Mendocino County Today: Tuesday 8/27/2024

By AVA News Service on August 27, 2024

Outpost Motel Sign, Rt 101 South of Laytonville (Jeff Goll)

YESTERDAY'S HIGHS: Ukiah 97°, Yorkville 95°, Boonville 94°, Covelo 92°, Laytonville 90°, Fort Bragg 68°, Point Arena 65°

CALM, warmer than normal temperatures will build over the next couple of days with slightly enhanced northerly wind right along shore. More mild weather will return late in the week. (NWS)

STEPHEN DUNLAP (Fort Bragg): On the coast this Tuesday morning I have 52F under clear skies. The fog has built back in more than expected hence patchy fog is back in our forecast. It does look mostly clear at 5am so far with the fog mostly to our south.

NURSE LOUISE NEEDS A HOME

Two years ago it was a threat, now it's for real. I must give up my home of 42 years. Do you have a rental anywhere between Albion and Fort Bragg? I'm used to living small so I don't need alot of room. A tiny home, secondary unit, accessory dwelling unit (ADU), mobile home park… I'll consider everything. I prefer a country/forest setting but in-town would be o.k. too. Please call me at 707-937-4837 or leave an e-mail. Thanks a lot Louise louise416@gmail.com

PS. I have impeccable references…..

HOPLAND ‘HORSES’ [photo from yesterday]

Bruce McEwen writes: Those two sorrel mules are not horses. I keep waiting for some of the experts to notice but nobody seems to Ken the diff ‘tween mules and horses.

AV UNIFIED OFF TO A GOOD START, SUPERINTENDENT LARSON REPORTING

It was a fantastic first week! Attendance was good overall, and we had a handful of new students transfer into both schools, so we are excited about that. I just sent you a little blurb that is going to the community that is pretty general. We've been busy! Classes are going well at both sites and new administrators are very happy being here because of the great community.

Students showed up excited and ready to learn at both sites

We changed up the traffic pattern at the elementary school at the advice of our architect/DSA, and it has been the smoothest drop-off experience I have ever seen. The parents have been wonderful and cooperative. As an educator of 30+ years, I can tell you that is unusual.

Construction is continuing and the Jr/Sr High is looking better and better. I'm including a few photos. See below.

Several of our educators have signed up to attend a conference about Restorative Practices; this philosophy has been shown to positively impact student behavior more than the more typical, punitive practices. Staff are excited about this.

It looks like Mr. Toohey, Athletic Director, is not getting enough football players to make the season. 12 of 17 on the team were seniors last year and they have graduated. He is going to beef up the soccer team and hopes to add a cross-country team, while working toward getting the football team back on track next year. Volleyball and soccer are underway.

Thank you for always representing our district so well in the AVA. We appreciate you!

With respect,

Kristin Larson Balliet

Superintendent, AV Unified School District

MCGOURTY TO GARZA

by Malcolm Macdonald

Recent reporting on 1st District Supervisor Glenn McGourty's residence prompts a multiple pronged response.

The “concerned citizen” letter filed regarding McGourty's residence, while giving some precise details, demonstrates a lack of understanding about the Mendocino Coast Health Care District (MCHCD). The “concerned citizen” repeatedly refers to it as the Mendocino Coast Hospital District (MCHD). In mid-2024 that is an archaic term, not used since the coast healthcare district affiliated with Adventist Health (AH). The operations of the hospital in Fort Bragg are run by Adventist Health.

Since July 1, 2020, AH receives patient payments, thus the healthcare district board, on which Jan McGourty now sits, will not receive Medi-Cal or Medicare payments. “Concerned citizen's” contention that this created a conflict of interest for Supervisor Glenn McGourty is therefore lacking in sufficient research and credibility.

If “concerned citizen” had truly followed recent goings on at the Mendocino Coast Health Care District, they might have come up with far more political backroom dealings. On May 21, 2024 Jan McGourty gained appointment to the Mendocino Coast Health Care District (MCHCD) Board of Directors by a 3-1 vote of the county supervisors.

It may be of interest to readers to note that on Monday May 20, a day before the Board of Supervisors met and appointed Jan McGourty, the MCHCD website published a “Chair's Report” authored by Paul Garza. One of the first lines in Garza's report read, “I am pleased to welcome Ms. Jan McGourty to [the] District’s Board of Directors.”

Garza, the chair of the healthcare district declared Ms. McGourty already a member of the MCHCD Board at least a day before the BoS acted on her appointment. If Garza's chair's report was published on Monday, May 20, it is likely he actually drafted it on the 18 or 19. Given indications elsewhere that Jan McGourty registered to vote in Fort Bragg on May 18, one gets the idea of the rushed nature of things.

Garza had to propose the name to a County Supervisor (Fourth District Supervisor Dan Gjerde) in order to get it on the supervisors' agenda. That would have to happen on or before May 16, the day that the next week's BoS agenda became public.

The agenda as published contained a brief “To Whom it May Concern” letter of interest from Ms. McGourty, opening with, “I am moving to Fort Bragg, having purchased a home there.” Side note, Ms. McGourty misidentified the entity to which she sought appointment as the “Mendocino County [sic] Health Care District.”

Let's return to Garza's “Chair's Report,” published a day before Ms. McGourty was up for consideration with the board of supes. After stating he was pleased to welcome Ms. McGourty to the MCHCD Board, Garza continued, “Ms. McGourty has been a long-term community leader on and advocate for mental health.” Obviously, Garza did not proofread the sentence, so there are missing words in the latter half. However, the “Ms. McGourty has been a long-term community leader…” is of interest. It allows the general public to infer that Ms. McGourty may be a community leader on the Mendocino Coast. The line fails to clarify that she has not been a resident of the coast or that when Garza encouraged her to seek the office she was not even registered to vote on the coast.

At the Board of Supervisors meeting on May 21, Garza hemmed and hawed, essentially interrupting himself multiple times, through a presentation to the supes. The thrust of his stop and go verbalization amounted to something akin to dire consequences occurring if the MCHCD did not have a full five member board to vote on putting forward a $20 million bond measure at the November election. McGourty's presence, Garza appeared to imply, would insure at least a 3-2 vote in favor.

The irony here is that the desperately needed vote of McGourty became moot when Garza dropped the idea of a bond measure by late June, McGourty's first official day at a MCHCD Board meeting.

In his somewhat confusing appearance before the Supervisors on May 21, Garza made a garbled statement that he and the MCHCD Board had been searching for someone to fill that fifth seat, but he left out any reference to the late April MCHCD Board meeting at which three candidates were interviewed for the vacancy. One of those was obviously not qualified. Another, Gabriel Maroney, answered all the questions forthrightly, including one directed only at Maroney, not the other two, which appeared to be Garza's attempt to rationalize not picking Maroney. It was clear to this observer that Garza would not vote to pick Maroney for the vacant seat because he (Garza) felt he couldn't count on Maroney's absolute yes vote on the $20 million bond issue. Keep in mind that Maroney had been regularly attending MCHCD board and committee meetings for over two years.

Garza, on the other hand, had never been to a MCHCD meeting when he threw his hat in the ring for an appointment to a board seat made vacant by a resignation in the summer of 2023.

That's right, Garza was an appointee who rose from never attending a healthcare district meeting until late September 2023 to become chair in January 2024. Perhaps the first line of Garza's letter of intent from last September gives a clue, “I received notice from the Coast Democrats that you are seeking to fill an opening…”

At the time two other members on the MCHCD board, Lee Finney and Susan Savage, had close ties to the Coast Democratic Club. Though the elected positions on the Mendocino Coast Health Care District board are non-partisan posts, Garza signaled his allegiance. When it came time for the board to vote to fill that vacancy last September, Finney and Savage voted for Garza. MCHCD board members Paul Katzeff and Sara Spring voted for Gabriel Maroney (an individual with a public health and global health background – imagine that on a healthcare board!).

Amid the confusing board discussion that ensued after the deadlocked 2-2 vote (At one point Katzeff offered to resign to create two vacancies, but only one had been officially listed on the agenda), Maroney took to the peak of the high road and withdrew his name from consideration, thus securing the position for Garza. Maroney may have done so under the presumption that Katzeff would make good on an exit in the near future. Garza made no attempt to climb onto that high road to make any sort of similar gesture to that of Maroney.

That is a big part of the back story of the April 24, 2024 MCHCD meeting, which included another interview and vote for a new board member (Finney had resigned in early March). Garza displayed zero inclination to return the favor Maroney had shown him little more than six months prior, quite the opposite.

But that was not the only machination Garza had in store that April evening. The other potentially viable candidate that day was Chris Hart. Yes, one of the Hart brothers who control the parent company that acquired much of the mill site property on Fort Bragg's headlands. During the interview process for the vacant MCHCD board seat, Hart gave reasonable answers, and in response to a query about his connections to the Skunk Train, Mendocino Railway, and the mill site, Hart stated that he was seeking the MCHCD position due to his interest in healthcare on the coast, not to enhance his business interests.

There is a back story here as well. Someone on the MCHCD board had encouraged Chris Hart to seek the vacant seat (either Garza or Savage – betting odds point at Garza… the two other board members have adamantly denied contacting Chris Hart).

Whether Garza knew who Chris Hart was at first is an unsure proposition. About a week before the interviews for the MCHCD board vacancy Garza got cold feet to the extent that he confided to a coast resident, “Uhh, we have one candidate… um… that's… um… has some real strengths, but, also, potentially is very controversial.”

He was referring to Hart and that as a somewhat controversial figure he might sink the chances of a bond issue passing this November (requiring a 2/3 voter approval). According to reliable sourcing, Chris Hart received a phone call (presumably from Garza) hours before the board interviews telling him “that he [Hart] would not get a unanimous vote and if he wanted to step down and not be told no they would understand.”

Who “they” is/was has not been clearly defined. Also, keep in mind that Garza abandoned the bond issue less than two months later.

As reported above, Chris Hart did show up for the interviews as did Gabriel Maroney. When it came time to vote for a single applicant to fill the board vacancy, and with only three board members present, MCHCD Vice Chair Paul Katzeff voted for Maroney. Garza and fellow Coast Democratic Club ally Susan Savage abstained. No candidate had achieved a majority vote.

The vote was conducted by paper ballot, with the individual board members writing their name on a slip of paper along with the candidate they preferred then each ballot was read aloud. What are the odds that two board members, out of three, after hearing in person interviews would independently write down “abstain” on a piece of paper? Garza and Savage were spotted huddled together in an adjacent hallway just a few minutes before the commencement of the interviews to fill the board vacancy.

The lack of a majority vote at MCHCD took the process to the Board of Supervisors, all of whom were apprised of the basics of the machinations, by text or email, early in the morning of the BoS vote (a day after Garza published his “Chair's Report” welcoming Jan McGourty to the MCHCD Board). Of course, Glenn McGourty recused. Supervisor Mulheren voted against Jan McGourty's appointment. Supervisors Gjerde, Williams, and Haschak voted in favor.

One more Garza-ism: At the MCHCD Board meeting in April, when Maroney and Hart were interviewed for the vacant seat, Chair Garza refused to allow comments or questions from the public on the matter of who would be the newest board member to represent the community. Thus, he violated California Government Code 54954.3(a): “Every agenda for regular meetings shall provide an opportunity for members of the public to directly address the legislative body on any item of interest to the public.”

In Paul Garza's world of governance the Brown Act apparently only exists when it serves his purposes. He has failed to allow public input on agenda items directly related to the finances of the District and how the taxpayers’ money is invested. As board chair, he refused to allow public comment on the consent calendar. He and new board member Jan McGourty have told me in one-on-one conversations that specific criticism of board members' actions is rude. Apparently, before taking their appointed seats both failed to bother reading down a couple of paragraphs in California Government Code 54954.3 to paragraph (c), which states, “The legislative body of a local agency shall not prohibit public criticism of the policies, procedures, programs, or services of the agency, or of the acts or omissions of the legislative body.”

READER RESPONSE TO ‘MENDO'S ENTITLED TOURISM PROMOTERS…’

by Betsy Cawn

The Lake County Board of Supervisors received a presentation last week from the developers of the county’s “Comprehensive Economic Development Strategy” (CEDS) — a five year “plan” that enables a handful of local entrepreneurs to pay themselves to access federal funding from the US Economic Development Agency (EDA), and then pay themselves to distribute EDA grants and loans for small businesses and to “advise” the Board of Supervisors about where there are “opportunities” for economic sustainability and growth in the county.

Aimed at bringing in greater tourism revenues, for which the county also created its own Tourism Investment District to invest in out-of-county billboards and online “targeted marketing” advertising, the authors note that shortfalls in “lodging” and other accommodations for out-of-county workforces and lack of competent local workers, plus profound “infrastructure” deficits, are “obstacles” to realizing that goal, as is the need for modernized communication services (basic broadband) and “destinations” attractive to the few remaining lake-based event sponsors.

Federal taxpayers (and those funders of county government services for “economic development” promoters, including the Administration and the BoS itself) put around $80K into the collection of simplistically described “opportunities” in “retail corridors” where General Plan Zoning and Land Use designations are logically focused on “Community Development Boundaries” and pre-existing commercial land tracts — all well known and long-standing as targets for bringing in new sales tax generators (sales taxes being one of the main sources of county government revenues). ”Ideas” like “facade improvements” and new “signage” are offered as means of revitalizing defunct clusters of empty storefronts and under-utilized strip malls.

Members of the “economic development” club are those who have the exclusive access to those EDA funds, for the conduct of small potato loan projects and “technical assistance” for would-be entrepreneurs who might — if they are clever enough — come up with new products that can be “exported” (thus achieving local revenue), despite also well-known development inhibitors such as the cost of transport for those products and lack of investors in new manufacturing plants.

