THE AVA RECOMMENDS
Prop 2: $10 Bil For School Facilities. YES.
Prop 3: Right To Marry. YES.
Prop 4: Safe Water Wildfire Prevention Climate Change Risks. YES.
Prop 5: Bonds For Housing. YES.
Prop 6: Involuntary Servitude In Prisons. YES.
Prop 32: Minimum Wage To $18 Dollars An Hour. YES.
Prop 33: Rent Control. YES.
Prop 34: Ensures Healthcare Funding Gets To Patients, Not The Owners Of Medical Corporations. YES.
Prop 35: Ensures Medi-Cal Funding Remains Untampered With. YES.
Prop 36: Increases Penalties For Drug And Theft Crimes. NO.
Previously, recommendations with commentary: https://theava.com/archives/253303#14
MIKAEL BLAISELL
Will There be a Future for our Mendocino Coast Hospital?
Existing California law requires all hospitals to meet the state's stringent requirements for earthquake safety by mid 2026 -- two years from now. By January 1st, 2030, even more strict requirements will apply.
Our Mendocino Coast hospital buildings do not currently meet those standards. When the deadlines arrive, if corrective action has not been taken, our hospital will be required to either close, or to offer only non-acute care. While the governor signed AB 869 into law yesterday, September 28th, 2024, that allows for a 3-year delay for some hospitals, the time for effective action is now. Hospitals are not built or retrofitted in a day.
It is the responsibility of the Mendocino Coast Health Care District (MCHCD), the landlord for our hospital, to prepare and execute the strategic plans to meet those fast-approaching deadlines and requirements. By the terms of the lease agreement between MCHCD and Adventist Health, MCHCD must present a committed plan to achieve seismic compliance to the reasonable satisfaction of the tenant, Adventist Health, by January 1, 2025. That's roughly 90 days from now. If the plan is not forthcoming, the tenant has the option to terminate the lease.
The MCHCD Board has made major progress since the last election. But much more is needed, and time is getting critically short. There are two open seats on that Board to be filled on November 5th. If the deadlines are to be successfully met, the two directors to be seated must be prepared to work fast and effectively with the continuing three directors: Paul Garza, Susan Savage, and Jan McGourty.
I am a candidate for one of the open seats on the MCHCD Board., and have been endorsed by Paul Garza, currently MCHCD Chairman, and Susan Savage, MCHCD Secretary. For more information, please visit my campaign website at: https://mb4mchcd.com
VANCE won the debate, considered purely as an argument, but America, as usual, lost, given that both candidates represented catastrophic plans for US captives of the two-party stranglehold. The Coach didn't seem prepared, or maybe he's just slow on the draw, which seems more likely. He whiffed on numerous opportunities to slamdunk Vance. Vance, however, is smart with the added advantage that he's also a sociopath, managing to go from his fervid liberalism and insults of Trump of a few years ago to an equivalently fervid Trump-ism. Sociopath? Isn't that a little strong? As Vance admitted, he made up the story about Haitians eating pets to draw attention to “more important issues,” and if that one isn't sociopathic it's psychopathic. Vance's boss apparently didn't get the memo about the Haitians snagging pets soooooo, as the boss closes in on Biden in the Senility Sweepstakes, seems to believe the most preposterous whopper ever trotted out by a presidential candidate. Vance is too smart not to know Trump is batshit, but Vance is a sociopath, a dangerous one, a guy who will do and say anything to advance himself. In that, he's just right for Trump.
A READER WRITES: I’ve been in the restaurant business for many years and, after reading your phone message menu for the police department and the newspaper office, I thought I’d do one for the restaurant business. Most of our business is walk-in, not phone calls, so this is a list of options that we should post on our front door.
“Hello. You are about to enter the Clean Spoon Restaurant. In order to best serve you, please read the following options and select the one that best fits your situation. If you’re arriving within two minutes of closing time and want to know if we’re still open for dinner after reading the hours of operation, please accept our apology: we’re closed. If, after eating your entire meal and being asked several times how it was and saying fine, you want to complain about how horrible it was, please write your complaint on the toilet paper in the bathroom so that we may process it appropriately. If you’re here to pick up a take-out order that you ordered three hours ago expecting it to still be warm, please bring your own microwave. If you can see that every table in the Clean Spoon is full and we’re very busy, and you want to complain that we’re not filling your water glass promptly enough after you asked everyone in the place to fill it, please bring your own canteen in the future. If you want reservations when we’re not taking reservations but you claim to know the owner and you know she’d be happy to put you on the (non-existent) reservation list, please write your own reservation list and give it to the owner. If you’d like to refuse a meal because it is just like it was described on the menu but wasn’t what you thought it was, please eat it anyway. If you want your rare steak to still be rare after you took half an hour to eat your salad while the steak sat cooking under the hot warming lights because you emphatically demanded that it shouldn’t be brought out until you’re finished with your salad, please accept your medium-well steak. If your sandwich includes an ingredient you didn’t want which was clearly listed on the menu, please exchange your sandwich with your lunch guest. If your cooked chicken salad includes some pieces of chicken which are not ice cold, please pour your ice water on your salad. If you’re going to leave a $4 tip in coins no larger than a dime because you don’t have any one dollar bills, please keep your tip. Thank you for your business, and remember, we’re here to feed you, not coddle you.
