wine grape vineyards. The World Health Organization has cited “strong evidence” that glyphosate is “probably carcinogenic to humans.” It is ludicrous to market the industry as sustainable given this practice.

While some winegrowers run stellar sustainable operations, as a whole the wine industry is engaged in serious greenwashing, not so different from fossil fuel companies. Hypocrisy abounds. Kruse’s commentary suggests that there is 60% less use of glyphosate. What is not mentioned is that this reduction is because glyphosate is being replaced by another product, glufosinate — which is chemically similar and much less tested, with some preliminary observations that it could be linked to seizures.

Another example of big industry swapping one bad chemical for another — not a sustainable practice. The wine industry can do better.

Kimberlee Keller

Sebastopol

CONFUSION HILL: We’re looking forward to this weekend with the Snack Bar reopening & Mountain Train Ride returning!

SHERWOOD CORRIDOR SPECIAL BENEFIT ASSESSMENT

At the May 21st Board of Supervisors meeting, a significant resolution was unanimously passed, the Sherwood Corridor Special Benefit Assessment, marking a crucial step in enhancing community emergency infrastructure. The Sherwood Corridor Special Benefit Assessment is an annual property assessment that would provide funding to repair and maintain two emergency access routes in the Sherwood corridor benefiting the Brooktrails, Sylvandale, Spring Creek, and the Gates communities.

Board approval is the first step in implementing the assessment. Property owners within the designated benefit boundary will now vote on adopting the special benefit assessment. All property owners within the benefit boundary will receive an official ballot by mail by June 7, 2024. Ballots must be returned not later than July 23rd, by the end of the public hearing. Detailed voting instructions will be included with the ballot. If approved by voters, the earliest that the special assessment will appear in the tax roll is fiscal year 2024-25. The proposed benefit assessment term is set at 20 years. The rate of the special benefit assessment is $30.88 per developed parcel and $1.39 per undeveloped parcel annually, subject to CPI increases annually.

The existing Sherwood Road corridor, a single road serving a large population in a high-risk fire area, poses significant safety risks during wildfires. The proposed Sherwood Corridor Special Benefit Assessment, a crucial funding source, aims to address this issue by providing alternative access routes. These routes are essential during an emergency, serving as dedicated access roads for first responders or alternative evacuation routes for residents.

Firco Road is an example of the importance of such alternate routes. It was effectively used during the Oak Fire, allowing for a successful and safe evacuation of the area. However, Firco Rd and Willits Creek Rd both need repairs and ongoing maintenance to provide safe and effective emergency access. Because these roads are not county-owned but accessed through deeds, specific, dedicated funding must be raised to maintain them. This assessment is dedicated solely to the repairs and maintenance of these routes, ensuring their continued safety and effectiveness, and significantly enhancing our community's safety during emergencies.

Third District Supervisor John Haschak shared his support for this resolution, “Our community’s safety is of the utmost importance to the Board. This resolution has been a long time in the making and I am very excited we have found a path forward. It paves the way for improvements to much needed emergency access routes, increasing our community’s safety during a wildfire event. I look forward meeting with the community May 28th to answer questions and emphasize the importance of property owners to please cast their votes. Lastly, I want to thank the many people who have helped in this process.”

The community is invited to a public presentation on May 28, 2024 at 7:00pm during the Brooktrails Township Community Services District’s Board of Directors meeting. Third District Supervisor John Haschak, the contracted engineering firm Bartle Wells, and County staff will be available for questions.

Important dates:

May 28th:

Community Presentation at 7:00pm

Location: Brooktrails Township Community Services District

24860 Birch Street, Willits CA 95490

June 7th:

All property owners assessed for special benefit will receive an official ballot by mail.

July 23rd:

Public Hearing and ballot count. All ballots must be received prior to the end of the public hearing on July 23, 2024.

Location: Board of Supervisors Chambers

County of Mendocino Administrative Building

501 Low Gap Rd, Ukiah, CA 95482

For more information visit: mendocinocounty.gov/business/economic-development/special-benefit-assessment

CATCH OF THE DAY, Friday, May 23, 2024

JESUS BANDA-MARIN, Ukiah. Probation revocation.

JODI HODGES, Ukiah. Disorderly conduct-alcohol, parole violation.

JEREMY HODYS, Laytonville. More than six marijuana plants without permit, pot possession for sale, resisting.

DAVID JOHNSON, Covelo. Disorderly conduct-alcohol&drugs, drinking in public, public intoxication, interfering with business.

JEREMY MILLER, Ukiah. Failure to appear.

GARRETT REHA, Ukiah. Violation of domestic violence court order.

MONICA RODRIGUEZ, Ukiah. Failure to appear.

Excavating the second bore of the Waldo Tunnel (1954)

I'VE EARNED SHELTER

Spiritual Identification in a Time of Confusion and Madness

Warmest Spiritual Greetings,

As I sit here on a public computer at the Mendocino Public Library in sunny Ukiah, California, at ease with the Absolute working through this body-mind instrument without interference, and with the upcoming mandated exit date from Building Bridges Homeless Resource Center scheduled for June 12th at noon, with there presently being no place to go to with the two pieces of luggage and a letter to law enforcement deterring my arrest for illegally "camping" outside because there is no other place to go to, it is of the utmost importance for this experiment in freedom and democracy in America to realize that identification with spiritual reality is the answer to all of the existential problems, both locally and by extension, worldwide.

Feel free to stop sending me the dumbest possible general advice, in particular the insane criticism due to current social circumstances, which criticism has been routinely posted on public websites and has been mostly inaccurate, and moreso, the ongoing condemnation for my not being a more successful materialist, and lastly, the even crazier complaints for my having requested subsidized housing short term and requesting donated money be sent to me at Paypal.me/craiglouisstehr.

Regardless, following 53 years since graduation from the University of Arizona, which included 23 years of volunteering with Catholic Worker serving the "poorest of the poor", a commitment to radical environmentalism which included 15 trips to Washington, D.C., constantly writing about it all and of course enjoying it being published…and not just when I was the editor of a publication…plus a half century of spiritual practices including a summer in India, all of which resulted in bona fide samadhi experience and the recognition that Self realization is resultant, you may now tell your ego to shut up and appreciate my presence on the planet earth. Thank you.

Craig Louis Stehr

JUST AFTER WINNING the mega millions, Larry found true love.

MEMO OF THE AIR: Good Night Radio show all night tonight on KNYO!

Soft deadline to email your writing for tonight's (Friday night's) MOTA show is 6pm or so. If you can't make that, that's okay, send it whenever it's done and I'll read it on the radio next week.

Memo of the Air: Good Night Radio is every Friday, 9pm to 5am PST on 107.7fm KNYO-LP Fort Bragg and KNYO.org. The first hour of the show is simulcast on KAKX 89.3fm Mendocino.

I've set up a new computer with new versions of all the software I use, to put my show text together, and get and edit resources, and stream to the web and the transmitter. I /think/ that last part of it is set up right, but there might be problems with the sound. If you notice something, help me out. I'll try to remember to check email once in awhile during the show, on music breaks.

