Warming | Lenticular Cloud | Monthly Rainfall | Barn | Fauci Grilled | Grocery Argument | Cloverdale Secret | Vagrant Watch | Public Health | Nosey Neighbor | Fire-Safe Meeting | Lounge Noir | First Aid | RR Bridge | Craver Memo | Football Camp | Super Sheriff | Decriminalize Pot | Landline Intro | Ed Notes | Visit Palestine | Judi Bari | John Figaro | Yesterday's Catch | No Comments | Robespierre Effect | Primera Mujer | Caitlin Mania | Pepper Spray | Heat Waves | Apaches | Presidential Criminals | Snorky & Whiffle | Which Movie | Ho Gardening | War Criminal | Less Crookish | Wuhan Virus | Museum Guard
HOT, DRY weather will rapidly build by mid week with high heat risk for many interior valleys, especially Lake County, Wednesday and Thursday. Breezy north to northwesterly winds will return Wednesday and Thursday, with the strongest gusts over the coastal headlands and exposed ridges. Isolated thunderstorms are forecast for the northern Trinity mountain on Thursday during the late afternoon and evening. (NWS)
STEPHEN DUNLAP (Fort Bragg): Clear skies & 48F this Tuesday morning on the coast. June showers brought .27", hectic. Clear skies & light winds for the rest of the week. It will get increasing warm as you head inland this week.
MONTHLY RAINFALL TOTALS for the 2023-24 rain season (Oct-Sep):
Boonville (46.89" total)
2023
0.76" Oct
3.28" Nov
10.02" Dec
2024
10.50" Jan
11.41" Feb
8.08" Mar
1.47" Apr
1.37" May
Yorkville (57.00" total)
2023
1.32" Oct
4.84" Nov
12.48" Dec
2024
13.32" Jan
12.80" Feb
9.20" Mar
1.68" Apr
1.36" May
POWER WAS OUT in most of Anderson Valley from around 8:30 to about 1pm Monday. PG&E didn’t announce a reason but some locals speculated that it was weather related combined with PG&E’s recently installed hyper-sensitive shut off switches that turn off power at the slightest hint of a problem. Then it takes PG&E several hours to inspect their lines before they can turn things back on again. Locals also noticed what looked like PG&E land and airborne inspection crews south of Boonville late Monday morning.
FAUCI GRILLED BY LAWMAKERS ON MASKS, VACCINE MANDATES AND LAB LEAK THEORY
Dr. Fauci testified before a House panel investigating Covid’s origins. The panel found emails suggesting that his aides were skirting public records laws.
by Benjamin Mueller & Sheryl Gay Stolberg
Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the former government scientist both celebrated and despised for his work on Covid, on Monday forcefully denied Republican allegations that he had helped fund research that sparked the pandemic or had covered up the possibility it originated in a laboratory, calling the accusations “absolutely false and simply preposterous.”
In an occasionally testy appearance before the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, Dr. Fauci read aloud an email from February 2020 in which he urged a prominent scientist who was then suspicious about a lab leak “to determine if his concerns are validated” and if so, “very quickly” report them to the F.B.I.
“It is inconceivable that anyone who reads this email could conclude that I was trying to cover up the possibility of a laboratory leak,” Dr. Fauci testified.
Monday’s session was the culmination of a 15-month inquiry that was billed as an investigation into the pandemic’s origins, but that has lately turned into a referendum on Dr. Fauci, an 83-year-old immunologist who spent more than half a century as a government scientist and became the public face of the pandemic response under two presidents.
Democrats painted Dr. Fauci as an American hero, with Representative Debbie Dingell, Democrat of Michigan, disparaging the Republican-led inquiry as “a witch hunt.” Republicans blamed him for school closings, mask ordinances and other “invasive” policies. One, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, tore into Dr. Fauci, saying, “You belong in prison.”
The Republican-led subcommittee is the only Congressional panel charged with weighing the origins of the worst pandemic in a century and the American policy failures that made it so devastating. Dr. Fauci, the panel’s most prized quarry, was at the center of a Covid response that left the country with far more deaths than many other wealthy nations.
The hearing on Monday occasionally touched on the country’s vulnerability to the pandemic. Representative Brad Wenstrup, Republican of Ohio, the committee’s chairman, bewailed the haphazard way rules had been applied and lamented that public health officials had not been more honest “about what we didn’t know.” Republicans lobbed questions about, among other things, masking policies — a liability for Dr. Fauci, who downplayed the effectiveness of masks for the general public in the pandemic’s early days before later changing his tune.
At one point, Ms. Taylor Greene held up a photograph of an unmasked Dr. Fauci at a Washington Nationals baseball game, while complaining that masked children had been “muzzled in their schools.”
But the House panel rarely lingered over evidence that concerned the origins of the coronavirus, or responsibility for its brutal toll in the United States. Lawmakers never pressed Dr. Fauci over his reassurances early in 2020 that Americans needed not worry about the virus, which was then sweeping the globe. The hearing occasionally strayed far afield from the pandemic, as when Ms. Taylor Greene waved around a photograph of some beagles and hammered Dr. Fauci over the use of dogs in federally funded experiments. She later blasted him for “repulsive evil science.”
And for all the hundreds of thousands of pages of documents and more than 100 hours of closed-door testimony that the panel reviewed, lawmakers produced nothing on Monday linking Dr. Fauci to the beginnings of the Covid outbreak in China, an accusation that has long made him a villain to proponents of the so-called lab leak theory.
Representative Raul Ruiz of California, the panel’s ranking Democrat, seized on that dearth of evidence on Monday. “They have come up empty-handed for evidence of their extreme allegations,” he said. Asked after the hearing was over what he had learned, Mr. Ruiz said flatly, “Nothing.”
Dr. Fauci has long faced suspicion over grants that the medical research agency he once led contributed to EcoHealth Alliance, an American virus-hunting nonprofit group. As part of efforts to anticipate disease outbreaks, the grants stipulated that EcoHealth pass some of its funding to scientific collaborators abroad, including a coronavirus lab in Wuhan, China, the city where the pandemic began.
But the coronaviruses being studied at the Wuhan lab with American funding, as well as other such viruses known to be the subject of research there, bore little resemblance to the one that set off the pandemic.
Dr. Fauci said on Monday that it was “molecularly impossible” for the taxpayer-funded experiments in Wuhan to have produced the pandemic-causing virus. “It’s just a virological fact,” Dr. Fauci said, while acknowledging that he did not know whether unreported experiments in China focused on more closely related viruses.
Dr. Fauci said, as he had previously, that he kept an open mind about the pandemic’s origins but that some lab leak theories were conspiratorial. In closed-door testimony, Dr. Fauci told the panel that, in his view, the weight of evidence pointed toward the virus originating from animals before spilling into humans outside a lab.
He referred to studies relying on early cases and viral genomes as well as sampling at an illegal wild animal market in Wuhan that suggested the pandemic-causing virus leaped from animals into people there.
In rooting through emails, Slack messages and research proposals, the panel turned up messages suggesting that Dr. Fauci’s former aides had sought to evade public records laws at the medical research agency he ran for 38 years until his retirement in December 2022.
Some of the emails suggested that agency officials charged with producing records under transparency laws helped colleagues circumvent those regulations, a possibility that a government accountability expert said was “extremely concerning.”
The emails suggested that agency officials were worried not about the emergence of evidence related to the origins of the pandemic, but rather about the disclosure of notes in which they bluntly discussed “political attacks” on their research.
Still, some of those emails painted Dr. Fauci as a man preoccupied with his public image. Others suggested that Dr. Fauci, too, avoided putting sensitive comments in places where the public might eventually find them.
“I can either send stuff to Tony on his private gmail, or hand it to him at work or at his house,” Dr. David Morens, a senior adviser, wrote of Dr. Fauci in the course of reassuring scientists in April 2021 that they need not worry about public records requests — an email that Republican lawmakers repeatedly highlighted on Monday.
Dr. Fauci denied ever using his personal email to conduct agency business and criticized Dr. Morens for his handling of public records and dealings with EcoHealth leaders.
“It was a terrible thing,” Dr. Fauci said. “It was wrong and it was inappropriate.”
Social distancing rules became another point of contention at the hearing. In closed-door testimony from January, Dr. Fauci told the House panel that the six-foot social distancing rule “sort of just appeared.” He said on Monday that he was referring to the absence of controlled studies on the optimal distance, which he said would not have been possible before the rule was implemented.
“These were important when we were trying to stop the tsunami of death early on,” Dr. Fauci said as Republican lawmakers pressed him on that and other Covid restrictions. “How long you kept them going is debatable.”
Monday’s hearing was as much theater as it was substance. Two members of the audience were ejected one after saying that Dr. Fauci belonged in prison. Ms. Taylor Greene sparked a kerfuffle within the subcommittee and was rebuked by Mr. Wenstrup after she repeatedly referred to Dr. Fauci as “Mr.” instead of “Dr.”
Another Republican lawmaker played a tape of Dr. Fauci using salty language while arguing that vaccine mandates in colleges and businesses would compel people, no matter their ideology, to get their shots. And Republicans pressed Dr. Fauci on whether he had earned drug company royalties during the pandemic. Dr. Fauci replied that he had received about $120 per year for inventing a monoclonal antibody treatment a quarter-century ago.
While Republicans assailed Dr. Fauci, Democrats heaped on praise, thanking him for his public service and apologizing for the conduct of their Republican colleagues. Representative Jamie Raskin of Maryland, a Democrat, analogized the “big lie” that Mr. Trump won the 2020 election to the “medical big lie" that Dr. Fauci was responsible for the Covid pandemic.
(NY Times)
BOILED, NOT BURNED
On 06-02-2024 at 9:56 P.M., Deputies responded to 1 Marcela Drive in Willits (Adventist Health Howard Memorial Hospital) due to a 33 year old male Willits resident in the Emergency Room claiming he was set on fire by his relative. Upon arrival, Deputies learned the male victim had not been set on fire but had had boiling water thrown on him during an argument at a residence north of Willits. The Deputies observed injuries consistent with the victim's statement and the victim was receiving treatment for those injuries at the hospital.
The incident took place during an argument between the male victim and his relative, Raymond Cavino, at a residence located in the 30400 block of North Highway 101 in the Willits area. Deputies learned the male victim and Cavino were arguing in the kitchen area of the residence about Cavino's groceries. As the argument escalated, Cavino removed a pot of boiling water from the kitchen stove and threw it onto the male victim who was seated nearby. The boiling water caused significant burns to several parts of the male victim's body.
After throwing the boiling water on the male victim, Cavino transported the victim to Adventist Health Howard Memorial Hospital and left the area. Deputies were later able to contact Cavino for a statement regarding this incident. After speaking with Cavino and other witnesses, Cavino was arrested for battery with serious injury and was transported to the Mendocino County Jail to be held in lieu of $30,000 bail.
