Mendocino County Today: Saturday 9/14/2024

By AVA News Service on September 14, 2024

Laguna Point Boardwalks, MacKerricher (Jeff Goll)

A VALLEY READER WRITES: Simulated rifles for the purpose of getting birds off of vineyards is the most annoying solution I’ve ever experienced. May your life be the same hell you are creating. POW POW POW. Salmela Road was peaceful.

WEAK SHORTWAVE RIDGING will diminish today as longwave troughing pushes into the region. This longwave troughing aloft will bring consistently cooler temperatures well into next week, with a couple shortwave troughs expected to bring rain tomorrow and Wednesday. (NWS)

STEPHEN DUNLAP (Fort Bragg): 46F under clear skies this Saturday morning on the coast. Lovely weather is forecast for the weekend with a breeze kicking up tomorrow. Maybe a sprinkle on Monday then maybe light rain on Wednesday, the forecast keeps changing? What do I always say next?...

LOCAL NOVEMBER ELECTION HIGHLIGHTS

by Mark Scaramella

Among the candidates for local elections this November are some recognizable names from the past. Most of the special and school district races are uncontested with the same number of candidates (often including incumbents) as seats. In some races there are fewer candidates than seats which will mean an appointment by the Supervisors. But some races have more candidates than seats.

For example, Former Sheriff Tom Allman is running for one of the three Willits City Council seats that are up for election along with incumbent (and former Willits Police Chief) Jerry Gonzalez, Robin Leler and Matthew Alaniz.

Former Sheriff Jim Tuso is an incumbent board member of the Redwood Valley/Calpella Fire District and is running unopposed for one of three seats up for election. Incumbent John Strangio is instead running for the Ukiah City Council and is not running for re-election to the Redwood Valley/Calpella Fire District Board. Anne Woida is the only other candidate for the remaining two seats there.

Former Ukiah Attorney Brian Carter, son of the legendary Republican fixer-attorney Jared Carter and former Attorney for infamous Pacific Lumber CEO/criminal Charles Hurwitz, who now lists his residence as “Manchester,” is running for an appointed seat on Redwood Coast Fire District board.

Scott Cratty who manages the Mendocino Fire Safe Council is running for a vacant seat on the Ukiah Valley Fire District board.

Incumbents Adam Gaska and Tom Schoeneman are the only candidates for the two Redwood Valley Water District board seats.

Former Coastal County road manager, former Grand Jury member, and former candidate for Fourth District Supervisor Steve Cardullo is running to fill a vacant seat on the Westport Water District board.

Four candidates are running for two “full-term” Mendocino Coast Healthcare District board seats including incumbent Paul Katzeff (of Thanksgiving Coffee) and Mikael Blaisdell, Lynn Finley and Gabriel Maroney. Incumbent Sara Spring is not running for re-election. In addition, Jan McGourty (“appointed”) and Paul Garza (also “appointed”) are running for the Healthcare District’s two “short term” seats.

Three political newcomers are running for two open seats on the County School Board since incumbents Charlene Ford and Drew Duncan are not running for re-election: David Strock, Nancy Bennett and former AV Superintendent and former County School Superintendent Michelle Hutchins. This could be the most interesting local race since Ms. Hutchins lost by a narrow margin to current County School Superintendent Nicole Glentzer in a hotly contested and mean-spirited race in 2022.

Occasional AVA on-line commenter Lew Chichester is not running for re-election to the Round Valley Unified School district board. Instead, incumbent Zoe George will run against Steve McCormack and Cindy Nelson for the two Round Valley Unified seats that are up for election.

In two of the more closely watched local races we see five candidates running for two seats on the Fort Bragg City Council: Incumbent Lindy Peters, along with Ryan Bushnell, Bethany Brewer, Scott Hockett and Mel Salazar.

And inland, there are two incumbents, Josephina Duenas and Doug Crane running against four new candidates Kris Mize (formerly of Anderson Valley), Heath Criss, the aforementioned John Strangio and former Second District Supervisor candidate Jacob Brown. The latter two of which are also members of the newly reassembled “Mendo Matters” group which is lobbying the Supervisors to do something about the increase in homeless encampments in the Ukiah Valley area.

In Anderson Valley the three incumbents for the AV Unified Board, Richard Browning, Saoirse Byrne and Justin Rhoades are the only candidates for the three seats. The AV Community Services District Board sees three candidates running for three seats, two of which are incumbents Valerie Hanelt and (appointed) incumbent Steve Snyder along with architect “Sash” Williams who will replace Francois Christen.

Some local ballot measures are also of interest:

Measure V (Ukiah Valley Fire District): “to adequately fund firefighter/paramedic emergency responses to house fires, wildfires, medical emergencies, car accidents; to hire/train firefighters/paramedics; upgrade aging firefighter equipment and life-saving tools, shall the Fire District enact a $33.50/unit annual parcel tax using the schedule of units in voter-approved Ordinance 97-1 (annual adjustments not to exceed 2%), raising approximately $987,000/year until ended by voters; annual public reporting; all money used exclusively for local fire and emergency medical services.”

Measure W (City of Ukiah): “Shall Ukiah City Code Section 1752 be amended to increase from the current 10% to 13% the transient occupancy tax imposed on the room rate charged to customers of hotels and motels and vacation rentals in the City of Ukiah?”

And Measure X (City of Point Arena): “Point Arena Essential Services Measure. Shall the measure providing Point Arena funding for city services, such as public safety, pier operations, and general government services by establishing a 7/8-cent or 0.875% sales tax providing approximately $90,000 annually until ended by voters, and requiring independent audits and public disclosure of all spending, be adopted?”

For the full list of candidates and positions go to: https://www.mendocinocounty.gov/home/showpublisheddocument/66389/638609673769630000

LOCAL EVENTS

THE REDWOOD VALLEY MUNICIPAL ADVISORY COUNCIL MEETING (September 11, 2024)

by Dolly Riley

Here are some highlights.

Guest Speaker Angela Godwin, County Ag Commissioner, stated she wants to support farmers and growers. Her focus is on education and compliance and is reaching out to the community. Her goal is to promote and protect agriculture, citizens, and the environment by monitoring pesticide use which is highly regulated in California. She helps certify Farmer’s Markets. Her office traps exotic fruit flies and checks incoming FedEx and UPS shipments for pests in fruit. Med flies came to CA from Hawaii in a gift and have cost many millions in So Cal to eradicate. Her office checks weights of cattle trucks and wine grape gondolas, and is responsible for providing a seal on gas pumps to indicate correct octane and price. Also present was Ag office co-worker Amanda Stoner. Amanda pointed out the “Ag Pass,” which allows landowners to access their property within fire evacuated areas, to water crops including cannabis or to care for livestock. It must be obtained ahead of time, is on County Ag website, and not guaranteed.

Chris Boyd, Chair of the Redwood Valley/Calpella Fire District Board, stated their next meeting is 9-12-24 at 6pm at the firehouse. She added that the PG&E fire cameras have been helpful, and asked all to use the Watch Duty app for active fire updates. Gizmo Henderson stated the OES is still waiting for PG&E permission to use their poles for 4 more local sirens, and Kahli Johnson added that PG&E shares poles with AT&T, the latter using the first 23 feet.

Coming Redwood Valley Grange activities include: Grange Flea Market on 9-14, Adopt-a-Road 9-21, and Grange Dance 11-16-24. John King announced the Redwood Valley Inland Humane Society’s Critter Carnaval on 9-22-24, noon to 4pm, which the Grange supports. It is a family activity that benefits the Inland Humane Society and will feature animals, provide food, and have celebrity dunking.

The Redwood Valley Rec Center (RVRC) steering committee is working to transition the old Redwood Valley School into a recreation and community center. The 8-8-24 Ukiah Unified School District (UUSD) meeting was a packed house of locals wanting to lease the old school site for the community. At that meeting, Marybeth Kelly had asked if the soccer fields could be used by the public and recently Superintendent Deb Kubin stated “no” because insurance would not cover the usage. The RVRC will be present at the 9-12-24 UUSD meeting at 6:30pm to ask if UUSD can turn on the water for the fields, as we will provide seeding preparation and insurance. The public is invited to this meeting. We await the UUSD’s request for a November waiver to allow them to lease or sell the property. People are encouraged to email the State Dept of Education to make our intentions known.

The increased size of licensed cannabis farm grows was on the BOS agenda for 9-10-24. Pien Ris-Yarbrough announced that the Supes voted unanimously to keep grow size to 10,000 square feet, and to allow an additional 12,000 sq ft for a cannabis nursery in special situations. The BOS are sending the policy back for a re-write.

The proposed Faizon Gas Station megalith project for Redwood Valley is highly opposed, and no date has been set by the BOS for a permit decision. CalTrans requires a $2 million center divider on the 101 Fwy as a condition of the permit, for the purpose of preventing left turns across the freeway to get to the proposed gas station. So Faizon submitted a new traffic study purporting there is a quarter of the traffic now, compared to the original study (indicating they’d like to forgo the center median). However, on 8-20-24 Chair Dolly Riley spoke with County Planner Liam Crowley who stated “Informally, CalTrans has told me they don’t agree with Faizon’s newest traffic study.”

New proposed development includes the bus stop construction on N State St and West Rd near 101. MAC members and the public decided we want the spot to retain public parking, food trucks, and a bus stop. Chris will prepare a letter from the MAC to CalTrans to retain public usage of the bus stop project pullout area.

Subcommittee to prohibit new gas stations is doing research. Chris noted that even though the BOS one year ago had rejected the idea of a County-wide prohibition of new gas stations, with information provided by the Grassroots Institute, there are new supervisors coming in that may be more open to the idea.

Next meeting 10-9-24.

(Dolly Riley is the Chair and Jini Reynolds is Vice-Chair of the Redwood Valley Municipal Advisory Council.)

Peacock walking along Reynolds Hwy 8 (Jeff Goll)

JIM SHIELDS

This past Tuesday, the Supervisors unanimously rejected a proposal by staff (Cannabis Department, Planning and Building Department, and the County Counsel’s Office) to illegally expand by more than double, the 10,000 square-foot cap on weed cultivation.

The Supervisors are to be commended for their action and for paying attention and listening to the vast majority of their constituents. Hopefully, this is a sign of the dawning of a new day.

It's impossible not to recognize the seemingly institutional dysfunction in the governing process of this county. Too many elected officials and “public servants” who are classified as department heads, middle management, and “staff,” go out of their way to create problems when their main goal and purpose is to provide services to the public and solve problems when they arise. As I’ve said, probably too many times, most people don't have lofty expectations of their elected representatives. Most would settle for an adaptation of the Physician's Oath, “First, do no harm.”

