Mendocino County Today: Monday 8/5/2024

Poppy | Warm Interior | Randy Bloyd | Eyster Problem | Estuary Landscape | Kennedy Sympathy | John Perrill | Covelo Woes | Jumbo's Hiring | Maritime Cafe | Red Taped | Sailboat | Ed Notes | Book Signing | Single File | Yesterday's Catch | Recession Fear | Mother's Comfort | Substitution Food | Elvin Returns | Hippie Bust | SF Homeless | Ina Coolbrith | Vanilla Scent | Borneo Return | Miracle Life | Boo! | Bear RFK | Hugh Thompson | Israel's Weekend | Happy Guy | Empire Problem | Naked King

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HOT and dry weather is expected in the interior this week. Temperatures are expected to peak Wednesday then slowly diminish later in the week. The coast is expected to see fairly persistent low clouds and fog today with better chances for afternoon clearing Tuesday and Wednesday. (NWS)

STEPHEN DUNLAP (Fort Bragg): On the coast this Monday morning 55F with fog. Patchy drizzle is in our forecast into Tuesday then more clouds than fog for the week. This pattern shows no sign of letting up soon.

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A CALLER REPORTS THE SAD NEWS:

Randy Bloyd was found dead Sunday off Highway 128 near Nash Mill Road. He apparently lost control of his motorcycle on the turn heading in the direction of Navarro. His body was discovered by a local man, Johnny Ray Harding. Randy's bike was found some distance from his body. An autopsy is scheduled for Wednesday, and a CHP report on the accident is being prepared.

SAMANTHA PEREZ

We found Uncle Randy Bloyd on Sunday. He is with his parents now. Unfortunately he didn't survive a bike accident. Thank you to everyone who helped look, sent information, prayed, and reached out. I will be making a gofundme page to help my dad and uncle cremate and bury him with our family in the old cemetery in Philo. Thank you again and I'm sorry to anyone who loved him. He was a great person and we all have lots of memories. Thank you

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OUR DAVID EYSTER PROBLEM

by Tommy Wayne Kramer

Whatever shall we do with Dave Eyster?

We can shake our fists and yell at him but we can’t eat him. We can write mean letters to editors but we can’t chase him around the courthouse with sticks. The Supervisors won’t fire him unless Dave tells them to.

Dave Eyster has single-handedly plunged the County of Mendocino, or more precisely her taxpaying citizens, into a legal and financial mess he designed and implemented. Knowing Dave he’s probably proud of himself.

He instructed the Board to fire an elected official, which was itself cowardly, but that our mute and mutant Board members would silently acquiesce and actually vote to fire her was cowardice on stilts.

Can an official elected by the citizens be terminated by other officials elected by the citizens? We’ll let smart lawyers and wisdom-ish judges sort all that out. Now let’s peek at the mess DA Dave has produced.

At bottom it’s a wrestling match over $68,000. It could have been settled over a cup of coffee and a simple agreement scribbled on a napkin, something like “in future such expenditures shall be approved by so and so and this and that, amen.”

To the county a measly $68,000 is pocket change found in sofa cushions. At Redwood Community Services Burning Bridges Homeless Headquarters they pay $68,000 to empty the wastebaskets. It’s the school district travel budget for the first two weeks of every month. The DA’s office spends $68,000 on paperclips.

And it takes far, far more than $68,000 to partly, temporarily, pay for the nice big raises the Board of Supervisors voted themselves last week. (Outstanding Achievement, if you’re wondering.)

Questions: Was the $68,000 authorized? Did it have to be? Who did or didn’t authorize it? These are issues local voters worry about less than they worry about the Giants’ need for pitching down the stretch, or whether to send their ex-President a get well card.

Defense lawyers suggested Dave recuse himself from prosecuting the defendants because we all know it originates in personal malice and bias.

But a testy Dave Eyster (NOTE: Dave’s default setting is “testy”) defied the request and waded ever deeper into the murky muck of a legal swamp that, if he won, would gain him not a moment’s glory and if he lost would bring him shame and blame for the financial burden he’d created.

So Dave, fresh from loudly refusing to quit the case, quit the case. He selected a Sonoma County lawyer (at $400 per hour) to prosecute it in his stead. Dave will then be free to spend his own time, and annual salary, reviewing misdemeanors and parking meter violations.

The price Dave is demanding we pay that he may smite his enemies is modest. Thus far. But just ahead, as sure as the sun will arise at the morning call of the barnyard rooster, lies a swamp of debt this county has never before seen emerge from a single slick of lawyers.

For defense attorneys a big smelly legal swamp is a happy place to visit and an even happier place to set up camp and vacation for a few years, at $400 per hour. Get this: There is no cap, no limit to how many hours the attorneys work. Lawyers keep their own records of hours worked; details of what they do and for how long they do it is their business, and forever a mystery to citizens who pay the bills.

Any incentive to settle a case, or minimize time or expenses plausibly devoted to it while earning $400 per hour from an anonymous client with limitless funds is, as we might expect, no incentive at all. Multiple additional lawyers are also billing the county, plus sundry investigators, paralegals, staff, mileage and office expenses (BEGIN ITALICS) (have you seen the price of paper clips lately?!?) (END ITALICS) and lunches at Patrona’s.

Then comes a wave of lawsuits filed against the county by defendants for wrongful termination, back wages, pain, suffering, whiplash, punitive damages and 24 months of therapy sessions in Hawaii, adding to the many more millions of dollars the county won’t have.

The day this financial bomb lands, all our supervisors will retire, leaving a new board to announce it had nothing to do with the mess we’re in.

Thanks, Dave. It’s a fine and fitting way to show citizens your gratitude for electing you to office, repeatedly.

