Off the Record 9/30/2024

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.”

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.”

“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.

SCOTT WARD (retired Mendo Planner):

Residential cnstruction 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 Bilding 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.

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 enourmous 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.

AWARE that the NYT specializes in received opinion and is a prose arm of the Democrats, and that Maureen Dowd is the paper's only regular who writes with panache, this morning's on-line paper nevertheless irritated hell outta me. It featured the predictable quadrennial whine from a professional Democrat that Jill Stein and Cornel West, and third party candidates generally, undermine the only “sensible” choice in our “inevitable” two-party dictatorship, and that choice is Kamala Harris.

APOLOGIES for re-posting Gail Collins' feeb-a-rama attack on us third party voters, and bearing in mind that we are a sliver of the minority of Americans who bother to vote while half of our citizens eligible to vote don't vote. And of the half that does, half of them are former Republicans who've become Maga cultists. However, and be that as it is in our doomed republic, the NYT drone’s crude assault is a useful exemplar of what we’ve heard for fifty years.

WHICH all translates as a minority of a minority of Americans will decide who’s president of the oligarchical murder machine:

TAKE IT AWAY, GAIL: (My illuminating annotations are in parens)

Considering a Third-Party Candidate? Get a Life.

by Gail Collins

OK, people, tell me when you last contemplated Jill Stein, perennial Green Party candidate for president.

(Last election)

“Y’all, this is a little spicy, but I have thoughts,” said Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in a recent Instagram post criticizing Stein’s third attempt at running for president.

(We all have noted that Ocasio-Cortez has almost totally sold out but are delighted she still has thoughts.)

Truly, “a little spicy” and “Green Party candidate Jill Stein” do not often come up in the same sentence. Or paragraph. Or train of thought.

(Why would they?)

But this is the season when we start to fret a lot about third-party presidential candidates who could divert enough cranky voters from the real options to change the outcome of the election.

(Salud! my fellow cranks!)

We will stop now for a moment to remember the Green Party’s presidential candidate in 2000, Ralph Nader, who drained just enough support from Al Gore in Florida to tip the election to George W. Bush.

(Rigged for Bush but Al rolled over without a fight. Viva, Ralph!)

Or, um, Jill Stein. Whose presence on the ballot in a few swing states was just enough to keep Hillary Clinton from beating Donald Trump in 2016.

(For which I and millions more will be eternally grateful. Why vote for a lesser monster?)

The danger isn’t nearly as great as it was a few months ago, when it looked like the race was going to be Biden-Trump and millions of depressed voters were wondering whether to write in the name of a close friend or, hey, George Clooney.

(Nope, with me and several million other patriots it's always been Stein or West)

But still, you can never tell how things might get screwed up, particularly since any outcome not involving the election of Trump is going to lead to months of legal battles and protests.

(With a real Democrat, the race wouldn't even be close)

So feel free to worry about Stein — or other presidential candidates, like Cornel West, whose only major achievement this time around has been not making the ballot in Pennsylvania.

(Note the witless sarcasm)

They’re not exactly building a movement, and as Ocasio-Cortez said, if “all you do is show up every four years,” you really ought to be doing something else. Maybe running for a less ridiculous office, the way Ocasio-Cortez did when she knocked off an entrenched and deeply unthrilling House veteran in 2018.

(Stein and West have been out there on the left for years as OC used to be before she got used to private jets and the rest of it)

Or sign up for a night-school class. Clean the basement. Reread “War and Peace.” The options are endless. Get a life.

(Says the passive-aggressive as she comes charging out of her closet with one of the most exhausted insults of all time.)

---

I'VE VOTED third party since McGovern, the last real Democratic candidate, and I've always admired Ralph Nader's lonely, principled stand against the Democrats.

THE DEMOCRATS are drawing off a lot of Republicans. The Cheney family is quite a catch for them. Can W. Bush be far behind? But why the surprise? The parties are fundamentally interchangeable and funded by the same class of billionaires.

MENDO reliably goes about ten percent third party, as does the rest of the Northcoast, thus drawing off enough votes from the corporate killer party to occasionally knock out a career Democrat. (cf Doug Bosco.) The now defunct Peace and Freedom Party brought off that coup, but that was the last gasp of an organized left in these parts.

THE REPUBLICANS? The Northcoast is so thoroughly gerrymandered for Democrats that an upstart third party candidate is highly unlikely to get beyond the primary, as Norman Solomon, a truly progressive Democrat, found out when he couldn't get the extra five percent he needed to get into a runoff with the soporific automaton from San Rafael, Jared Huffman. The Democrats encouraged a slew of vanity candidates to run in the primary to sab Solomon.

ASSUMING things don't break down entirely in the near future, we're going to be stuck with another round of liberal killers and their laughing hyenas.

SUPERVISOR MULHEREN (facebook):

“Today the Board of Directors took steps forward to creating what will become the Future Great Redwood Trail Agency with approval of the Organizational Structure.

These positions won’t be hired immediately but I appreciate the level of transparency and vision planning given by our Director Elaine Hogan and look forward to future developments.”

RALPH NADER got 0.4% of the vote in the 2004 election (almost 3% in 2000). As an unrepentant 0.4 percenter, I enjoyed the documentary film about Nader called ‘An Unreasonable Man’ the title deriving from, I think, Emerson's observation that if it weren't for unreasonable men and women nine-year-olds would still be putting in twelve hour days in coal mines.

