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TEMPS REBOUND TODAY and light rain move over the Redwood coast this afternoon as a warm front approaches. Widespread light to locally moderate precip sweeps through Sunday afternoon with a cold front. A stronger storm may impact NWRN CA around mid week, although details remain unclear. (NWS)
STEPHEN DUNLAP (Fort Bragg): A brisk 38F under clear skies this Saturday morning on the coast. Increasing high clouds today with less wind. Enjoy the dry weather as many rainy days are now in the forecast for next week except Monday.
GRADY’S GUN, DRUGS & FIREWORKS
On 11/09/2024 at approximately 1:23 a.m., two Ukiah Police Department (UPD) officers were on patrol together in the 100 block of South Main Street when they observed a GMC Yukon fail to stop at a stop sign at the controlled intersection. The UPD officers conducted a traffic enforcement stop on the GMC Yukon due to the vehicle code violation.
When the two UPD officers approached the vehicle, one of the officers on the passenger side observed a black handgun within arm’s reach of the driver behind the center console. The driver was later identified as Grady Hollenbeck.
For the UPD officers’ safety, they told Hollenbeck to exit the vehicle. As Hollenbeck exited, the officers observed a glass methamphetamine pipe in plain view inside the driver door pocket. Hollenbeck was detained in handcuffs without incident and secured in the rear seat of the officers' patrol vehicle. A probable cause search of the vehicle was conducted following the discovery of drug paraphernalia and the firearm. During the search of the vehicle, the officers found that the firearm was a Glock Model 20 chambered in 10mm with a loaded magazine directly next to it. On the front passenger seat of the vehicle, there was a plastic pencil box containing suspected cocaine, methamphetamine, and oxycodone tablets, commonly referred to as M30s.
The UPD officers continued their search and located multiple other items of drug paraphernalia, as well as a backpack containing large “Mortar”-style explosive fireworks, which are illegal to possess in California. Due to the size and potential danger of the fireworks, the Sonoma County Sheriff’s Office EOD (Bomb Squad) was contacted and briefed on the specifics of the items. It was determined that the items were consumer-grade and not homemade, which would be safe to transport to a secure facility. The Sonoma County Sheriff’s Office EOD later responded to Ukiah and retrieved the items for destruction.
Hollenbeck was placed under arrest for the above-listed violations and transported to the Mendocino County Jail to be booked and lodged.
As always, UPD’s mission is to make Ukiah as safe a place as possible. If you would like to know more about crime in your neighborhood, you can sign up for telephone, cellphone, and email notifications by clicking the Nixle button on our website: http://www.ukiahpolice.com.
ON LINE COMMENT: “Yall wanted a cop in town so bad, so don’t complain when he pulls you over for some bs.”
STEPHANIE MARCUM replied: A lady got hit crossing the street last Friday. Right in front of AV Market. By a local. A Jr High kid only made it half way through the cross walk and had to stop because the north bound car was speeding. My son almost got clipped leaving the high school last Thursday because someone was passing on the shoulder. I could go on and on.
VICKI WILLIAMS (facebook):
I will be picking up trash this weekend on this Nov 16th Sunday [sic] starting at 10 AM for anyone who wants to help you can reach out to me personally on IM.
Go ahead and call Derek at Caltrans at the Boonville station and pick up a part of 128 yourself. We will never be able to keep up with the Modelo drinkers without constant work.
FIRST-ROUND NCS PLAYOFFS
Friday’s results:
D2
No. 1 Liberty 35, No. 8 Vintage 7
D4
No. 1 Ukiah 35, No. 8 Alameda 0
No. 2 American Canyon 7, No. 7 College Park 0
D5
No. 3 Sonoma Valley 49, No. 6 Hayward 12
No. 4 Maria Carrillo 28, No. 5 Tamalpais 20
D6
No. 5 Petaluma 39, No. 4 Montgomery 33
No. 6 Benicia 42, No. 3 Piner 38
8-person D2
No. 2 Elsie Allen 38, No. 3 Round Valley 14
Saturday’s games:
Open/D1
No. 5 Cardinal Newman at No. 4 Marin Catholic, 1 p.m.
D2
No. 3 Windsor at No. 6 Casa Grande, 7 p.m.
D6
No. 1 St. Vincent vs. No. 8 Arroyo, 1 p.m.
8-person D1
No. 3 Roseland University Prep at No. 2 Branson, 1 p.m.
MIKE GENIELLA:
GREAT FACADE—Ukiah-based Black Oak Coffee Roasters gets a big thumbs up with the facade of its Healdsburg location. It makes me smile every time I see the photo posted. A full and proud disclosure: our son Luke Geniella works with Black Oak CEO Jon Frech on marketing and design elements.
DISRUPTERS CLAIM CREDIT FOR FIXING THE PROBLEMS THEY CREATED
by Mark Scaramella
Like most Mendolanders, if you didn’t know the history, after the self-congratulatory November 5 financial presentation you might believe the Supervisors’ underhanded and ill-considered financial office consolidation and abrupt ouster of former Auditor Chamise Cubbison had worked out nicely, like a magic wand had been waved, and poof! Mendo’s finances were suddenly positive.
Not true.
It’s as if Dad knowingly poisoned Mom. Then, after a dedicated emergency room doctor worked feverishly to save her, Dad blamed the poisoning on Mom and denounced the doctor for taking so long to save Mom’s life and then claimed credit for hiring a nurse to tend to her while she recovered.
Our review of the video and written record going back to when Ms. Cubbison was first grudgingly made Acting Auditor and then elected to be the County’s Auditor-Controller/Treasurer-Tax Collector (ACTTC) shows that most of the credit for whatever positive developments were reported recently goes to Cubbison, not the Board’s hand-picked replacement Sara Pierce who inherited what Cubbison had done, or the Board which disrupted County finances with their wrong-headed and obstinate decisions.
For example, the recently completed, long delayed Annual Comprehensive Financial Report (ACFR) and year-end audit that the Board seems so happy with is the only one completed by Ms. Pierce. All the previous reports, including those done under former Auditor Lloyd Weer, were quietly prepared primarily under ousted Auditor Cubbison.
The County’s fancy new “Munis” Finance System was purchased years ago under former CEO Carmel Angelo. But was never used for anything other than for show because it was incompatible with departmental financial tracking systems and was not, as the computer people say, “user-friendly,” with its confusing set of obscure financial terminology and acronyms, many of which didn’t apply to Mendocino County. None of these problems, however, stopped Angelo from buying it for millions of dollars and bragging about it even though to this day it has yet to produce useful current financial status reports.
In 2019, the County paid for a Munis upgrade to version 11.3. The Auditor’s office under Assistant Auditor Chamise Cubbison (Auditor Weer didn’t bother himself with techno tasks) worked hundreds of unscheduled hours trying to apply that upgrade to Mendocino County. They’re closer now, but Munis still falls far short of providing departmental budgeting and tracking.
The County’s Property Tax conversion project to replace the antiquated 1980s-era precursor with a new package called “Aumentum” saw that system installed in September of 2020. It “went live” prematurely under orders from the CEO at the end of January 2021. But it too was unusable. The Aumentum software had never been used in California, yet CEO Angelo bought it based on Aumentum’s sales pitch and their promises that it could be made to work in Mendocino County. Major issues immediately cropped up, mostly associated with incompatibility of property and tax data between the old system and the Aumentum system structure. Cubbison and her staff, along with the Assessor’s office, had to work hundreds of unplanned hours a year with the data and the software vendor. Finally after several years under Cubbison’s watch most of the data was finally transferred.
In March of 2022 long-time Treasurer-Tax Collector Shari Schapmire retired saying she could “no longer work with this board” in the wake of the Board’s ill-planned and unjustified consolidation. Her long-time assistant Julie Forrester retired a few weeks later with only two-weeks notice.
Thanks in large part to delays in the County Counsel’s office it wasn’t until January of 2023 that the Board officially published the ordinance creating the combined office and allowing staffing and hiring to even begin.
Making matters worse, after Weer retired in 2021, lengthy personnel department delays in reclassifying the new positions under the Board’s ill-considered “consolidation” of the Auditor and Treasurer’s office, prevented Cubbison from filling key vacancies.
Also during this time the Board decided to refinance several outstanding debts to lower interest rates. A good idea, but it created yet another extra workload for the already understaffed and under-experienced combined ACTTC office.
As predicted by the two elected financial officers in formal statements to the Board, four senior staffers from the two combined offices retired in a matter of months after the Board’s rash decision to consolidate the office. Because these were relatively small offices, all of them were “working bosses,” spending much of their time on the accounting tasks while also managing their departments. They were not bureaucrats who sat around doing nothing telling people what to do. So their loss was in both staffing and experience.
After the consolidation spawned those senior staff departures, Cubbison was stuck with the understaffed office and few experienced staffers, especially ones with applicable government accounting backgrounds.
Cubbison spent months recruiting, interviewing and training replacements for these positions (or their equivalent under the consolidation) and they were finally filled, albeit with inexperienced people. As a result, Ms. Pierce is now more or less caught up on staffing.
