Off the Record 8/17/2024

TRUMP ON FOX LAST WEEK: “There's never been a ticket like this. This is a ticket that would want this country to go communist immediately, if not sooner.”

HUH?

THIS deliberate conflation of liberals and what there is of a left in this country, is already Trump and Vance's main move, even though Kamala and Coach Walz have just teamed up. The two “weirdos” — thank you Coach for describing Trump and Vance so succinctly — are claiming that the Democrats are really a gang of Bosheviks aimed at establishing “socialism” in the United States. Eek! Save me, Orange Man, save me!

AS A MATTER of historical fact, socialists formed a good part of Roosevelt's New Deal, including social security and other mass programs that were and are of enormous benefit to everyday Americans. Socialism has a long and honorable tradition in this country, as Boonville understands every time it crosses the WPA bridge over Con Creek, and as we all understand in our gratitude for Social Security and MediCare. Republicans have opposed these benefits since they were first proposed in 1930.

SOCIALISM, to Trumpers and would be Trumpers, has somehow been transmogrified into a horror for low info citizens because, in this country of amnesiacs, few Trumpers know what it is, it having become a convenient shorthand for all the boogeymen rioting in the perfervid Trumper brain — killers and rapists welcomed into the country at the border by Poor Old Joe; men in women's sports; drag queen story hours for kindergartners, etc. and so endlessly on. If you are an American of ordinary means, which is most of us, Dos Weirdos are not for you, or shouldn't be for you. If you vote for them, you're voting against yourself.

ARE KAMALA and Coach Walz any better? I think Kamala is another huge blunder by the wealthy non-democratic Democrat shot callers. Enthusiasm for the Coach might lift Kamala past Trump but it will be close. Myself, I have zero enthusiasm for the party that supports Israel's monstrous mass murder in Gaza. Which is both parties at this point.

IS IT CYNICISM or fact that the problems we face in our deteriorated country are built-in, structural, and beyond the capacities of our leading political figures to intelligently address even if they dared defy their funders to have a serious go at them?

I MUST SAY I like The Coach. He's the first fun and funny candidate in years who, obviously, should quickly switch places with Kamala to prevent Trump from becoming the next president.

THE SLIME MACHINES on both sides are busily publicizing the human lapses of the other side's leading figures. Turns out The First Gentleman's first wife left him when he made a baby with their au pair, and The Coach picked up a DUI when he was young and, according to a former National Guard comrade, he ducked out of a deployment. Youthful folly accounts for the DUI, I'll wait until the evidence is in on the deployment.

MY OBJECTION to the First Gentleman has always been aesthetic — the cloying placement of the guy as Mr. Kamala is, is, is… mildly nauseating, and one more “personality” shoved down the American gullet. A steady diet of this silly willy if Kamala's elected president, is unbearable to contemplate.

THE COACHES' DUI? Raise your hand if you've had one or should have had one? Uh, huh, just what I thought. A majority of Americans, more males than females, but females coming on fast, have big screw-ups in their background.

I STOPPED driving drunk when I was about thirty because, after a softball game in Cloverdale with a team of heavy boozers, as was the custom of the sport in that time and place, we gathered for post-game merriment at Bob's Pizza where I often over-indulged, one night so dangerously I didn't remember driving back to Boonville. That was it for me.

THE POINT? Young people, especially young men, do dumb, dangerous stuff that they understand only later could have gotten them killed. Some of us even grow all the way up.

CHANGE OUR NAME, Fort Bragg: “…the biggest change was realizing we're not talking to the other side, when we make these arguments about the truth of the past, we're not trying to convince white supremacists in the League of the South to change their mind. We're not even convincing white supremacists in Congress to change their mind. I think we're talking to folks in the middle and I think we're talking to students. And I think that is the nature of truth telling, this idea that you're going to somehow strike up a friendship with the white supremacist and all of a sudden it's going to be Green Book. I think that's what American audiences and quite frankly, white audiences often want out of stories. They want reconciliation. But I think the work is actually reckoning. How do we tell the truth about the past?” — Furioius Carol