A RECENT HEADLINE in the SF Chronicle read: “Grand tour of BART's bathrooms — from the pristine to the pathogenic.” Public bathrooms should all be privatized, one to each entrepreneur who would agree, as part of the deal, to work on-site for a minimum number of hours a week to ensure quality control. Rather than enter the fetid, toxic dank of the typical public lavatory, wouldn't you pay a buck to use scrupulously clean facilities manned or womaned by a smartly uniformed attendant who hosed you down afterwards and handed you a fresh towel? Why, think of it! The national transformation of the public bathroom experience! Clearly a project made for free enterprise!
THE WATER CRISIS, shortage of, is still with us. Ukiah and Sonoma are tardy filing state mandated water management plans while much of Sonoma County continues to take more of the Russian River's depleted waters than Sonoma County is supposed to be taking. The reason Northcoast municipalities must file water plans is to prevent those municipalities from erecting more structures than they will be able to provide water for. The reason Sonoma County is probably looking at strict water rationing before the end of this scorching October is because Sonoma County has already overdrawn the Russian River, source of much of that county's water. Much of the Russian River, as you should know by now, originates over the hill from Potter Valley in the Eel River. The Eel is diverted at Potter Valley via a tunnel hand dug by Chinese labor at the dawn of the 20th century. The diverted water moves through Potter Valley and into storage at Lake Mendocino from where it flows south to metastasizing Sonoma County where it is distributed to stakeholders as far south as Sausalito.
SONOMA COUNTY owns most of the water stored at Lake Mendo, having picked it up for a song when Mendocino County supervisors, with the shortsightedness characteristic of them to this day, the late Joe Scaramella the only supervisor dissenting, basically gave the water to downstream developers in the early 1950s. Without the Eel River Diversion — a half-mile tunnel about four feet wide and seven feet tall — which, by the way, was constructed to provide Ukiah with its first electricity, there wouldn't be a Lake Mendocino, and without the summer time Eel confined in the lake there would be no water in the summer time Russian River. To say that Sonoma County’s water depends on an extremely precarious delivery system radically understates the case.
SO, BACK IN FRISCO with a fistful of checks, I once jogged a block to my all-Chinese neighborhood branch of the Bank of America to open my AVA account. There were some communication problems. “What kind biznest is this?” the manager asked, enunciating it, “What kine biznest is dis?” I explained the biznest as a weekly newspaper based in Mendocino County. “You live here, not there?,” he said, puzzled. “You want an ATM card?” I live there much more than here, I explained and, no, I don't want an ATM card. Mounted on the wall behind the manager was a huge print of Maplethorpe's pornographic Calla Lily. “You don't want an ATM card?” the manager asked. And asked five more times over the length of the transaction during which he also muttered skeptically several times to himself, “Biznest there, you here. Newspaper. Huh!” Then he’d say, “Meno what cowny? You want ATM card? Where is Meno Cowny? How far?” Two hours north, I said. It’s very beautiful, beautiful like your Calla Lily, I said, pointing at the Maplethorpe behind him. The banker turned to look at the picture; its straining pestil leaped out at his forehead. The manager seemed to be seeing the painting for the first time. “San Francisco better,” he said. “You sure you don’ wan’ ATM card?”
RUMMAGING through the fascinating Friends of the San Francisco Library book store at Fort Mason, I found a monograph called, “The Actor from Point Arena, excerpts taken from the ‘Memories of an Old Theatrical Man” by Frederick G. Ross. As a child, Mr. Ross’s family moved from San Francisco to Point Arena. The year of the Ross family’s move from the city to the untamed Mendocino coast was 1868. Young Fred, as a city kid, had already been bitten by the theater bug. He’d spent his formative years hanging around the numerous show biz venues clustered around San Francisco's Portsmouth Square, dreaming of one day becoming a performer himself. The lad was not eager to leave the excitements of the city for frontier Point Arena where, still not quite into his teens, the boy became a ranch hand. “My father was a believer in hard work; he worked hard himself. So, from the age of twelve or thirteen, my time at first was spent with the roughest woodsmen. I soon learned to swear as well as the best of them. Let me say right here that with the men it was but a habit, for they were real men. Later it was my lot, after my father closed the years of his mill career, to do about everything on the ranch a young fellow was able to do. And let me say right here that ranch and farm life is real hard work. But how to attain my ambition to act was the question. I mustered courage to ask my father for permission to leave home and go to work in San Francisco. He was a just man, and finally, after a long talk, he agreed, with the proviso that I learn a trade, and preferably his own trade, that of carpenter. This was agreed upon.”
BACK IN SAN FRANCISCO, Ross became an apprentice carpenter at fifty cents a day. He soon parlayed his newly acquired skills into work as a stagehand then, when various performances required emergency replacements, Ross got his first roles, all be them temporary. But he had talent, and before long Ross was earning a handsome living as a full-time thespian, going on to become nationally famous with long runs in character roles on Broadway, some of them in plays starring the Booth brothers, one of them John Wilkes, Lincoln’s assassin.