And good work, County Supervisors. Why not celebrate by giving yourselves another round of raises?

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PAM PARTEE:

What I feel is sadness for what this lawsuit has done to Ms. Kennedy. Ms. Kennedy was paid $68k for 2300 hours, or about 57.5 regular workweeks over her regular hours, for skilled work that needed to be done to get employees paid. And I bet she didn’t get paid for any of the work she did before she was offered compensation. I would also bet the county was in a bind, underemployed during the pandemic shutdown, and needed this work done. Of course she deserved extra pay for the extraordinarily heavy burden that was put on her, far beyond her management responsibilities, and one she donned as a dedicated employee knowing it had to be done. Ms. Kennedy should have her case diverted and eventually dismissed, and her honor restored.

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JOHN HAYWARD PERRILL

June 15, 1938 - June 11, 2024

John Hayward Perrill of Mendocino was born June 15, 1938 in Xenia, Ohio, died of natural causes surrounded by his loving family June 11, 2024 in San Rafael, California.

As a young man John excelled at baseball playing as a Wildcat third baseman on scholarship at Northwestern University where he earned a degree in literature. He later attended Tulane University and studied medicine. He wrote fiction and poetry throughout his life and was admired for his stories, his talent and his simple way of life. John is survived by his wife of 49 years Beth Perrill, their children and spouses, Andy Perrill (Anna), Jake Perrill (Elisa), Nova Perrill (Christin), Eve Swagerty (Jesse), grandchildren Nova Perrill, Aleah Perrill, Jane Perrill, Hans Perrill, Mabel Swagerty, Josephine Swagerty, Jonas Perrill, and Levi Swagerty, each will remember him as an inspiring thinker and a wonderful person to be around. He was predeceased by his parents Jane and George Perrill, brother Stephen Perrill and grandson Abram Perrill. A family memorial will be at Mount Tamalpais Cemetery.

To plant trees in memory, please visit the Sympathy Store.

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LOU CHICHESTER

Thanks to the AVA for publishing sheriff Kendall’s information regarding illegal marijuana grows and Covelo. I live in Round Valley, north of the “town” of Covelo, and have been here for over 50 years now. What’s become a bit different for the illegal grows are the complexities and confusions of being on an Indian Reservation. What’s private property, what’s Tribal, what’s in Federal Trust, what might be an “heirship” and not really “owned” by anyone is all up for speculation and exploitation. A lot of the ten acre allotments within the Reservation boundaries now have low budget, trashy, lit up all night, generators cranking, and Spanish speaking workers. Those of us not directly involved in the operations suppose that these are “cartel” connections, but I suspect that is a tenuous connection. Illegal, somewhat organized crime connections, yes. It’s all a big mess. A few people are making money I suppose, but it sure is ugly, brings in a lot of bad people and certainly doesn’t do the kids, or the rest of us, any good at all. Thanks Matt, doing what you can.

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SHERIFF KENDALL

You’re welcome Lew!

The problems seem to be settling down across most of the County except for around Round Valley. The violence associated with the illegal grows has remained out of hand. Round Valley has roughly 4% of the county’s population, however about 50% of our murders are being committed in and around Round Valley. Also for the past several years nearly 50% of our homicides have been in illegal grows. Think about it from that perspective and it’s pretty telling where the problems are.

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JUMBO’S OF PHILO ABOUT TO OPEN

We are excited to open our doors very soon!

We need two people to fill two full-time kitchen positions at Jumbo’s Win Win.

We promise a fun working environment, great food and good pay.

Jumbo’s will be open 7 days a week, 11-8.

Please reply here or call Scott at 510–414-2352

We are as excited as you are for us to get open! Thank you

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BEAT THE HEAT AV, and come to the coast to check out Maritime Cafe in Elk. We’re open for lunch Saturday and Sunday 10am-3pm, and Dinner Thursday/Friday/Saturday 5-8pm (and 3-5pm Friday and Saturday for a limited menu).

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STEPHEN DUNLAP (Dunlap Roofing, Mendocino Coast)

Sadly, California is among the most red tape states in the country - the insurance industry alone is suffocating now - really hard to get anything past local officials, Mendocino County is a wasteland of slow Planning Dept timing & high Building Dept permit fees.

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ED NOTES

MY MOST MEMORABLE BIRTHDAY, July 22nd, 2003:

DON MACQUEEN wrote, “Saw your distinguished profile featured in the July 22nd Press Democrat.” Wasn’t me, Don. I’d recognize myself anywhere. Even my wife says it wasn’t me. I’m not “distinguished looking.” I like to think I look like Gene Hackman, but the truth is you can’t tell me from any other more or less ambulatory old white beatnik type guy. But here’s the rest of the story:

JULY 22ND is my birthday, and if any of you say, “I knew you were a Cancer!” you are permanently prohibited from reading this newspaper. I’m way, way too old to care about birthdays. As they do for all of us, birthdays come faster and faster as the abyss grows closer and closer, so I’m just pleased as heck to wake up for another one.

ANYHOO, it was my birthday. Like every Tuesday it was a work day. I rose at five. Put the coffee on. Tottered out to get the morning paper which, in Boonville, is the Santa Rosa Press Democrat. I can’t help but note that there’s a story about my attempt to stop the county from paying public money to a private lawyer to defend a lunatic the County had hired.

A PHOTO of a man who isn’t me sits in the middle of the story. The photo is of one of the pedophile priests the paper is always writing about. I’m not a priest, and I’m not a pedophile. And how did the Press Democrat know it was my birthday?