Just within the recent past County staff has ensnared the Supervisors in the following snafus:

Decision by CEO Darcie Antle and Dr. Jeanine Miller, who oversees both the Public Health and Behavioral Health Departments, to relocate/evict the Veterans Services Office to another facility.
Decision by the County Counsel’s Office to implement illegal copy fees in violation of the California Public Records Act (CPRA) for records requested by the public and media.
Decision by the CEO’s Office and County Counsel’s Office proposing “dissolving” upwards of 29 citizen committees, including all six of the existing Municipal Advisory Councils (“MACs”) located in Gualala, Hopland, Laytonville, Redwood Valley, Round Valley, and Westport.

I was involved as a participant and leader in all of those issues, working with other individuals and organizations. Fortunately, we were able to defeat all three of those very bad ideas. In all three issues, I worked with Supervisors John Haschak and/or Dan Gjerde to set things right. However, the point is none of those issues should ever have seen the light of day since they weren’t problems until the Supervisors’ staff and Department heads made them problems.

It’s like I always say, problems just don’t happen, people make them happen. It can be argued that permeating the entire local governing process is that both previous and current Boards of Supervisors have functioned too often as a rubber-stamp for too many dubious proposals emanating from the County Executive Officer, Department heads, and staff.

That dynamic must change, and the Supervisors must reassert their control over the CEO and staff who are all un-elected bureaucrats, whose primary role is to support elected supervisors in their duties and efforts to articulate and represent the best interests of their constituents. It’s obvious that too many of the Supes’ staff don’t give a damn about what’s in the best interests of county residents.

That reversal of the tail wagging the dog should be the number one item on the Supervisors’ to-do list.

MENDOCINO COUNTY SUPERIOR COURT RETIREMENTS & WHY WE NEED A $150 MILLION NEW COURTHOUSE 3 BLOCKS FROM THE DA’S OFFICES & WAY OUT OF DOWNTOWN UKIAH

Mendocino County Superior Court will soon have two judicial vacancies due to retirements, and is therefore “reorganizing the workload to accommodate these changes,” court officials announced.

In a press release, court officials reported that “beginning on Monday, Sept. 16, Judge Cindee Mayfield will no longer have a regular judicial assignment. She will be winding down a few trials and will be finishing some orders and decisions in anticipation of retiring at the end of the calendar year.”

With the pending retirement of Mayfield and the recent retirement of Judge Jeanine Nadel last January, “the court will soon have two judicial vacancies and is reorganizing the workload to accommodate these changes,” the press release notes, explaining that “Presiding Judge Keith Faulder has met with the judges and determined that the two felony departments will equally divide the misdemeanors and that visiting judges will handle infraction court trials, misdemeanor jury trials, and other evidentiary hearings.”

The new judicial assignments were listed as follows:

Dept A, Judge Faulder — felonies and misdemeanors

Dept B, Judge Shanahan — felonies and misdemeanors

Dept C, Judge Pekin — family law, limited civil, Adult Drug Court and Behavioral Health Court

Dept E, Judge Moorman — unlimited civil and probate

Dept F, Comm. Saxby — child support (Thursdays)

Dept F, Judge Brennan via Zoom — unlawful detainers (Wednesdays)

Dept G, Judge Dolan — juvenile justice and juvenile dependency

Dept H, Visiting Judge — jail arraignments, misdemeanor/infraction trials, evidentiary hearings.

SUPERVISOR MULHEREN (facebook):

Congratulations to our Behavioral Health Team we are now 24/7 staffed to do Crisis Response with Law Enforcement. This was one of the key components of Measure B when it was envisioned and I’m grateful to the team that steps up each day to do this important work. The goal has been to leave mental health diagnosis to trained mental health professionals and we are getting there with this program. We are also continuing the hiring process so we can keep this program fully staffed. You will note in the data how few people meet the requirements for a 5150 hold, this is an ongoing community conversation. Meeting these thresholds is important for client care, this doesn’t mean that people that are in Crisis don’t need mental health care, it just means they don’t meet the standard to be on a hold. As we work to unite with all of the providers of mental health in our community I hope we can better articulate the roles in the mental health care system and continue to identify and fill gaps in partnerships with the various agencies. PS. In an emergency you should always call 911 and the dispatchers will send out County Crisis. You can also call the Crisis hotline and they will send them out as well. Both work.

CHANGE OUR NAME FOREVER

September Teach-In

Change Our Name’s next Monthly teach-in will be Tuesday, September 17 at 7 p.m. at Town Hall in Fort Bragg at 363 N. Main Street.

Envisioned as a program to educate attendees about the issues involved in the name change and to hear neighbors’ ideas, the teach-in will last about one hour and will feature a speaker and a question and answer/discussion period.

Speakers will be:

Sandy Turner, who has lived in Mendocino County for 36 years, almost all of that time in Redwood Valley before moving to Fort Bragg 3 years ago. He has worked with kids much of that time as a school bus driver and then as a teacher in Ukiah area schools, and, now retired, he volunteers at Dana Gray School. He has long been active with non-profit organizations in the Ukiah area and has been involved with 3 or 4 here on the coast in the last three years. He will speak about interacting in positive ways with people in Fort Bragg Forever, in particular, in collaborating on several projects on which he believes we mostly agree.

Amanda Cruise, who is an artist, writer, educator, facilitator and earth based healer. She founded Wild Soul Medicine and over the last fifteen years has helped many people lift stress, distress and trauma individually and collectively, through the healing power of nature, art, subtle and deep soul work. Amanda was born in Rome, Italy, and raised multilingual in multiple countries, providing her with a wealth of exposure to the many below the surface ways that racism, oppression, and toxic patriarchal systems can permeate people, places and communities. She will talk about the effort to rename streets and remove statues in Glasgow, Scotland which honor those who profited from slavery.

Discussing controversial topics requires civility and respect for the opinions of others. This program is free and open to all.

https://www.changeournamefortbragg.com

https://www.facebook.com/groups/2334853713317266

https://www.youtube.com/@ChangeOurNameFortBragg

Canada geese, Comptche, CA (photo by George Hollister)

ED NOTES

RICHARD GARLICK was once one of Mendocino County’s more passionate senior citizens, at least on the night in 2004 when he tried to murder his wife and his sister-in-law.

AT AGE 81, Mr. Garlick sat in the Mendocino County Jail on bail of $500,000, soon raised to a cool mil when the authorities discovered that Garlick was a man of considerable means, that he had more than enough money to flee, and given the strenuous crime he'd committed there was no doubt he had the energy to run.

THE OLD BOY'S CRIME? Attempting to incinerate his estranged wife and her sister. Mrs. Garlick, herself on the casket side of 70, had left him. And Garlick's sister-in-law? She had put in a lot of time urging her sister to stuff Cupid’s errant arrows back in the quiver, and Mrs. Garlick had finally taken Sis’s advice. Mrs. Garlick told Mr. Garlick to go away and stay away, a demand she backed up with a restraining order.

AT 12:16am the morning of Thursday, May 6th, 2004, an hour most citizens in their 8th decade are deep in slumber, their dentures resting safely beside them in jars of Polident, Mr. Garlick set out for the 400 block of North Whipple where his former wife and her sister resided.

ON THE WALL of the alley residence occupied by his wife and her one-person support team, he wrote a great big but non-specific “Fuck You” and set the structure and himself on fire, and obscuring his juvenile curse, too. The old man, singed and unhinged, hadn't intended to scorch himself but he managed to drive off, perhaps gloating to himself, “Got 'em both.”

FORTUNATELY for everyone on the crowded block, 24 Fort Bragg firefighters were able to contain the blaze before it took out the whole neighborhood. For every person living in a street-front Fort Bragg house, it seems like there’s five people living in hobbit huts out back.

GARLICK'S crude attempt at revenge could have killed Mrs. Garlick and her sister, and could have been a major disaster for the town but for the valiant effort of the Fort Bragg Fire Department.

NOBODY but the vengeful old coot was injured, and him not seriously when his forearms and eyebrows were crisped when his gasoline accelerant had blown up in his face. The old man had been seen driving off from the fire and he was soon under arrest.

GARLICK was arraigned in Ten Mile Court, Fort Bragg, on charges of attempted murder and bound over on high bail.

AND THEN WHAT? I don't know. And it’s bothered me for years that I don't know. I was never able to find out what happened in the matter of The People vs. Garlick, but I suspect he pled guilty and, given his age, was told not to do it again, and home he went to Fort Bragg where he lived to be at least 102 (!), a celebratory fact noted in the Fort Bragg Advocate.

IN THE VALLEY AMONG THE HILLS

by Chuck Bush

(Reprinted from the March 6, 2003 Mendocino Beacon.)

According to the late Charlotte Hoak, daughter of one of the first settlers in Comptche, the town was named after Compatche, a Pomo chief who brought his people through that beautiful area seasonally, as a part of their hunting and gathering, nomadic life. The Pomos told her his name means, “in the valley among the hills, beside the river of potholes” — quite a lot for only one little word. It doesn't do justice to such a lovely place, but does seem to be a more appropriate name for the town than for the chief. Other than one Spaniard who obtained a Mexican land grant prior to 1848, there is scant evidence of settlers in the area until the late 1850s/early 1860s.

The first Comptche settlers followed the Pomos' trail about 32 miles west from the small village of Ukiah, bringing their supplies in on foot or horseback, or on the backs of hired Pomo laborers. About 15 miles west they passed Orr's Springs, named after Samuel Orr who moved his family from Kentucky in 1850 and bought the springs in 1858 (from Barry Wright who had bought the land from the Spaniard with the original Mexican land grant). Orr built a three-story inn for travelers and visitors to his sulphur springs. Six miles further west was where Francisco Faria homesteaded some property with Nathaniel Smith in 1863, after selling his property in Cuffey's Cove. A few miles further west was a Pomo campground complete with sweathouse, and just beyond that was the Andrew and Elizabeth Montgomery homestead, later to become Montgomery State Park.

Continuing west another six miles was the Newman Hoak Ranch, the first Comptche house along the trail, about a mile and one-half east of where Comptche Corners would later develop. James Rice from Ohio laid claim to that property in 1857, but soon thereafter married Caroline Coombs of Little River and moved there; he turned his interest over to his business partner, Newman Hoak, who completed the purchase. Hoak was from Maine and had spent many years at sea as a captain before becoming a lumberman. Hoak was the first to log in Comptche and later became superintendent for the Albion Logging Company. Hoak's house was built around 1860 and his family lived in it for 40 years.

Close by the Hoaks were the Danish Oppenlanders. In 1866, Charles Henry Oppenlander and his wife Ida bought 160 acres in Comptche from William Kelley (who had purchased much of what was to become Comptche as a part of his lumber holdings). They started the Oppenlander Ranch, which later was to grow to 2,707 acres. In 1873 Oppenlander also bought property some eight miles east and built an inn which became the Halfway House, and for many years was a stopping place for the Mendocino-Ukiah stages.

Oppenlander came to Comptche with another Dane named John Christian Ottoson. They both had worked for the Mendocino Lumber Company in 1865, cutting hay in two adjoining valleys, and when Oppenlander bought property in one valley, Ottoson bought in the other. He brought his wife and three children from Denmark, and built a home not far from the present Comptche Corners. When Chief Compatche finally passed away, after moving through the Comptche area with his tribe many times, he was buried on a knoll just west of the Ottoson property.