No reports on the success rates of previous plans was provided, but in a subsequent presentation from the distributors of EDA grants and loans, it was revealed that pandemic-era financial assistance preserved a total of 16 jobs that would otherwise been lost during the COVID pandemic, and that the majority of new local businesses deliver personal grooming services for hair and nails.

And despite the fact that fully one half of the population in Lake County relies on Medi-Cal for health care services, the report claims that there has been a “decrease” in poverty justifying optimistic predictions for the next five years.

A completely untranslatable forecast of future federal interest rate changes and consequent job growth was provided by the regional swami of economic futures, Dr. Robert Eyler, a professor of “economics” at Sonoma State University.

One Supervisor gently complained that the “commercial cannabis industry” is not included in the “analysis” of the county’s economy, and another Supervisor harangued the authors for missing the importance of Tribal businesses that support “thousands” of jobs.

Fewer than 20% of the homes and businesses lost in the 2015 wildfire disaster have been restored. Increasingly difficult water quality impairments of the county’s highly touted most important tourism asset, Clear Lake, have discouraged creation of new resort venues and diminished the lake’s once famous desirability as a bass fishing destination. And intractable socio-economic conditions continue to smother attempts to rebuild public health and safety workforces (law enforcement, medical care, government employees).

But the Board of Supervisors nonetheless thanked the authors and lauded the report for its level of (entirely missing) detail, making it abundantly clear to the paying public that the Wizard of Oz lives on in Lake County, California.

LOCAL EVENTS (this weekend)

ED NOTES

ON THE SUBJECT of cruel and unnatural punishment, i.e., American prisons, consider the case of John Wesley Hardin, the famous 19th century outlaw. Regarded at the time as “the meanest man that ever lived,” Hardin killed a consensus 44 men, one of whom he dispatched for snoring too loud. Hardin was finally arrested and put away in the Huntsville, Texas prison in 1877 to serve 25 years for various episodes of mayhem. He was out in 15, pardoned by the governor. Hardin then opened a law office in El Paso and never again violated the law from its unsanctioned side. So, how come our half million or so John Wesleys get put away forever with no hope for starting over?

THE LOCAL ANGLE. The real Popeye was based on a fellow named Frank Fiegel, a one-eyed tough guy who was something of a local legend in Chester, Illinois, for getting into fist fights with men who annoyed him. And most men Fiegel encountered annoyed him. We’re talking way back in the early 1920s when a talented young fellow named Elzie Segar, also a resident of Chester, population 3,000 or so, converted the real life adventures of Frank Fiegel into the cartoon character, Popeye The Sailor Man. Fast forward to Boonville and Ukiah. The late Tom Segar, heir to the Popeye fortune, once a resident of Upper Boonville, was Elzie Segar’s son. Mr. Segar and his wife ran Mysteries By Mail out of a large blue-roofed, barn-like structure six miles up the Ukiah Road where the Segars also made their home. The Segar place is now owned by Robert and Nicola Anderson of San Francisco.

ON THE OFF CHANCE you’re unaware how far to the political right this country has moved over the last 50 years, please accept this reminder: Richard Nixon was for national health insurance; he founded the Environmental Protection Agency; Nixon was for much higher taxes on unearned income, i.e., stock dividends etc. He influenced the 1972 Republican platform opposition to corporate relocation overseas, which he rightly described as large-scale tax evasion, but now known as savvy fiscal management. The great malefactors of wealth excoriated by Republicans from Lincoln on up through the first Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Eisenhower, and Nixon? Both parties today are not only funded by them, they celebrate them.

FROM THE CHRON’S garden section: “…A poinsettia will survive in a sunny, sheltered spot in mid-winter areas, but they typically look scrawny, so you may want to toss the plant.” Resist that temptation. If you can get past its scrawny period and keep it alive for a full year, you’ll get almost as much multi-hued beauty from an ongoing poinsettia as you will from any variety of Japanese Maple. I had a poinsettia I’d nursed along for four years to a height of about four feet. I loved that plant, and was darn near suicidal when a sudden frost carried it off. My own carelessness was the culprit; I’d put off carrying my poinsettia inside where it safely spent its winters. But they’re easy to keep going. Not too much water, keep ‘em warm and, in my experience, out of direct sunlight (leaves are too sensitive for hot day suns), and you’ll have yourself a plant you’ll really, really like. I’ve got a three year poinsettia going that’s already looking good year-round.

ADULT SCHOOL

Dear Anderson Valley Community,

Please take a look at the attached informational flyers to learn about the classes we are offering this fall to adults in Anderson Valley. Most classes start the first week of September and run through the second week of December.

This semester we are offering English as a Second Language (two levels), Citizenship, Child Development classes (in Spanish), Conversational Spanish (three levels), Basic Computers, Aikido, Basic Reading and Writing for Spanish speakers, Creative Writing, Chorale, and Watercolors. Some classes are offered in partnership with Mendocino College. Prices for these classes are either free, $12, or $60 for the entire semester, depending on the type of class.

Teacher information, start dates, and meeting times are on the attached flyers or on our new website:
www.avadultschool.org

You can complete the first part of registration via the website or attend our Registration Night on Wednesday, August 28th from 5:30- 8 p.m.

Please help us spread the word and don't hesitate to reach out if you have any questions or need assistance. You can reach us at adultschool@avpanthers.org or 895-2953.

Best wishes,
The Adult School

GRIEF RECOVERY SUPPORT GROUP TO BEGIN IN SEPTEMBER

An eight-week grief support group offered by Hospice of Ukiah will be starting on September 5, continuing every Thursday until October 24.

The free group is provided as an aid to anyone who has lost a friend, relative or loved one - in the immediate past or at an earlier time.

Kay Lieberknecht is the Grief and Bereavement Counselor for Hospice of Ukiah. She will be facilitating the course.

The course, says Lieberknecht, draws on information from a variety of sources. It is non-denominational and is designed to address the many issues faced by individuals facing what can be an overwhelming array of emotional and physical responses to the death of a beloved person.

“Grief can be very complicated, and the course is based very much around the needs of the particular people who attend,” says Lieberknecht. “There is definitely a bonding that takes place between participants, so we ask people to commit to coming to every session. This isn’t a drop-in group. If you are not able to make at least 7 of the 8 sessions, it would be better to save your commitment for another time.”

Lieberknecht stresses, “It doesn’t matter if you fee like you are coping well with your grieving or not. The course will benefit everyone. The participants become an amazing, supportive group for each other. Everyone cries. I cry,” she smiles.

Lieberknecht was a registered nurse when she was originally exposed to the work of death and dying.

“I was a visiting RN and was honored to accompany people and their families through their transition time into death - a deeply important time in their lives. I went through training to be a hospice nurse when my daughter was killed in a car accident. That experience left me with a desire to reach out even more. I discovered that the aftermath following death is very important.”

The group will make agreements about confidentiality, being good listeners and being supportive to others. There will be light “homework” assignments that will involve keeping a grief journal.

Pre-registration is required. For more information, please contact Kay Lieberknecht at (707) 391-1917 or phone the Hospice of Ukiah office at (707 462-4038.

Redwood Coast Medical Services helipad (Randy Burke)

CITY OF UKIAH SEEKS PUBLIC INPUT ON CURRENT AND FUTURE PARKS AND RECREATION NEEDS

Ukiah, CA. August 26, 2024. - The City of Ukiah is conducting a Parks Gap Analysis to assess how well existing parks are meeting community needs, and what might be needed for future parks. In addition to staff analysis, a robust community engagement process will be undertaken. Community engagement will include focus groups, individual meetings, surveys, event tabling, and outreach to City of Ukiah commissions.

An online survey is available at https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/EnglishParksAnalysis (English); a Spanish version is available at https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/EspanolUkiahParques.

In addition to the online surveys, an outreach table will be open at the Ukiah Pumpkinfest for public comment and an open community forum will be held at the Public Spaces Commission meeting on September 10th at 5:30 PM at the Ukiah Conference Center.

The need for this analysis was identified in the City's 2040 General Plan, which states the City "shall prepare a parks gap analysis identifying areas of the city underserved by parks and recreation facilities access." Additionally, the "analysis shall, at a minimum, establish equitable access standards, including the minimum distance between parks and every residence, and potential funding mechanisms." This will help the City of Ukiah to prepare for population growth, changing demographics, and possible annexations.

The process will include mapping exercises, the identification of appropriate level of service measures, and goals for the City's Park system. Recreation opportunities and needs will also be assessed. Finally, the document will address potential funding opportunities.

For more information contact Araceli Sandoval at asandoval@cityofukiah.com or 463-6231.

PAUL BUNYAN DAYS LOGGING SHOW RETURNS TO FORT BRAGG AT SKUNK TRAIN’S HISTORIC MILLSITE

The 2024 Paul Bunyan Days Logging Show, a signature event of the Labor Day weekend in Fort Bragg, is set to take place at the old Millsite adjacent to Skunk Train location again this year.

“We are excited to welcome the Logging Show back this year,” said Efstathios Pappas, General Manager of the Skunk Train. “Our location on the old Georgia Pacific Millsite offers a perfect blend of history and natural beauty, providing a fitting stage for this event that honors our local logging traditions.”

The Skunk Train, rooted in a long tradition of serving its community, has generously provided the use of its grounds for this year’s event, continuing the ongoing commitment to supporting local traditions. This gesture offers easy access for the public and a unique backdrop that combines the rich history of logging with the iconic charm of the Skunk Train, located next to the competition grounds.

This fun-filled event offers a variety of activities showcasing the strength and skill of the logging community, including exciting competitions like single and double buck handsaw, choker setting, and the ever-popular axe throw. For the little ones, there’s a special pillow fight to keep them entertained. The Logging Show is an event for all ages, and tickets are available for purchase at the gate.

Join us at the Skunk Train for a weekend of family fun, historical celebration, and community spirit as we keep the tradition of the Paul Bunyan Days alive. Beyond the excitement and festivities, your participation supports the Paul Bunyan Days Association, which provides a vital scholarship for a deserving individual pursuing education in logging or forestry-related studies. This is more than just an event—it’s an opportunity to contribute to the future of the community and the preservation of the region’s rich heritage.

For more information, please visit www.skunktrain.com or www.paulbunyandays.com.

California Western Railroad / Skunk Train located in the redwood forests of Northern California’s Mendocino County, is a heritage railroad that has been operating both freight and passenger service since 1885. Initially used to move redwood logs to the Mendocino Coast sawmills from the rugged back country, the Skunk Train has become a beloved institution touted as one of the “10 Best Rail Tours in the Country” (USA Today), and a “Top 10 Family Activity in California” (National Geographic Traveler). The Skunk Train journey covers 40 miles of scenic delights and 30 bridges, all while retaining its original charm—minus the historic pungent aroma that once preceded its arrival. Operating year-round, this multi-generational experience welcomes passengers to bring along their families and even their dog, ensuring a memorable and inclusive adventure.

Sanderlings in Flight, Navarro Estuary (Jeff Goll)

LARRY SPRING MUSEUM AND MENDOCINO FILM FESTIVAL TO PRESENT SILVICOLA AT COAST CINEMAS SEPTEMBER 12, 2024

Documentary Explores Forestry Through Breathtaking Cinematography

Ft Bragg, CA — The Larry Spring Museum of Common Sense Physics, in partnership with the Mendocino Film Festival, is proud to present Silvicola, a documentary that explores the human impact on forests through breathtaking vistas and poignant vignettes set in Canada's Pacific Northwest.

The screening will take place on Thursday, September 12 at 7pm at Coast Cinemas, 135 S Franklin St, Fort Bragg. Tickets are $15.00 and are available at the Mendocino Film Festival's Website

https://classicfilm-mff-2024.eventive.org/films/66a981de829f4100481ec024.

Silvicola is a story told through the eyes of an eclectic mix of characters whose lives and livelihoods are intimately entangled with the forest. Our hope is that the film and the panel discussion that follows will act as a catalyst for our community to connect with the uncertainties expressed in the film through discussion and creativity.

The showing is a part of Larry Spring Museum’s Redwood Time Project. Redwood Time proposes a radical re-reading of the monumental Redwood Round that stands at the heart of Fort Bragg, drawing into question our notions of individuality as we link ourselves together with complex histories, ecosystems and multi-species inhabitants. We do this by collectively stitching together a fabric 1:1 maquette of the round and populating it with new place-based timelines and conceptions of time to adorn it.

The Larry Spring Museum is an artist-run museum that began with the collection of self-taught experimenter Larry Spring. Spring perceived the world through the lens of enchantment; he was amazed by natural science and possessed by a unique relationship with physics. Larry passed into the ether in 2009, and we continue to marvel at his curiosity, ingenuity, and the unchecked audacity of his models and writings.

Like Larry Spring, the Museum shirks institutional conventions and instead, cultivates wonder, curiosity, and connection as the basis for all we do. Our goal for this work is to head to the far horizons of imaginative experience, to see the mysteries running under the surface, to embrace the weird and the wonderful, and to continue to orient ourselves and our community toward the culture of the commons.

THE MENDOCINO COUNTY FAIR AND APPLE SHOW is celebrating its 100th Anniversary

Dates: Friday, September 13 through Sunday, September 15, 2024

Location: Fairgrounds, Boonville, Anderson Valley, Mendocino County, California

Hours: 9 am to Midnight Daily!

Admission: Adults - $10 Juniors 13-18 - $8 Children 7-12 - $6

6 and under – Free Admission tickets available online at mendocountyfair.com

Special Promotions: Friday -- For the 100th Anniversary Celebration, the 1st 100 people through the front gate will receive free admission – the 2nd 100 attendees will receive a free food voucher & the 3rd 100 attendees will receive a voucher for a free carnival ride. These special promotions will only be available at the front gate.