THE DEMOCRATS said Nader destroyed the republic in '00 and 04 by running for president because he took enough of the Democrat vote to twice elect Bush. But as Nader points out in the film, both parties are funded and owned by the same destructive forces, a fact of American political life verified every election by half the people who don't bother to vote, but a fact that Nader thought he could use to alert people that half-bad is still bad for most of us.

WOULD Gore have gotten us out of Iraq? No. He said he'd send more troops to the slaughter. Would Gore have eviscerated the Constitution and have done all the other bad things Bush has done? No, they would have been half to 75% bad in the tradition of Clinton, eviscerating the Constitution only when no one was looking, and then only to doom low-profile citizens or criminal defendants and prison inmates.

SO NADER put everything on the line because he thought his run for president was the best way to hip people to the dangerous bankruptcy of the two-party stranglehold. And here we are two decades later and the political garrote is as tight around our necks as ever.

OF COURSE the national media ignored Nader's issues-only campaign and he was rewarded with national vilification.

THE UNIQUELY unattractive critics the film hauls out on-screen to damn Nader — Todd Gitlin, Eric Alterman, James Carville, and a couple of laughably pompous former Nader's Raider's — manage only to establish the correctness of Nader's two decisions to run. But if you prefer to believe the fantasy that the Democrats represent an alternative to Republicans, that if Ralph hadn't upset the wine and cheese tables from Mendocino to Manhattan we'd have no war and single payer health insurance, don't see this fine little documentary, and certainly don't stop voting for Kamala and Jared and Mike and Wood. (What's that definition of insanity again?)

THE DAILY BEAST, via Steve Heilig, tells us that Jill Stein is rich, that she's a hypocrite for wanting to crack down on the forces represented in her investment portfolio. Cornel West has made a lot of money over the years but he says it has all gone to three ex-wives and child support. He probably qualifies as a pauper despite a tenured job at Harvard. Ralph Nader is worth about 6 mil, and if ever a guy earned it, it's Ralph. My net worth is an acre in Boonville assessed at about $400,000, a genuine blowpipe complete with poison darts from deep in the Borneo jungle, two small paintings by the renowned Guerneville painter Mary Robertson, and a paid off Honda. (The two manufactured homes on my property have no value, according to the mortgage banks when I tried to get some money out of them.) Clearly, I am the only possible choice for president.

KAMALA HARRIS is worth at least six mil, which seems like magic money given that she's always been employed in modestly compensated public jobs, but then Biden, also a public servant, is a multi-millionaire, a nice hunk of it from selling access to Ukranians and China.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/michelatindera/2020/10/30/how-kamala-harris-and-her-husband-earned-over-7-million-while-she-served-in-the-us-senate

‘LAZARUS’ (Willits) “Appeals Court Bans Police Mug Shots” – Jim Shields I hope Mr. Shields is correct about the Supreme Court reversing this terrible mug-shot decision. The friends I have left, to a person, are pissed, appalled, or bewildered by what the 9th Circuit has pulled off. It comes in handy to know who the really bad people are in the communities. Granted most are likely young and dumb, wrong place, wrong time, bad luck, whatever… However, when a really bad man or woman comes along, the public should know what to look out for. Be careful out there… It’s getting really weird. Ask around…

BACK IN 2004 we followed an otherwise minor DUI case involving Ukiah’s current police Chief, then-Ukiah patrol officer, Cedric Crook.

Officer Crook had followed a couple guys in a dark sedan around the sidestreets of Ukiah because they were driving suspiciously slowly at 1am on a Thursday morning. Crook followed them as they made several turns. Officer Crook was sure that the two in the car were aware that he was following them. After several turns the dark sedan turned down a street into a cul de sac. According to the pair, they got into the cul de sac and, instead of driving around the circle of the cul de sac, they did a “three-point turn,” turning left into the curb, backing up, stopping, and turning left again facing Officer Crook’s cruiser. Officer Crook said the pair hadn’t even made it into the cul de sac circle, but simply executed an “unsafe u-turn” in the middle of the road. Either way, the pair in the sedan was now heading out of the cul de sac. The sedan boys said that as they were driving back past Officer Crook, the officer stuck out his hand in a manner like he was signaling left, but with his palm toward the pair, which they took as a request to stop. Officer Crook, who is known to be a by-the-book cop and a by-the-book Police Chief, said he would never stick out his hand to stop a car because that’s unsafe and not according to procedure. Crook said the pair simply stopped and the driver said, “We’re not trying to avoid you, officer.” Officer Crook then asked if he could search the car and they consented. He then asked if they’d take a field sobriety check, which they consented to also. Crook thought they were drunk and took them to the hospital where they tested more than 1.0 blood-alcohol. The driver was arrested and charged with DUI. At trial the case came down to whether Officer Crook had put out his hand. Legally, if he did, that sort of qualifies as “a detention.” So, if it’s a detention, there has to be probable cause. Was there probable cause? There was the unsafe u-turn Officer Crook said the pair made, but which they say they didn’t make. The late Judge Ron Brown took the trouble to actually visit the cul de sac before ruling that he couldn’t determine which version of events was correct and dismissed the case, essentially saying that the word of the by-the-book police officer carried no more weight than the word of the drunk defendant, who, along with his drunk passenger, told what sounded like a rehearsed story about Officer Crook’s “detention” hand. Officer Crook was pretty irritated that Judge Brown didn’t take his word over the two drunks. We expect that now-Chief Crook still remembers this annoying incident, even though Judge Brown passed away more than a decade ago.

