A MENTAL HEALTH professional describes the County's mental health effort: “Law enforcement is now and always will be the first responders when a mental health crisis goes bad. Long gone — except in the three or four big psychiatric hospitals — are the days of the big, white-suited psych techs who wrestle the person to the ground and whomp him or her with an injection of thorazine. County mental health crisis staff, i.e. low-wage workers, are prohibited to do a take down. Law enforcement keeps bringing in indigents with no MediCal who are psychotic from drug or alcohol abuse. County mental health has no funds for direct response and is not equipped to do anything for these people. The state psych hospitals require testing for drugs before a client can be admitted and will not accept anyone who tests positive. Right now in this county the jail is all there is for the “non-reimburseables.” Sheriff Kendall runs a good jail; incarcerated inmates have few complaints. In jail, under medical supervision, they detox. We need the mental health staff in the jail to provide follow-up case management. County government is, as you know, run by nincompoops so the County is applying its hiring freeze to positions fully funded by outside sources. The jail has had an outside-funded mental health position vacant for two years.”
JEALOUSY, the kid asked. What is it? The definitive analysis of that crippling mental condition was written nearly 150 years ago by Anthony Trollope in a novel called, ‘He Knew He Was Right.’ If anybody's defined it better, let me know. Another Trollope novel applying directly to the collapse of criminal capitalism we are presently witnessing is called, ‘The Way We Live Now.’ If you don't have the time or the patience for long novels, the Masterpiece Theater productions of Trollope novels are truly excellent, true to the master work and wonderfully acted.
THE PERSONAL TOUCH. Picked up a pair of glasses from Costco the other day. This card tumbled out of the case: “Certificate of Authenticity. Congratulations on your purchase of Costco's Premium Anti-Reflective Lens Treatment.” I looked around for the presenter with my trophy. Alas, no ceremony. But think of it! A corporate clap on the back for simply buying the cheapest pair of reading glasses I could find!
A READER WRITES: “Please clarify, if you're able, your confused remarks about the economy. Did you mean you think nationalization of the banks won't work?”
AS AN, ahem, generalist, I have no specialized knowledge of economics, or anything else for that matter. I read those economists who share my biases against capitalism as the linchpin of social organization, but I don't know anything more about our fatally indebted economy than you do. I'm sure Obama’s 2008 nationalization/bailout of the banks worked swell for the people who own and run them, but giving privately owned banks billions of public dollars to keep the rest of us employed with full wallets of credit cards so we can keep on driving around buying stuff? That won't work, long term, and we're being robbed unto the tenth generation besides! You don't need an economist to figure that out. Anyway, driving around buying lots of stuff is way over. They deliver the stuff to you!
FROM HERE ON it's strictly lowered expectations for higher costs which, if the transition is more or less serene, will be good for both the human and natural ecology. The insane acquisitiveness that drives half of us half nuts, and the rest of us to self medication, being no longer viable, we'll withdraw back into our families and to small communities like Boonville where we'll all have backyards full of chickens, cucumbers and cannabis, where we know each other and help each other out. Of course this is the rosy view. We may just as well be headed into a period of mass dislocations, roving bands of the armed desperate, and food riots, and from there quickly on into the militant fascism that industrial ruling classes always resort to when things get uncomfortable for them but unbearable for us.
MYSELF, I lowered my expectations fifty years ago when, in a flash of precocious insight never repeated, I concluded that I'd make a virtue of my already apparent unemployability, that I would permanently lower my expectations, that I'd substitute travel books for travel, home food for restaurants, thrift stores for clothing, solitude for society, walking and push-ups for exercise, a slug of Maker's Mark when things went awry. I knew that everything I'd learned in school was either wrong or unhealthy, a slam-dunk death ticket if it were taken seriously. No sir, the beatniks of my youth put me on the correct path.
