CHUCK ROSS
Just a reminder, I will be giving a couple of slide shows on the history of Cuffey's Cove and Greenwood this Friday evening and Saturday morning. Love to see you there, we have room. I'll bet I can show you something about your little town that you didn't know.
https://www.facebook.com/events/457029196737034/457029980070289/?active_tab=about
THERE'S PRIDE, THEN THERE'S SLOBS
On Saturday, June 15, Mendocino County flew its Pride Flag with a joyful display of unity and community. Pride organizers hosted a celebratory march through downtown Ukiah, starting at Black Oak Coffee and terminating in Alex Thomas Plaza. Along the way, some participants stopped at the courthouse to paint the front steps on State Street with a rainbow display that adorned the façade of the courthouse right up to the courthouse entry doors.
The marchers painted their display with tempera paint, creating a huge mess that had to be scrubbed off the steps at great public expense. Much of the paint was in powder form that adhered to the soles of shoes and tracked inside the courthouse. As a result, the court closed the front entrance to the courthouse for the entire day while the paint was removed. All public entry into the building was diverted to one entrance on Perkins Street, creating delays at the screening station and frustration for all court visitors including jurors and citizens seeking court services. County and court maintenance crews spent the entire day vacuuming and power washing the paint off the steps. The final cost of cleanup is estimated at more than $5,000 and will be paid by the State of California from taxpayer funds.
VOTING YOUR PRINCIPLES, you see, is, well, self-indulgent, and here we are again, as we are every four years, with Democratic Party hackdom's ancient lament as perfectly expressed on Wednesday's MCN chatline:
“It is lamentable, but for all practical purposes, we have a two-party political system. A third-party candidate will never be elected president in our lifetimes. Ever. Unfortunate, but indisputable. Given this, voting for anyone other than one of the two major candidates is indeed throwing your vote away. “Voting your conscience” is a pointless exercise of ego. Voting for someone who might be better aligned with your views but is outside of the two parties is pointless. Hold your nose if you must, but a vote for one of the two major candidates is the only vote that makes sense. The Biden administration, while imperfect — what administration isn’t? — has been among the most progressive in recent history.”
NOTHING CAN BE DONE. The system while “lamentable” is the system, so reconcile your egomaniacal self to a vote for two endless wars, one of them “precision bombing” of an entire population of trapped people, the other a proxy war that should have been diplomatically settled a week after it started. Meanwhile, here in the consumer paradise, forty percent of the people are living, and maybe even eating, paycheck to paycheck, secure in the knowledge that the Biden administration is “among the most progressive” in the history of the country, this insufferably smug fool concluding, “Hold your nose if you must," but a vote for one or the other, grotesque senility or straight-up fascism, “is the only vote that makes sense.”
MENDO DEMOCRATS will gather at the end of the month to honor their “Democrat of the Year,” an uncomprehending cash and carry lib from Ukiah named Mastin. There will not be a single person present who is not financially secure, and the whole dreary mob will wonder, maybe even out loud, as they genuflect at the feet of the mediocrities they routinely and enthusiastically elect to Northcoast office, why it is that working people, the vanished base of the Democratic Party, has gone over to the Orange Monster.
RFK JR. is half a crank, but he's pretty much a traditional Democrat of the used-to-be type, like his father and uncle, in fact, which is why the Hillary-Obama-Biden Democrats are vilifying him, also claiming, like the above-cited feeb from MCN, that it's either support the Biden Construct or Trump will throw Rachel Maddow into a concentration camp and deport your house cleaners! At least that's what Rach said the other day on The View, a cackling collection of party gang girls. And not only will Rachel be locked up but George Clooney too! (Jeez, if I thought Trump could bring that off I might vote for him.)
SO, MR. EDITOR, Mr. Pontificating above-it-all, who are you voting for? McGovern being the last Democrat I voted for, I'll go Third Party, probably with Cornel West whose views are pretty much my political views. For those of you who think West is a little too much, Jill Stein of the Greens is also a vote you can cast without knowing for a fact you'll be murdering babies in Gaza.
ER, meditation as a group activity?
FORMER SHERIFF ALLMAN told me that there were about a dozen registered pyromaniacs the Sheriff's Department kept tabs on, which is reassuring in what's shaping up as a bad fire season and huge daily temptations for the pyros.
A READER WRITES: “First, Bruce, How are you doing? We are concerned that you still have cancer in your system? Is that correct? An affliction that you can live with for a long long time? How comfortable are you? Are you getting your stamina back? Are you pain free? I hate this aging process but my dad always said there’s only one alternative.”
IN ORDER: I have cancer outposts in my lungs which, I'm assured by the medicos, were too small to round up during surgery, but which will be zapped by one or another form of chemo. (These healer-type people are all professionally optimistic.) I had a rather excruciating MRI yesterday — the noise level was like being rolled down a steep hill in a garbage can for fifty minutes, and not recommended for claustrophobes — which will determine the chemo strategy.
YES, my cancer is slow-moving, rather like its host actually, but at my age, 85 next month, I wonder which exit The Reaper will choose for me. I would prefer to stumble on for a few more years, and am continually surprised and grateful I've lasted this long, especially when I think back on all the stuff that could have killed me and almost did a couple of times.
I'M FAIRLY COMFORTABLE, thank you. I've got the runny nose that comes with cancer (I'm told) and I have to vacuum the hole in my throat a dozen times every day round the clock, but there's never been any pain associated with this bottom-of-the-ninth, two outs process, although the medicos said I could have all the pain meds I needed but have needed none. (I guess I could have collected a bunch and given them as Christmas presents to my drug friends, but…)
STAMINA seems to be returning. I'm walking a couple of miles every morning but am still unable to do more than ten push-ups, which I find frustrating. But the last five months have been depleting for sure. I lost all my stamina. I still can't go places unless I carry a bag of emergency gear, but overall I'm optimistic that I'm getting stronger. Still voiceless, however, but rather enjoying being non-verbal. Nobody bothers to ask, “How ya doing today?” Visitors can only gaze at my mute bulk as we exchange arm and hand signals with an occasional written communication.
