Mendocino County Today: Thursday 9/19/2024

Warming | One Log | Principal Resigns | Spirited | Jac & Fred | Doggie Door | Ed Notes | Rock On | Unaffordable Housing | Bridge Meeting | Better Braggers | Chamber Music | Drifter | KZYX Ukiah | River Bend Cafe | Weedflation | Yesterday's Catch | Quick Quiz | Cows Kill | Prioritizing Relationships | Service Station | Without Alcohol | Henpecked Husbands | Homeless Students | Confession Compulsion | Secret Deals | BS Mystery | Nora Barnacle | One Take | Intimidating Journalists | FBI Errors | Lead Stories | Latest Joke | Massassinations | Boing! | Brazil Burning | Woke Up

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HIGH PRESSURE is building over the area. This will strengthen through the weekend and into early next week bringing above normal temperatures. Some of the warmer valleys may see temperatures around 100 Sunday and Monday. Offshore flow strengthens over the weekend bringing sunny skies and warm temperatures to the coast. (NWS)

STEPHEN DUNLAP (Fort Bragg): Our rain maker ended up staying offshore yesterday hence no rain for us. 51F with dense fog this Thursday morning on the coast. Patchy fog is our forecast next couple days leading to a bit sunnier conditions for the weekend. Or so they say.

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AV ELEMENTARY PRINCIPAL RESIGNS

Dear Anderson Valley Unified School District Community,

I regret to inform you that Alyson McKay, principal of Anderson Valley Elementary School, has resigned for personal reasons; her final day at AVES will be October 1, 2024.

We are thankful to Mr. Jim Frost, retired superintendent, who has agreed to serve as principal of AVES while we begin a recruiting campaign. We are also deeply thankful to the staff at AVES for their dedication to our students and the school.

We are thankful to Alyson for her service to the district and her commitment to a smooth transition.

If you have questions or concerns, please feel free to reach out to me.

With respect,

Kristin Larson Balliet

Superintendent

Anderson Valley Unified School District

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HORSES & WHY I HAVEN'T BEEN WRITING

by Anne Fashauer

Back at the end of June I was working on a series about our travels in Italy. I still intend to finish that up, in case you’re wondering. But at the end of June, on a beautiful Sunday morning, my life as I knew it then was abruptly changed.

I was heading to help friends with a yard sale and as I drove out I noticed that one of my horses, a big bay named Fred, was standing outside of his pasture. I drove down to where he was and led him by his fly mask back to the pasture. When I got there I noticed that one of the lines of the fence was missing. I use electro-braid electric fencing, three strands, to keep them in. They are older geldings and used to this fencing so it’s not always “hot” and it wasn’t in this case. I then walked the line to find that strand and found it way out in the field; by this time I knew something wasn’t right and when I returned to the horses I noticed that my other gelding, a Paint horse named Jac, was standing still and his hind legs were covered in blood.

I haltered both horses and led them up to the barn, where I tied them up outside and started to clean them up, while also calling the vet. It took a little while, being Sunday morning, to get a response, but I did get one and, after sending some photos of the damage, was told the vet was on her way. The damage was a deep slice in the hind leg, deep enough to expose bone. It had stopped bleeding, which was good, and the rest of his legs were revealed to be fine, once the blood was washed away. An hour later the vet arrived and we spent the rest of the afternoon at the barn as she cleaned up the area and sewed the wound shut. She showed me how to bandage him, gave me a routine to follow and set me up with medication for him.

The following day I went to the barn to take care of both of them and I put Fred out in a nearby pasture. He was not happy about being separated from his friend, but I figured he would settle down in a few hours. Unfortunately, he did not. I was driving in to the office a few hours later when my neighbor called and said I needed to get home and to call the vet, that Fred was bleeding profusely. I turned around and headed home and found that Fred, in attempting to get back to his buddy Jac, had tried to push through a gate and had torn his shoulder to shreds. I really did not think he would live out the day. I was able to stop the bleeding and get him somewhat cleaned up as I waited for the vet to arrive.

Another day was spent at the barn, this time as the vet not only cleaned the wound, but then had to stitch it up in three layers - the muscle, the subcutaneous and then the skin. She put in a drain and showed me how to take care of that wound. No bandaging could be done however, due to the location of the wound. We figured that a heavy application of fly repellent around the wound would be the best while I ordered a covering meant for keeping braids, called a sleazy, in place to use to create a type of bandage. I was given different medication and a different routine for this horse’s care and told it would be a long time before we’d know how well he would recover.

At this point, I lost all free time. I would get up, make a cup of tea and one of coffee and walk to the barn. I’d pull one horse out and do the wound care, then clean his stall and paddock and then medicate and feed and return that horse and do the other one. For the month Fred was confined to his stall with no paddock access. That made for a very smelly and messy stall. Jac at least could walk outside and do his pooping and peeing out there. I also learned during this time that Jac was a rather neat horse, usually peeing in one spot and pooping outside his stall. Fred would wait until I had cleaned his stall and put down fresh shavings and then pee next to them (never on top of them). I found myself spending two to three hours in the morning at the barn, medicating, tending wounds and cleaning up. The evenings were shorter, usually only an hour, hour and a half, with only feeding and cleaning. But four hours out of every day was most of my free time; no more bicycling, no more crocheting, no more cooking. I would make breakfast most mornings, but dinner was all on Van. In fairness, he does most of the cooking anyway, but I usually help with things like the salad or vegetables. No more; I usually didn’t make it back from the barn until 8:00 PM and by then I was too tired to do anything.

The first couple of weeks were OK; I was tired, but I was game. As the weeks passed it got harder. My only break was when we sat down to eat dinner in front of the TV to watch one of the shows we like. I enjoyed the time I was spending with the horses when I was there and I soon started to listen to books while I was down there (ten minutes hosing a horse’s wound doesn’t sound like a long time until you have to do it every day, twice a day and the horse doesn’t like it either). But everything else was suffering - my work was very busy, but I couldn’t sit down to do anything until 10:00 AM, sometimes later; then I’d have to shower and drive somewhere - my office, a property to show it, a new listing to look at. I’d come home in the evening and change clothes and head back to the barn. And then there were the days that the bandaging I’d done that morning would need to be redone - either it had slipped or been damaged by the horse.