— ms

A READER WRITES: Supervisor Mulheren’s silly pic of the organizational chart for the Great Redwood Trail that you posted yesterday shows what a nice bunch of jobs for Democrats are being created. Of course, that was the point all along, I suppose, since there never will be a “great” trail, just a few little “not so great trails,” here and there in the urban areas. These Democrats make Mitch Stogner’s old North Coast Railroad Authority gang look like pikers. Stogner and crew never had anywhere near this many do-nothing jobs. Nor did they waste as much money on contractors. At least the never-gonna-happen NCRA railroad was a cleverly disguised scheme by the old scammer Doug Bosco which you had to admire for its complexity. This new bunch isn’t even clever or deceptive. They just roll their never-gonna-happen scam right out in front of us, knowing that large swaths of the northcoast are gullible enough to swallow it whole. I wonder if we’ll discover a hidden Bosco angle to the Great Redwood Scam someday. It wouldn’t surprise me, but Bosco might be too smart to involve himself in this 21st Century version of his original scam.

IN 2004, the prescient editor of the Anderson Valley Advertiser, as always ahead of the historical curve, lamented that the Hasting's School of Law was still called the Hastings School of Law. For all anybody knew, the school was a respectable adjunct of the University of California. Of course, Hastings had left the university a nice hunk of money conditioned, I believe, on the naming of the university’s law school after him. After all, he’d been Californiia’s first Supreme Court Justice.

IT WAS GRATIFYING to learn that a few students at Hasting's may have been influenced by reading about Hastings’ murderously true history in the Boonville weekly. A law student wrote that year, “I read your recent article on the genocidal namesake of the Hastings School of Law and was really disturbed and upset by it. I can tell you with confidence that there is little to no awareness of these facts among the Hastings student body… We’re going to try to get the school to change the name.”

GOOD LUCK, KID, I'd said, but it will be a slog. NorCal Indians, unlike other ethnic groups in our state's explosively multicultural hot house, are slow to anger. Or maybe they're so accustomed to being kicked around and insulted that a lot of the abuse and misunderstanding they endure without comment because they assume it as part of life in the Golden State, much as they once assumed that murder was part of that life.

JUDGE HASTINGS, as mentioned, was California's first chief justice, the go-to guy for the murder of thousands of Indians throughout the Eel River basin, from Mendocino County on up through Humboldt County and on into Trinity, with side excursions into Glenn and Tehama counties. From his lofty perch as chief justice, Hastings easily got the state to pay people to kill Indians because Indians were in the way of his and his associated 19th century Mendocino County land thieves. Hastings himself appropriated Mendo's Eden Valley where he operated a horse ranch while living most of the time in Benicia.

ANOTHER SANCTIFIED character long overdue for a reappraisal is the anthropologist, A.L. Kroeber, also a U.C. faculty man who, for all his scientific pretense, assumed that the Indians he studied were simply unfortunate victims of Darwin's sad but immutable survival theories. Surely you remember those theories? White people wiped out (fill in the name of the people here) because it was survival of the fittest and white people were fittest. Mrs. Kroeber was a Darwinist, too, and both of them simply loved Ishi to death soon after California's last wild Indian was captured near Oroville in 1915.

KROEBER said there never could have been 12,000 to 20,000 Yuki Indians in Mendocino County, no, certainly not, and certainly not based on the say so of the few Yukis who had eluded the casual state-funded killings of Indians that began with their initial interface with the ad-sals (as the Indians called white people) when the Azbill brothers opened fire on the first Indians they met in Covelo in 1850, not to mention the predations of Judge Hastings, Texan Boy Hall, Jarboe and his Eel River Rangers, and the rest of the first wave of ethnic cleansers. Just because the surviving Indians said that almost everyone they knew had been murdered by the ad-sals was written off as merely one more Indian myth.

KROEBER reasoned that because there were only a few Yukis left when the 20th century dawned when he arrived to wonder where the heck everyone had gone off to, that if there'd been as many as 20,000 Yukis when the long, lean lethal sons of Missouri began arriving in 1850, how could there possibly be so few Yukis a mere 50 years later? Kroeber wrote that there was no accounting for the “tremendous decrease” in the Yuki population — no epidemics, no wholesale removals, no prolonged contact with the Spanish mission system that might have whacked the population to a mere handful of survivors. Nope, must have been a small tribe to begin with, maybe 2,000 people, max, Kroeber figured, leaving mass murder out of his calculations. Why not murder as at least one of the reasons for the radical reduction in the number of Yukis by 1900? Probably because there were still lots of people alive who not only knew the truth of what had happened to the Indians but were very sensitive about it, having just upgraded themselves to Noble Pioneer status, and having benefited directly from what they knew were great crimes.

CONTEMPT FOR INDIANS was still strong into the 1940s, even from crusading liberals like John Steinbeck who, in his epic novel, ‘East of Eden,’ wrote, “And that was the long Salinas Valley. Its history was like that of the rest of the state. First there were the Indians, an inferior breed without energy, inventiveness, or culture, a people that lived on grubs and grasshoppers and shellfish, too lazy to hunt or fish. They ate what they could pick up and planted nothing. They pounded bitter acorns for flour. Even their warfare was a weary pantomime.”