(I JUST WATCHED a Netflix doc on Lance Armstrong, a guy I knew nothing about beyond that he did some spectacular lying about using drug enhancers to win a bunch of prestigious bike races. Most interesting to me was Armstrong's literally incredible defeat of cancer that began in his testicles and spread throughout much of his body, including his brain. It took numerous surgeries by doctors who thought they couldn't save him, but he not only survived he came back to win a bunch more highly competitive races.)
THE EARTHQUAKE shook down in San Francisco hundreds of thousands of dollars' worth of walls and chimneys. But the conflagration that followed burned up hundreds of millions of dollars' worth of property. There is no estimating within hundreds of millions the actual damage wrought. Not in history has a modern imperial city been so completely destroyed. San Francisco is gone. Nothing remains of it but memories and a fringe of dwelling-houses on its outskirts. Its industrial section is wiped out. Its business section is wiped out. Its social and residential section is wiped out. The factories and warehouses, the great stores and newspaper buildings, the hotels and the palaces of the nabobs, are all gone. Remains only the fringe of dwelling houses on the outskirts of what was once San Francisco.
Within an hour after the earthquake shock the smoke of San Francisco's burning was a lurid tower visible a hundred miles away. And for three days and nights this lurid tower swayed in the sky, reddening the sun, darkening the day, and filling the land with smoke.
On Wednesday morning at a quarter past five came the earthquake. A minute later the flames were leaping upward. In a dozen different quarters south of Market Street, in the working-class ghetto, and in the factories, fires started. There was no opposing the flames. There was no organization, no communication. All the cunning adjustments of a twentieth century city had been smashed by the earthquake. The streets were humped into ridges and depressions, and piled with the debris of fallen walls. The steel rails were twisted into perpendicular and horizontal angles. The telephone and telegraph systems were disrupted. And the great water-mains had burst. All the shrewd contrivances and safeguards of man had been thrown out of gear by thirty seconds' twitching of the earth’s crust.
By Wednesday afternoon, inside of twelve hours, half the heart of the city was gone. At that time I watched the vast conflagration from out on the bay. It was dead calm. Not a flicker of wind stirred. Yet from every side wind was pouring in upon the city. East, west, north, and south, strong winds were blowing upon the doomed city. The heated air rising made an enormous suck. Thus did the fire itself build its own colossal chimney through the atmosphere. Day and night this dead calm continued, and yet, near to the flames, the wind was often half a gale, so mighty was the suck.
Wednesday night saw the destruction of the very heart of the city. Dynamite was lavishly used, and many of San Francisco's proudest structures were crumbled by man himself into ruins, but there was no withstanding the onrush of the flames. Time and again successful stands were made by the fire-fighters, but every time the flames flanked around on either side, or came up from the rear, and turned to defeat the hard-won victory.
An enumeration of the buildings destroyed would be a directory of San Francisco. An enumeration of the buildings undestroyed would be a line and several addresses. An enumeration of the deeds of heroism would stock a library and bankrupt the Carnegie medal fund. An enumeration of the dead — will never be made. All vestiges of them were destroyed by the flames. The number of the victims of the earth’s quake will never be known. South of Market Street, where the loss of life was particularly heavy, was the first to catch fire.
Remarkable as it may seem, Wednesday night, while the whole city crashed and roared into ruin, was a quiet night. There were no crowds. There was no shouting and yelling. There was no hysteria, no disorder. I passed Wednesday night in the path of the advancing flames, and in all those terrible hours I saw not one woman who wept, not one man who was excited, not one person who was in the slightest degree panic-stricken.
Before the flames, throughout the night, fled tens of thousands of homeless ones. Some were wrapped in blankets. Others carried bundles of bedding and dear household treasures. Sometimes a whole family was harnessed to a carriage or delivery wagon that was weighted down with their possessions. Baby buggies, toy wagons, and go-carts were used as trucks, while every other person was dragging a trunk. Yet everybody was gracious. The most perfect courtesy obtained. Never, in all of San Francisco's history, were her people so kind and courteous as on this night of terror.
— Jack London
WITHIN HALF A DOZEN BLOCKS of the coronet Spade left the car and went into the vestibule of a tall brown apartment-building. He pressed three bell-buttons together. The street-door-lock buzzed. He entered; passed the elevator and stairs; went down a long yellow-walled corridor to the rear of the building; found a back door fastened by a Yale lock; and let himself out into a narrow court. The court led to a dark back street, up which Spade walked for two blocks. Then he crossed over to California Street and went to the Coronet. It was not quite half-past nine o'clock.
The eagerness with which Brigid O'Shaughnessy welcomed Spade suggested that she had been not entirely certain of his coming. She had put on a satin gown of the blue shade called Artoise that season, with chalcedony shoulder-straps, and her stockings and slippers were Artoise.
The red and cream sitting-room had been brought to order and livened with flowers in squat pottery vases of black and silver. Three small rough-barked logs burned in the fireplace. Spade watched them burn while she put away his hat and coat.
“Do you bring me good news?” she asked when she came into the room again. Anxiety looked through her smile, and she held her breath.
“We won't have to make anything public that hasn't already been made public.”
“The police won't have to know about me?”
“No.”
She sighed happily and sat on the walnut settee. Her face relaxed and her body relaxed. She smiled up at him with admiring eyes. “How, ever did you manage it?” she asked more in wonder than in curiosity.
“Most things in San Francisco can be bought, or taken.”
“And you won't get into trouble? Do sit down.” She made room for him on the settee.
“I don't mind a reasonable amount of trouble,” he said with not too much complacence.
He stood beside the fireplace and looked at her with eyes that studied, weighed, judged her without pretense that they were not studying, weighing, judging her. She flushed slightly under the frankness of his scrutiny, but she seemed more sure of herself than before, though a becoming shyness had not left her eyes. He stood there until it seemed plain that he meant to ignore her invitation to sit beside her, and then crossed to the settee.
“You aren't,” he asked as he sat down, “exactly the sort of person you pretend to be, are you?”
— Dashiell Hammett
ARE THESE THE ORIGINALS? They seem watered down. Where's the Old Testament thunder? Don't tell me that even the Bible has been dumbed down. I thought it read, “Thou” shall not do this and that, and I thought it was Thou shall not bear false witness period, not just against your neighbor. And wasn't the covet stricture about not coveting your neighbor's wife? Usury. What happened to that one? Was it tossed because our country runs on it? Knowing Louisiana they've probably got it all screwed up, having turned to a committee of illiterate fundies for a re-write consistent with their primitive belief systems.