ED NOTE: Dear Furious Carol, it won't have occurred to you Name Changers that it's your overweening piety, not to mention your racist version of Coast history, that instantly turned off the sensible people of Fort Bragg. Blind to the complications of history in your righteousness, you contradict your reason for being, to wit, the history of Fort Bragg as a tale of the wholesale murder of native people by white settlers, reinforced by white soldiers. Since you enjoy the telling, don't you want to keep Fort Bragg as Fort Bragg? What would you do with all your free time? As you glory in the spectacle while pretending to be shocked by it, and implying that contemporary white Fort Braggers approve of both their Confederate namesake and the unhappy story of the native people, Fort Bragg is a handy historical reminder. According to you. In fact, soldiers were dispatched to bring order to the upper Mendocino Coast and, soon, to escort area Indians to the new rez in Covelo where they would be safe from white depredations. No, the Indians weren't bussed to Round Valley. They walked. The infirm and the elderly died. They weren't safe in Covelo, but that's a story for another time, and one you Name Changers would certainly enjoy because it's a bloody one. The times being what they were, the white-Indian interfaces were often lethal, but the really, really bad white slaughters, the deliberate, state-funded killings of native peoples, occurred far to the east of Fort Bragg in the Eel River basin. If we re-named every American town because their namesakes were bad people we'd have to re-name much of the United States, wiping out the true history of our fine, fat country in the process. To summarize, the first white settler in Mendocino County with his small herd of cows immediately killed Indians as he and his cows destroyed the natural world's balance the Indians depended on for their lives. Finally, the Indians always fought back as best they could. Name Changers always make it seem as if the Indians stood passively around while they were gunned down and their women raped. There were small detachments of soldiers posted to inland Mendocino County through the early 20th century because Indians were still resisting.

COAST CHATLINE RUMOR: “County buying Teslas?

Anyone know for sure? Can it possibly be true that Mendocino County is buying some Teslas for the Police Department?”

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Mark Scaramella Notes: The County does not have a police department. Ukiah does. Willits does. Fort Bragg does. The County has a Sheriff’s department. Last we heard at a Board meeting, Sheriff Kendall was willing to consider electric vehicles, but was not enamored of them due mainly to their limited range in the large expanse of the County. However, that may not be as much of a problem in city police departments.

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County buying Teslas??

Ukiah City Council approved for Ukiah Police Department

Tom, The Coast

RECOMMENDED READING: ‘Rancho Costa Nada: The Dirt Cheap Desert Homestead’ by Phil Garlington, published by Loompanics Unlimited. Blurbed as an “amazing tale of what can be done on a low-tech scale with good old-fashioned American ingenuity in these high-tech, cash-scarce times,” Garlington’s book turned out to be that and more. Replete with amusing anecdotes about the ingenious characters living “in the middle of a monotonous, baked-dry alkali basin that’s arid, scrub-covered, lacking in amenities and way the hell off the paved road,” this most amusing book will hold your attention cover-to-cover even if you don’t have immediate plans to flee your mortgage and re-locate beyond the reach of bill collectors. The many and varied schemes for shelter that Garlington’s dropped-out neighbors assemble out of the detritus of modern civ are as billed — amazing. All kinds of interesting how-to stuff and funny, too. A big bargain at $14.95.

ANOTHER fascinating read but one that suffers from an annoyingly portentous prose style is ‘Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America,’ by John M. Barry. Knowing nothing about the Mississippi other than it’s big and wide and tends to flood, Barry’s exhaustively researched tome tells the story of how a genius Civil War-era engineer by the name of Eads not only made the river’s mouth regularly navigable by big ships but devised the first sensible flood control strategies, the latter undone by successive generations of less gifted engineers. The politics involved in attempts to tame the Mississippi and the various flood control strategies are interesting despite the ponderous telling of them. Even more interesting are the accounts of levee sabotage by towns attempting to spare themselves a big flood at the expense of the community upstream. And some of the stories of how whole populations were mobilized to shore up the levees in mostly vain attempts to keep the rampaging river from busting through the levees and destroying their homes and home towns are real jaw-droppers, as in the newspaper account of a Mississippi town where black labor was ordered at gun point to lie down the full length of their exhausted bodies on top of the very last row of sandbags they’d heaved onto the levee as the river rose as fast as they could sandbag it. When they ran out of bags the human black sandbags were ordered to place their bodies end-to-end on top of the levee, thus becoming a final layer of humans between the raging river and the town below. (In that episode, the human sandbags saved the day.)