But work continued with staff available on regular accounting functions plus the non-routine things including a Property Tax data audit going back more than seven years to check the tax records in the newly converted Aumentum system requiring field work on many properties that had not been checked in years.
Cubbison and staff began working with outside auditors to incorporate some never before included adjusting entries in the Munis finance system for the final issuance of the fiscal year 21/22 reports. The 21/22 reports were largely completed prior to Cubbison’s suspension, but they had been delayed due to Auditor’s office short staffing, finance system upgrades, short staffing in other departments’ fiscal units, and incorporating a backlog of year-end audit adjustments in Munis for fiscal years 21/22 and 22/23. When Cubbison was suspended, the Auditor’s office was close to issuing the final reports for 21/22 and 22/23.
Other unplanned extra work imposed on the office included setting up a contract with outside vendor Granicus/Host Compliance for Transient Occupancy Tax (TOT) Collection and tracking services.
Cubbison renegotiated better rates for a recurring contract with Chandler Asset management for investment related services, matching the better rate Lake County was getting.
Cubbison also spent dozens of hours working with Supervisor Mulheren and the rest of the Board to come up with Cannabis Tax payment plans and an interest/penalty amnesty program to collect delinquent cannabis taxes.
All of this was reported to the Supervisors in open session during their prolonged “Get Cubbison” project period. But the Supervisors were not paying any attention because to do so would undermine their Get Cubbison agenda. All attempts by Cubbison to explain the difficulties the consolidation had introduced were interpreted by the Board as non-cooperation.
In both software cases — Munis and Aumentum — most of the work to get those systems in something resembling working order was done under Cubbison. By last month (October 2024) various finishing touches were added. Ms. Pierce and the Supervisors then rushed to claim credit for work that was primarily done and nearly finished under Cubbison.
The Supervisors created an accounting mess by consolidating the offices without any planning at a critical time of major software conversion, predictably causing long-time senior staffers to quit or resign, thereby delaying the reports they had been complaining about but never specifying what they really wanted, and in the process incurred a significant legal liability by abruptly “suspending” Cubbison, the last senior staffer who had been deeply involved in the difficult conversion process and the unplanned additional tasks.
Yet, at that November 5 meeting they took special care to congratulate themselves and their “acting” handpicked financial caretaker for belatedly getting somewhat caught up on work that would have been completed sooner had they not thrown their misguided monkeywrenches into the County’s two elected financial offices that everyone with an opinion on the subject advised against.
To top it off, they turned around and accused the people they caused to leave of being uncooperative in the misguided consolidation without the slightest awareness of their own responsibility for the problems.
PILE BURNING PLANNED NORTH OF LAYTONVILLE STARTING NOV 23
Mendocino County, CA– The Eel River Recovery Project, in collaboration with local landowners, and the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (CAL FIRE), is planning to burn 16-acres of piles in the Lower Tenmile Creek Watershed on Saturday, November 23 and Sunday, November 24th, at the Vassar Ranch.
The Lower Tenmile Creek project area is located near Hwy 101, approximately 7 miles north of Laytonville. Burning will begin at 8am, and smoke may be visible from Hwy 101 and surrounding areas. The burn will be led by qualified Burn Boss Scot Steinbring of Torchbearr, with a burn crew on site and permitting from CalFire and Air Quality.
The burn is part of an ambitious multi-year watershed-wide forest health project in the Tenmile Creek watershed to return good fire to the ecosystem, thinning areas of dense trees and reducing the buildup of woody fuels on the forest floor, the consequence of over a century of fire suppression. Burning the piles of slash and woody debris will start to reduce the fuel load so that prescribed broadcast burning can happen in the area in the future. Thinning and piling of hundreds of piles by Elk Ridge Tree Service took place over the spring and summer.
The pile burn will be ERRP’s second application of good fire on the Tenmile project. Earlier this season, on October 11 Steinbring and Torchbearr led a successful prescribed burn further downstream in the Tenmile Creek Watershed on approximately 30-acres of mixed hardwood and conifer forest. Ideal burn conditions, and the diligent work of a crew of fire professionals and community members, resulted in an effective broadcast burn that safely cleared understory fuels and encroaching invasives.
ERRP is working to recruit volunteers to participate in controlled burns to assist with meeting their current ambitious prescribed fire goals, and to help the community build a stewardship corps that can assist with cooperative controlled burns as a way of maintaining forest and grassland health into the future. On December 7th, Will Emerson of the Northern Mendocino Ecosystem Recovery Alliance (NM-ERA) will co-host an onsite workshop at the North Vassar Unit, open to all community members, to learn more about the pile burning and the Tenmile Creek Forest Health Project and see the burn effects. Emerson will conduct a hands-on demonstration of the ecological benefits of different burning methods including conservation piles, “rick” burning, and the portable biochar kiln.
Funding for the Tenmile Creek Watershed Forest Health Project is provided by CAL FIRE’s Forest Health Program as part of California Climate Investments (CCI), a state-wide program that puts billions of Cap-and-Trade dollars to work reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, strengthening the economy, and improving public health and the environment – particularly disadvantaged communities.
Contact Alicia Bales at 916-595-8724 to get involved.
FREE HOME-HARDENING FOR INCOME-ELIGIBLE SENIORS
by Sara Reith
The Mendocino County Fire Safe Council offers a number of programs to help local people survive and thrive in a wildfire-prone environment. One of the key ingredients to making a property more fire resistant is defensible space, which means clearing vegetation from around inhabited areas. It’s hard work, and if you can’t do it yourself, it’s expensive. For retired people on a fixed income, it’s easy to let high dollar hard labor fall to the bottom of the priority list.
The Mendocino County Fire Safe Council is offering to do some of that work at no cost for income-eligible senior citizens. The DSAFIE, or Defensible Space Assistance for Income Eligible program, is funded by the county, through disaster relief funds from PG&E for the 2017 Redwood Complex wildfire. Program coordinator Bobbie Delgado made the case for defensible space.
“Defensible space is crucial for wildfire safety,” she said, describing the levels of clearance that are required by law and are key for wildfire defense and firefighter safety. Zone 0 is the area within five feet of the home, where intense fuel reduction is needed to protect against ember intrusion. Zones 1 and 2 extend from 30 to 100 feet of the home. That work entails varying levels of vegetation management, from keeping branches within ten feet of chimneys to proper placement between shrubs and trees and making sure flammable items are not stowed away under decks and stairs.
The program is administered with a light touch. There are HUD guidelines for income eligibility, but the Fire Safe Council relies largely on the trust that’s so essential in a well-functioning community. So far, over 439 Mendocino County residents have been served by the program, with a goal of serving another 100 per year until 2026. Other local agencies are pitching in, too. The senior centers and neighborhood Fire Safe Councils are ready to help people with the applications for the program. And some of the firefighting agencies can offer help with the application as well as crews to perform the defensible space work. So far, the Whale Gulch Volunteer Fire Company, the Leggett Valley Fire District, and the Anderson Valley Fire Department have joined the DSAFIE effort.
Delgado emphasizes that the DSAFIE program is nothing like the invasive clear cutting that some landowners have experienced at the hands of state agencies or utilities. “We really try to focus on the client’s needs,” she declared. There is always a work plan for clients to review and approve. “We say this is recommended, but we won’t go in and cut your prize roses and clear all of the trees you have for privacy around your home,” Delgado said reassuringly. There is an educational aspect, too, with crew members offering suggestions that clients are free to incorporate or reject. “We always respect our clients’ needs,” she maintained. “But we do also try to focus on the next step that they could take to prevent any risks around their home.” Ideally people will eventually do all of the work needed to minimize their risk from wildfire, including having a completely nonflammable zone 0 (the five feet immediately around the home). And the program may require that more work get done in the future. But for now, the DSAFIE program is helping people get started. Doing something is the first step toward becoming wildfire prepared.
Interested parties can apply for the DSAFIE program on the Fire Safe Council website at firesafemendocino.org/dsafie or by calling Bobbie Delgado at (707) 462-3662.
MENDOCINO CITY COMMUNITY SERVICES DISTRICT (MCCSD) TO HOST PUBLIC EVENT ON DRAFT SOURCE WATER STUDY FOR MENDOCINO
Residents Encouraged to Participate in Shaping Mendocino’s Water Future
Date: December 3, 2024 | Time: 6:00 PM
Location: Mendocino Community Center, 10525 School Street, Mendocino, CA 95460
The Mendocino City Community Services District (MCCSD) is hosting a community information event on December 3, marking the first of two public forums to address Mendocino’s persistent water scarcity challenges. This initial event will present the draft findings of the Source Water Study, conducted by GHD, with a focus on existing and potential water sources for the study area in Mendocino community.
The study, funded by the Safe and Affordable Funding for Equity and Resilience (SAFER) Program through the California State Water Resources Control Board (SWRCB), examines both current and potential water resources within a mile of MCCSD’s service boundary. Within this area, 28 public water systems, and approximately 400 wells supply water to Mendocino’s residents and businesses.