FRANKLY, numbers five through ten wouldn't harm young psyches and might even add to their vocabularies. “Covet.” How many adults these days know what that means, let alone the average kid who is absorbing brain rot through his telephone all day every day and pure idiocy from his television set?
LOUISIANA will be slam dunked on this cretinous ploy by the fundies to violate the Constitution. As we're all supposed to know, the founding aristocrats organized US to specifically keep religion out, the idea being strict separation of church and state. They'd seen what religious conflict had done to Europe and wanted to keep religious zealotry outta here. By ordering the Ten Commandments to be prominently displayed in classrooms is so blatant a violation of separation of church and state you've got to wonder if the governor has himself read the Constitution.
WHEN I WAS A KID — please don't groan so, so, so audibly — we kicked off every school day with the Pledge of Allegiance and a chorus of America the Beautiful, and this pledge was before the zealots inserted “under God” in it and on our money. We also celebrated Spring with a maypole ceremony. I think I was about 30 before I read about the pole’s phallic implications in the Golden Bough. Life is pretty much serial disillusions, isn't it?
THE DEMOCRAT'S and their captive media — CNN, MSNBC and probably the NYT, are claiming that the Republicans are faking film of Biden's deep senescence, which is one more grand insult to the millions of people who see it plainly. His looming “debate” next Thursday with the equivalently incoherent rhetorical Trump will neatly summarize the true state of our doomed nation, a nation where half the people will vote for a corpse because the cadaver isn't the other guy, a bloviating buffoon. Of all the brilliant, honest people in this country we get these two?
RECOMMENDED VIEWING on Netflix: “Emily the Criminal.” Best movie I've seen in a long, long time. The starring actress is way beyond good, and when's the last time you saw a realistic and sympathetic portrait of a prole?
OBVIOUS, AIN'T IT, that we have too many lawyers? When they start advertising on buses and on television you can almost feel the snakes writhing at your feet. My fave is Legal Help with Gina and Rob. “How much money can you get for your accident?” Gina and Rob are posed against a backdrop of about 30 people, lawyers presumably, one of whom looks like Obama, all of them busy answering the phones from the harmed and the humiliated. Gina and Rob will negotiate a settlement with an insurance company and give you, the vic, maybe a third. There are a lot of these law school grads advertising their alleged services on television, including two leather-clad yobbos specializing in motorcycle accidents.
HERE IN MENDO, lawyers haven't yet begun advertising on the backs of MTA buses because almost all of them draw regular pay via the Mendo court system, an easy gig for a few minutes “work” playing “Let's Make A Deal” with one of the hacks from the over-staffed DA's office. How often does a complicated case make it all the way to a jury? The DA's own non-case is the first in years, and it hasn't even made it to the prelim yet as the expense to the public approaches, I'd suppose, half a mil, if not more.
REGARDING THE TEN COMMANDMENTS, I always enjoyed Mark Twain’s “Letter from Earth,” his long-suppressed deconstruction of organized religion, especially the old testament.
For example: ““Thou shalt not kill.”
Twain: “It is plain He cannot keep His own commandments.” … “And they warred against the Midianites, as the Lord commanded Moses; and they slew all the males. And they slew the kings of Midian … Now therefore kill every male among the little ones, and kill every woman that hath known man by lying with him… And when the Lord thy God hath delivered it into thine hands, thou shalt smite every male thereof with the edge of the sword. … But of the cities of these people, which the Lord thy God doth give thee for an inheritance, thou shalt save alive nothing that breatheth.”
Or: “Thou shalt not commit adultery.”
Twain: “By temperament, which is the real law of God, men are goats and can’t help committing adultery when they get a chance; whereas there are numbers of men who by temperament can keep their purity and let an opportunity go by if the woman lacks in attractiveness. But the Bible doesn’t allow adultery at all, whether a person can help it or not. It allows no distinction between goats and tortoises — the excitable goat, the emotional goat, that has to have some adultery every day or fade and die; and the tortoise, that cold calm puritan that takes a treat only once in two years and then goes to sleep in the midst of it and doesn’t wake up for 60 days. No lady goat is safe from criminal assault, even on the Sabbath Day, when there is a gentleman goat within three miles to leeward of her and nothing in the way but a fence 14 feet high.” … “Poor old wrecks, they couldn’t disobey the commandment prohibiting adultery if they tried. And think — because they holily refrain from adulterating each other, they get praise for it! Which is nonsense, for even the Bible knows enough to know that if the oldest veteran there was could get his lost heyday back again for an hour he would cast that commandment to the winds and ruin the first woman he came across, even though she were an entire stranger.”
And so on…
(Mark Scaramella)
FRED GARDNER
I see Ellen Taylor's lovely picture of Alex's headstone, and call with one of him preparing to photograph the headstone of EB Schnaubelt.
Sorry about the quality. My only print is shellacked onto a file cabinet. We were at the graveyard in Trinidad, on our way to or from the Redwood Summer protest in Samoa.
Schanubelt’s widow had put up a stone that said
“E.B.Schnaubelt
Born April 5, 1855, Died May 22, 1913
Murdered by Capitalism”
Alex had heard about Schnaubelt's headstone and wanted to pay homage. He later wrote (in ‘The Golden Age is in Us’), “E.B. had set up a lumber mill as a workers’ co-op but then the big companies cheated him out of the land where the mill stood, though he still owned the plant. One night Schnaubelt, living nearby, thought he heard someone messing with his machinery. He went to investigate and a watchman hired by the companies shot him dead. His widow put up the stone and moved away.”
Alex himself may have been murdered by Capitalism (in which case Capitalism could claim self-defense). We’re all being massively bombarded by radiation and exposed to carcinogens in the air, the water, the food, the upholstery, the receipt at the gas station… And it’s all in the pursuit of profit. America’s “war on cancer” does not mean identifying and eliminating the causes of cancer but a “search for the cure.” The corporados don’t want to stop the plague by closing their nuclear power plants and eliminating cancer-causing chemicals in their production processes. That would cut into profits. They want to fight the war on cancer inside our bodies. That generates profits.