I started to have new appreciation for all kinds of little victories - at first, it was just a day that no other disaster had occurred; then it was the day that Fred could go out in his pen and do his toilet outside. Then there were the days that the medication ended and I no longer had to grind pills or force a giant syringe into a mouth twice a day (for a while it was two syringes twice a day). Then they both got to the point that their wounds didn’t need daily attention; my time at the barn went from three hours in the morning to two and sometimes only one and a half. The evenings got down to 45 minutes.

Bandaging Fred’s wound was a whole other adventure. First I used the sleazy with a piece of t-shirt material cut to size and safety pinned in place to keep the flies off. He also had the skin to help with that. But then, when they stitches were removed, so was that flap of skin as it had died. At that point he had a huge open wound. The vet put in stitch loops that I would use to hold a bandage in place covering the wound; this worked for a week or so until the wound started to itch and he rubbed off those stitches. I finally went online and found a very large, very expensive bandage that looks like a giant t-shirt that would cover the area.

Amazingly, Fred’s wound, which looked so much worse than Jac’s - much deeper and much more ragged, started to heal up nicely. Jac, on the other hand, seemed to stay the same. This necessitated x-rays, which revealed what looked like an infection near the bone (and a broken bone in that leg, a finy thin bone) and so that started another round of antibiotics. This, plus some manuka honey, seemed to finally get that healing process moving forward.

There is a problem keeping horses in stalls for weeks at a time. Just like a human who is forced to rest due to an injury, the horse gets out of shape, which can cause new injuries to happen. One evening as I was at the barn feeding, my nephew shot a buck and the gunshot spooked the horses who ran out of the barn into their paddocks. When Jac came back inside he was carrying his good hind leg and seemed unable to put any weight on it. I watched it, took photos, called the vet and waited. It never swelled up but he also could not set it down for more than a few seconds. The vet said to cold hose it, give him some bute and call in the morning with an update. Well, the next morning he was the same; the vet arrived around 9:15 AM and took some x-rays; nothing was broken, but it appeared that all of the ligaments around that hoof had been damaged. We talked about what care would look like, but with the other leg compromised and no guarantee that he would actually recover, combined with his being 25, we made the heartbreaking decision to have him put down.

Putting down an animal is never easy but at least with an animal who is older you usually have watched them go downhill and then you know when it’s time. The problem with horses is that everything else can be just fine but one leg; Jac was as full of life as ever, but horses cannot get by on three legs. It was a terrible shock to us and more heartbreaking because of all the time I had recently spent with him.

So, now I have only one horse. I was concerned about his mental health as horses are herd animals, but he seems to be doing fine. I go down twice a day, as before, only now I take him out for walks, both as a chance for him to get out of the stall for a while, but also to help him build up some muscle and get fit again. I hope his wound continues to heal as nicely as it has been and that in a few more weeks he won’t need the big t-shirt bandage and I’ll be able to put him out in a small pasture. Eventually, I hope he can go out in the large one where he can roam and hang out with the various deer and birds. Fred is also 25 but barring any more injuries, he is in good health and shape.

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ED NOTES

AN AVA READER NOTED: “The root cause of homelessness is exploitation. Why do rents go up 2-3% minimum EVERY year? This is also one of the root causes of inflation. Why do some people own several homes and get tax write offs on all of them? Why are some homes not even lived in but merely held as an asset by overseas investors? Quit blaming the victims and the people who are collateral damage of capitalism.”

THE ANDERSON VALLEY went over to wine-based tourism years ago, prior to which it was a coherent community based on logging, sheep, apples, and retired people who'd always lived here. Now? A whole lotta transient rentals with locals struggling to pay extortionate rents while working in unstable service jobs.

SODDEN THOUGHT. How long will it be before we see a cell phone murder in this country? I give it a month.

SIGHTED at the Fair, a local MAGA woman walking around displaying a Harris/Walz sign, constantly explaining to her startled MAGA comrades, “I lost a bet.”

THE FAIR EXHIBIT that absolutely wowed the Lego Generation and everyone else was a remarkable Lego recreation of D-Day by a grandson of the late David Colfax.

“OVERHEARD in the halls of the County admin center: “We all know that you and the other supervisors have sacrificed a lot to serve us because you could be making a lot more money in the private sector.”

NAMES! NAME ONE Mendocino County supervisor over the past forty years who has been lured from public office by the private sector.

YOU CAN get anywhere in The City on the Muni’s bus, trolley and train lines, but don't be in a hurry to get there and allow at least an hour for the journey if your trip requires a transfer. And always be ready to dismount and walk if you happen to be on the bus when Our Nation's Future is getting out of school, or traffic is so jammed that it doesn't move at all for long minutes and you can walk ten blocks faster than the bus will carry you. When it rains in The City everyone learns to drive all over again, and the bus drivers are in snarlingly bad humor, and they’re hardly jolly even in the most serene circumstances. A depressingly large number of Muni drivers seem to be active misanthropes, but given the provocations they suffer, small wonder. They take their revenge when they can.

I REMEMBER a day when a hard rain fell, catching lots of us without our umbrellas, as six of us huddled in the southbound shelter at California and Polk, me clutching my transfer like a worried kid with a note home from school pinned to his shirt. The bus finally appeared, but rather than pull up at the shelter so we could board without getting wet, the driver stopped the bus a dozen feet beyond. A young girl and I exchanged glances and laughed. Two Asian women reacted not at all, a young Hispanic male muttered under his breath, a huge fat man in knee length grey shorts inscribed “Michigan Baseball” on one leg, lumbered on board and loudly asked the driver, “Why'd you do that?” The driver looked straight ahead, unhearing, uncaring. There's no answer to petty malice of course, so the fat man, having satisfied himself (and us) with his rhetorical blast sat down heavily in the front section. These seats are theoretically reserved for the elderly and the infirm, but the young and firm are often planted on them, as two of the young and firm were that day, both of them mesmerized by hand held devices. I was hoping the fat man would sit down on them, but he took up two seats across the aisle, where he sat wheezing from getting wet, getting annoyed, getting on the bus, and now facing the prospect of repeating the annoyances in reverse order when he got off the bus, and he could count on the driver letting him off in the least convenient spot he could find to disembark his critic.