You can always go to https://MemoOfTheAir.wordpress.com and hear last week's MOTA show. By Saturday night I'll put up the recording of tonight's show. Also there you'll find an assortment of cultural-educational amusements to occupy you until showtime, or any time, such as:

How to tell how fast a black hole a billion light-years away is spinning. https://gizmodo.com/supermassive-black-hole-spin-quarter-light-speed-1851492036

The 1939 Hammond Novachord. 58 vacuum tubes. You could cover the vent holes with duct tape and bake a pizza inside it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dMEuibX4c04

And rerun: How to buy a used car without getting screwed. https://kottke.org/16/05/how-not-to-get-screwed-buying-a-used-car

Marco McClean, memo@mcn.org, https://MemoOfTheAir.wordpress.com

In July of 1944, a French resident offers a glass of wine to an American soldier in Périers, France

TRAVIS KELCE REACTS TO KANSAS CITY CHIEFS KICKER'S CONTROVERSIAL GRADUATION SPEECH

by Kimberley Richards

Travis Kelce has weighed in on a controversial speech by his Kansas City Chiefs teammate Harrison Butker, who dismissively referenced Kelce’s girlfriend, megastar singer-songwriter Taylor Swift, and expressed bigoted views in remarks at Benedictine College earlier this month.

During Friday’s episode of his podcast, “New Heights,” the Chiefs tight end said that he believes Butker is “a great person and a great teammate,” and that he’s only seen him treat people with “nothing but respect and kindness.”

But Kelce distanced himself from Butker’s views, saying that the kicker’s beliefs “are his.”

“I can’t say I agree with the majority of it, or just about any of it, outside of just him loving his family and his kids,” Kelce said of his teammate’s speech.

At the same time, the tight end said that he doesn’t think he “should judge [Butker] by his views, especially his religious views.”

“I grew up in a beautiful upbringing of different social classes, different religions, different races and ethnicities, in Cleveland Heights … It showed me a broad spectrum, or just a broad view of a lot of different walks of life,” Kelce said. “I appreciated every single one of those people for different reasons, and I never once had to feel like I needed to judge them based off of their beliefs.”

Speaking to his brother and podcast co-host, retired Eagles center Jason Kelce, Travis explained how his own upbringing did not reflect Butker’s argument that being a homemaker is “one of the most important titles of all” for women.

“My household — my mother and my father both provided for our family,” Travis said. “Both my mother and my father made home what it was. So they were homemakers and they were providers, and they were unbelievable at being present every single day of my life.”

“No doubt,” Jason said.

“That was a beautiful upbringing for me,” Travis continued. “I don’t think everyone should do it the way that my parents did. But… I sure as hell thank my parents and love my parents for being able to provide and making sure that home was what it was.”

He added, “I’m not the same person without both of them being who they were in my life.”

Butker has received widespread backlash since his archconservative commencement speech at the Catholic liberal arts college in Atchison, Kansas.

During his address, Butker referred to Pride month as a “deadly sin,” and took aim at “dangerous gender ideologies” and the “tyranny of diversity, equity, and inclusion.”

Butker also said he believed the majority of the female graduates in the crowd were likely “most excited” about the possibility of one day getting married and having children. He suggested that his wife Isabelle Butker’s life “truly started” when she became a wife and mother.

While criticizing some Catholic priests, he quoted a song by Taylor Swift without naming the music icon, only referring to her as “my teammate’s girlfriend.”

The NFL released a statement last week distancing itself from Butker’s comments, saying that “his views are not those of the NFL as an organization.”

Jason Kelce said on Friday’s episode that he doesn’t “align” himself with a lot of things Butker said in his commencement speech, but that he connected with the kicker’s love for his family.

“When you’re listening to somebody, you take in things that you like, you listen to other things, and you say, ‘Well, I don’t fucking like that’,” Jason said.

He later added: “If you don’t like what somebody says, all you gotta do is say, ‘Oh, that guy’s a fucking idiot.’ And then you move on.”

(NY Times)

“What do you need to know about Tokyo? Deep, deep waters. The first time I came here, it was a transformative experience. It was a powerful and violent experience. It was just like taking acid for the first time—meaning, What do I do now? I see the whole world in a different way.

I often compare the experience of going to Japan for the first time, going to Tokyo for the first time, to what Eric Clapton and Pete Townshend—the reigning guitar gods of England—must have gone through the week that Jimi Hendrix came to town.

You hear about it. You go see it. A whole window opens up into a whole new thing. And you think, What does this mean? What do I have left to say? What do I do now?”

– Anthony Bourdain

ON-LINE COMMENT OF THE DAY

Doesn’t really matter who gets the puppet strings as everyday will be groundhog day once again. The system is large and vast and only needs a pulse and a teleprompter to rule. The election will be close once again but team Dems will squeak out another victory after the real counting starts … while most folks are sleeping.

OF MEN & MYTHS

by James Kunstler

“Donald Trump doesn’t trust women. I do. ” — “Joe Biden” on “X”

There comes a time when the rigors and exertions of being insane just aren’t worth it anymore. You end up in a deadly Pareto distribution in which 80 percent of your energy gets wasted on hallucinating and the rest is barely enough to get yourself dressed, comb your purple hair, and choke down a granola bar.

Verging on a long, hot summer, the party behind “Joe Biden” looks like a 1950s horror movie, complete with lurching ghouls, evil scientists in white lab coats, and the sore beset denizens of Anytown USA screaming down the streets. Only it’s the actual life of our nation now, and it looks like an awful lot of the people who live here lawfully have had enough of it.

The mysterious cabal in power knows that they must ditch the old stumblebum pretending to run for president, and time is running out to get the dastardly deed done. They are staring down a month of dread days that lead to the proposed great debate between the major party candidates, which is doomed to play like a combo of the classic horror movie endings — the unmasking of the phantom with a wooden stake driven through his heart, with Donald Trump cast as Prof Van Helsing. Can our resourceful intel blob instead maybe find a way before that to make it look like the “president” passed away peacefully in his slumber? Or perhaps it would suffice to just leak the voice recording of his interview with Special Counsel Robert Hur and allow people to compare what’s in it with the already-released printed transcript.

Here’s just how crazy the party is: rumor has it that they might just rudely shove old “JB” aside and try the Hail Mary pass of inviting RFKJr back on-board from exile to head the ticket. The Kennedy name alone used to be synonymous with the party’s brand, is their thinking, you see. Trouble is, the Democratic Party is, in reality, synonymous with the intel blob that infests it, and protects it in the service of protecting its own sorry ass. You might recall that RFKJr has publicly stated that his father and uncle were murdered by that selfsame intel blob, which he has promised to treat very harshly were he actually elected. So, scratch that gambit.

Beyond that, you’re back to the maddening rotation of Gavin Newsom, Michelle, and Rodan the Flying reptile, a.k.a. She-Whose-Turn-It-Is — all of them appallingly impossible. Gavin might have been Mr. Dreamboat incarnate — that hair! that height! those teeth! — prompting a pandemic of The Vapors among ladies who lately predominate in the Democrat rank-and-file. But, alas, under his charge California degenerated into a Woke bedlam of diseased homeless junkies shitting all over his cities, with non-stop flash-mob looting, carjacking, and drag queen promenading in the background, and there’s no way of hiding it. Gavin Newsom has a big “L” carved on his forehead the way that Charlie Manson used to sport a swastika.