Addressing the Water Crisis
Mendocino has long grappled with water shortages, relying on private wells, many of which are shallow or hand-dug. In recent years, prolonged droughts have further stressed these limited resources. To address the ongoing scarcity, MCCSD submitted a technical assistance request to the California State Water Resources Control Board (SWRCB). The SWRCB assigned GHD as the technical assistance provider and charged them with preparation of this study to evaluate existing and potential new water supply sources.
This study includes an assessment of the water systems within the study area and the estimated demands. The draft Source Water Study document can be found at https://tinyurl.com/mendowaterstudy2024.
Why Community Involvement Matters
The December 3 event is a vital step in MCCSD’s collaborative process to address Mendocino’s water needs. Residents and stakeholders are invited to review findings, ask questions, and contribute feedback. MCCSD will hold a second event date in the future, to present the study’s final recommendations and gather additional community input on implementing a sustainable water strategy.
“Our goal is to work closely with the community to create a sustainable, resilient water future for Mendocino,” said Ryan Rhoades, MCCSD Superintendent. “With support from SWRCB and the expertise of GHD, we aim to protect Mendocino’s water resources for generations to come.” This event marks a pivotal step in the journey toward water sustainability for Mendocino. MCCSD encourages all residents and stakeholders of Mendocino to attend on December 3, 2024, to engage in this important conversation and help shape the future of our community’s water sustainability.
How to Get Involved
The event is free, and all community members are encouraged to attend in person. A zoom link will also be available prior to the event. For updates and more information, please visit https://tinyurl.com/mendowaterstudy2024.
A FISHERMAN’S POINT OF VIEW FOR THE RESTORATION OF THE EEL RIVER WATERSHED PROJECT, Part 1
by Roy Branscomb
(This week we introduce the first of a multi-part series on the history of water, fish, and the socio-economic influences that affect all of us who live in this region. Its author Roy Branscomb tells a story from the perspective of a person descended from a long family line of people who lived and loved this country and all the wonders found within its borders. It’s a colorful, significant and evocative story that Roy has put together and it’s a great read. —Jim Shields)
California had three gold rushes that all started around 1850. The first was when gold was discovered in the South Fork of the American River. At or around the same time, redwood and tan bark were discovered in the coastal region. Lastly, it was discovered that the Eel River was a treasure trove of salmon and other fish. All three of these discoveries led to jobs, to greed, population growth, destruction to the environment, and changed the Native American way of life forever. The Eel River, my focus, has a different terrain now because of the devastation to the physical and ecological landscape caused by man’s interference, and natural causes. Until we learn the history, we think the way we see the river now is how it has always been.
A common saying is: “ You cannot step twice in the same stream.” That makes me think about the comments I’ve heard about restoring the Eel River Watershed to its “natural” condition and that makes me wonder, to what part of natural would the river be restored.
Change is constant so how can we take something back to its natural state without including all factors?
I started fishing with my dad, Ben Branscomb, at the age of 9 years old in 1961. We did most of our fishing in the Leggett Valley area. We only fished for steelhead back then, because in our opinion they were a fresher and better eating fish than salmon. During the spring and summer months, my dad would go to work at Harwood’s Branscomb Enterprises mill, in Branscomb, California. He would drop me off at different tributaries of the South Fork of the Eel River. He let me fish for trout until he picked me up after work at an agreed upon time and place. There was an abundance of salmon, steelhead, and trout in those times. It was a terrific way for a young person to grow up. I felt that all of this was normal and would never change, and I feel that it is important to let people know what it was like on the river and its tributaries in my early years.
It is hard for me to believe, but I am now an elder whose experience includes walking and fishing the Eel River as often as I could with my dad, from mid-November through March each year. I’ve seen what caused the decline in salmon in the Eel River system from my fisherman point of view. Like the Eel has forks, I am fifth generation of a many “forked” pioneer family who worked the area and fished the Eel and its tributaries, shortly after the Eel River was named in the 1850s.
There were years of abundant rain and high waters to allow the migration of fish to complete the cycle. If you can try to imagine during the late fall and early winter months being on the river after the spawn, with decaying salmon carcasses the width of the gravel bars and tangled up in willow brush everywhere we went. The smell was nauseating. But those were years when the rivers and tributaries ran high and wild. These river water conditions allowed for high yield fishing. Not for the purpose of bragging, but try to imagine a 12 year-old kid catching over 100 steelhead in 1964, in a brief period of time, after the high water from the 1964 flood had dropped to a fishable state. Only two other years in my life did I ever catch that many fish in a season. From then on, I witnessed the start of the decline in these runs of fish. I continued fishing for many years until the decrease in fish made it just too depressing to be on the river.
In my earlier days we had early fall rains that were adequate to raise the main river and start the adult fish moving upstream and out of tidewater. More small rains followed allowing the fish to move further upstream as well as allowing the water to soak into the ground. When the larger rains hit in late October and November, the fish could enter the tributaries and spawn. Our larger rains were normally before Christmas. After Christmas there were frequent smaller rains with snow and freezing weather. For many years now we have the opposite. Some years no rain to speak of, and if we do get the rain, it is later in the year.
In July of this year, I was given around 300 pages of information provided by the Eureka newspapers that I never knew existed. The articles include information on the fisheries from 1850 to 1950. More current information is from our biologists from 1970s to 2010. This information is sad-factual and leads me to feel more committed to the ideas that I have to participate in the effort to help stop this decline.
To sum this up, for over 40 years, I have written this story many times and have always thrown it away because I am not a writer, and there are powers that be who have their own strong agendas and financial backing. While I agree in part, my agenda is to try to keep these fish from total extinction. I have information and ideas that I believe are common sense that are based on a life–long, interested resident fisherman’s reality; that I would like to be part of the restoration conversation.
In upcoming articles, I will make available some of my ideas to be shared with the general public and river restoration agencies. I would also like to explain my ideas and tell why I think they make sense. Hopefully, these ideas can lead us to a more complete Eel River Watershed solution conversation than we currently have.
MY COUSIN RUSTY (NORVELL)
by Pebbles Trippet
You wrote so engagingly about my cousin Rusty Norvell in the AVA after he died in a car wreck that I'm moved to round out the picture.
His neck was broken; his car intertwined with a tree. His life was over — snap the twig, just like that.
Rusty was not a careful person. Very likely, we'll find he was speeding and saturated with alcohol, on a fling with his only solace. He had lost Flo Ann, his life-long friend, wife and family backbone to stomach cancer the year before. He was dysfunctional in key ways without her and had just, months before, survived back-of-the-throat cancer himself with debilitating assaults of chemo/radiation on his face, skin, jaws and teeth, affecting his will to live. Rusty's son Cove, who built their first house in the Mendocino woods, says the wreck was better than the agony of having his tongue cut out, had throat cancer taken over his mouth.
Each of us had flashes that somehow, the end was near. Photos of suicide bombers in Baghdad show their heads being blown from their bodies as a futile statement of protest against a meaningless life. The end of Rusty's life was a statement as well — as an intellectual who liked to talk and teach, he beat cancer of the throat but then broke his neck right around the throat and couldn't hold onto his head, where all his activity took place and where his real problem lay.
As fun, smart, clever, creative and talented a writer and teacher as he was, I am struck by Rusty's other competing side — the dysfunctional genius, lifelong alcoholic and serious self-saboteur who could never pull his life's dream together — which was to found and fund an alternative school for writers and teachers of writers and related graphic arts/music/poetry. He waxed poetic about having seen and heard Billie Holiday as a young man; was an admirer and scholar of Lincoln; wrote unpublished books. “Royalty,” his novel, was the one I read, about gnarley aspects of his life and family, which he likened to “an oozing pimple.”
His incomplete textbook for teaching writers how to write was to have been used at his alma mater in Bell Buckle Tennessee, where he taught private high school students, who remembered his methods and wrote letters of thanks years later. Flo’s friendly margin notes like “Fix!” were scattered throughout the book, that wouldn't and couldn't be finished without her.
Rusty Norvell married Flo Ann Hedley, the wholesome artist daughter of a beachcombing family from southern California, who learned how to scrounge the beach for a modest living building rafts, sculptures and elegant island architecture from driftwood, abalone and ingenuity. She vowed that if she ever owned land on the ocean herself, she would allow public access to the beach from her property.
Rusty and Flo kept that promise when they bought oceanfront property and built their home on the Caspar bluffs, with a public path to the beach that skimmed the edge of their house.
The Hedleys were on the functional upbeat side of the family who made do with what they had. Rusty was on the downbeat dysfunctional side who never knew what to do with what he had.
When they moved to the Mendocino Coast in the 70s, they were inspired and inspired others. With humor and charm, the odd couple worked well as a team. Together with a small group of dedicated environmentalists, they formed Ocean Sanctuary to help protect the beauty of the Coast from oil drilling and federal intrusion. Riding a wave of united public opinion with hearings, slide shows, t-shirts, bumperstickers and an abiding love of the ocean, the coast community prevailed and kept the oil wells at bay. Flo and Rusty are widely regarded as having been critical in holding it together, keeping momentum going, “running interference between the egos” as one Sanctuary activist put it.