A READER WRITES: I was in Fort Bragg last week and right downtown there were two obviously mentally ill homeless people near the intersection of Franklin and Laurel. I had intended to shop near there but I didn’t like the vibe the homeless people were giving off so I drove down to the whart area and had lunch. Yesterday, I was in Cloverdale and the contrast is stark. I visit Cloverdale frequently and I have never seen a homeless person downtown. Ukiah is much worse than Fort Bragg. I always see a few homeless people on State Street, often in the downtown area. Cloverdale is on the same Highway 101 as Ukiah and is closer to the Bay Area and Santa Rosa, yet there are no homeless on Cloverdale’s downtown streets. What is Cloverdale doing that Ukiah and Fort Bragg are not?
UKIAH VAGRANT WATCH
This woman, Deborah Lee Anderson returned again Saturday evening on a bicycle shouting disparaging remarks and threatening event attendees.
She has been trespassing and informed by police she is not to be near the property yet she continues to harass.
The people these images are upsetting who express their disapproval of the post are misdirecting. Politicians like Mo Maureen "Mo" Mulheren - Mendocino Second District Supervisor and the like want you to believe that the cause of these individuals being outdoors is not theirs. They lie, waste public funds, and use these lost souls as a tool for re-election. It is a sick and absurd act if you think about it. Literally using human-beings for govt fundraising with no intention of ending their suffering. They give them gear, phones, money, etc. and pat them on their bottoms to go roam around the streets, soiling public and private properties, disrupting businesses and the public at large.
When is enough, enough? How many more minutes, hours, days, months do we allow this to continue.
I will not subject anyone who visits the properties I control to this and am asking all property owners, agents, and their assistants to do the same. This will go a long way to stopping some of it. Do not be afraid, call 911 if you have to or private security.
You have the right to defend yourself from assailants and ask others to help you.
PUBLIC HEALTH FIRST
Dear Editor,
The recent report aired May 31, 2024, on KZYX radio station, exposes the poor state of Mendocino County’s health, with high levels of drug overdoses, suicides, lack of access to mental health and general health care including prenatal care.
“Report Sheds Light on Mendocino County’s Health Woes: High Smoking, Firearm Deaths, and Overdoses”
This is nothing new. As the Senior Public Health Analyst, I have been reporting on this for years. However, due to the near constant upheaval in firing Public Health directors and upper-level managers going back to the 2000’s, and the lack of apparent understanding from the Board of Supervisors about how important experienced, trained leadership in Public Health is, our population’s health has steadily declined.
With the appointment of Jenine Miller as Acting Public Health Director, over 30 very experienced staff retired, quit, were fired, or transferred to other departments because they knew she lacked the expertise to run the Public Health department. The old saying, “You don’t know, what you don’t know” comes to mind, and it is my opinion that Miller exhibits a certain hubris in thinking she is qualified to run a “Health Department.” Now the Board of Supervisors are deciding whether to make her the Health Director. Judging by the recent statistics cited in the report, during the time she has been Director of Behavioral Health and Recovery Services (BHRS), our population’s mental health has seriously declined.
These statistics highlight the need for a trained, experienced Public Health Director. Human Resources reports that despite sending out hundreds of letters, they say they have received no qualified candidates. Why could this be?
In 2022-23, when Human Resources tried to recruit candidates, there were three individuals who were interviewed for the job. But the most qualified among them declined to take the position, after learning about the history of how many Public Health directors, and other top managers, had been fired with literally no warning. Understandably, no one wants to risk tanking their career with an institution that has allowed such capricious behavior.
Combining BHRS and Public Health, as I have said before, may make sense and save money by combining common administrative functions for the two departments. However, if this government is to serve the people in the way it is mandated to, Public Health must be led by someone with the qualifications and the experience. And Public Health must be the umbrella under which BHRS functions. The candidates are out there, but there needs to be real assurance that the Public Health director is not simply “at will” (meaning they can be fired at any time at the whim of their boss), but that they will be afforded the protections in the Civil Services rules like any other employee.
I urge the Board of Supervisors to instruct Human Resources to continue the search for a qualified Public Health Director candidate to oversee a Health Department, if the decision is made to combine Public Health and BHRS.
Respectfully,
Julie Beardsley
Ukiah
FIRE SAFE POINT ARENA MEETING
Wednesday, June 5th, 4:45 p.m., Coast Community Library, GMRS Radio check-in will be at 4:00, on channel 2
Agenda:
- Discuss Manchester Grange Home Hardening pilot project/volunteer work day (previously the Crispin Road fuel reduction project)
- Update on grants in progress
New items:
- Educate ourselves on radio operations with our new repeater! Thank you Timber Cove Neighborhood GMRS network/Dave Horvitz for the donation. Thank you Gaspo for making the installation happen.
- Begin prioritizing which roads need fuel reduction work (one-way-in/one-way-out, heavy fuel load, etc.) We'll have maps of the area. People with knowledge of wind direction, past fires, and knowledge of how the geography of our area affects fire behavior are encouraged to come help begin the work necessary for future grants that will pay for fuel reduction in our area.
- Monthly United Policy Holders preparedness tip - a non-profit 501(c) (3) organization whose mission is to be a trustworthy and useful information resource and an effective voice for consumers of all types of insurance in all 50 states.
If you are not able to attend the meeting, feel free to contact Fire Safe Point Arena with questions, comments and/or information at: firesafepointarena@gmail.com
A READER WRITES: “During the course of routine events today I stumbled upon a tragic scene. A young girl was struck by a car, a hit and run from what I overheard, but I am not sure. It took me several minutes to figure out exactly what was going on, as there was buzz and hubbub but people were just standing around looking at some event obscured by the corner of a building and a parked vehicle. It was not until I was leaving the parking lot that I saw the girl and the frantic women trying to save her. I backed up and parked, assuming emergency vehicles were on the way because a guy was on his cell phone, and got out to, I don't know, assist in some way. Within a very long 15 seconds one of the women and I were giving CPR and clearing blood from her mouth and nose until the fire department arrived in full force about four minutes later and took over. That was it.
“I just phoned the hospital. They said that she had passed away, that she never recovered, that her injuries were too extensive.
“First and foremost my prayers go out to the family and friends of this child, I do not know her name. I cannot begin to imagine so I won't.
“Second, it was apparent that a small proportion of bystanders had only the slightest inkling of what to do or how to do it. This is the meat of this letter. That beautiful little girl reminded me that those of us with the will and resolve to participate in tragic events owe it to the world to keep up on our skills. Call the American Red Cross or the community college or the fire department or whoever and book yourself into a class to become CPR certified, a water safety instructor, or work towards your EMT if you have the time. Take a class in basic first aid. Something.
“I thought of my daughter and all the trouble she'll get into when she learns to walk and drink paint and crash into trees and lose hold of a rope swing and god forbid ride a bicycle with her dad. I hope that if I am absent there will be someone who could fill my shoes.
“I shouldn't get too far into what I think about the driver as I don't know what actually happened. I will say that I was there and you were not. Thank you for your time.”
KEVIN BAILEY (forrmer Sheriff’s detective; former DA investigator):
Tony Craver was a man with many sides. I remember as a young deputy on the coast I totaled a new patrol car. I was still on probation and told my wife the best we could hope for was for me to be transferred back to the jail. My Sergeant asked me to write a memo detailing the accident and I wrote a long memo on how my accident was a result of driving to fast for the road conditions and that as a result I was unavailable to provide response to the citizens and backup for my fellow officers, thus jeopardizing the safety of everyone on the coast.
Tony called me into his office and I steadied myself for the firing or transfer that I deserved. Tony had my memo in his hand when I sat in front of his desk. He looked at me and said “Jesus Christ you’re too hard on yourself. I just want to know how the damn accident happened.” He crumpled up the memo and threw it into the trash. I wrote him a new, much shorter one, and we never spoke of the accident again. I returned to patrol and the rest is history. Tony had my career in his hands, but I think he saw something in me that I didn’t necessarily see in myself. I will always be thankful for how he handled that. He had his warts like we all do, but I’m sad he’s gone.
DAVE GOWAN: Tony Craver was a Super Sheriff. I was Mendocino County Fair Manager for a time in the 1990s. Tony and his deputies kept the peace. Sad to hear he passed.
A READER WRITES: “I have not been a pot smoker since the Department of Transportation instituted drug testing back in ’86. I know that dope does not improve people. Plenty of nasty folks smoke weed. I know that you put the anti-pot articles in the paper just to annoy some of the local navel gazers. What I suspect about pot smokers is that they would not have amounted to much anyway. It is not like without weed they would be leading the social revolution. But I do feel that dope de-criminalization is a big step up from, say, struggling to establish doggy parks. De-criminalization might result in a few more blissed out stoners, but it could also reduce the population of the rape cages, aka the penal system."
ED NOTES
TOM BACHAR WRITES: “It’s nice that you praise Barry Scheck for freeing innocent men through DNA analysis. But isn’t it more important to attack our corrupt criminal justice system? Do you really think that over 100 innocent men ended up in jail “accidentally”? Aren’t you curious (and more importantly, furious) about how 80 men (so far) on death row turned out to be innocent? This is a serious matter, and the Scheck DNA tests are not the answer. Cracking down on the problem, rather than the symptom of that problem, is the real issue, and the problem is that prosecutors and police departments across the nation are corrupt — whether deliberately framing innocent men, or just being too lazy and sloppy to make sure the wrong man doesn’t get locked up. This happens every day, and nothing is changing. Also keep in mind who pays the millions of dollars in lawsuit settlements to those wrongly imprisoned: You do. Let’s start taking that money from the crooked district attorneys and police departments who continue to commit these crimes.
CASE IN POINT. Tate Laiwa was a Point Arena man packed off for twenty years in state prison on zero evidence that he shot and killed a man named Poe during a drop-fall drunk party on the PA rez. Laiwa's conviction was so egregious it was taken up by the Innocence Project.
LOCAL AUTHORITIES had been convinced that they'd find the victim's blood on Laiwa's clothes; they also were convinced that they'd find gunshot residue on his hands. They didn't, but pursued him anyway, the investigating officer claiming that Laiwa confessed to the crime while the cop's tape recorder was off. When the tape recorder was back on there was no confirmation, or even mention, that Laiwa had confessed to shooting Poe.
LOTS OF PEOPLE asked me, “Are you sure you didn't leave something out? Do you mean Mendocino County convicted Laiwa on this?” I didn't leave anything out, and what happened to Tate Laiwa was a major crime itself.
LAIWA served his time and is now alive and well and working as a chef in Los Angeles.
CONFIRMING old suspicions that The Valley’s pesticide and herbicide-soaked vineyards have wiped out the frog populations in and around them, the U.S. Geological Survey has found that the increased pesticide concentrations in Pacific tree frogs downwind of San Joaquin Valley ag correlated with a decline in amphibian numbers in the Sierra. The specific pesticides included chlorpyrifos and Diazinon, both of which are widely applied by the wine industry.