THE OLD MAN ordered one no frills hamburger, one order of French fries and one small soft drink. He unwrapped the unadorned burger and carefully cut it in half, placing one half in front of his wife. He then carefully counted out the French fries, dividing them into two equal piles, one of which he gently placed in front of his wife. The old man took a sip of the drink then passed the drink to his wife for her sip. The old lady placed the drink between them. As the couple began their austere meal, the people around them kept looking over and whispering. You could tell they were thinking, “That poor old couple; all they can afford is one meal for the two of them.” An earnest young man appeared with a polite offer to buy the two seniors another meal. The old man said they were just fine. They were used to sharing everything. But everyone noticed that the little old lady hadn't eaten a bite. Again the kind young man came over and begged them to let him buy them another meal. This time the old woman replied. “No, thank you. We’re used to sharing everything.” As the old man finished and was wiping his face neatly with his napkin, the generous young man again came over to the little old lady who had yet to eat a single bite of food and asked, “Ma’am, what are you waiting for?” “The teeth,” she said.
PINOLEVILLE, just north of Ukiah, historically, was vacant land, very limited water, unsuitable for farming, and, therefore, of no value to Ukiah's white 19th and early 20th century panjandrums. But it was close to burgeoning Ukiah so it became a convenient place for remnant Indians to live. If Indians had no other place to go, Ukiah's city fathers sent them to Pinoleville from where their often compulsory labor could be summoned by nearby farms and ranches. Indians themselves have disputed ownership of the land for many years, and disputing who belongs there and who doesn't, and even who's an Indian and who isn't. Indians directly descended from the beginning of time have often been declared non-Indians by other Indians. As the tribal council changes elected officials, fresh disputes arise, and high handed maneuvers by the persons in power to dispossess ancient enemies are not uncommon. Lawyers, of course, can be depended upon to add to the confusion and bad feeling.
ONE OF THE TRULY great men of Mendocino County is a forgotten man called Steve Knight. One would think that the Indians, awash in casino money, would find a few dollars to properly honor him. Many of Knight's descendants live in the County today not that they or our local historical societies seem aware of him.
A BRILLIANT articulate man, Knight represented local Indians in Washington. It was his persistence that won official recognition for many Mendo and HumCo tribes. Without him, many Norcal Indians today would be landless.
I INVOKE STEVE KNIGHT in the context of Native American Night at the ballpark because he objected to Native Americans appearing in headdresses during negotiations with the federal government, arguing that headdresses reinforced primitive stereotypes. White men in headdresses, of course, is doubly insulting.
STEVE KNIGHT was one of the founders of the California Indian Brotherhood, whose first meeting was convened in Ukiah in the winter of 1926. His was among the most articulate voices in summarizing the transition from Mexican to American rule as it affected Mendocino County Indians. His words are the truest words we have, in capsule form, of Indian life in Mendocino County before the great murders: “Mexican people built no missions up here, so the Indians were allowed to live pretty much as they had been before and after the Mexicans came, and the Indians were given certain areas of land to use to grow things for themselves. They built brush fences around them, had their homes there, planted gardens, had corn and everything they needed to eat on these places. When the Americans superseded the Mexicans the Indians were aware of the change — they seem to have known there was a change — they didn't resent the Americans coming in where there was just a few came in, but finally then the miners came in by the hundreds and by the thousands, then trouble arose between the Indians and the whites. Then the American government sent agents among the Indians to make treaties with them in order to get the Indians on reservations where they might be protected, but mostly to forestall Indian uprisings. These agents came out, made treaties with the Indians, promising them certain reservations. The Indians signed these treaties in good faith. They thought these treaties were final when they signed their name to them — they did not know it had to have the approval of the Senate of the United States, so the Indians were expecting to be moved onto the new reservations, but these new promised reservations were being filled up by white settlers. Then those Indians realized that they had been fooled. But the old people up to very recent times [the 1920s] believed that the government would make some other settlement with them. These treaties were pigeon-holed in the archives of the United States Senate for 50 years. No one ever saw them until after the 50 year term had expired. Someone then dug them up and made a few copies of some of the treaties. When these old Indians were told about the treaties having been recovered from the archives they became very much interested and told the younger Indians about how these treaties were made, by whom signed.”