FARTHER BACK, Jack London, whose name, by the way, appears with his wife Charmian’s in an old Boonville Hotel register, was also contemptuous of of the darker races, and had commented, “What the devil! I am first of all a white man and only then a Socialist.” To which Mark Twain replied, “It would serve this man London right to have the working class get control of things. He would have to call out the militia to collect his royalties.”

THIS ASSUMPTION that Indians lacked “energy” and “inventiveness” is very odd considering the known history of California and the United States. The relative success of California's resource administrators goes like this: INDIANS for 12,000 years. MISSIONS and missionized Indians for 150 years. MEXICO for 40 years. (Of course given current demographic trends, Mexico may retake California for another round of rule, albeit one less likely to be as leisurely as the first regime's when men like the civilized General Vallejo were deciding administrative matters for Northern California.) US of A for 150 years.

SO, CLASS, I ask you, whose energy and inventiveness would you trust to get your family over the next few millennia, Dick Cheney’s and the Democrats or the Yukis?

JACOB PATTERSON

RE: Fort Bragg Hospice.I don’t think it was financial problems that ended in-home hospice. The Coast’s former hospice program was one of a handful of very effective hospice programs, but Adventist ended it because it was not a revenue generator and they wanted to have a different program that they could bill for even though it was funded through the thrift store so revenue wasn’t an issue. I wonder what the “hospice” thrift store money goes to now if there isn’t a hospice? Now AH gets the thrift store money for whatever they want and they also get in-home health reimbursements that they didn’t get under the old hospice model that provided excellent patient care. I am not sure why we are all still paying the Measure C parcel tax if all they do is cut our services. What’s next? As Malcolm Macdonald reported on, rumors swirl that they will close infusion and oncology on the Coast to centralize those services in Ukiah.

---

PETER LIT:

I think Jacob is correct: Hospice, which should be in home, had its financial support removed by Adventist (the “non-profit” hospital because it didn’t bring in the same revenue as an “in hospital hospice (an oxymoron) program” which they have. The Adventists cite reasons why they couldn’t support it, lack of doctors, lack of nurses etc. I believe it is the lack of revenue.

MIKE WILLIAMS:

Regarding UC Berkeley Professor of Anthropology Alfred Kroeber and California Indians. Judging his intentions in the context of our time reflects poorly on Kroeber. In the context of his time he was seen as enlightened and compassionate. His Handbook of California Indians was the first comprehensive compilation of the various tribal groups throughout the state. But let’s go one step farther to his first Masters Degree issued in 1908 to Ukiah’s own Samuel Barrett (Ukiah High class of 1899). Barrett’s family owned a local grocery and young Samuel learned to value the quality of Pomo basketry. His Ethnogeography of the Pomo, his Master's Thesis, is probably the greatest historical document to come out of our county. It covers nearly every village site, permanent and seasonal, in every watershed in the county and beyond, covering all of Pomo territory, and includes the name and meaning of each site, with historical details. Barrett went on to a distinguished career, but returned to the area in the early ‘60s to produce Native American Films, where he recorded traditional practices both material and cultural.

Our collective history in relation to the natives is horrifying for the most part. A few academics in the late 19th and early 20th centuries began to study the remnants of the native populations. While they were beholden to their Victorian values, there were a few, like Barrett who respected the people they were trying to understand.

Held Poage may have a copy.

You can read it online through this link.

https://archive.org/details/ethnogeographyp02barrgoog/page/n111/mode/1up?view=theater

There are copies in the library system, but it looks like they are listed as reference, as in library access only.

It used to be available through Coyote Press but no longer. I have given away two copies, the last one was to the Flow Kana people when they were occupying the Masut village site. Boy that was a mistake.

---

ED NOTE: I immediately went to the link provided by Mr. Williams and was astounded — blown away, as the young people say — by the depth of Barrett's scholarship. He not only provides a fascinating vocabulary of native terms, he identifies lost village sites throughout Mendocino County and into western Lake, retrieving a once-upon-a-time geography of the place now inhabited by heedless us. This remarkable document reveals, for instance, that Indians called Anderson Valley “Taa-bo-tah,” abbreviated by white settlers to “Tabahtea.” Take a look, Mendo, at what once was.

L. KIELD GARDNER, DM

I've been looking at a bunch of historical documents about Mendocino County, specifically the coast. It's been fun, and the quote mining has been just fantastic. Since we are commencing with fall season, I thought I'd share one. This quote speaks about an area of the coast likely around Navarro:

“It was by now full autumn, and the vegetation had taken on those warm and thoughtful hues that make the season so pleasing. How gracious are these deep and sensitive tones, — the gravity of umber, the dignity of Sienna, the mild magnificence of madder, the serenity of gray! One may call spring the lyric, summer the epic, and winter the dirge of the color year. Autumn is the elegy, the quiet reconsideration, the rich maturity of experience.”

— Found in a book available on the Library of Congress website called California Coastal Trails (1913) by Joseph Smeaton Chase (page 274-275).

Happy Fall, everyone!