I NEVER DID find out who sent me an unsigned collection of fine poems with the promising inscription, “This book is dedicated to my boyfriend. He knows who he is,” and lived up to it in stanzas like: “Beery breath and belly proud / leering kindly toward each other / balancing on elevated stools / listening to muscle turn to padding.”
MENDO FOR PALESTINE is hosting this awesome event on June 23rd!
Sunday, June 23rd at 11am at Good bones in Caspar, CA
A daytime festival celebrating the vibrant and rich culture of Palestine!
Food like Masakhan (Sumac chicken with onions and flat bread) and Kunafeh (Layered crispy pastry and sweet cheese soaked in a light syrup) will be on the menu.
Kids area with arts and crafts!
Learn a traditional Dance, learn to tie a Keffiyah, to write Arabic, who Handala is and much more!
Learn about the ongoing occupation and ways to help make a positive difference.
Film Showing (TBD) 3-5pm
Good Bones 14957 Caspar Road, Caspar, CA 95420
OFF THE RECORD (May 15, 2002)
THANK THE GODDESS for Maria Bee, Oakland City Attorney. As Ms. Bee summed up her defense of three Oakland cops who the Bari-ites allege conspired with the FBI to frame Bari and Cherney for carrying the bomb that exploded beneath Bari and she and Cherney headed south to beat the drums for Redwood Summer, Ms. Bee assessed the Bari-Cherney commitment to non-violence this way: “Nonviolence? I don't think so. Mr. Cherney sang a song for us called 'Spike A Tree For Jesus' and they compare themselves to the civil rights activists of the 1960s? How dare they?”
HOW DARE THEY, INDEED. The entire Bari-Cherney case is one breathtaking lie piled on another. Just a couple: Bari's deathbed self-interrogatory presented in federal court last week was billed as a deposition. It wasn't a deposition because Bari asked herself, via attorney Cunningham, all the questions. The government asked none. In fact the government clearly assumed that Bari and Cherney were lying from the start, which is why the federal attorneys never bothered to depose either Bari or Cherney.
WHEN JUDI BARI said in her video that the media attention directed her way after the bombing was painful for her, that the spotlight's glare was almost unbearable, I laughed out loud. Media attention was like a drug to her, and is a drug for Darryl Cherney. The mere sight of a television camera had the same effect on both of them as pure methedrine has on a speed freak.
AND JUDI'S characterization of herself in her one-way video deposition as having been staged for the famous Uzi photo is a straight-up lie. Her friend (and one of her likely co-conspirators) Pam Davis took that picture at Piercy. I ran it in the AVA as a joke, well before Redwood Summer. Davis called me to demand photo credit, which I thought was pretty silly and awfully vain of ol' Pam given the visual fact that the pic was a snapshot of less than Ansel Adams quality. Judi Bari had driven straight to Piercy from her provocative appearance at the Ukiah abortion rally with her camo Earth First! outfit, fully prepared for the Uzi photo-op. Irv Sutley supplied the Uzi as pre-arranged with Ms. Davis, himself, Bari and Cherney. Judi Bari was not compelled or tricked into posing with the gun. It was her idea. She and Cherney thought it would be funny as an album cover for their collection of eco-tunes. For her to say from the grave, as it were, that Sutley posed her with a gun is a statement she didn't make while she was alive or while someone was around to remind her of the truth.
WAS JUDI BARI a violent person? Yes, she was. She often laughed about her bar fights and was very proud of exchanging punches with a crew of crankhead loggers, the Lancasters, near Whitethorn. As a high school kid, she said she hung out with football players. Up here in Mellow Mendo, Judi preferred the company of tough guys. She liked loggers. She often laughed at the male sectors of her enviro-allies as wimps and, as I recall, douche bags, not the kind of descriptive color she allowed us male douche bags to paint with. She was also verbally quite violent, frequently going off publicly on defenseless persons — including Cherney — for long, painful moments, and with such passion one wondered if she weren't clinically nuts. She was a very smart person who tended to become irrationally angry with persons who weren't as smart as she was, and the people who weren't as smart as she was was everyone around her. Judi went off a lot because she was constantly provoked by her comrades, many of whom were not only stone dumb, but institutional-quality crazy.
ON THE OTHER HAND, Judi Bari was often funny and fun. She was good company, always lively, always with something interesting to say. Her colleagues were mostly un-fun. The ones who were also smart and funny, Judi drove off, often sending them away wrapped in untruthful denunciations as FBI agents, as whatever. One lady victim of the Bari-Cherney lie factory was in real life very smart, efficient and hard-working. She was denounced by Bari and Cherney (of all people!) as so inefficient she'd cost them money because she hadn't filed a funding application on time. Bari also said the woman had made a pass at her! Cherney, of course, functioned as echo chamber for whatever slander Bari mustered against people who'd fallen from favor. The truth of this particular double-barreled lie turned out to be the woman's refusal to lie on the application form. The sexual canard? Doubt it. But what was the woman who would tell groups of lesbians that she “feels like a lesbian trapped in a hetero body” doing damning another woman on this basis?
BARI-ITE ALLIES like Naomi Wagner, Karen Pickett, Noelle Hanrahan, and several other of the inner cadre of self-anointed Gandhian practitioners of love and peace as a way of life, aren't Judi Bari although some of them have ghoulishly taken to imitating Bari's speech and her laugh. Unlike the late Bari, these people have zero redeeming qualities. They make up their intellectual deficits in pure personal nastiness masked as political struggle and/or oppression, hence the ever-smaller “movement” on the Northcoast. If I were the Bari-Cherney legal team I'd have asked them to stay away from the Oakland trial because they have a negative effect on regular people who are inevitably repelled by their arrogance, their smugness.
TO SUMMARIZE CLASS, ECO-FEMINISTS of the Bari-ite sub-type tend to be small and mean and travel in deceptively ragged patchouli-drenched packs, although they invariably come from wealthy homes and have thus been spared the pain of earning their way. Eco-males? Ever seen a big one? They're, uh, like smaller and, uh, like fuzzier and, uh, sorta vague to vacuousness, know what I'm sayin'? Like, you know how accumulated Arctic pesticides seem to have withered polar bear testicles? Well…
DEATH OF JOHN FIGARO
by Carol Dominy
June 3, 1919 - John Figaro died in a New York hospital at the age of 32 after a short illness. At the time of his death, he was returning from his military service overseas.
Born in Mendocino in 1887, John was the oldest child of Manuel and Mary (Maderia-Saudades) Figaro. Manuel and Mary were married in the Azore Islands and immigrated to the Hawaiian Islands before May 1883. They moved to Mendocino and purchased property on Little Lake Road where they built their home. John attended school in Mendocino and later worked at the mills in Mendocino and Greenwood (Elk).
John was one of the first three men drafted from Mendocino to serve in World War I. In September 1917, he left for Ukiah to catch a train to Washington State with the other draftees from Mendocino County. John was placed with the 20th Engineers and sent to France in the Fall of 1917. The Forestry division also included Mendocino coast residents Dwight Kent and Emery Sweetzer. All three had experience in sawmill or logging work.
Before the 20th Engineers departed France after the end of the war, John became ill. He was hospitalized at the Base Hospital in Brest, where he recovered enough to make the journey back to the United States. Unfortunately, the rigorous ocean crossing and his weakened condition proved too much for him. Shortly before landing in New York, he fell ill again and was admitted to the hospital where he passed away.
John's remains were transported to Mendocino, and his funeral was held on June 12th. Every business in town closed its doors, and people from neighboring areas attended to pay their final respects. The funeral service began at the Figaro home, where the local order of Foresters, of which John was a member, remembered him as a highly respected and industrious young man. From there, the services moved to the Catholic Church, and finally he was laid to rest in Hillcrest Cemetery. The pall-bearers were soldiers who had served overseas. As John’s remains were lowered into their final resting place, Manuel Catherina blew "Taps" on his cornet. John’s survivors included his parents, his sister Dina Quaill, and his brother Herman Figaro.
(kelleyhousemuseum.org)
CATCH OF THE DAY, Monday, June 3, 2024
BRITTON AZBILL JR., Covelo. Domestic battery, controlled substance violation of domestic violence court order, county parole violation.
VINCENT BROCK, Ukiah. Tear gas, paraphernalia, failure to appear.
JONATHAN CAMARGO, Ukiah. Controlled substance, paraphernalia, petty theft, unspecified offense.
JOSHUA CLARK, Eureka/Ukiah. Contempt of court, probation revocation.
WILLIAM FRANKS, Ukiah. Probation revocation.
ALVIN GARCIA, Ukiah. Vandalism, conspiracy.
ANGEL GARCIA-CRUZ, Ukiah. Domestic battery, damaging wireless communication device.
CHRISTIAN REYES, Ukiah. Vandalism, conspiracy.
JOSE SANCHEZ-MEDINA, Nice/Ukiah. DUI.
SAMUEL TODD IV, Ukiah. Domestic battery.
ON-LINE COMMENT OF THE DAY
The secret wish of 90% of the politicians and bureaucrats is easily summed up in one sentence.
“STFU and do as you are told, or else.”
What the politicians seem to ignore is that the unelected bureaucrats feel the same about them. The politicians and their useful idiot sycophants also ignore what I call the Robespierre effect - what they can do to DJT, (a billionaire and former President) they can do to anyone.
The DOJ, and the alphabet intel agencies are just the latest to make that abundantly clear.
THE CAITLIN CLARK DRAMA IS GOOD FOR THE WNBA; BAD FOR SPORTS HOT TAKES
by Scott Ostler
When the Indiana Fever’s Caitlin Clark got body-checked off her feet by a chippy WNBA opponent Saturday, that was one small bump for a woman, one great leap for women’s sports.
The media and social-media reaction to the cheap-shot foul delivered by Chennedy Carter of the Chicago Sky not only showed how much new attention is being focused on the league this season, it was also a marker of the advancement of women’s sports in general.
People are watching! People care! The league that has been fighting for recognition for decades seems to be picking up some steam, part of a general rise in women’s sports.
When was the last time all the folks around the proverbial office water cooler, or at the barber shop and the beauty salon, were heatedly debating an incident in a regular-season game in a woman’s sport?
There are ugly side elements to the Shove. Accusations of racism, charges of petty jealousy, and alarm that cheap and dirty play is hurting the league. But those elements have been present in the NBA for about 75 years, and they haven’t slowed that league.
Basics of the Shove, if you missed it: Clark is the league’s hottest ticket, the college scoring sensation drafted No. 1 by the lowly Fever. She has had a rough introduction to the WNBA, with some nice moments and some large speed bumps.