I’VE NEVER SEEN so much as a reference to Frederick Ross, Mendocino County’s most famous actor, in any of the local histories, but then Frederick was still Little Freddy when he labored like a man in Point Arena, which was then not much older than he was.
WHEN JIM MITCHELL, of the exciting Mitchell Brother’s Theater in San Francisco, shot his brother Artie to death back in 1991, Jim and his supporters were very unhappy with the prejudicial coverage the event was receiving in the Bay Area papers. Warren Hinckle decided Jim would get fairer treatment in the AVA, especially if Warren wrote the coverage himself. So every week while Jim’s trial was underway in Marin, I’d print up a couple thousand extra papers and trundle them down to the theater. I was handsomely compensated for the extra effort, and not only by the fleshly visuals of naked women I couldn’t help but see as they roamed the busy premises as I, an all-business bumpkin from Boonville, lugged the papers to the theater’s upstairs office. From the O’Farrell Street flesh palace the papers were driven to Marin where they were distributed the next day throughout the Marin County Courthouse. Maybe the counter-coverage worked because Jim got three years for ending his brother’s turbulent, apparently menacing life. Naked women in the aggregate might as well be a field of sunflowers so I came away with only one vivid memory of the theater — an old man in a walker emerging from one of the sinning alcoves with a big smile on his face. “Do you get a lot of old guys?” I asked theater manager Jim Armstrong. “Right around the first of the month, we do,” he said, “when their social security checks come in.”
THE SHARP RISE in foreclosures in California is getting a lot of attention, but not much attention is being paid to the reasons, beyond vague references to “sub-prime” lending practices, i.e., no money down with escalating interest rates higher than those charged by the Mafia. Lots of people don’t read the fine print. Or if they do, they don’t understand what they read. The exploited certainly don’t do the math when they buy their house on terms cynically made fleetingly affordable to them. A year later, the homeowner’s payments can be so high as to literally force them out onto the street. In these cases the lenders and their realtors are co-conspirators. They know the victim is in over his head, but hey, they tell him, you can afford it. One fairly standard sales pitch pushed supposedly low interest deals, but buried in the paperwork were not only additional fees, but fees which applied repeatedly, and oddly triggered interest rate hikes which were at least 2% over conventional bank rates -- not the bargain loans they were advertised to be.
FROM the August 3rd, 1907 edition of the Mendocino Beacon, as once compiled by Debbie L. Holmer “About 3 o'clock last Tuesday afternoon, the stage leaving Ukiah for Wilbur Springs, Blue Lakes and Upper Lake was held up by a lone bandit and the eighteen passengers were lined up alongside of the conveyance and relieved of their jewelry, money and other valuables. A few minutes later, a second stage from Ukiah, bound for Potter Valley and carrying about ten passengers, came into view, and the robber proceeded to line up these people along the roadway with the occupants of the first stage, and appropriate all that they possessed of value. After making sure that he had secured all the valuables the passengers possessed, he ordered them to proceed on their way up the mountain road. The robber then disappeared in the direction of Ukiah and later held up two freight wagons, taking all the money the drivers possessed, and also some provisions. He then escaped into the brush.”
BLACK BART, whose real name was Charles C. Bolton, successfully worked the Emerald Triangle for nearly a decade until, at his last job in Calaveras County, the usually scrupulous highwayman left behind a piece of his shirt with an identifying San Francisco laundry mark on it. Bart’s uncharacteristic carelessness led the police to him and he was soon packed off to San Quentin for five years. Following his release, the famous hold-up man was never heard from again.
LOCAL HISTORIANS may be able to tell us about a daring Ukiah High School teacher who was believed, at the time, to occasionally supplement his teacher’s pay as a stage robber. I've only seen one reference to the teacher in the histories of the area, and that was a vague one in the context of his much more renowned contemporary. A huge boulder near Willits, known as the Black Bart Rock or Bandit’s Rock, was once the hiding place of the enterprising bandit who, traveling on foot from the Sierras to the Coast Range, robbed a known total of 27 stage coaches between 1875 and 1883, a few of them on the long, lonely stretch of road between Cloverdale and Willits, but there were other bandits out there, too, among them it seems a Ukiah teacher. Bart, by the way, never fired a shot in all his robberies.
HELL, YOU'D BE HAPPY TOO IF YOU JUST SCORED A COUPLE HUNDRED THOU FROM MENDOCINO COUNTY. NOBODY'S IN CHARGE OVER THERE SO WATCH US RUN THIS BABY UP.
LEE EDMUNDSON
I used to see my urologist over here in her office on Sequoia Drive in Fort Bragg. She was in residence there twice a month. Whenever I saw her, my payment flowed through our Coast Hospital coffers.
She no longer attends here on the Coast. To see her, I have to drive over to Ukiah. Thus, my payments for my visits no longer flow through the Coast Hospital, but through Ukiah’s facility of Adventist Health.
I strongly suspect this factor — looked at over the entire sphere of medical practice of Adventist Health’s tenure running our coast hospital — suggests a very good reason the Coast Hospital runs at such a deep deficit: Adventist doesn’t send its medical practitioners over to the Coast, instead requiring us (the patients) to drive over there to Ukiah.