Friday - Seniors - 65 and over $6 - All Day! & Friday - Children 12 and under - Free!

Three Day Pass for Seniors - 65 & over - $20 (Purchase Pre-Fair)

Carnival: Daily! Pay-One-Price for Unlimited Rides - Valid all day – $35 Pre-Sale (before Fair opens) - $45 if purchased during Fair -- Pre-Sale available at the Fair Office, Lemon’s Market in Philo, A.V. Elementary School & online at mendocountyfair.com

Special Events: Horse Show – 4-H & FFA – Friday – 8 am – Rodeo Arena

Varsity Soccer – Friday, 3 PM – Arena APPLE BOWL Varsity Football – Friday, 5 pm – Arena

Dance - Friday 8 pm to 10 pm in the Rodeo Arena featuring

Scott Forbes Band Free with Fair Admission!

C.C.P.R.A. Rodeos Saturday night - 8 pm Sunday afternoon - 2 pm

Dance - Saturday 9:30 pm to Midnight in the Rodeo Arena featuring Dean Titus & The Coyote Cowboys Free with Fair Admission!

Sheep Dog Trials Finals - Sunday - 10 am - Rodeo Arena

Classic Car Show - Sunday - 10 am - Rodeo Parking Lot

Parade - Sunday at Noon - Highway 128 to Rodeo Arena

Dance - Sunday 6 pm to 9:00 pm in the Rodeo Arena featuring

Norteno SG & Clave-MC Free with Fair Admission!

Entertainment: All Free with Fair Admission - Continuous Family Entertainment, including –

Godfrey the Magician – Multiple Shows Daily – Lawn Stage

Robin Lara - Strolling Act Bri Crabtree’s Silly Circus Show

Music by Jimmy Becker Cutest Show on Earth

Pony Land Petting Zoo, 10 am to 6 pm Freaky Fruit Contest - Sunday

Apple Tasting: Daily! Sample some of Anderson Valley’s Finest Varieties!

Wine Tasting: Daily! Sample some of Mendocino County’s award winning vintages!

Special Attractions: 26th Annual California Wool & Fiber Festival

97th Annual California National Wool Show

Livestock Shows Parade of Champions – Saturday Floral and Garden Displays

Feature Booths Apple Displays Arts and Crafts Classic Car Show

Pony Rides Shearing & Skirting Demo – Saturday Spinning Contest – Sunday

Parking: $5 Please: No Pets Website: www.mendocountyfair.com

Directions: Take Highway 101 to Highway 128 West to Boonville

Mailing Address: P.O. Box 458 - Boonville, CA 95415

For Further Information Call: 707.895.3011 Email: mcofair@pacific.net

CATCH OF THE DAY, Monday, August 26, 2024

ANDREW CEDILLO, Ukiah. Probation revocation.

LAMONT JONES, Ukiah. Disorderly conduct-alcohol, county parole violation.

CURTIS NELSON, Laytonville. Probation revocation.

GERARD PARKER II, Clearlake/Ukiah. Under influence, probation revocation.

FREDY REYES-RUBIO, Ukiah. Probation revocation.

RYAN ROYDOWNEY, Covelo. Grand theft.

ANDREA SCROGGINS, Willits. Disorderly conduct-alcohol.

FRANK VANVRANKEN JR., Ukiah. DUI.

Warmest spiritual greetings,

Tomorrow is the final medical routine examination with the head of the cardiovascular department at Adventist Health-Ukiah Valley. There is no further reason whatsoever for me to be in Mendocino County after tomorrow. Three years of putting in rental applications accomplished nothing. The landlords (who live in other counties) did not want to be bothered with the paperwork in order to receive the $2,000 federal voucher incentive to rent to me. The two years spent at Building Bridges Homeless Resource Center is its own immense story, but suffice it to say that it's history now.

My exit date from the Royal Motel is on Sunday September 1st at 11 a.m. Constant networking emails have produced nothing particularly spectacular, in spite of the fact that even with the now reduced SSI, there will be over two thousand dollars available to go somewhere else. As of tonight, there is no certainty of where that is because I have received no long term offers from anybody anywhere to do anything.

Meanwhile, I am spiritually identified with that which works through the body-mind complex without interference, as the 75th birthday approaches on September 28th.

Craig Louis Stehr

A HANDSOME CLUSTER OF ACORNS from a tree in our Sebastopol, Sonoma County garden.

Many of the local live oaks look generally like Coast Live Oak, Quercus agrifolia but lack its' tufts of hairs in the axils of major veins, suggesting some Interior Live Oak, Quercus wislizeni influence perhaps.

VICTIMS OF DEREG

Editor:

Even though many of us were victims of deregulation, some Americans do not remember the problems it caused. We, my deceased wife and I, nearly lost our home due to a corrupt loan industry. After surviving that crisis, Cathy’s insurer canceled coverage because she couldn’t return to work due to a back injury. I tried to put her on my policy, but they denied her since she had a preexisting condition. We had to purchase a policy costing $625 a month. Our experience replicated a quote from Michael Moore’s film “Sicko,” “The more people you deny coverage to, the more money we make.” To prevent denials, I started calling to verify policy coverage. Regardless, about half got denied. If I called with a complaint, the operator would say the person I asked for was unavailable.

One of the current presidential candidates is a proponent of deregulation. I have had enough. What good is a promise to fix the system if you use the solution that caused it.

Tom Fantulin

Fort Bragg

ON LINE COMMENT OF THE DAY

The idea that “daddy” or the patriarchal social organization stands against this social disintegration – this is nonsense. Men have traditionally enjoyed precisely these “freedoms.” Much of the feminist movement sprang from women’s desire to be as “free” to be as antisocial as men have always been: unchaste, vulgar, arbitrary (that is, unjust and unreasonable) in their use of power, and indifferent towards their children and families.

A READER WRITES: Speaking of nuclear weapons, as the Biden administration goosesteps us towards WW3, rest assured that we have an expert on queer theory in the National Nuclear Security Administration.

From an article she co-wrote last year (her co-author was a man, for the haters):

”Discrimination against queer people can undermine nuclear security and increase nuclear risk.”

“Such workplace cultures also create enormous psychological stress for minority staff, including queer people, who spend lots of time and energy adapting to role expectations, rather than focusing on bringing their full, authentic potential to the policy-making process.”

“Exclusion and unfair treatment of queer individuals and other minorities by a homogenous, cis-heteronormative community of practitioners also creates vulnerabilities in nuclear decision making.”

“An example of this is the threat posed by some white supremacist groups with plans to acquire nuclear weapons or material, which can go undetected when a white-majority workforce does not perceive these groups and their ideological motivation as a relevant threat to their nuclear security mission. Individuals targeted by these kinds of groups—including women, people of color, and the LGBTQ+ community—are more likely to identify these types of behaviors and attitudes as security risks and can play a crucial role in identifying a potential insider threat.”

I, for one, feel much better knowing that Biden appointed someone who is more worried about “white supremacists” getting ahold of a nuclear weapon than the actual risk taken by using US weapons, ISR, and “mercenaries” (sheep-dipped soldiers), into Russia, where they make Tik-Tok videos of themselves hanging pregnant Russian women from trees.

We wouldn’t want someone who feels pressure to adapt to ”role expectations” (i.e. doing their job), instead of flourishing as their authentic self, to make decisions about nuclear war, would we?

Remember the end of Dr. Strangelove, when a straight white male rode the nuclear bomb to destroy Russia?

In the Biden White House, that will be a queer something-or-other person, maybe wearing women’s clothes stolen from airports, with thickly applied makeup and lipstick. The bomb will be painted in joyous rainbow colors by a diverse group of neuro-divergent employees.

We’ll all be so proud!

TWEAKERS AT MOTEL 6 (artist & location unknown)

TOPICAL SONGS

Zanzibar to Andalusia

redrose, violet or fuchsia

straight arrow or hoochie-coocher

Who is he or she?

The prolific comment writer was too young to take part in the “action” that established People’s Park. I was there at the creation, mainly out of respect for my friends in the leadership. I sang at a rally and tried to get into the spirit of the thing, but I was struggling against cynicism.

Ain’t gonna be no traffic in this city any more

ain’t gonna be no room for the cars

cause people got other needs now

we got shovels, we got seeds

and the state shall whither away.

Ain’t gonna be no guards at the border turn you ‘round

ain’t gonna be no border there at all

No undercover narcos

No more war machine

When the state shall wither away

It may be on a Sunday morning

It may be on a Tuesday afternoon

but no matter what the day is

I’m going to make it my business to wither soon

Ain’t gonna be no poison sprayed down on the plants

ain’t gonna be no “Atoms for Peace.”

The sun is shining brightly, the wind is blowing free

and the state shall wither away

(John Henry get your hammer! Paul Bunyan get your axe!

and the state shall wither away.)

Z-to-A recalls buying the Anderson Valley Advertiser at Modern Times on Valencia Street. In September ‘71 I fell for a woman who had been dissed by the owner of Modern Times. He wouldn’t carry her paper, The Woman’s Page. She was righteously angry, and I had found my muse!

The millionaire owner of the socialist bookstore

passing your name around with a dig

The picture of Ho is looking down soulfully

at that PIG

The lady composes a song about bread and roses

yeah, she’s got a nice bouquet on

a little gift from her sisters and other resisters

who still get just crumbs and thorns

And the hippie who tells you your life is “plastic”

if you wear a jacket and tie for your gig

Makes you feel bad, says you’ve been had

makes me mad that PIG

And the lawyer defending those seven young cut-ups

pretending he ain’t makin’ it big

He’s shrewd and defiant, you’d think he’s his client

Well maybe he is… maybe he is… The Pig

A pig ain’t a cop out walkin’ the beat

though some take bribes and go for blood

the pig don’t work with his hands or his feet

he rips off your garbage and roots in the mud

Like the millionaire owner of the “people’s” bookstore

passin’ your name around with a dig

the picture of Lenin is practically yellin’

Marty Liebowitz, Ooooh, youuu PIG!

When I was a lad and there were farms in Brooklyn, the word “pig” was used as a synonym for “slob.” In 1966 or ‘67, I think, a preacher at a Black kid’s funeral used “pigs” to describe the cops who had killed him. “Off the pig!” became the Panthers slogan and they literally spread the word. Soon, students occupying university administration buildings were yelling “Pigs off campus!”

I never used the word pejoratively, except in that song. I like pigs. In fact, I identify as a pig. When I was a kid I read all the Freddy the Pig books in the Brooklyn Public Library. Created by Walter R. Brooks, Freddy was a detective, a newspaper editor, and a lyricist. He played football, got involved in electoral politics, went to Florida, and had a cousin named Weedly.

A friend to the cows, the ducks and the goats

A politician plying for votes

A shrewd detective looking for clues

A ballad maker singing the blues

Every year he changes his gig

Oink, oink, oink says Freddy the Pig

One chick told him right to his face

“You have got to find your own space”

When he figured out what she meant

He knew he could never come up the rent

Straight from a bottle of Remy he’d swig

Oink onk oink says Freddy the Pig

Anoher chick said, “the thing that you do

is hide your feelings” but how come she knew?

He concluded it’s really a case

Of feelings showing too clear on his face

He hopes it’s more than his loins that you dig

Oink oink oink says Freddy the Pig

‘OUT OF CONTROL’: BURNING MAN'S DRUG ENFORCEMENT POLICIES ARE SHOCKINGLY STRICT

by Lester Black

It’s never been easier to smoke weed in America. You can legally buy cannabis in more than half of all U.S. states and smoke marijuana in public with little fear of repercussions, whether you’re standing in downtown San Francisco or on the National Mall in Washington, D.C.

But when it comes to Burning Man, the annual Nevada event world-famous for its shirking of societal conventions, openly doing drugs or smoking marijuana can land you in legal hot water. The festival is heavily patrolled by law enforcement, and people have been ticketed and even arrested for cannabis in previous years.

Jacob Smith, a staff attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union of Nevada and a volunteer for the Burning Man Legal Observer Program, said that he knows people who have been ticketed and even removed from the festival for smoking pot.

“Although Burning Man can be a nurturing and safe space, there’s still real world dangers and potentially real world over-enforcement of marijuana laws,” Smith said.

In 2019, 58 people were arrested with most being drug-related arrests, including one San Francisco man who was charged with felony pot possession and kept on $500,000 bail. However, arrests decreased in the following years. Last year, there were few arrests because rain created a weather emergency that left officers primarily helping people navigate a muddy desert, according to the Reno Gazette Journal.

The arrest numbers often don’t tell the entire story of drug enforcement at the event, according to Mitchell Gomez, the executive director of DanceSafe, a harm reduction organization that’s been active at Burning Man for 15 years. He said undercover police frequently approach people they suspect of doing drugs and hand out tickets for using substances like cannabis.

“For simple cannabis possession, they often let you plead down to non-drug offenses and just pay a fine, but you still have to get a lawyer and deal with that,” Gomez said.

The constant surveillance from police at the festival has led to widespread warnings to never smoke weed openly during the event, or risk having cops search your entire camp for other drugs.

“You should not walk around with a joint at the playa, it’s a bad idea,” Gomez said. “That provides probable cause for searching you. They can go through your pockets. They’ll often say you have to get your ID and take you back to your camp and then search your entire camp.”

Overlapping law enforcement

Burning Man draws more than 70,000 people every year to a temporary settlement called Black Rock City in a rural stretch of the northern Nevada desert. The weeklong party takes place on federal land and is patrolled by five different law enforcement agencies.

Pot remains illegal on the playa, the term used by Burners to describe the festival grounds, thanks to overlapping federal and state laws. Marijuana is completely illegal according to federal law. And while pot became legal in Nevada in 2017, state law still forbids smoking marijuana in public.