SO, I’ve been awake for ten minutes and I’ve already been defamed. We’re off to a bad start, birthday boy. The mail arrives. I receive a single birthday card. It’s a computer-generated congratulations from my insurance agent, a person I’ve never met. The day grows warm, then hot. The work day grows long, then longer. But Tuesdays are always long. So are Mondays and Sundays and most other days in this business. Outback newspaper publishing is a fool’s game. I’m right where I should be — old and broke in Boonville. Nevertheless, I anticipate a slab of Safeway birthday cake on which I’d planned to erect a single candle and sing happy birthday to myself and my wife. But she’s watching the Fox Network and says she can hear me from where she is if I feel like singing happy birthday to myself. I look for the cake. It’s not where a cake should be. It’s outside on the porch where it was 105 two hours ago. The cake is a pile of grease. My colleague, The Major, “forgot” to bring it inside.

TO REDEEM what’s left of the day, and just as some Fox fascist begins barking in the next room, I decide to take my dog Perro up into the hills for a quick, restorative, pre-sunset hike. My birthday wasn’t over yet! Pleasure was still a possibility! (Fox Network’s Greta Van Susteren is my wife’s fave, but she invariably stays around for O’Reilly, too. I like Greta, but Bill…)

DEEP IN THE EAST HILLS above Boonville, in the middle of literal nowhere, a dog the size of a small bear suddenly appears! Bear-Dog charges straight at Perro. Perro’s not very smart, and he’s no fighter. He runs up to Bear-Dog like Bear Dog is going to be his new friend. Bear-Dog barrels into Perro and they’re immediately locked in mortal combat. Perro is up on his hind legs fighting a rear guard action. The lady with Bear-Dog is tiny. She tries to separate the animals. Even if she weren’t tiny, and even if I wasn’t mesmerized by the fight raging around us, both of us together couldn’t get the dogs apart. Perro is very strong. Bear-Dog is even stronger. I’m watching the fight and waving my walking stick around as if I’m somehow helping restore order when it occurs to me that my pathetic gesturing is not only ineffective, it’s inane.

BY NOW, Perro is fighting for his life. He has no choice. Bear-Dog is trying to kill him. But Perro’s got about half of Bear-Dog’s huge head locked in his jaws. Bear-Dog has his mammoth jaws sunk bone deep in Perro’s bad leg. The snarling combatants tumble down an embankment and into a stream. The tiny lady follows them, still trying to restrain her Bear-Dog. I remain above the fray on the road where I resume waving my walking stick. Bear-Dog tires. He’s old, fortunately. If he were young Perro would be a goner. Me too, probably. Bear-Dog un-jaws Perro. Perro un-jaws Bear Dog. Perro runs off on his three functioning legs as Bear-Dog sucks in restorative oxygen. I catch up with Perro and hide him in a copse of young fir. Bear-Dog has gotten his second wind and is jogging up the road looking for us. Bear-Dog wants another round. Perro and I are well-hidden a couple of hundred yards away. Bear-Dog can’t see us. He turns around and jogs off towards his apologetic owner. Perro’s beat up pretty good. Bear-Dog is beat up, too, especially his face. Perro’s exhausted. I lift him into the truck and we drive home. Perro immediately goes to sleep. I head for the freezer for some birthday ice cream.

THERE WAS NO ICE CREAM.

THE NEXT DAY I call the Press Democrat’s corrections desk. “That wasn’t me in yesterday’s paper,” I said to the lady who answered the phone. “That was a child molester.” She laughs. “Are you sure?” I can check with my wife again if you want, I reply. She laughs again. “We’ll certainly print a correction,” she says. For the next five days I look for the correction.

THE CORRECTION appears on the fifth day after my name had been besmirched beneath the perv’s photo. Here’s what it said: “A photograph accompanying a story about Anderson Valley Advertiser publisher Bruce Anderson that ran in Tuesday’s Empire section was misidentified as Anderson. The photo was supplied by the Los Angeles Times.”

SURE IT WAS. Santa Rosa called LA and said, “We need a picture of Anderson. He’s in the big file just before Bush and Kobe Bryant.” The PD is run by true idiots.

THE LA TIMES my ass. They blame the LA Times for something like this? Obviously, they were taking a shot at me just to annoy me, as I apparently annoy them. It was mildly flattering that they went to the trouble. That very day I happen to encounter a PD staffer. PD people are under strict orders not to be seen with me, not to communicate with me, not to associate themselves with me in any way. I’m a one-man no-go zone, and may the newspaper gods keep it that way. But PD reporters often communicate with me on the qt. This one says, “I heard that photo was a picture of some guy we took at the California Newspaper Publishers Association meeting.” I’ll stay with the perv jacket, thank you. Newspaper publishers these days are a lot worse than any perv I can think of.

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BILL KIMBERLIN:

Did a book signing in San Francisco with some of my old colleagues. It was billed as “the creators,” meaning those who actually did the creative work on Star Wars. There was an artist who used to come to my aunt's resort in Anderson Valley. He had a shock of white hair as an older man and some of the children asked their parents, “Is he an old man that looks young, or a young man who looks old?” In any case I sold a hell of a lot of my books in a little over two hours to a bunch of Star Wars fans up from Los Angeles for this event.

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ARE THEY NUTS?

Editor,

I remember when cyclists knew to ride single file on two lane roads to allow cars to safely pass. Nowadays, I see cyclists riding next to each other — even on windy, two-lane roads — while they chat away. Are they insane? Please ride in a single-file fashion and save your chat for the pit stop at the bakery.

Bob Elkjer

San Rafael

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CATCH OF THE DAY, Sunday, August 4, 2024

ALEXANDER BARGER, Ukiah. Failure to appear.

DAMON CORNISH, Las Vegas/Ukiah. Domestic battery, false imprisonment.

BRITTANY DAVIS, Ukiah. Controlled substance, paraphernalia, tear gas.

LAMONT JONES JR., Ukiah. Under influence, county parole violation.