Not much further west was where Andrew Jackson Mack homesteaded after crossing the country in a covered wagon in the 1850s. Mack was part Sioux and always had friendly powwows with the Pomos, whenever they passed through. About five miles west of Comptche Corners along the road to Mendocino is the property granted to William Host and his wife in 1869; Host became constable and he started the search for the famous Mendocino Outlaws in 1879. It is on and around his property that the wild logging camp of Melburne developed, including saloons and bordellos. But after the trees were cut, it quickly disintegrated, so there remain few signs of that town.

West of the Hosts was the Louis Gonsalves ranch. The second homestead claim in Comptche was filed by Francisco Faria for his cousin Louis Gonsalves, who also came from the island of Pico in the Azores. Gonsalves arrived in 1864, and soon brought over and married his fiancee. As a reward for acquiring the property for Gonsalves before he arrived and became a citizen, Gonsalves gave Faria one acre, on which Francisco built a cottage and a saloon sometime in the early 1870s, after he sold his property out on Orr's Springs Road. The Gonsalves property is about as far west as you can be and still consider yourself in Comptche.

Louis Gonsalves Ranch, c. 1900. (Gift of Robert J. Lee)

In the 1870s, in came the Thomsons, the Philbricks, Crocketts, Gibsons and Collins; the Russells moved into Comptche from Orr's Springs. Then the McDonalds and a host of others arrived. The road was good enough to support a stage coach line in the early '70s, the post office started in 1877, and the first school opened in 1884.

There were supposed to have been about 100 families out there in the later 1800s. I don't think the town is that much larger today. Comptche is just a magical secret place where around a hundred fortunate people enjoy living in some of the most beautiful country in the world. May it always stay that way. Thanks to the late Elsa Thompson for her 1973 booklet, "Early Settlers of Comptche."

CATCH OF THE DAY, Friday, September 13, 2024

CHLOE CARLSEN, 20, Clearlake/Ukiah. Disobeying court order, failure to appear.

CHRISTOPHER GARCIA, 43, Ukiah. Parole violation.

CLINT GUNTER, 48, Ukiah. Failure to appear.

SALVADOR HERNANDEZ, 46, Ukiah. Domestic battery, false imprisonment.

JOHN IMUS, 62, Ukiah/Willits. Parole violation.

MACIE MILLER, 21, Hopland/Ukiah. DUI.

NICHOLAS NELLEN, 32, Laytonville/Ukiah. DUI.

AUSTIN SUNDBERG, 24, Galesburg, Illinois/Ukiah. Parole violation.

JEFF GOLL NOTES:

AVA, good piece by John Lanchester from the London Review of Books on the zero-sum activity of financial speculation and especially the derivatives market. Lending banks create $9 of lending credit from $1 of capital and 97% of that is lended to financial institutions.

Speculative derivatives account for $667 trillion — 6 times the entire economic activity of the world. Who conceived and implemented these derivatives (as well as Fractional Reserve Banking) and how is this “Free Market Capitalism”? It’s not, of course. And along with the $1 Trillion interest on the national debt, the consequence of this will be economic collapse.

All the while, the farm stands are at hand.

ON FRIDAY JAMES MARMON GLEEFULLY passed along a recent social media post by Former President Trump

“MASSIVE NEWS! The Department of Justice just released brand new Crime Data showing I was absolutely and completely right at the Debate. In fact, the Data is even worse than we could have ever imagined. Compared to 2020, Violent Crime is up nearly 40 percent, Rape is up 42 percent, Aggravated Assaults are up 55 percent, Violent Crime with a weapon is up 56 percent, Violent Attacks on strangers are up 61 percent, Car Theft is up 42 percent, and the most serious forms of Violent Crime are up 55 percent. Our Cities are UNDER SIEGE. And this does not include the Migrant Crime and Migrant Rape spree that has overtaken our Cities in recent months. Kamala Crime is destroying America, and gangs are taking over!”

Commenter George Dorner asked for a fact check of Trump’s claim which has been repeated on a number of right-wing news outlets.

Here’s the Department of Justice chart from the report that Trump is apparently referring to.

So yes, crime rates are up compared to 2023, but down compared to 2019 when Trump was President and down overall over the past two decades.

As usual, such statistics can be presented in a variety of ways depending on how you calculate it and what political point you may be trying to make. Far be it for us to draw any major conclusions from any of this other than overall crime rates seem to be trending down long-term, but up in the last couple of years. There doesn't seem much correlation between the fluctuating crime rates and who the President is. In California, we certainly agree that the Democrat-inspired Proposition 47 has made theft and drug crimes much harder to deal with and Sheriff Kendall is correct in blaming it on the increase in such crimes. We agree that the reform-oriented Proposition 36 would probably help in California and locally and should be supported.

(Mark Scaramella)

ON-LINE COMMENT OF THE DAY

Obama ate dog meat, the animal… when he was a kid. I looked it up. And it’s documented in his book, “Dreams from My Father.” What a Country…

MEMO OF THE AIR: Good Night Radio show all night tonight on KNYO!

Soft deadline to email your writing for tonight's (Friday night's) MOTA show is 6pm or so. If you can't make that, it's okay, send it whenever it's done and I'll read it on the radio next week. Probably I'll even check email on a music break and read it tonight anyway.

Memo of the Air: Good Night Radio is every Friday, 9pm to 5am* PST on 107.7fm KNYO-LP Fort Bragg and KNYO.org. The first hour of the show is simulcast on KAKX 89.3fm Mendocino.

Plus you can always go to https://MemoOfTheAir.wordpress.com and hear last week's MOTA show. By Saturday night I'll put up the recording of tonight's show. Also there you'll find an assortment of cultural-educational amusements to occupy you until showtime, or any time, such as:

"I don't wanna go in there! I don't wanna go to bed yet!" https://laughingsquid.com/cockatoo-late-night-tantrum/

Trade show body armor demo. This reminds me of the old joke that ends with, "Ungh! Ungh! Ungh! Ungh! Ungh! There's your frickin' canoe, ya bastards!" https://theawesomer.com/stab-proof-vest-demo/749855/

And this will bring back memories. Model airplane construction. The impressive airplane this is a model of was made in 1934 by men who weren't even born when the Wright Brothers put a motor on a big cloth kite and flew it at seven miles an hour for 120 feet, which is close to the /wingspan/ of the Short Sunderland flying boat, that weighed 20 tons fully loaded, and could fly at 210 miles an hour for 3,000 miles. It's a lot like Serenity, the ship in /Firefly/. Kaylee: "You every sail in a Firefly?" Shepherd: "Long before you were crawlin'. Didn't have the extenders, though. Tended to shake." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e4ItIpkqdbI

Marco McClean, memo@mcn.org, https://MemoOfTheAir.wordpress.com

A PERSONAL MEDITATION ON GROWING OLD

by Rebecca Gordon

The Washington Post headline reads: “A big problem for young workers: 70- and 80-year-olds who won’t retire.” For the first time in history, reports Aden Barton, five generations are competing in the same workforce. His article laments a “demographic traffic jam” at the apexes of various employment pyramids, making it ever harder for young people “to launch their careers and get promoted” in their chosen professions. In fact, actual professors (full-time and tenure-track ones, presumably, rather than part-timers like me) are Exhibit A in his analysis. “In academia, for instance,” as he puts it, “young professionals now spend years in fellowships and postdoctoral programs waiting for professor jobs to open.”

I’ve written before about how this works in the academic world, describing college and graduate school education as a classic pyramid scheme. Those who got in early got the big payoff — job security, a book-lined office, summers off, and a “sabbatical” every seven years (a concept rooted in the Jewish understanding of the sabbath as a holy time of rest). Those who came late to the party, however, have ended up in seemingly endless post-doctoral programs, if they’re lucky, and if not, as members of the part-time teaching corps.

Too Broke To Retire

For the most part, I’m sympathetic to Barton’s argument. There are too many people who are old and in the way at the top of various professional institutions — including our government (where an 81-year-old, under immense pressure, just reluctantly decided not to try for a second term as president, while a 77-year-old is still stubbornly running for that same office). But I think Barton misses an important point when he claims that “older workers are postponing retirement… because they simply don’t want to quit.” That may be true for high earners in white-collar jobs, but many other people continue working because they simply can’t afford to stop. Research described in Forbes magazine a few years ago showed that more than one-fifth of workers over age 55 were then among the working poor. The figure rose to 26% for women of that age, and 30% for women 65 and older. In other words, if you’re still working in your old age, the older you are, the more likely it is that you’re poor.

Older workers also tend to be over-represented in certain low-paying employment arenas like housecleaning and home and personal health care. As Teresa Ghilarducci reported in that Forbes article:

“Nearly one-third of home health and personal care workers are 55 or older. Another large category of workers employing a disproportionate share of older workers is maids and housekeeping cleaners, 29% of whom are 55 or older and 54% of whom are working poor. And older workers make up 34% of another hard job: janitorial services, about half of whom are working poor. (For a benchmark, 23% of all workers are 55 and up.)”

We used to worry about “children having children.” Maybe now we should be more concerned about old people taking care of old people.

Why are so many older workers struggling with poverty? It doesn’t take a doctorate in sociology to figure this one out. People who can afford to retire have that option for a couple of reasons. Either they’ve worked in high-salary, non-physical jobs that come with benefits like 401(k) accounts and gold-plated health insurance. Or they’ve been lucky enough to be represented by unions that fight for their members’ retirement benefits.

However, according to the Pension Rights Center, a non-profit organization working to expand financial security for retirees, just under half of those working in the private (non-governmental) sector have no employment-based retirement plan at all. They have only Social Security to depend on, which provides the average retiree with a measly $17,634 per year, or not much more than you’d earn working full-time at the current federal minimum wage, which has been stuck at $7.25 an hour since 2009. Worse yet, if you’ve worked at such low-paying jobs your entire life, you face multiple obstacles to a comfortable old age: pay too meager to allow you to save for retirement; lower Social Security benefits, because they’re based on your lifetime earnings; and, most likely, a body battered by decades of hard work.

Many millions of Americans in such situations work well past the retirement age, not because they “simply don’t want to quit,” but because they just can’t afford to do so.

On The Road Again

It’s autumn in an even-numbered year, which means I’m once again in Reno, Nevada, working on an electoral campaign, alongside canvassers from UNITE-HERE, the hospitality industry union. This is my fourth stint in Washoe County, this time as the training coordinator for folks from Seed the Vote, the volunteer wing of this year’s political campaign. It’s no exaggeration to say that, in 2022, UNITE-HERE and Seed the Vote saved the Senate for the Democrats, re-electing Catherine Cortez Masto by fewer than 8,000 votes — all of them here in Washoe County.

This is a presidential year, so we’re door-knocking for Kamala Harris, along with Jacky Rosen, who’s running for reelection to Nevada’s other Senate seat.