BY 1850, the criminal drifters who had not struck it rich in the gold fields began wandering through Mendocino County's untouched magnitudes, much of it perfect country for the raising of sheep and cattle. Its seemingly empty solitude surprised these first white men. The rest of the state was already mostly claimed. The first permanent white residents of the remote mountains and canyons of the Northcoast were killers and outlaws, many of them on the run from the settled areas of the country. The law was a late arrival to Northern California and, I would say from my experience, never has fully prevailed. As the relentless sons of Missouri staked out Mendocino County's myriad, well-watered little valleys, they shot Indian men where they found them, helped themselves to Indian women, sold Indian children into slavery, rez-ed the Indians they hadn't managed to kill, indentured them, and segregated them for the next one hundred years. Knight got some ot the stolen land returned.
MANY YEARS AGO, a grieving Hopland woman appeared at a community meeting in Yorkville to defend her dead husband. He had been shot and killed in a marijuana garden. It was not his garden. He'd told his wife he was going deer hunting. The Hopland lady believed her husband. She got up at the meeting and indignantly told then-Sheriff Jim Tuso that her husband was an innocent deer hunter gunned down by outlaw pot growers. Sheriff Tuso looked in her face and said, “I'm sorry, Ma'am, but your husband was shot and killed in the marijuana patch because he was there to steal marijuana, not to hunt deer.” I've always admired Tuso for telling the lady the painful truth straight on like that, admired him for not resorting to evasions, that he hadn't said something like, “That is not our information. Next question.” Tuso went on to tell the widow that he knew how her husband had died because he'd talked to the two men who were with him, and they'd confirmed that the three of them had been pot poaching not deer hunting.
ANSWERING REVISIONISM
JIM ARMSTRONG: “A homicidal social worker named Sharon Amos also invited us to the People’s Temple. She would cut the throats of her three children, then slash her own jugular in Guyana where she functioned as Jones’ gatekeeper in the capital of Georgetown.”
Bruce Anderson has made this claim at least a dozen times in these pages and at least twice he has admitted and I paraphrase: “Armstrong is right, No one knows for sure what happened in Amos’ apartment in Georgetown.”
Going further this time, he slanders her by calling her “homicidal,” inferring that he knew this to be part of her psychological makeup ever since she tweaked him in earlier engagements.
When you think a journalist may be deliberately printing inaccurate information, you may take some of his other views with a grain of salt.
When you know he is doing so, you doubt them all.
Editor: As a matter of confirmed fact, Ms. Amos was a former social worker for Mendocino County and chief Jones lieutenant at Jones’ Georgetown office where she screened would be visitors to the Jonestown jungle compound. On the fatal day Amos murdered her own children by cutting their throats and then her own. Any book on the mass murder details Amos’s last day.
Armstrong: “Confirmed fact” is quite a claim. Are citations more than “any book” available?
Editor: You need more? Odd that you continually defend one of Jones’ primary enablers.
Armstrong: When I started at the then Welfare Department’s children’s service unit in 1970, Linda Amos and I had adjacent desks and shared a telephone for about two years.
Actually, she was an adult services social worker and I have never understood why she came calling on you on that fateful day you wrote about and have reprinted so many times.
Sharing such close quarters over such a long time left few aspects of either of our professional and personal lives very secret. We became friends as well as coworkers.
She was dedicated to her job, her children and to the Peoples Temple. Exhaustion was her standard state.
Of course, there were several other Temple members employed there in quite varied jobs.
A good friend of mine, one even better acquainted with several Temple members, and I were invited to Sunday services and attended most of one the famous all day mindboggling productions. Suffice it to say, it seems more like yesterday than fifty years ago.
To the point, Linda was an amazing, exceptional, flawed angel, with very strong beliefs commitments.
Calling her homicidal on the basis of recent “facts” based on old conflicting information is slanderous.
I am sorry that you find that defending her “odd.”
Editor: From ‘Raven: The Untold Story of the Rev. Jim Jones and His People’ by Tim Reiterman. Chapter 54, ‘Holocaust.’ Pages 544 - 545.