JEFF BLANKFORT: Tonight I watched Trump's entire speech before an adoring crowd and it was clearly a triumph of demagogy as well as a call to arms, if necessary, against those who challenge his and their vision of US supremacism. He spent considerable time attacking Joe Biden but perhaps his most effective moment in doing that was recounting Biden's massive plagiarizing of Labour Party leader Neil Kinnock's speech when running for president in 1988 which forced Biden to drop out of that presidential race and should have barred him from ever being a Democrat Party candidate again if, for no other reason that doing so was indefensible and became an Achilles Heel that any opponent not in the tank like all of his leading Democrat opposition must have known about and failed to mention.
WHATEVER HAPPENED to the Progressives' Festival in Petaluma and the Anarchist Book Festival in SF? With the Trumpers screeching about “marxist communists” destroying the country you'd think all us marxist communists would be rendezvousing like we used to do to plan our counter-attacks.
2002 was a rough year for me and Boonville's beloved weekly. Me and my newspaper were getting banned by marxist commies all over the place, but the most surprising ban occurred after having spent much of a Sunday afternoon at the “Progressives Festival” in Petaluma, but what do I get in Monday's mail? An express letter that cost its senders $13.65 to get from Petaluma to Boonville:
“Dear Bruce: After reading your comments in the AVA about the Progressives Festival, please be advised that we are withdrawing our invitation for you to have a booth at the Festival. Please find a check for $50 enclosed to refund your booth fee. Yours, The Petaluma Progressives.”
MY FRIENDS, this communique represented the final insult. Having been banned by “progressive” community radio KZYX even before it went on the air, having become an official non-person at KMUD and KPFA, having been kicked out of the left by at least a hundred leftists on a hundred different occasions, I was now informed that I couldn't even drag my garage sale card table to a public park in Petaluma to hawk the only truly progressive newspaper left anywhere in this doomed country! I ask you….
UNAWARE that I was unwelcome to attend, I went anyway. When I got there, nobody said anything to me about having been dis-invited, so I settled in and enjoyed myself, as did my neo-pariah tablemates, Mary Moore and Irv Sutley, both of them long-time pwogs. We spent the afternoon chatting with passersby, and not a hostile among them.
THE ONLY OTHER TABLE that caught my interest was one across the way manned by a young couple who looked like Mormon missionaries. They were passing out expensively printed anti-circumcision literature, an issue I thought was of interest only to the parents of infant males. “Is it too late for me to get my foreskin back?” I inquired, hoping to get some idea of what motivated the couple. “I'm glad you asked, sir, because in fact it's never too late to get a new foreskin.” I quickly retreated to my table before the guy could load me up with foreskin lit.
SAFE within the comfortable confines of Boont Berry Farm, I mentioned the foreskin table at the Petaluma pwog fest to a Boonville friend who said, “You know something? Every man I've ever known who hasn't been circumcised has been much nicer than the men I've known who have been circumcised." Another lady suggested that we poll Boont's male customers, beginning with a two-column sign-up sheet; one column for the circumcised, one for the uncircumcised. Once the raw data had been collected a committee of local women would assess the men listed for their relative niceness to see if foreskins or their absence correlated with the more desirable male personality traits.
MEANWHILE, back with the Petaluma Progressives, I was pleased to see Terrence Hallinan, then Frisco's DA, and undoubtedly one of the few persons in the crowd who knew the entire history of “progressive” up to and including the latter-day perversion of its otherwise grand etiology by tepid liberals who delude themselves they're to the left of Al Gore. Always liked and admired the guy, and hadn't seen him in person since way, way back in the CORE days. He shuffled over to say hello as I wondered what he could have made of a church mouse-like event pegged to the banner beneath which his pop ran for president back in '52? (The ava's very own Fred Gardner was, at the time, DA Hallinan's press guy. Shall the circle be unbroken!)
TO ME, THERE'S A HUGE DISCONNECT between the organizers of left or, in this case of Petaluma, pseudo-left events, and the people who identify with the left — the thousands of people who are naturally drawn to the left then repelled by what they find there. The left identifiers are the people I like; the organizers of left events are the kind of people I don't like. But somehow, some way, dwarf Stalinists have grabbed control of the few potentially progressive institutions there are in NorCal, being especially strong at the area's pseudo-public radio stations, which they've nearly destroyed by making them so piously, tediously, predictably boring that nobody outside the catechist circles tunes in to hear the few useful programs offered.
I NEVER DID SEE Petaluma's lead prog, this Chuck Sher character and, as I've said, I had no idea I was banned from the event until I opened Monday's mail. I wondered if my ban could be made retroactive? Could I pretend I wasn't a Petaluma Progressive if I didn't cash the refund check?
THE ANARCHIST BOOK FESTIVAL was fun, and maybe because of its book emphasis perhaps attracted a less pious, more sophisticated, more tolerant crowd. Convened in the House of Flowers on the edge of Golden Gate Park the venue was packed. Lots of ava readers stopped by to chat including our now regular contributor Terry (Ryder) Sites, and, memorably, Craig ‘Post Modern” Stehr.
Stehr was dressed like a door-to-door bible salesman, which made him stand out in a crowd heavy on tats and piercings. I can't remember what we talked about because the hall was all a-din, and also because a very odd man, cadaverous and clad in a black suit, was haranguing me about my numerous thought crimes he'd read in my paper. Craig smiled beatifically throughout our interface, and only some time later did I realize through his letters that he was perpetually blissed out, a plainclothes hari krishna who, years later, is a transient resident of Ukiah. Now in his golden years, Craig is looking for permanent housing, a helluva note for an old man in a rich country.
JIM SHIELDS
Willie Mays was a boyhood idol of mine, hell for my whole life. He was and is an All-Time Legend, All-Time Great Ballplayer, All-Time Great Human Being, All-Time Hero To Kids No Matter What Their Age.
Barack Obama said that he might have never become the first Black president if not for the way Mays charmed and captured the country’s imagination half a century earlier. “A few years ago, Willie rode with me on Air Force One. I told him then what I’ll tell all of you now. It’s because of giants like Willie that someone like me could even think about running for president.”