When I agreed to return to Reno, it was with a heavy heart. In my household, we’d taken to calling the effort to reelect Joe Biden “the death march.” The prospect of a contest between two elderly white men, the oldest ever to run for president, both of whom would be well over 80 by the time they finished a four-year term, was deeply depressing. While defeating Donald Trump was — and remains — an existential fight, a Biden-Trump contest was going to be hard for me to face.

Despite his age, Joe Biden has been an effective president in the domestic arena. (His refusal to take any meaningful action to restrain the Israeli military in Gaza is another story.) He made good use of Democratic strength in Congress to pass important legislation like the Inflation Reduction Act. That kitchen-sink law achieved many things, including potentially reducing this country’s greenhouse gas emissions by 40% by 2030, allowing Medicare to negotiate drug prices directly with pharmaceutical companies (while putting a $2,000 annual cap on Medicare recipients’ outlays for drugs), and lowering the price of “Obamacare” premiums for many people.

Still, Biden’s advanced age made him a “terrible, horrible, no good, very bad” candidate for president. Admittedly, a win for 59-year-old Kamala Harris in Nevada won’t be a walk in the park, but neither will it be the death march I’d envisioned.

Old & In the Way?

Government, especially at the federal level, is clearly an arena where (to invert the pyramid metaphor) too many old people are clogging up the bottom of the funnel. Some of them, like House Speaker emerita Nancy Pelosi, remain in full possession of their considerable faculties. She’s also had the grace to pass the torch of Democratic leadership in the House to the very able (and much younger) Hakeem Jeffries, representing the 8th district of New York. Others, like former California Senator Dianne Feinstein, held on, to paraphrase Rudyard Kipling, long after they were gone. Had my own great heroine Ruth Bader Ginsberg had the grace to retire while Barack Obama was still president, we wouldn’t today be living under a Supreme Court with a six-to-three right-wing majority.

What about the situation closer to home? Have I also wedged myself into the bottom of the funnel, preventing the free flow of younger, more vigorous people? Or, to put the question differently, when is it my turn to retire?

I haven’t lived out the past three stints in Reno alone. My partner and I have always done them together, spending several months here working 18 hours a day, seven days a week. That’s what a campaign is, and it takes a lot out of you. I’m now 72 years old, while my partner is five years older. She was prepared to come to Reno again when we thought the contest would be Trump versus Biden. Once we knew that Harris would replace him, however, my partner felt enormous relief. Harris’s chances of beating Trump are — thank God — significantly better than Biden’s were. “I would have done it when it was the death march,” she told me, “but now I can be retired.”

Until Harris stepped up, neither of us could imagine avoiding the battle to keep Trump and his woman-hating, hard-right vice presidential pick out of office. We couldn’t face a Trump victory knowing we’d done nothing to prevent it. But now my 77-year-old partner feels differently. She’s at peace with retirement in a way that, I must admit, I still find hard to imagine for myself.

I haven’t taught a college class since the spring semester of 2021. For the last few years, I’ve been telling people, “I’m sort of retired.” The truth is that while you’re part of the vast army of contingent, part-time faculty who teach the majority of college courses, it’s hard to know when you’re retired. There’s no retirement party and no “emerita” status for part-timers. Your name simply disappears from the year’s teaching roster, while your employment status remains in a strange kind of limbo.

Admittedly, I’ve already passed a few landmarks on the road to retirement. At 65, I went on Medicare (thank you, LBJ!), though I held out until I reached 70 before maximizing my Social Security benefits. But I find it very hard to admit to anyone (even possibly myself) that I’m actually retired, at least when it comes to working for pay.

For almost two decades I could explain who I am this way: “I teach ethics at the University of San Francisco.” But now I have to tell people, “I’m not teaching anymore,” before rushing to add, “but I’m still working with my union.” And it’s true. I’m part of a “kitchen cabinet” that offers advice to the younger people leading my part-time faculty union. I also serve on our contract negotiations team and have a small gig with my statewide union, the California Federation of Teachers. But this year I chose not to run for the policy board (our local’s decision-making body), because I think those positions should go to people who are still actually teaching.

Those small pieces of work are almost enough to banish the shame I’d feel acknowledging that I’m already in some sense retired. I suspect my aversion to admitting that I don’t work for pay anymore has two sources: a family that prized professional work as a key to life satisfaction and — despite my well-developed critique of capitalism – a continuing infection with the productivity virus: the belief that a person’s value can only be measured in hours of “productive” labor.

Under capitalism, a person who has no work — compensated or otherwise — can easily end up marginalized and excluded from meaningful participation in society. The political philosopher Iris Marion Young considered marginalization one of the most ominous forms of oppression in a liberal society. “Marginals,” she wrote, “are people the system of labor cannot or will not use,” a dangerous condition under which a “whole category of people is expelled from useful participation in social life and thus potentially subjected to severe material deprivation and even extermination.”

Even when people’s material needs are met, as is the case for the luckiest retirees in this country, they can suffer profound loneliness and an unsettling disconnection from the social structures in which meaningful human activity takes place. I suspect it’s the fear of this kind of disconnection that keeps me from acknowledging that I might one day actually retire.

Jubilation & Passing the Torch

The other fear that keeps me working with my union, joining political campaigns, and writing articles like this one is the fear of the larger threats we humans face. We live in an age of catastrophes, present or potential. These include the possible annihilation of democratic systems in this country, the potential annihilation of whole peoples (Palestinians, for example, or Sudanese), or indeed, the annihilation of our species, whether quickly in a nuclear war or more slowly through the agonizing effects of climate change.

But even in such an age, I suspect that it’s time for many of my generation to trust those coming up behind us and pass the torch. They may not be ready, but neither were most of us when someone shoved that cone of flame into our hands.

Still, if I can bring myself to let go and trust those coming after me, then maybe I’ll be ready to embrace the idea behind one of my favorite Spanish words. In that language, you can say, “I’m retired” (“retirada”), and it literally means “pulled back” from life. But in Spanish, I can also joyfully call myself “jubilada,” a usage that (like “sabbatical”) also draws on a practice found in the Hebrew scriptures, the tradition of the jubilee, the sabbath of sabbaths, the time of emancipation of the enslaved, of debt relief, and the return of the land to those who work it.

Maybe it’s time to proudly accept not my retirement, but my future jubilation. But not quite yet. We still have an election to win.

(CounterPunch.org)

MONUMENT TO STUPIDITY: The truth about a dumb new campaign to cull memorials

By cleansing the city of monuments deemed retrograde or offensive, San Francisco's leadership diminishes us all.

by Gary Kamiya

They’re back! Just as the city begins to recover from the Great School Renaming Debacle, officials are embarking on another self-righteous crusade to ferret out people and things that don’t “align with San Francisco’s values.”

This time, the campaign is aimed not at canceling the public schools named after malefactors like Abraham Lincoln and John Muir — a ludicrous “progressive” exercise that made the City by the Bay an international laughingstock — but at cleansing San Francisco’s collection of monuments and memorials of supposedly objectionable works.

One hopes that this $3 million monument cull, funded entirely by a Mellon Foundation grant, will not be as historically illiterate as the crackpot school-renaming campaign, but it is equally wrongheaded, an exercise in virtue signaling that will do nothing to improve social justice but, rather, will diminish the city’s historic and aesthetic texture.

San Francisco started down this path to civic stupidity in 2018, when officials, bowing to pressure from Native American activists, removed a large statuary group called “Early Days,” a crucial part of the 1894 Pioneer Monument in the Civic Center. “Early Days” was deemed objectionable because it shows a Spanish missionary looming above a seated, overwhelmed-looking Native Californian (inaccurately depicted as a Plains Indian). After Indian groups criticized the work as degrading, the city had it hoisted away.

Then came the nationwide June 2020 protests that followed the murder of George Floyd. In San Francisco, mobs rampaged through Golden Gate Park, tearing down statues of Francis Scott Key, Junipero Serra, and President Ulysses S. Grant and vandalizing other works. Mayor London Breed and other city officials gave these actions their imprimatur, removing the three toppled statues, as well as a large depiction of Christopher Columbus.

Breed justified the removals by declaring that the monuments did not “reflect San Francisco’s values.” In the black-and-white moral fervor of the moment, the fact that Grant briefly owned an enslaved man named William Jones (whom he emancipated rather than sold for profit) outweighed the fact that he led the Union armies to victory in the war that ended slavery in the United States.

If city officials had stopped there, major damage to San Francisco’s historic fabric would already have been done. Lost in the self-congratulations over the removal of “Early Days” was the fact that the statuary group included a debonaire vaquero — making it, as far as I know, the only 19th century monument in San Francisco to the Spanish-speaking Californians whose dispossession by the Americans was a founding injustice of the state.

Also ignored was the fact that it is far from clear that the work depicts the Spanish padre in a positive light. “Early Days” is a fascinating, ambiguous work, which the city could have curated and used as a teaching tool to discuss both the tragic destruction of Native peoples and cultures and the little-known Californio/Mexican era. Instead, the city removed it.

‘By its very nature, this “equity audit” will be an absurd powerwashing of history.’

Unfortunately, San Francisco did not stop there. After removing the four other monuments, officials doubled down on their sanctimonious monument-cleansing crusade. Breed formed a 13-person Monuments and Memorials Advisory Committee, whose charge was to “examine the history of monuments in the public realm in San Francisco, the individuals, events and ideals they venerate, and how the narratives associated with these monuments align — or do not — with San Francisco’s values today.”

In 2023, that commission duly recommended that the city undertake an “equity audit” of the 98 public works of art in its collection. That audit will be carried out by an outside firm, which will hold three public workshops in October and issue its final report in January. Based on its recommendations, the City Arts Commission will decide whether each monument will be replaced, relocated, or receive additional curation.

Just which of the 98 works the city will deem unworthy of its “values” or failing to contribute to “equity” (whatever that means) is unknown. (Educated guess: Anything commemorating the Spanish-American War had better watch its bronze back.) It is also possible that monuments that have been removed will be restored.

But one thing is certain: By its very nature, this “equity audit” will be an absurd powerwashing of history. As the school-renaming debacle and ridiculous cancellation of Grant demonstrate, the effort by ideologues to weigh long-dead human beings with contemporary moral scales is a fool’s game.

But beyond the silliness of trying to figure out whether Spanish explorer Juan Bautista de Anza or his “narrative” “reflect San Francisco values,” there’s a more foundational question: Why do a city’s public monuments need to align with its contemporary values?

The entire memorial-renaming campaign rests on the assumption that all city-owned monuments, no matter how old, represent a permanent endorsement of the people, events, or ideals they commemorate. That assumption is questionable at best. A memorial may initially constitute an endorsement, but that endorsement fades over time. Monuments represent a record of what people in a city at a given time thought was worth commemorating.

What people in 1894 thought about “Early Days” is not what we think now. Indeed, the very gap between the historic beliefs enshrined in a monument and what we believe now is part of that monument’s richness and aesthetic appeal. This is why they are excellent teaching tools, a function that can be enhanced with curation. The Dewey Monument in Union Square, to choose just one example, is a perfect candidate for a new plaque discussing the imperialist nature of the Spanish-American War and the brutality of the succeeding Philippine-American War.