The Michelle ploy might tempt them, but let’s face it: it’s really just Barack getting a fourth term in the White House — really his fourth-and-a-half, since the Obama intel blob cabal was behind all the RussiaGate roguery that beset, preoccupied, thwarted, and overthrew Mr. Trump’s turn in office. Behind the still-charming Obama façade lurks a penumbra of menace. It begins to look like maybe he really did want to destroy our country, to complete the Cloward-Piven downfall that dedicated Marxians deem the necessary step to creating their nirvana of equity and inclusion. And there are still those dark tales of his coke-fueled cruising nights in Chicago. . . and the mysterious death of his paddle-boarding chef-pal on Martha’s Vineyard. . . and those persistent rumors that what you see in Michelle is not what you get. Can you really see Barack hosting kaffeeklatsches in the East Room while Michelle plans drone strikes in the Oval?

So, finally there is. . . Hillary. After all, she still stalks this earth. She still pops up on TV regularly pronouncing this and that, mostly in the name of. . . women. . . who just can’t get a fair shake in this land, despite running all the elite universities, the foundations, many corporations (especially MSNBC), and the new misinformation-squelching commissions. She’s still reminding all and sundry that the country owes her the Big Prize in this era of historic firsts. She also happens to own the DNC, the apparatus that actually runs the party’s affairs. Her last time around (2016) she simply shoved primary election leader Bernie Sanders off-the-plank when convention time rolled around and there was nothing else left to do. Personally, I’d love to see the rematch. It would be the end of the party, which apparently doesn’t grok just how much America loathes her.

Much more, I daresay, than even the Golden Golem of Greatness who is metamorphosing day by day into an archetypal hero that the ancient Greek myth-makers would be proud of as he survives one tribulation after another thrown at him by Nemesis. Now, as he awaits conviction in the shuck-and-jive court case under mad dog Judge Juan Merchan, he ventured onto Democratic Party sacred ground up in the South Bronx to a surprisingly warm welcome by exactly the hard-up people the Democrats pretend to care about (as long as they stay down on the plantation and don’t get too uppity).

Will Judge Merchan actually try to send the candidate to jail? Or maybe confine him to Trump Tower under some sort of house arrest? With maybe a big clunky ankle-bracelet for additional humiliation? That will be ripe. Let me proffer some advice to the Judge: the last thing you want to do with an archetypal hero is give him a prison to break out of so he can come roaring out for vengeance. In the end, Mr. Trump could accomplish something truly remarkable: bringing our country back together as a people united against being fucked-around by their own government.

THE APACHE

The "Apachue" (enemies) were called so by the zuni of the peoples of adobe, the Apache recognize themselves as "Diné", "The people". They are divided into seven tribes: Chiricahua, Jicarilla, Kiowa, Lipan, Mescalero, Coyotero and Navajo.

They all speak dialects of a common language, of Atapascan roots that confirm their origin in the north of the continent, and their way of life was based on gathering, hunting and pillage. They worship as sacred animals the cougar and the coyote, the eagle and the falcon, the bison and the bear. The Apache were able to survive in the scarcity of the desert, crossing it at full speed and stealth.

They stood out in the art of war for their ambushes, with their bows and arrows, which sometimes filled with ponzona of insects and reptiles, and they were not afraid to go into the fight hand to hand armed with spears and even knives. Their ferocity that sometimes scratched in brutality not only won them the respect and fear of their neighbors, men as warped as the Lakota and the Mohavians, would also make them one of the greatest threats of the desert border to the Spanish, and afterwards to Mexicans and Americans.

SET THE KILLERS FREE: THE PARDONING OF DANIEL PERRY

by Jeffrey St. Clair

In one of the most egregious uses of the pardon power since Bill Clinton freed billionaire tax cheat, Israeli agent and international fugitive Marc Rich as the clock struck midnight on his lamentable administration, last week Texas Gov. Greg Abbott freed an avowed racist who ran a red light, before plunging his car into a crowd of protesters and fatally shooting a man who was trying to protect people from being run over. Abbott granted the killer a pardon, even though the gunman had been obsessed for months with the idea of killing BLM activists.

Just before 10 o’clock on the night of July 25, 2020, a crowd of anti-police brutality protesters were crossing the intersection of Fourth Street and Congress Avenue in downtown Austin, Texas, when a car ran a red light and repeatedly drove into the mass of people.

Several of the protesters approached the car to get the driver to stop menacing pedestrians. One of them was Garrett Foster, a 28-year-old Air Force veteran, who was pushing his wheelchair-bound fiancé, Whitney Mitchell, a quadruple amputee, across the intersection as the car honked at and rammed into the protesters. Foster was carrying an AK-47 rifle for protection, as allowed by Texas’ open-carry law.

As Foster approached the car, telling the driver to “move on, move on,” Daniel Perry, a 30-year-old US Army sergeant, took out his own gun, a .357 Magnum revolver, shot Foster five times through the car’s window and fled the scene. Foster, who like Perry was white, died at the scene.

Later, Perry called the police and reported his version of what happened. Seeking to shield himself behind Texas’s expansive Stand Your Ground Law, Perry claimed he shot in self-defense after Foster came toward him with his AK-47 slung over his shoulder. None of the witnesses reported seeing Foster point his weapon toward Perry or his car. And video of the incident showed Foster keeping his rifle at what gun enthusiasts call the “low-ready” position.

Almost before Foster’s blood had dried, Perry had become a hero of the vigilante right, an adult version of the man-child Kyle Rittenhouse. And a Texan, too, with all that implies in the mythology of American masculinity. Perry was portrayed as a brawny defender of the civil order, a regular American who’d struck back at the lawlessness and anarchy, which many conservative blowhards fumed, had taken over the streets of urban America after the murder of George Floyd.

For months, it seemed as if Perry, a former soldier at Ft. Hood, might not even be charged with killing Garrett Foster. Despite evidence to the contrary, the police seemed to have bought his story of being fearful that Foster was prepared to shoot him and the Austin cops had little sympathy for anyone demonstrating against police brutality. Austin’s police chief originally told the press, “There were two volleys of gunfire,” falsely implying that Foster had fired at Perry. The lead detective in the case, David Fugitt, would later voluntarily testify for the defense, not the prosecution and the leadership of the Austin Police Department drafted a letter advocating for Daniel Perry’s pardon, claiming that his conviction was based on “conjecture,” “innuendo” and “character assassination.” The two-page letter on Department stationery was signed by interim Chief Robin Henderson. After consulting with lawyers for the City, Henderson decided not to submit the letter. It’s clear that the Austin cops wanted to extend the same qualified immunity they enjoy to the white-power vigilantes, who kill their critics.

It’s worth noting here that while more people were killed by US law enforcement in 2023 than at any other time in the last 10 years, total law enforcement on duty deaths for 2023 were at their lowest level since 1959. In other words, police are killing more and being killed less.

Then nearly a year after the slaying of Foster, Perry was indicted by a Travis County grand jury on charges of murder, aggravated assault and deadly conduct. He didn’t spend more than a few hours in jail, however. After Perry turned himself in, he was almost immediately released on a $300,000 bond, raised from his cadre of rightwing supporters.

The week-long trial took place in late March and early April of 2023. The prosecutors portrayed Perry as a man who couldn’t keep his anger under control, a man consumed with racial animas who’d fantasized about killing protesters. The defense’s arguments that Foster had aimed his gun at Perry, were undermined by his own comments in his videotaped interview with police. The jury also rejected the defense’s contention that Perry was unable to control his emotions because of his autism. In closing arguments, prosecutor Elizabeth Lawson said: “He did not have to engage with the protesters, Garrett Foster, or anybody else. You cannot shoot and kill someone for walking up to you while exercising the right to open carry.”