SHELLY LEGGETT, Covelo. Failure to appear.

TIAHNA MCGOVERN, Ukiah. Failure to appear.

RAFAEL PAZ JR., Willits. Controlled substance, paraphernalia, burglary tool, county parole violation.

SIXTO RAMOS-O’CONNELL, Ukiah. Controlled substance for sale, paraphernalia, resisting.

SESARIO RIOS IV, Hopland. Controlled substance, paraphernalia, vehicle registration tampering.

ADAM VASQUEZ, Hopland. Petty theft, stolen property, controlled substance, paraphernalia, conspiracy, probation revocation.

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STOCK MARKETS around the globe have continued to plunge on Monday amid fears the US economy may be on track for a recession as Japan suffered its worst sell-off since 'Black Monday' in 1987. Experts at investment bank Goldman Sachs said they now believed there was a staggering 25 per cent chance of a recession in the US - up ten percent from their previous estimate of 15 per cent, while JP Morgan put the chances of a recession at 50 per cent. US stock index futures tumbled on Monday, with those tied to the Nasdaq falling nearly 4 per cent, but traders are now ramping up bets that the Federal Reserve will announce an emergency interest rate cut in response to the global stock market crash and to avoid a huge recession. The sell-off followed the release of a dismal unemployment report last week. Employers added just 114,000 jobs last month, according to Labor Department data released Friday, far below the Dow Jones estimate of 185,000.

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SHOP SMART

Editor:

Consumers are concerned about higher food prices and for four years I have watched prices climb. It hasn’t affected our bottom line. Why?

It’s an economic principle called substitution. When prices go up, you can switch to other choices. This isn’t the Soviet Union. There isn’t just one chicken you can buy, there’s also beef, fish and vegetarian. You don’t have to pay high prices.

Monday is shopping day for us. I looked at some prices. On one shelf, extra virgin olive oil was offered for $15 for one brand, $30 for the one next to it. Beef sirloin was $4.21 per pound, and chicken thighs were $1.69 per pound. Store brand ice cream was $7.49 for five quarts and next to it was a name brand at $5.99 for two quarts.

In my orbit in Rohnert Park, we have Safeway, Raley’s and Food Maxx. There are others. Each has a different price for the same things. With all these choices, there’s no need to stick with your old brands. You can change what you eat and pay the same or less than in the old days.

Or you can contribute your scarce dollars to the record profits of the grocery chains. Your choice.

Hans Beerbaum

Petaluma

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BAND MEMBERS FOR DYLAN SHOW August 3 2024

For those who missed Elvin Bishop at the Taj Mahal concert in Santa Rosa last week (he had to cancel because of “illness”) he showed up Saturday night in Mountain View to take the stage with Bob Dylan. You can catch him tomorrow in Wheatland too! Great show. When Bob asked him how he was doing he didn’t answer, but as Charlie Daniels used to say, “He sure can play!”

— Bruce McEwen

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SAN FRANCISCO TAKES HARDER LINE AGAINST HOMELESS CAMPS, DEFYING ITS REPUTATION

Mayor London Breed has told city officials to issue citations and encourage homeless people to leave town by offering free bus tickets.

by Heather Knight

The homeless men who huddled in tents on a wide sidewalk near Golden Gate Park in San Francisco knew that city crews were coming to clear them out. But they did not budge.

They dozed. They bantered. One strummed a guitar. Fifteen times this year, the city has cleared the sidewalks near the local Department of Motor Vehicles office — and 15 times, the homeless campers have quickly returned.

But attempt No. 16 would be different, Mayor London Breed vowed. No longer would San Francisco allow homeless people to stay on the sidewalks if there was another place to sleep. The individuals camping around the D.M.V. branch had collectively turned down 89 offers of shelter this year, according to the mayor’s office, and Ms. Breed had had enough.

“We need some tough love on the streets of our city,” Ms. Breed said at a re-election campaign rally held four days before the Monday clear-out.

San Francisco has long had a reputation as a liberal bastion, a city that had hoped to solve its problems more through compassion than crackdowns. But with voters frustrated by homeless encampments, open drug use and a downtown that has lost some of its verve, Ms. Breed has taken a tougher approach as she fights for her political life in a hotly contested mayoral race.

Empowered by a recent Supreme Court decision and encouraged by Gov. Gavin Newsom of California, Ms. Breed, a Democrat, has vowed to aggressively clear encampments this month and has told police officers that they can cite homeless campers for illegal lodging if they refuse shelter, with jail time on the table.

The Police Department, whose chief reports to Ms. Breed, told officers in a memo on Wednesday that they can now cite people for violations that included sitting, lying or camping on sidewalks; obstructing people’s ability to walk in public spaces; and creating a public nuisance through conduct that is “offensive to the senses.”

On Thursday, Ms. Breed directed city officials to offer bus tickets to homeless people before providing them a shelter bed or other services. It was the starkest sign yet that San Francisco had changed its tack — and stood in contrast to Los Angeles, where leaders criticized Mr. Newsom for issuing an executive order last week encouraging them to sweep homeless encampments.

“San Francisco will always lead with compassion, but we cannot allow our compassion to be taken advantage of,” Ms. Breed said in her busing order. “We will not be a city with a reputation for being able to solve the housing and behavioral health needs of people across our country.”

On Monday afternoon, the mayor made a personal visit to the sidewalk alongside the D.M.V., a few days after homeless campers had been warned their tents would be cleared through notices that were stapled to nearby trees.

Ms. Breed was joined by about 30 city workers, including her aides and security detail, public health officials and eight police officers. Their numbers dwarfed the four homeless people who were staying put on the sidewalk.