Regarding faltering plans for a book, Rusty remarked to me, “I realize now we can't do a book on the ocean without including the science of the ocean. That is beyond my knowledge.” Another dream unrealized…
Rusty's mother Alberta, an accomplished Spanish teacher wherever she traveled, had the one son whom she neglected, then divorced and remarried, as did Rusty's father. Alberta lived out her dying years in San Francisco with Rusty and Flo and a live-in Hispanic woman taking care of her. When Rusty responded to your question about Mexicans — “Hell, the country couldn't survive without them!” — he spoke from personal experience and feelings of appreciation.
But all in all, ours was a family of alcoholics and prescription pill addicts, including my mom (Rusty's aunt), their three other siblings and nearly all their children and grandchildren including my two sisters, except me. I use cannabis instead.
Rusty knew marijuana works as an alternative to alcohol and used it from time to time and sometimes regularly. Flo, being a practicing Christian Scientist, frowned on the use of “drugs” around the house and didn't realize how her attitude was another way she enabled Rusty's alcoholism. He would sometimes turn to me or Captain Fathom for access. But once he entered the hospital for throat chemo, he swore off smoking altogether since he feared a recurrence. Edibles were too hard to swallow.
I visited him during his treatments and noticed how weak and miserable he was. When I asked him what he was eating, he held up a can of “Ensure.” I looked at the ingredients and pointed out it was largely sugar water.
On my second visit, I came with topical cannabis salve for chemo burns on his face and neck and cannabis butter for nutrition and to improve his appetite. He couldn't digest the bread the butter was on. So I gave him a tablespoonful of straight green marijuana butter, soft and easy to digest, and then another. After a few minutes, Rusty walked to the frig for more and asked, “Have you noticed since you got here, how I have more energy?” It was working. Each visit, I'd leave with him a couple of jars of butter. They were eaten as vital medicine.
I also noticed little alcohol bottles in his trash during the final treatments. After he got home and was pronounced “in remission,” it was happy hour forever and it seems he never stopped drinking.
I am reminded of a story. I once shared marijuana leaf joints with low level psychoactivity with a well-known streetperson and alcoholic with AIDS who I came to know in San Francisco from my years of vending First Amendment protected messages on streetcorners and at streetfairs. Jub-jub was the poorest of the poor and was grateful for the medical attention. He never bothered anyone and was well-loved. With his health deteriorating, he went home to Georgia to die but came back to San Francisco with enough life in him to seek me out where I vended in the Castro. He hung around reading books always with a large cup of beer at his fingertips. One day I noticed he wasn't drinking much from his cup and I asked him, “Why not?” Sitting on a stoop, he looked up at me with such clarity and said, “Pebbles, when I do your leaf, I forget to drink!”
In light of that eloquent message, it seems to me Rusty needed everyday cannabis to restore his health and fight his depression — a regular regimen of edibles and succulents to break through his alcohol stupor, lift his spirits and calm his restless soul.
Instead he chose firewater and the fast lane to snuff out the flame.
This is my unvarnished view of the innermost struggle that finally got the best of my cousin Rusty Norvell. All the humorous anecdotes we tell to summarize Rusty's life with Flo can't hide the ultimate truth: he and Al K. Hall had a date with death.
ED NOTES
MODERN LIFE comes with greater irritations of course than this, but certain forms of graffiti never fail to irritate me. I’m not talking about the big, unintelligible spray-canned smears you see everywhere, the contemporary equivalent of Kilroy Was Here, which are certainly bad in the way they wipe out whole vistas of otherwise pleasing views. No, I mean the messages the “cool people” put around, neatly stenciled sidewalk questions like, “How Honest Are U?” (Who wants to know? And what are your qualifications for asking?) But the ones that really, really annoy me are the decal-sized ones at eye level, especially the one on a tree I have to pass all the time. It says, “Venom is more important than you.”
OF COURSE IT IS, but so’s the Golden Gate Bridge and a jar of peanut butter, and certainly the coyote the neighborhood people are warning people about on strategically placed placards, inspiring in one young mommy I know visions of the cunning little beast trotting off with her toddler.
AND SO'S EVERYTHING ELSE more important or not important in the great whirligig of whatever it is we’re all spinning around in. If the point of these inane statements and impertinent questions is simply to annoy random passersby, they’ve effectively annoyed one passerby to where he feels like he has to say something about them.
A READER WRITES: “Several years ago, while living in Oakland, I was standing in line at my bank one afternoon and struck up a conversation with a middle-aged Chinese woman who was behind me. After several minutes of talk we got onto the topic of our respective family histories in the state. Since mine was zilch, she did most of the talking. I forget most of what she told me, but one part of her story was remarkable. She said her great-grandparents owned a large farm on the coast near Monterey, but in the late 1800s — during the anti-Chinese hysteria — the land was confiscated and they fled the area in fear for their lives, never to return. “That's awful,” I said. “What's there now?” She answered with a grim sigh: “Pebble Beach…” Chinese were also driven out of Humboldt and Mendocino counties in periodic yellow peril hysterias, their property seized by neighbors envious of their prosperity.
A READER WRITES: “I was enjoying my morning AVA hit while also thinking about the audio version of Moby Dick I'm listening to narrated by Frank Muller. At first I thought that he went just a trifle too fast but then I realized it was just a matter of me wanting more time to let it sink in. So I started reading it too, going back and forth. I am now close to the end, but slowing down because I don’t want to leave Melville’s world. What I notice this time around is how much Melville is enjoying himself…”
I READ Moby Dick every few years, and I’ve also enjoyed a very good audio rendition by an actor named Norman Deitz, and like my friend Reader Writes, I never want the story to end, book or audio. I always keep the book handy to make sure I heard right. Some books on tape are good, some very bad. The bad ones tend to be those read by movie stars who mispronounce words and read like they’ve never seen the material before, which they probably haven’t. I guess the producers figure that with the star doing the reading the star struck will buy it, neither reader nor producer aware or caring that the movie star is ruining the book.
I'VE TRIED listening to British actors read War and Peace but I was immediately lost because, I think, they were over-acting, making their diction indistinct. Of course the problem might have been with my failing audio receptors, but some of these recordings are terrible, very carelessly done or simply weirdly done like Debra Winger rushing through a flat-affect performance of the Brothers K. If the listener didn’t know the story there’s no way he could decipher Deb’s sprint through it. I do know the story and I lost interest in following it after about ten minutes because of the uninflected, disinterested way the actress read it. I also warn you about a lugubrious reading of Ulysses by a guy who doesn’t seem to know the book is often funny as hell.
NOT LONG AGO, I listened to an excellent reading of Babbitt with Ed Asner as Babbitt. But the very best book-on-tape I’ve ever heard was Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man read by Joe Morton. Morton performs all the parts (including the women), and is so good I realized I’d missed most of the book when I’d first read it. It’s almost as if Ellison wrote it to be acted, and Morton’s rendition was definitely the kind of performance that reminds us that in the beginning was the word.
ALSO RECOMMENDED is Jeremy Irons’ rendition of ‘Lolita.’ These mentioned books are internal monologues which are perfect vehicles for a good reader. I'm sure your local library can track 'em all down.
THERE ISN'T MUCH contemporary fiction that holds my interest, and I’ve pretty much given up trying unless it’s pegged to an area of history I’m interested in, although I highly recommend Edward P. Jones’ fiction, the only contemporary fiction I’ve read lately that I really, really liked. I am interested, though, in the political-cultural history of California as depicted in fictional form, as I’m sure many of you are.
ONE EXCELLENT HISTORICALLY-BASED golden state novel is by Eddie Muller, and is called ‘The Distance,’ a murder mystery set in the boxing milieu of San Francisco in the 1930s. (Eddie M also produces the annual noir film festival at the Castro Theater in SF.) Muller’s dad was the boxing writer for the old Examiner, when boxing and baseball were the dominant spectator sports, and the only boxing writer in the country to predict Cassius Clay’s victory over Sonny Liston. But what’s most interesting about Muller’s book is his faithful reproduction of the old tough guy slang, and how people dressed and how they talked to each other and what the city looked like then.
’GOLD’ BY BLAISE CENDARS is fiction centered loosely on John Sutter but faithfully reproduces California prior to the Gold Rush, the cataclysm that ruined Sutter.
BEING Amer-centric in my literature preferences, I’ve always got Dreiser, Lewis, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Steinbeck, and Edmund Wilson close by. Who needs furriners when we’ve got most of the best ones right here? Anyway, most of us read these books in college or when we’re too young to understand a lot of it, not that there’s anything particularly inaccessible about Steinbeck or Dreiser.
I PLOWED through Proust when I was maybe 25, emerging from the experience with a single memory of the experience, “This guy was a French aesthete who didn’t miss a thing and was so sensitive to noise he cork-lined his bedroom.”
The Glen Blair Mill Fort Bragg. This may be when it was still called Glenela on Pudding Creek and the Puddng Creek Lumber Company at the Rider family left in about 1893.