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SCOTT WARD (retired Mendo Planner):

Residential construction in California is exorbitantly expensive due to several factors. The California Building Codes are amended and re-written every three years. The California state legislature uses the building code for social engineering such as the Green Building Code and the California Energy Code. Building material manufacturers use lobbyists and spend millions to get their products mandated by the Codes. The insurance companies lobby for code changes so that they do not have to pay out claims.

Local government such as Mendocino County raise building permit fees to cover costs AND to replenish the General Fund.

In California whenever an affordable housing project is built with government loans and subsidies the contractor and subcontractors have to pay prevailing wage (Union scale) to their employees. The items above are why the term affordable housing in California is an oxymoron.

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CALTRANS TO HOST VIRTUAL MEETING FOR ALBION RIVER BRIDGE PROJECT

Caltrans invites you to participate in a virtual meeting for the proposed Albion River Bridge Project on Thursday, September 26 from 6 p.m. to 7:30 p.m. Meeting information and link will be posted on the project website: Albionriverbridgeproject.com.

Based on public comments expressing interest in rehabilitating the existing bridge, staff will present information related to the rehabilitation alternatives that were considered but eliminated from further consideration in the Draft Environmental Impact Report/Environmental Impact Statement.

Caltrans is considering three build alternatives and a no-build alternative in the Draft EIR/EIS. The project is needed to address functional, safety, and structural deficiencies associated with the existing wood truss bridge. Correcting these deficiencies would improve safety for all users, reduce the chance of catastrophic bridge failure and minimize ongoing maintenance costs.

Public review of the document is available at albionriverbridgeproject.com and at the Caltrans District 1 Office at 1656 Union Street in Eureka on weekdays from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m., as well as at the Mendocino Community Library at 10591 William Street in Mendocino and at the Fort Bragg Branch of the Mendocino County Library at 499 East Laurel Street in Fort Bragg. Comments on this document are accepted by mail or email albionbridge@dot.ca.gov until October 9, 2024.

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ALLIANCE FOR A BETTER FORT BRAGG summed up by Daney Dawson:

My guess is that these folks represent the interests of the Hart Bros. and Mendocino Railway, the corporation that is attempting to take over Fort Bragg with its enormous Noyo headlands development. If that happens, Fort Bragg will never again be the charming, small town it is now, but will become one big theme park overrun with tourists, traffic, and a further stretch on services such as police, fire, water, health care, etc.

Be careful who you vote for.

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OPUS CONCERT THIS SUNDAY!

Opus Chamber Music Concerts presents its first concert of the season with Festival Players this Sunday, September 22nd, at 3 PM, Preston Hall, Mendocino!

This ensemble features the talents of Eric Kritz on clarinet, with Paul Brancato, Marcia Lotter, and Susan Freier on violin, Stephen Harrison on cello, and Carolyn Steinbuck on piano. The program promises a rich tapestry of sounds, opening with the vibrant “Disco Toccata for Clarinet & Cello” by Guillaume Connesson, followed by the emotive “Sonata for Clarinet & Piano by Francis Poulence, The first half concludes with Peter Schickele’s “Quartet for Clarinet, Violin, Cello & Piano. After the intermission, the grandeur of C. M. von Weber’s “Grand Quintet, Op.34” for Clarinet and String Quartet will be on full display.

Tickets and more information at symphonyoftheredwoods.org and at Out of this World in Mendocino.

Coffee, tea and cookies will be available 30 minutes prior to the start of the concert and during intermission.

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KZYX: A HISTORY, 2021 TO THE PRESENT

by Susan Baird, KZYX Board President

The previous issue of The Connector named some of the equipment and transmission challenges that KZYX staff, programmers, and listeners regularly contend with. These problems are getting worse, but they’re not new. They led the Board of Directors in 2021 to purchase 390 West Clay Street in Ukiah, the former offices of acupuncturist Grace Liu, for repurposing as the future home of Mendocino County Public Broadcasting.

Fundraising and construction have gradually moved forward since then, with the pace of construction determined by the pace of fundraising. When both are complete—targeted for late 2025—our community radio station will move into its new and improved headquarters in Mendocino County’s population, government, and economic center.

The new KZYX headquarters will be a major upgrade from the station’s beloved but well-worn mothership in Philo. New broadcasting facilities will include an on-air audio studio and two production studios, plus a meeting and training space that can double as a studio for performances and other programs. New telecommunications and internet infrastructure and broadcasting equipment will assure the reliability and stability of operations. And for the first time in many years, staff will have adequate offices.

There’s a buzz of anticipation about the impending changes among old and new KZYX community members. Longtime programmer Jimmy Humble said this: “It’s time. We’ve grown up to where we need to go to a big town where there are more volunteers and voices. It makes all the sense in the world. It’s important for the station to evolve.” Co-founder Sean Donovan adds that it makes economic sense for the station to own its headquarters, after renting for 35 years. From her vantage point on the Ukiah City Council, KZYX programmer Mari Rodin observed, “It’s good for the station to have more exposure in the county seat.”

For his part, Radio Engineer Brian Henry praised the Board for taking action to solve issues that are limiting the station’s effectiveness. He also stressed that KZYX has a great deal of value to be preserved. “These days, some companies own a thousand stations, or all the stations in a given major-market area. KZYX is the exception. There’s also been a huge decline of news directors and staff in local stations, and much of the public has lost news on the local level. KZYX can be a model of sustaining local news, which is key to democracy in the U.S. The move to Ukiah is about being able to do a better job of serving the community’s interests.”