Joel Beiswanger, 49, sat amid a pile of his belongings as the police officers stood nearby and watched him. Wearing a bright orange sweatshirt and pajama pants emblazoned with Santa Claus, he said he found shelters too stressful and had nowhere else to go. He said he has been homeless on and off since he was 14.

Mr. Beiswanger took issue with Ms. Breed’s statement last week that she wanted to make it “uncomfortable” for people to live on the street.

“Where are the bathrooms at? Showers? Where is there comfort?” he asked. “Every week, someone comes through and takes everything you own, no questions asked. I guess it’s how you get your votes.”

Emmanuel Siple, 48, woke up from a nap in a tent nearby. He said a drug and alcohol problem and divorce had led him to live on the streets, and he resented being “micromanaged” by city workers. The threat of jail won’t convince him to stay in a shelter, which already feels like jail, he said.

Ms. Breed did not engage with the homeless men, observing them from across an intersection. She said she did not want to be recorded by a group of activists for homeless rights who had shown up to monitor the clearing and take videos of the workers.

For years, San Francisco has struggled to deal with encampments crowding sidewalks, and the authorities have said that some tents have been used as cover to sell and consume drugs — particularly fentanyl, which has contributed to a spike in deadly overdoses. The city lacks enough affordable housing, drug treatment programs and hospital beds to address the misery, and voters are steamed.

The mayor told reporters last week that she was “excited” about the Supreme Court, dominated by Republican appointees, upholding the ban in Grants Pass, Ore., on homeless people sleeping outside. For several years, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, which oversees nine Western states including California, had blocked laws that made it illegal to camp when no shelter was available.

Governor Newsom’s recent order directed state officials to begin dismantling thousands of homeless encampments and urged local leaders to follow suit. Ms. Breed praised the enforcement approach, noting that her teams repeatedly offer shelter beds, but are turned down two-thirds of the time.

But advocates for homeless people called it cruel, saying it would do little to solve the underlying factors that lead to homelessness. City and county leaders in Los Angeles have criticized both the Supreme Court and Governor Newsom and vowed to solve homelessness in their own way, primarily by finding motel space and services for people before clearing them from the streets.

In San Francisco, however, a police officer this week told one homeless person that tents were being swept in the city because Ms. Breed and Mr. Newsom had declared “no more on the streets, no more encampments,” The San Francisco Standard reported.

Some of Ms. Breed’s challengers have criticized her approach. Aaron Peskin, president of the Board of Supervisors and the most liberal candidate in the mayoral race, said that he would add 2,000 shelter beds, fight evictions and boost the number of rent-controlled apartments.

“What is happening now is a quick and performative election-year gimmick,” he said.

At the D.M.V., activists had their own way of countering the sweep overseen by Ms. Breed. They parked a U-Haul van nearby and offered to store the men’s belongings in it until the city crews left. Ms. Breed, standing across the street, said they were only enabling homelessness and doing nothing to actually help.

Jeff Klein, 31, bought turkey and Swiss sandwiches for the men. Another activist gave them Oreo cookies. Mr. Klein said the city should have been spending its money on food and housing instead of paying for the workers involved in the clearing, most of whom did not engage with the homeless men or clean the camp.

“We have our values completely backward,” Mr. Klein said.

Lt. Wayman Young of the San Francisco Police has worked on the camp-clearing team for five years. He said that people living in tents in neighborhoods away from downtown are often disabled people, older citizens or teenage runaways — all of whom desperately need help.

Downtown is another story, he said, fueled mostly by the open-air drug trade. The team has found guns, knives, machetes and axes in the tents, as well as giant containers of urine and feces, rats, mold and drugs. Lt. Young said the police search the records of anyone who gets aggressive with them, and he estimated that roughly one in four have come back with warrants for crimes that ranged from car break-ins to sexual assault.

He said the new policy allowing citations will make it easier to keep sidewalks clear.

“We want them to go to shelter, and if they don’t, we have to enforce the law,” Lt. Young said. He added that those cited will be released on site and that it would be up to the district attorney to decide whether to charge them. Those with warrants will be taken to jail immediately.

In the first few days of the latest effort, city employees had 235 conversations with homeless people and removed 81 tents. Twenty-four people accepted a shelter bed, while the rest declined or did not respond. The police reported that they have made nine arrests, eight for outstanding warrants and one for illegal lodging, who was cited and released on site.

Among the arrested was Mr. Beiswanger, outside of the D.M.V., who had outstanding warrants for falsely identifying himself to the police and possessing methamphetamines. They took him to jail, and he has been released. He could not be reached for comment after leaving the camp.

The other homeless men by the D.M.V. loaded their belongings into the U-Haul van and wandered away. That, for the time being, was enough to avoid citations.

About an hour after the city crews left, the men retrieved their belongings, and carried them through Golden Gate Park to a different corner.

There, they erected a new encampment.

(NY Times)

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INA COOLBRITH (1841-1928) was an American poet and a prominent figure in the early San Francisco literary scene.

In 1915, she was named California’s first poet laureate. She associated with the likes of Bret Harte, Mark Twain, John Muir and Joaquin Miller and was a mentor to Jack London and Isadora Duncan.

Born Josephine Donna Smith, a niece of Mormon founder Joseph Smith, she came west with her family during California’s Gold Rush. Coolbrith was fifteen and living in Los Angeles when her poetry was first published. After she divorced her husband at age twenty-one, she changed her name to Ina Donna Coolbrith, concealed her Mormon ancestry, and moved to San Francisco, where her celebrity as a poet grew.

An excerpt from her poem San Francisco: April 18, 1906:

I saw thy barren hills against the skies,

I saw them topped with minaret and spire;

Wall upon wall thy myriad mansions rise,

Fair City of my love and desire.