After two days of deliberation, the jury convicted Perry of murder and the judge later sentenced him to a term of 25 years in prison.

Not even a full day after Perry’s conviction, Abbott abruptly announced his intent to pardon Perry for the murder, something Abbott could only do after the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles handed him the legally required recommendation. “Texas has one of the strongest ‘Stand Your Ground’ laws of self-defense that cannot be nullified by a jury or a progressive District Attorney,” Abbott brayed on Twitter. “I look forward to approving the Board’s pardon recommendation as soon as it hits my desk.” Rep. Dan Crenshaw said that not only should Perry be pardoned, but he should be compensated for the inconvenience of being convicted by a jury of his peers.

But Perry proved a strange role model for the moral guardians of the right, who’d spent much of the previous four years fulminating about sex trafficking and the grooming of underage girls. After Perry’s conviction, a tranche of text messages was released which showed that Perry had exchanged flirtations online messages with a 16-year-old girl, after searching for “good chats to meet young girls.”

In one of the chats a young girl says, “Ok so im 16 ill be 17 in 3 months u sure u want me?”

“What state,” Perry asked. “Also promise me no nudes until you are old enough to be of age…I am going to bed come up with a reason why I should be your boyfriend before I wake up.”

The lionizing of Perry was accompanied by an all-out assault on the character of Garrett Foster, who was smeared as an Antifa terrorist. Even the police union joined in the trashing. Without any evidence, Ken Casaday, president of the Austin Police Union, said Foster was “looking for confrontation and he found it.” Even though Texas is an open-carry state, Garrett said Foster was on the police’s “radar because he would commonly come to the rallies with the AK-47. Our individuals who were responsible to monitor people with firearms, he was on the radar already.” But Perry, who’d spoken of his desire to kill protesters, had escaped the radar of the police.

Garrett Foster and his fiancé Whitney Mitchell

Perry’s defenders, from the police association to the governor’s office to FoxNews pundits like Tucker Carlson, claim that Foster had aimed his rifle at Perry, thus triggering Texas’s Stand Your Ground law enabling Perry to shoot Foster with impunity. But Perry’s own account undermined this assertion. In his initial interview, Perry told Austin police he feared Foster might aim at him and shoot him before he could. “I believe he was going to aim [his rifle] at me. I didn’t want to give him a chance.” When Foster’s gun was recovered by Austin police, the safety was on and there was no round in the chamber.

By all accounts, Foster was a small-l libertarian, who was raised in a conservative family, but he’d become appalled by police brutality. Foster was a caring and tender man. He and Whitney had been together since they met in high school, when they were both 17. Two years. later Whitney suffered from septic shock, leading to the loss of all four limbs. Foster didn’t abandon her. Instead, he became one of her caretakers, bathing her, clothing her, brushing her teeth and braiding her hair. He cut short his career in the Air Force when Whitney sank into a depression without him. Whitney was black and Garrett white, but that was never an issue for them or their friends and family. They planned to marry and had just bought a house together. After the murder of George Floyd, both Whitney and Garrett were outraged at the injustice and began attending BLM rallies in Austin. By the night of his murder, Whitney and Garrett had participated in at least 50 consecutive BLM protests, Garrett pushing Whitney’s wheelchair, as she often held a sign in her lap reading, “Silence is violence.” This was the quality of the man described by the cackling right as a thug, a rioter and a terrorist.

Perry, on the other hand, was a self-confessed racist. “Black Lives Matter is racist to white people,” Perry fumed. “It is official I am a racist because I do not agree with people acting like animals at the zoo.” In a Facebook post on June 1, 2020, Perry wrote that “Now it is my turn to get banned (from Facebook) by comparing the black lives matter movement to a zoo full of monkeys that are freaking out flinging their shit.”

He openly fantasized about killing them and how he would get away with it, writing:

Perry: “I might have to kill a few people on my way to work they are rioting outside my apartment complex.”

Justin Smith: “Can you legally do so?”

Perry: “If they attack me or try to pull me out of my car then yes.”

Justin Smith: “If I just do it because I am driving by then no.”

After the murder of George Floyd sparked nationwide protests, Perry wrote of his desire to: “Go to Dallas to shoot looters.” A few days later in a Facebook chat, Perry vowed: “No protestors go near me or my car.”

“Can you catch me a negro daddy,” a man replied.

“That is what I am hoping,” Perry responded.

A month before the shooting, Perry wrote: “The blacks … gathering up in a group I think something is about to happen…I wonder if they will let my [sic] cut the ears off of people who’s decided to commit suicide by me.”

Perry told people he believed one of the goals of the BLM movement was to evict his parents from their house so that it could be given to poor Blacks: “My parents own a 4-bedroom house and the BLM movement believes that my parents should give their house to a poor black family and pretty much live in a one-bedroom house that they should buy with money they don’t have.”

Perry mused about having shot “an Afghan in the chest with a 50 cal,” which he justified by saying, “They are not real people.” A year earlier, Perry had written wistfully to a friend about his military career: “To [sic] bad we can’t get paid for hunting Muslims in Europe.”

Generally, pardons don’t come easy in Texas. Indeed, Abbott has one of the stingiest pardon records of any government, typically issuing only a few at the end of the year for minor, nonviolent offenses, after the prisoners had served many years behind bars. In fact, the Houston Chronicle reported that this was “the first time in at least decades that a Texas governor has pardoned someone for a serious violent crime, let alone murder.” Perry’s pardon came after he’d served little more than a year in prison from his 25-year sentence, after being indicted by a grand jury and convicted by a unanimous jury verdict.

Abbott promised to pardon Daniel Perry before the pardon board even met to discuss his case.

Of course, Abbott appointed the board members so he’d already forecast their decision before Perry’s appeals were exhausted. But the board’s inevitable ruling to recommend freeing Perry lacked any legal rationale. This is because there wasn’t one. Texas’s Stand Your Ground Law, which Abbott cited, actually applied more to Foster, who was trying to protect his disabled fiancee and other pedestrians, than Perry, who was never threatened at all. In condemning Abbott’s pardon for Perry, Travis County DA José Garza said, “The [Pardon] board and the governor have put their politics over justice and made a mockery of our legal system.”

Both men were white. Both men were veterans of the military. Both men were advocates of the Second Amendment. So why did Abbott come down so categorically in favor of Perry, who fatally shot a man for simply carrying a gun? Naked political ambition.

Even before Perry went on trial, FoxNew’s Tucker Carlson had been needling Abbott for not preemptively pardoning the shooter. He continued to goad Abbott after the verdict, which Carlson denounced as a “legal atrocity,” was announced, saying on his show that night: “So that is Greg Abbott’s position, there is no right of self-defense in Texas.” The next day Abbott capitulated, saying he would approve the pardon board’s recommendation “as soon as it hits my desk.”

Under the logic of the new vigilantism, Foster deserved to be killed for taking to the streets to express his political views and Perry deserved to be freed for having the courage to kill someone who was nothing more than a “rioter,” a threat, violent or not, to the civil order. The right of self-defense only applies to the right people.

“I loved Garrett Foster. I thought we were going to grow old together,” wrote Foster’s fiancee Whitney Mitchell in a letter to the Texas Observer after learning of Abbott’s pardon of Perry. “He was the love of my life. He still is. I am heartbroken by this lawlessness. With this pardon, the Governor has desecrated the life of a murdered Texan and US Air Force veteran, and impugned [the] jury’s just verdict. He has declared that Texans who hold political views that are different from his—and different from those in power—can be killed in this State with impunity.”