To quote Vice President Kamala Harris: “You exist in the context of all in which you live and what came before you.” When a city erases parts of a shared and often painful past, it impoverishes us all.

A city obsessed with cleansing itself of monuments that it deems retrograde is a diminished city, a shrill and moralistic city, one that does not trust its citizens to “read” it intelligently. San Francisco has always prided itself on being both swashbuckling and smart. Its pursuit of moral purity is timorous and dumb.

(Gary Kamiya is the author of the best-selling books “Cool Gray City of Love:49 Views of San Francisco” and “Spirits of San Francisco: Voyages Through the Unknown City.” His award-winning column now appears on his Substack, Kamiya Unlimited.)

"THUNDER ROAD, 1958" starring Robert Mitchum with his younger brother Christopher Mitchum. They originally wanted Elvis Presley for the part, but Colonel Tom Parker demanded more money than the production company could afford, Christopher was paid $10.00.

Mitchum not only starred in the movie but produced it provided the original idea and sang the theme song "The Ballad of Thunder Road." The song spent 21 weeks on the Billboard Hot 100.

The movie was filmed in and around Asheville, NC. The moonshiner's cars used in the movie had been used to run moonshine. The production company bought the cars, and the seller used the money to buy faster cars.

ON LINE COMMENT OF THE DAY

So I’m spending good money, time and birthing hormones on my dog, this pint-size carnivore with rheumy eyes that lives in my pint-size apartment. Every day, I probably look at her a few dozen times and feel my heart quiver as I silently wonder: What does she need? What’s she thinking? Is she happy here with me? And she, curled up like a cooked snail in her fuzzy little bed, continues to nap.

ON LINE REACTIONS TO HUMCO DEMOCRATS NAMING MIKE MCGUIRE DEMOCRAT OF THE YEAR

What “significant difference” has State Senator Mike McGuire made for “environmental protection” in Humboldt County?

His accomplishment is being a democrat and getting elected…

Really. This is the best we can do?

McGuire, is no Jerry Brown.

If you like self-promoting and horn-tooting, well, Mike’s your man…

Non Sparkling, boring, even, just talks and talks…

Reminds me of High School…

Hamburgers in the Cafeteria? We’re there…

Talk about low expectations. He’s a bum.

Wow, democrat of the year…. what a great honor! NOT!

The best thing that Mike and the rest of our local Democats have done is keeping maga out our state legislature. Hopefully the maga cult will wind down after their nut in shining armor babbles himself into oblivion.

North westCertain license plate out of thousands c

Giant squirrel should get the honor. There are not many people that turn Republicans into Democrats.

“Honoring” any politician is oxymoronic. Professional liars.

Yay for the grifter.

SMASH & GRAB

by Tran Nguyen

Governor Newsom signed a bill Thursday bringing back tough criminal penalties targeting large-scale stealing schemes and smash-and-grab robberies that have fueled voter frustration across the state.

The new law requires prosecutors to start imposing harsher sentences again for those who damage or destroy property valued at more than $50,000 while committing a felony. A similar law expired in 2018. The new law will sunset by 2030.

“California already has some of the strictest retail and property crime laws in the nation — and we have made them even stronger with our recent legislation,” Newsom said in a statement. “We can be tough on crime while also being smart on crime — we don’t need to go back to broken policies of the last century.”

The decision to bring back tough penalties comes as Democratic leaders continue to work to prove that they are tough enough on crime while trying to convince voters to reject a ballot measure that would bring even harsher sentences for repeat offenders of shoplifting and drug charges.

While shoplifting has been a growing problem, large-scale, smash-and-grab thefts, in which groups of individuals brazenly rush into stores and take goods in plain sight, have become a crisis in California and elsewhere in recent years. Such crimes, often captured on video and posted on social media, have brought particular attention to the problem of retail theft in the state.

The new law is part of a bipartisan legislative package of about a dozen bills aiming to crack down on thefts, making it easier to go after repeat shoplifters and auto thieves and increase penalties for those running professional reselling schemes.

“Violent ‘sledgehammer crimes’ and flash-mob attacks by organized gangs must stop now,” Assembly Speaker Robert Rivas, who authored the bill, said in a statement. “Our business owners and workers should not have to live in fear that these crimes will come to their doorstep.”

The measure is also supported by the California Retailers Association, which said the new penalties would serve as “a deterrent against ‘smash and grabs’ and retail crime.”

But opponents, including criminal justice advocates and public defenders, said the new law will result in more people behind bars for non-retail theft crimes. The measure increases prison time for a wide range of felony charges, they said. That means a person could receive a tougher sentence for offenses such as damaging vehicles while driving under the influence under the new law.

They also criticized the new law for modeling after a plan proposed in a tougher-on-crime ballot initiative, which Newsom and Democratic lawmakers spent months lambasting and unsuccessfully fighting to keep off the November ballot. The new law will expire in five years, while the ballot measure proposes a plan to make the harsher penalties permanent.

“If we’re opposed to it being permanent, why aren’t we opposed to it being temporary?” said Taina Vargas, executive director of Initiate Justice Action, about the new law. “This makes it apparent that, you know, certain individuals in the Legislature and the governor just want to give off the impression of doing something.”

How to tackle crimes in California has become increasingly difficult to navigate in recent years for state Democrats, many of whom have spent the last decade championing progressive policies to depopulate jails and prisons and invest in rehabilitation programs.

As the issue could even affect the makeup — and control — of Congress, some Democrats broke with party leadership and said they supported Proposition 36, the tough-on-crime approach.

Newsom’s administration has spent $267 million to help dozens of local law enforcement agencies increase patrols, buy surveillance equipment and prosecute more criminals. Law enforcement across the state has arrested 6,900 people for retail theft crimes in the first six months of the operation, Newsom’s office said Thursday.

It is hard to quantify the retail crime issue in California because of the lack of local data, but many point to major store closures and everyday products like toothpaste being locked behind plexiglass as evidence of a crisis. The California Retailers Association said it is challenging to quantify the issue in California because many stores don’t share their data.

(ABC7 News Bay Area)

THE JESTING OF ARLINGTON STRINGHAM

by Saki (via Bruce McEwen)

Arlington Stringham made a joke in the House of Commons. It was a thin House, and a very thin joke; something about the Anglo-Saxon race having a great many angles. It is possible that it was unintentional, but a fellow-member, who did not wish it to be supposed that he was asleep because his eyes were shut, laughed. One or two of the papers noted "a laugh" in brackets, and another, which was notorious for the carelessness of its political news, mentioned "laughter." Things often begin in that way.

"Arlington made a joke in the House last night," said Eleanor Stringham to her mother; "in all the years we've been married neither of us has made jokes, and I don't like it now. I'm afraid it's the beginning of the rift in the lute."

"What lute?" said her mother.

"It's a quotation," said Eleanor.

To say that anything was a quotation was an excellent method, in Eleanor's eyes, for withdrawing it from discussion, just as you could always defend indifferent lamb late in the season by saying "It's mutton."

And, of course, Arlington Stringham continued to tread the thorny path of conscious humour into which Fate had beckoned him.

"The country's looking very green, but, after all, that's what it's there for," he remarked to his wife two days later.

"That's very modern, and I daresay very clever, but I'm afraid it's wasted on me," she observed coldly. If she had known how much effort it had cost him to make the remark she might have greeted it in a kinder spirit. It is the tragedy of human endeavour that it works so often unseen and unguessed.

Arlington said nothing, not from injured pride, but because he was thinking hard for something to say. Eleanor mistook his silence for an assumption of tolerant superiority, and her anger prompted her to a further gibe.

"You had better tell it to Lady Isobel. I've no doubt she would appreciate it."

Lady Isobel was seen everywhere with a fawn-coloured collie at a time when every one else kept nothing but Pekinese, and she had once eaten four green apples at an afternoon tea in the Botanical Gardens, so she was widely credited with a rather unpleasant wit. The censorious said she slept in a hammock and understood Yeats's poems, but her family denied both stories.

The rift is widening to an abyss," said Eleanor to her mother that afternoon.

"I should not tell that to any one," remarked her mother, after long reflection.

"Naturally, I should not talk about it very much," said Eleanor, "but why shouldn't I mention it to any one?"

"Because you can't have an abyss in a lute. There isn't room."

Eleanor's outlook on life did not improve as the afternoon wore on. The page-boy had brought from the library By Mere and Wold instead of By Mere Chance, the book which every one denied having read. The unwelcome substitute appeared to be a collection of nature notes contributed by the author to the pages of some Northern weekly, and when one had been prepared to plunge with disapproving mind into a regrettable chronicle of ill-spent lives it was intensely irritating to read "the dainty yellow-hammers are now with us, and flaunt their jaundiced livery from every bush and hillock." Besides, the thing was so obviously untrue; either there must be hardly any bushes or hillocks in those parts or the country must be fearfully overstocked with yellow-hammers. The thing scarcely seemed worth telling such a lie about. And the page-boy stood there, with his sleekly brushed and parted hair, and his air of chaste and callous indifference to the desires and passions of the world. Eleanor hated boys, and she would have liked to have whipped this one long and often. It was perhaps the yearning of a woman who had no children of her own.

She turned at random to another paragraph. "Lie quietly concealed in the fern and bramble in the gap by the old rowan tree, and you may see, almost every evening during early summer, a pair of lesser whitethroats creeping up and down the nettles and hedge-growth that mask their nesting-place."

The insufferable monotony of the proposed recreation! Eleanor would not have watched the most brilliant performance at His Majesty's Theatre for a single evening under such uncomfortable circumstances, and to be asked to watch lesser whitethroats creeping up and down a nettle "almost every evening" during the height of the season struck her as an imputation on her intelligence that was positively offensive. Impatiently she transferred her attention to the dinner menu, which the boy had thoughtfully brought in as an alternative to the more solid literary fare. "Rabbit curry," met her eye, and the lines of disapproval deepened on her already puckered brow. The cook was a great believer in the influence of environment, and nourished an obstinate conviction that if you brought rabbit and curry-powder together in one dish a rabbit curry would be the result. And Clovis and the odious Bertie van Tahn were coming to dinner. Surely, thought Eleanor, if Arlington knew how much she had had that day to try her, he would refrain from joke-making.

At dinner that night it was Eleanor herself who mentioned the name of a certain statesman, who may be decently covered under the disguise of X.

"X.," said Arlington Stringham, "has the soul of a meringue."

It was a useful remark to have on hand, because it applied equally well to four prominent statesmen of the day, which quadrupled the opportunities for using it.

"Meringues haven't got souls," said Eleanor's mother.

"It's a mercy that they haven't," said Clovis; "they would be always losing them, and people like my aunt would get up missions to meringues, and say it was wonderful how much one could teach them and how much more one could learn from them."