A spokesperson for Burning Man said in an emailed statement to SFGATE that the event organizers do not have data on drug arrests because law enforcement has not always shared that information, but confirmed that the agencies “still enforce cannabis laws, and we can confirm that arrests have been made for cannabis possession.”

Despite the prohibition on pot, law enforcement officials have broad discretion in deciding how they enforce laws, and marijuana is smoked widely, often with little repercussions, across Nevada, including on federal land at national parks and in the city of Las Vegas. Lawyers for Burners, a group of volunteers who help coordinate resources for people arrested at the festival, blamed heavy-handed law enforcement on Pershing County Sheriff Jerry Allen, writing on their website that he’s increased enforcement and describing him as “Out of Control.”

Allen said in an email to SFGATE that his officers have reduced the amount of enforcement against marijuana at the event following state cannabis “decriminalization.” However, he confirmed that arrests do happen, primarily for people who use the drug in public or have more than an ounce of the drug.

“People must remember if you use marijuana in another product, brownies for example, it is not just the weight of the drug, it is the total weight of the product containing the drug, and brownies for example are heavy and would then exceed the 1 ounce maximum possession limit,” Allen said.

The Nevada State Police, the Washoe County Sheriff’s Office and the Pyramid Lake Police Department, all of which patrol the playa, did not respond to a request for comment. John Asselin, a spokesperson for the Bureau of Land Management, which also patrols the event, declined an SFGATE interview request but said in an emailed statement that the federal agency “enforces all applicable laws on Public Lands throughout the year.”

‘You’re not on Mars’

Burning Man is designed to make attendees feel like they’ve left American society. It has the look of a lawless place from the outside, with, outlandish performances, massive electronic music shows, sex parties and even a ban on exchanging money. But the heavy law enforcement begins as soon as people enter the festival.

Smith said his group stations legal observers 24 hours a day at the festival’s entrance, where law enforcement use drug dogs to sniff for contraband and are known to search entire RVs if attendees are caught driving even a couple miles over the speed limit.

“When you’re driving in you have to be extremely careful because any sort of stop could lead to not only being pulled over, but having everything you packed up being taken outside of your RV and searched through,” Smith said.

The surveillance continues throughout the week inside the festival, where police are on constant patrol, including undercover officers dressed in Burning Man costumes and even some law enforcement using night vision technology, Smith said.

“If you are out in the art area where it’s almost pitch black, a lot of times they will have thermal vision things … any kind of fire that looks like it’s about the size of a cigarette or a joint or anything, they will approach,” Smith said.

Gomez said that one of his friends was dancing at an electronic music camp one year and stopped to look into his backpack. Suddenly a cop was behind him with a flashlight and saw drugs inside the bag, leading to the friend’s arrest.

“The playa feels like another planet, but the reality is you’re in rural Nevada. You’re not on Mars. … You are subject to both federal and Nevada state law, those are the legal realities that exist on top of Burner culture,” Gomez said.

(SF Chronicle)

THEY DELIVERED 5,600 BABIES. THEY BLAME CALIFORNIA RULES FOR PUTTING THEM OUT OF BUSINESS

by Kristen Hwang

Colorful collages line the hallways of Best Start Birth Center in San Diego, the squishy faces of hundreds of newborns carefully cut out and framed. A picture of executive director Karen Roslie’s son, born in 2003, hangs among the smiling, crying and squinting babies.

Thirty years ago, Roslie’s mother, Roberta Frank, opened Best Start after training to become a certified nurse midwife. Since that time, state agencies and national organizations have recognized the birth center as a model for alternative birth practices. The Canadian health ministry even visited in the 1990s as it developed plans to fund midwifery services, Roslie said.

But in March, Best Start closed its doors, unable to keep up with escalating costs. TRICARE, a major military insurer and Best Start’s biggest contractor, wouldn’t pay for licensed midwives — only nurses, who can make much more money in a hospital. In a community where the Navy is a major employer, it was a debilitating blow to the birth center. The photos Roslie meticulously framed over the years will most likely have to be destroyed to avoid any medical privacy violations — evidence of more than 5,600 births shredded.

“It feels like I’m mourning a death,” Roslie said, gazing at the pictures.

Best Start was the first licensed and accredited birth center in California, and even those credentials couldn’t save it. In fact, they may have hindered the birth center’s survival, requiring expensive renovations that many midwives say aren’t relevant to the care they provide or the safety of their practice. Its closure was one of at least 19 birth center shutdowns and service reductions in the past four years, according to the California chapter of the American Association of Birth Centers.

Those closures deepen a crisis of declining women’s health services across California. More than 50 California hospital labor and delivery wards have closed in the past decade, creating maternity care deserts in rural communities and overburdening the remaining labor wards in cities and suburbs.

Health experts have pointed to birth centers as a way to expand capacity in communities where hospitals no longer deliver babies. The midwife-run clinics handle low-risk births and direct higher-risk pregnancies to hospitals.

But California has some of the toughest licensing requirements in the country, according to the American Association of Birth Centers, and facilities such as Best Start have long argued that California’s onerous regulations and an uncooperative Public Health Department prevent them from succeeding.

Only six operating birth centers are licensed in California. Another 26 are unlicensed. Licensure isn’t required, but it helps enable a practice to work with insurance plans and serve lower-income families who can’t pay birthing costs out of pocket.

Increasingly, only wealthy families who pay cash can afford a midwife.

“The system is just a mess. It’s flawed. It’s set up to prevent providers that can provide really good care from even getting started,” Frank, the founder of Best Start, said.

While most California births happen in hospitals, birth centers serve a small but growing number of families. Planned out-of-hospital births attended by midwives have doubled over the past decade even as birth rates overall declined, according to data from the Medical Board of California. And a statewide survey conducted in 2018 by the California Health Care Foundation indicated that more than one-third of pregnant people would be interested in having a midwife for a future birth.

Frequently, those who seek the services of midwives and birth centers cite the desire for more personalized care, or poor experiences with previous hospital births. Studies show that for low-risk pregnancies, midwife-led deliveries at birth centers are safe and lead to fewer interventions such as cesarean sections.

“Women deserve this,” Frank said. “Every human deserves to find their own strength, find their place, exercise their initiative, and I wanted to share it.”

But even as demand for out-of-hospital births increases, birth centers across the state are shutting their doors, unable to withstand the joint battering ram of financial and regulatory challenges.

Last year, the Santa Rosa Birth Center stopped delivering babies, reducing options in a Wine Country community that recently lost a hospital maternity ward and another birth center.

A Sacramento midwife closed her birth center in February and left the country because she said California’s health system was too unfriendly to make ends meet. Another Sacramento birth center is also on the verge of closure because it cannot get a state license.

In September, Monterey Birth and Wellness Center will close, citing high costs and poor insurance reimbursement.

The California Public Health Department refused multiple requests for an interview about licensing, responding only to emailed questions. Licensing requires facilities to meet “minimum standards” for patient care, which include regulations about proper equipment and staff competency, the department said in an unsigned statement.

“We cannot speculate or comment on any reason why providers chose to close these facilities, aren’t seeking licensure for new (birth centers), or what could be done to improve the process,” the department statement said.

Years-long wait for a health department license

Nancy Myrick, a co-founder of the San Francisco Birth Center, said it took four-and-a-half years of back-and-forth with the state health department to obtain a license. In one instance, Myrick said, she asked for a list of items an inspector would check and the health department referred her to regulations that had not yet been written.

“In the process of opening, the state bureaucracy was like the Great Wall of China. It was such a horrible barrier,” Myrick said.

It wasn’t until Myrick called her state assemblymember’s office to complain about the inability to get licensed and see Medi-Cal patients that the application was approved, she said. The birth center was licensed in 2020.

“It literally took calling in the political dogs to get it done,” Myrick said.

Many providers noticed that getting a license became much more difficult after the state centralized the process under the public health department in 2018. Since then, nearly all birth center applications — 11 out of 13 — have been rejected, according to department-provided data.

The department said in a statement the change was necessary to improve “standardization and consistency” in licensing multiple kinds of facilities. Previously, the department’s 14 regional offices processed applications and approved 11 out of 12 applications.

Yet midwives and advocates say obstacles continue to plague the process. It’s slow, often taking years; it’s expensive, costing tens of thousands of dollars to retrofit buildings and maintain a license; and the standards are frequently at odds with midwives’ scope of practice. What results is a “de facto ban” on birth center licensure in California, said Sandra Poole, a lobbyist with the Western Center on Law and Poverty.

Without licensing reform, more birth centers will close, said Bethany Sasaki, president of the state chapter of the American Association of Birth Centers.

A key problem, Sasaki said, is that birth centers are expected to comply with building standards designed for hospitals. For example, the standards include negative pressure rooms for infection control and cast iron plumbing for water supply and drainage.

Many midwives argue the standards don’t make sense because their patients are legally required to be healthy with low-risk pregnancies. Any condition that would require the additional medical intervention the standards are meant to accommodate, such as surgery, would force the patient to be transferred to a doctor or hospital, Sasaki said.

“There’s no reason to hold a birth center to the same standards as a hospital because it’s not a hospital, and that’s the whole point, Sasaki said.

According to the state Department of Health Care Access and Information, which sets building codes for health facilities, it would take legislative changes to make exceptions for birth centers. Poole and a number of groups representing midwives and Black maternal health advocates tried to introduce a bill earlier this year that would ease licensing requirements but were unable to find a legislator to carry it.

The state denied Sasaki’s licensure application for Midtown Nurse Midwives in Sacramento in 2020. The holdup is the building’s ventilation system, which doesn’t meet hospital building code.

In March, Sasaki requested an appeal and emergency license after TRICARE, the same insurer that Best Start relied on, stopped contracting with unlicensed facilities. As of mid-July, she has not received a response from the state, though the department told CalMatters the appeal deadline for Sasaki’s application had passed.

Without the TRICARE contract, which made up about 30% of her clients, Sasaki said the birth center will close by November.

“We’ve had to turn away so many people that we stopped answering our phone, because I don’t want to listen to another person cry,” Sasaki said.

Birth centers must get licensed for Medi-Cal

Why is licensure such a stumbling block for birth centers? Medi-Cal, the state’s public insurance program for low-income families, pays for half of all births in the state, and it requires birth centers to be licensed.

“The single biggest thing that will help with sustainability is if birth centers can take Medi-Cal and if Medi-Cal can actually reimburse appropriately,” Sasaki said.

The majority of Medi-Cal births — more than 80% — are babies of color. A statewide survey also indicates that people of color, particularly Black women, want alternative birth support such as midwives and doulas more than any other demographic group. White women and those with private insurance were the highest users of midwives, the survey shows. While those who wanted a midwife but didn’t use one most commonly cited lack of insurance coverage as a barrier.

Caroline Cusenza, a midwife and owner of the Monterey Birth and Wellness Center, said taking insurance allowed her to serve a more diverse population in the working class Latino enclave where the birth center is located. She wanted to take Medi-Cal patients, but couldn’t. Cusenza applied for licensure twice but was also rejected because the building didn’t meet ventilation standards.

The birth center will close in September after seven years.

“It was a hard decision to walk away, but we really just could see no path forward,” Cusenza said.

The Western Center for Law and Poverty has pointed to accreditation as a possible alternative to licensure. The Commission for the Accreditation of Birth Centers is the national organization that sets standards for birth center quality and safety. California regulators have used accreditation to help license other kinds of health facilities, but health department officials see no need to provide birth centers with alternate options. They argue, in an email to CalMatters, that very few have tried to get a license in the first place. Only 23 birth centers have applied in the past decade.

Holly Smith, a certified nurse midwife and co-lead of Midwifery Access California, contends the low number of applicants reflects the difficulty of the process. Midwives know licensure is nearly impossible, so they don’t bother applying, Smith said.

“If (the Public Health Department) can be much more involved in figuring out solutions to help birth centers exist and be licensed should they want to be, then we would see a greater proliferation of it,” Smith said.

Midwifery Access California is working with another state agency to improve access for low-income patients, Smith said. The advocates hope to convince the Department of Health Care Services to increase Medi-Cal payments to midwives. Right now a licensed birth center gets about $1,300 per birth while the midwife gets $400.

At those rates, some birth centers say even Medi-Cal wouldn’t be enough to save them.

“If our birth center were to accept Medi-Cal, we would go bankrupt,” said Trisha Wimbs, owner of the California Birth Center in Rocklin.

Wimbs’ facility was one of only three birth centers to get licensed since the public health department took over and tightened building codes. It was licensed in 2023. Wimbs said it cost $1 million to build the “hospital grade facility” to code, including $80,000 to move a fire hydrant two feet closer to the building. The birth center does not take Medi-Cal because it pays too little to recoup expenses. Instead, the birth center caters to cash pay and commercially insured clients in the affluent suburb of Sacramento. Licensure was essential to securing commercial insurance contracts, Wimbs said.

To sustain birth centers, Medi-Cal needs to pay around $8,000 per birth, Smith said. At that price point, delivering at a birth center would cost less than half as much as a hospital delivery.

Saying goodbye to Best Start

Eighteen years ago, Ellary Alonso was born at Best Start Birth Center when her mom, a former labor and delivery nurse, sought a more personalized birth experience. Alonso, who was 21 weeks along in March, wanted to deliver her son in the same place, surrounded by midwives she knew, maybe even in a bath. She wanted the emotional support of the team, she said, because her husband is a Marine, and there’s no guarantee he’ll be able to make it to the birth.

But a week before her first prenatal appointment at Best Start, Alonso got a call that the center was closing permanently. No other birth centers in Southern California take her insurance.