“…With characteristic determination, Sharon Amos crossed through the living room to the kitchen, where she searched the drawers for a large, sharp butcher knife. Clutching it to her bosom, she walked back through the living room and motioned for Christa and Stephanie to follow her. “Come here, Martin,” she added. The kids followed her to the white-tiled bathroom at the end of the long corridor. Just before she turned into the hallway, she motioned to Chuck Beikman, Becky's husband, to follow her. As the person in charge at Lamaha, Amos spoke with the authority of Jim Jones; Beikman obeyed her.
“As she led her three children into the shower, Amos was shaking and uncontrollably nervous. She turned to Beikman, saying she was going to kill the children before the police took them. She pulled Christa to her, and holding her by the face, she slit her throat. Christa fell screaming to the floor, her legs kicking up spasmodically. Beikman watched helplessly. He could not, or would not, interfere. Sharon then reached for Martin, who began to slink away from her, but she caught up with him, held him by his nose and mouth, and slit his throat, too. Beikman froze as she ordered him to kill Stephanie; he administered only a superficial cut and let her drop to the floor. Amos, meanwhile, turned to her daughter Liane and handed her the knife. “Here,” she cried, “you've got to do me,” and as Liane cut, Sharon urged, “Harder, harder.” She took Liane's hands, and with her own hands guiding them, managed to complete her own suicide, murmuring, “Thank you, Father,” as she collapsed to the floor. Liane then turned the knife on herself. With some difficulty she slashed her own throat, before she fell convulsing to the floor.
“People in the living room first heard Christa say, “Oh, Mama.” Then came the screams.
“Calvin Douglas, the forward on the basketball team, bolted from the card table and raced down the hall. When he threw open the bathroom door, Calvin found three bodies in a deep pool of blood. Amos's oldest daughter was still barely alive; her body twitched, the knife still in her hand. There was hope for little Stephanie, with a relatively minor cut on her neck. So Douglas snatched her up and whisked her to the living room, where someone attended to her. The whole slaughter had taken just a couple of minutes.”
RETIRED SHERIFF’S DEPUTY RON PARKER:
Several deputies knew what a terrible person Jones was but no one would listen to them. They were aware of Jones’s breaking up families to gain donations. Property was given to Jones with only one spouse agreeing to do so. These cases were civil not criminal so there was little or nothing deputies could do. Jones also promised local politicians the vote of 100% of his congregation to keep them in line. He had employees in social services, banks, the DA’s office, and the sheriff’s office to gather information for him. Early on Tim Stoen was in fact a true believer, but recanted later on. Jones had one of his members drive past the Redwood Valley church firing a pistol in the air, at night, so he could convince his sheep they were under attack. He did so much bull shit like this but the politicians still supported him.
FOR PURE HYPOCRISY, it's hard to beat the mainstream media now claiming to be shocked that Biden hasn't been president for the past four years, shocked that the Democratic Party's shot callers, knowing Biden was ga-ga when they shoved him out there to take on the Orange Beast, knew Biden was ga-ga when they made him the candidate.
WHAT ought to be even more shocking is the historically unique fact that unelected people have been running the country for four years, nevermind that policy for both parties is on auto-pilot. This Biden situation might accurately be called a coup.
AMERICA no longer has a novelist with the gifts required to explain what has happened — a walking corpse won election over a half-demented guy who said on national television that Haitian immigrants were eating household pets. We're way, way beyond satire into a whole new sphere of unreality.
WHY even the lowly Boonville weekly repeatedly warned prior to Biden's nomination that he was out of it. Did anyone listen? Noooooo. Mendolib, frightened down to their decaf lattes of the orange beast, marched out in typical lemming-like righteousness to vote for the deceased.
NOT that the Democrats had a viable alternative to the dead man, and here we are with Musk as our national shot caller. To paraphrase T.S. Eliot: “Hurry along, please, it won't be long…”
LUIGI MANGIONI, hands down, is the all-time propagandist of the deed. The kid's assassination of a serial healthcare killer has freed up a deluge of hopefully transformative criticism of the Pay or Die health care system we've got going in this country. No more half-measures. No more phony ObamaCare. We've got to have MediCare For All, which, if we ever get it, will be because Mangioni broke the insurance-big pharma-corporate-owned Democrat logjam.