There is a park named after Ina Coolbrith on Russian Hill. This park is a hidden gem with spectacular views. The Russian Hill Stairways Walking Tours takes walkers to Ina Coolbrith Park.

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THIS IS HOW THE WORLD’S FAVORITE SCENT DISAPPEARS

by Aimee Nezhukumatathil

Ms. Nezhukumatathil is a professor at the University of Mississippi, a poet and the author of “Bite by Bite: Nourishments and Jamborees,” from which this essay is adapted.

Once you notice vanilla, you’ll smell it everywhere. It’s in sweets, pharmaceuticals, mosquito repellents, seltzers, makeup and hair products. When real estate agents host open houses or advise clients, they suggest infusing the house with vanilla, for its particular ability to put potential buyers at ease.

Two years ago, scientists from the University of Oxford and the Karolinska Institute in Sweden presented 225 people from nine cultures around the world with 10 different scents. All agreed that the scent of fresh vanilla was their favorite. From custard to candles, we live in a world suffused with vanilla.

And the plant that produces it is in danger.

Extracted from the bean pod of a delicate orchid, vanilla must be grown under exceptionally precise conditions along a very narrow band of the earth, between the Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn. This supreme finickiness makes it unusually vulnerable to the growing shocks of climate change and deforestation.

Most commercial production of vanilla is in Madagascar, Mexico and Tahiti. As the world warms, cyclones and storms in these regions are growing stronger, toppling the orchid blossoms and vanilla beans before they get a chance to fully mature. In 2017, a Category 4-equivalent cyclone decimated an estimated 30 percent of the vanilla vines in Madagascar, which produces 80 percent of the vanilla used around the globe. As a result, the price of vanilla bean pods surged to nearly $300 a pound. The increasingly erratic weather, along with pressure to cut the forests that harbor the orchids, is particularly worrisome for farmers who rely on this crop and wait up to four years for a single orchid to blossom.

Most people I know who brood and despair over climate change might know that extreme weather could soon threaten crops like corn and coffee. But you probably haven’t fathomed what it would be like to lose the scent and the taste of real vanilla. Yes, vanilla substitutes exist, but there is no replacing the symphonic complexities of the real thing. For me, nothing can compare to the memory of baking birthday cakes or leche flan in the kitchen alongside my mother, or having my own teen sons baking alongside me.

A changing climate, a changing world

Climate change around the world: In “Postcards From a World on Fire,” 193 stories from individual countries show how climate change is reshaping reality everywhere, from dying coral reefs in Fiji to disappearing oases in Morocco and far, far beyond.

The worst climate risks, mapped: In this feature, select a country, and we'll break down the climate hazards it faces. In the case of America, our maps, developed with experts, show where extreme heat is causing the most deaths.

To understand how much we could lose if real vanilla disappears, you have to understand the history, some of it dark, of how it became a global commodity. We wouldn’t have vanilla ice cream, perfumes or desserts without a 12-year-old named Edmond Albius. His mother died in the early 19th century, on the island of Réunion (then called Bourbon), off the coast of Madagascar. The man who enslaved him was a botanist who fussed and fumed over his vanilla orchids, which simply would not bloom.

At the time, only bees were known to pollinate vanilla flowers, something that posed a problem for plantation owners in the tropics who wanted to grow this expensive spice, second only to saffron in price. The lure of vanilla’s irresistible flavor and scent was spreading around the globe, creating a feverish demand and desire for it. By the 17th century, the French started adding vanilla to ice cream, as Tim Ecott notes in his book “Vanilla: Travels in Search of the Ice Cream Orchid.” The French writer Marquis de Sade requested vanilla pastilles while in jail. Madame de Pompadour, a mistress of King Louis XV, liked to have chocolate flavored with vanilla and ambergris alongside celery soup and truffles at dinner, Ecott writes.

Historians don’t know if the young Mr. Albius was ordered to find a solution or if he came up with it on his own, but in 1841 he developed the technique — flattening the anther sac and the stigma of the orchid blossom with his finger and thumb — that is still used today all over the world to pollinate vanilla orchids manually and produce large quantities of the extract. This discovery made vanilla far easier to farm commercially, and helped turn vanilla into the essential, pervasive spice it is today.

Farmers also figured out that when you bend vanilla vines, which grow about 30 to 50 feet tall, and keep them low, they produce more flowers. But the orchids’ bloom is brief: Morning sees them unfurl in wide display, but by noon, the flower closes, making the window for hand pollination very narrow.

Then, for each pollinated blossom, it takes nearly a year to fully grow and dry the beans. When the pods shrivel and become supple, they turn a dark brown color and then give off the rich aroma.

Farmers today grow about 4.4 million pounds of dried vanilla beans annually, but it takes about 300 hand-pollinated orchid blossoms to produce just one pound. So if wind and unusually heavy rains knock these blooms off early, farmers must start the whole lengthy yearslong process from scratch. They don’t cultivate them indoors because of the extremely high costs of providing enough space, heat, indirect sunlight and humidity for the vines, which grow draped on trees and shrubs and extend to upward of 100 feet, flourishing under the soft, dappled light that pokes through a tree canopy.

Because the production of real vanilla is so labor-intensive, scientists have experimented with creating substitutes. But many of these substitutes are terrible for the environment, creating large amounts of wastewater.

One vanilla substitute is castoreum — a secretion from beavers that use it to stake their claims and mark their territory. Castoreum extract possesses a warm, sweet odor and may be used as a stand-in for vanilla extract in many dairy products and baked goods, but mostly now is used for perfumes and colognes. I don’t want a world where these are the only vanilla-like scents we have left.

When I cook or make gifts for friends using vanilla beans, my fingertips stay oiled with the scent of vanilla beans and the tiniest whiff of orchids for days. The scent creates a kind of nostalgia of having sweets cooked up for me at various family gatherings — that my grandparents in India and the Philippines have passed on to my parents here in the States, and that I hope gets carried onto my sons living in north Mississippi.