This brings the KZYX story to the present. Now it’s time for the KZYX community to make history.

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KZYX Ukiah Site Party

Saturday, October 5, 11am - 2pm

390 West Clay Street, Ukiah

Guided tours; Live music by Back Porch Trio

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RON PARKER:

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ON LINE COMMENT OF THE DAY

Northcoast Real Estate: Well, let’s be real. It’s only pennies on the dollar compared to the insanely inflated prices of the greenrush.

If you viewed your remote mountain homestead as an investment that would increase 10x in value in terms of real purchasing power you were delusional. It is, ultimately, marginal land in a remote area that has historically only had value as part of industrial timber harvest.

The market for a super cool off grid homestead an hour+ from any kind of town is vanishingly small when the buyer can’t also expect a 6 figure weed crop off it annually.

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CATCH OF THE DAY, Wednesday, September 18, 2024

SEAN FLINTON, 43, Fort Bragg. Disoderly conduct-alcohol, failure to appear. (Frequent flyer.)

FRANK KEECH, 59, Ukiah. Sexual battery by registrant.

MARK MCCARTHY, 43, Lakeport/Ukiah. Robbery, resisting.

MATTHEW MIRAVELLE, 40, Ukiah. Parole violation.

EVAN NELSON, 28, Ukiah. Under influence, concealed dirk-dagger, contempt of court.

KELLY STANTON, 48, Ukiah. Battery, battery on peace officer.

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QUICK QUIZ: For what elected position are Mike Greer and Chris Rogers running? Bonus points: Who are they? (Note: Using google is okay AFTER answering.)

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HEALTHY LONGEVITY

by Paul Modic

I wonder if I can sue my “best friend” in small claims court for attempted murder because he never stops by to hang out anymore? (Or maybe just involuntary psychic manslaughter?) This is what I was thinking after reading an article about the seven keys to longevity in The New York Times today.

I was good with the first six: getting physical activity, eating fruits and vegetables, getting enough sleep, not smoking or drinking, dealing with health conditions, and cultivating a positive mindset, but was I lagging with what they called the most important one: “prioritizing your relationships”? (“Isolation and loneliness is as big a detriment to our health as smoking, and puts you at a higher risk for dementia, heart disease, and stroke,” the article said.)

Regarding “prioritizing your relationships,” the article suggested you ask yourself how many friends or family you’ve seen in the last week. (Does that include phone calls? What about online correspondence like email or social media?) How about a fifteen minute talk with another walker in the park, or if I just say hello to people in passing, does that count? Can several short encounters be counted as one full “social contact unit,” like trading in four houses for a hotel playing Monopoly?

Maybe it’s time to start going to the neighborhood ping pong game once a week, talk to my neighbor when he goes by walking his dog, hang out with another friend more often in our cars in the parking lot, and make up with the Problem Child and visit her sometimes? (If someone comes by to work with me on a project does that count on the “relationship ledger?”)

What kind of social activities could fill this gap? I recently met a nice couple at the park, should I invite them over for fun activities like basketball, Nerf dodge ball, or Non-ecstatic dancing? Could we play hula hoop-Nerf dodge ball once a week? These are important questions, dammit, and if you don’t come by I’ll see you in court! (Maybe I could play golf with the judge, try to bribe him with a bag of worthless buds?)

Who else can I sue for social neglect for withholding life-enhancing conversation and company? How about my sister who never comes by, except twice a year to bring me a pie. (Hey, that rhymes, I’m a poet, let’s start a poetry group, Haiku only.)

What happened? They finally got smartphones and with that seductive blue light glowing in their hands bringing them the universe, they don’t need me, and they don’t read books anymore, listening to podcasts and watching Youtube instead. Is it time to also sue smartphone manufacturers for creating this reality, and stage interventions for my addicted friends? (Am I the one who needs an intervention? I would welcome that, for the added social interaction.)

Jeez, am I such an abrasive instigator that you just can’t bring yourself to put your phone aside, visit me, and help extend our lives? (Hey, I just hold the mirror up, you don’t have to look into it.) Oh hell, just join “Team Paul” and I’ll forget all the lawsuits, otherwise…

Then I got to the last sentence of the article which said, “If you have to pick one healthy practice for longevity do some version of physical activity.” Well, I got that one right and I headed to the park, though I’m still wondering why my glorious company isn’t wanted or needed. (Maybe those “friends” are stressed out, depressed, just want to be left alone, and don’t want to bring me down with their whining and complaining?)

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LEARNING TO CONNECT WITH FRIENDS — WITHOUT ALCOHOL

Quitting drinking was the easy part. Figuring out how to be myself was harder.

by Lilly Dancyger

About six months after I quit drinking, I sat at a corner table in a candlelit restaurant with one of my closest friends. It was the kind of place where we used to refill each other’s wine glasses all night, sharing appetizers and intimate details of our lives.

That night, though, it felt more like we were catching up: surface-level conversation you might have with a work acquaintance or when seated next to a distant cousin at a wedding. By the time the entrees came, we’d reached the end of these “so what else is new” updates. I recognized that we were at a threshold — one I had been unable to cross so far without booze.

There are studies that confirm what I — and anyone else who has ever made friends with another drunk woman in a bar bathroom — have always known: Drinking can help build social bonds. It lowers inhibitions and fosters feelings of connection. But what happens when you’ve come to rely on alcohol to establish and reinforce those connections?

I started drinking when I was 13, skipping class to chug cheap vodka and 40s with friends. We’d sprawl out on park benches or huddle on stoops, laughing about everything and nothing. I liked the sloshy, blurry feeling; the warmth in my cheeks and heaviness in my body. But what I liked most about being drunk was that it made it OK to say how sad I was — or to just start crying, without saying anything at all.

By my late teens, a drink in the evening (and then a second and third) to soften the edges of my life seemed normal — even more so once I became a bartender, tucked away in a nocturnal world that revolved around alcohol. I prided myself on being able to do shots with customers all night and still settle the register correctly at 5 a.m.