On Saturday, Clark was waiting for an inbounds pass when she was side-blasted by Carter and sent crashing to the hardwood. Carter casually trotted away. On the previous play, Clark was seen trash-talking Carter. Carter was assessed a common foul for the Shove, which the league upgraded to a flagrant 1.
Pick your side:
Clark is the league’s ticket to the moon, a great player and fabulous drawing card, and deserves at least minimal protection against petty, dangerous bullying.
Clark is an overhyped, overrated, overly brash rookie getting way too much love and attention, and deserves to be put in her place.
Some random thoughts:
Clark is showing grit. On Sunday, she said of the physical play she has been feeling, “You gotta find a way to hold your own. I grew up with two brothers and things were very physical … so I’m definitely prepared for it.”
In terms of timing, Joe Lacob is light-years ahead of everyone. The owner of the Golden State Warriors, and now the Golden State Valkyries, he has bought into the WNBA at the exact moment it is exploding.
Here’s a what-if: Clark is playing at a sub-All-Star level, and her team is struggling. So maybe after this season, the Valkyries can swing a trade with the Fever. Lacob, already selling tickets briskly, might have to add another level to Chase Center.
This is an opportunity for the WNBA to decide what it wants to be. To be legit, you don’t have to be roller derby in sneakers. Tough and gritty is good; dangerous and dirty is not. The tone is dictated from the top. The hit on Clark rates a suspension, and not because it was on Clark.
The league can’t legislate out petty jealousy and spite, but it can protect its players. All of them.
There are legit ways to put Clark in her place. The New York Liberty showed that the following day, when they used a clever tool known as tenacious defense to hold Clark to three points (1-for-10 from the field). If you want to humble an opponent, try doing it by playing better basketball.
If I were Clark, I’d suggest to my boyfriend and my brother that they exit social media. Both have been active participants in the X/Twitter debates between the backers of Clark and those of the Sky’s Angel Reese, Clark’s longtime collegiate foe and now a fellow WNBA rookie.
The boyfriend and the brother are being accused of liking racist tweets. I haven’t seen evidence of that, but why swim in that sewer? Let Clark fight her own battles, on the court.
Before you accuse the Fever of being crybabies because the team sends clips of hard fouls on Clark to the league office, know this: That’s what all teams do, including NBA teams. When Pat Riley coached the Lakers in the ’80s, he bombarded NBA headquarters with clips of foes mugging Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.
Here’s another Showtime Lakers comp: Rookie Magic Johnson (1979-80) was subjected to widespread disrespect. Johnson spent a lot of time sprawled on his keister, and when he made the All-Star team, one league general manager said it was solely because of Johnson’s smile.
Chicago head coach Teresa Weatherspoon showed some leadership. She said of Carter, “She and I have discussed what happened and that it was not appropriate, nor is it what we do or who we are. Chennedy understands that there are better ways to handle situations on the court, and she will learn from this, as we all will.”
Memo to Fever: When a teammate hits the deck, you rush over and help her up. As my Chronicle teammate Bruce Jenkins pointed out to me, not one teammate went near Clark to help her up, or let Carter know she had crossed the line of acceptable play. Maybe the Fever can bring in Draymond Green for a clinic on standing up for a teammate — without the headlocks, stomps or karate chops, of course.
The B word is being thrown at Clark, by Carter on the court, and then again on TV by ESPN’s Pat McAfee? For shame, though at least McAfee eventually apologized. Clark is tough and smart, she’s showing great leadership, especially for a struggling rookie. Too many turnovers, sure, but Clark is playing with the type of flair that makes the game fun to watch.
Clark is the focus right now, but she’s far from the only reason for the increasing interest in women’s sports in general and the WNBA in particular. It’s a cool cultural evolution and revolution.
Tune in for the cheap stuff, stay for the great stuff.
(SFgate.com)
THE HEAT WAVE SCENARIO THAT KEEPS CLIMATE SCIENTISTS UP AT NIGHT
by Jeff Goodell
On a recent Thursday evening, a freakish windstorm called a derecho (Spanish for “straight ahead”) hit Houston, a city of more than two million people that also happens to be the epicenter of the fossil fuel industry in America.
In a matter of minutes, winds of up to 100 miles per hour blew out windows on office buildings, uprooted trees and toppled electric poles and transmission towers. Nearly a million households lost power. Which meant that not only was there no light, but there was no air-conditioning. The damage from the storm was so extensive that, five days later, more than 100,000 homes and businesses were still marooned in the heat and darkness.
Luckily, the day the derecho blew in, the temperature in Houston, a city infamous for its swampy summers, was in the low to mid-80s. Hot, to be sure, but for most healthy people, not life-threatening. Of the at least eight deaths reported as a result of the storm, none were from heat exposure.
But if this storm had arrived several days later, perhaps over the Memorial Day weekend, when the temperature in Houston hit 96 degrees, with a heat index as high as 115, it might have been a very different story. “The Hurricane Katrina of extreme heat,” is how Mikhail Chester, director of the Metis Center for Infrastructure and Sustainable Engineering at Arizona State University, once put it to me, echoing the memory of the catastrophic 2005 hurricane that struck Louisiana, devastated New Orleans and killed more than 1,300 people.
Most people who died in Louisiana during Katrina died from drownings, injuries or heart conditions. But Dr. Chester was using Katrina as a metaphor for what can happen to a city unprepared for an extreme climate catastrophe. In New Orleans, the levee system was overwhelmed by torrential rains; eventually, 80 percent of the city was underwater.
What if, instead, the electricity goes out for several days during a blistering summer heat wave in a city that depends on air-conditioning in those months?
In Dr. Chester’s scenario, a compounding crisis of extreme heat and a power failure in a major city like Houston could lead to a series of cascading failures, exposing vulnerabilities in the region’s infrastructure that are difficult to foresee and could result in thousands, or even tens of thousands, of deaths from heat exposure in a matter of days. The risk to people in cities would be higher because all the concrete and asphalt amplifies the heat, pushing temperatures as much as 15 degrees to 20 degrees in the midafternoon above surrounding vegetated areas.
The derecho that hit Houston was a warning of just how quickly risks are multiplying in our rapidly warming world. As if to prove this point, some 10 days after the Houston blackout, another windstorm knocked out power to hundreds of thousands of homes and businesses in and around Dallas.
One of the most dangerous illusions of the climate crisis is that the technology of modern life makes us invincible. Humans are smart. We have tools. Yeah, it will cost money. But we can adapt to whatever comes our way. As for the coral reefs that bleach in the hot oceans and the howler monkeys that fell dead out of trees during a recent heat wave in Mexico, well, that’s sad but life goes on.
This is, of course, an extremely privileged point of view. For one thing, more than 750 million people on the planet don’t have access to electricity, much less air-conditioning. (In India, New Delhi experienced temperatures as high as 120 degrees last week, leading to an increase in heatstroke, fears of blackouts and the possibility of water rationing.) But it is also a naïve point of view, if only because our bubble of invincibility is far more fragile than we know. So what can we expect in a heat Katrina?
Last year, researchers at Georgia Institute of Technology, Arizona State University and the University of Michigan published a study looking at the consequences of a major blackout during an extreme heat wave in three cities: Phoenix, Detroit and Atlanta. In the study, the cause of the blackout was unspecified.
“It doesn’t really matter if the blackout is the result of a cyberattack or a hurricane,” Brian Stone, the director of the Urban Climate Lab at Georgia Tech and the lead author on the study, told me. “For the purposes of our research, the effect is the same.” Whatever the cause, the study noted that the number of major blackouts in U.S. more than doubled between 2015-16 and 2020-21.
Dr. Stone and his colleagues focused on those three American cities because they have different demographics, climates and dependence on air-conditioning. In Detroit, 53 percent of buildings have central air-conditioning; in Atlanta, 94 percent; in Phoenix, 99 percent. The researchers modeled the health consequences for residents in a two-day, citywide blackout during a heat wave, with electricity gradually restored over the next three days.
The results were shocking: in Phoenix, about 800,000 people — roughly half the population — would need emergency medical treatment for heat stroke and other illnesses. The flood of people seeking care would overwhelm the city’s hospitals. More than 13,000 people would die.
Under the same scenario in Atlanta, researchers found there would be 12,540 visits to emergency rooms. Six people would die. In Detroit, which has a higher percentage of older residents and a higher poverty rate than those other cities, 221 people would die.
Perhaps we should not be surprised by these numbers. Researchers estimate 61,672 people died in Europe from heat-related deaths in the summer of 2022, the hottest season on record on the continent at the time. In June of 2021, a heat wave resulted in nearly 900 excess deaths in the Pacific Northwest. And in 2010, an estimated 56,000 Russians died during a record summer heat wave.
The hotter it gets, the more difficult it is for our bodies to cope, raising the risk of heat stroke and other heat illnesses. And it is getting hotter across the planet. Last year was the warmest year on record, and the 10 hottest years have all occurred in the last decade.
In the study simulating a heat wave in those three cities, researchers found that the much larger death toll in Phoenix was explained by two factors. First, the temperatures modeled during a heat wave in Phoenix (90 to 113 degrees) were much higher than the temperatures in Atlanta (77 to 97 degrees) or Detroit (72 to 95 degrees). And second, the greater availability of air-conditioning in Phoenix means the risks from a power failure during a heat wave are much higher.
A lot can be done to reduce these risks. Building cities with less concrete and asphalt and more parks and trees and access to rivers and lakes would help. So would a more sophisticated nationally standardized heat wave warning system. Major cities also need to identify the most vulnerable residents and develop targeted emergency response plans and long-term heat management plans.
Making the grid itself more resilient is equally important. Better digital firewalls at grid operation centers thwart hacker intrusions. Burying transmission lines protects them from storms. Batteries to store electricity for emergencies are increasingly inexpensive.
But the hotter it gets, the more vulnerable the grid becomes, even as demand for electricity spikes because customers are running their air-conditioning full throttle. Transmission lines sag, transformers explode, power plants fail. One 2016 study found the potential for cascading grid failures across Arizona to increase 30-fold in response to a 1.8 degree rise in summer temperatures.
“Most of the problems with the grid on hot days come from breakdowns at power plants or on the grid caused by the heat itself, or from the difficulty of meeting high demand for cooling,” Doug Lewin, a grid expert and author of the Texas Energy and Power newsletter, told me. The best way to fix that, Mr. Lewin argued, is to encourage people to reduce power demand in their homes with high efficiency heat pumps, better insulation and smart thermostats, and to generate their own power with solar panels and battery storage.
The looming threat of a heat Katrina is a reminder of how technological progress creates new risks even as it solves old ones. On a brutally hot day during a recent trip to Jaipur, India, I visited an 18th century building that had an indoor fountain, thick walls, and a ventilation system designed to channel the wind through each room. There was no air-conditioning, but the building was as cool and comfortable as a new office tower in Houston.