Thus bleeding the Coast Hospital’s revenue stream dry. Someone tell me I’m mistaken here.
To take another point (as long as I’m on this): The Coast Hospital District’s Board should be lobbying full-time and strongly for Sacramento to push back the Seismic Standards requirements to 2040, or beyond. We don’t need a new hospital, only our existing one retrofitted. The cost/plus benefit analysis should plainly show this to be true.
Finally, the Hospital Board should be lobbying Sacramento and Washington DC to pass legislation nationwide to subsidize rural Health Care Facilities, i.e. Hospitals. What’s going on here on the Mendocino Coast is occurring throughout rural America. Duh! As long as Medical Care in America is driven by the profit motive — as Adventist Health’s is — there will always be a shortfall of dollars. Health Care should not be considered a money making enterprise.
My 2-cents worth…
MIKE GENIELLA:
UKIAH'S PALACE HOTEL STILL SITS ROTTING. The owner refuses to act to prevent further damage, and City Hall administrators and the City Council publicly keep mum while talking among themselves behind closed doors about the fate of a downtown landmark. A summer ago, a new local investor had a promising plan to revive the Palace based on a design by noted San Francisco preservation architects. That effort collapsed when the current owner Jitu Ishwar, refused to accept a lower price and unexpectedly turned to a new group who hoped to piggyback a local tribe's ability to secure public funds to demolish the town's most historic building. That touted effort, widely promoted in the local community, collapsed after high-ranking state officials wondered if the tribe wasn't being used as a “mule” to secure public money for a private venture. Still, there are examples of what can happen when people and communities get serious. Here's another: https://www.fresnobee.com/news/local/article285711391.html
MENDOCINO COUNTY is no stranger to police misconduct cases. High-profile examples dominated local headlines in 2022-2023. Law enforcement officials, including the county's District Attorney, largely stayed mum. An investigative series statewide suggests why—there was far more than the public had not learned about police misconduct and how cases locally were handled behind closed doors. The city of Ukiah, for example, refused to turn over documents relating to so-called private agreements detailed in the new statewide investigative report.
Here's the link to the series, published by the San Francisco Chronicle with reporting by the University of California Berkeley's Investigative Reporting Program:
“This is the secret system that covers up police misconduct — and ensures problem officers can get hired again
The Police Officer’s Career was in peril. Twenty-five years ago, Hossep ‘Joe’ Ourjanian’s supervisors at the Los Angeles County Office of Public Safety accused him of “flagrant” misconduct. They said he had pretended to attend military training to skip work. They had already decided he should be fired when they learned of another allegation: Ourjanian’s girlfriend said he had grabbed her and pulled her hair while she held their infant son.
But then Los Angeles County did something remarkable: The county agreed to hide evidence that Ourjanian allegedly lied to dodge work in exchange for his promise to go without a fight. Records documenting the county’s finding of misconduct would be removed from his personnel file and their very existence would be kept secret. His firing would be rescinded. If any future employer asked, the county agreed to say only that he had resigned ‘indicating personal reasons’.” …
https://www.sfchronicle.com/projects/2024/police-clean-record-agreements
(Mike Geniella)
THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY is the problem, you fools! Don’t you understand anything? And at your age, too! There hasn’t been a real liberal around here since Congressman Clem Miller died in a plane crash in the early 1960s and he still managed, as a dead man, to defeat Don Clausen, the Republican candidate. So, class, if a young, pro-labor liberal can get elected as our congressman in the early 1960s when the population of the Northcoast was entirely pre-Cambrian, maybe the political problem is with the current population of Northcoast “progressives,” eh my little apple cheeked lib-lab?
HAVEN’T found anybody yet who can confirm, but I’ve got a source who tells me there are indeed for-profit dog fights in Mendocino County. It’s also a fairly well-known fact of local life that cock fights are not hard to find if you travel in those circles where your friends keep 50 roosters and no hens in their backyards.
I WAS WALKING around Mission Bay, early for the latest in endless doctor's appointments, marveling that my value to that noble profession is in the low millions as they keep me alive to loot Medi-Care, when a raggedy man of my vintage rode up to me on his bicycle and said, “It's your lucky day. I'm going to tell you the joke nobody told you at Christmas.” I don't remember anybody telling me any kind of joke at Christmas and anyway it's September except for, “Golly, you sure look great.” I probably first heard the joke the bicycle man proceeded to tell me sixty years ago. It was a smutty unfunny one about a door-to-door salesman and a housewife, but it was the thought that counted so I thanked him and moved on, it occurring to me he was more of a prisoner of a time long past — 1950s traveling salesman gags — than I was, a person with zero nostalgia for the 1950s, a strangling era of insane domestic policy and an even more insane foreign policy, a time much like today except for people living on the streets and millions of others in their telephones.
ENCOURAGING BUMPERSTICKER spotted in San Rafael: “Your kid's an honor student but you're a moron.”
QUOTE OF THE WEEK from Joe Namath: “I never walked off a professional football field without first thinking of something boring to say.”