THE THIRD recommended book today, and the only readable one on Edgar Allan Poe I know of, is called ‘Poe, A Biography,’ by William Bittner. The prob with a lot of contemporary bios is that they’re too long. We don’t need to know everything about the subject, but because most bios are the work of academics who’ve made one luminary their life’s work, a lot of biographies become monomaniacally endless. The best bios I’ve read are those little Penguin bios mostly written by novelists and newspaper people. If you’re like me and have never been able to get through a life of Abe Lincoln, his Penguin bio is the one for you. ‘Back to The Raven,’ Published in ‘62 by an Englishman, I think, who worked as a librarian in Berlin and long out of print, Bittner’s Poe is the goods. Edgar Allan has always been an inspiring figure for living up to his famous declaration: “To the few who love me and whom I love — to those who feel rather than to those who think — to the dreamers and those who put faith in dreams as in the only realities… What I here propound is true: — therefore it cannot die: —if by any means it be now trodden down so that it die, it will ‘rise again to the life everlasting’.” I found the Bittner bio in a used book store for $10. I don’t know anything more about the author than the scant bona fides he provides on the book jacket.

FROM THE UKIAH POST:

In recent months, residents of Ukiah have noticed new cameras appearing at intersections and along major roadways. These devices are part of a nationwide trend as cities adopt Flock Safety cameras to enhance public safety measures. While these cameras have quietly been introduced in Ukiah, understanding their purpose and impact can provide insight into this growing technological trend.

Flock Safety is a company that specializes in providing Automatic License Plate Readers (ALPR) to neighborhoods, law enforcement agencies, and businesses. Unlike traditional security cameras, Flock Safety’s ALPR systems are designed specifically to capture vehicle license plates, make, model, and color. The goal is to assist in identifying vehicles involved in criminal activities.

ADAM GASKA of Redwood Valley reports that the Great Redwood Trail is paying for private security to remove homeless people from their small Ukiah segment. Kinds of undermines the GRT party line that the GRT is not just a Great Hobo Trail — and a sign of things to come.

WITH NATURAL GAS prices ever upward I’m reminded that lots of people along Mountain View Road here in Boonville sit on land whose mineral rights are owned by one of the major extractive industries, I can't remember which. Something valuable up there buried beneath the splendid views to the east. I don’t recall the buried treasure as a potential natural gas field, but if a bunch of guys suddenly arrive on Ornbaun Road and begin drilling laterally to the west residents of Mountain View Road could get their timbers rather severely shivered. Maybe some royalty checks, too. (If anyone knows more and better, please inform.)

EXTREMELY NUTSO statements prior to the internet were confined to the neighborhood crank, the guy everyone avoided, the guy you said good morning to and he said, “And another thing…” as you made frantic excuses to get away. “Sorry, Bob. Gotta go. I think my arse is falling off.”

SO HERE'S a comment I read on-line this morning: "The really scary part about all of this is that the Obama/Hillary Hag/Soros Democrat scum cabal actually allowed or sanctioned two avowed Communist sympathizers to sit at the top of Democrat ticket—a pair of candidates that would get thoroughly pummeled in the general election in a sane Republic.”

DOCTOR! Quick, the straight jacket!

BUT THE MAGATS routinely talk the paranoid talk like this. It truly reflects their wacko world view. “Avowed Communist sympathizers”? Dude, please. There isn't a communist party for conservative liberals like Kamala and the Coach to avow to. If there are a hundred thousand self-identifying communists out there I'd be surprised. And if there's a Lenin out there to lead us, er, them, he/she seems to be distracted getting his/her pronouns in order.

HEADLINE from the Daily Mail: "Trump says Harris-Walz ticket will turn America ‘communist immediately’.”

WHICH is paranoia's mainstem. No wonder the millions of lesser Magas think like they do.

TRUMP, as we know, is also on record as saying there will be a “bloodbath” if he loses again in a rigged election.

THAT STATEMENT, which is about a year old now but often repeated since, reminded me to check on my arsenal of two pistols, a shotgun, and a rifle. I've often wondered if I should scope the rifle to pick off the Magas before they get close enough for the shotgun and handguns, or should I assume the local police will remain loyal to the Constitution and distract the Magas with promises of double cheeseburgers before they get to Anderson Valley Market? (The cops and the military won't go for the Fathead Revolution. They're paid too well. The libs are forever invoking Hitler, but Trump isn't Hitler and America isn't ethnically chromatic Germany of 1930.)

SERIOUSLY, THOUGH, won't happen, although IMO there's as much scumbaggery among the Democrats as there is among the blowhards. If Trump loses, and that's a big if — Kamala does not wear well — there may be a few Jan 6-type skirmishes in Redding, rural Missouri and Idaho, but there's zero evidence that the Trumpers have the leadership to pull off Big Trouble.