A NOTE on Mangioni's alleged Unabomber inspiration, the diff being that Mangioni used a gun because, as he has written, he didn't want to kill innocent people. The Unabomber didn't care who he killed besides his target. One of his first bombs was hidden in the baggage compartment of an airliner. Fortunately, it failed to explode. Kazinski's theory — that techno-civ would kill us all — is proving out, but he was no humanist. Mangioni's theory that identifiable individuals do great harm is also correct, but realistically it's an awfully long hit list.
MANGIONI'S KINDA REMINISCENT of Gavrilo Princip, the young Serbian (?) nationalist who singlehandedly kicked off World War One by assassinating Archduke Ferdinand, not that his noble act had desirable long-term consequences.
SPEAKING of Democrats, the scloratic leadership of the party — Pelosi, Schumer etc, are hiding their young, smart, attractive colleagues like AOC in favor of Adam Schiff, a guy only a suicidal political party would put up front.
CONTRARY to a lot of prison myths, most jails, including the Mendocino County Jail, are quite diligent in separating inmates, keeping the vulnerable away from the predators. The real tough guys are housed by themselves, the goofy guys and the natural victims have their own quarters, the catch of the day and the in and outters, plus the boys and girls doing county time, comprise the largest unit.
THERE ARE ALSO a few iso units for the extremely insane and those random others who have to be isolated, usually for their own safety. I did a couple of weeks in one of these cells for contempt of court back in the 90s. Not difficult at all for me so long as the books held out. Very difficult for a non-reader, I would think. The Mendo Jail is humane and well-run, despite being the sole repository for lots of untreated crazy people and people addicted to drugs who used to be sentenced to state hospitals before drugs became prevalent.
THE LAST TIME (presumably) I was locked up in the Mendo Jail, a young kid of a corrections officer would take me out into a large cage where I could walk around in the sun. “You know the problem with this place?” my keeper demanded. “It's too goddamed easy. These guys just lie around all day watching TV.” I had to agree. We had a long talk about all kinds of things beyond penal policy. He was local so we shared a large Mendo frame of reference. Another young corrections guy assigned to accompany me for my state-mandated forty-five minutes of fresh air was all business. He refused to say a word. I surmised he was a by-the-book dude that said, “Inmates are dangerous criminals. Don't engage with them because they'll manipulate you into becoming one of them.” In a bad jail, I thought, this inflexible character would be dangerous, and in danger himself, too.
I'VE ALWAYS regretted losing the name of the corrections officer who did me a huge favor. I'd finished the, ahem, quality lit I'd come in with and was beginning to panic. I told this C.O. something like, “I'll go nuts without something to read.” I expected him to say, “Tough shit. You're in jail, not a library.” But darned if he didn't lead me out of my cell and down the hall into a dank room piled high with jail mattresses and a pile of battered paperbacks, from which I retrieved a couple of large collections of short stories that lasted until the very hour a bunch of books arrived directly from the publisher courtesy of Martin Cruz Smith, who also won a place of honor in my memory.
THE RUSSIAN RIVER is seriously overdrawn by an “industry” that didn't exist 40 years ago, at least not to the extent it does today with every lawyer and stockbroker in America retired to Mendocino and Sonoma County frantic to get his silly puss on a wine label. (The late Jess Jackson of Kendall Jackson is the prototype here.) Before 1900 there wasn't a summer time Russian River until Healdsburg, and it wasn't until early in the twentieth century that Chinese labor and Jim Armstrong hand dug the mile-long tunnel diverting the Eel into the dry beds of the summer Russian River at Potter Valley. The purpose of that diversion was to electrify Ukiah, not to produce forty dollar bottles of booze or surplus water for Potter Valley ranchers to flood their hay fields like rice paddies. The inland Farm Bureau types have helped themselves to local streams for so long even a hint that they've got to cut back propels them into a mild state of apoplexy. Add the Farm Bureau Gang to the wine people and, well, it's Entitlement City. (Chemical runoff from vineyards is another negative impact on the Russian River, and another negative impact on the dying waterway that the noble sons of the soil pretend doesn't exist.)