THE OTHER DAY I watched an elderly Chinese man snapping off the stems of a half-dozen red peppers he soon purchased. I couldn't figure out why he was doing it. I told my cultural consultant what I'd seen. “Oh, he's just making them weigh less so they'll be cheaper.” Cheaper? The total savings on that particular purchase couldn't been more than a tenth of a cent, but if he'd been de-stemming fruit and vegetables for 70 years the old boy probably had himself the equivalent of this year's Honda. My cultural consultant agreed. “That's exactly the way we look at it.”
WE ALL, at one time or another, get the verbal finger when we call the County Courthouse where the lines are always busy and the person you want to talk to is out when he’s in and in when he’s out. To ask to talk to a judge, well, you might as well call up the Vatican and ask for the Pope. When I still had a voice I called the Courthouse eight times one morning, not to talk to one of the eight majesties of the Mendocino County Superior Court, those holiest of holies, no my fellow vassals, I placed those calls because the verbal finger I got made me laugh. Yes, I’m easily amused, but try dialing a Courthouse number yourself and you’ll hear a chirpy recording of a female voice say, “Your call cannot be answered at this time. Please try again later. Good bye.” It was the way she said, “Good bye” that cracked me up. There was laughter in her voice, as in “Good bye forever, you fool. You’ll never get through to us because we only have one line and it will always be busy, forever and ever and ever.”
THE DA doesn't talk to Mendo media these days. We used to be on pretty good terms, good enough that the DA would stop in when he was in Boonville to chat. But when we started slugging away at him when he engineered the purge of the Auditor for no tangible reason other than his pique at her temerity for challenging his expense account, DA Dave, always a petulant personality type, went to the mattresses. Now, thanks to his judge buddies, DA Dave has managed to parlay his non-case into an expensively endless series of court appearances, replete with delays (of course) while his unilaterally-appointed substitute prosecutor at $400 an hour thank you very much suckers, “gets up to speed.” Last we heard she was still in pursuit of fully informed. Only in Mendo.
THE NIGHT BARRY BONDS jacked his big one in San Francisco, so many fans got on their cellphones the instant the ball disappeared into the center field stands that none of their calls got through. The networks were so jammed they failed for an average, T-Mobile announced the next day, “of 217 seconds.” When the Big One hits us expect telephone communications to disappear along with the freeway overpasses. Outside the park after the game, entrepreneurs held up signs offering $20 for ticket stubs.
BONDS’ record breaking home run ball that memorable night was caught by a Mets fan, a young man named Murphy, 21, who single-handedly caused a major revision in Murphy’s Law. Murphy, who lives in New York, who happened to stop in at the ballpark because he had a night to kill before he got on a plane for a vacation in Australia. Young Murph snagged the ball and was then serially assaulted in a huge pile of scrimmaging ball hawks. The kid wrapped his pummeled body around the little treasure and hung on until he could be rescued. He said later that “The San Francisco Police Department saved my life.” Murphy then put the ball in a bank vault and flew down under the next day. The lucky traveler then arranged with Sotheby’s and SCP Auctions to sell it to the highest bidder. Sotheby's also sold Bonds’ home run ball number 700 for $102,000 soon after Bonds launched it back in 2005. Bonds’ 715th home run ball, the one that put him ahead of Babe Ruth, sold for $220,100. Previous record-setting balls sold at auction include Bonds’ 73rd home run ball (surpassing Mark McGwire for the single season record), which sold in 2001 for $517,500. And Hank Aaron’s 755th ball which garnered $650,000 back in 1999.
THE HAZARD to satire in Mendo, or even obvious humor, arises from a stultifying combination of mass reading handicaps and political correctness or, as expressed lately, “wokeness.” Tommy Wayne Kramer, not so long ago, managed to outrage the county’s NPR brigades two weeks in a row. Kramer did an amusing riff on Ukiah’s outdoor concerts as dominated by the dozen or so skeletal exhibitionists who unfailingly insert their writhing, arrhythmic, cadaverous selves between the audience and the bandstand at outdoor pop music concerts. The entire Ukiah cemetery came out swinging on that one. One of Kramer’s critics managed to link his humor to Nazi propaganda, another dared us to substitute “hippie” for a u-pik variety of victim groups. Others merely applied the blanket opprobrium “inappropriate,” a fave of Kramer's Westside neighbors.
I’LL TAKE the hippie-as-victim dare. Ready? Mendocino County’s extinct hippies were not Holocaust Jews or Klan lynchees, and now that the children and the remedial readers are out of the room, we’ll continue.
THEN Kramer took a shot at Ukiah’s Methodist Church’s irritatingly pious announcement board which seem to accompany the treacly pop tunes the church plays on its loud speakers in lieu of traditional church bells, the net message being that Jesus Christ was not only a very hip guy, should He re-appear any time soon He is certain to make His way directly to the guest of honor pew among the Ukiah Methodists.
AS WITH KRAMER’S merry account of the ghosts of the Summer of Love at Ukiah’s concerts in the park, the inland descendants of John Wesley rallied in defense of a pop theology the old boy would not recognize, demanding that Kramer either be, well, crucified, or they’ll cancel their subscriptions to the Ukiah Daily Journal.