QUICK STORY about Sheriff Kendall. I hope he won't mind. One quiet day I'm sitting in my trailer office considering my non-existent options when the Sheriff pops in, whether out of genuine neighborliness or simply to keep one more jerk off his back, I'll never know. Anyway, we're chatting when the Sheriff says, “You keep that little .38 handy, huh?” I thought I had my gat pretty well concealed among a pile of papers… “Uh, well, Sheriff, in this business we do get a lot of hostility, and would you like a cup of coffee?” He laughed, and we went on to other matters, but this guy misses nothing, nothing I tell you!

THE ONLY TIME I thought I might need my office defense unit was one afternoon when a big, fit-looking kid hurdled the fence separating us from the Redwood Drive-In and ran straight for my office door. “Goddam! I don't want to shoot this beast!” Turned out he just wanted to renew his subscription, the most dramatic piece of business I can remember transacting.

IT TOOK the great basketball player, Kevin Durant, to succinctly state the American reality: “A lot of bullshit happens in our country. But a lot of great things happen, too.”

SHERIFF MATT KENDALL:

“Sheriff pops in, whether out of genuine neighborliness or simply to keep one more jerk off his back.”

I swing by for the coffee and conversation. We all know men don’t “Gossip” so we tend to call it something else. Lord knows we have scolded so many for “gossiping” we would never do that! And I enjoy visiting with folks who remember many of the happenings of our county.

When I was a young detective I would visit with Bruce Mcewen at the courthouse while awaiting my cases to be heard. I knew exactly what had happened and normally Bruce did as well. But, while visiting with him I always got a completely different perspective on the exact same subject. He looked through the lense of what the public thinks and sees, no fabrications or dishonesty, just looking from a different angle. This fascinated me and it still does.

And I wish I could write as well as he does, but my Round Valley education was cut a little short by my youthful wandering.

That’s an entirely different story.

REBECCA SOLNIT

We talk a lot about what's wrong with the US media. Everyone here has access to a better option, the UK-based Guardian, which has neither the timidities nor the right-leaning pretenses of neutrality that manifest as bothsidesism--softening coverage of the right while slamming the Democrats and the left in order to create an illusion of balance in an unbalanced reality. It stands proudly on its 203-year progressive history., and I'm proud to write for it. Best climate newspaper around, solid coverage of global news, and by the way no paywall though if you read it regularly you should donate.

Tom Nichols last month on US press problems: "The real double-standard problem is not about coverage, but about interpretation. This is not “bias” in the political sense. It is, as Atlantic editor in chief Jeffrey Goldberg put it, a bias toward coherence, the inability to accept—and say—that one of the presidential campaigns is completely bonkers. “Trump overwhelms us with nonsense,” Jeff notes, and so, when confronted with Trump’s obvious mental instability, we work backwards: “Trump sounds nuts, but he can’t be nuts, because he’s the presumptive nominee for president of a major party, and no major party would nominate someone who is nuts.” he result of this bias is that the press too often continues to present what should be appalling, even horrifying information as if it is just part of the normal give-and-take of a political campaign: Trump goes to Las Vegas and rants about sharks, and the press, likely trying to appear unbiased, instead pulls out a dull nugget about Trump’s mention of not taxing tips. Trump vows to destroy the American civil service, and the headlines talk about his “plans to increase presidential power.” Why? Because it is not in the American journalistic tradition to say: Today in Las Vegas, one of the two major candidates said things so rabidly toxic and incoherent that they raised doubts about his sanity."

I give you a newspaper that can keep you fully informed without the biases of the American journalistic tradition.

US edition: https://www.theguardian.com/us

International edition: https://www.theguardian.com/international

There are also UK and Australia editions.

JEFF GOLL WRITES:

Good issue on Saturday, but don't conflate 1930s Communism with the modern “March Through the Institutions” of Western societies and their abrupt change. Soros et al is not interested in worker's rights, unions or economic equality- in fact just the opposite. Richard Wolff is a modern socialist that actually gets it with honest conviction. When Trump refers to “Communism” he's bait-clicking the limbic fear of people who have been negatively affected by this insidious agenda. James Kunstler refers to this in today's issue as “ ‘Progressives’ looking to progressively destroy the entire armature of civilized life in order to create out of ashes a nirvana of sadomasochistic persecution and punishment- their Hieronymus Bosch Wokester utopia.” I define “Modern Progressive” as the Plutocracy, Deep-State, pawns and the elephant in the room that cannot be mentioned. Concerning the letter writer that wants "Corporations, Mega Rich Need to Pay More in Taxes" I would say yes, in principle to a Democratic Republic, they absolutely should. Even if they paid at the 21% rate, all those taxes amount to 17/70,000 or 0.000242% of the national debt. Most of that 35 Trillion dollar debt was created out of thin air and the $1 Trillion in interest payments every quarter of that debt majorly goes to the already wealthy so that horse left the barn for a while now.