“In this time when everything is about choice, you can choose not to have a baby, but you can’t choose how to have your baby,” Alonso said. “Hospitals are the only option.”

Compared to a hospital room, Best Start offers a homey atmosphere and the promise that the midwife attending each birth will be familiar to the laboring client. The birthing rooms come with queen-sized beds, floral duvets, and white porcelain tubs for water births. A marble-topped “crash cart” sits in each room. With the doors closed, the cart looks just like an end table that matches the decor. Inside it’s filled with medical supplies for emergency resuscitations or to stitch up lacerations. The rooms are homey, but bear the hallmarks of a by-the-book clinic. Boxes of nitrile gloves are in each room, hazardous waste bins are mounted discreetly to the wall. Best Start was the only birth center in the state to have a licensed clinical laboratory to confirm water breakage.

It has never lost a mother or baby, Roslie said. Its transfer rate for cesarean sections was less than half the statewide target set for low-risk births. In the past five years, no episiotomies have been performed. And 96% of newborns are exclusively breastfed before leaving Best Start compared to the statewide hospital rate of 69%.

Despite the center’s recognized success, keeping it running has always been a labor of love, Roslie said.

“It’s never been a thriving business,” Roslie said. “Roberta’s gone without pay. I’ve gone with reduced pay. That’s what it takes to run a birth center.”

When Roberta Frank, Roslie’s mother, graduated from UC San Diego with her nursing midwifery degree in 1981, she was told “San Diego will never accept midwives.”

Sometimes — in the face of Best Start’s closure — it still feels that way.

(CalMatters.org)

IMPERIALISM: CONRAD, LENIN AND HEART OF DARKNESS

by Jonah Raskin

Imperialism was a loaded word, a most unsavory word, in academia in the U.S. in the 1960s when I wrote a Ph.D. thesis about Rudyard Kipling and Joseph Conrad titled “The Mythology of Imperialism.” I was a grad student on a scholarship from “Her Majesty’s Government” at the University of Manchester in England, once near the beating heart of the industrial revolution and the cotton industry, and the city where Frederick Engels, Marx’s comrade, wrote the classic The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845).

More than a century later, Manchester was still thoroughly working class, though when I asked an English woman, soon after I arrived, if there were wealthy people in the city she said, “Where there’s muck there’s brass.”

I wasn’t the only person in my circle of American friends who went to England in the mid-1960s; Michael Meeropol, the older of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg’s two sons, went to England and so did Peter Linebaugh and Eric Foner, all of whom I knew from New York. I was 22 in 1964, the year I arrived in Manchester, eligible for the draft. I received a notice from my draft board asking me to report for a physical exam, but I received an exemption because I was a student, and married and living in England.

My wife, Eleanor, also attended the University of Manchester and wrote a thesis on The Masses, the lefty magazine that the U.S. government shut down in 1917 on the grounds that it conspired to obstruct conscription during World War I, which Lenin described as “an imperialist (that is, an annexationist, predatory war of plunder) on the part of both sides; it was a war for the division of the world, for the partition and repartition of colonies and spheres of influence of finance capital.” Lenin argued that the “contradictions of imperialism” led to an “inevitable revolutionary crisis.” He certainly did in Russia and Germany.

One of my Manchester advisers and mentors, Frank Kermode, an English eccentric born on the Isle of Man — and the author of the widely acclaimed Romantic Image and The Sense of an Ending — called my thesis “Bolshie,” (short from Bolshevik) which probably said more about him and his life and times than about me and my work. It spoke well for Kermode that he cut his ties to Encounter magazine when he learned that the CIA funded the publication. He was not a Cold War intellectual, and in that regard unlike Lionel Trilling, probably the Columbia College professor who influenced me more than any other when I was an undergraduate from ‘59 to ’63.

It was in Trilling’s comparative literature class that boasted on the reading list works by Thomas Mann, Franz Kafka, James Joyce and Marcel Proust and where I first tangled with Conrad’s searing novella, Heart of Darkness (1899), which taught me more about imperialism than Lenin’s Imperialism: the Highest Stage of Capitalism or any other book on the subject, including J. A. Hobson’s Imperialism (1902). The Bolshevic leader, V. I. Lenin believed that imperialism was the last phase of capitalism and would lead to socialist revolutions.

Born in Ukraine in 1857, which was then a part of the Russian Empire, Conrad witnessed the ravages of imperialism in Europe, Africa and Asia. Employed by a Belgian corporation, he traveled up the Congo River in 1890 and saw first hand the atrrocities committed in the Congo Free State, a private colony of King Leopold II. Workers who didn’t meet quotas had their hands chopped off.

“The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much,” Conrad’s narrator, Marlow, says in Heart of Darkness and seems to speak for the author himself. “What greatness had not floated on the ebb of that river [the Thames] into the mystery of an unknown earth!,” he says to the men who listen to his tale.

Marlow adds, “The dreams of men, the seed of commonwealths, the germs of empires.” Perhaps Conrad’s greatest achievement in Heart of Darkness was his creation of Mr. Kurtz, a quintessential imperialist who says he wants to civilize the Congolese and who is described as “an emissary of pity and science and progress,” and who ends up slaughtering Africans and mounting their heads on poles outside his compound.

Of the Congolese men he sees up close, Marlow says, “they were not inhuman. Well, you know, that was the worst of it — this suspicion of their not being inhuman. It would come slowly to one. They howled and leaped, and spun, and made horrid faces; but what thrilled you was just the thought of their humanity — like yours — the thought of your remote kinship with this wild and passionate uproar.”

Some of Conrad’s language is crystal clear and some of it is opaque, as when he writes about, “the stillness of an implacable force brooding over an inscrutable intention.” Say what?

Wisely, Marlow leaves it to an African to utter the last words about the “emissary of pity and science and progress.” He says, “Mr. Kurtz – he dead,” a line that T. S. Eliot memorialized in The Waste Land.

Near the end of Marlow’s journey into the heart of the Congo’s darkness he encounters an African woman whom he romanticizes as “a wild and gorgeous apparition” and who strikes him as emblematic of the wilderness itself and its own “tenebrous and passionate soul.” When he meets Kurtz’s European fiancé he lies to her and says nothing about the atrocities Kurtz has committed.

What Professor Kermode and I had in common was a shared interest in endings, the apocalypse, and millenarian movements, though he definitely didn’t see imperialism from a Leninist perspective as an end game, and didn’t use the word “imperialism,” either. Kermode introduced me to the history of end-of-the-world narratives which are at least as old as the Old Testament if not older.

In the mid-1960, the only writers who were likely to use the word imperialism were Marxists. Maoists and guerrilla warriors like Che Guevara who aimed to topple imperialism in the Congo and Bolivia and might have succeeded if it had not for the intervention of the CIA.

Some Americans, including SDS members who opposed the war in Vietnam began to use the word in about 1965 to characterize American’s role in Vietnam and to express their total condemnation of the invasion and occupation of the South East Asian nation which had been a colony of France until the Vietnamese defeated the French at a place called Dien Bien Phu, one of the most dramatic battles of the 20th century.

Then, the US stepped in and stepped up its role militarily, politically and economically, as the Pentagon Papers would reveal when they were published by The New York Times, thanks mostly to Daniel Ellsberg, whom I called in print a “white collar guerrilla,” much to his delight.

My Manchester Ph.D. thesis tackled the subject of British literature and the British Empire, but the subtext was American colonialism and imperialism in Vietnam. By the 1960s, it was clear to me and to many others in my generation that the British Empire had fallen and that the American empire had taken its place. All empires declined and fell, I concluded, beginning with the Roman Empire.

Some of Conrad’s most vivid images in Heart of Darkness — such as gunboats shelling the African jungle — seemed to anticipate the American bombardment of the Vietnamese landscape.

It made sense to me that when Francis Ford Coppola made his Vietnam War feature film he drew inspiration from Conrad’s novella. Some of the best-known lines in the novella, such as “horror the horror,” show up in the film, while the words “exterminate the brutes” have been borrowed repeatedly and used as short hand for the way that imperialists and colonists think and act. Call it genocide.

Trilling assigned my paper on Heart of Darkness an A- and asked on the last page, “Is Conrad’s novella only about imperialism?” I wanted to say, but I never had the opportunity to say, “no, it’s not only about imperialism, but no critic has noticed the obvious, that imperialism is the heart of darkness and the heart of darkness is imperialism.”

Conrad knew it, but psychological critics like Albert Guerard, the author of Joseph Conrad (1947), didn’t see it or if they did they chose to ignore it. For Guerard Heart of Darkness was all about Jungian archetypes. I thought that was a monumental evasion.

I received a BA from Columbia in ’63 and an MA in American lit from Columbia University in ’64. I wrote a master’s thesis about Henry James titled “The Historical Imagination” and focused on the images of the French Revolution which crop up at critical moments in James’s novels when he compares his fictional characters to doomed French aristocrats in 1789.

James, I argued, was much more political than Trilling, the “Jamesians” — the Henry James “mob” or enthusiasts — and T. S. Eliot allowed. “He had a mind so fine no idea could violate it,” Eliot insisted. Sorry, T.S., James had ideas.

In the early 1960s, when I was an undergraduate, politics was a topic to be avoided at Columbia; real writers, I was told by Trilling, Jacques Barzun and Quentin Anderson — who taught a class I attended on Ralph Waldo Emerson and another on mid-nineteenth century American fiction — were apolitical. Politics contaminated prose and poetry Anderson, Barzun and Trilling insinuated, suggested, and argued ad nauseum and ad infinitum, though around the world and especially in Europe and Latin America critics linked literature and politics as though it was the most natural thing to do.

When I was interviewed by Stephen Marcus, one of Trilling’s protégés, and Daniel Bell, the author of The End of Ideology, Bell asked me “Do you know any communists,” I was shocked and horrified. I stormed from the room and told my friends what had happened.

Given the rejection of Marxism, Marxist literary criticism and even social criticism by America scholars and reviewers, such as Granville Hicks, Maxwell Geismar and F. O. Matthiessen, in the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s, I decided that I’d better not even try to write a Ph.D. thesis at Columbia that would combine literature and imperialism. Professor Lewis Leary recruited me to join the Ph.D. program at Columbia, but I declined the opportunity.

England seemed to offer an intellectual home for young wannabe cultural and literary critics like me. E. P. Thompson, E. J. Hobsbawm and Arnold Kettle, who wrote insightfully about imperialism and literature in his two-volume study of the English novel, taught at British universities, and unlike American lefties weren’t purged.

If there was a Red Scare in England it was much milder than in the States. I became friends with Kettle and visited him and his family in Leeds, where he taught.

For three years, from 1964 to 1967, I read widely and deeply in the fiction and nonfiction about imperialism and colonialism in the main library in Manchester and in the British Museum Reading Room in London. Once a week I met my tutor, R. G. Cox (not C. G. Cox) and read a paper I’d written that week about Conrad’s Victory, Nostromo or The Nigger of the Narcissus.

Conrad, I would realize, embodied contradictions; an anti-imperialist, he tended to be, but wasn’t always a white supremacist and a believer in the virtues of the British Empire. Though R. G. Cox often dozed while I read an essay, I was not phased. I’d done the work and liked the work I’d done.

I had contradictions of my own. I was writing a politically charged thesis, but I steered clear of everything political: marches, demonstrations and protests. In fact, I settled in England not only because I thought I’d receive a warmer welcome in academia there than in the States, but also because I wanted to be far away from the temptation to organize for civil rights and against the war.

All through my undergraduate days, I’d protested against segregation, the committees that investigated “subversives,” and the paternalism of Columbia, our “alma mater,” where students were treated like children who couldn’t make wise decisions.

I figured that if I stayed in New York, I’d join SDS, CORE or one of the W. E. B. Du Bois Clubs – there were a half-dozen or so small lefty groups in New York in the early and mid 1960s — and become a full time radical. I didn’t see a way to straddle and combine research and scholarship and the causes of the day.

In Manchester, I was having heaps of fun in pubs, at parties, and in the company of Ian, Mike, and Tony — Irish, Scots and Welsh folk singers and poets. The English proved to be elusive. I could understand why Doris Lessing titled one of her books In Pursuit of the English.

Indeed, one had to search for them, and pry them loose from their Hobbit holes, their drawing rooms and from flats and digs that didn’t seem to be much improvement over the conditions of the working class that Engels described in 1844. Moreover, many of the union officials I met and got to know were dead set against Pakistanis joining their unions. They wanted white-only organizations and even went on strike to keep Pakistanis out.

During my last year in Manchester, my thesis finally took off, took shape and held together when I stumbled upon a 1919 essay by T. S. Eliot — a self-defined Anglican, a royalist and a traditionalist — titled “Kipling Redivivus” in which he wrote that “Conrad is the antithesis of Kipling. He is, for one thing, the antithesis of Empire, (as well as democracy); his characters are the denial of Empire, of Nation, of Race almost; they are fearfully alone with the Wilderness.” That was all the ammunition I needed to finish my thesis.

Of course, Eliot was also an avant-garde poet when he wrote The Waste Land, and an astute, dialectical critic when he wrote the essay, Tradition and the Individual Talent.

I finished my thesis, defended it before a committee that included Walter Allen, an expert on the English novel. Kermode, the quintessential peripatetic professor, had moved to another university. I attended the graduation ceremony, was awarded a Ph.D. and received a diploma. I was hired to teach at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, and returned with my wife to the U.S.

Two months after I returned, I stood outside the walls of the Pentagon with thousands of other anti-war protesters. I joined SDS, served on a panel with Susan Sontag at the inaugural Socialist Scholars Conference and discussed the topic of the responsibility of intellectuals vis-à-vis Vietnam.