SONOMA COUNTY sits on its water stored for no purpose other than the merriment of oafs on jet skis at Lake Sonoma while Sonoma County sells Lake Mendocino County’s water to customers as far south as Sausalito. Former Supervisor Pinches is the only person around who pointed out that the entire Mendo-SoCo water arrangement should be made equitable, with much more Lake Mendo water remaining in Lake Mendo so parched inland communities like Redwood Valley can draw it when they need it. (If you came in late, Sonoma County got water rights to Lake Mendocino in the middle 1950s because Sonoma County put up most of the money to build Coyote Dam, behind which the lake rests. Because they built it, Sonoma County basically owns the water in Lake Mendocino. Fifty years later, and several million more people, Sonoma County still takes the water from the lake while using almost none of their own water piled up at Lake Sonoma. (A case can be made, as Pinches once did, that since the water in Lake Sonoma fell to the ground in Mendocino County, it’s our water and could be the basis for arguing that more Lake Mendo water should be kept in Mendo.)
THE LATEST ROUND of mass shootings was certain to inspire a deluge of murderously stupid comment. Sure enough, we get editorials that begin, “So many slayings across U.S., but one question: Why?”
HMMM Let's plop our thinking caps onto our pointy heads and see if we can puzzle this one out. Don't hesitate to interrupt, but I'd say a lot of it is the easy access that crazy and otherwise irresponsible people have to guns and ammo. Who else deliberately shoots children? Or shoots people they don't know? The larger problem is our psycho-social-political nexus that literally drives millions of people crazy, especially people who lack the opportunity to accumulate a lot of stuff and never get a trophy at the awards banquet. Or even get invited to the banquet. Most European countries, Canada, Japan and Malaysia, tax themselves to provide a social floor through which it’s difficult to plunge. You always have a roof and a sympathetic ear. But here we have a “system” with so many holes in the social floor that the floor doesn't exist, and millions of people fall straight on through, and some of them get guns and go out and get even.
A RECENT piece in the LA Times on Fort Bragg's Glass Beach locates Glass Beach in Sonoma County and describes Fort Bragg as “the scruffier northern neighbor of Mendocino.” Harrumph. Double harrumph. Fort Bragg's a great little town, still coherent even though the mill and the fish are gone, and quite interesting, too, by far the most beguiling place anywhere on the Pacific Coast all the way up to Astoria at the mouth of the mighty Columbia, which Fort Bragg resembles. Mendocino, of course, is, well, a kind of open air, seaside mall, not really a place for people to live, although I understand some do.
ONE MORNING'S headlines from the SF Chronicle reminds me that in 1955, a single murder case, was a headline story for two years, culminating in the execution at San Quentin of Burton Abbott:
“Family of man fatally shot by police in S.F.’s Union Square seeks answers
“Two women’s naked bodies were found by a Fremont road. Decades later, a killer is convicted
“Northern California man arrested in beheading of 1-year-old son
“Former Vallejo High teacher arrested for alleged sexual assaults of student
“Two fatally shot after argument in Oakland home
THE POINT, Mr. Editor? The accelerating collapse of Western Civ.
WITH CAPITALISM eating itself everywhere except the ballpark, I paid $3.75 for a cup of coffee at the Giants ballpark a few years ago before making my way to my $33 gift seat a few rows up from the bullpen. It was the most expensive cup of coffee I've ever had, and lukewarm at that, kinda like the Giants, you might say.
I settled in among the vapid young people who filled the reserved section that night, chattering on their cell phones and waving to their friends in other areas of the vast enclosure.
The game wasn't very interesting, but the people sitting next to me were.
They were an elderly couple with a chubby little girl I assumed was their granddaughter, although these days, I suppose, the kid could have been some delayed in-vitro creation.
Grandpa was under attack from Parkinson's so severe it was an unnerving. He fluttered the whole game like a large bird over a nest, and positively alarmed everyone around us when Grandma, about every two innings, sent the old boy reeling up the stairs for more wildly overpriced negative food value delicacies.