Obama went on to say, “Willie Mays wasn’t just a singular athlete, blessed with an unmatched combination of grace, skill and power. He was also a wonderfully warm and generous person — and an inspiration to an entire generation. I’m lucky to have spent time with him over the years, and Michelle and I send our deepest condolences to his family.”
Obama gave Mays a Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2015 during his second term in the White House.
Mays started playing for the Birmingham Black Barons of the Negro American League in 1948 when he was 16 before being signed by the New York Giants in 1950. He started playing for the Giants in May of 1951 and never returned to the minor leagues. He served in the U.S. Army for most of 1952 and all of 1953 before returning to the major leagues in 1954.
The Hall of Famer played for the Giants for 21 seasons and was a 24-time All-Star, hitting 660 career home runs and ending his career with a .301 lifetime batting average.
Ironically, Mays passed Tuesday afternoon, just days before he and the Negro Leagues were scheduled to be honored during a game between the San Francisco Giants and St. Louis Cardinals at Rickwood Field in Alabama.
I’ll tell you this, without any doubt at all, Willie was the greatest ballplayer I ever saw play the game. There will never be another. The one and only “Say Hey Kid.”
RIP Willie.
JEFFREY ST CLAIR:
Here’s Nathaniel St. Clair standing in front of the Alexander Cockburn Memorial Tree in the small rancher cemetery where Alex’s remains were planted, which local grandees–to the extent Petrolia has them–wanted to cut down because the giant eucalyptus sheds its bark–making it look “unkempt” and in need of, as every MAGAmoron knows, occasional “raking.” A radical uprising of Alex’s friends has saved this beauty–so far…
POLLY GIRVIN:
AIM Spirit Runners made it to Ukiah after their 500 mile run from Round House to Round House starting in the Sierra's I was totally honored to help give them their certificates along with Priest of the Redwood Valley Rancheria. They stood with us in the past for protecting sacred sites being desecrated by Cal Trans in the construction of the Willits Highway ByPass.
One of the young men all of nine or so now gifted me with a beautiful pine needle basket he made
My heart is filled with love and joy for being a friend of these spiritual earth warriors.
IF YOU MISSED IT, a year-long survey conducted by LaughLab, a Brit-based, academic research outfit, discovered that the following joke made the whole world laugh:
A couple of New Jersey hunters are out in the woods when one of them falls to the ground. He doesn't seem to be breathing, his eyes are rolled back in his head.
The other guy whips out his cell phone and calls emergency services. He gasps to the operator: “My friend is dead! What can I do?”
The operator, in a calm, soothing voice, says: “Just take it easy. I can help. First, let's make sure he's dead.”
There's a silence, then a shot is heard. The guy's voice comes back on the line. He says: “OK, now what?”
MONDAY, Oct. 6, 1952, The Redwood Journal Press-Dispatch (Ukiah): “Court approves film contract between Doss Couple and movemakers; will benefit family. — A contract between the Rev. and Mrs. Carl Doss of Boonville and the Stanley Kramer Company, Inc., of Hollywood was approved by Judge Lilburn Gibson in the Superior Court Friday. The contract gives to the Stanley Kramer Co. the right to create motion pictures based upon the family life and experience of Mr. and Mrs. Doss and the 12 minor children which they have adopted. Terms of the contract are $20,000 at the rate of $5,000 per year. The picture will be based on a book now being written by Mrs. Helen Doss entitled ‘The More The Merrier,’ which Mrs. Doss expects to have completed in the spring of 1953.”
THE GRAND JURY'S REPORT titled: “Mendocino County Family and Children Services: The Broken Process at Family and Children Services refers to "past grand juries regarding issues in Family and Children Services, (which) is of concern to our community and to the disenfranchised fostered children in Mendocino County. Social workers are required to produce reports from the time the child/children are removed from their home (and) when vulnerable families are separated, an anxiety-fueled frustration is created, and the longer the separation, the more toxic the stress.”
THE REPORT neglects one of the major salient points of why there's a crisis. (1) Prospective foster parents are discouraged from becoming foster parents by onerous, often unnecessary bureaucratic requirements designed to protect the placing agency, not the foster parent or the foster kid.
2) The County's foster home system has contracted out the placement of dependent children to private non-profits — Redwood Childrens, the biggest — who take a big whack of the state and federal reimbursements for fostering the children of the poor.
The foster kid feeds a parasitic apparatus of publicly-paid persons, meaning that there isn't anyone in the kid's life who isn't living off him or her.
If the typical foster kid were of a more privileged background, we wouldn't have a "foster home crisis" because middle-class parents know how to use the system to defend themselves. The poor don't know what hit them or their kids.
THE COUNTY'S JUVENILE JUSTICE COMMISSION and the local Superior Court are also big parts of the overall "foster home crisis." The Juvenile Justice Commission is composed almost entirely of people presently employed as "helping professionals" by the County's incestuous helping bureaucracies. These folks get to take paid time out in the middle of their leisurely work days as probation officers, social workers and public contract therapists to sit around in an airless room at Juvenile Hall pretending to oversee the system that employs them.
The Superior Court that appoints the commissioners, like the commissioners themselves, pretend that the dependent child system is the best that can be done in the circumstances , which is, lamentably, mostly true, so what we have is an evil entropy in an imploding society that destroys the children it is supposed to be saving.
REFORM of the present local Social Service dysfunction in a small county like this one could be accomplished at a stroke by installing an intelligent, compassionate person in the boss job, which is unlikely given the givens of civic Mendo. The Superior Court, however, might occasionally challenge the functioning of the system in its particulars as it appears in their courts.
Nothing will change in "progressive" Mendocino County until someone in authority at the upper levels of county government acts on the basic proposition that all children are entitled to stable, safe homes, which is tripley unlikely given the invisibility of the dependent child.
JAYNE THOMAS
This poem by Mosab Abu Toha really hit us….
JEFF BLANKFORT
Since last October, the people of the US have been living in what should be called"The Invasion of the Country Snatchers," lacking only the wit, skills, and, perhaps, above all, political courage of a Lewis Carroll or Jonathan Swift to put the unbelievable story on paper.