Later, I met Professor Edward Said who was teaching Conrad at Columbia and who assigned to students my book, The Mythology of Imperialism, published in hardback by Random House and in paperback by Delta. In April 1968 I was arrested with about 800 students and “outside agitators” like myself at Columbia.

It was as if I had never left the States and gone to England to tackle the subject of imperialism which seemed in 1968 more ominous than ever before.

In 2009 Mythology was republished by Monthly Review Press with an introduction by Columbia professor Bruce Robbins, an afterword by me about Edward Said, and with the original preface in which I meant to channel Sartre and that begins, “We, the readers of literature have been hijacked. The literary critics, our teachers, those assassins of culture, have put us up against the wall and held us captive.” I was angry. I still am.

If I had to select one sentence to exemplify my voice, my style and my point of view I would select the above sentence from the thousands of sentences I have written over the past half-century. I was young, I was brash and I was ready to take on imperialism, fangs and all. Imperialism still lurks at the heart of darkness all over the world and wherever rebels seek liberation and freedom.

Conrad’s tale, flaws and all, still demands to be read and understood. It’s a classic in the field of literature about empire and its indelible corruptions. I think Lenin would have admired it. An astute literary critic, Lenin wrote insightfully about Tolstoy, whom he called “a great artist” riven by “contradictions,” but who created “incomparable pictures of Russian life” and “made first-class contributions to world literature.”

Mr. Kurtz – He ain’t dead. He’s alive wherever men with guns and lies aim to conquer, oppress and exploit men, women and even children who don’t look like them, whether in Asia, the Americas, Africa and Europe.

(Jonah Raskin is the author of Beat Blues, San Francisco, 1955.)

‘RFK, JR. MURDERS WHALE WITH CHAINSAW!’

by James Kunstler

“Our society is now a strange hybrid of the Middle Ages, the Third Reich, and Brave New World. We have two classes — lords and peasants; we are in the midst of a very profitable genocide; and it’s all infused with surveillance technology, mind-altering drugs, and wall-to-wall propaganda.” — Dr. Toby Rogers

The alliance between Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and Donald Trump is many things. But first it’s an all-clear signal to a large class of less-than-fully brain-damaged Americans that it’s okay to quit being insane. As you know, this election is no longer a battle between the political Left and Right. It’s an epic struggle-session between the sane and the insane.

You just witnessed the Democratic Convention nominating an empty pantsuit whose only record as a high government official is failure to protect and defend the nation and to support its constitution. All arranged without any real votes cast. Pretty neat trick, pulled off under the banner of Saving Our Democracy. Please understand that it was the result of hypnotizing so many vulnerable personalities into a mass formation psychosis. They were vulnerable because they are scared stiff by propaganda specifically targeting their deepest archetypal fears — in this case, fear of Daddy, meaning fear of behavioral boundaries, in short, of being civilized.

Thus, the advocacy for Hamas terrorists (Israel = Old Testament = moral boundaries), abortion (no more babies = die-off of cultural line), drag-queens (“mother” = demonic imposter), open border (border = nation’s boundary), the Ukraine War (“Let’s You and Him Fight”), censorship (hatred of fairness), mandates and lockdowns (destroy purposeful, meaningful, productive life), and so on. The propaganda engineered to produce this madness surely comes from our intel blob. They have devoted all the years since the founding of the CIA in 1947 to developing and refining their methods of mindfuckery. They have unleashed it lately at full force because they fear that Mr. Trump will deconstruct their intel blob and possibly prosecute some of its current and former officials for serious crimes such as treason, misprision of felonies, and murder.

The final ingredient in all that is submission of the populace to these programmatic suggestions. Simply put, they yield to the fears induced in them. Try to enter the mind of a committed Democratic voter. You’ll discover that you are locked out. Sharing of thoughts is impossible because there is no thought in there, only disordered emotion.

Ask a Democrat what they think Donald Trump actually did as president for four years. I guarantee you they will say only one thing: he cancelled abortion. Which is actually not true. He nominated several Supreme Court Justices who ruled that abortion properly belonged under the jurisdiction of the fifty states. (It was the act of ruling that drove them nuts because rules = boundaries.) Of course, all the single batshit crazy cat-ladies of Boston, New York, Atlanta, Chicago, Minneapolis, Seattle, Portland, Denver, and Los Angeles now raging over the issue are free to abort themselves to their hearts’ content, should some unlikely accident of misfortune find them pregnant.

So, Kamala Harris emerges from this Cluster-B personality disorder exercise in hypnosis (the convention) as the avatar of . . . “joy” . . . in the absence of any ideas about actually running the government of a country which, for the moment, is run by nobody because the current president (“Joe Biden”) is both mentally unfit and on permanent vacation. None of this is very promising. The raptures of “joy” tend to obscure the idea that there is a future to be concerned about. Enter Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

He explained his view of the situation and his role in it with unsurpassed clarity last Friday in a powerful and moving speech outlining a decision that must have been very painful for him. As I averred he would do last Friday morning, he denounced the party of his ancestors in unequivocal terms for coming to militate against its own traditional principles — opposing war, fighting for free speech, helping poor working people, and against weaponizing government agencies. He threw his support to Mr. Trump because it’s become obvious that Mr. Trump’s aims and ideas are more in-tune with those forsaken principles of Mr. Kennedy’s father and his uncle, JFK.

And now he’ll campaign on behalf of Mr. Trump, with the expectation that he will play an important, well-defined role in the next Trump administration — in charge of a range of public health issues that he is deeply familiar with from decades of litigation and researching the books about pharmaceutical racketeering actually written by himself.

It’s Monday after the convention. What’s on the candidates’ campaign schedule today. CNNs “Campaign Latest” page says that Mr. Trump will give a speech in Detroit today to the National Guard Association where he is expected to greet the endorsement of former Rep. (and Lt. Col. In the National Guard) Tulsi Gabbard. Kamala Harris has no public appearances scheduled, but CNN reports that she has raised a fabulous $540-million since her launch a few weeks ago. Isn’t that nice? Boolah boolah, lotsa moolah. On Wednesday, Ms. Harris and her veep sidekick, Tim Walz, embark on a bus tour around Georgia. Bus tours will be the signature of their campaign.

Let me tell you what that means: instead of flying expeditiously between campaign stops where they might have to state some positions on public issues, Harris & Walz will eat up many hours on long bus rides from Point-A to Point-B, hiding from the public and the press.

Bobby Kennedy, meanwhile, is cramming as many media appearances as possible into his schedule, submitting to questions about everything, including the latest barrage of accusations about his fully-disclosed personal history. Fox has had him on several programs, though the other cable news stations are ignoring him, as are The New York Times and the WashPo, except to publish scurrilous stories from his mindfucked siblings and cousins — the latest being that he cut the head off a dead whale on the beach at Cape Cod with a chainsaw. Readers are supposed to construe that to mean he murdered a whale with a chainsaw.

An ‘Ice Man’, delivering a 25 pound block of ice in 1928, Houston, Texas.

MAKE AMERICA ‘LETHAL’ AGAIN: A REVIEW OF SOME SPEECHES AT THE DNC

by Stephen F. Eisenman

The Not-So-Good Ones

The just concluded Democratic National Convention at the United Center in Chicago was by most accounts a success. On Monday, the first night, Joe Biden gave his valedictory address, after which the audience breathed a sigh of relief. Not just because the long, self-indulgent peroration was over, but because Biden was finally out: one geezer down, one more to go. Two days later, state delegates conducted a celebratory roll-call vote, formally designating Kamala Harris and Tim Walz the Democratic Party nominees for president and vice-president.

On Tuesday, there were not-so-good speeches by their Royal Majesties the Obamas and Clintons. Michelle spoke glowingly and interminably about her mother and all mothers. (Like dogs, there are no bad mothers.) But she also delivered the best zinger of the convention. Reminding listeners of Trump’s gaffe at the conference of the National Association of Black Journalists, she said: “Who’s gonna tell him that the job he is currently seeking might just be one of those ‘Black jobs’”. Barak’s address, which immediately followed his wife’s, was ponderous and unfocussed. (He should study the cadences and inflections of Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro.) His only attention-getting line concerned Trump’s peculiar (not to say “weird”) preoccupation with comparing his crowd size to Harris’s. At one point, Obama brought his hands close together to indicate Trump’s comparatively small size. He undercut the punch line by embarrassment at his own vulgarity.

Bill Clinton was avuncular but confusing – no more “Secretary of “Splainin’ Stuff”, as Obama called him in 2012. Hilary was pompous as expected and mangled her metaphors: “As vice president, Kamala sat in the situation room and stood for American values.” Did anybody hold the veep’s chair as she did all that sitting and standing? “Together,” Hilary continued, self-referentially and prayerfully, “we put a lot of cracks in the highest, hardest glass ceiling.” She went on in the same vein: “Tonight, we are so close to breaking through, once and for all.” And still more: “I want to tell you what I see through all those cracks. I see freedom.” Why did she need to look through the cracks to see it? Was the glass dirty – didn’t anybody tell her about Windex? But Hilary wasn’t done: Kamala could finally “break through” at which point she’d be “on the other side of that glass ceiling.” Was it the sitting down and quickly standing up – and bumping her head — that finally broke the ceiling? Who repaired he floor above, and can you please get me his number? It’s hard to fine good contractors.

Oprah spoke with earnestness but little substance. She emphasized unity and decried those who would “divide and conquer us.” She spoke in favor of books, abortion rights, and “adult conversations” in place of ridiculous tweets. She wound up being the only person in the five days to mention animal rights, when she said: “When a house is on fire, we don’t ask about the homeowner’s race or religion, we don’t wonder who their partner is or how they voted. No, we just do the best we can to save them. And if the place happens to belong to a childless cat lady, well, we try to get that cat out too.”

Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, another Democratic grandee, gave a six-minute address highlighting Biden and the Democrats’ achievements during the previous four years including the Inflation Reduction Act, Infrastructure Bill and legislative and executive actions on behalf of veterans, seniors and students. It was boilerplate, memorable for just one thing: the rapturous ovation Pelosi received on her way to the podium. The diminutive, 84-year-old legislator from the Bay Area was, by all accounts, the person most responsible for giving Joe the boot. No amount of “Thank you Joes” will wash away the stain of that act of political benevolence.

Two other disappointing performances were delivered by the leading Democratic Party progressives, 34-year-old Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and 82-year-old Senator Bernie Sanders. The former thanked Biden, blessed Harris, and energetically cut the air with hands and index fingers. She spoke euphemistically, at first, like American politicians do, about the American middle-class. Just as there are no bad mothers, there’s no American working class, only a middle class stifled in its aspiration to become…middle class. (In fact, nearly 70% of the U.S. population is working class; excluding home ownership, they have no other assets than their wages.) AOC then confusingly shifted gears and began speaking about the American working class, but never got beyond generalities. United Auto Workers President Shawn Fain was more direct and more internationalist in his short address. He began it by saying: “Good evening to the people that make this world move, the working class!” I half expected him to sing the Internationale.

Bernie was better than AOC, though plodding – he sounds less and less, these days, like Larry David’s impersonation of him. As usual, Sanders spoke in lists, calling for an activist government that increased the minimum wage, expanded Medicare and Medicaid, and increased Social Security payments to the elderly. He also supported legislation to increase union membership, create public financing of elections, and raise taxes on corporations and the billionaire class. One reason the address was so boring, paradoxically, is that these positions are now uncontroversial among Democratic voters and politicians. That they remain aspirational however, reveals the gap between party rhetoric and Democratic legislative priorities.

I might have missed somebody, but so far as I could tell, the only artist or literary figure given time at the convention podium was Amanda Gorman. At the Biden inauguration in 2021, she performed a sentimental and much-lauded hip-hop poem titled “The Hill We Climb.” For the DNC, she read “This Sacred Scene,” which began: “We gather at this hallowed place because we believe in the American Dream.” The United Center? The only deity she could be invoking is Michael Jordan, whose Bulls won six NBA championships between 1991 and 1998. But if Jordan is God, I worry for Harris and Walz; the Bulls finished 9th in their division in 2023-4.

The Better Speeches

The best speeches at the convention, in my view, were not given by the A-listers, but the B-listers. Senator Raphael Warnock started his address by saying that Georgia made history on Jan. 5, 2020, by electing him, a Black man, and Jon Ossoff, a Jewish man, as U.S. Senators; but that history was tarnished the next day by a Trump-inspired insurrection to overturn the results of the presidential election. He meandered a bit in the middle of his 15-minute speech – there was the inevitable and deflating encomium for Biden — but Warnock regained his groove when he said: “Donald Trump is a plague on the American conscience.” That was a new epithet. Then he launched into a series of claims – would that they were true — that the Democrats were quickly moving forward on reproductive rights, worker’s rights, and voting rights. Then he spoke about the kindness of fathers, in particular his own, now deceased, “a preacher and a junkman who, Monday through Fridays lifted old broken cars and put ‘em on the back of an old rig. But on Sunday morning, the man who lifted broken cars lifted broken people…and told them they were God’s somebody.” He followed up by saying: “I’m convinced we can lift the broken even when we climb…we can heal sick bodies, we can heal the wounds that divide us, we can heal a planet in peril….” Great stuff from a preacher turned senator.

In his brief but rousing address, Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro invoked Philadelphia, his state’s biggest city and site of the first, Continental Congress (1774-81), to tell a story of continued American progress in the advancement of freedom and justice. All that was thwarted, he said, by Donald Trump in his single term in office and would be again if he was elected once more. Trump and the Republicans, Shapiro said, wrap themselves up in the rhetoric of freedom, but undermine it at every turn. “It’s not freedom to tell our children what books to read” he said, with Obama’s former cadence and a Black English inflection. “And it’s not freedom to tell women what they can do with their bodies.” Pausing briefly for cheers from the audience, he tightened his lips and shook his head, adding “No, it’s not.”