Greg Abbott’s unconditional pardon allowed Daniel Perry to be set free last Thursday. All of Perry’s civil rights were restored, including his right to own, carry and use firearms. Perry was pardoned despite showing no signs of contrition or remorse. Neither did Abbot, who, despite being confined to a wheelchair himself, couldn’t summon a word of sympathy for the family, friends or fiancé of Garrett Foster, the man who for 14 years had lovingly tended to his girlfriend Whitney, acting as “her fifth limb,” until one fateful night on streets of Austin, when Garrett intervened to protect her and others from a rampaging motorist, that limb too was amputated by the hate-fueled man Abbott praised as a hero and put back out on the streets.

(Jeffrey St. Clair is editor of CounterPunch. His most recent book is An Orgy of Thieves: Neoliberalism and Its Discontents (with Alexander Cockburn). He can be reached at: sitka@comcast.net or on Twitter @JeffreyStClair3. CounterPunch.org)

Unknown. Burial Scaffolds. Oklahoma Native American Photographs Collection. 1850 - 1900.

GREEN COLONIALISM IN THE EMPIRE STATE: THE TONAWANDA SENECA NATION FIGHTS BACK. AGAIN.

by Cecilia Yearsley

Seneca Chief was the name of the packet boat on which DeWitt Clinton, Governor of New York and former New York State Canal Commissioner, inaugurated the Erie Canal at the end of October, 1825. A replica of the Seneca Chief will be launched this month in Buffalo and be used next fall to recreate the voyage as part of the canal’s bicentennial celebrations. For ten days those two hundred years ago, Clinton’s vessel led an eastward parade of boats down the waterway, stopping at various towns along the route—from Buffalo, the starting point, through Lockport, Rochester, and Palmyra, along to Syracuse and Utica, and finally to Albany, whence steamboats towed the flotilla down the Hudson River to New York City. Clinton and his fellow dignitaries disembarked at these burgeoning cities to enjoy lavish dinners, patriotic toasts, and other festivities to usher in a new era of economic prosperity for New York State. When, sated and celebrated at the end of the 425-mile journey, Clinton at last reached New York Harbor, he ceremonially poured a keg of Lake Erie water into the Atlantic—a “Wedding of the Waters” which officially marked the completion of New York’s great transportation corridor.

Philip Meeder, “Governor Dewitt Clinton Wedding the Waters of Lake Erie with the Atlantic,” from Cadwallader Colden and William Leete Stone, Memoir … at the Celebration of the Completion of the New York Canals (1825) (New York Public Library Digital Collections)

As of last October, Central and Western New York can boast a new economic thoroughfare. Buffalo, Rochester, and Syracuse have now been federally designated as the NY SMART I-Corridor Tech Hub—that’s “I” for “Innovation”—one of 31 inaugural “tech hubs,” a program authorized by the 2022 federal CHIPS and Science Act. The act hopes to revitalize American manufacturing of semi-conductors, an essential component of microchips and therefore of any electronic device, but especially those considered indispensable to the green transition, such as wind turbines or the EVs that will shepherd the country and the world into a climate-uncertain future. New York’s senior senator, Charles Schumer, would like to take credit for the new status: “I pulled out all the stops to land this Tech Hub Designation for my great home state” he said, in a press release from the US Economic Development Administration announcing the award on October 23, 2023. Now “three of our own cities that helped build America”—Buffalo, Rochester, and Syracuse—“are officially on the road to becoming America’s semiconductor superhighway.”

Like Schumer, who authored the CHIPS act and pushed it through Congress, New York Governor Kathy Hochul has been a champion of green tech in New York State, funneling state funds into the manufacturing of transition technologies, especially semi-conductors. In February 2022, Hochul initiated a “Focused Attraction of Shovel-Ready Tracts New York” (FAST-NY) grant program that promised $200 million to develop sites to attract high-tech industry. The same week the federal CHIPS Act was passed, Hochul signed New York’s own Green CHIPS legislation, boosting federal incentives with state tax breaks. In a press release from the Governor’s office, dated August 11, 2022, Schumer weighed in on Hochul’s law: “Simply put—this is the 21st century's Erie Canal!”

Schumer’s comparison is fitting, if unwittingly so, not because this “Erie Canal” will bring 19th-century prosperity back to the Western Empire State—that remains to be seen—but because these initiatives represent the latest phase in New York’s long history of Indigenous dispossession in pursuit of connectivity, from the first roads, canals, and railroads to today’s “semiconductor superhighways” and “innovation corridors.”

In the decades leading up to the construction of the Erie Canal, state and federal officials, alongside land speculators, pressed for the extinguishing of American Indian title to land along canals and, later, where turnpikes and railroads were planned—a history of calculated dispossession detailed by Lawrence Hauptman in his Conspiracy of Interests: Indian Dispossession and the Rise of New York State. More than a decade before the canal arrived at the Niagara Frontier in Western New York, the Ogden Land Company set about purchasing preemption rights to the Seneca Indian Reservations in Western New York. Similarly, the journals of the chief engineer of the Erie Canal, Benjamin Wright, exemplify the certainty among developers and politicians that New York would lay hold of whatever Indigenous land it coveted for its canal network. Writing in 1816, the year before construction on the Erie Canal began, Wright argued for a branch to connect Oneida Creek to the main canal on the grounds that “the State property now owned and that owned by the Indians which will soon become State property will be trebled in value.” Compare the vision of Elkanah Watson, a contemporary of Wright, who, in 1788, attended a treaty negotiation at Fort Stanwix—which would soon become Rome, New York—the object of which was “to purchase all the Indian lands lying west, in this state, to the great lakes.” Already then, he imagined a future metropolis, should a waterway like the Erie Canal be built: “I am led to think this situation will, in time, become the emporium of commerce between Albany and the vast western world above.” By 1794, thirteen small canal channels had already been illegally cut through Oneida lands in Central New York.

Schumer’s conjuring of the New York State Green CHIPS Act as a new Erie Canal echoes the reasoning of Wright and Watson and stands out as yet another example of New York State big brass using the rhetoric of economic progress and connectivity to justify the infringement of the rights of Indigenous people. Schumer and Hochul have been staunch supporters of the Science, Technology, and Advanced Manufacturing Park (STAMP) in Genesee County, near Alabama, New York, thirty miles east of Buffalo in the NY SMART I-Corridor. The mega-site has been funded almost entirely by state money, including Hochul’s FAST-NY program and Andrew Cuomo’s notoriously corrupt Buffalo Billion. Hochul and Schumer have promised that the money is well spent: they claim their green tech incentives from the state and federal CHIPS acts will attract lucrative tenants.

Whatever the environmental promise of those grants, industrialization at STAMP poses an immediate ecological threat to the ancestral lands of the federally-recognized Tonawanda Seneca Nation—1,250-acres of which the site occupies—and to their traditional lifeways, which depend on ecosystems it endangers. On a publicity tour of the site in September of 2021, Schumer showed characteristic insensitivity to the land he stood on and to the people it had been stolen from: “The WNY STAMP Campus is the perfect place to establish the next global hub for the semiconductor and clean energy industries.” Schumer’s salesman attitude contrasts sharply with the views expressed by Tonawanda Seneca Chief Roger Hill in a 2022 letter to President Biden: “Recognizing our longstanding, treaty-based Nation-to-Nation relationship with the United States, we call upon you to ensure federal funding will not be used to desecrate our ancestral territory, pollute our treaty-protected forests or waters.” Whatever the benefits of the CHIPS and Science Act, he argued, it “should not be used to harm Indigenous Peoples.”