On my nights off, my friends and I went out, often to the same bar where I worked. And though I didn’t loiter on stoops drinking vodka out of the bottle anymore, the end of a night out was ultimately the same: Once I’d had enough to drink, it felt safe to admit to being sad or lonely or unsure.

Alcohol was a shortcut to intimacy, a way to override my fear of looking foolish or sharing too much. It was the password to a private back room where secrets could be shared without reproach. After a night of drinks and confessions with a friend, I would fall into bed and into the deep sleep of the unburdened.

But by my early 30s, hangovers escalated from discomfort to debilitation. My chronic migraines came more frequently, and were undeniably exacerbated by alcohol. I tried just drinking less, but I eventually started getting headaches partway through my first drink. Something had to change.

Cutting out alcohol entirely wasn’t that hard after years of scaling back. I didn’t miss the taste of wine or the warm, relaxed feeling — but I didn’t realize I’d have to relearn how to connect with my friends.

Seeing how much I had relied on alcohol to feel close to people I love made me more certain that cutting it out had been the right decision. I hated the idea of requiring a substance for something so essential. But that still left me with the question of how to bridge the gap; how to access that private room if the password I’d used for all these years was no longer available to me.

Eventually it became clear that I’d have to just push through the discomfort. I’d have to make a conscious decision to say the vulnerable thing that would have slipped out on its own after a few drinks. And so, at that candlelit dinner, I asked myself: What would you say right now if you were at the end of your second glass of wine? Not pretending I was drunk; just pushing myself to be bold.

I took a sip of my too-sweet mocktail, and blurted out the details of a difficult family situation that I hadn’t yet shared with anyone other than my husband. Then I laughed, in surprise or nervousness or both. But my friend didn’t miss a beat: She asked me questions, listened and empathized. And then, with the threshold behind us, she shared a worry of her own — and there we were together in that back room, saying the real stuff. I was so relieved. And in my relief, I understood that part of me had truly feared I wouldn’t be able to connect with people in the same way without drinking.

I want the people I love to see me in all of my messiness, and I want to see them in theirs. For us to be ourselves together, fully and without pretense. But wanting that closeness doesn’t make it any easier to expose my uncertainties and fears and human weaknesses.

My desire for intimacy is forever at odds with my desire to appear put-together and in control. For most of my life, alcohol made it easy to let go, but now I’m learning to do it on my own. I still feel a flutter of embarrassment as I step over the threshold, but knowing I can still access that space has kept me going — and kept me sober.

(Lilly Dancyger is the author of “First Love: Essays on Friendship” (The Dial Press).)

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HOMELESS STUDENTS CAN SLEEP SAFELY IN THEIR CARS at this California college. Other campuses say no

by Briana Mendez-Padilla

Pink hues adorn the horizon as the sun rises on a nondescript parking lot at Long Beach City College. The lot is quiet but not empty, with the same gray asphalt and slightly faded white lines as any other one on campus. But from 10 p.m. to 7 a.m., it is much more than a place to park.

The lot is a designated area for Long Beach City College’s Safe Parking Program, an initiative from the college’s Basic Needs Center that offers safe overnight parking for students and connects them to resources like showers and Wi-Fi. The program was created to address a particular student demographic: homeless students living in their cars.

A report from the Community College League of California found that 2 out of 3 of the state’s community college students struggle to meet their basic needs and almost 3 out of 5 are housing insecure.

To help these students, multiple legislative measures have tried to create safe parking options similar to Long Beach City College’s. The most recent effort was Assembly Bill 1818. Introduced by Assemblymember Corey Jackson early this year, the bill would have required the California Community College and California State University systems to create pilot programs to provide safe overnight parking for students living in their cars.

“Parking lot homeless programs are a best practice that’s been used throughout the nation; churches have done it, cities have done it, it’s time for colleges to step up and do it too,” Jackson said.

The bill was killed in the appropriations committee on Aug. 16, but would have required the California State University to select five campuses to participate in the pilot program; the California Community College chancellor would have had to select 20. The pilot program would have lasted through 2028.

The appropriations committee, which assesses the financial viability of a bill, estimated establishing pilot programs across the Cal State system would cost around $500,000 as well as an additional $2.25 million in annual costs. For the California Community Colleges, the committee estimated between $91,500 and $112,00 in one-time costs and $10 million to $13 million in annual costs for the duration of the program.

Justin Mendez, coordinator of Long Beach City College’s Basic Needs Program, oversees the safe parking program and said those estimates sound high, although he acknowledges that costs will vary from campus to campus. Long Beach City College has been able to fund their program for less than the committee’s estimated costs by working collaboratively with other departments and using existing contracts.

While the bill had garnered support from organizations like the California Faculty Association and the Student Senate for California Community Colleges, several community college districts and the California State University system opposed it. Some of their concerns include liability risk and cost. They also argue that providing secure overnight parking is not a permanent solution.

Letitia Clark, chief communications officer for the South Orange County Community College District, said the district has been investing in programs that support basic needs, including housing, as well as exploring building housing on campus as part of their facilities master plan.

“We don’t want any mandates or anything that would take away from that, and especially with an alternative that we actually don’t think is safe and really provides a good quality of life for our students,” Clark said.

Mendez at Long Beach City College acknowledges that overnight parking is not a housing solution.

“We’re not in the understanding that providing our students a safe place to park is providing them housing,” Mendez said, adding that the program is just one of the many resources available for students facing housing insecurity. However, overnight parking provides an immediate safe space while students are connected to longer term housing.

Providing holistic support

Started in 2021, the program has evolved over the years. The lot is now located next to the college’s campus safety building, which has allowed Long Beach City College to cut down on the nearly $500,000 they spent the first two years hiring an outside security company. Students have access to the bathroom in the campus safety building throughout the night and can access the locker room showers from 6 a.m. to 9 a.m. at the nearby school stadium.