WHEN I FLED north for Mendocino County in 1970, an unwitting back-to-the-lander, San Francisco, for all its long-distance beauty had, close up, become a place to get away from. What we have now in the city is a kind of schizophrenia, with many people doing very well served by people not doing well, excluding, of course, the thousands of unhoused walking wounded wandering around streets, most of whom should be in lock-up medical rehab facilities but won't be because the well off don't feel much civic obligation these days and the career officeholders are afraid to tax them. And the streets are dirty, the Muni continues as it has for 50 years as a morass of missed schedules, bunched busses, too many crazy drivers, while street crooks operate in plain view in too many public places, and a small army of people, self-medicating or just plain nuts, live on the sidewalks

EVERY MORNING a fleet of buses from Marin Country drives across the bridge to pick up the sons and daughters of the well-to-do for a day of economically segregated classes in the proliferating private schools of Marin, while City parents who can afford it have also abandoned San Francisco's chaotic, failed schools for San Francisco's private academies.

THE CITY'S school board has been a collection of babbling fools for years. I occasionally monitored their meetings for as long as I could stand listening to them, but an hour of it and your cognitive capacity is half what it was before you tuned in, and what's left is ricocheting between despair and fury. What is it about school boards that turns otherwise intelligent people into muddleheads?

JUST THIS WEEK, SF Mayor London Breed had formed a crack finance team of city specialists to “address the crisis” at SF Unified in a desperate attempt to avoid state takeover of SF Unified.

https://www.kqed.org/news/12005932/sf-mayor-sends-team-to-address-crisis-at-school-district-but-dont-call-it-a-takeover

THE FOLLOWING EPISODE remains with me as a handy explanation of why San Francisco's schools are a mess. That night, listening to their fumbling deliberations, I darn near fell out of my chair when the city school board voted to reimburse an un-re-elected colleague for the 15 years of travel he claimed to have amassed while toting Frisco's edu-bale as a trustee. His former colleagues promptly made a gift of public funds to him in the amount of $13,747.60 which, by the way, included his junket to Beijing a few years earlier. I suppose he went there because San Francisco has a large Chinese population which, in this city, might also be a pretext for tax-paid trips to Russia, Samoa, Vietnam, Cambodia, all of Spanish-speaking America, India, Russia, and the United Arab Emirates. The sole no-reimbursement vote was cast by a trustee who said she thought the grifter should only be reimbursed for three years travel! The chiseler himself, a yobbo called Dan Kelly, casually pimping his own kids, told the Chronicle, “I always knew I was going to ask for the reimbursements eventually, so I kept the receipts. It was really a personal choice and a personal discussion between me and my family.” Who presumably shouted in unison at their patriarch, “If they're dumb enough to give it to you, grab it, daddy, grab it!” This is how the city schools manage money at the top, so is it a surprise that the racially isolated schools of Hunter's Point don't have basic school supplies?

GAVIN NEWSOM was mayor at the time. As he ascends inevitably to the White House, Newsom gets over for the same reason that lots of elected hollow men and women get over — millions of people can't tell glib from reality. Anybody who can get a coherent sentence past his or her big white photo-op teeth while wrapping it in chuckles and implied huggsies is on his way to the top. Or, at a minimum, the San Francisco School Board. Then, again, maybe we can tell glib from reality but settle for glib because the reality is, well, ominous.

A FRIEND leaving work downtown one night called me on his cell phone to ask me why he was stuck in traffic on the Embarcadero. And I'm like all, How would I know? But I said I thought it was probably because the Queen Mary Two was about to go back out through the Golden Gate and lots of people were downtown to gaze at the big boat before it chugged off for Hawaii. “Well,” my friend said, “Every idiot in the City is out here today for sure. I haven't moved for an hour.” I said I was one of the thousands of idiots who'd gone out to the bridge to watch the sea-going behemoth squeeze under the middle span, and if there was a certain amount of absurdity in the spectacle, well, what can you expect with a ship larger than Alcatraz in the Age of Wretched Excess?” (I believe the final statistic was that the QM II made it under the bridge with 13 feet to spare.) A fellow gawker said to me excitedly, “And there's one on the drawing boards that's even bigger!”

DONALD CRUSER (retired Coast Math Teacher, former County School Board trustee):

I am mystified by the fact that what is missing from the discussion about the homeless is the fact that the way to solve the problem is to provide these unfortunates with a roof over their head. It is important to recognize that Putin would provide these people with a place to live. Some years ago I spent a little time in St. Petersberg, didn’t see any homeless people, and had a couple of opportunities to enter the homes of local people. They were large apartments, government built, and solid enough to stay warm in the Russian winter.

When the economic system fails to meet a need then government needs to step in, and this is not a new idea. After World War Two veterans were eligible for government subsidized low interest loans for buying a home. This opened the door for home ownership for many working class families. In our recent history there have been many government programs to subsidize the construction of low income housing. And then we can’t forget the California state mental health hospitals. Drive out East on Talmage rode on into the Buddhist Temple grounds. The old hospital has enough dormitory rooms to house all the homeless in our four northern counties. There were six or seven of these around the state and that darling of the fake conservatives, Ronald Reagan, shut them all down. He got government off the backs of the mentally ill and put the mentally ill on our backs. In a classic case of poetic justice, a few years later he became mentally ill with alzheimers.