Pudding Creek mill 1886 - 1895. From 1895 on it was called the Glen Blair Mill and owned by the C R Johnson family of the Union Lumber Co. in Fort Bragg.
— Ron Parker
CATCH OF THE DAY, Friday, November 15, 2024
FERMIN BARRALES-GONZALEZ, 33, Ukiah. Battery with serious injury, probation revocation.
TRAVIS BONSON, 44, Ukiah. Transient registration, parole violation.
GEORGE DALSON, 26, Willows/Ukiah. Failure to appear.
BRITTANY DAVIS, 34, Ukiah. Possession of personal identification info with intent to defraud, disobeying court order, paraphernalia.
DOMINIC FABER, 62, Ukiah. Parole violation.
RUBICEL GOMEZ-VINCENTE, 39, Forestville/Ukiah. DUI.
JOSE GRANT, 44, Willits. Parole violation.
JOSHUA HARDAGE-VERGEER, 23, Ukiah. Vandalism, failure to appear.
NICHOLAS HOGAN, 41, Ukiah. Parole violation.
RYAN JONES, 27, Willits. Disorderly conduct-alcohol, resisting, probation revocation.
CODY MENDEZ, 21, Ukiah. Narcotics for sale, probation revocation.
KRISTO OUSEY, 40, Ukiah. Controlled substance, paraphernalia, parole violation.
PATRICK PAINTER JR., 52, Ukiah. Failure to appear.
JACOB SHIPMAN, 22, Ukiah. Failure to appear.
CHAD TURLEY, 53, Ukiah. Probation revocation.
BILL KIMBERLIN:
This is a crew gift I got for working on "The Mask", a 1994 comedy staring Cameron Diaz and Jim Carrey. We all thought Cameron was just the director's girlfriend because she had never done anything. Jim Carrey was there but the two movies that would make him famous, hadn't been released yet and the studio was trying to cut his salary. Then "The Mask" opened and the rest is history. Turned out that Cameron could act.
WANDERING, Chapter Two
by Paul Modic
My sister and I arrived in Whitethorn and I showed her Nooning Creek which I had been raving about the previous year, with flowery letters back home, about drinking directly off the mossy springs on the mountainside. She found a three-sided shed to live in near Henry and Laurie's land and I crashed at the old school house in Whitethorn where Little Black Bobby and another guy were staying. In the morning Bobby walked out into the living room naked with a big smile on his face and his morning wood proudly on display.
Henry and Laurie, who I met camping the year before, had become Jesus freaks and invited me to dinner at Living Waters, the new name for Gopherville. It was a revival meeting and an attractive young woman with long blond hair confessed her sins. She cried openly and loudly with copious tears, her face turned red as we all watched. Praise the Lord.
We met David Cantaloupe, walked down the road to Needle Rock, and as we passed Pisces Point we heard Doug Chatard and Barbara having a loud argument. We were so tired walking back up from the ocean that I held my sister's hand and pulled her up the steeper parts of the road. When we got near the top, David took us to Pisces Point where Barbara cooked us a nice dinner.
It was the middle of winter in Whitethorn, nothing was happening and I was thinking of going back to Indiana, when I saw the sign in the post office announcing a “Walk for Edible Plants” on the Yellow Dirt Road. We learned about and picked sorrel, nettles, Indian lettuce and other plants, and when we got to the end of the road by the creek Timothy Clark took a bottle of home-made salad dressing out of the weeds and we all ate the day's harvest.
On the walk we met some people from the Big House back in Thompson Creek who invited us for dinner. We spent the night, I moved in, and worked at their daycare center called “Jan's Experience” for room and board. Nicky had taken a lesbian lover, Tess, an imposing woman of about 29, bought a rustic house on 40 acres and moved to the woods with her three teenagers. The girls Elaine and Marilyn were comely lasses while the boy Paul was an odd one who probably became a computer genius and made millions. Since there was already a Paul I needed a new hippie name and like most things I didn't give it much thought: “Let's see, I'm into food, umm, Zucchini? Umm, okay Zukini!”
The family was into EST, a cult-like self-help group developed by Werner Erhard based in the Bay Area. (It's still around today known as The Forum.) The hippie neighbors eagerly brought their children to the nursery school and I and others watched over them. One day I was preparing bread dough, giving the kids a hands-on demo, when a little boy named Carl wandered off. No one noticed at first but later someone said, “Where's Carl?” (It might have been his mother Freya coming to pick him up.)
The search was a circus as Gulchers converged on the Big House, neighbors came from nearby communities, the Mendocino deputies arrived with cruisers and a helicopter, and even the Jesus freaks showed up to look for the three-year-old all night long. “Carl!” was the shout heard into the night.
Elaine was a brooding, big-breasted girl of about fifteen who I had a crush on. We walked together down the road with flashlights, talking for hours about EST, life, and other topics as we sort of searched for the lost boy. (In EST you were discouraged from saying “but” or “because,” she told me, because those words implied a rationalization, and to this day I hesitate a millisecond when I use them.)
After Carl was found alive and well by Della the next morning, not far off the Thompson Creek back trail, things settled down. One night we listened in our beds downstairs while Barry, who lived in the Plastic Palace just down from Lewis and Anna's house, had loud sex with Vickie, one of the teachers, up in the loft. A possibly innocent wanna-be hippie kid from Indiana, I was learning how it was in California. (Years later I liked to kid the grown children like Jessica and Ali that I had wiped their asses when they were three.)
Before I hitchhiked back across the country to Indiana to try to find a woman to live with me in a plastic house in Whale Gulch, I bloodied Ray Raphael's lip in a game of one-on-one where he had a hoop on the skid road above his cabin on the Yellow Dirt Road, the name he had coined. That began a decades-long sports friendship including golf, softball and even tennis a few times. For the softball teams Ray was the organizational brain and I was the brawn, the home run hitter, the enthusiastic youth who didn't know anything except growing weed and eating canned beans and cardboard tortillas.
(Many years after I bloodied his lip we were in a big slow-pitch softball tournament game and the other team was giving me shit as I pitched. They hung an oversized zucchini behind home plate and were chanting, “Nuke the Zuke!” When I got back to the bench I started razzing and screaming at them but Ray wanted me to relax and settle down, he had his wife hold my hand, and I thought fondly about her many nights after that.)
I headed South, took some pink mescaline one of my rides gave me, then hitched west to trip out by the sea. While running through Salinas to get to the edge of town, an old green panel van from the fifties slowed to pick me up and the occupants got out.
“Hello!” I shouted to the guitar player from skid row LA. We smiled, laughed, and shook hands, but they were going to San Jose so we said goodbye, sweet coincidence, and I continued to the ocean with my burlap bag to the beach at Carmel. In the distance people walked with lights by the water and I wailed out a song fragment, “A fire walking by the sea…and here I sit so chemically,” into the fresh salty air.
The next day I hit the road and made it back to Indiana in three days.
MEMO OF THE AIR: Good Night Radio show all night tonight on KNYO!
Soft deadline to email your writing for tonight's (Friday night's) MOTA show is 6pm or so. If you can't make that, it's okay, send it whenever it's done and I'll read it on the radio next week.
Memo of the Air: Good Night Radio is every Friday, 9pm to 5am PST on 107.7fm KNYO-LP Fort Bragg and KNYO.org. The first hour of the show is simulcast on KAKX 89.3fm Mendocino.
Plus you can always go to https://MemoOfTheAir.wordpress.com and hear last week's MOTA show. By Saturday night I'll put up the recording of tonight's show. Also there you'll find an assortment of cultural-educational amusements to occupy you until showtime, or any time, such as:
Zappa. A documentary. It starts out slow, but then it takes you everywhere. (Full film, 128 min.) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qiExr2zuydE
Robots (full 90-min. film, with ads). I saw this in the theater when it came out, and since then lots of little cars have come out in those colors and attracted me, not that I ever in my life could buy a car and choose the color at the same time. But maybe I will win the lottery. (Hear that in Michael Myers' voice, in the same tone he used to say, "And maybe monkeys will fly out of my butt." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ojLBv8pERPI
And nightlife of the German moonbase. Night lasts two weeks there. https://nagonthelake.blogspot.com/2024/11/night-on-moon.html
Marco McClean, memo@mcn.org, https://MemoOfTheAir.wordpress.com
CONTROVERSIAL TRAIL NAME CHANGED AT JACK LONDON STATE HISTORIC PARK
by Isabel Beer
The Coon Trap Trail trail in Jack London State Historic Park has been renamed Trap Trail by the California State Parks Department after some visitors became uncomfortable with its name.
The trail, which branches off the Historic Orchard Trail on the southwest side of the park toward Sonoma Mountain, was once where raccoons were hunted and trapped for their fur -- hence the name Coon Trap Trail. The word, however, is also considered a racial slur, which historically has been used against Black Americans.
Jack London Park Partners Executive Director Matt Leffert said they became aware that visitors were uncomfortable with the trail’s name through posts and links to the park’s social media.
“We understand that while the name probably referred to fur trapping, the name made some visitors uncomfortable and unwelcome,” Leffert said.