It would be a pity to lose these soothing, warm sensations to something chemically made and one-dimensional, while the real deal gets relegated to the memory bins of an older generation. Mostly, I hope that we’ll learn to recognize the value and the time it takes to grow a single vanilla pod, especially in the tropical belt full of birdsong and bright-colored insects. Under that colorful canopy of wild and audacious feather and carapace, the pale vanilla orchid glows as if it were a sentinel, a lighthouse offering us a gentle warning before it’s too late.

Aimee Nezhukumatathil is a poet and essayist and the author of “Bite by Bite: Nourishments and Jamborees,” “World of Wonders: In Praise of Fireflies, Whale Sharks, and Other Astonishments” and four books of poetry.

(NY Times)

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“I WAS BROKEN HEARTED and at a crossroads in my life when I first went up the Skrang River in Sarawak, Borneo. The people I met there, ten years ago, who hosted me and my crew in their longhouse, who fed us and looked after us, treated me with great kindness. When the Chiefs invited me back for their yearly harvest festival, GAWAI, I said I would come.

It took me a while, but in the end I did return.

I have to admit, I was wondering if all the bad shit running through my head the first time I went up that river was still lurking there — if I’d managed to entirely put it away. I was fulfilling a promise. And I was curious to see how things had changed.

The Iban people are wonderful hosts. It is true that once, not too long ago, they were headhunters — a proud tradition reflected in the faded tattoos on the fingers of the elders — and the dusty bouquet of skulls that hung over my head in the longhouse the first time I was there.

The skulls are gone now. And there are more TV’s and cell phones… And when I arrived this time, friends and relatives from all over the world had returned for the festival. The forest has been somewhat denuded by timbering, but much is the same.

We went to great lengths to retrace our steps — so some of you might feel you’ve seen this show before. Which you have.

But things are different now.

The drinking was non-stop. The Iban karaoke, insane. And my idea to get a traditional, hand-tapped jungle tattoo on my sternum was probably ill advised.

But it’s one of the most beautiful places on earth-as remote and as different from where I grew up as anyplace could be. The people are lovely — and the food, as everywhere in Malaysia, incredible.

It was, in the end, the best kind of adventure.”

–Anthony Bourdain

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ON-LINE COMMENT OF THE DAY

The miracle of life. The fertilized egg has the information in it that will form a full grown human being in 21 years, where every cell will be placed, how every cell is specialized, what the basic personality traits will be, a basic setup for a language in the brain, what sex it will be.

And we just treat this miracle like a piece of trash, to be discarded at someone’s convenience.

I used to be pro-choice long ago, That was before I considered abortion murder in the first degree.

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IN BIZARRE VIDEO RFK JR. ADMITS THAT HE DUMPED A DEAD BEAR IN NEW YORK’S CENTRAL PARK

by Demian Bulwa

Apparently seeking to blunt the impact of a forthcoming New Yorker article, independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. released a bizarre video Sunday admitting that, a decade ago, he dumped a dead bear cub in New York City’s Central Park and staged the scene to look like a bicyclist had run over the animal.

The female black bear was discovered in bushes and partially covered by a bicycle in October 2014, prompting an investigation into the circumstances that never revealed answers, at least publicly, until Sunday. In a twist, the mystery of the bear carcass was covered in 2014 by then-New York Times reporter Tatiana Schlossberg, the granddaughter of former President John F. Kennedy.

In the video that RFK Jr. posted to X, formerly known as Twitter, he recounted his dumping of the bear to Roseanne Barr, with the two smiling and laughing. He said that, on the fateful day, he was far from Central Park — on his way to a “falconing” excursion in Goshen, N.Y. — when he witnessed a woman in a van fatally strike the bear. He said he scooped up the dead bear and put it in his own van, planning to later skin it and eat it.

Hours passed, Kennedy said, and he ran out of time to take the bear home before catching a flight. As he told Barr, he and some people he was with — he said the others had been drinking — came up with a plan: abandon the bear and an old bike, which happened to be in Kennedy’s van, in the park, taking advantage of the fact that there has been a rash of bicycle accidents recently in New York.

“The next day it was on every television station,” Kennedy told Barr. “Luckily, the story died down after awhile.” Laughing, he said the New Yorker had found out about his role in the incident. “You know,” he said, “it’s going to be a bad story.”

(SF Chronicle)

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VIETNAM HERO: HUGH CLOWERS THOMPSON JR.

Hugh Clowers Thompson Jr. (April 15, 1943 – January 6, 2006) was a United States Army officer, serving as a warrant officer in the 123rd Aviation Battalion of

He is credited with ending the Mỹ Lai Massacre of the South Vietnamese village known as Sơn Mỹ on March 16, 1968, alongside Glenn Andreotta and Lawrence Colburn.

During the massacre, Thompson and his Hiller OH-23 Raven crew, Andreotta and Colburn, stopped a number of killings by threatening and blocking American officers and enlisted soldiers of Company C, 1st Battalion, 20th Infantry Regiment, 11th Brigade, 23rd Infantry Division.

Additionally, Thompson and his crew saved a number of Vietnamese civilians by personally escorting them away from advancing United States Army ground units and assuring their evacuation by air. Thompson reported the atrocities by radio several times while at Sơn Mỹ.

Although these reports reached Task Force Barker operational headquarters, nothing was done to stop the massacre.

After evacuating a child to a Quảng Ngãi hospital, Thompson angrily reported to his superiors at Task Force Barker headquarters that a massacre was occurring at Sơn Mỹ.