So how do we provide housing for those who can’t afford it. Here is my suggestion for helping those at the bottom. The first thing to do is go to the city and county planning departments and do a land survey. It will reveal that local government, school districts, churches, and other social institutions own land, and even buildings, that they are not using. Building on donated land greatly reduces the cost. For example, I am not too familiar with the land along the railroad tracks in Ukiah, but I am sure there is some extra space in places. Bring in a contractor to build community bathrooms and kitchens. Go to home depot or that tough shed place on North State Street and buy some 10 X 12 feet buildings ( no permit required). Move the buildings in on blocks, keep the numbers in each group around 20 people, and it becomes a workable community where the residents will have some control and they will reside in a place where they can receive medical treatment. With an address many will be eligible for financial assistance and they will be able to pay rent. This could all be done for each group for about a social worker’s salary. There will still be problems but, at least they hopefully won’t be shitting in the bushes any more. Moreover, we can all feel better about treating the neediest among us in a humane way.

“UKIAH, CA, August, 2024 — The Mendocino County Homeless Services Continuum of Care (MCHSCoC) has released its results from the 2024 Point-in-Time (PIT) Count, an annual count of sheltered and unsheltered homeless persons in Mendocino County. More than 40 volunteers took part in this year’s PIT Count, which was held on the morning of January 24, 2024. The data collected on that night is organized and submitted to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development and is typically approved and released back to the community in late summer. In 2024, volunteers counted 779 individuals experiencing both sheltered and unsheltered homelessness – 227 of those individuals were in shelter, and 552 of those individuals were unsheltered on the night of January 23. Utilizing a location-based application, short surveys were administered to individuals and families residing on the streets and in vehicles, makeshift shelters, encampments, and other places not meant for human habitation throughout the County. Non-responsive observed persons were documented and included in the Count totals as well.”

SAN FRANCISCO does it, too, and can you even imagine a more imprecise funding method? One night, as observed by yours truly, in the city that knows how, a bunch of “volunteers” from agencies whose funding depends on the count, were out counting the homeless — silently counting them, not asking them if they were in fact unhoused. The SF volunteers reported that they had seen exactly 6,377 unsheltered people, a dubiously achieved stat given the methodology, and certainly a low-end stat because it excluded multiple families jammed into shared spaces, people living in their cars, people temporarily on a couch in a friend's apartment — the thousands of people who can't be counted. And there are lots of people out there who don't want to be counted. (in Mendo, the “volunteer” counters count anybody who even looks homeless. “How about that guy, Debbie?” And Tanya says, “Got him Deb. He might even be a reimbursable.”)

WHICH BROUGHT ME to the north end of the Ferry Building where there's a cluster of benches, some of which face east, some west, giving idlers the choice between the natural beauty of the Bay or the human comedy of the street. A presumed homeless man, a black man I pegged as being in his middle fifties, complete with a meticulously organized shopping cart parked in front of him, faced the Bay. Two pairs of perfectly shined and buffed dress shoes and a couple of water bottles dangled from his cart, the rest of whose contents were neatly tarped in a quality camo canvas.

I stood at an oblique to the homeless guy, enjoying a cup of wildly overpriced Peet's looking out over the sleeping man at the endlessly fascinating parade on the street beyond him. The homeless man was snoring; snoring, so deep in dreamland he could have been in a medically-induced coma.

Two uniformed rent-a-cops approached. One of them gently shook the sleeping man's shoulder. Instantly awake, the homeless man said, “Can I help you?”

I laughed. I'd never seen anyone come that far out of unconsciousness that fast and that lucid.

The security guy announced, “This is private property. You can't sleep here. You'll have to move.”

“I'm awake now, and thank you very much,” the homeless man said as if the two guards were a couple of hotel clerks who'd just made a personal wake-up call.

“This is private property. You have to move,” came back the security man again, both of whom were very young, one Hispanic, one black.

“Wrong,” said the homeless man. “This is public property, and I'm a citizen of this city and this country, a veteran and a voter and I have the right to be here. Are you two fools even citizens?”

I laughed.

The two security guys looked at each other. The homeless man was way ahead on points.

“Don't make us call the police,” said the black security man.

“I wouldn't think of making you do anything,” the homeless man said.

I laughed again.

The homeless man, pointing at me, said, “Why don't you move him along? He was here before I got here.”

Togged out in my walking clothes and backpack, I had to agree that I was probably marginal by most visual acceptability scales. But I was down with the homeless man. He wasn't bothering anyone, just an old guy sleeping in the sun when he wasn't pushing his worldly goods up and down the Embarcadero's three-mile promenade, from Fisherman's Wharf to the ball park, a beautiful panorama of people and water and sun. If I were homeless these three miles would be my home for sure.

The Ferry Building's management was moving the homeless man along because he was, I guess, unsightly, maybe even distressing to the upscale shoppers milling around inside buying ten dollar hunks of Scharfen Berger chocolate. (I happened to have known John Scharffenberger for many years. He's a Philo guy. Known him all the way back to when he was one person.)

The security men stepped back to confer, and soon one of them brandished a cell phone in the direction of the homeless man.

With a sigh, the homeless man stood up.

“Are you leaving?” one of the security boys asked.

“I'm not doing Pilates, am I?” the homeless man said, and began pushing his stuff out towards the sidewalk. The security boys watched him go.

But I wanted to know this man. He was smiling when I walked up to him and asked if I could buy him a cup of coffee.

“No, but you can give me the cash for one,” he said. “I'm on my way to the ball game.”

He was, too, because a couple of hours later when I got to the free view sites behind the right field wall there he was talking about one of the Giant's pitchers with another fan, his shopping cart parked out by the rail at the water where the kayak people wait for splashers.