Air-conditioning may indeed be a modern necessity that many of us who live in hot parts of the world can’t survive without. But it is also a technology of forgetting. Once upon a time, people understood the dangers of extreme heat and designed ways to live with it. And now, as temperatures rise as a result of our hellbent consumption of fossil fuels, tens of thousands of lives may depend on remembering how that was done. Or finding better ways to do it.
(Jeff Goodell is the author of “The Heat Will Kill You First: Life and Death on a Scorched Planet.”)
‘NO ONE IS ABOVE THE LAW.’ REALLY, MR. BIDEN?
by Ralph Nader
After the jury came in with its verdict that Donald Trump was guilty of a scheme and coverup to illegally influence the 2016 election, the Biden campaign issued a statement saying that the judgment demonstrated that “no one is above the law,” not even a former President. The overwhelming truth is that the majority of criminal laws are not a deterrent to the serious violations of law committed by sitting presidents of the United States.
This includes the incumbent Joe Biden, especially with regard to foreign and military decisions.
At least five long-standing federal laws explicitly condition the shipment of weapons to foreign countries. It is legally impermissible for the US government to provide weapons to countries that violate human rights or use these weapons offensively. Day after day, Joe Biden has become a co-belligerent with Netanyahu’s genocidal war crimes and mass slaughter of innocent children, women and men. He has violated all five of these federal laws. (See my February 16, 2024 column: Biden & Blinken – Rule of Illegal Power Over Rule of Law).
As the military, diplomatic and political enabler of the Israeli government’s siege, with the unconditional shipment of weapons of mass destruction, along with civilian bombardment and starvation of defenseless Palestinians in Gaza, Biden is violating the UN Charter and other treaties that past Administrations have signed and that have been ratified by the U.S. Senate. Biden and other presidents act like they are above these and other laws.
One president after another has spent monies not appropriated by Congress, has defied subpoenas issued by Congress, launched wars undeclared by Congress, sent deadly weapons to nations that obstruct the delivery of U.S. humanitarian aid, and that do not protect civilian populations under foreign military rule. All violations of federal law.
Donald Trump in 2019 brazenly stated the lawlessness in one sentence: “I have an Article II, where I have the right to do whatever I want as President.” Trump got away with defying over 125 Congressional subpoenas, and with violating the criminal statute known as the Hatch Act by using the White House and other federal property to promote his re-election campaign. Then of course there was the January 6 insurrection, and the likely delay of his trial until after the election, if at all.
Joe Biden shuffles around unappropriated monies, continues to allow the violation of a 1992 federal law requiring the Pentagon to provide Congress with an audited military budget, and is constantly sending unlawful armed incursions into other weaker countries with impunity.
To make matters easier for presidents, there is the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel memo, from decades ago, that asserts there can be no criminal prosecution initiated against a sitting president.
As attorney Bruce Fein, who worked in the Office of Legal Counsel, has said repeatedly, this baseless opinion has no legal force and should be rescinded. (See, Letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland, May 31, 2024).
The courts have shielded presidents from accountability for perpetuated crimes committed either by the White House or by the president’s administration. For example, citizens have no “standing to sue,” to challenge in court a variety of Executive Branch abuses says the Supreme Court, not even members of Congress. As for presidential violations of the Constitution and federal laws by launching illegal wars or armed attacks abroad, the courts dismiss such cases, saying they raise “political questions” outside the jurisdiction of the courts.
Being allowed to get away with crimes is what constitutional law specialist Bruce Fein calls “a way of life at the White House.” Obstruction of justice or deliberate non-enforcement of seriously violated laws marks every presidency. Trump just boasted about what he inherited and intensified it.
Again, presidents operate in a system of considerable sovereign immunity, and law that either can’t or has not breached this shielded impunity. They really are above the criminal laws. Only the very difficult political penalty of impeachment by the House of Representatives and conviction by two-thirds of the Senate can only evict them from office, after which they are free to enjoy life, and receive huge lecture fees and large book advances.
WHICH MOVIE WILL IT BE?
by James Kunstler
“It’s almost as if the principals (prosecutors and judge) were performing for their political audience — with a wink, a nod and a stage whisper (“watch this!”) as they ignore yet another fundamental element of American due process.” — Jack DeVine on “X”
The ninnies of Bidenworld seem to not understand that by subjecting Mr. Trump to a kangaroo court they’ve made him the kind of outlaw that Americans revere above every other archetypal hero. He’s the new American Robin Hood, the people’s outlaw — with “Joe Biden” relegated as the wicked Sir Guy of Gisbourne, master of foul play and servant of the evil regent Prince John (Barack Obama). The galvanizing moment in this melodrama was not the verdict in Judge Juan Merchan’s kangaroo corral of a court, but the next day in the White House when “Joe Biden” was asked to comment on it as he shuffled away from the podium, halted, turned, and smirked silently at the cameras, a gesture that is sure to live in infamy.
The fun should really kick off when the judge gets to sentence Trump-the-Outlaw July 11, a few days before the Republican convention. Life in some New York state pen? A year on Rikers Island? House arrest? Who knows. But you can bet that just like Robin-of-Locksley, Donald-of-Mar-a-Lago will manage to slip out of his captors’ clutches and cleverly vanquish them. In a sane world, of course, the US Supreme Court would be entreated to adjudicate this gross insult to due process as spelled out in Section 1 of the 14th Amendment.
No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”
But you might have noticed that this is not a sane world, at least not these days, and not a few supposedly sober analysts, such as Jonathan Turley of George Washington University, claim that a SCOTUS review is a long-shot — which only confirms the reigning insanity since it’s hard to imagine a more compelling moment for the SCOTUS to carry out its fundamental duty: to elucidate the meaning of our Constitution and resolve disputes arising therefrom.
Now, it looks like what we’re seeing after a few days for the shock to wear off, is a mighty righteous rage arising among the faction designated as “Red” — that is, the anti-Woke, anti-Globalist, anti-neoMarxist, anti-Deep State blob, anti-Lawfare, anti-Democratic Party chunk of the adult US population. It amounts to a recognition that we are already in some kind of civil war, and that the tactics of “Joe Biden’s” party must and will be opposed by all means. The SCOTUS is the last resort of legal means for redress in this matter, and they would punt this duty at great peril to the country.
To clarify just what this matter is: “Joe Biden’s” White House and Department of Justice conspired with New York County (Manhattan) authorities to maliciously construct and execute a court case made of patently false charges against their principal political adversary, and with a cavalier disrespect to both state and federal law.
As such, the “Stormy Daniels Payoff Case,” as it’s known, is just the latest ploy in a long train of lawless gambits starting with RussiaGate in 2016 (the “Steele Dossier” and all) that have left hundreds of high appointed officials in the federal bureaucracy (plus many retired from it) liable to severe criminal charges ranging as far as sedition and treason. RussiaGate may have started its life as a typical campaign prank by doofuses in the Hillary Clinton organization, but it turned seriously sinister when it was adopted by the FBI and the CIA to execute a plan to harass and defenestrate the elected president, Mr. Trump.
With each subsequent prank, to distract from and cover-up their crimes, the same group of officials has committed more crimes, to the point that the federal government now behaves like a gigantic mafia, dedicated to nothing but crime of one kind or another. The Democratic Party has become this mob’s protective order; the old mainstream media its mouthpiece; and the people of this country increasingly its victims. Naturally, these criminals are now desperate to avoid having to account for their crimes, which is exactly and explicitly what Mr. Trump promises to make them do.
So, there it is: a criminal regime versus the people defended by their outlaw hero. Does the SCOTUS want to aid and abet this gang of criminals — led by the way, and just so you know, by Barack Obama and his Kalorama coterie, John Brennan, Mary McCord and her Lawfare coterie, Hillary and Bill Clinton and their henchmen, and scores of additional DC lawyers, fixers, and judges — or, will the SCOTUS avert an epic crisis of legitimacy by stepping in to quash the ridiculously fake New York case just concluded?
If they demur in some cowardly blur of excuses, then it’s onto the next truly nation-ending stage of this game. The “Joe Biden” regime would like nothing more than an outbreak of civil violence they can blame on “right-wing extremists.” In fact, they could and probably will gin that up themselves, just as they transformed the Jan-6-21 mass protest against widespread ballot fraud into a “MAGA insurrection.” You are also certainly aware of the sinister millions, mainly young men from faraway lands, who “Joe Biden” imported across the border the past three years. And you might imagine how they could be put to use against American citizens, along with the Democratic Party shock troops known as BLM and Antifa. Summer’s here and the time is right for fighting in the streets. And, of course, even if the SCOTUS puts an end to this latest bit of Lawfare fuckery, the “Joe Biden” crew can always opt to just up and kill its opponent. Nothing is beneath them now. But when that happens, we’ll be in a very different kind of movie.
WAR CRIMINAL NETANYAHU SHOULD NOT BE INVITED TO ADDRESS CONGRESS
by Bernie Sanders
It is a very sad day for our country that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been invited – by leaders from both parties – to address a joint meeting of the United States Congress.
Israel, of course, had the right to defend itself against the horrific Hamas terrorist attack of October 7th, but it did not, and does not, have the right to go to war against the entire Palestinian people. Israel does not have the right to kill more than 34,000 civilians and wound over 80,000 – 5% of the population of Gaza. It does not have the right to orphan 19,000 children. It does not have the right to displace 75% of the people of Gaza from their homes. It does not have the right to damage or destroy over 60% of the housing in Gaza. It does not have the right to destroy the civilian infrastructure of Gaza, to obliterate water and sewage systems, and deny electricity to the people of Gaza. It does not have the right to annihilate Gaza’s health care system, knocking 26 hospitals out of service and killing more than 400 health care workers. It does not have the right to bomb all 12 of Gaza’s universities and 56 of its schools, or deny 625,000 children in Gaza the opportunity for an education.
It most certainly does not have the right to block humanitarian aid – food and medical supplies – from coming in to the desperate people of Gaza, creating the conditions for starvation and famine. It does not have the right to condemn hundreds of thousands of children to death by starvation. This is a clear violation of American and international law.
The International Criminal Court recently announced that it is seeking warrants for the arrest of Benjamin Netanyahu, the Prime Minister of Israel, and Yahya Sinwar, the leader of Hamas. The ICC is right. Both of these people are engaged in clear and outrageous violations of international law.
Benjamin Netanyahu is a war criminal. He should not be invited to address a joint meeting of Congress. I certainly will not attend.
WHY THE PANDEMIC PROBABLY STARTED IN A LAB, IN 5 KEY POINTS
by Alina Chan
Dr. Chan is a molecular biologist at the Broad Institute of M.I.T. and Harvard, and a co-author of “Viral: The Search for the Origin of Covid-19.”