In November of last year, the Tonawanda Seneca Nation sued the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) over its illegal approval of a wastewater disposal pipeline that would service STAMP. According to the Tonawanda Seneca Nation, the USFWS approved the Genesee County Economic Development Center’s (GCEDC) construction of the 9.5-mile pipeline without conducting a sufficient environmental review and without a government-to-government consultation with the Nation—in direct violation of their sovereign rights. Last Thursday, April 25th, 2024, the USFWS revoked the GCEDC’s permit to construct the pipeline; the decision will go into effect on June 24th. Both the Nation and the Department of the Interior, also named as a defendant in the suit, have now filed a joint motion in federal court to dismiss their case.

Although the USFWS’s revocation of the permit counts as a victory, county officials show no sign of reconsidering development at the STAMP site.

One need only glance at the “featured properties” in the GCEDC’s webpage for STAMP to realize that, in spite of Schumer’s high-flying rhetoric and the receipt of FAST-NY “shovel-ready tract” funding, the project remains mostly farmland. Because the site lacks the infrastructure to support the industries it hopes to accommodate, the GCEDC is under pressure to forge ahead with development. Immediately after the USFWS pulled its permit, the GCEDC announced plans for an alternative pipeline, to a nearby wastewater treatment facility, but it has still not given up on its original idea. The CGEDC said in a statement this past Thursday that it “will continue to pursue the force main to Oak Orchard Creek in the town of Shelby through a different construction method.”

This does not bode well. Last August, not long after the drilling of horizontal boreholes for laying the contested pipeline had begun, contractors spilled drilling fluid thick with sodium bentonite clay slurry. A few weeks later came a second and then a third spill of several hundred gallons, sinkholes forming as the fragile wetland gave out under the pressure of drilling. The USFWS ordered a temporary suspension of work and the Tonawanda Seneca filed their suit. In November, samples taken from the spills tested positive for hazardous waste—arsenic, barium, cadmium, lead, acetone, pyrene, and phthalates. These spills took place in the federally and state protected Iroquois National Wildlife Refuge—the GCEDC’s chosen route to Oak Orchard Creek.

The Iroquois National Wildlife Refuge forms part of a 19,000-acre wetland complex, known locally as the “Alabama Swamp” or the “Sixth Great Lake.” Since the period of the glaciers that melted and formed it, this lake has sunk underground, but it surfaces in the many streams and pools that make the complex one of the most biodiverse inland ecosystems in the eastern United States and one of the largest remaining contiguous blocks of natural habitat in Western New York.

In the lawsuit, the Tonawanda Seneca Nation explained that these wetlands protect the “plants, animals, land, and water resources that are essential to Tonawanda Seneca traditional cultural practices and beliefs,” including the gathering of traditional medicines in the “Big Woods,” a primary forest on the northeast corner of their territory immediately contiguous to STAMP. This is the habitat of the endangered Short-Eared Owl and the Northern Long-Eared Bat, of the rare Heartleaf Plantain and American Gromwell. If completed, the pipeline would discharge up to 6 million gallons per day of treated wastewater into the Oak Orchard Creek, which is upstream of the wetlands and of the Tonawanda Seneca Nation, most of whose citizens rely on wells for their water.

The printable brochure for STAMP on the GCEDC website advertises that New York is “gaining national attention as a refuge from climate change thanks to our abundant fresh water, mild temperatures, reliable infrastructure, and safety from natural disaster.” If it is a climate refuge, it is one in spite of STAMP, which has already polluted protected watercourses—precisely because of its unreliable infrastructure.

In reapplying for a permit for their Oak Orchard pipeline, the GCEDC is required by law to consult with the Tonawanda Seneca Nation. The GCEDC claimed in their statement last Thursday that they “look forward to working with the United States Department of Fish and Wildlife and the Tonawanda Seneca Nation as this process moves forward,” but it is hard to believe that they will listen in good faith. The “Allies of the Tonawanda Seneca Nation,” a site dedicated to collating testimonials on behalf of the Nation and rallying the public against STAMP, has pointed out that any runoff from the site flows west towards the Big Woods and the wetlands in the Refuge. Industrialization there will bring with it the noise of heavy industry, light pollution, and an estimated daily increase of an extra 140 cars and diesel trucks per hour up the narrow country road that leads to the refuge and through the Nation.

These considerations make clear that the pipeline is only one small hazard in a much larger array of dangers: the entire STAMP site is a threat. But it is difficult to imagine that the consultation process with the GCEDC will result in anything but mitigation, considering what the developer stands to gain by bringing STAMP across the finish line and given the political power-players who support the project. In 2021, the Investigative Post, an independent newspaper operating out of Buffalo, New York, which has been closely following development at STAMP, reported that Steve Hyde, the executive director of the GCEDC, earned $240,193 in 2019, making him the highest paid economic development official in the state. They also reported that the solar-powered sign at the entrance of STAMP cost $49,798.

Reacting to the toxic spills on November 2, 2023, Hochul announced a $56 million state grant from the FAST-NY budget to pay for the completion of the necessary infrastructure, the fourth major state grant for STAMP since 2012. To date, Hochul and Governor Andrew Cuomo before her have directed nearly $100 million in state money to the site, despite it having failed the state’s smart growth test when first proposed. Not only STAMP, but its tenants—who number only two—have been heavily subsidized. One is Plug Power, a green hydrogen producer tottering on the brink of bankruptcy despite having received a $75 million grant from the Department of Energy in March.

For its facility at STAMP, Plug Power has received $270 million in subsidies—mostly tax breaks from the GCEDC, calculated by the value of the company’s “improvements” to the land, in addition to discounted hydropower from the New York Power Authority’s plant on the Niagara River. This makes the price of each of the 68 Plug Power jobs a cool $4 million. The other tenant, Edwards Vacuum—a maker of dry pumps used in the semiconductor manufacturing process—agreed to set up shop at STAMP in 2022, after a personal phone call from Schumer to the company’s president, the promise of $39.2 million in subsidies, and the prospect of still more from CHIPS and Science Act incentives. On Friday, April 26, 2024, the day after the USFWS pulled the GCEDC’s pipeline permit, Hochul and Schumer announced the start of construction on Edwards Vacuum’s $319 million facility at STAMP. “Today is a great day for the Western New York and Finger Lakes region,” Schumer said.

However “green” its tenants, there is no such thing as an eco-friendly industrial park. At STAMP, state funds are actively facilitating environmental destruction and environmental injustice. The ideology of the “just transition” to a more sustainable economy is being used by the GCEDC, Hochul, and Schumer to greenwash what is really happening: developers wasting taxpayer money, a governor and senator playing at being the saviors of Western New York and boosting their phony green credentials while caring little about the sovereignty and future of the Tonawanda Seneca Nation.