But when he saw me coming, the funniest street guy I'd encountered in months looked quickly back at the field, telling me without saying so to move on.

UKIAH FOOTBALL under coach Paul Cronin, the second-winningest coach in Sonoma County history, Ukiah, 2-1, is building a good case to make the jump back into the rankings after a quality 28-21 win at Northern Section power Chico last week. A win over San Marin this week would definitely be enough to shoot Ukiah up a few spots in the Northcoast rankings.

REMEMBER Rick Le Burkien, the flagrantly stupid self-promoting doofus the Mendocino Promotional Alliance (now called “Visit Mendocino”) hired in November in 2007 as their CEO? Several members of the local press, including the newspeople at KZYX, passed along Le Burkien’s hilariously goofy promotional bullshit as if he was some kind of high-priest of Mendo Marketing. (Please resist the temptation to pronounce his name as Chick Turducken.) A high point in Le Burkien’s big splash in Mendo in 2006 was when KZYX reporter Annie Esposito asked him how he’d know if he was doing his job. Le Burkien said that we’d know by the number of new wineries started in Mendocino County by 2015, some ten years later — meanwhile, trust him. At one point a Ukiah Daily Journal editorial described Le Burkien’s obviously incompetent rap as “innovative.” KZYX newsperson Annie Esposito called it “passionate.” We were astonished that these alleged newspeople could not see through this guy’s crap. But our astonishment went nowhere. Le Burkien had charmed the local promoters by claiming to be a former “professor of marketing at the University of the Virgin Islands.” But UVI’s website said he taught one (1) freelance marketing class in 2004. None of his other hyperbolic claims could be verified.

A FEW MONTHS EARLIER Promotional Alliance board chair Bill Crawford of McDowell Valley Vineyards, said, “Of all of the candidates we interviewed, Mr. Le Burkien especially impressed us with his depth of marketing knowledge and his desire to help build community, not just promote it.”

LE BURKIEN’S main skill, it seems, was ass-kissing, a skill in high demand at the Promotional Alliance. “These people, government leaders, business leaders, and various associations have all made the ground fertile and ready for prosperity beyond their wildest imaginations,” said Le Burkien, upon taking his high paying, tax-funded job. “Mendocino County is a great place, with great people and beautiful land — it’s just a great product to sell. The greatest asset from my perspective isn’t the wine, the grapes, the art, the lodging, the environment or the beauty alone. It’s everything together! This county is a marketer’s dream! This is an economic developer’s dream!” Le Burkien was an enthusiastic advocate of “working together” too. (Apparently, none of the other “candidates” could think of these sophisticated marketing concepts.)

THE PROMOTIONAL ALLIANCE, you may recall, wasted hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars every year, trying, without a shred of proof, to buy glossy ads in the Chronicle and Wine & Leisure, hoping to lure unwitting touri and wineyup writers to the Coast, mainly. (Last year, citing budget restrictions, the County finally stopped giving the tourism marketers their taxpayer handouts.)

BUT THEN in the summer of 2007, Le Burkien abruptly but predictably quit (or was fired; we never knew which because nobody can tell anymore). The Ukiah Daily Journal seemed at least to have finally caught on to Le Burkien's bullshit, albeit belatedly. Having lucratively kissed Mendo’s collective ass with a juvenile enthusiasm that would make a St. Bernard puppy blush, Le Burkien said, “There are some bigger picture opportunities I am interested in that would allow me to better optimize my talents, energy, spirit and experience,” explaining, “I didn’t believe I was serving all members of my Board in the most effective way possible.”

THIS SAID more about the Promotional Alliance Board than it did about Le Burkien. What kind of morons would hire a transparently idiotic ass-kisser like Le Burkien? The Promotional Alliance Board, that’s who. And that Board was made up of the same people who spent taxpayer money on this same kind of crap in the vague hope that it might bring more undesirables, er, tourists, to Mendo. It took me less than five minutes to see how big a bullshit artist Le Burkien was, but it took the Promotional Alliance Board eight months. That’s about right. At least they finally did.

IT TURNS OUT that the problem was that Le Burkien wanted to be the bullshitter while the Promotional Alliance Board wanted him to be the bullshitee. “I thought I was pretty smart,” Le Burkien said in his still-self-promoting departure note, “However, it took coming to a place I never heard of to a group of unique people to learn my greatest lessons. 1. Talk less; 2. Logic may not be the solution; 3. Talk less; and 4. Relax and have patience. All things I’ve known all my life but it’s in your face here [in Mendocino County].”

BULLSHITTING at each other’s face obviously was a problem. But a close reading of Le Burkien’s stupid going-away gibberish requires us to focus on the word “patience,” Mendo’s unofficial mantra. Mendo is absolutely allergic to deadlines, and dates certain. Need a proposal to deal with the homeless? Have patience, we’ll get to it in a few decades as we earn our big bucks handing out federal cash to our friends. Need a way to reign in AirBnB rentals? No rush, it’ll get done in ten years or so, maybe, after all, we can’t just use the Sonoma County approach; we need a carefully “crafted” one of our own which takes a lot of time and meetings. Need a budget report? Give us a big pay raise to attract excellent people and we’ll… Oh, I forgot. Budget reports might cause people to ask questions. Can’t have that.