In the latest news, evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkin's Facebook account has been cancelled after posting that male boxers shouldn't fight women. “There's some perversion that's happened in our country in the last several years.” — K Harris

THE PERIPATETIC CRAIG STEHR, Mendocino County's only Hindu-Catholic, is 75, and much less peripatetic than he used to be. A long-time member (in good standing) of the AVA's famously exclusive family, Craig will be homeless at the end of the month which, most of us would agree, is a helluva grim prospect for a person of his years, and a helluva grim prospect for a person of any age “in the richest country in the world.” The old mystic, a kind of latter-day Mr. Natural, is presently staying at one of State Street's grim motels, there being no other kind the length of Ukiah's grim main drag. This particular dump is called the Royal Palms, which is truly royal if you get my drift. Craig ponied up $1300 out of his monthly Social Security to stay sheltered at the Palms through the end of the month. Mr. Patel, of the inevitable Motel Patels, the manager, knocked down Craig's rent from the $2,000 Patel usually charges per month because the manager likes him. Craig is likeable, especially compared to several other state and county-funded tenants housed at the Palms who, like Craig, have graduated from Building Bridges down the street, but unlike Craig are unlikeable. But the manager's charity is one-time only. Craig's gotta be outta there by the end of the month. A model tenant, Craig can pay a modest rent. If you have something please contact the AVA.

LONG BEFORE there was a library, and more than a quarter century before there was a science building, Mendocino College boasted a pro football-quality weight room, a nifty little football stadium, an all-weather track, a fine baseball park, a women’s softball park, and a huge gym used almost exclusively by the college’s men’s basketball team.

THE COLLEGE'S science structure was finally erected, but for years college priorities began with competitive athletics as its library remained woefully under-booked while well-off retired people and younger dilettantes took advantage of frivolous course offerings. I don’t object to some old gaffer from Deerwood making a pot for the next generation to piss in because they can’t afford higher education, but a quick run through Mendo CC’s course offerings makes it obvious that the place is still heavy on frills, light on substance, and “returning students” can still get good deals on trips abroad.

COMMUNITY COLLEGES were begun as inexpensive sites for college-level study for young people, not Olympic Villages for former high school jocks or tax-subsidized rec centers for late-blooming weavers and potters, and travel centers for the wealthy.

AS WE GEAR UP for this year's Boonville Fair — theoretically a county fair but long ago captured by Boonville Old Boys — we've gone from the raucous, drinkin' and fightin' annual events of the sixties and seventies to the sedate, child-centered fairs of today.

SHERIFF MATT KENDALL:

“A Covelo degenerate. Gentlemen with this same type of persona have just basically overtaken Covelo.”

This problem is continuing to grow and now there’s a new wrinkle. I received a “Cease and Desist” letter from the Round Valley Tribal Council threatening litigation if I continued to investigate the commercial marijuana grows on tribal land. This correspondence cited the Cabazon case which changed law enforcement across native lands. This causes a serious problem because the vacuum of enforcement in tribal lands will likely cause many more “with this same type of persona” to run to tribal lands. Sadly the recent violence will likely grow larger and continue. By not dealing with things which are causing the violence, it will take greater resources to deal with the aftermath.

A STORY that still bothers me, and bothers me even more in my semi-dependent, mute dotage, occurred years ago in Ukiah. According to eyewitnesses, in the Dora Street parking lot of a Ukiah doctor, Carleen Hagood deliberately ran over her 89-year-old mother as the old lady sat in her wheelchair on the sidewalk. Hagood had just off-loaded the old girl from the Hagood van when Carleen backed her van up, revved the engine, and, with a running start, propelled the vehicle into her mother, thus ending the life of a woman who may have been Mendocino County’s toughest, most resilient senior citizen.

HOW THE OLD LADY survived her daughter’s care long enough to finally be run over is miraculous. Daughter had previously been cited for assaulting mom in the lobby of the Ukiah Civic Center, for wheeling the old lady down the street in hundred degree weather with mom wrapped in layers of cold weather clothing and an overcoat, and for breaking mom’s leg “turning her over in bed.”

CARLEEN herself was nuts, obviously, and clinically paranoid, photographing the door knobs of her house to capture the fingerprints of non-existent intruders. And there was the time she painted her mother’s anus blue “so doctors could tell it from bed sores.”