"What could you learn from a meringue?" asked Eleanor's mother.

"My aunt has been known to learn humility from an ex-Viceroy," said Clovis.

"I wish cook would learn to make curry, or have the sense to leave it alone," said Arlington, suddenly and savagely.

Eleanor's face softened. It was like one of his old remarks in the days when there was no abyss between them.

It was during the debate on the Foreign Office vote that Stringham made his great remark that "the people of Crete unfortunately make more history than they can consume locally." It was not brilliant, but it came in the middle of a dull speech, and the House was quite pleased with it. Old gentlemen with bad memories said it reminded them of Disraeli.

It was Eleanor's friend, Gertrude Ilpton, who drew her attention to Arlington's newest outbreak. Eleanor in these days avoided the morning papers.

"It's very modern, and I suppose very clever," she observed.

"Of course it's clever," said Gertrude; "all Lady Isobel's sayings are clever, and luckily they bear repeating."

"Are you sure it's one of her sayings?" asked Eleanor.

"My dear, I've heard her say it dozens of times."

"So that is where he gets his humour," said Eleanor slowly, and the hard lines deepened round her mouth.

The death of Eleanor Stringham from an overdose of chloral, occurring at the end of a rather uneventful season, excited a certain amount of unobtrusive speculation. Clovis, who perhaps exaggerated the importance of curry in the home, hinted at domestic sorrow.

And of course Arlington never knew. It was the tragedy of his life that he should miss the fullest effect of his jesting.

TRANSPARENCY ACT WILL REQUIRE MORE BUSINESS FILINGS

by Matthew Viohl

In the alphabet soup of federal government agencies, farmers and ranchers are well familiar with agency acronyms such as USDA, BLM, EPA and the IRS.

While we may often prefer to forget the latter of those exists, employers are now learning of a different bureau housed under the U.S. Department of the Treasury—the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, or FinCEN.

The reason for learning what FinCEN is comes almost exclusively as a result of the Corporate Transparency Act. Signed into law in late 2021, the legislation imposed a new regulation that requires applicable businesses to submit a Beneficial Ownership Information Report, or BOIR, by Jan. 1, 2025.

Per the Treasury Department, roughly 32 million businesses are expected to be liable for filing such a report, including many farms, ranches and agricultural businesses.

Now, I know you’re probably thinking, “I don’t recall anyone from the Treasury Department ever calling me up to let me know about this.” My guess is you’re not alone. In a recent hearing, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen revealed that fewer than 3 million reports have been filed. That is less than 10% of total expected reports through nearly much of the open filing period.

You are also probably wondering what a report is exactly and whether it applies to you. Let’s start with the first piece. FinCEN is trying to establish those who identify as a “beneficial owner” for a given company. A beneficial owner is anyone who either directly or indirectly exercises substantial control of the company or owns or controls at least 25% of a company’s interests.

Any such person who meets this threshold will be required to submit the following on a BOIR: name, date of birth, address and identifying number, which could either be from a driver’s license, passport or even a unique FinCEN ID. Put all of these together for each beneficial owner and you have an official BOIR ready to file.

Own a family business where ownership is split evenly between four individuals? Then that’s four individuals whose information needs to be collected.

As for which businesses this applies to? The answer is: quite a lot.

The Corporate Transparency Act gives exemptions to 23 specific types of entities, which can be found on the CTA FAQ portal. The most relevant may be the large operating company exemption, which excuses companies with at least 20 full-time employees.

The devil is in the details though, so it is best to go online and examine the requirements and exemptions yourself. FinCEN has a robust webpage, www.fincen.gov, that has answers to many questions, as well as contact details if you’re still unsure about your potential obligations.

You are going to want to figure out your potential liability because of what could happen if you choose to not file a BOIR. Willful failure to submit this report could lead to civil and criminal penalties. This includes fines of up to $10,000 and even jail time.

Secretary Yellen has reiterated that the CTA was not formed for the purpose of going after mom-and-pop shops that forget to file reports. The original intent behind the legislation was to help FinCEN detect, prevent and punish financial crimes carried out by money launderers, including those enabling financial terrorism and other bad actors.

While this is all well and good, a legal requirement remains a legal requirement. The federal government may not intend to go after small businesses, but many feel targeted. Not only that, but many people are rightfully leery of providing even more private data to an agency they may be just hearing about and don’t understand.

What is being done to alter this quickly approaching deadline? Some congressional efforts have begun to try to reverse what Congress did just three years ago. But the prospects of legislative relief seem dim at this point.

However, on the judicial front, the National Small Business Association successfully sued the Treasury Department on behalf of its members. In March, a U.S. District Court ruled that the Corporate Transparency Act was unconstitutional and unfairly burdened small businesses by requesting this personal data. While the Treasury Department is appealing that decision, NSBA’s 60,000 members are no longer required to file a BOIR, at least for now.

This still leaves more than 31 million businesses on the hook for filing a BOIR by the end of the year. While I cannot say for certain if that includes your farm or ranch, my guess is there’s a good chance it does.

A counterpart of mine in Washington, D.C., recently quipped, “The federal government seems intent to make 30 million felons overnight.” Rest assured, that’s not the case.

You’re largely safe from becoming one, unless you happen to be a money launderer. Still, I would urge you to go online and determine your legal obligations so that you can avoid any fines or penalties that could result if you fail to file.

(Matthew Viohl is director of federal policy for the California Farm Bureau. He may be contacted at mviohl@cfbf.com.)

BEYOND THE LAW

Twenty-three years ago, America's leaders asserted the right to ignore the law. Now, they want voters to ratify their own disenfranchisement

by Matt Taibbi

On September 14th, 2001, President George W. Bush signed Proclamation 7463 declaring a “National Emergency by Reason of Certain Terrorist Attacks.” The measure activates over 400 additional provisions of executive authority and has been re-signed every year by every succeeding president, including four times by Donald Trump. As discussed on the new America This Week, Joe Biden just signed its latest renewal, effective tomorrow, noting the threat of 23 years ago “continues”.

Along with 200 other Republicans, former Vice President Dick Cheney and former Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez just endorsed Kamala Harris.

Gonzalez, who as George W. Bush’s counsel received and signed the infamous torture memos and dismissed the Geneva conventions as “quaint,” said in a Politico essay his reason was that Donald Trump represented a “threat to the rule of law.”

Cheney said Trump tried to use “lies and violence” to stay in power.

Beyond pushing “enhanced interrogation” and conducting affairs of state through extralegal mechanisms like the Office of Special Plans, Cheney perfected the institutional whopper. His lies weren’t crazy and off-the-cuff, but monstrous and effective, like saying Saddam Hussein “is actively pursuing nuclear weapons” or had “high-level contacts with Al Qaeda going back a decade.” Putting a Trump lie in a class with one of Cheney’s is like comparing a flatus and a methane planet.

It’s the right metaphor, because that doesn’t mean the Trump experience smells great. But we’ve forgotten the scale of the other thing.…

https://www.racket.news/p/beyond-the-law

WHAT YOU DON'T KNOW MIGHT SURPRISE YOU

by James Kunstler

Some of you may have noticed that my regular website, www.kunstler.com vanished from the Internet all week. We have been frustrated trying to get straight answers from the host company, only vague references to “a hardware problem.” We begin to suspect that the Three-letter boys might have seized the server unit my website lived on last Sunday night. We’re standing by on further developments. For now, the blog is still here for you on Substack, Fridays and Mondays. Thanks for your support through this difficulty.

By now, you’ve probably heard enough debate about The Debate, so I’ll spotlight only a few points everybody else left out. You might know this, but Hollywood plays a larger role in the Kamala campaign than just stuffing the endorsements of celebs such as George Clooney, Taylor Swift, and John Legend into the corporate media tank. In fact, much bigger playas, Jeffrey Katzenberg and Steven Spielberg, are producing and directing things backstage at Kamala Central, so what gets in the Kamala news plays as a Spielberg movie like The Color Purple. Just so you know…

Ms. Harris had the advantage Tuesday night of being able to speak in declarative sentences, while her opponent, Mr. Trump, is given, shall we say, to a more choppy, telegraphic speech delivery. It lent Ms. Harris the appearance of being intelligent. The catch was, everything she said was disingenuous or an outright lie.

One whopper — more significant than you might realize — was her stating that she was in the US Capitol building when the J-6 riot happened. You’d think she’d want to be on-hand there, seeing as a joint session of Congress was about to certify her as the first female veep in US history — a chance to be joyful and shine! But, in fact, at 11:15a.m. on 1/6/21 — hours before protesters breeched the Capitol — Kamala Harris was spirited away a few blocks to 430 South Capitol Street, the headquarters building of the Democratic National Committee, where a pipe bomb (or facsimile of one) had been planted hours before by some DC law enforcement person (Capitol police? FBI? DC Metro Police? A paid “contractor” to the preceding outfits?). The exact identity of the culprit has never been released by the FBI, though they have all perp’s cell phone data and closed circuit TV footage. Clusterfuck Nation is a reader-supported publication. Subscribe on Patreon or right here on Substack. This blog is sponsored this week by Vaulted, an online mobile web app for investing in allocated and deliverable physical gold.

The plan, you see, was to disrupt the election certification process underway at mid-day in the House chamber by creating a furor over the discovery of the pipe bomb planted to assassinated veep-elect Kamala Harris — a joint blob / Democratic Party operation. The pipe bomb ruse, it turned out, was never needed because the FBI-instigated riot at the Capitol created a big disruption just in time to send the politicians scurrying for safety and cancel scrutiny of various state’s electors’ reports.

After that scare, the Senators and Congressmen did, in fact, drop the certification challenge and returned to hurriedly finish the certification process later that night of 1/6/21. The pipe bomb story barely made the news, and the scant news about it was expeditiously memory-holed thereafter. After nearly four years, as averred to above, the FBI has come up with. . . nothing. It is important that you understand just how nefarious your federal agencies are, and how corrupt the news is.

Now, as for the Harris-Trump debate, otherwise, and given the rigged features of the exercise, it’s obvious that Mr. Trump muffed several major scoring opportunities. When Ms. Harris dredged up the notorious hoax about “very fine people on both sides” in Charlottesville, Mr. Trump could have addressed the moderators, David Muir and Linsey Davis and asked them why they did not “fact-check” the utterance, which had been thoroughly debunked by the Left-wing site Snopes.com, advertising itself as “the definitive Internet reference source for researching urban legends, folklore, myths, rumors, and misinformation.” Nor did they fact check the likewise debunked “suckers and losers” hoax about US soldiers supposedly uttered by Mr. Trump at the Normandy D-Day cemetery. Actually, Muir and Davis “fact-checked” Mr. Trump over thirty times and Ms. Harris hardly at all.