Concerned that Jewish students in the US might feel insecure because US defenders of the lives of innocent Palestinians that have been destroyed by their Israeli co-religionists are pointing the finger at them for defending the killers a perfectly natural response,, or would be, if a far wealthier, more politically skilled element of those co-religionists whose primary loyalty is to Israel had not taken over our country and its Middle East policies
"Earlier this month, the website of The Columbia Law Review, one of the country’s most prestigious student-edited law journals, was taken offline by its board of directors after its editors published an article arguing that Palestinians were living under a “brutally sophisticated structure of oppression” that amounted to a crime against humanity.
"As the protests at Columbia intensified during the spring, some Jewish students were targeted with antisemitic vitriol inside and outside of campus. In early March, nine Jewish college students — including one from Columbia — testified before members of Congress about feeling unsafe on their campuses and facing antisemitism.
"Pro-Palestinian student protesters on Columbia have expressed concerns about being doxxed by pro-Israel groups who have accused them of antisemitism. Such protesters at Columbia and other campuses have faced online harassment, rescinded job offers and death threats. As a result, some have chosen not to share their full names publicly."
BUT THERE’S A REASON. There’s a reason. There’s a reason for this, there’s a reason education sucks, and it’s the same reason that it will never, ever, ever be fixed. It’s never gonna get any better. Don’t look for it. Be happy with what you got. Because the owners of this country don't want that. I'm talking about the real owners now, the real owners, the big wealthy business interests that control things and make all the important decisions. Forget the politicians. The politicians are put there to give you the idea that you have freedom of choice. You don't. You have no choice. You have owners. They own you. They own everything. They own all the important land. They own and control the corporations. They’ve long since bought and paid for the senate, the congress, the state houses, the city halls, they got the judges in their back pockets and they own all the big media companies so they control just about all of the news and information you get to hear. They got you by the balls. They spend billions of dollars every year lobbying, lobbying, to get what they want. Well, we know what they want. They want more for themselves and less for everybody else, but I'll tell you what they don’t want: They don’t want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking. They don’t want well informed, well educated people capable of critical thinking. They’re not interested in that. That doesn’t help them. That’s against their interests. That’s right. They don’t want people who are smart enough to sit around a kitchen table to figure out how badly they’re getting fucked by a system that threw them overboard 30 fucking years ago. They don’t want that. You know what they want? They want obedient workers. Obedient workers. People who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paperwork, and just dumb enough to passively accept all these increasingly shittier jobs with the lower pay, the longer hours, the reduced benefits, the end of overtime and the vanishing pension that disappears the minute you go to collect it, and now they’re coming for your Social Security money. They want your retirement money. They want it back so they can give it to their criminal friends on Wall Street, and you know something? They’ll get it. They’ll get it all from you, sooner or later, 'cause they own this fucking place. It's a big club, and you ain’t in it. You and I are not in the big club. And by the way, it's the same big club they use to beat you over the head with all day long when they tell you what to believe. All day long beating you over the head in their media telling you what to believe, what to think and what to buy. The table is tilted folks. The game is rigged, and nobody seems to notice, nobody seems to care. Good honest hard-working people -- white collar, blue collar, it doesn’t matter what color shirt you have on -- good honest hard-working people continue -- these are people of modest means -- continue to elect these rich cocksuckers who don’t give a fuck about them. They don’t give a fuck about you. They don’t give a fuck about you. They don't care about you at all -- at all -- at all. And nobody seems to notice, nobody seems to care. That's what the owners count on; the fact that Americans will probably remain willfully ignorant of the big red, white and blue dick that's being jammed up their assholes everyday. Because the owners of this country know the truth: it's called the American Dream, because you have to be asleep to believe it.
― George Carlin
JEFF BLANKFORT
A victory! It seems so. NPR reports Julian Assange to accept plea deal with the US and be released to go home to Australia being credited by the US with “time served.”
“WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has entered into a plea deal with the U.S. government, bringing an end to a years-long international saga over his handling of national security secrets.
“Assange is preparing to plead guilty to a single count of conspiring to obtain and disclose information related to the national defense in a U.S. federal court in Saipan, in the Northern Mariana Islands, a U.S. commonwealth in the Pacific, this week, according to newly filed court papers.
“Under the terms of the agreement, Assange faces a sentence of 62 months, equivalent to the time he has already served at Belmarsh Prison in the United Kingdom while fighting extradition to the United States. He is expected to be released and to return to his home country of Australia following the court proceeding later this week.”
SOME READERS MAY RECALL that about a week ago Supervisor Elect Madeline Cline wrote a letter to the editors of several local outlets entitled: “Don’t Let New Fees Drain Your Wallet-Attend the Groundwater Sustainability Agency Meeting.” In the letter Ms. Cline “encouraged [readers] to get involved. Ask questions of your representatives on the GSA Board. Question the budget and the fees being collected. We should all be asking if what is being done is effective and efficient.”
ON MONDAY, MendoFever reporter Monica Huettl reported: “No Public Comment at Ukiah Valley Basin Groundwater Meeting Finalizing $600K Budget and Fee Structure.
“The Ukiah Valley Basin Groundwater Sustainability Agency Board meeting was scheduled for three hours, but finished in two, because nobody from the public showed up to comment. This is most likely because the Mendocino County Farm Bureau members already know about the new fees, as there have been several public meetings since January 2024, attended by Farm Bureau members and management.”
Apparently, not even Cline herself commented.
(Mark Scaramella)
THE STATE LAW THAT MANDATES AN AUDIT OF MENDOCINO COUNTY
SB 164 / Government Code Section 8546.11.
(a) The California State Auditor shall conduct an audit of the County of Mendocino by January 1, 2026, which shall include, but not be limited to, all of the following.
(1) Any potential waste, fraud, abuse, and mismanagement.
(2) The county’s administration of elections in 2024.
(3) Contracting and procurement.
(b) Notwithstanding Section 10231.5, the California State Auditor shall report their findings to the Legislature, including the Assembly Committee on Budget, the Senate Committee on Budget and Fiscal Review, the Assembly Committee on Local Government, and the Senate Committee on Local Government, by January 1, 2026.
SEC. 60.
The Legislature finds and declares that a special statute is necessary and that a general statute cannot be made applicable within the meaning of Section 16 of Article IV of the California Constitution because of the unique need to ensure proper oversight and avoid abuse and mismanagement in the County of Mendocino.
HED from this morning's Chron: “Is S.F. the worst-run city in the US? Experts call this analysis ‘misleading’.” No, Ukiah is the worst-run city in the US, adjusted for per capita consideration of course.