Photo of STAMP tenant Plug Power’s hydrogen electrolyzers by Jess Cherofsky. Courtesy of the Allies of the Tonawanda Seneca Nation

Resisting STAMP means looking beyond last Thursday’s good news. Though updated to the technological imperatives of the 21st century, STAMP follows on from a history of New York State schemes which place connectivity, industry, and commerce above the rights of Indigenous people, and continues a legacy of New York State politicians justifying environmental degradation with economic advancement. Belittled as “Clinton’s ditch” by Governor DeWitt Clinton’s political opponents in the 19th century, the Erie Canal inflicted traumatic changes on the landscape of Upstate New York. Schumer, in hailing the Erie Canal as a venerable precedent, is blind to the enduring reality that the building of the canal and its feeders disrupted the natural flow of waterways that were sacred in the Haudenosaunee cosmology, by damming rivers, artificially straightening creeks, and forcing them to flow in an East-West direction.

DeWitt Clinton it should be recalled, was the nephew of James Clinton, the co-commander of the devastating scorched earth campaign that bears his name in Haudenosaunee territories in 1779. Accompanying the governor down the Erie Canal on Seneca Chief in October 1825 was another boat, one called Noah’s Ark. It had been outfitted at Grand Island in the Niagara River, just shy of the mighty falls—a place that to this day the Seneca Nation claim was illegally purchased by New York in 1815. The ark carried a selection of representative specimens, recorded by William Leete Stone in his Narrative of the Festivities Observed in Honor of the Completion of the Grand Erie Canal. These included, among other creatures, a bear, two eagles, two fawns, “not forgetting two Indian boys, in the dress of their nation—all products of the West.” The Haudenosaunee are still very much present in New York—whatever the boat’s name implied, trading as it does on the myth of the vanishing Indian—even though the opening of the canal accelerated their dispossession. The Tonawanda Seneca steadfastly fought to retain what they could of their territory.

In the years immediately following the completion of the Erie Canal, a series of fraudulent treaties were forced on the Seneca by the Ogden Land Company, whose agents were working hard to secure the title of the Buffalo Creek Reservation, extending inland as it did from Buffalo Harbor, just south of the western terminus of the canal—prime real estate. The 1838 Treaty of Buffalo Creek nominally eliminated the Buffalo Creek reservation along with Tonawanda lands—which had been reduced from 46,209 to 12,800 acres in an earlier treaty—and the two other remaining Seneca reservations. A “compromise” treaty in 1842, restored the Allegany and Cattaraugus Reservations but confirmed the sale of Buffalo Creek and Tonawanda. The Tonawanda Seneca had not been represented at negotiations. Furious that their lands had been sold from under their feet, they declared their independence from the Seneca Nation and refused to leave their home. After a fierce legal and political campaign, the Tonawanda Band of Seneca signed a new treaty with the federal government in 1857 which provided a mechanism for them to buy back 7,549 acres of their reservation—another partial victory, considering the extent of their original territory, but a heroic one nonetheless that was confirmed by the 1898 Supreme Court case, New York Indians v. US.

The Tonawanda Reservation is located at the intersection of two historic foot trails, the 300-mile Seneca Trail—today’s State Route 5—and a 78-mile path that connected the Seneca communities in the Genesee River Valley to Fort Niagara. The Western New York Land Conservancy has proposed a different kind of thoroughfare, the Western New York Wildway, a wildlife corridor that would link Northern Pennsylvania to the Great Lakes, via the Iroquois National Wildlife Refuge, and extend the far-reaching Eastern Wildway, which runs all the way from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico. According to their website, this greenway, if achieved, “will create and protect connectivity, the solution to fragmentation. It will allow plants and animals to migrate across the land as they once did.” The self-styled environmentally conscious proponents of STAMP would transform this nature corridor into a manufacturing hub radiating roads on which its workers will drive in and its trucks loaded with semi-conductors and their paraphernalia will drive out.

New York’s great 19th-century transportation artery, the Erie Canal, and its successor, the newly minted Buffalo, Rochester, and Syracuse NY SMART Innovation-Corridor Tech Hub, have both weaponized the rhetoric of “connectivity” to motivate and justify the dispossession of Indigenous peoples and the destruction of precious wilderness. From the “wedding of the waters” to a “semi-conductor superhighway”, or a “21st century Erie Canal” and an “innovation corridor”, to STAMP which boasts its “prime location only 5 miles to I-90!”—all these ways of conceiving connection and selling the STAMP project as a boost to new green manufacturing are fundamentally at odds with a much more profound sense of connectedness—to land, to nature. The connectivity being pitched by Schumer, Hochul, and the Genesee County STAMP developers is utterly disconnected from place. For these pushers of “progress,” corridors are not meant to be lingered in, but passed through. Racing down the highway, the surrounding landscape becomes a blur. If the ultimate goal is transit from point A to point B, a location’s only value becomes its distance from other cities and other consumers. This is STAMP’s ultimate insult to the people of the Tonawanda Seneca Nation for whom these woods, waters, and fields are their ancestral home, a place they are profoundly connected to and that they have fought so long and against all odds to retain.

(Cecilia Yearsley is an Upstate New Yorker who writes on Native rights and the environment. She can be reached at ceciliayearsley@gmail.com. To join the fight against STAMP, visit the Allies of the Tonawanda Seneca Nation action page to learn how: alliesoftsn.weebly.com/take-action.html.)

*Before the Rain* oil on canvas by Igor Dubovoy (Russian, b. 1972)

26 Comments

Sick n tired May 25, 2024

“Haschak was quoted saying that not continuing to waste $125k a year on a widely opposed consolidation”
See, the Board never learns. How many consolidations must we endure only to have them fail? How much money did we waste on HHSA? CSA? General Services? The VSO move out and move back? Why don’t we add up all the losses from those very poor decisions and deduct that amount from the BOS and CEO salaries? Bet they might start using their heads then. Now another unwanted consolidation without a common sense plan, stupid stupid stupid are those who fail to look at history while planning our future.

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- jill ales May 26, 2024
  
  Having been there through HHSA and then the purposed combining of the departments two years ago, and now the integration of the two departments I would say we are the experts of what is happening. The services themselves have not been integrated because they are delivered by trained professionals. The administration departments of public health and behavioral health have been. What is important is it takes a well trained leader to see how to merge this without taking away the trained services of any of the departments. We all serve this community and a lot of the time the same individuals. While fiscal, grants, IT, QA/QI and other administration staff are trained in a pacific area that does cross over. This is what is not understood by the public. Home nursing does not go out and offer substance use treatment, but they can identify if a family may need that help, and visa versa, but we can collaborate together to help any needs as a team. This is now become a service that is no longer siloed but unified. It takes a leader to make that happen. While HHSA was considered a super model which a lot of counties have or are adopting it did not work in Mendocino County. Once again I will say leadership is the key. If you question the merge then why don’t you listen to the people that are going through the merge as to weather they feel it is a good idea or not? They are the ones that will make it succeed or fail. I always say ask the experts if you want the correct answer.
  
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Steve Heilig May 25, 2024

“GIVEN the givens of our crowded, collapsing society, it’s my experience that people generally remain remarkably hate-free, that I seldom encounter a seether, a frother, the kind of person who immediately launches into unhappy complaints about this or that group of people. On-line is a different matter. All the hobgoblins come rushing out in the safety of anonymity.”. – The Editor
– thanks for this. Maybe post at start of each day’s MCT comments section?

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- George Hollister May 25, 2024
  
  Hate-free starts with your family, and also being a good neighbor: Being helped, and helping out when needed. Be mindful of your own property, and mind your own business. Finding common ground, and common interests. Be tolerant, and forgiving. It has to be a two way street or it doesn’t work. Place value in a good neighbor.
  