Off he'd go, flailing up the stairs and, twenty minutes later, here he'd come flailing back down the stairs, chili dogs falling, garlic fries fleeing, beer spilling onto him and the occupants of the aisle seats.
Settling into his seat like a helicopter landing in a compost pile as the remaining inedibles flew in all directions, the old guy would pass the remaining rubber mega-dogs to the old lady and the child while he commenced digging into his with wholly inadequate plastic cutlery which, of course, resulted in long minutes of utterly futile stabbings and sawings before the random bits of petrified pig parts finally reached his mouth.
The child ate non-stop. When she wasn't pounding down the cotton candy, she was swilling a magnum-size soft drink.
The old lady was tucking it away too, four separate servings of pure junk food over 9 innings. If she ever once looked out on the field of play she did it while I wasn't monitoring her. Every time the crowd got excited, the old lady would jab me in the ribs.
“What happened?”
“Mendolib struck out Cheney, Bush is on deck. Rumsfeld's in the hole, and we're probably doomed as a species.”
“Thank you,” she'd say, then she'd dispatch the old man up the stairs for more corn dogs and sugar-coated grease sticks, and off the old man would go, windmilling his way up the stairs, fighting to keep himself propelled forward and upward.
Just after the 7th inning stretch, which my three companions passed hunched over their latest round of double-dipped deep fried whatevers, the old lady suddenly produced a see-through pouch containing innumerable syringes. She extracted one, and began brandishing it.
Jesu Cristo! Now what?
“My granddaughter is diabetic,” the old lady explained. “It's time for her insulin.”
The old lady was holding the syringe up to the sky, tapping it, loving the needle, grinning rather maniacally it seemed to me. I thought of the Russian defector the Bulgarians knocked off in London with a poison-tipped umbrella. The little girl, oblivious in her sugar cocoon, was tossing M&Ms into her mouth.
“My husband usually does this,” Grandma explained, “but he says his fingers are too cold tonight.”
I thought back to the baseball fans of my youth. I remember them coming out to the ballgame for the game, not to force feed their children life-abbreviating concoctions, but by the time the kid got the needle Tony Bennett was singing about having left his heart in San Francisco, the seagulls were circling, and the Giants had lost another one.
SOME SERIOUS PUSHBACK appears in last week’s Independent Cost Observer about the Chronicle article (which ran here at the time) entitled “Someone Is Buying Up
A Historic Coastal City. Is It The Next California Forever?” (A reference to a grandiose plan to build a privately-owned city being undertaken by an “anonymous” developer in Solano County.)
Among the statements disputed in the ICO article by Chelsea Randall and Anthony Cuesta are:
- The palm tree, which the Chronicle reporter alleged was chopped down by Mr. Jeff Hansen (the primary subject of the piece) has NOT been chopped down and is clearly visible in a photo taken by one of the reporters.
- Mr. Hansen insisted to the ICO that contrary to the Chronicle reporter’s claim, he DID respond to the article writer, Soleil Ho, via email, as well as to the Chronicle’s Editor in Chief Emilio Garcia.
- Hansen says he’s buying up dilapidated properties to restore them as he did with the old Seaside Motel that he bought some 10 years ago and restored and there is nothing nefarious about his varioius real estate dealings.
- Hansen also disputes the reasons Ms. Ho gave for a restaurant that he rented to closed. Hansen siad that Amber’s Diner was “bleeding money” when it closed.
- For her part Point Arena City Manager Peggy Ducey (formerly Fort Bragg City Manager) called the Chronicle article a “hit piece,” adding that the reporter’s slant on the subject — that Hansen was secretly buying up the city for some mysterious personal reason — was not appreciated.
There was no indication in the ICO article about whether or not Mr. Hansen or Ms. Ducey have written letters of complaint to the Chronicle since the article appeared.