Jack London Park Partners, the nonprofit organization that manages the park on behalf of California State Parks, doesn’t have the authority to change trail names, so visitors were directed to appeal to State Parks about changing the name.
Jack London Park Partners were not asked to provide input on new trail names.
In recent years, requests for name changes at California State Parks properties have increased as part of the department’s Reexamining Our Past Initiative, which seeks to rename places, monuments, statues and plaques within the department system that contain derogatory place names or inappropriate honorifics.
One recent name change includes the renaming of Patrick’s Point in Humboldt County to Sue-Meg Point to reflect the wishes of the indigenous Yurok Tribe.
“Anything being changed in parks must be identified by park staff or the public,” Peter Ostroskie, staff park and recreation specialist at California State Parks said. “From there a formal request is sent to our district superintendent and they reach out to the director of parks.”
If the name change is approved, the new name is updated in the department’s Geographical Information Systems (GIS) software before new brochures with the updated name are printed and distributed.
The renaming process can take several months to complete, but the trail name has already been updated to Trap Trail on the Jack London State Historic Park map, but still reflects the original name on California State Parks brochures.
California State Parks is not alone in reexamining its place names. City and town names in recent years have come under scrutiny for honoring historical figures who have what some consider offensive pasts.
Some residents of Fort Bragg in Mendocino County have been pushing to change the town’s name, which currently honors Confederate Gen. Braxton Bragg, who is accused of keeping more than 110 slaves.
Kelseyville in Lake County is embroiled in the same issue. The town is named after Andrew Kelsey, an enslaver, rapist and killer of Native American. A Lake County group is has been pushing to change the town’s name to Konocti.
Measure U on Lake County’s Nov. 5 ballot asked voters if the board of supervisors should recommend the name change of Kelseyville to Konocti. Results for Measure U as of Nov. 14 indicate Lake County voters are not in favor of the change.
(Santa Rosa Press Democrat)
NORTH BAY FOOTBALL OFFICIALS STRETCHED THIN BUT KEEP GAMES ROLLING DESPITE GETTING ‘YELLED AT SO MUCH’
It’s not a glamorous job, but referees keep games going each week for players, parents and coaches.
by Kienan O’Doherty
Across the prep sports landscape this fall, there has been a plethora of scheduling changes for local high school teams.
In football alone, the long-standing tradition of “Friday Night Lights” has been expanded to include more games on Saturdays — and even some on Thursdays.
Casa Grande High School’s varsity team had to play a league game against Tamalpais on a Thursday night — Tam’s second Thursday night game of the season.
The reason? There aren’t enough game officials to staff a full slate of Friday night games.
The North Bay Officials Organization, which oversees the referees and other game officials in the region, has 66 names on its roster — and three are currently on the injured list. Out of the 63 who remain, seven are in their first year, 18 have less than three years of experience and 45 have more than three years. This year, the total number of officials who can work games is down 10%.
“If you look at the National Association of Sports Officials, you’ll find that sportsmanship is at an all-time low,” said Spencer Crum, the head of the North Bay officials group who is in his 27th year working high school games.
NBOO members cover a wide area, officiating at games in Sonoma, Marin and Napa counties as well as in Middletown and Ukiah. That’s more than 30 high schools.
It’s not a glamorous job.
“A lot of refs are real hesitant to get into it due to the negative reactions of the crowd and coaches,” Crum said. “There’s a real hesitancy to get involved right now, and it’s really hard to keep them once they do get in because they get yelled at so much. As much as we enjoy it, there are times when the crowds, the kids and the coaches become overly boisterous.”
Members of the NBOO group have had their fair share of encounters with hostile coaches and crowds, Crum said — from a coach squirting an official in the face with a water bottle to a referee crew being followed to their locker room by a coach shouting profanities at them.
Officials get $100 for a varsity game and $59 for a JV contest.
Prior to each game, the officials will give evaluation cards to the coaches of both teams. They can be mailed back to the NBOO anonymously after the game, but Crum said only about 25% are returned.
And this fall’s league realignment for the largest football-playing schools that created the four-tier Redwood Empire Conference led to more Friday night games — a new wrinkle that is proving extremely difficult for Crum’s group to cover.
“In the past, we’ve had about 11 games on a Friday night,” Crum said. “This year for some reason we have upward of 15 requests on a Friday night. We have more teams with lights than ever before, a lot of teams with single games being requested, and it’s been really hard for us to cover.”
And with the first round of the North Coast Section playoffs this weekend, eight games took place Friday night and another four are set for Saturday.
So why become an official? Crum has an answer.
“It’s super fun to be a part of, it’s a great thing to do on Friday nights — and a good way to give back to the community,” he said.
Trying to keep up with the demand, the NBOO is always looking for new help. Anyone interested can sign up at nbofficials.org.
(Santa Rosa Press Democrat)
SHANNON BRIGGS (former WBO heavyweight champion, 2006-2007):
“I want to see a great fight, but at the same time, I don't want Jake to get hurt. But I used to train Jake, and I'm telling you, he's a tough kid.
“For me to see him step in the ring with Mike Tyson is absolutely amazing. I was just training a kid, and for him to even be doing this, respect to him. Everyone wants Mike to win but I just want Mike and Jake to make a lot of money, hit the after-party together, and have a good time.
“At the end of the day, it's about feeding their families. It's a phenomenal event, because we're in a time now where this is going to be on Netflix.
“Damn, the whole world is going to see it — everywhere! If you've got a phone and a wi-fi signal, whether you're in Japan, Switzerland, Africa, or even Antarctica you can watch the fight!”
IT WAS ONE OF THE MOST HIGHLY-ANTICIPATED boxing matches of the year, yet the bout between Mike Tyson and Jake Paul proved to be a huge disappointment - with everyone coming to the same conclusion.
Tyson looked to be every bit a 58-year-old as he lost to Paul in a unanimous decision in front of 70,000 people at AT&T Stadium in Arlington, Texas, on Friday.
He was sluggish and stiff, stumbling around the ring while failing to make an impact outside of the first 30 seconds - especially as his right knee was in a brace.
Many wondered why it was allowed for a man of Tyson's age and condition to be allowed to take part in such an event against a far younger and fitter 27-year-old.
While others tore into Gen Z YouTuber Paul for taking the cash before knocking around his much older rival with ease, with some branding it 'elder abuse'.
Among the celebrities and fans worldwide who slammed the bout, MMA star Conor McGregor offered a bleak assessment of the occasion in a now deleted tweet.
'A 16-minute spar in sparring gloves. F**k off,' the Irishman said.
(dailymail.co.uk)
OPINIONS ─ BERTRAND RUSSELL (1943)
“If an opinion contrary to your own makes you angry, that is a sign that you are subconsciously aware of having no good reason for thinking as you do. If someone maintains that two and two are five, or that Iceland is on the equator, you should feel pity rather than anger, unless you know so little of arithmetic or geography that his opinion shakes your own contrary conviction. The most savage controversies are those about matters as to which there is no good evidence either way. Persecution is used in theology, not in arithmetic, because in arithmetic there is knowledge, but in theology there is only opinion. So whenever you find yourself getting angry about a difference of opinion, be on your guard; you will probably find, on examination, that your belief goes beyond what the evidence warrants.”
VIRAL PHOTO OF MIKE TYSON WITH PALESTINE FLAG IS AI-GENERATED
Newschecker noticed the lack of detail around Tyson’s eyes, raising our doubts on whether the image was digitally altered. We also did not find any credible news reports about such a photo.
We next ran the photo past TrueMedia, an AI image-detection tool, which found “substantial evidence of manipulation”.
“The image depicts a well-known individual draped in a flag that resembles the Palestinian flag. However, his association with this flag is not documented or widely known in public records. The flag seems to have been digitally altered or added to the image, as it is not typical for this individual to be associated with this particular flag in such settings. The lighting, edges, and drape of the flag suggest it might be an edit,” read the tool’s review. A scan by another similar tool, AI Detect Content, too, stated that the viral image is “likely AI generated/deepfaked”.
(newschecker.in)
ON-LINE COMMENT OF THE DAY
JFK was an immoral pig, but, I believe, he was the last President who actually tried to be President. He tried to eliminate the CIA. He tried to keep us on the gold standard for our money. He tried to keep us out of Vietnam. And yes, he wasn't controlled by the Israeli mafia. As a human being he was a pathetic wretch. As a President, at least he tried to do best by America and for that they shot him through the head.
LEAD STORIES, SATURDAY'S NYT
Under the Chandelier at Mar-a-Lago, Trump Makes Picks at Breakneck Speed
Kennedy’s Views Mix Mistrust of Business With Unfounded Health Claims
Donald Trump Names Karoline Leavitt as His White House Press Secretary
Trump’s Victory Could Mean End of Inquiry Into N.Y.P.D. Sex Crimes Unit
“UNSURPRISINGLY, the other team’s pick will have political differences than my own. That being said, my colleague Sen. Marco Rubio is a strong choice, and I look forward to voting for his confirmation.”