MIKE GENIELLA:
Susan Faludi is a fine writer and insightful commentator on the American scene.
Some of us on the North Coast had the opportunity to get to know Faludi well when she roamed the backwoods and interviewed people about the Judi Bari/radical environmentalism phenomenon surrounding a long, hot summer of redwood logging protests three decades ago.
Later, when a federal civil rights case went to trial in Oakland after Bari's death, Faludi and I sat next to each other in the courtroom every day. Our professional relationship took off, and a personal friendship deepened. I have immense respect for Faludi, her judgments, and the penetrating analysis she brings to the 'poisonous huckster' who presents a challenge unlike any other.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/06/opinion/kamala-harris-donald-trump-security.html
CITY NOTEBOOK. I was on the outbound 38 Geary when three raucous fat girls clamored aboard through the exit doors. Two looked to be about 20, the third a young teenager. Entering the bus through its back doors is theoretically a misdemeanor, as is eating, smoking, drinking, and sitting in the front seats reserved for the elderly and the handicapped. But on every major bus line people of all ages routinely enter through the exits, eat, drink, smoke (dope and cigarettes), and generally behave as if the droning, mechanized warnings against bad behavior do not apply to them or anybody else.
THE THREE fat girls joined me in the rear of the bus, traditional home of the badly behaved. One was unabashedly sucking her thumb, another was washing down corn chips with Hawaiian Punch, and the third, the fattest one, was smoking Marlboros and loudly talking about “some bitches I'm gonna get one at a time, one at a time, you hear? And I don't care if the m-fers are big, little, fat, skinny, I'll fight 'em all.” The fattest girl promised to get the doomed bitches a dozen times between Kearny and Divisadero, seemingly psyching herself up for mayhem if the g.d. m-fers suddenly happened into her viewshed. The other two fat girls occasionally shouted out support. “That's right, girl. One at a time. They know who they are.” The fat girls went on in call and response fashion for several blocks before the chief avenger sighed and said, “I sure could use a Pepsi,” and all three lapsed into silence, perhaps dreaming of Pepsis.
I SAW the same handful of street drunks and the same homeless woman almost every day. The drunks camp to the rear of a public parking lot off Clement from which they emerge to panhandle, and often collapse, on Clement itself, busy shoppers stepping over and around them. One Christmas Eve, two of them were passed out in front of the busy Walgreen’s, since closed when thefts outnumbered purchases. Another guy was about to topple and, as I approached, the fourth guy did topple, falling backwards into a cluster of newspaper racks, one of which was propelled heavily into a parked car.
IT WAS VERY COLD, cold enough for all four to die if they didn't get shelter. Although dying is the point of habitual drop-fall drinking, I asked a kid with a cell phone to call emergency services. For selfish reasons I didn't want to read the next morning that a drunk had died in front of Walgreen’s at 9th and Clement. The cell phone kid was togged out in sags and the rest of the ganga banga gear, so I wasn't confident he'd be up for an electronic errand of mercy. But without a word he called the drunks in, and then he stuck a dollar bill in each of their jacket pockets.
CHRISTMAS DAY, the mummified homeless woman, a familiar sight, was shuffling east on California Street, her belongings heaped in a shopping cart. When I first noticed her, I had to take a closer look before I could safely assume she was a woman, a fact I still assume because the layers of clothes comprising her ensemble are mostly feminine and include brightly colored scarves placed at odd intervals, head to toe. Inspired by the charity of the previous night's ganga banga kid, I held out a dollar and said, “Merry Christmas,” assuming I'd just bought a buck's worth of basic civility. The mummy snatched the bill and resumed shuffling east. “What's your name?” I asked. “Get the hell away from me, you son of a bitch,” she said.
SHERIFF MATT KENDALL: (Re: the Ukiah City Council’s non-endorsement of Proposition 36)
I watched this portion of the city council meeting and was a little bit shocked myself. Call me old-fashioned, however I still don’t think it’s OK to steal from anyone.
Some of the comments made seemed a little out of touch and although I’m certain they were intended to sound like they were caring and thoughtful to the plight of our fellow humans, ultimately they seemed uninformed.
Our coroner’s cases show we lose almost 50 people a year to overdoses. We have lost none to starvation.
Listening to the city council members say they understand why people steal and framing it as a necessity due to poverty was simply ridiculous. People who steal power tools aren’t eating them, they are being sold at a discount for drugs and that’s simply a fact.
When times get hard we have to raise the bar and people will meet the challenge. Obviously, our state has been lowering it and people are reaching down to meet that expectation. Sad times to at the least.
LEW CHICHESTER (Covelo):
Yesterday’s “Formerly Known As Camp” [a Sheriff’s office presser about pot eradication in Round Valley] leaves out a lot of information known to the locals in Round Valley. Grows on “tribal” properties didn’t get raided, even though the environmental degradation, pesticides, etc. is similar to the grows which were busted. The tribal government has a “cease and desist” order with the sheriff, exempting the tribal properties from state enforcement. That allows all kinds of narco state development on the reservation with extensive grow operations leased out and managed by Spanish individuals from out of the area. A few tribal members are financially benefitting from this arrangement but it has led to a level of corruption and crime which is incompatible with the so-called “compassionate use” fictional element of this particular tribal sovereignty issue.