THE LAST PUMP that serviced the Vaillancourt Fountain failed about two weeks ago, the city said. Now, the 53-year-old brutalist sculpture must have its mechanical and electrical systems replaced. The cost? Over $3 million.
BULLDOZE IT. It's brutal for sure and has fouled the brutalist Justin-Herman Plaza since the day it was installed.
Frisco got hustled big time when it paid a Canadian “artist” a quarter mil for this eyesore, which is an eyesore even when the pumps were pouring water over it. Hold it! I've got an idea. Make a monkey island out of it like the one out at the Zoo, which would convert this random pile of concrete into a major amusement for adult and child alike.
COMMENT from this morning's ava: “Mulheren is the worst Supervisor in the history of county government.”
MO would probably make the top twenty, for sure, but there are years of competition for worst ever supervisor, a depressing lineage that includes at least three certifiably crazy solons and several straight-up morons.
COLFAX has been the only intellectual to hold down a supe's seat in the long years of elected dull-normals, but “intellectual” in Mendocino County means anyone who wears glasses and can pronounce paradigm, the Khmer Rouge definition of intellectual in other words. And Colfax hustled himself and his colleagues the big raises they didn't and don't deserve for this part-time “work” on what he knew was the cynical basis that big pay would attract better candidates, an obviously false premise. (How many hours a week do you suppose Dan Gjerde puts in “serving” his 4th District constituents?)
CONSIDERED purely on a gender basis, Liz Henry has been the only intelligent, capable female supervisor Mendo has experienced and, the way things are trending, probably the only intelligent female supervisor we'll see in our lifetimes. And she was unmercifully, steadily undermined by the screeching hags sector of Mendolib who, imo, drove her out of Mendo for a new and, I hope, happier life elsewhere.
JOHN McCOWEN was a genuinely conscientious, hard working supervisor with a real commitment to making local government work. He should have run for re-election against the Pom-Pom Girl, but given the way his treacherous colleagues not only refused to support him in his righteous opposition to CEO Angelo's reign of terror — the architect of today’s Mendo mess — but refused to even grant him the pro forma WHEREAS send off even the worst lamebrain supervisors are routinely granted! McCowen left office on a tsunami of Angelo-generated false charges that he had stolen county property, and there he went without so much as an apology from any of his colleagues.
BEFORE THE UNHINGED ANGELO was installed as County CEO, no matter how incompetent the supervisors were there were always smart, capable CEOs like Mike Scannell and Al Beltrami to bail them out, to make sure county employees were reasonably happy as they went about the public's business and that Mendo government didn't become the bad joke it is today. (There was also a smart County Counsel in Peter Klein where today there's a dozen or so faceless drones in that office who farm out a lot of their cases to city lawyers at another huge cost to the county. Not all that long ago the County Counsel was one person who even showed up as legal eagle at school board meetings, the great comic figure of County Counsel Frank Zotter often showing up in Boonville to pull legal opinions out of thin air.)
WHEN ANGELO, a Queeg-like personality type, assumed the county's power chair her remit was to preside over an austere budget, which she attempted to do by not filling vacancies and firing administrators, arbitrary terminations that have cost Mendo literal millions in legal fees.
ANGELO totally intimidated the supervisors, as sad a collection of wusses you'll ever see, as she proceeded to demoralize county workers. And here we are with Angelo's hand-picked successor, Darcy Antle, about to get a big raise from the five wusses although there is zero evidence her job performance warrants the big pay she now gets.
IN THE GRAND SCHEME of things, it doesn't seem a stretch to simply write off Mendo's civic malaise as a local example of The Great Slide, the prevalent chaos, the pure absurdity we see everywhere in the land, local, state and certainly national, the metaphor for where we're at perfectly expressed in Biden-Trump.
HED from the Daily Mail: “Outrage as Taylor Swift shouts ‘F**K the patriarchy’ at sold-out London show.”
Speaking as both a patriarch and grandparent to a confirmed 11-year-old “Swiftie,” I really wish Taylor would set both a better verbal and political example. Shouting obscenities, especially in the context of the retro canard, “the patriarchy,” seems doubly dumb.
A READER WRITES:
Big cheers for Heidi Bauer, senior staff at North Coast Regional Water Quality Control Board, and the DTSC's Diane Barclay, the agency's Northern California division chief, for questioning the Guidiville “Give us $6 million in public money” to tear down the town's most historic building under the guise of contamination. And hiss on those, including non-native deal promoters and Ukiah city officials who acted as if the ploy was doing business as usual.
COMRADE ROSENTHAL QUOTING Gentleman George of Comptche: “There are some themes of pieces in this paper, and in other papers that make me skip or scroll past.”
Rosenthal: “Some themes, George? For many months now I would say most – at least 80% – of the content of the AVA is stuff I can’t scroll past fast enough, either by its header, byline, or first sentence. I used to devote an unconscionable amount of time to the AVA, almost to the level of worship. But, as Bob Dylan wrote, things have changed.”
WHICH IS WHY GOD gave us the scroll bar comrade R, and twenty percent is ten percent more than I get from most media. But seriously folks, there are givens in this thankless business that we're stuck with, pseudonyms for one. I'd ban them altogether but our comment line would be a lot thinner, and I've always understood that here in the Liliput of Mendocino County some opinions, and even inconvenient but known facts can invite unpleasant, even violent consequences, hence the necessity of pseudonyms, and because anon communications are often valuable in increasing the knowledge of this odd place in an apocalyptic time, I live with pseudonyms.
THINGS HAVE DEFINITELY CHANGED. National politics have heated up considerably, meaning that on a diverse site like the mighty ava's in a terminally divided country, there appears lots of opinion many readers of the partisan type would rather not read, opinions that outrage them in fact, which a guy like me finds deeply gratifying, truth to tell.
I LOATHE lockstep opinion and find much of what's out there, from the NYT through CounterPunch, predictable and boring as hell. The only other Northcoast website that rivals the ava in all-round readability is the Redheaded Blackbelt.
SO WE STUMBLE ON as we have for forty years, losing exactly zero sleep over what this or that person or entity objects to.