CARLEEN WAS 60 when she finished Mom off. The DA, as always prepared to shoot the wounded, piled on the charges, neglecting, of course, to indict the helping professionals who'd failed to protect the old lady. Carleen was indicted for second-degree murder, infliction of pain on an elder, vehicular manslaughter, special allegations of use of a deadly weapon, her vehicle, vehicular manslaughter, special allegations of infliction of pain on an elder, and causing the death of someone over the age of 70. I guess Carleen was packed off, but I can't recall the case's disposition.

AMERICA is not a happy country to grow old and defenseless in. The Hagood case is undoubtedly only an extreme instance of many thousands of less dramatic cases of the dependent elderly spending the tail end of their golden years in bed pan torture chambers. The Hagood case is one of a limited person, half-cracked herself, left in the position of caring for her senile, bed-ridden mother when, objectively, mom needed professional nurses, but that option doesn’t exist in this country unless a family can afford it, and few families can.

ACCORDING TO HER DOCTOR, the old lady had been a “vegetable” for years, which is no excuse for her being vehicularly pureed by her deranged daughter, but to charge the daughter as if she were a more or less responsible person is almost as grotesque as the circumstances of the old lady’s last years. If anybody should be charged, it should have been the incompetents at the Mendocino County Department of Social Services who were well aware of the old lady’s situation but failed to intervene.

I WANT to live long enough to disrupt the inauguration of this new County Courthouse, which will be a major eyesore for generations to come bequeathed by an overlarge, overpaid and civically destructive Superior Court, whose 9 (count 'em) judges have always put their comfort and welfare ahead of the public they allegedly serve.

PLANS for this monstrosity at the old railroad depot site off South Perkins Street, Ukiah, have been foisted off on Mendocino County by the State Judicial Council, and funded, largely, by the extortionate court fees and fines forcefully collected from ordinary citizens. The new courthouse will house only the eight judges and one part-time commissioner and their ancillary staff. Other crucial county offices, including the DA, will stay in the present, perfectly serviceable county courthouse, leaving those left behind county workers to jog up and down Perkins in all kinds of weather to serve their judicial majesties in their new quarters.

THE NEW THREE-STORY structure will house 57 staff including the judges for whom the building was designed.

ALL OTHER court-related services will remain in the present courthouse, requiring the DA, for instance, to shuttle back and forth from the center of town to the new structure three blocks to the east. The new courthouse will seriously harm central Ukiah's perennially struggling businesses. The project has “moved forward” despite no one other than the overlarge contingent of Mendocino County judges, nine of them for a population of roughly 90,000 people, being for it. I daresay most Mendo people are not even aware the new judges-only courthouse is being planned.

THE PRESENT COURTHOUSE, however imperfectly organized from the judges' perspective, is perfectly serviceable and could be attractively remodeled for much less public money than the new abomination. This same cast of state and local characters insisted on a new Courthouse for Willits which, after a mere two decades of use, is now abandoned as a courthouse but remains as an eternal visual blight on the center of Willits.

THE JUDGES CLAIM — only the late judge David Nelson dared argue publicly for the new courthouse — that the new courthouse is needed for many reasons because the present building is in such poor physical condition renovation of it was deemed by the judges as impossible, and that the present courthouse also presents an ongoing security risk.

OVER THE PAST 60 years there has been only one security scare, which occurred when a mommy tried to slip her murdering son a handgun as the son was being led into the courthouse. The judges have always created their own “security” problems by refusing to do most preliminary hearings and arraignments at the County Jail. (A few years ago, then-Anderson Valley resident deputy Craig Walker, speaking for the County’s Deputy Sheriff’s Association, told the Supervisors that the DSA unanimously opposed the construction of a new courthouse and recommended that the existing courthouse be remodeled to address whatever minor security issues.)

NATCH, we get the earthquake ploy, that the present courthouse is not safe in an earthquake. No one and no building is safe in a major earthquake, not seen in Ukiah since 1906. Structures can also be retrofitted to make them stronger or resiliant, but as most of us are aware, the earthquake scare is a longtime racket in California to milk the public for upgrades that may or may not withstand The Big One.

THE STATE JUDICIAL COUNCIL allegedly studied all of the courthouses in California and prioritized those that were most in need of new facilities. A new Ukiah courthouse was high on that list. SB 1407, authorizing a $5 billion bond to fund critically needed courthouse construction, was signed into law in 2008. The new Ukiah Courthouse was one of the 41 projects to be funded by this bond.