On Monday, Dr. Anthony Fauci will return to the halls of Congress to testify before the House subcommittee investigating the Covid-19 pandemic. He will most likely be questioned about how the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which he directed until retiring in 2022, supported risky virus work at a Chinese institute whose research may have caused the pandemic.
For more than four years, reflexive partisan politics have derailed the search for the truth about a catastrophe that has touched us all. It has been estimated that at least 25 million people around the world have died because of Covid-19, with over a million of those deaths in the United States.
Although how the pandemic started has been hotly debated, a growing volume of evidence — gleaned from public records released under the Freedom of Information Act, digital sleuthing through online databases, scientific papers analyzing the virus and its spread, and leaks from within the U.S. government — suggests that the pandemic most likely occurred because a virus escaped from a research lab in Wuhan, China. If so, it would be the most costly accident in the history of science.
Here’s what we now know:
The SARS-like virus that caused the pandemic emerged in Wuhan, the city where the world’s foremost research lab for SARS-like viruses is located.
At the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a team of scientists had been hunting for SARS-like viruses for over a decade, led by Shi Zhengli.
Their research showed that the viruses most similar to SARS‑CoV‑2, the virus that caused the pandemic, circulate in bats that live roughly 1,000 miles away from Wuhan. Scientists from Dr. Shi’s team traveled repeatedly to Yunnan province to collect these viruses and had expanded their search to Southeast Asia. Bats in other parts of China have not been found to carry viruses that are as closely related to SARS-CoV-2.
The closest known relatives to SARS-CoV-2 were found
in southwestern China and Laos.
There are hundreds of large cities in China and Southeast Asia.
The pandemic started roughly 1,000 miles away, in Wuhan,
home to the world’s foremost SARS-like virus research lab.
Even at hot spots where these viruses exist naturally near the cave bats of southwestern China and Southeast Asia, the scientists argued, as recently as 2019, that bat coronavirus spillover into humans is rare.
When the Covid-19 outbreak was detected, Dr. Shi initially wondered if the novel coronavirus had come from her laboratory, saying she had never expected such an outbreak to occur in Wuhan.
The SARS‑CoV‑2 virus is exceptionally contagious and can jump from species to species like wildfire. Yet it left no known trace of infection at its source or anywhere along what would have been a thousand-mile journey before emerging in Wuhan.
2The year before the outbreak, the Wuhan institute, working with U.S. partners, had proposed creating viruses with SARS‑CoV‑2’s defining feature.
Dr. Shi’s group was fascinated by how coronaviruses jump from species to species. To find viruses, they took samples from bats and other animals, as well as from sick people living near animals carrying these viruses or associated with the wildlife trade. Much of this work was conducted in partnership with the EcoHealth Alliance, a U.S.-based scientific organization that, since 2002, has been awarded over $80 million in federal funding to research the risks of emerging infectious diseases.
The laboratory pursued risky research that resulted in viruses becoming more infectious: Coronaviruses were grown from samples from infected animals and genetically reconstructed and recombined to create new viruses unknown in nature. These new viruses were passed through cells from bats, pigs, primates and humans and were used to infect civets and humanized mice (mice modified with human genes). In essence, this process forced these viruses to adapt to new host species, and the viruses with mutations that allowed them to thrive emerged as victors.
By 2019, Dr. Shi’s group had published a database describing more than 22,000 collected wildlife samples. But external access was shut off in the fall of 2019, and the database was not shared with American collaborators even after the pandemic started, when such a rich virus collection would have been most useful in tracking the origin of SARS‑CoV‑2. It remains unclear whether the Wuhan institute possessed a precursor of the pandemic virus.
In 2021, The Intercept published a leaked 2018 grant proposal for a research project named Defuse, which had been written as a collaboration between EcoHealth, the Wuhan institute and Ralph Baric at the University of North Carolina, who had been on the cutting edge of coronavirus research for years. The proposal described plans to create viruses strikingly similar to SARS‑CoV‑2.
Coronaviruses bear their name because their surface is studded with protein spikes, like a spiky crown, which they use to enter animal cells. Although never funded by the United States, the Defuse project proposed to search for and create SARS-like viruses carrying spikes with a unique feature: a furin cleavage site — the same feature that enhances SARS‑CoV‑2’s infectiousness in humans, making it capable of causing a pandemic.
The Wuhan lab ran risky experiments to learn about how SARS-like viruses might infect humans.
- Collect SARS-like viruses from bats and other wild animals, as well as from people exposed to them.
- Identify high-risk viruses by screening for spike proteins that facilitate infection of human cells.
In Defuse, the scientists proposed to add a furin cleavage site to the spike protein.
- Create new coronaviruses by inserting spike proteins or other features that could make the viruses more infectious in humans.
- Infect human cells, civets and humanized mice with the new coronaviruses, to determine how dangerous they might be.
While it’s possible that the furin cleavage site could have evolved naturally (as seen in some distantly related coronaviruses), out of the hundreds of SARS-like viruses cataloged by scientists, SARS‑CoV‑2 is the only one known to possess a furin cleavage site in its spike. And the genetic data suggest that the virus had only recently gained the furin cleavage site before it started the pandemic.
Ultimately, a never-before-seen SARS-like virus with a newly introduced furin cleavage site, matching the description in the Wuhan institute’s Defuse proposal, caused an outbreak in Wuhan less than two years after the proposal was drafted.
When the Wuhan scientists published their seminal paper about Covid-19 as the pandemic roared to life in 2020, they did not mention the virus’s furin cleavage site — a feature they should have been on the lookout for, according to their own grant proposal, and a feature quickly recognized by other scientists.
Worse still, as the pandemic raged, their American collaborators failed to publicly reveal the existence of the Defuse proposal. The president of EcoHealth, Peter Daszak, recently admitted to Congress that he doesn’t know about virus samples collected by the Wuhan institute after 2015 and never asked the lab’s scientists if they had started the work described in Defuse. In May, citing failures in EcoHealth’s monitoring of risky experiments conducted at the Wuhan lab, the Biden administration suspended all federal funding for the organization and Dr. Daszak and initiated proceedings to bar them from receiving future grants.
Separately, Dr. Baric described the competitive dynamic between his research group and the institute when he told Congress that the Wuhan scientists would probably not have shared their most interesting newly discovered viruses with him. Documents and email correspondence between the institute and Dr. Baric are still being withheld from the public while their release is fiercely contested in litigation.
In the end, American partners very likely knew of only a fraction of the research done in Wuhan. According to U.S. intelligence sources, some of the institute’s virus research was classified or conducted with or on behalf of the Chinese military.
The Wuhan lab pursued this type of work under low biosafety conditions that could not have contained an airborne virus as infectious as SARS‑CoV‑2.
Labs working with live viruses generally operate at one of four biosafety levels (known in ascending order of stringency as BSL-1, 2, 3 and 4) that describe the work practices that are considered sufficiently safe depending on the characteristics of each pathogen. The Wuhan institute’s scientists worked with SARS-like viruses under inappropriately low biosafety conditions.
In one experiment, Dr. Shi’s group genetically engineered an unexpectedly deadly SARS-like virus (not closely related to SARS‑CoV‑2) that exhibited a 10,000-fold increase in the quantity of virus in the lungs and brains of humanized mice. Wuhan institute scientists handled these live viruses at low biosafety levels, including BSL-2.
Even the much more stringent containment at BSL-3 cannot fully prevent SARS‑CoV‑2 from escaping. Two years into the pandemic, the virus infected a scientist in a BSL-3 laboratory in Taiwan, which was, at the time, a zero-Covid country. The scientist had been vaccinated and was tested only after losing the sense of smell. By then, more than 100 close contacts had been exposed. Human error is a source of exposure even at the highest biosafety levels, and the risks are much greater for scientists working with infectious pathogens at low biosafety.
An early draft of the Defuse proposal stated that the Wuhan lab would do their virus work at BSL-2 to make it “highly cost-effective.” Dr. Baric added a note to the draft highlighting the importance of using BSL-3 to contain SARS-like viruses that could infect human cells, writing that “U.S. researchers will likely freak out.” Years later, after SARS‑CoV‑2 had killed millions, Dr. Baric wrote to Dr. Daszak: “I have no doubt that they followed state determined rules and did the work under BSL-2. Yes China has the right to set their own policy. You believe this was appropriate containment if you want but don’t expect me to believe it. Moreover, don’t insult my intelligence by trying to feed me this load of BS.”
SARS‑CoV‑2 is a stealthy virus that transmits effectively through the air, causes a range of symptoms similar to those of other common respiratory diseases and can be spread by infected people before symptoms even appear. If the virus had escaped from a BSL-2 laboratory in 2019, the leak most likely would have gone undetected until too late.
One alarming detail — leaked to The Wall Street Journal and confirmed by current and former U.S. government officials — is that scientists on Dr. Shi’s team fell ill with Covid-like symptoms in the fall of 2019. One of the scientists had been named in the Defuse proposal as the person in charge of virus discovery work. The scientists denied having been sick.
4The hypothesis that Covid-19 came from an animal at the Huanan Seafood Market in Wuhan is not supported by strong evidence.
In December 2019, Chinese investigators assumed the outbreak had started at a centrally located market frequented by thousands of visitors daily. This bias in their search for early cases meant that cases unlinked to or located far away from the market would very likely have been missed. To make things worse, the Chinese authorities blocked the reporting of early cases not linked to the market and, claiming biosafety precautions, ordered the destruction of patient samples on January 3, 2020, making it nearly impossible to see the complete picture of the earliest Covid-19 cases. Information about dozens of early cases from November and December 2019 remains inaccessible.
A pair of papers published in Science in 2022 made the best case for SARS‑CoV‑2 having emerged naturally from human-animal contact at the Wuhan market by focusing on a map of the early cases and asserting that the virus had jumped from animals into humans twice at the market in 2019. More recently, the two papers have been countered by other virologists and scientists who convincingly demonstrate that the available market evidence does not distinguish between a human superspreader event and a natural spillover at the market.
Furthermore, the existing genetic and early case data show that all known Covid-19 cases probably stem from a single introduction of SARS‑CoV‑2 into people, and the outbreak at the Wuhan market probably happened after the virus had already been circulating in humans.
An analysis of SARS-CoV-2’s evolutionary tree shows how the virus evolved as it started to spread through humans.
Not a single infected animal has ever been confirmed at the market or in its supply chain. Without good evidence that the pandemic started at the Huanan Seafood Market, the fact that the virus emerged in Wuhan points squarely at its unique SARS-like virus laboratory.
5Key evidence that would be expected if the virus had emerged from the wildlife trade is still missing.
In previous outbreaks of coronaviruses, scientists were able to demonstrate natural origin by collecting multiple pieces of evidence linking infected humans to infected animals.