Being next to the campus safety building means overnight security officers and parking employees periodically check in on the lot as part of their routine rounds. Mendez said that despite there not being 24/7 surveillance there haven’t been any safety issues.

The lot has 15 parking spots reserved for safe parking participants from 8 p.m. to 7 a.m. although the program can have around 30 folks enrolled at a time. Mendez said they rarely have issues with capacity because students use the resource to varying degrees — some enroll as a backup because they are at risk of losing their housing, others may only need a night or two while they wait to relocate.…

https://calmatters.org/education/2024/09/california-homeless-college-students/

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POLICE ARE USING SECRET DEALS TO HAND PENSIONS TO TROUBLED OFFICERS. MILLIONS OF TAXPAYER DOLLARS SUPPORT THE SYSTEM

by Katey Rusch

In 2016, internal affairs investigators at the Ventura Police Department concluded that a newly promoted corporal, Josh Young, had lied in a police report. The department demoted Young, who denied wrongdoing, and informed him that dishonesty was a fireable offense.

But before the department could hand down additional discipline, Young went out on paid injury leave. He claimed his demotion was the latest incident in a campaign of religious harassment and that the punishment left him too traumatized to work. Though Ventura argued there was no evidence of an injury, the disciplinary process was paralyzed.

In the end, Ventura was caught between its determination to get rid of Young and the daunting legal obstacles to firing any officer. So it made an extraordinary offer — one that California police departments have extended to hundreds of other officers through a secret system of separation deals known as clean-record agreements.

To secure Young’s retirement, Ventura not only agreed to hide every trace of his alleged misconduct, but to go along with what it viewed as a bogus injury claim. The agency formally certified that Young, then 35, was too disabled to work as a police officer, making him eligible to collect a disability pension from the state of California.

“The City has closed its investigation without any discipline being imposed on Young related to the Internal Affairs investigation referenced above in paragraph 1.2 and will not place any documents from that investigation in his personnel file.”

Five years later, Young continues to claim he is too disabled for police work, and according to the most recent state records, from June 2023, still collects an annual $64,000 disability pension.

Yet he is also earning at least $195,000 a year working as a deputy commissioner in New York City’s corrections system. His job: to reform the city’s jail complex, including Rikers Island on the East River, an institution that has been plagued by, among other issues, correctional officers falsifying reports and abusing sick leave.

Neither Young nor Ventura officials would comment about Young’s case, the details of which come from an array of public documents as well as interviews with five people — the former president of Ventura’s police union and four sources with direct knowledge of the matter who were granted anonymity in accordance with Chronicle policies.

Under California law, police agencies are forbidden from dangling disability pensions as an inducement to rid themselves of problem officers. And judges have repeatedly ruled that officers who claim injuries after they commit wrongdoing are not eligible to collect these pensions. “The pension roll is a roll of honor — a reward of merit, not a refuge from disgrace,’’ a judge wrote in a 1998 opinion that bars public employers statewide from approving disability pensions for employees fired for misconduct.

But an investigation by the San Francisco Chronicle and UC Berkeley’s Investigative Reporting Program identified 49 officers across the state who, on the verge of being ousted for alleged misconduct, were allowed to walk away with their wrongdoing hidden and collect lifetime disability pensions for injuries their own employers had challenged as unsubstantiated.…

https://www.sfchronicle.com/projects/2024/police-clean-record-agreements-pensions

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NORA BARNACLE was born in 1884 at Galway City workhouse, the second child of Thomas and Annie Barnacle.

At a young age, she was sent to stay with her grandmother, although later she returned to live at a house in Bowling Green in the city with her mother and six siblings.

Nora was known for being impulsive and carefree and enjoyed flouting convention.

She moved to Dublin in 1904 where she worked as a maid in Finn's Hotel on Nassau Street.

It was at this point that she caught the attention of an aspiring author named James Joyce.

Later that year, after a whirlwind romance, the pair eloped to Switzerland. They lived together thereafter and had two children, although they did not marry until 1931.

It appears that James Joyce visited his wife's home county of Galway just twice.

On the second occasion in 1912, he spent several weeks and attended the Galway Races, cycled to a graveyard in Oughterard, sailed to Inishmore and possibly went as far as the Marconi Station near Clifden.

Joyce was clearly inspired by his visit to the west.

His poem 'She weeps over Rahoon' is written about the cemetery in Galway while Joyce also wrote two essays on the county.

He also published an article on his namesake, Myles Joyce, hanged unjustly for a murder he did not commit at Maamtrasna in 1882.

Joyce and Barnacle moved around Europe regularly over the coming years and Nora became a multi-linguist.

She also worked various jobs, including as a laundress, to support her husband, whose career as a writer took some years to take off.

Nora was less than impressed with Joyce’s complicated writing style, and later said she had never read Ulysses, his most famous book.

Nevertheless, she was a superb muse and Joyce based many of his most famous characters, including Molly Bloom, on his wife.

Joyce eventually found literary success, giving Nora much of the credit for her support.

James Joyce died in 1941, having not returned to Ireland since his sojourn to Galway in 1912.

His relationship with his homeland was strained.

“Do you know what Ireland is? Ireland is the old sow that eats her farrow,” Stephen Dedalus, a character in Joyce's 'A Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man' says, perhaps mirroring Joyce's own view of the country.

Nora Barnacle outlived her husband by a decade, dying in Switzerland in 1951.

Today, there is a little museum in Galway City, Nora Barnacle House, dedicated to her life and that of her husband.

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IN 1988, ISRAEL KAMAKAWIWO'OLE called the recording studio at 3 a.m. and said he had to record a song right away. 15 minutes later, Israel arrived at the studio. The studio owner, Milan Bertosa said, "And in walks the largest human being I had seen in my life." A security guard gave the 500-pound man a large steel chair to sit on. Milan said, "Then I put up some microphones, do a quick sound check, roll tape, and the first thing he does is 'Somewhere Over the Rainbow.' He played and sang, one take, and it was over."