Then, mixing the rhetoric of the Baptist preacher–Shapiro is Jewish – and the union leader, he continued, pointing at the camera: “And hear me on this, it’s sure as hell not freedom to say: ‘You get to vote, but he picks the winner.” “Real freedom” he continued, is “when a child can walk to and from school and get home safely to her mama.” Shapiro then expertly deployed what rhetoricians call anaphora. He repeated the phrase “real freedom is” followed by a series of positive liberties: the freedom to “join a union,” marry “who you love”, start a family “on your own terms,” “breath clean air, drink pure water…and live a life of purpose in which [you] are respected for who [you are].” Shapiro understood that an effective speaker doesn’t pause after applause, but speaks over it, building up to a crescendo. Though he treated anti-Israeli protesters on Pennsylvania campuses shamefully, he sure gives a good speech.

And finally, there was Kamala Harris’s acceptance speech. On the plus side, it was short and well-delivered. She began by discussing her mother Shaymala, an Indian immigrant and later, cancer researcher. Harris said little about her father, the prominent, Jamaica-born Marxist economist Donald J. Harris, except that he and her mother created a home environment of love and support. After saying that she proudly accepted her party’s nomination for president, she went on to describe the fundamental characteristics of a good president, including common sense and the ability to listen, and said that she possessed them, while Donald Trump lacked them.

From there, like the prosecutor she was, Harris proceeded to build the case for her presidency block by block. In the courtrooms of Oakland, she stood up against predators who abused women and children. As California Attorney General, she “took on” the banks that were illegally foreclosing on poor tenants and homeowners, and supported laws protecting consumers. She however omitted from her story the fact that as prosecutor and AG, she defended manifestly wrongful convictions, supported the forensic work of lab technicians convicted of corruption, upheld the death penalty, opposed a bill requiring state investigations of police shootings, and challenged a law mandating correct use of police body cameras.

Harris spent the middle of her address attacking Trump – there’s no need to recite the litany here – and then moved to close the argument in favor of her own election. To be sure, the case is for me open and shut. But there were several passages in her speech, that should temper everyone’s enthusiasm for her candidacy. The first was her strong support for the “bipartisan border security law” proposed by Biden and backed by leading Republicans until it was nixed by Trump – it might rob him of his signature issue. She said she would bring it back to Congress and when passed, sign it into law. The bill is a sop to the far right; it would among other things, set arbitrary caps on asylum claims in contravention of existing U.S. and international law.

The second was her unconditional support for Israel’s security, regardless of its leadership or policies. She spoke about Gaza in the passive voice, as if the genocide were a natural disaster: “At the same time, what has happened in Gaza over the past ten months is devastating. Too many innocent lives lost. Desperate, hungry people fleeing for shelter again and again, the scale of suffering is heartbreaking.” But her answer to the travesty is simply to follow the same path to peace that has been blocked again and again by Israeli president Netanyahu and his war cabinet. She did not propose simply following U.S. law – the Leahy Amendment – that denies U.S. weapons and supplies to any regime that violates human rights with impunity. She did not support the International Criminal Court in its pursuit of arrest warrants for both Israeli and Hamas leaders.

The third utterance that made me cringe – leaving aside the bromides about American exceptionalism — was the following: “We must be steadfast in advancing our values and our security abroad….As Commander-in-Chef, I will ensure that America always has the strongest, most lethal fighting force in the world.” That the U.S. has the most lethal military in the world is beyond question. But that’s the problem, not the solution to global violence. The genocide of Native Americans, the wars against Korea and Vietnam, and the military interventions in Afghanistan, Iraq and a dozen other nations have killed millions. The wars currently wars fought in Ukraine and Gaza have the stamp of U.S. incompetence, indifference and profiteering all over them.

Paeans to America’s “military might” are by now reflexive. All candidates repeat them to appear strong and attract votes. But that reflexivity is, to repeat the formulation above, the very problem that a good president must tackle. By repeating the oath to lethality and war so prominently in a speech seen by 30 million Americans – way more than Trump’s acceptance speech, but who’s counting – Harris risks making her promise self-fulfilling. Is she already, even before her possible (now likely) election, sowing the seeds of her own political demise, just as Lyndon Johnson did in 1968 with Vietnam and Biden did in 2024 with Gaza?

(Stephen F. Eisenman is emeritus professor at Northwestern University. His latest book, with Sue Coe, is titled “The Young Person’s Guide to American Fascism,” and is forthcoming from OR Books. He can be reached at s-eisenman@northwestern.edu. CounterPunch.org)

WHY ARE LIBERAL ZIONISTS CHEERING AS HARRIS ECHOES BIDEN ON GAZA?

by Abba A. Solomon

Hours after Kamala Harris gave her acceptance speech at the Democratic convention, the president of the “pro-Israel, pro-peace” organization J Street took a victory lap in an effusive e-mail to supporters. “Wow,” Jeremy Ben-Ami wrote. “What a week! As J Streeters leave the Democratic National Convention fired up and ready to go, it’s clear we’re having a greater impact than ever.” He added that “the vice president’s remarks on Israel-Palestine were perhaps the clearest articulation of J Street’s values from a presidential nominee.”

But what are those “values” and how do they apply to what’s happening in Gaza?

Discussing Gaza, Harris’ DNC acceptance speech began with the anodyne evocation of “working on a cease-fire” of Gaza’s pounding that America is funding: “President Biden and I are working around the clock, because now is the time to get a hostage deal and a cease-fire deal done.”

Then came the “ironclad” pledge of eternal support for Israel, justified in this case by the October 7 Hamas raid: “And let me be clear. And let me be clear. I will always stand up for Israel’s right to defend itself, and I will always ensure Israel has the ability to defend itself…”

Key to Harris’ brief discussion of Gaza in her acceptance speech was the customary refusal in American political discourse to attribute the slaughter to the U.S. or its Israeli partner. Instead, there was a reference to “what has happened” — evoking victims without victimizers — in this way: “What has happened in Gaza over the past 10 months is devastating. So many innocent lives lost. Desperate, hungry people fleeing for safety, over and over again. The scale of suffering is heartbreaking.”

After pledging unconditional support for Israel’s military, Harris expressed sorrow — as if the horrors are being inflicted by a force of nature, not a military force that the U.S. government supplies with fundamental and essential support.

Style aside, what Harris articulated about Israel-Palestine in her speech was no different than what President Biden has been saying and doing since last fall while enabling the slaughter of Palestinian civilians. The vehement enthusiasm from J Street, perhaps the USA’s leading liberal Zionist organization, is illuminating.

Harris carefully omitted any mention of the only way that the U.S. government could actually put an end to the suffering in Gaza that she called “heartbreaking” — an arms embargo to stop the huge shipments from the United States that provide the Israeli military with the weapons and ammunition it’s using to continue to massacre Palestinian people of all ages.

The Harris speech was consistent with the national party’s new platform — which “J Street helped shape,” Ben-Ami proudly wrote. But full affirmation of Biden’s policies toward the Gaza carnage should not have been any cause for celebration.

“As a Palestinian American who is an elected Democrat to the Colorado State House, it has been disheartening to witness Biden facilitate and abet Israel’s brutal war on Gaza with billions of dollars in U.S. weapons,” Iman Jodeh wrote during the convention. Harris “has said that an arms embargo — which human rights organizations have been calling for — is off the table, but that she supports a ceasefire.” However, “to truly reach a ceasefire and prevent a regional conflict, the U.S. must halt the arms shipments that fuel the conflict.”

The British medical journal The Lancet estimates that well over 100,000 residents of Gaza will die because of the Israeli bombardment and siege since Oct. 7, as hunger and disease are endemic, and housing and infrastructure have been systematically destroyed. Polio is appearing in the devastated population of more than 2 million. Israel’s assault on the enclave, populated substantially by refugees from the 1948 creation of the Israeli state, remains unchecked — and is literally made possible by the continuous arms pipeline from the United States.

For J Street’s leadership, the current U.S. policy hits the spot. “Could not be prouder of VP Harris for her remarks on Israel/Palestine — and of Democrats’ reaction,” Ben-Ami tweeted after the convention adjourned. “This is what it means in 2024 to be pro-Israel, pro-peace and pro-democracy.”

At the convention, the parents of a hostage held by Hamas since Oct. 7 spoke. But no Palestinian American was allowed to say anything. In effect, the convention’s podium was a place of apartheid, mirroring the reality of Israel’s apartheid system (In his email, Ben-Ami wistfully noted the missed opportunity: “Hosting the first ever Palestinian speaker at a national convention would have been a powerful way to underscore the shared goal of an immediate ceasefire and hostage deal, and the compassion the party feels for Palestinians and Israelis alike.”)

J Street is determined to help ensure that liberal Zionism does not question the “ironclad” U.S. commitment to Jewish nationalist control in Palestine, as discussed in articles I co-wrote that were published 10 years ago and last spring The organization is eager to define the limits of acceptable criticism of Israeli government policies from the Democratic Party establishment — setting aside human rights considerations as secondary to the mantra of Israel’s “right to exist.” (Whether apartheid South Africa had a “right to exist” is not a topic open for discussion.)

J Street represents untenable liberal American Zionism that clings to the fantasy of a democratic and humane “Jewish state.” Washington office-holders pledge continued weapons resupply for that fantasy Jewish state -- with no connection to the actual Israel that is now engaged in remorseless genocide.

(Abba A. Solomon is the author of “The Miasma of Unity: Jews and Israel and “The Speech, and Its Context: Jacob Blaustein’s Speech — The Meaning of Palestine Partition to American Jews,’ Given to the Baltimore Chapter, American Jewish Committee, February 15, 1948.

41 Comments

Call It As I See It August 27, 2024

Malcom McDonald the concerned citizen’s point has nothing to do with MCHCD. By the way, great point chastising the concerned citizen about not getting the name right, only to admit Jan McGourty, your new member, then botched the name!

The concerned citizen point is simple. Glen McGourty is violating the law. He knew the rules that you must live in the district you represent. By claiming the coast home as his residence so his wife could sit on this board puts him in violation. He doesn’t think rules and laws apply to him.

Maybe Jan is a good pick for your board with her experience with mental health, she lives with a lunatic named Glen.

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- Jacob August 27, 2024
  
  Although I find the McGourtys to be distasteful, I don’t think it is fair to say they broke the law. Following the law is often nuanced and dependant on the facts. The McGourtys have (at least) two residences, one in the First District where Glenn is registered, and a new one in Fort Bragg where his wife has registered. That doesn’t mean they are breaking the law. It is entirely possible that Glenn still maintains his primary residence inland and won’t move with his wife until he December when his term ends. Jan could have moved to Fort Bragg before her husband and it seems that is what they’ve done.
  
  The Health Care District is a mess and the Board is contributing to that. Everyone should be a lot more concerned about their apparently incompetent or actively dishonest chair is violating open meeting and public comment rules. The only good thing he has done is abandon the misguided bond measure, which would have never passed. In fact, I have heard many people discuss not only not supporting a new bond but the desire to repeal the Measure C parcel tax because the District is apparently standing idly by as Adventist considers reducing Coast services even further. It was bad enough when we lost labor and delivery prior to affiliation but apparently now they are considering eliminating the Coast infusion and oncology center forcing patients inland. Can you imagine the Coast hospital without a full-service oncology department? We have very high rates of cancer… ridiculous but this board could very well excuse away such changes ignoring our local health care needs!
  
  Reply
  - Call It As I See It August 27, 2024
    
    On his loan papers he cites this as his primary residence. So is he lying in order to obtain the loan? You can’t have your cake and eat it too.
    Lying on a loan application is against the law. So if he is not lying on the application then he violates the California code for BOS. You tell me which law he is breaking because he is breaking one of them.
    
    Reply
    - Jacob August 28, 2024
      
      I didn’t know that, thanks for the extra details. I agree that is concerning.
      
      Reply
  - The Shadow August 27, 2024
    
    You’re always complaining, but what are you actually doing to make the situation better? All you seem to do is harass staff members and criticize. Why don’t you throw your hat in the ring for city Council? Because you would get crushed because people are tired of your BS. I read recently that you went to the Point Arena City Council to Criticize the new city manager, who used to be the Fort Bragg city manager. What the hell does that have to do with you? I would think Point Arena would not appreciate you inserting yourself into their affairs when you don’t live there and I doubt you know much about the culture of the area. Point Arena’s new city manager didn’t play your games in Fort Bragg. You seem to have something against women because that’s the only people you seem to harass. You wisely know that a man would take you behind the woodshed. The way you treat women is disgusting. It must be really nice to not have to earn money so you can flit about, stirring the pot, harassing women, and doing nothing to help solve problems. I’ll pray for you.
    
    Reply
    - Call It As I See It August 27, 2024
      
      Who are you talking to? If you’re talking to me, I have never been to Pt. Arena City Council meeting. And yes I ‘m working with a group of citizens to make our county and city safer and prosperous.
      
      Reply
      - The Shadow August 27, 2024
        
        I’m talking to Jacob. The threads on this site are confusing and suck royally.
        
        Reply
        
        Call It As I See It August 27, 2024
        
        I agree!
        
        Reply
        
        sam kircher August 27, 2024
        
        Maybe start a separate, more functional thread for anonymous kibbitzers.
        Call it “twatter,” or “rude-it?”
        
        Reply
    - Jacob August 28, 2024
      
      I was asked by people from Point Arena to let their councilmembers know that they should check her references with the Fort Bragg City Council to better understand what they might have been getting themselves into because no one had bothered to do that and she was already alienating members of the public. I am always happy to help out when people ask me to. Regarding your other silliness, you should check your facts since they aren’t accurate although you are entitled to whatever opinions you might have. Some of us don’t lurk in the shadows…
      
      Reply
  - Liri Heller August 28, 2024
    
    ‘Ice man’ 1928
    
    Inquiring minds want to know, so I wrote to the Co.
    