Despite the intense search trained on the animal trade and people linked to the market, investigators have not reported finding any animals infected with SARS‑CoV‑2 that had not been infected by humans. Yet, infected animal sources and other connective pieces of evidence were found for the earlier SARS and MERS outbreaks as quickly as within a few days, despite the less advanced viral forensic technologies of two decades ago.
Even though Wuhan is the home base of virus hunters with world-leading expertise in tracking novel SARS-like viruses, investigators have either failed to collect or report key evidence that would be expected if Covid-19 emerged from the wildlife trade. For example, investigators have not determined that the earliest known cases had exposure to intermediate host animals before falling ill. No antibody evidence shows that animal traders in Wuhan are regularly exposed to SARS-like viruses, as would be expected in such situations.
With today’s technology, scientists can detect how respiratory viruses — including SARS, MERS and the flu — circulate in animals while making repeated attempts to jump across species. Thankfully, these variants usually fail to transmit well after crossing over to a new species and tend to die off after a small number of infections. In contrast, virologists and other scientists agree that SARS‑CoV‑2 required little to no adaptation to spread rapidly in humans and other animals. The virus appears to have succeeded in causing a pandemic upon its only detected jump into humans.
The pandemic could have been caused by any of hundreds of virus species, at any of tens of thousands of wildlife markets, in any of thousands of cities, and in any year. But it was a SARS-like coronavirus with a unique furin cleavage site that emerged in Wuhan, less than two years after scientists, sometimes working under inadequate biosafety conditions, proposed collecting and creating viruses of that same design.
While several natural spillover scenarios remain plausible, and we still don’t know enough about the full extent of virus research conducted at the Wuhan institute by Dr. Shi’s team and other researchers, a laboratory accident is the most parsimonious explanation of how the pandemic began.
Given what we now know, investigators should follow their strongest leads and subpoena all exchanges between the Wuhan scientists and their international partners, including unpublished research proposals, manuscripts, data and commercial orders. In particular, exchanges from 2018 and 2019 — the critical two years before the emergence of Covid-19 — are very likely to be illuminating (and require no cooperation from the Chinese government to acquire), yet they remain beyond the public’s view more than four years after the pandemic began.
Whether the pandemic started on a lab bench or in a market stall, it is undeniable that U.S. federal funding helped to build an unprecedented collection of SARS-like viruses at the Wuhan institute, as well as contributing to research that enhanced them. Advocates and funders of the institute’s research, including Dr. Fauci, should cooperate with the investigation to help identify and close the loopholes that allowed such dangerous work to occur. The world must not continue to bear the intolerable risks of research with the potential to cause pandemics.
A successful investigation of the pandemic’s root cause would have the power to break a decades-long scientific impasse on pathogen research safety, determining how governments will spend billions of dollars to prevent future pandemics. A credible investigation would also deter future acts of negligence and deceit by demonstrating that it is indeed possible to be held accountable for causing a viral pandemic. Last but not least, people of all nations need to see their leaders — and especially, their scientists — heading the charge to find out what caused this world-shaking event. Restoring public trust in science and government leadership requires it.
A thorough investigation by the U.S. government could unearth more evidence while spurring whistleblowers to find their courage and seek their moment of opportunity. It would also show the world that U.S. leaders and scientists are not afraid of what the truth behind the pandemic may be.
Alina Chan (@ayjchan) is a molecular biologist at the Broad Institute of M.I.T. and Harvard, and a co-author of “Viral: The Search for the Origin of Covid-19.” She was a member of the Pathogens Project, which the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists organized to generate new thinking on responsible, high-risk pathogen research.
(NY Times)
Re, Vagrant Watch…
They are gaining ground, more members by the day even some service providers. This is the deal, no one wants people left on the street without treatment housing & support. This guy believes everyone should be locked up and out of his way so he does not have to look at them, he is not compassionate he is pissed these humans even exist in the first place and that he is paying taxes that go to programs that do nothing to help or as he says enable. Regardless of his pissed off rantings by the way most of his photos are not in front of his business. He does not own the building or anything surrounding it. It is my humble opinion in order to mitigate this because this could really get out of hand and someone hurt that dual crisis response be utilized to attend to these matters! When I told him to utilize this resource he declined and bitched he would not do that. We should have adopted the Cahoots model, instead of what is happening now, at least in that model these people would be assessed and tended too. I called dual crisis response not to long ago, dispatched surprised a reg citizen requesting help, it was not dual response, nor did they do anything but talk to the man who was clear as day 5150, went and got him food, supposedly. The crisis worker flat old told me he could not take him in on 5150 maybe cause no officer? But because then he had no control of the care plan or what would happen after???? WTF? …. This is what we get ? …. 🤦♀️😢🤬
mm 💕
“Cloverdale is on the same Highway 101 as Ukiah and is closer to the Bay Area and Santa Rosa, yet there are no homeless on Cloverdale’s downtown streets. What is Cloverdale doing that Ukiah and Fort Bragg are not?”
Cloverdale is not feeding them or giving them a bunch of free stuff. Furthermore, Cloverdale PD moves them along their way. The same thing with Willits.
MAGA Marmon
va·grant
a person without a settled home or regular work who wanders from place to place and lives by begging.
MAGA Marmon
James.
moves them along their way to Ukiah ??? hmmm
mm 💕
That’s what we do here in Lake County, and the Schraeders are the ones doing it. They have a big contract with Lake County to reduce our homelessness. That’s why Craig and others are being kicked out of “Burning Bridges”. They need the beds. There is no contract between the Schraeders and Mendo to reduce homelessness in Ukiah (aka vagrancy).
MAGA Marmon
Cloverdale gets 100 degree summer weather regularly. Fort Bragg averages 57 dregrees. You’re a transient. Doesn’t take a rocket surgeon.. Hello!
Ukiah, Fort Bragg and Cloverdale
First, as Mayor of our beautiful community let my apologize for your uncomfortable stay here.
The short answer to what is FB doing. a lot. Seeing two of what you assumed mentally ill people while here is a far cry from what it used to be. Six to seven years ago, very few wanted to venture downtown. That includes locals and tourists. In 2016 if you didn’t see twenty you weren’t looking. What we have developed is a program that requires hand holding and perseverance. If you understand that being mentally ill or homeless is not a crime but instead a result of failed policy by those at the upper tier of government that hold the purse strings Also, unless court ordered services are voluntary. Until someone is ready, they will not take part. This is why our CRU team is on the street daily. I could all but guarantee our team knows the two you are talking about and is doing everything they can to help get them stabilized and into housing. This can sometimes be accomplished after a couple visits or after several months, but we do not quit. The other aspect of failed policy is a system that allows someone to qualify for PSH (permanent supported housing) but not mandated to take part in those services while housed. This is part of the housing first model. There is almost zero accountability to stay in PSH outside of following ground rules. We continue this model today after seeing years of data that proves it is not an affective policy. A great analogy i heard was, think of it like a Pel Grant. Would we be ok with paying a student 5K a month for housing and living expenses and never require them to go to school? Probably not. So why in with this Demographic Street level homelessness grows roughly 15% a year and we continue to throw increased funds at it. Excuses are easy but it takes political will power and a willingness to make change.
I cannot speak for Cloverdale as it has been a while for me. Ukiah, just drive downtown. It will take loud enough voices speaking to the county and Ukiah to make change. We heard it hear in Fort Bragg and acted on it.
loud voices yes, but what we need is ears at the top that listen and act. I think most Ukiahans would like us to use the Marbut approach, the system we paid for to address the issues we face. BUT, according to a past police chief, the Non Profits declared it too harsh and the City officials caved in and here we are today. We need BIG ears at the top who listen and have enough COURAGE to act. They are suppose to serve the community as a whole, not just non profits who have proved over time now that the status quo is not working for the good of the whole community (especially the ones who suffer mental illness and wander the streets). Maybe they should pack up and leave, maybe that’s the appropriate first step.
At the screening of Marbuts documentary last week they included 7 of the 29 facilities they toured across the country. The one Commonality amongst the facilities is, none
Of them check the boxes for state or federal funding. One facility If I remember right was in Arkansas. It was a 158 housing unit with all needed services with an over 90% rate of success. The average cost per day per person was $20.62. The HUD facility several blocks away operates at a cost of $400per person per day. With just over 40% rate of success.
😂☠️
hahaha really but I bet they took the social security checks for payment which in essence would be same as Federal Funding…….
mm 💕
The clients responsibility in almost all cases is 30% of their income. Regardless of income level. If that includes their social security so be it. They are getting it done at a high success rate. In most cases two to three times the state or federal government.
Bernie,
Also in Arkansas and other states such as Utah the laws are different you can place someone in treatment against their will!
30 percent of income is HUD..rules… so thats interesting. I only said about the SSI because you made it sound as if they are doing it some other way, not the non-profit way, maybe privately, doubtful. Maybe they get donations. People over inflate shit, so success rate is probably lower.
mm 💕
I have no reason to believe their stats weren’t scrutinized. even if the are some, the point is the private industry is far more successful than the government. if the goal is to improve the situation then supporting the ones with success should be the plan.
Bernie,
Thats a crock and no one here could afford private care… pretty sure vagrants and poor people are screwed.
mm 💕
I was not referring to private care. Private ownership. They were mainly funded through philanthropy and donations. Regardless, they are getting it done and it’s the same demographic. We have here in our county.
.. Really interesting that the movie and an interview of him talking about it and it is the “Salvation Army” !!! Philanthropy at it’s finest. ….. So recruiting homeless people into religion for their salvation?…
mm 💕
Bernie
So guess were sending everyone to AK.. lol
haha also you move to a different state your SSI payment changes… hmmm maybe if for treatment it doesn’t but not likely… getting SSI is a bitch.
mm 💕
Bernie,
How are you accomplishing stabilization? If you are getting people into housing maybe you could help Craig Stehr ? I am very curious on the stabilization what you mean by that and how it is being accomplished? Being there are very limited services in Fort Bragg and stabilization of these issues often requires medication compliance which can be very hard to accomplish with Mental Illness, besides medication protocols being trial and error and the long list of side effects from those. ….. How many homeless people are there in Fort Bragg? Also if someone needs treatment for addiction and they agree where are they going? Out of county.? Also being that MI and addiction are often co occurring and need treatment for both simultaneously most addiction treatment does not take people with both because they are not qualified to treat the MI! You are correct policy is part of the issue, taking action and meeting need absolutely necessary. I think the support of your program is important, but there are still many roadblocks in people getting their needs met.
mm 💕
One of our hardships is exactly that. We are not social service workers nor do we receive funding to be such. So what we do is lead and handhold through the process to get folks clean and into housing. We do the best we can with staff that we have to make sure they remain stable but we cannot force people to take their meds. There are disappointing situations where we do all of that and get people into housing and medically stabled and they stop taking meds. Then of course they most likely either lose or walk away from their housing. What we do is go right back to them and start all over. It is important to point out this is not the majority of the cases. I refer back to the failed policy of housing first without accountability. We have an understanding that accountability comes with time and shouldn’t be taken expected right away but it must show improvement over time. You can have an over abundance of services but until they are mandated to be in the system and to receive assistance this issue will not go away. We take folks to Ukiah and other rehabs across the state. It depends on insurance and family needs.