— Sen. John Fetterman, D-Pennsylvania
WHAT R.F.K. JR. GETS RIGHT — AND WRONG — ABOUT NUTRITION
by Alice Callahan
As part of a promise to address the high rates of chronic disease in the United States, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — who was recently tapped by President-elect Donald J. Trump to lead the Department of Health and Human Services — has said that he would “fix our broken food system.”
In interviews and on social media, Mr. Kennedy has made a number of claims about the country’s food supply and eating habits. We fact-checked five of his most repeated refrains.
Ultraprocessed Foods
His claim: Ultraprocessed foods are driving the obesity epidemic, and they should be removed from school lunches.
What the research suggests: Many public health and nutrition experts agree that ultraprocessed foods — which make up an estimated 73 percent of the U.S. food supply — are probably contributing to the obesity crisis in the United States, and it would be beneficial to cut back on them.
But the category is wide-ranging, and it’s not clear if all ultraprocessed foods are harmful, experts say. There may be downsides to avoiding some ultraprocessed foods, like flavored yogurts and whole wheat breads and cereals, they add, because they can provide valuable nutrients.
Lindsey Smith Taillie, an associate professor of nutrition at the U.N.C. Gillings School of Global Public Health, said that it would be “transformative” to remove ultraprocessed foods from school lunches. But, she added, schools would need more resources to prepare meals from scratch.
Food Dyes
His claim: Food dyes cause cancer, and A.D.H.D. in children.
What the research suggests: While some small clinical trials have suggested that certain synthetic food dyes may increase hyperactivity in children, there is no solid evidence that they directly cause A.D.H.D. However, many experts agree that because food dyes aren’t nutritionally necessary, it wouldn’t hurt to avoid them.
In 1990, the Food and Drug Administration banned the use of Red Dye No. 3 in cosmetics after research in animals linked it to cancer. At the time, the agency said that it would also work to extend the ban to foods and drugs, but it has not yet done so. The F.D.A. is currently reviewing the safety of Red Dye No. 3.
Raw Milk
His claim: Mr. Kennedy has said that he only drinks raw milk and has suggested that the restrictions on small farmers from selling raw milk should be re-examined.
What the research suggests: Food safety experts say that because raw (or unpasteurized) milk can contain harmful pathogens like E. coli, listeria and salmonella, drinking it can cause serious food-borne illness, so it should be avoided. Raw milk is especially risky for young children, older adults, pregnant women and those with weakened immune systems.
Sugar
His claim: Mr. Kennedy has suggested that consuming too many added sugars, especially from high fructose corn syrup, contributes to childhood obesity and cardiovascular disease.
What the research suggests: This is correct. There is solid evidence that consuming too many added sugars, including from high fructose corn syrup, can drive up the risk for a number of health problems, including cardiovascular disease, Type 2 diabetes, fatty liver disease, obesity and cavities.
Americans consume, on average, about twice the American Heart Association’s recommended limit for added sugars, with sweetened beverages like sugary sodas being a top source.
Seed Oils
His claim: Americans are being “unknowingly poisoned” by seed oils like canola, soybean and sunflower oils, and it would be healthier for restaurants to fry food in beef tallow instead.
What the research suggests: The claim that seed oils are harmful to health is false, nutrition experts say. Decades of research have shown that seed oils are not only safe, but the heart-healthy unsaturated fats they contain have been linked with reduced risks for cardiovascular disease, Type 2 diabetes, cancer and earlier death. Seed oils are a far better choice for health than solid fat alternatives, like beef tallow, butter or lard, which are high in saturated fats.
HOW AMERICA'S ACCURATE ELECTION POLLS WERE COVERED UP
The Real Clear Politics National Average was removed by Wikipedia before the election and the New York Times denounced its failure to skew data. A solution to the "mystery" of crappy polling?
by Matt Taibbi
John McIntyre couldn’t believe it. The publisher of the Real Clear Polling National Average, America’s first presidential poll aggregator, woke on October 31st to see his product denounced in the New York Times. Launched in 2002 and long a mainstay of campaign writers and news consumers alike, the RCP average, he learned, was part of a “torrent” of partisan rubbish being “weaponized” to “deflate Democrats’ enthusiasm” and “undermine faith in the entire system.”
“They actually wrote that our problem was we didn’t weight results,” says an incredulous McIntyre. “That we didn’t put a thumb on the scale.”
The Times ended its screed against RCP’s “scarlet-dominated” electoral map projection by quoting John Anzalone, Joe Biden’s former chief pollster, who said: “There’s a ton of garbage polls out there.” But being called “garbage” in America’s paper of record was nothing compared to what happened to RCP at Wikipedia.
Six months ago, when former Wikipedia chief Katherine Maher became CEO of NPR, video emerged of her talking about strategies at Wikipedia. She said the company eventually abandoned its “free and open” mantra when she realized “this radical openness… did not end up living into the intentionality of what openness can be.” Free and open “recapitulated” too many of the same “power structures,” resulting in too much emphasis on the “Western canon,” the “written tradition,” and “this white male, Westernized construct around who matters.”
In the context of poll averages, it seems even a track record of accuracy did not “end up living into the intentionality of what openness can be.” The ostensibly crowdsourced online encyclopedia kept a high-profile page, “Nationwide opinion polling for the 2024 United States presidential election,” which showed an EZ-access chart with results from all the major aggregators, from 270toWin to Silver’s old 538 site to Silver’s new “Silver Bulletin.”
Every major aggregate, that is, but RCP. McIntyre’s site was removed on October 11th, after Wikipedia editors decided it had a “strong Republican bias” that made it “suspect,” even though it didn’t conduct any polls itself, merely listing surveys and averaging them. One editor snootily insisted, “Pollsters should have a pretty spotless reputation. I say leave them out.” After last week’s election, when RCP for the third presidential cycle in a row proved among the most accurate of the averages, Wikipedia quietly restored RCP.
“They just whitewashed us away three weeks before the election because we were a point or a point and a half more favorable to Trump, which as it turns out still underestimated him,” McIntyre said.
What happened in 2024 to RCP is emblematic of wider failures in data journalism, which has now turned in three straight cycles of obscene misses. Although problems in polling have been lavishly, even excessively covered, failures are inevitably presented as a Scooby-Doo whodunit, rooted in a magic invisibility power apparently unique to Trump voters. “If Trump outperforms the polls once again,” the Atlantic concluded this August, “something about his supporters remains a mystery.”
But it’s no mystery. The polling problem in America looks like good-old-fashioned lying, mixed with dollops of censorship and manipulation…
https://www.racket.news/p/how-americas-accurate-election-polls
THE GREAT ’SPLAININ' COMETH
by James Kunstler
“Many Democrats were considering how to navigate a dark future, with the party unable to stop Mr. Trump from carrying out a right-wing transformation of American government. Others turned inward, searching for why the nation rejected them. They spoke about misinformation and the struggle to communicate the party’s vision in a diminished news environment inundated with right-wing propaganda.” — The New York Times
In July 27, 1794, the non-insane members of the Convention, or national legislative body in Paris, suddenly turned on the rabid Jacobin leader Maximillian Robespierre and overthrew his ruling tyrannical bunch — who had killed 40,000 of their fellow countrymen in the paranoid orgy known as The Reign of Terror. The next day, Robespierre rode the tumbrel to his own appointment with “the national razor” and the Thermidorian Reaction was on!
By the way, in one of their many acts disordering French society, the Jacobins had changed the calendar, renamed all the months, and changed the weeks from seven to ten days (to eliminate Sundays as a holy day of rest in their anti-church crusade). Thus, Thermidor, the month of mid-summer. This was but a small part of their proto-communist agenda, but you see in it the flavor of their radical extremism.
The Woke Democrats of recent times were our Jacobins, and the election of November 5, 2024, marks the kick-off of America’s Thermidorian Reaction. The crazies have been overthrown and our country awaits a restoration of norms in culture and law. No more sexualizing of children, no more flood of criminal mutts across the US border, no more furtive censorship of public speech, no more creative lawfare, no more women on the battlefield, no more “anti-racist” racism in the workplace, no more intel takeover of everyone’s private life. . . you get the picture.
Many abiding mysteries about how this happened — even of what exactly did happen — remain to be sorted out by law and by history. That is probably because so much of the Woke Revolution was provoked by state-of-the-art mind-fuckery out of the giant intel blob’s psy-ops lab. This blob, you understand, had grown to be a colossal racketeering operation with many branches and ever-spreading roots, and it cast its spells over the populace to protect these interests — which, of course, involved huge revenue streams.
Perhaps its most potent spell was the manipulation of women’s emotion, harnessing female psychodrama as the propellant for mass social discord. In a nation of absent fathers, damaged children, and broken male-female relations, Donald Trump was painted as the ultimate archetypal tyrant Daddy figure to deflect the public’s attention from the actual tyranny growing under the US intel blob and its Globalist sidekicks. Case in point: RussiaGate, a long-running hysteria of fabricated accusations, a fabulous medley of scurrilous gossip, engineered at the highest levels of our government for the express purpose of wrecking Mr. Trump’s first term in office. “Witch hunt” was exactly the right term.