    Their response…
    
    ‘We simply adopted the brand / name as the old “Home Ice Company” disappeared decades ago. We haven’t been able to find much out about the old company, and really know nothing about this employee.
    
    We dress much better (and cleaner) than they did in the old days : )
    
    Best,
    
    John Sr.’
    John Heffernan Sr.
    Home Ice Company
    678-591-2925
    http://www.homeicecompany.com
    
    Reply
Ernie Branscomb August 27, 2024

To Bruce McEwen
It was nice to point out that the “horses” were actually mules. I also noticed that they appeared to be mules. But, what are the dead give aways that they are mules?

Reply
- Ernie Branscomb August 27, 2024
  
  Re: Cartoon
  “As for me and my family? whatever the Gov recommends, we’ll do the opposite.”
  
  “that these dead shall not have died in vain– that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth” (U.S. President Abraham Lincoln)
  
  It seems to have perished…
  
  Reply
Craig Stehr August 27, 2024

Please know that I am available to go anywhere and do anything that is spiritually worthwhile. My exit date from the Royal Motel in Ukiah, CA is Sunday September 1st at 11 a.m. Here is my contact information. Craig Louis Stehr Royal Motel 750 South State Street, Ukiah, CA 95482 Telephone: (707) 462-7536, Room 206 Email: craiglouisstehr@gmail.com Send survival donations here: Paypal.me/craiglouisstehr

Reply
- Mazie Malone August 27, 2024
  
  Craig,
  If there is something I can do to help you, let me know. I cannot provide you housing but I can help you with applications, rides, letters and moral support! Have you tried applying at Autumn Leaves Ukiah, Sun House Senior Apartments, North Pine Street Senior Apartments’. There are options, it takes perseverance and presence and a resourceful ally, Don’t give up and just maybe there is meaning here in Mendo for you maybe you are meant to be here.
  
  mm 💕
  
  Reply
  - Craig Stehr August 27, 2024
    
    The original rental applications were submitted in March of 2022. Routine responses to remain on the waiting lists were mailed in over the past two years. I am no longer receiving mail at Building Bridges, and no longer have a “housing navigator”. There has been total “perseverance” and “presence”, but nothing happened! I am accepting survival donations to keep the body-mind complex alive at Paypal.me/craiglouisstehr I am networking constantly to go anywhere and do anything which is spiritually worthwhile on the planet earth. I am willing to remain in Mendocino County. I am willing to leave Mendocino County. God, Jesus, Buddha, Krishna, and the Goddess approve! I have not as of yet received any offers from anybody anywhere in postmodern America to go anywhere nor do anything, understanding of course that the body-mind complex will need to be maintained. I am waiting patiently for anything from anybody anywhere. >>> In room 206 at the Royal Motel in Ukiah, California USA until September 1st at 11 a.m. <<< ~Peaceout~
    
    Reply
    - Mazie Malone August 27, 2024
      
      Craig,
      I am Curious did you mail those requests to remain on waiting lists or was that done by housing navigator? I am offering you help to get housed that is a standing offer and something important to maintain the body-mind complex. My advice is never make the assumption someone did their job because that leaves you vulnerable to fall through the cracks. You fell in the crack.
      
      mm 💕
      
      Reply
      - Craig Stehr August 27, 2024
        
        FOUR POINTS
        1. I am not interested in housing per se, unless there is a spiritually based opportunity for me, (i.e. to actually DO SOMETHING worthwhile). 2. My final routine medical appointment with the head of the cardiovascular department at Adventist Health-Ukiah Valley was today. I said to the doctor that time itself had healed all. I have no reason whatsoever to be in Mendocino County any further. 3. Thank you for understanding this. 4. 🫡
        
        Reply
Norm Thurston August 27, 2024

Mr. Macdonald did a good job explaining the events, which sound like politics-as-usual for Mendocino County and beyond. The solution, I believe, is for us (the electorate) to become better voters. I remember a time when Democrats and Republicans would gladly cross party lines to vote for a clearly superior candidate (much more helpful than voting for a 3rd party who will never win). Finding our way back to that mind-set would be a good start. Vote for candidates who place the good of the community, state and country above their alliance to a political party.

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- Chuck Dunbar August 27, 2024
  
  True that.
  
  Reply
Chuck Dunbar August 27, 2024

ED NOTES:

Who, these days, ever thinks back and reminds us of this brutal truth? At least our hallowed editor does, and it’s the underlying harmful fact of modern America:

“ON THE OFF CHANCE you’re unaware how far to the political right this country has moved over the last 50 years… The great malefactors of wealth excoriated by Republicans from Lincoln on up through the first Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Eisenhower, and Nixon? Both parties today are not only funded by them, they celebrate them.”

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- Norm Thurston August 27, 2024
  
  Chuck – I have been aware of unrelenting drift to the right of the Republican party since the 1980’s, and believe that it has been a planned and well executed change in policy. It has seemed imperceptible year over year, but its effect over time is dramatic. Kudos to Bruce.
  
  Reply
  - Call It As I See It August 27, 2024
    
    Have you noticed the extreme change in the Democratic Party? Probably not!!!! Well just to update you, inflation is off the charts, crime is up to record numbers, millions of illegals have crossed our border unvetted, homeless wander the streets defecating in public and adding to crime numbers. Censorship is their favorite action with the help of a corrupt media, just ask your hero Mark Zuckerberg. Trying to jail their political opponents, removing candidates from ballots and World War 3 is just around the corner. But if you continue not to get treated for your TDS syndrome, you’re going to wake up in far different country than we grew up in.
    
    Reply
    - Bob A. August 27, 2024
      
      My oh my, somebody needs hug, a walk, or maybe just a refreshing nap.
      
      Reply
    - Marshall Newman August 27, 2024
      
      You forgot to blame the Democratic Party for the sun rising in the morning.
      
      Reply
    - Norm Thurston August 27, 2024
      
      To start, inflation is under control and we even had deflation for the month of July. And it wasn’t really inlfation, it was greed-flation brought on by businesses large and small grossly overpricing their product in order reap record profits at the expense of all consumers. Yes, many people continue to come into our country, just as they did during Trump’s term. Trump promised to fix it but failed, and even had to be reined-in when he started keeping immigrants in cages, separating children from their parents, failing to document where those children and parents ended up. Yes, homelessness and mental health continue to be major problems, but improvements are being made around the country. My recollection is the problems got worse under Trump. Yes censorship is a problem, but is not uniquely a democratic problem and has never been part of the democratic platform. Republicans have demonstrated their willingness to ban books and movies without regard to First Amendment protection. Mark Z. is not my hero, especially since he has been displaying a fondness for conservative ideas lately. The DOJ is doing what it has always done: investigate and prosecute criminals. The fact that many of those criminals were right-wing extremists working in support of Trump is inconsequential. The fact that real criminals continue to be prosecuted for their crimes is something I hope we never lose. Removing candidates from ballots, WW III etc. are all just conspiracy theory scare tactics that have amazingly manipulated a good portion of our citizens to believe verifiable lies in place of the truth. Unfortunately, many of them vote based on those lies. Our country has never been closer to being run tyrants and bullies, our right to fair elections being taken from us, and government control of honest journalism. The only solution is to move forward. Sure we all have fond memories of the world we grew up in, but those times had their share of atrocities and injustices. The truth is you can never go back. We’re going forward, with Kamala Harris as president, and we will all benefit from it.
      
      Reply
      - Chuck Dunbar August 27, 2024
        
        Thank you for taking the time, Norm, to refute this nonsense with reason and clarity– making the case for us. Well done and appreciated.
        
        Reply
      - Call It As I See It August 27, 2024
        
        Oh yes, thanks Norm. Your response lacks common sense. Once again get help for your Trump Derangement Syndrome. Actually just keep reading your response over and over, soon the light bulb may go off.
        
        Reply
        
        Chuck Dunbar August 27, 2024
        
        Whoever you are, if you really think there is a “lack of common sense” in these remarks, why don’t you attempt to factually rebut them one by one, instead of making snide remarks. Put up or shut up, as in the old saying….
        
        Reply
        
        peter boudoures August 27, 2024
        
        Inflation-credit card debt is at all
        Time high, this doesn’t harm people like norm
        Border- trump had low numbers and was continuing to build a wall, Biden sold off the materials. He’s thinking of Obama when it comes to kids in cages.
        Censorship- liberal media companies continue to sensor free speech which is why Zuckerberg is beginning to come clean. Twitter files, Russia colusion, Biden laptop as examples.
        Right wing Jan 6thers are light work compared to pro Palestine riots.
        Removing Bobby from ballots is exactly what Happened and not fake news
        This is ww3
        The censored journalists are conservatives.
        Biden exit was a coup
        Harris won’t do interviews because she will drop in the polls.
        
        Reply
        
        Norm Thurston August 27, 2024
        
        Reciting what you heard on Fox News does not give you credibility. You also appear to be making a lot erroneous assumptions.
        
        Reply
        
        peter boudoures August 27, 2024
        
        You appear to be willfully ignorant or simply a liar.
        
        Mike J August 27, 2024
        
        You actually were wrong factually. In particular look up current inflation rate and crime stats and Biden administration actions addressing both.
        
        Harris polling average now at 4% lead and growing.
        
        Reply
        
        Norm Thurston August 27, 2024
        
        I was looking at the CPI for the Western States region, which showed a decrease for July. The CPI for the country has increased 2.9% over the past 12 months, which is not a bad number. Maybe you could tell us about crime stats and Biden.
        
        Reply
        
        Mike J August 27, 2024
        
        Biden actions signing legislation enhancing police depts was a help. Some of their passed legislation and other efforts have helped significantly reduce inflation. So many Trump claims are complete fantasies. Elements of the crime rate are very reduced, inflation now greatly reduced so in Sept the Fed reduces interest rates.
        
        Reply
MAGA Marmon August 27, 2024

The Reagan movie will be released on August 30th.

See trailer below:

MAGA Marmon

Reply
- Harvey Reading August 27, 2024
  
  I saw my fill of his movies on TV when I was a kid, and I’m damned sure not gonna watch another featuring him.
  
  Reply
Sarah Kennedy Owen August 27, 2024

I read with interest Jonah Raskin’s article on Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. First, it enlightened me as to the really advanced literature we were required to read at the prep school I attended. Heart of Darkness was being taught at Columbia while we teeny boppers were expected to wade through it in ,,, 12th grade? But most of all, I appreciate Raskin’s anger at the way that book was taught at Columbia, and likewise at my high school. I don’t think we were once informed that Conrad was reporting, albeit through a fictional account, on an actual situation in the Congo. All I knew was it was a depressing story about a very bad man named Kurtz, and that we were supposed to read it as symbolism, metaphor and analogy! Reading King Leopold’s Ghost enlightened me as to the reality of that book and opened my eyes, I totally agree with Raskin, that, here in America, literature is not taught in a way that makes it understandable .

I also want to comment on Mr. Kunstler’s objectionable article regarding Kennedy and the whale story. According to Wikipedia, Kennedy and one of his relatives cut off the head of a dead whale and strapped it to the top of their car and drove around that way, while the juices from the head dripped or even poured, into the car. That does not sound like a reasonable thing to do, and it’s not funny either. For all his supposed earnestness, Kennedy is a deeply flawed and troubled individual.

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Zanzibar to Andalusia August 27, 2024

It’s the fulfillment of a long time dream to be mentioned in the AVA, albeit pseudonymously. Thanks for reading and keeping track.

One of these days I should write the story of how I ended up here… featuring the narcissistic biker (survivor of many a near-death experience at the Boonville Lodge), John Ross (RIP), Bill Kimberlin (I remember the old old truck, not the Toyota, and the sound of an oak tree nearly cutting it in half), Jamie (the flat Earther), and a very patient real estate agent (who shall remain nameless, lest she take the blame).

I never knew the owner of Modern Times. Even if he was a jerk, I wish MT was still there instead of whatever Mission-killing monstrosity is there now. Hard to explain to people what it’s like to have your whole community evicted in the space of a decade… like a slow-motion bomb going off, but one that produces no sympathy.

And whatever cynical thoughts I might think about the origins of People’s Park, I sometimes fantasize about denying the University’s claim … by any means necessary. Michael Delacour (RIP) was kind of a jerk too, but the park seems to have died with him.

Reply
Zanzibar to Andalusia August 27, 2024

Kunstler …

“advocacy for Hamas terrorists”

There is no such thing as a Palestinian terrorist. Zionism is terrorism, and “Israel” – as an occupying force – does NOT have the right to “defend itself.”

“Israel = Old Testament = moral boundaries”

The IDF tried to arrest several of their own soldiers for raping Palestinian prisoners. However, pro-rape IDF soldiers showed up, not only to defend the rapists, but to rape more Palestinians to show how much they approve of the pro-rape policy. At first the rape advocates wore masks, but once they realized they were being hailed as heroes, the masks came off and they are now celebrities – making daily appearances on “Israeli” television wherein they proclaim that rape of “non-Jews” is perfectly legal.

Oh, and they bomb children. Daily.

Reply
Liri Heller August 28, 2024

‘Ice Man’ 1928

My brother sent me this…

Three Stooges were active between 1922 – 1970

“The Three Stooges: Curly, Shave Some Ice!”
https://youtu.be/bLug_bYSNtw?feature=shared

“Stooges Running Ice”
https://youtu.be/r7B0NdbCSog?feature=shared

Reply

Mendocino County Today: Tuesday 8/27/2024

41 Comments

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