LAWYERS in our lawyer-dominated legislature are always passing laws that benefit themselves. In fact, it was a legislative (mostly lawyers) swindle that saddled Mendocino County with so many judges. The County was adequately served by so-called lay judges for a hundred years. The lawyers passed the law that elevated all of Mendocino County's “lay” judges to superior court status with, of course, the lavish pay and perks judges seem to assume as some kind of birthright.

IF A NEW COUNTY COURTHOUSE was put on the Mendocino or even the Ukiah ballot it would not pass. It should alarm people that this project is “moving forward” with no public review, even from Ukiah's dependably inert planning commission and city council.

WHY the Perkins Street site? That site, and the railroad that went with it, magically became the property of the Northcoast's grasping Democratic Party, and our judges, past and present, being mostly Democrats, hence the Perkins Street owned by the Democrats. (“Negotiations for purchase resumed between the Judicial Council and the property owner, the North Coast Railroad Authority (NCRA)” aka the Democrats led by former Congressman Doug Bosco.) If you see former Supervisor McCowen around, ask him how it all went down. He was a major expediter of the project.

QUOTING from the new Courthouse propaganda, “Discussions to purchase the four plus acres needed for the courthouse and associated parking were ongoing. The City of Ukiah had made it a high priority to keep the courthouse downtown and was going to participate in its development at the depot site using redevelopment funds. However, when redevelopment funds were terminated statewide, the city was forced to give up its option on the property.”

INSIDER BASEBALL ALL THE WAY and pure bullshit. The City of Ukiah was using redevelopment funds illegally, and even on a city council dominated by incompetents with a city manager to match, Ukiah understood that establishing a new courthouse far from the city center would further harm the city's ongoing effort to maintain a viable city center.

CITING ADDITIONAL JUDICIAL PROPAGANDA: “The new site is three blocks from the old courthouse on Perkins Street. It is on a blighted parcel of land. The city has approval to extend Clay Street across the railroad tracks and into the project site. This will open up the corridor to the Grace Hudson museum and downtown on Clay Street. A bike path along the railroad tracks is being constructed which will connect the courthouse with the north and south ends of town. There will be other parcels available adjoining the courthouse site that would be ideal for offices that could house our county criminal justice partners. The Court is excited to contribute to the improvement of the depot area with the construction of a courthouse which has an estimated total cost of $94 million.”

AND IS NOW almost twice that. The entire stretch of West Perkins between the freeway and downtown is a ghastly, unplanned skein of empty unsightly structures. And a traffic mess during work hours.

THE ADJOINING PARCELS to the new courthouse will naturally become quite valuable and, one can be sure, the usual Ukiah sharks will profit mightily from proximity to their new neighbor. The bike paths the judges claim will link the courthouse to north and south Ukiah are simply laughable.

JUDGE NELSON once appeared before the Supervisors where he acknowledged the problems with the crucial county offices left stranded in the present courthouse. Those ancillary County employees from the District Attorney’s office, Probation, the Public Defender/Alternate Public Defender and non-bailiff law enforcement will have to travel up and down Perkins to the new courtrooms. Nelson blithely suggested that the County find the money to buy the neighboring parcels on which to build office for the DA and the rest of the county offices dependent on the courts. Johnny Pinches was Board chair. He replied to the suggestion that the county find the money to build the offices with a terse, “Thank you, Your Honor.”

MORE PROPAGANDA: “It is important to note that no General Fund dollars will be used for the construction of the courthouse. Construction will be financed by bonds. These bonds are supported by a revenue stream of court fees, penalties and assessments which were increased in order to ensure that these projects would be paid for from within the court system rather than drawing on the state’s General Fund or local taxes.”

THERE'S ONLY ONE SOURCE of funding for public entities — US. By raising fines and the rest of the nebulous fees attached to the justice process, which of course hits working people and the destitute particularly hard, we'll get a kind of judicial spa for nine people and their servants, complete with underground parking, private elevators, lavish chambers and the rest of the monarchical trappings these pampered, privileged persons seem to think come with their life sinecures. This structure has nothing to do with service to the public, everything to do with self-interested convenience and comfort of nine judges.

PROPAGANDA: “The architect for the project is internationally renowned Skidmore, Owings and Merrill LLP. They have built award winning projects all over the world, including other courthouses in California. If the site is acquired in this fiscal year, the schedule calls for construction to begin in 2017 and completion in 2019. We look forward to the day we will have the new courthouse that our citizens deserve.”

THESE PEOPLE have erected major eyesores all over the country. At a minimum, a local architect might at least come up with a structure we could all be proud of. But we are getting a glorified version of the Willits Courthouse which will only further foul Ukiah, once a very pretty, coherent little country town. A big, ugly building will ensure that Ukiah remains forever a blighted freeway stop, with its only redeeming public buildings left over from a better time early in the twentieth century.