In any case, Mr. Trump blew many other chances to pin Ms. Harris with her own lies and hypocrisies — like, failing to state plainly that in nearly four years she never actually visited the Mexican border (whatever her designated title was: “Border Czar,” ”Root Causes Detective”)… failing to clarify that the president has been removed from the abortion debate altogether and has no role in telling women what to do with their own bodies under current law. . . that Ms. Harris’s voteless selection as nominee was a paradigmatic affront to “our democracy” that even her own fellow party members ought to recognize… that the War in Ukraine was actually started in early 2014 by Barack Obama, Victoria Nuland, and the CIA, not by Mr. Putin… and omitting to state that all — every last one — of the 2020 election lawsuits across the nation were dismissed on procedural grounds and not on the merits of their arguments, which were never heard in court. That’s just a short list. It is also rumored that Ms. Harris got the debate questions beforehand, since her husband Hollywood lawyer Doug Emhoff, is a close friend of Dana Walden, Co-chair of the Disney Corporation board of directors (Disney owns ABC-News.)

Anyway, that much-awaited event is over now and we are into the homestretch of this election. Kamala Harris has still shown no disposition to meet the press, to answer any questions impromptu and unscripted. The voting public seems to be losing patience with that. Her poll numbers are sinking, despite her admirable ability to speak in declarative sentences and lead joyful laugh-fests.

What remains for our sore-beset country beyond that vortex of nefarious blobbery and balloting lawfare is the interesting development that our government is now pressing to commence World War Three before the election can happen. “Joe Biden,” of course, is lately as absent from the public consciousness as Rutherford B. Hayes, but whoever acts in the president’s name these days just gave permission for Ukraine to strike targets inside Russia with long-range missiles. So, far, the UK and the Netherlands have officially jumped in on that decision.

Note that the Ukrainians have no ability to actually do the targeting of said missile themselves, which involves satellite technology, meaning whatever missiles happen to get fired into Russia will be done by NATO personnel. Mr. Putin has made it clear that such action will have consequences. We might infer that means Russia will strike back at some NATO targets. I must imagine his primary target will be NATO headquarters in Brussels. Other targets would probably follow, perhaps even in the USA. Prepare to duck-and-cover, or possibly to put your head between your legs and kiss your ass goodbye.

WHAT COMPUTERS CAN’T DO

by Eli Zaretsky

The question of what computers can’t do was posed in 1972 by the philosopher Hubert Dreyfus. Dreyfus’s answer – think creatively – was soon considered an error, but the problem remained. In the New York Times last week, Yuval Harari suggested there is nothing that computers can’t do, as they are learning to mimic humans perfectly. David Brooks was more sanguine in the same paper a few months ago:

AI will probably give us fantastic tools that will help us outsource a lot of our current mental work. At the same time, AI will force us humans to double down on those talents and skills that only humans possess.

But Brooks's claim is mere assertion, since he never tells us what these ‘talents and skills’ are, nor why they cannot be replicated by machines, as Harari claims.

It is difficult to distinguish human from machine intelligence because we use the same underlying philosophical and psychological understandings of the mind to discuss both. We think of human beings as essentially rational, problem-solving, goal-oriented animals – an idea that long antedates neoliberalism. At the same time, we think of the computer as a problem-solving calculator, though one with access to far more data than an individual person. The main alternative to this paradigm – psychoanalysis – has long been discredited. Nonetheless, I want to propose a psychoanalytic answer to the problem Dreyfus posed. What computers can’t do is free associate.

Free association occurs when the normal functioning of the mind, which is outward-directed, rational, calculative and problem-solving, is suspended, and a different kind of thinking spontaneously arises. This thinking is free association. We all free associate normally, for example in daydreaming, while doing crossword puzzles or when trying to remember where we left something. In such cases we relax into a state of free-floating attention, rather than concentrate on solving a problem. This practice was the original foundation of psychoanalysis.

Free association reflected Freud’s original (and never abandoned) distinction between primary (i.e. unconscious) and secondary (preconscious but not yet conscious) processes. The primary process is the realm of free (undirected) associations; thoughts do not know where they are going; they proceed by association, which results either in condensations or displacements of affect; they contradict each other, more or less along Derridean lines. The secondary process, by contrast, is governed by a grammar or logic; thoughts have direction, meanings can be specified; thinking is essentially calculation. Freud’s discovery was that by suspending the secondary process, and thereby facilitating free association, it was possible to infer the memories, traumatic residues, wish-fulfilling fantasies, parental imagoes and so forth that give shape to our ‘free’ associations.

The early discoveries of psychoanalysis all rested on the primary/secondary distinction. In a dream, a preconscious thought that would disturb sleep (a fear or wish) drifts back into the non-logical, imagistic, associational world of the primary process, where it connects with early fantasies, wish-fulfilments and unconscious imagoes until it makes its way forward again in the form of a wish-fulfilling dream. Poetry too requires the primary process. In ‘On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer’, Keats begins with the secondary process experience of reading Homer, but then descends into archaic memories of a time in childhood when reading seemed like travelling, and the child could imagine himself ‘silent, upon a peak in Darien’. The archaism of the Homeric world converges with the archaism of infancy.

Computers can of course write poems; they can associate, and construct images gleaned from all the world’s literature, but they will never act like a little boy who began reading books when he was very young and imagined himself growing up to become an explorer. Computers have had no infancy, therefore no primary process, and no free associations because they have nothing to free associate to. Computers can solve problems, calculate, increase scientific knowledge or endow us with the powers to act on the world, or but they cannot turn inward, become passive and receptive, and discover an inner world, since computers have no inner world to discover.

Since computers perform the same instrumental, problem-solving, goal-oriented functions that we do, the fear that they might someday ‘compete’ with us is not unreasonable. The only edge humans have over computers is access to the unconscious through suspension of rational thought: i.e., free association. But what a paradox! Free association is precisely the capacity that we use less and less. Society today has reduced free association to playing word games or finding lost keys. To understand how this occurred, we need access to the unconscious.

The idea that the mind is a sort of computer goes back to the seventeenth century, to figures such as Hobbes, Descartes and Pascal, but it really gained ground in the mid-twentieth century, with the growth of cybernetics. The basic idea behind cybernetics was to bracket off the questions of subjectivity and interiority that pervaded the Freudian age and to focus instead on prediction and control gained through the gathering of objective, behaviorist information or data. While the cybernetics movement did not survive, a data or network-based view of the world gained ground. The turning point occurred in the 1980s, following the advances in microprocessor technology that made home computers possible, leading to today’s ubiquitous screens and interfaces, feedback loops and circuits, information cycles and supply chains.

The triumph of the computer was accompanied by the destruction of psychoanalysis. According to the cognitive psychologists, information theorists and computer pioneers of the 1940s and 1950s, psychoanalysis was a pseudoscience. Managed care, which arose in the 1970s, insisted that psychotherapy proceed according to the ‘medical model’, meaning that rationality was taken as the norm and mental ‘problems’ were defined as diseases that could be classified through their symptoms, while ‘cures’ were defined as the reduction of symptoms. While a psychoanalytic profession continued to exist, it adapted to the new regime by turning itself into a problem-solving, service profession, not one oriented to the exploration of the unconscious.

You might think that the turning away from free association toward the medical model occurred through secondary process thinking: i.e., the progress of science or the integration of psychotherapy into the world of computers. This would be wrong, however. The triumph of our contemporary ‘post’-Freudian way of thinking about the mind required the collective mobilization of vast fantasies, powered by emotions and advanced by the social movements of the 1970s. These fantasies characterized psychoanalysis as a movement that hid child sexual abuse (leading to a wave of false accusations of childcare workers) and as a countermovement to feminism, propagating the idea that women were inferior. While there were grains of truth in these accusations, the much larger truths of the unconscious and the universality of homosexuality and bisexuality were suppressed. The behaviorism of the social movements of the 1970s was reflected in the insistence that the mind was the product of society. As Juliet Mitchell wrote of the movements of her time, for them ‘it all actually happens … there is no other sort of reality than social reality.’

While the discovery of free association dates to the 1890s, Freud later formulated a second way of thinking about the mind, which built on and incorporated that discovery – the ideas of the ego and the id. The ego, as Freud conceived it, was the locus of the secondary process, but its borders with primary process thinking were permeable. The id was the source of the impulses, compulsions and narcissistic fantasies that pervaded the primary process. Freud envisioned an ego that could free associate and thereby maintain a sense of its unconscious environment. In the 1970s, the Freudian ego gave way to egoism in the form of ambition, competitiveness and other corporate values. As was frequently said at the time, in earlier social movements radicals were working for others but now radicals were working for themselves. The neoliberal redefinition of the subject in egoistic terms was a surface phenomenon, however. The embrace of egoism rested on the narcissism that emanated from the id. What Foucault called ‘productive power’ – self-generated and self-managed – required a libidinal basis. Market values, infused by egoism, rested on mass psychological processes.

We seem now to be coming to the end of a centuries-old process. The term ‘artificial intelligence’ was coined in the mid-twentieth century, but the reality of organizing society in the form of a series of algorithms goes back to the seventeenth century, with its focus on ‘matter in motion’. What else is the market but a conglomeration of calculating liberal agents? E.P. Thompson demonstrated the importance of the introduction of clock-time to an increasingly regimented – especially self-regimented – society. Alan Trachtenberg did the same for railways. Moishe Postone, building on the work of Georg Lukács, showed how all secondary process thinking in modern society is formulated on the template of the commodity. What Freud adds to this is awareness of the market’s phantastic sub-structure.

Given this history, reflecting on the destruction of psychoanalysis and the triumph of computers in the 1970s, the problem of artificial intelligence is ill-posed. The danger is not that we will someday have to go to war with computers powered by artificial intelligence. The danger is that we will become a species of artificial intelligence ourselves.

(London Review of Books)

29 Comments

Stephen Dunlap September 14, 2024

Mr. Garlick built the house on the property next to mine soon after I moved here in 2000. After he had legal troubles he sold it to another guy who ended up in prison also. Our current neighbors have had no such issues.

Reply
Julie Beardsley September 14, 2024

I am praying my little atheist prayers that on Nov 7th, Trump and his sickening racism will be behind us. Some people seem to have forgotten that unless you are Native American, we are all immigrants. In the 19th century the Chinese, Irish, Italians and others were vilified. The fact is that immigrants, whether illegal or legal, are here because they want a better life for their families. They are some of the most hard-working, law-abiding people you ever hope to meet. America is great BECAUSE it is a melting pot. Let’s not forget that on Nov 6th. VOTE!!

Reply
- peter boudoures September 14, 2024
  
  Can you break down how an employer can legally hire an undocumented migrant? Obviously this migrant would need to start work day 1 and any delay isn’t possible.
  
  Reply
  - Zanzibar to Andalusia September 14, 2024
    
    Employers can hire people who have made an asylum claim. It takes up to six years for them to get a hearing, and in the meantime they are legal to work. The government even sued Tesla for not hiring refugees.
    
    Not saying it’s right or wrong, just how it is. Seems odd to me that they don’t enforce the law that says if you’re claiming asylum you have to go to a real border crossing.
    
    Well, it did seem odd to me, until I read the Goldman Sachs report which says the reason the US didn’t enter a recession and the reason the US economy is beating most other countries’ economies is… immigration. Infinite growth models require… infinite growth.
    