CITY NOTES:
A friend commented: “I sometimes walk six miles to avoid taking Muni.” Me too, depending on how my legs feel, I sometimes walk six miles west all the way to 7th Avenue rather than board a packed Muni, on a hot day, not that I ever click my heels in anticipation of the experience. Muni is often unpleasant in ways large and small, from buses with windows blacked out with advertising so passengers can’t see out (which says it all about management’s regard for its customers), to the constant mechanized voice reminders to “hold on,” to feral co-passengers, to drivers who range from the verifiably insane to the merely rude and stupid to the saintly.
I'VE experienced the entire Muni gambit, from irritating to frightening. A minor encounter one afternoon at the foot of Market Street is illustrative of the irritating end of the spectrum. I’d been at the ballpark, then into the Ferry Building for a post-game cup of Peets and an hour of people watching on a bench outside, confirming my opinion that a national dress code was long overdue. I crossed the Embarcadero to Market where, as I approached, I was happy to see the 2 Clement at the bus stop, just sitting there with its door open, its engine idling, its driver, a portly white man, at the wheel. All for me!, I silently exulted, a gift from the public transit gods! I bounded up the buses’ three steps, flashing my wife’s senior pass at the driver, who half rose out of his driver’s seat and yelled virtually in my face, “Out of service! Get off. Can’t you see I’m out of service?”
OF COURSE. Silly me. A bus idling at a bus stop with its door open and its uniformed driver at the wheel? What else could it be but out of service?
I suggested, politely, in my best calming, therapeutic voice I keep ready for encounters with psychos, “Why don’t you close the door if you’re out of service?” The driver, mute, looked straight ahead.
I DISMOUNTED. A black female driver appeared. The psycho driver got off his out of service bus without looking at me. I fought off the temptation to remind him that fat guys are supposed to be happy.
THE NEW DRIVER welcomed me. “You can sit down on the bus if you want, but I can’t leave for another 15 minutes because of the schedule.” I thanked her and got back on, so pleased with her graciousness I wrote down the bus number and called in a commendation to the bus barn headquarters on Presidio.
A KINDLY SOUNDING woman answered the phone. I explained that “driver number 2413 was very nice, but before her, male driver 1435, asked me if he could see my private parts. I’m a senior citizen from Mendocino County, and we don't do that kind of thing in my home town of Boonville. I thought I should report him because I doubt Muni wants perverts driving its buses.” The lady on the other end of the line paused before she said, “We’ll make a note of that, sir. Thank you for calling.”
ACCORDING TO A RECENT REPORT by Chronicle reporter Sophia Bollag, Governor Newsom opposes Proposition 36 because “It’s about mass incarceration, not mass treatment. What an actual insult it is to say it’s about mass treatment when there’s not a dollar attached to it.” Bollag adds, “The nonpartisan Legislative Analyst’s Office, which estimates how much proposed laws will cost, found the measure will actually ‘reduce the amount the state must spend on mental health and drug treatment, school truancy and dropout prevention, and victim services’ by tens of millions of dollars each year.” According to Bollag, “That’s because Prop 47, the ballot measure Prop 36 would partially undo, used the money saved by keeping people out of prison for low-level theft and drug crimes to fund rehabilitation and treatment programs aimed at keeping people from committing crimes in the first place. If Prop 36 passes, it would cut into those savings by putting more people in jail and prison. That means there would be less money available for those treatment and rehabilitation programs. Supporters of the measure acknowledge that it would drive up costs to the state but have argued California needs to crack down on drug possession and retail theft.”
Let’s see if we get this. Opponents of Prop 36 essentially claim that Prop 47, which effectively decriminalized some “minor” theft and drug crimes, saved money for incareration and used it to prevent those crimes. Further, Prop 36 would “cut into those savings by putting more people in jail and prison.” Newsom says Prop 36 is bad because “there’s not a dollar attached to it,” and that therefore it wouldn’t produce the kind of coerced treatment that Prop 36 proponents claim.
The trouble with these arguments is that there’s no evidence that Prop 47 “saved” money by not incarcerating low level offenders. Sheriff Kendall and other supporters of Prop 36 say that without a “stick” to compel drug addicts into treatment, lots of people stay on the streets committing crimes and using drugs. Nobody has estimated how much that costs either. Newsom’s claim that he’d only support Prop 36 if there was treatment money associated with it is specious because there’s already lots of money earmarked for “treatment,” but, as with Mendocino County’s Measure B unspent treatment money, it hasn’t made much difference to the kinds of criminals Prop 36 is aimed at. The new wing of Mendo’s jail is supposed to be for some kind of treatment for the drug-addled/mentally ill who don’t otherwise qualify for the billions spent on mental health or treatment services. Yet nobody has objected to that purpose for the new wing of the jail. Proponents of Prop 36 say it will coerce some low level criminals into “treatment,” by giving them the option of jail or treatment. Just allocating money to treatment but not steering those who need it into it is a failed idea. We’d like to think that at least some of the people who will end up in jail or prison if Prop 36 passes will benefit from it via a temporarily imposed abstinance or treatment, and society will benefit from them being given a time out from whatever catch and release crimes they have been getting away with.