Many more psychodramas followed, all of them artificially cooked up by various branches of the blob: impeachments #1 and #2; the FBI-induced J-6 riot and the fake House J-6 inquiry that followed; the roll-out of DOJ-inspired fake criminal and civil cases that tied-up Mr. Trump in courtrooms through the year, and most especially the hostile news media’s presentation of all these things as one great big everlasting frenzy of on-screen women shrieking at the Daddy-figure, Donald Trump, like thirteen-year-old girls in fugues of hormonal disruption.
The voters, subject to years of trips laid on them, were eventually able to see through all this induced psychodrama as to how they were being manipulated, and on November 5, they finally revolted. Their quandary was probably epitomized by the absurdity of watching men in women’s sports — spiking volleyballs on the girls’ heads, bashing them on the lacrosse field, humiliating them in the swim lanes — and, more to the point, being helpless to do anything about it, because the officials in-charge under “Joe Biden” said it must be, no matter what you think and feel about what you are seeing.
The New York Times, your field-guide to blob-think, is warning its dwindling readership of psychodrama addicts that Donald Trump will now take out his “grievances” on the noble, self-sacrificing bureaucracy that manages things so well in this land. As usual, The Times misleads and misinforms. These are the grievances of the nation that has seen its law and its culture twisted into new orders of wickedness that leave daily life in the USA perverted, dishonored, and grotesquefied.
So now Mr. Trump has picked a cabinet that scares the blob to death — for good reason. They are aiming to systematically disarm and disassemble the blob. They are a team of serious and intelligent warriors and they mean business, in particular Gaetz, Gabbard, Kennedy, Ratcliffe, and Homan, with Elon and Vivek riding shotgun. (A new FBI Director has not yet been named.) You must wonder how the blob is planning to defend itself, for it surely will resist.
Many of us believe that the two recent assassination attempts against the now-President-elect were blob-sponsored operations. Everybody expects they’ll try again. But it’s possible that the American system still has enough mojo to self-correct. A whole lot of public officials have a whole lot of ‘splainin’ to do. It looks like they will be compelled to now, including the public health officers who brought us Covid-19 and the mandated, ineffective-and-harmful mRNA vaccines.
There’s every reason to believe that the ‘splainin’ can take place in correct proceedings according to law: hearings, grand juries, courts. We do have actual laws against racketeering, abuse of power, election fraud, bribery, malicious prosecution, sedition, treason, and conspiracy to commit all those crimes. Pay attention: all that is distinct from lawfare, which is making-up crimes, faking crimes, and faking procedure. You are going to see a demonstration of how law differs from lawfare. It ought to have a salutary effect on our national esprit. And that should motivate us to get on with the job of repairing the damage done to our country.
THE PROTECTION RACKET
by Finian O’Toole
In October 2020, on the morning after Kamala Harris had debated then vice-president Mike Pence, Donald Trump would not say her name. Calling in to Fox Business from the White House, he referred to her as “this monster that was onstage with Mike Pence.” The choice of this term was not accidental; he repeated it for emphasis.
Even by Trump's standards of vituperation, there is something strangely excessive about this verbal assault on a woman who posed little direct threat to his re-election. Typically, his insults are literal takedowns. The target is belittled (Mini Mike Bloomberg, Little Marco Rubio, Little Rocket Man Kim Jong-un) or rendered weak and infantile (Low Energy Jeb Bush, Low IQ Maxine Waters, Cryin' Chuck Schumer). Even Trump's opponent in that election, Joe Biden, was diminished to Sleepy Joe, Sleepy, of course, is also one of Snow White's Seven Dwarfs.
Choosing to (as Shakespeare might have it) “be-monster” Harris meant going against this grain. Instead of cutting Harris down, he was talking her up, inflating her into a Medusa, a Scylla, a Grendel. And in the recent campaign, he returned to this magnification of her malevolence, making Harris a sourer of American lives. Trump increasingly conjoins the monster Harris with the monster alien immigrants who are, in the dark hallucination he wants to engender, streaming across the southern border to invade American homes and murder and rape their occupants. On September 29, at a rally in Erie, Pennsylvania, Trump told his followers that Harris “should be impeached and prosecuted for her actions. And these killers are stone-cold monsters and have so little heart. They have no heart.”
In a Truth Social post on September 27, based on a wild distortion of figures that in fact refer to a 40-year period (including Trump's own years in office), he wrote that “Comrade Kamala Harris… allowed almost 14,000 MURDERERS to freely and openly roam our Country… And people are dying every day because of her. SHE HAS GOT BLOOD ON HER HANDS!” For many of Trump's biblically inclined followers, this surely evokes the Whore of Babylon from the Book of Revelation: “And I saw the woman drunken with the blood of the saints, and with the blood of the martyrs of Jesus.”
Trump identifies Harris completely with her rampaging army of killers. In his telling she is them, their actions are hers, and together they create a monstrosity beyond his audience's collective imagination: “These are rough, vicious, rougher than anything you can imagine.” Trump casts Harris in a horror movie that no moviemaker could ever put on screen: “If you wanted to do a movie, there's no actor in Hollywood that could play the role. There's nobody that could do it… But it's all because Kamala let these people in.” It seems unlikely that Trump has read Immanuel Kant, but here he is enacting Kant's idea of the sublime as a mix of pleasure and displeasure “arising from the inadequacy of imagination.” He is both thrilling and terrifying his followers.
Trump fires at Harris the familiar missiles of sexist abuse: nasty, dumb, lying, crazy, “mentally disabled.” But there is something more visceral in his conjuring of a female fiend. It is dredged from the depths of a specifically political strain of misogyny: the horror of the woman ruler. It harks back to the sixteenth-century Scottish Presbyterian preacher John Knox and his The First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstruous Regiment of Women (1558), in which “regiment” means “rule" or “government”:
“It is more than a monster in nature that a Woman shall reign and have empire above Man… The Empire of a Woman is a thing repugnant to justice, and the destruction of every commonwealth where it is received.”
In ‘Women and Power’ (2017), the classicist Mary Beard reminds us that male Greek writers depicted females who assume authority as perverters of the natural order:
“For the most part, they are portrayed as abusers rather than users of power. They take it illegitimately, in a way that leads to chaos, to the fracture of the state, to death and destruction. They are monstrous hybrids, who are not, in the Greek sense, women at all. And the unflinching logic of their stories is that they must be disempowered and put back in their place.”
It is notable that Trump did not resort to this mythic level of misogyny in his presidential campaign against Hillary Clinton in 2016. He painted her as weak, crooked, and deceitful — all golden oldies of anti-woman rhetoric. But he did not seek to construe her as the embodiment of a hellish vision of lethal femininity. Why does Harris, first as a vice-presidential and then presidential candidate, summon from the depths of Trump's psyche these terrifying tropes? It is partly because Trump has become ever more disinhibited as he has grown older and ever more inclined to turn up the dial on outrage and provocation. Partly too that his overall vision has become even more apocalyptic: the Whore of Babylon, if she is not stopped, heralds the end of the world, and Trump warns that if Harris is elected America is “finished.”
But there is another, less obvious factor: public attitudes about the effects of gender on life in America have undergone remarkably rapid changes in the Trump era. In 2017, the year Trump took office (and also the year of the Me Too cascade of revelations about rape and sexual harassment), just 35% of survey respondents agreed that “men have it easier in the US today.” Now 47% endorse the same proposition. Especially striking is that this alteration in perception is bipartisan. The rise in the recognition of male privilege is extremely pronounced among Democrats: from 49 to 68 percent. But it is proportionally even greater among Republicans; it doubled from 16 to 32 percent. It seems that significant numbers of Trump voters came to see America as more of a man's world while their own man was dominating US politics.
Yet the paradox is that this greater acknowledgment that women live at a disadvantage to men has been matched by another, equally dramatic shift. In 2020, 51 percent of Americans said the word “feminist” described their views either “very well” or “somewhat well.” Today just 35 percent say the same. Among Republican men, the figure is just 10 percent. What has happened, then, is an increase in acceptance of the reality that there is structural discrimination against half the population, combined with a shying away from the ideology that seeks to do something about it. It is in such contradictory states of mind that dark myths have most appeal.
(New York Review of Books)
https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=pfbid02SBvkFXTTCjrzdCu6GkGBjFdyACBN4vmYCKEBeUYdboZFRufd8tJSCZTKa9gjutCYl&id=100054880555535&mibextid=ZbWKwL
RE: JFKs morals…
Most, if not all politicians, like everyone, have questionable morals. Americans need to quit focusing on personal traits, or race, or gender. Instead, focus on what matters: policies.
LBJ was a racist who passed the Civil Rights Act. He was arguably one of the best “politicians “ ever, in a pure sense of that ugly word.
That’s why Bernie never wants to discuss his personal history. He wants to focus on what matters: policy.
Bernie and Honest Abe are on par in terms of morals. Trump and the rest of these actors are relatively despicable. Get over it and stick to the policies.
An important point, Kirk, well-put. The LBJ example is perfect.