Today, Israel Kamakawiwo'ole's version, is the most requested one of this classic song.

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NOTE ON SMEARS

Like everyone else in media, I have to take even crazy people seriously now

by Matt Taibbi

In November of 2000, I had lunch at a Moscow restaurant called Chevignon with a group of Russian reporters. I’d been invited by Leonid Krutakov, just canned by Izvestia after exposing a deal for an interest-free loan to a Yeltsin crony. Leonid had a new paper called Stringer and a staffer named Alexei Fomin came along. (I remember thinking I’d never seen Alexei sober, and he was probably thinking the same about me.) The late Anna Politkovskaya was there, and Oleg Luriye, a reporter for Novaya Gazeta, dropped by. NG at the time was facing heat for reporting possible FSB connections to infamous Moscow apartment bombings of 1999.

About a month later, just after appearing on the soon-to-be-raided station NTV to talk about his work, Luriye was attacked by four men, who left him with skull damage and only fled after Luriye’s wife escaped by driving her car through a garage door.

Luriye’s editor Georgy Rozhanov got a call telling him he was next if the paper didn’t stop investigating. Fellow Novaya Gazeta writer Igor Domnikov had already been beaten to death with a hammer. Six more NG reporters would be killed in the next decade or so, including Politkovskaya and a kindly man named Yuri Schekochikhin who’d excused my broken Russian to help me early in my career. These memories have prevented me from suggesting American media figures like me can know real intimidation.

Last Friday, Josh Christenson at the New York Post reported on a memo showing the State Department strategizing in response to reporting by me and the Washington Examiner’s Gabe Kaminsky. Later, Gabe tweeted that a Biden administration official briefed congressional staff that I wasn’t to be trusted because of “unsavory” behavior in younger years in Russia. That second news turned out not as bad as it sounded, but it made me think. Racket readers know I’ve dealt with kerfuffles, from an IRS visit to a threatening member of congress, and there’ve been other things left unmentioned. I wouldn’t call any of it serious, but most everyone I know in media is dealing with something now.

Six weeks before the lancing of the boil that is the Trump-Harris election, officialdom has never been antsier. There’s desperation up there and the more bureaucratically thuggish tactics employed by agencies like GEC have not scratched their itch of uncertainty. Arbitrary removals of content aren’t cutting it. New overreaches are coming, but what? Our goons aren’t Russian enough to smash people with hammers, but as the earlier story today shows, they aren’t sane either. I’m not intimidated, but the days of smooth sailing might be over.…

https://www.racket.news/p/note-on-smears

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LEAD STORIES FROM THURSDAY'S NYT

Harris Had Stronger Debate, Polls Find, but the Race Remains Deadlocked

Teamsters Won’t Endorse a Candidate for President in 2024

More Wireless Devices Explode in Lebanon in Second Attack

The Fed Makes a Large Rate Cut and Forecasts More to Come

‘Beast Games’ Contestants File Lawsuit Claiming ‘Dangerous Conditions’ on Set

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THE GRUESOME CREATIVITY OF ASSASSINATIONS ENTERS A NEW PHASE

by Serge Schmemann

We may never know all the details of how Israel got explosives into thousands of pagers, and apparently other wireless radios, that have been exploding in Lebanon, mostly in the possession of members of Hezbollah. The Mossad, the Israeli intelligence agency, is not in the habit of divulging information about its methods, and Israel is not likely to say anything. Yet the fusillade of exploding pagers has set a new standard — if not in ingenuity, then at least in scale.

Assassinations are as old as politics, and for most of history they were carried out by relatively straightforward means — knives or guns, with an occasional flourish. The mother of the nefarious Roman emperor Nero, for example, helped him to the throne by serving her husband Claudius a plate of poison mushrooms. (Nero then had her assassinated.)

But it is in the modern era that assassinations — now often whitewashed as “extrajudicial killings” — have become instruments of state and have harnessed cutting-edge science and inventiveness. Drones, bombs, disguised assassins or special forces are the most common killing tools, but ingenuity is still prized for the toughest targets — or as a way of sending a signal.

Israel has long been among the busiest, most creative and audacious of states that practice extrajudicial killing. According to Ronan Bergman, an Israeli journalist, staff writer for The New York Times Magazine and author of “Rise and Kill First: The Secret History of Israel’s Targeted Assassinations,” there have been about 2,700 such killings.

The pager explosions in Lebanon were not the first time Israel used a hand-held wireless device as a weapon. In January 1996, I covered the funeral of Yahya Ayyash, a Palestinian known as the “Engineer” for building suicide bombs used against Israelis. He was killed in Gaza when his booby-trapped mobile phone exploded. Other noteworthy techniques used by Israel involved poisoned toothpaste and a bomb hidden in a spare tire.

One Israeli attempted hit dramatically misfired. In 1997, Mossad agents in Jordan managed to inject poison into the ear of a Mossad official, Khaled Meshal. The assassins were caught, Jordan demanded an antidote from Israel, and Meshal is today probably the top political leader of Hamas.

Dramatic hits — and certainly dramatic failures — are hardly confined to Israel. The United States tried and failed to kill Fidel Castro hundreds of times, once by exploding cigar. The Soviet Union and Russia also launched some doozies. There was the celebrated “poison umbrella” against a Bulgarian dissident in 1978, the polonium-laced tea that Alexander Litvinenko drank in 2006, or the nerve agent used against Sergei Skripal in 2018 and Alexei Navalny in 2020 (both of whom survived the attacks).

Still, the pager attacks open a new chapter in the gruesome history of assassinations. This time, the target was not one person but an entire organization, with the certainty that the dead and injured would not be limited to members of Hezbollah. The long-term goal, moreover, remains unclear — Hezbollah has not been crippled, and is now compelled to retaliate.