WE DO THE BEST we can, the old editor said with a martyred sigh, wheezing through the hole in his throat, his liver-spotted hands trembling when he considers his mortal odds, but the ava, the ancient mariners of Mendo media, continue to roll the ava rock up the hill every morning and, unlike many sites, we not only survive, and behind a paywall yet. Why? Because the ava is the only place locals can read the unvarnished truth, truth I tell you! about the place they live.
A READER makes the basic distinction: I don’t know why this controversy keeps appearing: people like Richard Cardiff confusing the meaning of Republic with Democracy. It shows up in letters to the East Bay Times now and then and I always send a letter of clarification which they have always printed. It just annoys me so! Here’s a brief example of what I have written:
ON-LINE COMMENTS OF THE WEEK
[1] In the movie Day Of The Condor, Robert Redford stands outside the NY Times building and tells his boss that he will spill the beans to them.
His boss replies calmly that they will never print it.
And that movie was made just after Watergate, which we were told was a triumph of plucky intrepid reporters, but turned out to be two dudes, one of them a Deep State plant, who were fed anti-Nixon information by the FBI.
But at the time, didn’t most people believe that freedom of the press brought ol’ Tricky Dick down?
So that ending of the movie was a shock.
[2] Let’s celebrate the first day of summer. The operative word here is yet. It is now about four hours old, and as of this moment, there’s no nukes exploding anywhere, the US hasn’t broken up, Biden hasn’t publicly shit his pants, the temps around sunny Boston will be in the nineties, no mass murders, no illegals running amok, and the financial markets haven’t crashed.
What a day!
[3] In 1988, the League of Women Voters withdrew from sponsoring the presidential debates, saying It had “no intention of becoming an accessory to the hoodwinking of the American public.”
We’ve gone from that to 30 years of “debates” run by the corporate (and corrupt) Commission on Presidential Debates. And now to having no sanctioning body at all? Maybe Dana White and the UFC could step in? Hell, why not just put the thing on pay per view? The entertainment factor should be sky-high. That’s America for you.
[4] I’m not sure they are going to dump Sleepy Joe. Getting him re-elected would be the ultimate coup – a legendary wag-the-dog victory that would be discussed for the ages. First off, the most terrifying aspect of all of this was the unified cackling of “cheap fake” over the videos of the president looking like a Disney animatronic robot that had blown a fuse or two. You know that the newly coined term “cheap fake” had to have been something coined by a marketing company. After all, “deep fake” suggests some level of talent with some hacker wearing a hoodie in a dark room that looks like something out of the Matrix. Cheap Fake suggests that a MAGA Republican living in Florida can edit these videos while sitting in his un-airconditioned doublewide and do this “cheap” work on his “cheap” Samsung phone. That we were told not to believe our eyes and that the MSM jumped on it with all of them repeating the same talking points shows you just how far these monsters are willing to go to prop up Biden. BTW, I fully expect a masked actor to play Biden during the debate with a team of psychiatrists and marketing directors shouting directions into his hidden earpiece.
[5] I had a co-worker that sat down and did the math to figure out exactly how many light bulbs he needed to buy to last the rest of his life.
He then went out and bought them before the light bulb ban went into effect.
He hates LED lights and fluorescent lights with a purple passion.
[6] Hammer wielding baristas! gotta love that!
“The reality is a $20 cup of coffee.
Thirty-dollar two egg, two bacon and hash brown breakfasts.”
Before long the reality will be that you make your own coffee and breakfast. There won’t be any other options.
As a poor boy in my youth I went through a hardcore biker period that was so bad that I sold my only car so I could buy another motorcycle to add to my collection. I needed both street bikes and dirt bikes. I loved to travel on long distance tours that kept me out for days at a time. I was fortunate enough to have the option of working 12 hour days so I could get more time off to go traveling. But I was way too poor to afford motels and restaurants. I had a backpack strapped onto the sissy bar and had my restaurant and motel with me on the bike. I cooked my own food at roadside picnic areas or any off the wall spot outdoors that I could find. I camped in tents and arriving late at places like KOA campgrounds and state parks and I would leave very quietly and very early next morning without paying. With the very quiet Japanese factory exhaust it was easy to do. It was the 70’s in a time when Carter was president and it was tough with skyrocketing interest rates.
But that’s how traveling will be again for the average person during the Long Emergency. Not too many people on the roads and many on cheap motorbikes. You’ll be too poor to go to fast food places anyway. Out comes the little backpacking stove, the can of tuna, and the Tuna Helper. Or mac and cheese with a can of mixed veggies. Or if you are in a hurry, the bread and jar of peanut butter and jelly. Heat your own water and make your own coffee, you’ve even got some cream to go with it in your saddlebags. Quit complaining, it will be all you can afford. Be happy you are on the road and having fun instead of moping around at home watching tv, or otherwise sitting around on your ass.
[7] My late father always told me that men have a duty to value womanhood and to protect their women but it is women who are the gatekeepers of morality. Why? Because it is usually the women who say “yes” or “no” to the advances of the male. I’m not talking about cases of rape, I’m talking about consensual adult sexual encounters.
Women don’t get pregnant with a kiss. The act takes effort and considerable access for both the man and a woman.
Yes, men shouldn’t be spewing their seed everywhere and then walking away from the consequences. Women, however, shouldn’t be spreading her legs and permitting the man access to the location where he can spew his seed and impregnate her unless the man is her husband and has demonstrated worthiness to do so.
[8] The longer time passes the more and more people are starting to see the disgusting cancer that is plaguing our nation. I haven’t met a soul that actually believes everything is cool and copacetic in our country these days. Most people, however, don’t know what to do about it. And that is our quandary. We all sense it. We all feel it in our guts.
[9] I’m not expecting a rerun of the Lincoln-Douglas debate; I suspect this will be like two banal press conferences, with smarmy questions from the CNN panel designed to elevate Biden & denigrate Trump. Blitzer to Trump: “How does it feel to be convicted of 37 felonies?” Blitzer to Biden: “What would you say your greatest achievement was as POTUS, standing up to Russia or building the pier in Gaza?” At any rate, Biden will be wired, eyes glowing like coals, dosed by Dr. Feelgood with the meth/steroid elixer they use for Biden’s public appearances, which gives him the simulation of being lucid, breathing, and still alive.
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