MendoCourthouseTimeline

ON LINE COMMENTS RE NEW COURTHOUSE:

Hideous prison aesthetic. It would have been more appropriate to design it in the shape a giant middle finger. Either way it’s one more “F you” bestowed on Ukiah.

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Ugly as sin. Soviet Brutalist architectural style meets Apple Store banality. The entire frontage visually communicates “this is the place you go to, BEFORE you go to prison.”

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It’s as if somebody started with a bad design, then as the cost estimate went up and up, lead architect just grabbed the blueprint off the drafting table and said, Screw it, we’re done.

ON-LINE COMMENTS OF THE WEEK

[1] Kamala Harris was proclaimed the winner of the DNC election, with 99% of the vote.

99%? She was the only person on the ballot, and only delegates were allowed to vote. Shouldn’t that be 100%? Maybe they thought 99% sounded more legit.

In other news, the Democrats and the media are still telling us that the Venezuela election was unfair and rigged.

[2] Back in the old days in the USA, say back in the 30s, ya got married to your sweetheart and made a commitment. Say you’re an average person in the 1930s and you are living a bare bones existence, like most other people around. Life was hard and work was dangerous sometimes. A woman running a household in the days of old had wood burning kitchen stoves and no air conditioning in summer. She could easily die in childbirth. Life may have been fun at times but it also carried with it a lot of real physical pain and/or discomfort.

The bonds of a marriage are made strong because of all the shared intense and sometimes very physically painful experiences that go along with it. You’ve decided to make a partnership with somebody who is not just sharing sexual pleasure – but somebody who has also agreed to share all the pain and misery that often accompanies life. In the 30s it could be working your fingers to the bone for years and see the dust bowl blow it all away.

Because of comfy suburban living standards that eliminate pain and discomfort, the middle class marriages are boring, sterile, and meaninglessly repetitive. Conservative Christian churches sometimes have higher divorce rates than the heathens have.

I reckon I could use my parents as an example of a couple going through some intense experiences. My dad was a US soldier and met my mom when she was living like a rat in a bombed out Bavarian basement. He had qualified to remain in Germany after the war to be a part of the US effort to rebuild the place after the bombings had reduced everything to rubble. My mom and dad had shared part a war and its aftermath together, they knew what it was like to have bombs and shells blowing up close by.

Luckily I’ve never experienced modern warfare up close and personal. Once a couple goes through intense experiences like that, I’d imagine that bonds will form that go way beyond anything having to do with sex. Sex is just a part of the relationship as time goes by, and it’s not even the essential part. That’s what ya find out when ya get old.

[3] Take heart! Good news regarding the ongoing “War on Drugs” Several of the Cartel heads, big drug lords all, have been captured, with other arrests pending. El Chapo was caught months ago, just recently El Mayo. . It has been suggested that “El Ketchup”, “El Relish”, and “El Mustard” will be soon brought to justice! I’m getting sick of winning….

Well I see the Algerian he/she Olympic boxer with the testicles has claimed the gold medal, “beating” all the women in his/her weight class. My question is, since Algeria is 99% Muslim will he/she get a victory parade or defenestration? I thought Muslim’s frowned on this sort of stuff. I say we’re winning now, spreading western weirdness to the world on the international stage.

[4] I’m having a hard time understanding why, at this stage of the collapse, anyone would want to be president of the USA.

This may sound silly but apart from such things as being an officer in the US Army, working for the US State Department, teaching history and government, etc, I also have a love for Civilization type RTS (real time strategy) games and have been playing them for 25 years.

If I found myself in a game where I was this deep in debt, with people that were sick, dumb, obese, without morals, and had lost its “bonus” attribute (we are a frontier civilization) then I’d nuke it all and start over.

Certainly, I’m not the only one that would play the game this way.

[5] When they finally get batteries figured out, electric cars and trucks will put gas out of business except for heavy users where the weight of batteries will be too much. The price of batteries is on a steep learning curve and solid state is about to hit the market with big decreases in price and flammability. Lithium is an interim.

The next generation of Tesla and Toyota electric cars will be in the $20s, with ranges of 500+ miles. 500 miles, as somebody sang recently, is a key range as it is the normal cruising range for drivers. The next problem will be to get chargers into every shopping center , motel , hotel, gas station and workplace in the USA.

With 500 mile range, driver anxiety will drop and the up-coming increases in oil prices will “drive” people to electric, and without some fool in government trying to force the issue.