    Reply
    - peter boudoures September 14, 2024
      
      https://youtu.be/mXdu8gkNLTk?si=q2pHZctAxZy8Kkwa
      
      Yeah that’s what i gather. Looks like they wait for the sheriff instead of using the port of entry.
      
      Reply
  - Adam Gaska September 14, 2024
    
    Said illegal immigrant gives employer a fake resident alien card and someone else’s SSN. Said wmployer is not required to verify. They do regular with holdings and taxes, give said illegal immigrant a paycheck. Said illegal immigrant cashes their check.
    
    Reply
    - Kathy Janes September 14, 2024
      
      And the person whose SSN was used gets the credit on their account.
      
      Reply
      - Adam Gaska September 14, 2024
        
        Yes.
        
        Often, they are dead and the system just takes the money.
        
        Reply
Me September 14, 2024

Does the Measure V specifically state that the monies raised will go into a dedicated account string for sole use for fire services? Or is this a “promise” only that the funds will be designated as such but go into the General Fund?

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- Bob Abeles September 14, 2024
  
  I believe you’re asking about Mendocino County Measure P, a 10 year 0.25% sales tax passed by the voters in 2022. All that’s there is a wink and a nod that some of the funds might go to fire and other essential services. The Major’s probably up to date on how that’s worked out.
  
  Reply
  - Norm Thurston September 14, 2024
    
    A “General Tax” in California requires a simple majority (>50%), and is not legally restricted in how it may be used. A “Special Tax” is restricted to a specific purpose, and requires a 2/3 majority (66.7%). Measure P is a General Tax, so there is no legal restriction as long as it is spent for a government purpose. The Board of Supervisors have the final say in determining how to use those funds.
    
    Reply
    - Jim Shields September 14, 2024
      
      Norm has it correct with one exception: The two-thirds requirement on special, dedicated taxes is lowered to the simple majority standard if the measure is placed on the ballot by voters via the initiative process. The Library sales tax, Measure O, was put on the ballot by voters and was approved by the simple majority standard. That’s why Library proponents could argue they had put a “lock box” on the funds that the Supes couldn’t unlock, unlike the Fire Tax prop that was put on the ballot by the Supes.
      
      Reply
      - Norm Thurston September 14, 2024
        
        I am not familiar with the provision that allowed the library sales tax as an exception to the 2/3 majority, Jim. Do you have any codes or documents as a reference? Thanks.
        
        Reply
      - Norm Thurston September 14, 2024
        
        The ballot for Measure O specifically identifies it as a “Special” tax.
        
        Reply
  - Mark Scaramella September 14, 2024
    
    The Measure P money is being delivered in quarterly amounts in a very grudging process that’s at least a year behind from when the sales taxes were received. So far, I believe, two quarters worth of revenues have been delivered to fire districts, but at least it appears to be allocated more or less along the lines of the Board’s original formula and not being raked off. The County is requiring each of the approximately 20 separate fire districts to negotiate and sign individual “contracts” for each quarterly disbursement. Apparently this silly and wasteful arrangement is the brainchild of the former (interim) County Counsel James “$400 per hour” Ross and it is being continued by the new County Counsel Charlotte Scott.
    
    Reply
    - Me September 15, 2024
      
      I don’t feel I received a clear answer to the question “Does the Measure V specifically state that the monies raised will go into a dedicated account string for sole use for fire services?”
      
      Reply
      - Adam Gaska September 15, 2024
        
        Measure P.
        
        No. The money goes to the general fund. The BOS did pass a proclamation stating that they will use the money collected for fire services and the fire safe council in a formula similar to the campground TOT tax money that is devoted to fire services.
        
        Dan Gjerde has hinted about using some of the money to pay for dispatch services which the County pays for.
        
        Reply
        
        Me September 17, 2024
        
        Thank you very much.
        
        Reply
MAGA Marmon September 14, 2024

This is the new DOJ numbers that Trump is referring to, just released Thursday.

New DOJ crime data appears to support Trump’s debate claims about high crime rates

WASHINGTON (TND) — The Department of Justice released a new report on Thursday showing that crime rates remain elevated under President Biden.

This new data is challenging the narrative currently being pushed by the White House and the Kamala Harris campaign. It also highlights how difficult it is to get an accurate nationwide measure of where crime is actually trending.

The DOJ numbers come from a massive annual government survey of crime victims. The report found 22.5 out of every 1,000 residents reported being the victim of a violent crime in 2023 and 102 of every 1,000 reported being the victim of a property crime. Both of these numbers are statistically unchanged from the year before. Both are also higher than 2020, the final year of Donald Trump’s first presidential term. This appears to back up claims crime remains higher under the Biden-Harris administration than under Trump.

The Department of Justice released a new report on Thursday showing that crime rates remain elevated under President Biden. (TND)

“The public can look at the national crime victimization survey and see that crime is not going down. Again we are told to not believe our lying eyes,” said Sgt. Betsy Smith (ret.),spokesperson for the National Police Association.

But the FBI crime statistics tell a different story indicating drops in crime. These are the numbers the White House is focusing on. This set of data shows crime decreases year-to-year, but is still higher than five years ago.

READ MORE BELOW

https://www.foxbaltimore.com/station/share/new-doj-crime-data-appears-to-support-trumps-debate-claims-about-high-crime-rates-debate-fact-check-fbi-stats-kamala-harris-donald-trump-joe-biden-white-house-statistics

MAGA Marmon

Reply
- Zanzibar to Andalusia September 14, 2024
  
  Once again…
  
  Yes, higher from the bottom.
  
  And also yes, lower from the peak.
  
  See: U.S. violent and property crime rates have plunged since 1990s, regardless of data source, Pew Research based on FBI statistics:
  https://www.pewresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/20/2024/04/SR_24.04.23_crime_3.png
  
  Reply
- Harvey Reading September 14, 2024
  
  “Foxbaltimore”?
  
  LOL.
  
  Reply
- Jim Armstrong September 14, 2024
  
  I cannot think of any statistic that shows less about any administration than that of crime, in all of its incredible variety, causes and effects.
  IMHO, stats and polls are like those things on a boar.
  
  Reply
Betsy Cawn September 14, 2024

In response to Rebecca Gordon’s “meditation on growing old,” the perspective of self-worth based on remunerative value leaves out the contributions and importance of volunteer services. Understandably triggered by the current legislative attempts to raise the age of official “retirement” and the fact that more older people are staying in the workforce — much of it due to the fact that people cannot afford to retire, and the dearth of skills-based workforce capacities to take our places — the undervaluation of volunteer contributions is overlooked, both as a source of important (but chronically unfunded) public services and as a source of genuine self-worth.

As a secondary benefit of remaining actively employed, human interaction and affiliation with co-workers and “customers” provide sources of gratification and a sense of engagement, which the author ruefully contemplates as an inevitable loss, but that loss is not a concomitant of losing a paycheck. Hundreds of opportunities for social engagement, political participation, friendships and meaningful associations await the obviously abundant talents of so many older adults whose lives are tied to necessary means of economic self-sustainability.

Down-sizing one’s primary residence is more difficult in this era of escalating home prices, and alternatives for individual habitation requiring less financial drain (also offering greater communal benefits) are yet to be offered by the industries addicted to high profits for resource-consumptive subdivisions and high rises. But our generation also wields the strengths of life-long survival of global crises, the twists and turns of international competition, and de-catastrophizing the impacts of humanly-created disasters.

Divested of the obligations of on-the-job performances, both professional and personal, we elders can explore our social environments with an eye toward creating new ways of valuing our work, and help those next generation leaders to understand the importance of unpaid public service on which so many of our “safety net” programs depend.

To Ms. Gordon, I say, throw over those traces and have some fun doing the work you love! We all need you.

Reply
MAGA Marmon September 14, 2024

Putin warned NATO to get out of Ukraine or he would invade and he did. People pushing for escalation are suicidal and evil. The west is on record starting this. Russia is not our enemy. The globalist are!

MAGA Marmon

Reply
- Marshall Newman September 15, 2024
  
  I still go with Russia as our enemy. It has made several nuclear threats over the past two years and I haven’t heard any from the globalists
  
  Reply
Zanzibar to Andalusia September 14, 2024

I had a great vegan burger at Millennium in Oakland (formerly in SF). Worth the splurge.

I always thought it was funny that Bob Weir was connected to the Grateful Dead, SF high society, Bohemian Grove, and the community of Comptche.

Mostly unmentioned in the discussions of property crime is the role cannabis legalization played. A mutli-billion dollar industry that had thousands of… let’s call them sales associates… was suddenly rug pulled and replaced with corporations. So now that “workforce” has to find a way to replace the revenue.

The other thing that isn’t mentioned often is that the ‘smash and grab’ rings are not merely raging teenagers (primarily “of color”) but are in fact run by women like Michelle Mack, who ran one such operation to the tune of $8million/year (and with a distinct lack “of color.”)

Obama ate dog meat, and Trump gets within smelling distance – and actually touching – Laura Loomer. Not sure which is more gross.

Oh, that’s right, both of them bombed 100% innocent people in countries that never attacked us, and yet not only do they roam free, 40% of the electorate loves one and 40% of the electorate loves the other. THAT’s more disgusting.

Columbus was a child sex trafficker and mass murderer. Junipero Serra was a brutal enslaver. Yes, they should be taught about in school, but, no our public spaces should not be used to honor them. As another item on the page says….’“Honoring” any politician is oxymoronic. Professional liars.’

Kunstler thinking TLAs care about what he has to say. Laughable. Didn’t read past the first paragraph. Boycott Zionists.

Speaking of Zionists, Yuval Harari is one. Civil society groups have called for a boycott of “Israel,” and that includes an academic boycott. Besides being a Zionist criminal, he’s also a WEF idol who has said that humans must be “hacked” by elites. Deeply evil person.

Reply
Zanzibar to Andalusia September 14, 2024

https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/a-short-conversation-about-politics

“If you don’t vote for the Baby Incinerators with Blue Hats, you’re helping the Baby Incinerators with Red Hats!”

Reply
Elee Heller September 22, 2024

Rebecca Gordon, when is it my turn to retire…
Sept. 14, 2024

NICKY THOMAS – IS IT BECAUSE I’M BLACK?

The dark brown shades of my skin…
Wondering why my dreams never came true,
Is it because I’m black?

Something is holding me back,
Is it because I’m black?

In this world of no pity,
Something is holding me back
Is it because I’m black?

‘Cause I wanna be somebody so bad, so bad
I wanna be somebody, I wanna be somebody so bad

Ya see
I heard somebody say one time
You can make it, if you try
Oh, and some of us, we tried so hard, we tried so hard…

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Elee Heller September 23, 2024

The list of undesirables has feet 🐾, the level of intolerance grows.

The battle cries: ‘you are trying to replace me, you are trying to delete me’

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Mendocino County Today: Saturday 9/14/2024

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