(NY Times)

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BRAZIL BURNING

by Forrest Hylton

Following a prolonged drought, smoke from wildfires in the Amazon basin is choking people over an enormous swath of territory in Brazil, Uruguay, Argentina, Paraguay, Peru and Bolivia. The fires pose a direct threat to the social reproduction of Brazil’s 1.7 million Indigenous people, 75% of whom live in the north and north-east, with the states of Amazonas and Bahia accounting for 42.5% of the total. Only 21% of Brazil’s Indigenous people still live in Indigenous territory, which illustrates the extent of their dispossession, including language loss.

In the north, according to one Ka’apor leader in the Alto Turiaçu Reserve in Maranhão, fire has surpassed illegal mining, logging, ranching and poaching as a threat to his people’s survival. In 2013, the Ka’apor expelled the Fundação Nacional dos Povos Indígenas (the federal agency that is supposed to protect them) and appointed a new generation of leaders, represented by Sarapó Ka’apor, who died two years ago: the Ka’apor say he was killed by poison.

They have relocated their settlements to the edges of their reserve, which begins across the Gurupí river from the Alto Rio Guamá Reserve in Pará and extends nearly to Federal Highway 316 in Maranhão. They established a forest guard, armed with bows and arrows, to police it. Rifles are used only to hunt wild game, mostly by young men on motorcycles. They communicate via WhatsApp, use drones to monitor the activity of outsiders and are on constant high alert.

Only the coastal strip of the north-east has been unaffected by the smoke from the fires. In São Paulo last week the air quality was among the worst in the world, putting children and elderly people at risk of respiratory infection. The metropolitan region has 21 million people, the state 48 million. Power and wealth are concentrated there.

A new leader of the far right, Pablo Marçal, topped a recent poll ahead of the first round of the city’s mayoral race next month. He wants to introduce corporal punishment in primary schools. One of his rivals hit Marçal with a chair during a TV debate on Sunday night. From his hospital bed, Marçal compared himself to Trump. He aims to become the next Bolsonaro.

President Lula’s government in Brasília – mired in scandal with credible allegations of harassment against the former human rights minister Silvio Almeida (he was fired earlier this month) – has so far been unable to respond, just as it failed to respond to the floods that devastated Porto Alegre and Rio Grande do Sul in April and May. According to the climate scientist Carlos Nobre, if the country continues down its current path of mining and agribusiness, aided and abetted by high finance in São Paulo and politicians at every level from the federal to the local, most of Brazil’s cities could be uninhabitable by 2050.

All of its biomes will be transformed. According to one climate model, Belém de Pará, where the Amazon meets the South Atlantic, is projected to go from 130 days of extreme heat in 2030 to 222 in 2050, up from 50 at the turn of the century, while Manaus is projected to go from 200 to 258, as jungle becomes savannah. Semi-arid areas of the north-east, known as the sertão, will become arid. And the fertile mountains and valleys of Rio, São Paulo, Santa Catarina, Paraná and Minas Gerais will become semi-arid.

For Brazil’s impoverished plurality, particularly in its densely populated urban peripheries, where few public services are available, the air will be too hot, the land too parched, the forest cover too thin and the water too scarce to sustain human life. Brazil is projected to have millions of climate migrants.

At a ceremony in Rio de Janeiro last week to commemorate the return of a priceless artefact from Denmark, a cloak made from 4,000 scarlet ibis feathers that had been in Copenhagen since 1689, one Tupinambá leader went off script and lambasted Lula’s government for being weak and ineffectual in defense of Indigenous rights; the minister of Indigenous affairs, Sonia Guajajara, has been largely silent and missing in action. Lula’s attempt at self-justification missed the target; it was tone deaf, at best.

All the same, Lula’s government has made major strides in slowing deforestation, which reached new heights under Bolsonaro: more than 10,000 square kilometers were cleared in 2022, and around half that in 2023. In August, fires were at their lowest since 2018. Among other things, the fires may be a criminal conspiracy to erode the government’s legitimacy and reverse those achievements. Indigenous peoples like the Ka’apor and Tupinambá accuse mining and agribusiness firms of using arson to drive them from their lands. Organised crime – especially the PCC in São Paulo – is involved.

The finance minister, Fernando Haddad, has complained that only big business has lobbies in Brasília. Poor people – which includes more than 60% of children, according to a Unicef report last year – have none; this goes double for rural workers and triple for Indigenous people; the fifth of the population that still lives in ancestral territories is rural and poor, as are an untold number of the dispossessed.

Brasília, meanwhile, peddles tales of success as measured by macroeconomic GDP growth (2.9% last year), the rise of the average real wage by 12.5% and the reduction of extreme poverty through revamped assistance programs like Bolsa Família. When the Supreme Court judge Flávio Dino authorized emergency credits this week, as he had done in April, the Office of Budget and Planning refused to consider the plan because it might unbalance the budget.

This is developmentalism in its senescence. The contradictions between business as usual, with interest rates sky high and the far right on the march despite Bolsonaro’s fall from grace, and what amounts to a Brazilian version of the US Democratic Party under Lula, with empty spectacles of celebration, cannot hold. The wall of contention is too thin.

From the 1950s to the 1980s, capitalist development in Brazil was coupled with industrial investment and expansion. But since neoliberalism was implemented under Fernando Henrique Cardoso in the late 1990s, with the privatization of state enterprises and deindustrialization, speculative rent-seeking in both rural land and urban real estate, along with mining, agribusiness, and organized crime, have become the foundations of the country’s political and economic geography.

On the other side – the side of life and environmental preservation – the Ka’apor work with the Popular Peasant Movement, which has roots in Maranhão’s numerous quilombola communities descended from runaway slaves, and with an urban agriculture and regional autonomy movement among young people from Belém de Pará’s peripheries. So far, the Ka’apor have succeeded in protecting their territory, just as they succeeded at expelling loggers and holding miners and hunters at bay. But the odds are stacked against them, and the question is how long they can hold out without significant reinforcements.

Except for minuscule and ineffective communist and socialist parties, the Brazilian left, led by the PT, is busy discussing identity, diversity and the allocation of public-private sector posts and resources. If the fires don’t refocus attention where it matters most, what would?

(London Review of Books)

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