(Mark Scaramella)
MIKE ROSS:
I grew up in the 80’s during the Candlestick era. Joe, Jerry, Roger, Ronnie, John, Tom, Brent, etc. The crowd was always in the game and always had our team’s back. I just went to the last game at Levi and I was really disappointed. A TON of empty seats and people barely even stood up on 3rd down when our D was on the feild. I love my team, but I’m not a fan of a lot of our current “fans.” And a lot of you “fans” exposed yourselves last year against Detroit saying “I’m done with this team” at halftime. That’s not a fan. That’s the opposite of “faithful.” Don’t get me wrong, we do have some die hard fans, but they are becoming more and more rare. The Faithful need to do better.
ED NOTE: Class angle, Mike, apply social class analysis. The old fans were more real because they didn't have to take out a second mortgage for a ticket. The new fans in that awful mall-like stadium a zillion miles south of Frisco are softies and, mostly, only became fans an hour after these Niners started winning. Candlestick was perfect for football, too windy and cold for baseball. My credentials? I saw Y.A. Tittle at Kezar! There aren't many of us left who can make that claim. I think the prob with this crew of ominously stumbling Niners is Shanahan, his play calling, his apparent inability to adjust to changing on-field circumstances and his vibe, which a few players hint at but of course aren't about to comment on publicly, and by which I mean the soulless, petulant way the personality-challenged Shanahan interacts with his team. My idea of a coach, the archetype? Ladies and gentlemen, Dan Campbell of the Detroit Lions!
ON-LINE COMMENTS OF THE WEEK
[1] Trump says so much bullshit that the “Media” whether right or left let’s him get away with. Take any of his rallies and read what he has to say. People are so used to the garbage coming out of his mouth they just ignore it. His stream of consciousness is disturbing and if a family member of mine went on like he does, I would seek psychiatric for them.
If Trump has a subject he misspoke on I would let that slide, but when he says the same thing over and over, one has to conclude that that is what he believes.
“They’re eating the dogs” case in point.
[2] Funny how the "Blue Team" posters talk about inflation being back to "normal" and ignore that the 20% and more inflation prices are still in effect. Everything you buy is still at the higher prices, nothing has gone back to anywhere normal. I guess if your IRA is up $100,000 and you have 5.25& CD's, todays prices are of no concern to you.
[3] Hard to believe the degree to which narcissism is running this country. Give to other nations, while our own country is bankrupt, and cannot "afford" to provide aid to its own people in response to injurious, murderous natural disasters. It's disgusting, it's deplorable and it's as evil-intentioned as an administration can get. I wonder what would happen, if this REAL news were shared with all the apathetic, idealistic, clueless and naive, who seek "change," yet can't figure out for themselves that Harris represents the status-quo of the past 4 years of struggle, and then some.
[4] Personally I feel divine intervention is the only thing that will save us, not so sure what sorta intervention or such but know its got to be from on high as we are fast being nullified.
[5] For months now I have been trying to get Facebook to do something about a fake me that has been posting non existent merchandise for sale on Facebook and ultimately scamming some of you. I have requested from those of you that have accepted friend requests from this scammer that you report him and block him to no avail. This has become a very frustrating situation as it appears that no one is listening or maybe it's just too much trouble to do anything. This morning I got yet another request from someone I know to purchase one of the scam items that this person has listed. If it's too much trouble for you to block the faker or to figure out how to report him, contact me and I will guide you through the process. He is using this older photo of me on his page.
[6] The only good thing I foresee coming out of a Harris administration is a jump start to the breakup of the country, which I for one think is long overdue. I have no desire to convince the folks in San Fran and Martha’s Vineyard of the errors of their ways…I wouldn’t mind having to get a visa to visit them should I have a hankering to see the Golden Gate or Skid Row…..I just want them out of my life, as eagerly and passionately as they wish to be divorced from mine.
GARY WESTDAHL
In their three losses, the ‘Niners have been outscored by a combined 10 points. Those losses were punctuated by the kinds of mistakes that can be addressed by coaching. As Shannahan said last year during a similar losing streak, “the solution is on the roster.”
Both the offense and the defense have had some great moments this year, but both are out of syc at the moment. And, as we all know, some important pieces are still missing.
Best case scenario has them 4-4 at the bye, in my estimation. But it’s not necessarily the end of the world. In 2007, the Giants had a record of 10-6 when they won it all. Same thing in 2011, they were 9-7. The Bucs were 7-5 at the bye and had all their playoff games (until the Super Bowl stroke of good luck) on the road. It’s all about putting it together at the right time, and I absolutely believe this team can do that.
Maybe this is their year, maybe it isn’t. Like it or not, we have a coach that rolls the dice, not only with his player’s bodies but apparently by bolstering some parts of the roster at the expense of others; I have no good excuse for the situation at kicker. That’s 100% on Shannahan and Lynch.
Bottom line, this season can turn around. There’s precedent. Will it? Guess we’ll find out.
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