Update: According to LinkedIn, Mr. Le Burkien now does his ass-kissing as a “program specialist” in Hawaii’s social services department. Oddly, his list of previous positions doesn’t mention Mendocino County and the time frame from March of 2007 to September of 2009 is somehow missing from his resume.

(Mark Scaramella)

THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY is now the party of labor and of capital; the party of debtors and of bankers; the party that mocks the Ivy League but is largely run by Ivy Leaguers; the party of anti-monopolists and of Silicon Valley; the party for immigrants and for border security; the party of insiders and of the marginalized; the party of the football team and of the sorority; the party of family and of freedom; the party of ceasefires and of the war machine; the party that opposes fascism but abets a genocide. At the convention in Chicago, we were constantly reminded that it was the party of joy, whatever that means. …

Bernie Sanders asserted that “billionaires in both parties should not be able to buy elections, including primary elections.” It was a reference to his thwarted 2016 challenge to Hillary Clinton, but also to the recent defeat of two left-leaning congressional incumbents, Jamaal Bowman and Cori Bush, who had spoken out against Israel’s war in Gaza, to candidates funded by AIPAC (the American Israel Public Affairs Committee). Sanders was followed by billionaire J.B. Pritzker, governor of Illinois and son of the president of Hyatt Hotels. “Donald Trump thinks that we should trust him on the economy,” Pritzker said, “because he claims to be very rich. But take it from an actual billionaire, Trump is rich in only one thing: stupidity!” The applause from the hometown audience was overwhelming – it wasn’t a tough crowd – and the woman to my right, who had spent Sanders’s speech discussing Taylor Swift with the woman on her other side, gushed: “He’s such a badass!” The juxtaposition showed that the Democratic tent is big enough for firebrands who denounce billionaires as well as the right sort of billionaire. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Sanders delivered two of the strongest calls for a ceasefire in Gaza, with Sanders describing the war as “horrific.” He repeated his call for the US to “guarantee healthcare to all people as a human right, not a privilege,” a stance Harris held while campaigning for the presidential nomination in 2019, but which is no longer part of her program.

As for Gaza, Joe Biden said:

“We’re working around the clock … to prevent a wider war and reunite hostages with their families and surge humanitarian health and food assistance into Gaza now to prevent the civilian suffering of the Palestinian people and finally, finally, finally deliver a ceasefire and end this war. Those protesters out in the street, they have a point. A lot of innocent people are being killed on both sides.”

The protesters were also in the building. Outside my sightline and probably outside his, a group of delegates unfurled a banner reading “STOP ARMING ISRAEL” in red, green and black. They were quickly blocked by fellow delegates holding “WE [heart] JOE” signs. On the way out of the United Center I heard a pair of Democrats lamenting that this had happened. “Well, at least they stopped it quickly,” one said. “Doesn’t matter,” the other said. “It’s the pictures that matter.”

— Christian Lorentzen (London Review of Books)

A READER WRITES: Meanwhile, Anthony Blinken, the Don Knotts of American diplomacy, is in Egypt urging “all parties” to avoid steps that could “further escalate the conflict that we’re trying to resolve.” Obviously, Blinken seems to have no idea that he is being ignored by the Israelis, and that his feckless statements have only embarrassed the United States in the Middle East as well as the larger global stage.

ON LINE COMMENTS OF THE WEEK

[1] 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.

[2] The SF mayor must have taken leave of her senses to even consider making it free. Muni is already overloaded with stinky crazies, loud-mouth-behaved louts and other zoological forms of low life. The day it becomes entirely free, it will become a dumpster on wheels, and I, along with the rest of those who currently attempt to use the system, will give up on it entirely.

[3] Explain how it is that the “credible new sources” all said that the Hunter Biden laptop story was “Russian disinformation.” Explain how it was literally censored out of the news and social media. Explain how 50 something government security experts all signed a letter saying it was Russian disinformation. We now know that the FBI knew it was Hunters all along, and that it had nothing to do with Russians. And there were alternative news sources reporting the facts that were branded “fake news.” Explain that.

Explain how Hillary could hire a British spy to collude with Russians to put together a fake dossier on Trump, and that the government would use that to literally spy on the Trump campaign and then administration. Again, we now know that the FBI NSA etc all knew it was fake at the time, but they did it anyway. Explain why the “credible news sources” all breathlessly reported it as fact and every day were saying, “We got him now! It’s just a matter of time!” while at the same time anyone even questioning the propaganda was censored and ridiculed. Again there were alternative news sources reporting the facts that were branded “fake news.” Explain that.

These are the biggest political scandals in the History of American politics, and the “credible news sources” have consistently been on the wrong side, working in lockstep with/for the government propagandists. And these aren’t the only times, look at COVID for example. Censorship on a massive scale, much of which has since proven to be totally unjustified.

[4] Bum camp, Garberville: I walked into the one across the street from the Redwood Playhouse… what a sight that was. Fentanyl addicts passed out, tweaker dude talking to himself swinging a machete, a really nice 4wheeler(stolen I’m guessing), mountains and mountains of garbage, buckets of shit. Ive seen a lot of things, but it was quite shocking to see the squalid conditions people are living in just barley out of sight on the edges of our town. Like a third world slum. Where’s CDFW and the water board on that?

[5] July 4th weekend, 2023. 6 1/2 tons of garbage and left behind debris picked up from lake Tahoe beaches. Only 2 1/2 tons this year. Tell me people aren’t pigs.