Immediately following Thompson's report, Lieutenant Colonel Frank A. Barker ordered all ground units in Sơn Mỹ to cease search and destroy operations in the village….

(Wikipedia)

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ISRAEL AND HEZBOLLAH exchange limited fire, and other news.

Israel and Hezbollah, the Iran-backed militia in Lebanon, each said on Sunday that it had fired at targets in the other’s territory. But the attack from Lebanon did not appear to be the major retaliation that Hezbollah threatened after the Israeli assassination of one of its senior commanders last week. Hezbollah said it had launched dozens of rockets at the northern Israeli village of Beit Hillel.

As Iran and its proxies plan an attack on Israel, frantic diplomatic efforts are underway to contain the damage and prevent a wider war. Jordan’s foreign minister, Ayman Safadi, traveled to Tehran on Sunday, the first senior Jordanian official to visit Iran in 20 years, and met with the Iranian acting foreign minister, Ali Bagheri Kani. Jordan is a close Western ally and helped intercept Iranian missiles and drones in April during a tit-for-tat attack between Iran and Israel.

Two people were stabbed to death and two others were injured in Holon, Israel, on Sunday morning in what the police said was suspected to be a terrorist attack. The suspect was also pronounced dead. The Israel Police said he was a resident of the Israeli-occupied West Bank and was in his 20s.

A strike hit a group of tents where displaced people had been sheltering outside Al Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in central Gaza early Sunday, killing four people and injuring at least 15 others, according to Dr. Khalil Degran, a spokesman for the hospital. Videos of the aftermath circulating on social media showed men battling flames with fire extinguishers and pulling injured people from burning tents, shouting, “Oh, God, oh, God.” The Israeli military said on Sunday that it had “struck an operative that conducted terrorist activities” in that area, without specifying whether it was referring to the same strike.

(NYT)

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“WELL WHAT SHOULD ISRAEL HAVE DONE AFTER OCTOBER 7?”

by Caitlin Johnstone

People often object to criticisms of Israel’s ongoing mass atrocity in Gaza by saying, “Well what SHOULD Israel have done in response to October 7 then?” They say it like the question should confound you, as though it’s some kind of thought-terminating unanswerable Zen koan or something. 

But it isn’t. The question is very answerable, and the most correct answer is that Israel should have done what it always should have done: right the wrongs of the past and make peace.

October 7 was entirely a response to generations of abuse against the Palestinian people by the state of Israel, so the correct response to it would have been to heal those abuses in a way that is agreeable to the Palestinians. This would likely include ceding large amounts of land, the payment of very extensive reparations from Israel (and ideally from its wealthy western allies as well), eliminating all unjust laws and apartheid systems, a comprehensive push to purge society of the toxins of anti-Palestinian racism and Islamophobia, the right of Palestinians in exile to return to their homeland, and the negotiation of a peace agreement which yields so much that even the most hardline factions in Palestinian society would be compelled to agree with it.

And when you say this the common objection is “Yeah well Israel was never gonna do that!” To which the most correct answer is: duh. Of course not. Israel is a murderous apartheid state built on racism and hate and trauma, and on the premise of existing in a continuous state of mass-scale violence at home and abroad. 

That’s the problem here. Not Hamas. Not October 7. The problem is that Israel is a settler-colonialist project made of hatred and abuse and ceaseless violence. Which was why October 7 happened.

The fact that Israel would not have responded to October 7 by ending the abuses which caused it doesn’t change the fact that this would have been the correct thing for Israel to do. It just means the same depravities and injustices which gave rise to the state of Israel continue to exist and express themselves to this day. It means Israel itself is the problem.

Which means the real issue with the objection “Well what SHOULD Israel have done in response to October 7 then?” is that it’s asking the wrong question. The correct question to ask is, what should the world do about Israel? What should the world do about this murderous entity which keeps trying to drag us all into a horrific new war with Iran and its allies? What should the world do about this apartheid ethnostate whose relentless abuses were so egregious that Palestinians felt they had no choice but to carry out the October 7 attack?

And when you peel back the layers of this question you find that the question underneath it is, what should the world do about the US empire? What should the world do about this massive globe-spanning power structure which feeds into Israel’s abuses as a matter of policy to advance its own agendas of destabilization and division in a geostrategically crucial resource-rich region? What should the world do about the international power structure centralized around Washington which continuously terrorizes and abuses populations around the world with the goal of capturing them all under a single power umbrella?

I keep saying “the world” because this isn’t just an Israel problem or a United States problem. Clearly. We stand here on the precipice of what could easily become a massive new war in the middle east because of Israel’s actions and the US-centralized empire’s psychopathic facilitation of them, which means this affects all of us. 

Even if we manage to avoid full-scale war this time, we know we’ll be on the precipice again in a few years. And even if Israel itself is fully disarmed and dismantled, without the dismantling of the US empire, another agent of destabilization will just be inserted into the middle east to take its place. As Joe Biden said, “Were there not an Israel, the United States of America would have to invent an Israel to protect her interest in the region.”

So really when you get right down to it, the correct response to October 7 and the genocidal atrocities which have followed it is for the world to begin working to dismantle the US-centralized empire. Gaza and the brinkmanship we’re seeing in the middle east right now are just some of the most high-profile symptoms of the depravity that the US hegemon and its allies and assets are inflicting around the world at the moment. Later on it will be something else. And eventually that “something else” appears likely to culminate in a hot war between major nuclear powers.

So what we’re seeing in the middle east today is just the current symptom of a profoundly diseased world order whose sickness will eventually get us all killed. We’re going to have to find some way to stop these freaks. This is an existential issue for all of us. Gaza is just the most glaring example of an illness which affects the health and wellbeing of the entire world, and which cannot be allowed to continue untreated.

(caitlinjohnstone.com.au)

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