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  - Harvey Reading May 25, 2024
    
    And, who sets the criteria…? Who defines “hate”? Why, the ruling class, of course, eh George… People who are against genocide are condemned, insulted, assaulted, arrested, denied degrees, while those who commit the crime are lionized and supported with weapons. Just whom do you consider to be the real haters?
    
    Save your sanctimony for the suckers!
    
    Reply
    - peter boudoures May 25, 2024
      
      Who are you going to vote for Harvey?
      
      Reply
      - Harvey Reading May 25, 2024
        
        First of all, voting in Wyoming is a waste of time. The one most fascist wins by a two-to-one margin usually.
        
        So far, my ballot will remain blank with respect to the presidency. Neither leading candidate is worth a dime (as has been the case since 1972, when McGovern showed promise). And, until the nondemocratic electoral college is dismantled, I may never again vote for whatever lying scum is seeking the office.
        
        Reply
    - George Hollister May 25, 2024
      
      There is a lot of room for hate of people we don’t know, and who are far away. Good luck fixing that. That is timeless. Like everyone I know, or am acquainted with, I know little about Israel, and less about Hamas-Palestine. But we all can control personal relations with family, and our community. These are people we know, and are the most important.
      
      The Old Testament says to not covet your neighbor’s wife along with everything else your neighbor has. Don’t steal from your neighbors, don’t murder, and don’t spread false rumors about them, either. Also, be respectful of your elders. Those are the words of God, so are important. Nothing in the Old Testament is said about how to treat Canaanites, or Philistines other than to kill them when necessary. That pretty much sums up where we have been historically, where we are today, and where we will be in the future.
      
      Reply
      - MAGA Marmon May 25, 2024
        
        I would be very happy if the AVA just toned down their “America Hatred” this holiday weekend, at least until Tuesday.
        
        MAGA Marmon
        
        Reply
        
        Harvey Reading May 25, 2024
        
        MAGAts are the real haters of the country. Their goal seems to be total conformity to their concepts of reality and their desires, exclusively. You will find that there are still people who will stand up against you and your fellow MAGAts, and prevail.
        
        Reply
        
        Bruce Anderson May 25, 2024
        
        What? Evidence?
        
        Reply
      - Harvey Reading May 25, 2024
        
        What are contained in holy books are words of humans who want to control other humans. Most of what is in the book you reference are NOT proven facts, merely fairy tales centered on a particular group of “(self)-chosen ones”.
        
        The Adam and Eve tale is totally ridiculous and genetically highly unlikely. With only two breeders and their two (later one) male offspring, the chance for sustained population growth is zero. So, George, where did all the human females come from when the angels flew down for sex (a ridiculous tale to explain how human population increased…)? The tale is an example of just how ridiculous the tales told in holy books really are. The flood tale is another that comes quickly to mind…along with the chariot of fire that transported whatshisname the prophet, up to heaven.
        
        By the way, you “summed up” exactly nothing.
        
        Reply
      - MAGA Marmon May 25, 2024
        
        My biological father, Clayton Marmon, served in Europe during World War 2, one of his buddy’s and the most dedicated soldiers in America history was Audie Murphey. After his tour where he received several medals along side of Murphey, he re-enlisted and served in the Korean War where he was seriously injured. I will never forget all his bullet hole scares where a Korean soldier open fired on him with a machine gun. My bio always took pride in his service for our country and all Christmas cards that Mr. Murphey sent him until he died.
        
        MAGA Marmon
        
        Reply
        
        Harvey Reading May 25, 2024
        
        Gee, my maternal uncle served in the Army during the second war, too. He got a bronze star. He had joined up prior to Pearl Harbor, so had more training than the draftees. Though he did NOT like talking about his service, he did say that he felt badly about the poor training of draftees, who often got mowed down as soon as they exited the landing craft during Pacific island battles.
        
        Reply
        
        Gary Smith May 26, 2024
        
        It’s not Murphey. Your hero’s name was Murphy.
        
        Reply
Adam Gaska May 25, 2024

I remember the Hopkins Fire all too well. I responded as a volunteer for RVCFD. I drove with one of our captains through flames going up Marina Drive to do structure protection on Rubicon Court. The fire came up the hill fast, hit the brush, exploding into a flame ball that engulfed a two story house and turned the sky black. Luckily, the house survived as did we.

The next day I was helping with mop up, pulling apart a house where the resident was unaccounted for and who may be buried in the rumble. She wasn’t but her cat was, burned but alive. I was able to capture the cat and get it to vet volunteers. I still receive messages from the woman, thanking me for saving her cat. Her neighbors weren’t so lucky and lost all 4 of their pets. I remember her wailing as she was allowed in to retrieve their remains and see her house utterly destroyed.

I hope he is convicted and gets life. People could have died, myself included.

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- Bruce Anderson May 25, 2024
  
  That kid doesn’t look all there, a rather obvious diminished capacity case I’d say. I’m surprised he’s been found fit for trial.
  
  Reply
  - Mazie May 25, 2024
    
    Absolutely Agree….. no mention of it…. more importantly …. what occurred prior….were there calls for help and nothing was done to intervene? Which happens so often it is despicable…!!
    
    mm 💕
    
    Reply
    - Adam Gaska May 27, 2024
      
      Both of his parents died when he was young. Before they died, he had already fried his noodle abusing meth.
      
      Reply
      - Mazie May 27, 2024
        
        So sad
        
        mm.💕
        
        Reply
Tex Sawyer May 25, 2024

I had the master brake cylinder fail in a car a few years back coming down a hill. I agree with take your foot off the accelerator. Put it in low gear and then gradually apply pressure on the mechanical brake with either hand or foot while keeping the pawl from engaging, so that you can feather the pressure on the brakes. Don’t jam the mechanical brake down because you can cause a slide when the rear wheels lock up. DO NOT turn off the engine. You run the risk of having the steering lock up and losing control of the vehicle’s direction. Try practicing this maneuver in advance in a parking lot until you get the idea. Last ditch, drive your car gradually into a hill side, if one is available. -Tex

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- Marshall Newman May 25, 2024
  
  Sometimes there are no options. In the winter of – I think – 1962, my father and sister were driving downhill on our property in Philo in our old Dodge when the brakes and clutch both failed. The car went off the road at the hairpin curve at the bottom of the hill and – by pure luck – squarely hit the only large tree within 20 feet on each side. If it had not hit the tree, it would have landed in the Navarro River, which was high with winter rain. They walked back to the house bruised and battered, but otherwise fine. The car was totaled and had some of my sister’s hair in the shattered windshield.
  
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Call It As I See It May 25, 2024

Mulheren only apologized because she was caught in a lie, plain and simple!

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Pam Partee May 25, 2024

It’s a crying shame that the city of Ukiah did not support saving the historic Palace Hotel. The whole succession of events, over decades, has been marked by negligence and lack of foresight. What could have been a landmark draw to downtown Ukiah will be gone forever so that an investor will “be made whole”. Thank you Mike Geniella for your excellent reportage. City leaders, this decision is under your watch. For better or worse, you will be remembered for it.

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- coupé de ville May 26, 2024
  
  SAVE a portion of The Palace—not a complete demolition, not all or nothing.
  
  Reply
KH May 25, 2024

I applaud Mo for admitting she made a mistake and remedying it. I appreciate her transparency.

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Mendocino County Today: Saturday 5/25/24

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