Bernie.
So treating addiction without treating the mental illness together will fail. So most treatment centers do not address both, it is necessary. You can encourage medication adherence for some there is also a problem of remembering to take meds, but without insight into illness doomed to be ill. Sorry to bust your balls but if you are doing all the hand holding even while not compliant why is the housing lost? So is the CRU providing transport to Ukiah and out of state? And if most people have medi-cal is that paying for out of state treatment? And how do they return home after treatment and who pays for it?
mm 💕
Insurance pays for travel. Yes we transport in some case if family isn’t available. PSH is supposed to do both but can’t enforce taking meds. Big failure. In the facility in Arkansas like
Others if folks stop
Taking them they try and work with them to stay on board. If their is a complete unwillingness then they are out and someone new is
Brought in to occupy the bed. It’s tough but that is how the system of failure is built. We donor best to fill the gaps but we too for the most part have to work within the system. Again, there has to be some
Level of accountability by the client
Moving forward. Truth be told with the system of failure that is in place there will be folks who don’t get the help
Or
The hand holding
Thank you, Mazie and Bernie, for this extended dialogue on this tough community issue. Very interesting.
Chuck..,
💕💕💕💕
mm 💕
The Elephant In The Room
My POV (point of view)
https://www.instagram.com/reel/C7wklliOVzE/?igsh=MXJkbGZkeWt0aTVkcA==
I Forgot,
What is it? I deleted IG….
mm 💕
An elephant who paints sorrowful pictures get ostracized by his community. They push him into barbed wire, and push him over cliffs.
(I wonder if they’re punishing him for cooperating with Trainers, since painting is not a naturally acquired skill for elephants.)
MY POINT IS: Good illustration of BULLYING.
On another note…
I WAS WRONG, DR. TROTTER
about not growing Ford St. Program using Measure B money.
Thank you,
Thats exactly how I feel about the Vagrancy Watch Page, bullying…. that is always fun.. 🤮
I love elephants ….
mm 💕
Mm- that is your opinion about bullying!
Vagrant Watch is gaining steam because people are tired and frustrated. None of the vagrants are being arrested because they are homeless. They are committing crimes against people and properties. One of the most important jobs of government is to provide safety. The System is failing and leader’s are throwing their hands up in the air and blaming others. The everyday hard working people are left with no choice but to deal with it, I.E. Vagrant Watch.
Ms. Malone your bleeding heart solutions is what got us here! That’s my opinion.
Politicians, like Mo, don’t have the best interest of the tax payer in mind. Remember I don’t get a choice if I want to pay taxes. Simply, I expect anyone who receives a pay check from taxes needs to solve this problem They use it to get elected. Police, D.A. and Judges, who receive taxes for their salary, need to take responsibility and work together.
It is not okay to put a released sex predator on the street to chase three teenagers down the street in Ukiah. That really happened! Then we find out he was homeless.
We need extreme measures because this is getting to the point where this lifestyle is being forced on us as normal.
Call it as I See It…
First off it is not my bleeding heart that caused any ounce of this, you are way off base…… I understand the frustration I am not immune by any means. I do agree things are not being done adequately or appropriately I have said that a million times over. Thank God for free speech and the ability to have an opinion! I am sorry but that page has repeatedly bullied and degraded people for saying anything against their agenda. They also have a right to speak their mind no doubt however his solution to enact and demand policy change and no tolerance is not going to go anywhere. The problem is big and it requires action but action through policy often takes years sometimes never. So what would the solution be right now? Because it is going to get worse. You act accordingly in the moment of need, but that does not happen as you see and there is nowhere to take these people, no crime no jail…
You do not need extreme measures, we need services to step up and do appropriate interventions providing housing, treatment and support.
mm 💕
IMO opinion the page represents either fairly or not the result of the elected leaving or expecting the taxpayers to solve the problem. We have to remember the taxpayers are the ones that pay the bills and keep the lights on.
Exactly, Bernie. It is nice to know that at least one seat on BOS has common sense. I might have been a little harsh on Mazie, I think we are looking for a solution and we agree on a lot of issues.
The person who started Vagrant Watch is a business owner who has given blood, sweat and tears in opening a kid friendly environment only to be harrassed by the City of Ukiah’s Planning Dept. and Mo Mulheren. UPD looks at them as a complainer. I guess because they call the police when homeless are acting out in front of the business. I personally watched a UPD Sargent tell the owner he is picking on the homeless because of the way they- look, nevermind the homeless person they called on has been arrested at least 50 times and has a past of violence. When the owner asked the Sargent for his address suggesting he would send homeless to his home, the officer looked offended.
I guess there is an easy answer, all the people who think this okay, I have one question. Why don’t you take in a homeless person at your house, or give them a piece of your property to camp on.? The answer is obvious.
Thanks for saying that…
mm 💕
I think we all agree where the finish line is. How to run the race is where the disagreement is.
The Fauci witch hunt shows just how dumb, and determined to rule with an iron fist fasciuglicans can be…that and choosing a brainless rich boy for a third run for the office of president (he lost the first two attempts in actual popular votes). People better awaken to reality, or the country will turn into an even more authoritarian state with constitutional rights optional, that will be supported gleefully by the MAGAt crowd, bunch of dumb freedom haters that they are.
Too bad the best the fasciocrats can come up with is braindead Biden…
Deleted emails, 0% death rate for school age kids, killed small businesses, largest transfer of wealth all time, funded lab that leaked, withheld treatments until Paxlovid was available, didn’t suggest a healthy lifestyle as prevention, closed beaches lol. Liberals latch onto celebrities just like rinos. Just ask the aids patients what they think of fauci.
While conservatives bow down to trumples and the ruling class like the good little servants of wealth and supporters of Zionism that they are, not seeing that they are simply slashing their own throats. Poor witoh MAGATs…
Harvey,
Say: FASCI, FA(u)CI
fast five times
“RFK Jr.: The War On Our Rights”
https://www.kennedy24.com/war-on-rights
To what yuppie purpose? I had a bellyful of Kennedys decades ago.
Dang it, Harvey, you missed the point TWO times.
Is 3 the charm?
b.K. is saying BE AWARE…YOUR RIGHTS ARE BEING FLUSHED TO NEVERLAND.
What’s “the point”? I mean that in more ways than one.
Bobby’s little boy is saying nothing more what I have been witnessing for decades. I wouldn’t vote for him any more than I would vote for any of the mainstream trash that have been running since the turn of the century. They all make promises they have no intention of keeping because they are owned by Zionists and the US ruling class. And, this time around we have a “choice” between the brainless and the brain-dead. You may now return to your games.
I’m glad someone is bringing the doc to the table to answer for why he continues to protect misinformation.
I think it’s most likely jealousy because the elephant is getting more attention than the others.
Thank you for your point of view.
Vagrant Watch seems to be the attention getter this morning.
Everyone seems to know who wrote the first screed but me. What did I miss?
Important:
While I am here, I would be interested in what other State Farm home owner’s insurance holders are getting in the form of a “self-guided photo survey requirement.”
The more I look into providing it or not, the more bizarre the scheme seems to be.
They don’t give a reason for wanting it or explaining their right to demand it.
There is, of course, no reason to believe it will benefit policy holders.
Welp,….. I’ve done what I could regarding trying to save our vanishing Public Health department.
“Thank you for your service, please drive through.”
Thank you Dr. Coren for speaking out at the BOS meeting today. As for Mo, it was incredibly rude bullying for her to cut me off in Public Comment this morning, but after all, her being #2 in the “mean girls club” it was not unexpected.
Julie,
Unfortunately after Dr. Coren I bailed.
Thank you.
mm 💕
Julie I am saddened that you can’t comprehend the meaning of positive reinforcement. Mountains can be moved if you just believe you can. You condemned the very individuals today that you represented as a union president. You are retired now, let it go, grow some flowers and stop and smell the roses. These are all great things to do during retirement. All the while people with boots on the ground will do their magic to prove you wrong. Public health has an amazing team of leaders and staff. They are now so fun to be around and learn from. They will put Public health in the spotlight with all their ideas and efforts they are investing in a job they can now love to come too.
When you retired you took the dark cloud with you so I do need to thank you for that. Now you can truly retire and let the working class do their job.
What a condescending post. Age shaming. Is that what the community can expect of you during the course of your work? Retired persons beware! If this is how PH/MH employees treat people of a certain age, oh boy!
I think the impact of these conditions are greatly misunderstood… to be expected I suppose . But wrong because you are expecting blood from a turnip. The measure of these conditions should be behavior based not accountability based. It is again like asking your grandma with dementia to take charge of her needs with no supervision or help. She might take all her meds at once or not take them at all and die. it might take 2 years for someone to have any insight or accountability. Also they have poor memory function so how can you expect accountability as a means of progress because if they do know something happened they literally can’t account for it!
My son after 4 years, compliant with treatment stable still believes that he did nothing wrong when police arrested him, because he was in psychosis which damages the brain and causes memory loss.
mm 💕
Absolutely agree there are certain situations that require different rules and Leniency’s . That is why I don’t like the fact that the nearly the entire demographic is basically lumped into one category. These facilities Im referring to serve addicts and the homeless. Stand alone mental health facilities are a must as well and I fully support more of it.
When these bums aggressively panhandle, harass, bully and terrorize my daughter and my two granddaughters when they are shopping, I don’t give a fat rat’s rear-end if they are mentally disabled, addicted to drugs and/or alcohol, or just lazyass vagrants, this behavior is NOT ACCEPTABLE! The millions of taxpayer dollars given to Redwood Community Services and the taxpayer funded Measure G proceeds have not done squat to improve the situation in Ukiah. I am looking forward to Bernie being on the Board of Supervisors and hopefully his knowledge and proven track record will convince at least two more Board members (Madeline Cline and Ted Williams) to vote to change direction and adopt the Fort Bragg model.
“WAR CRIMINAL NETANYAHU SHOULD NOT BE INVITED TO ADDRESS CONGRESS”
Once again, Bernie Sanders gets it right. It boggles the mind that the U. S. Congress has extended this invitation. Why don’t we also have Putin come on over to share his views with our legislators?
One thing needed, for sure, don’t know if it exists, is Housing for DISABLED People with Mental Health Challenges, only. They have special needs, and need to be where they are safe, accepted, supported, and not bullied.
I Forgot,
You should shoot me an email if you would like to chat. Willow Terrace on Gobbi was built for that purpose and although I do not know for sure I think Orr Creek Commons may have been also.
maziemalone@yahoo.com
mm 💕