(Mark Scaramella)
DOPE, THE GLORY YEARS, an on-line comment:
The best years of Humboldt and Mendocino County were in the 1980s to 2000 when COMMET (County of Mendocino Marijuana Eradication Team) and CAMP (the State’s Campaign Against Marijuana Planting) was implemented and going strong. Being an outlaw was fun and good for the counties. Especially Eureka Ford and Fortuna Ford. You could work and make a good living growing under ten pounds. I actually did two years time in 2002. Made the front page of the Press Democrat. Well worth being an outlaw and more fun when we listened to KMUD and the C.B. to see if CAMP was coming through Whitethorn and past the store. We would jump in our rigs and head to the Shelter Cove store for a beer. What dickhead thought legalization was a good idea?!
THE HEARING on Chamise Cubbison’s attorney’s motion to dismiss the criminal case against her and former county payroll manager PJ Kennedy is currently scheduled for January 6 in the Ukiah Courthouse. Cubbison’s attorney Chris Andrian has request the judge dismiss the case because of a slew of missing emails that Andrian says were lost by the investigator and/or the County computer staff. Deputy CEO Tony Rakes (who also runs the County’s IT department), DA investigator Andrew Porter, and former County Auditor Lloyd Weer (and their attorneys) are scheduled to be in court for the January 6 hearing on Andrian’s. If the case is not dismissed at that time, the long delayed Preliminary Hearing is currently scheduled to take two days, January 22 and 23, at 10 AM in Department E of the County Courthouse, Judge Ann Moorman presiding. Of course, one must take these court dates with a large salt shaker since the case has dragged on now for more than a year with delay after delay after delay. If the Preliminary Hearing results in charges being approved by Judge Moorman, we’re probably looking at months if not years more of drawn out legal proceedings. And then there’s Cubbison’s wrongful termination civil case…
(Mark Scaramella)
DISCLAIMER. Some pot people, and some people hostile to pot, think we've become the primary local print propagandist for marijuana. We haven't and we aren't. We don't smoke it, don't recommend its use. We think it makes people dumber and slower, and we think it's an obvious menace to young people, sapping them of their energy and optimism at the only time in their lives they're likely to have any. Like most non-pot people we think it's laughable that so many stoners hide behind medical pot. “Dude, it's my medicine.” Yeah, right. We think, though, that the substance ought to be fully decriminalized if for no other reason than it sucks up too much public time and money chasing it. But it's here, and the Northcoast remains economically dependent on pot production, in large part, and for us not to cover the weed industry in all its splendid green multitudinousness would be to ignore much of Mendocino County's human activity.
ON LINE COMMENTS OF THE WEEK
[1] Several deputies knew what a terrible person [Jim] Jones was but no one would listen to them. They were aware of Jones’s breaking up families to gain donations. Property was given to Jones with only one spouse agreeing to do so. These cases were civil not criminal so there was little or nothing deputies could do. Jones also promised local politicians the vote of 100% of his congregation to keep them in line. He had employees in social services, banks, the DA’s office, and the sheriff’s office to gather information for him. Early on Tim Stoen was in fact a true believer, but recanted later on. Jones had one of his members drive past the Redwood Valley church firing a pistol in the air, at night, so he could convince his sheep they were under attack. He did so much bull shit like this but still the politicians still supported him.
[2] What sets Israel’s war on Gaza apart is not only its violent military operations, marked by the indiscriminate killing of women and children, but also its relentless assault on dissent, criticism, and even the mildest opposition to its internationally condemned human rights violations and war crimes.
[3] What I believe needs to be a priority in the new government is an investigation of members of the Biden administration for their willfully and actively concealing the incapacity of Biden, so unelected and unaccountable people could UNCONSTITUTIONALLY run the government on their own.
That has all the hallmarks of a treasonous and coup-like adventure, and they should not be able to just sail off into the sunset after having pulled off such a criminal travesty and fraud upon the American people and the world.
Heads should roll.
[4] We all knew in 2020 that Joe Biden was suffering from cognitive decline. The media is at fault for propaganda and scaring people so they would vote for a man in cognitive decline. Nobody has been running the government for 4 years, unless you count Jill Biden. The government cannot even fill the potholes on my street. These people are not capable of creating a pandemic, or a UFO invasion. They really are incompetent. That's the truth. The shredders have been running for 4 years. Good luck proving anything in a court of law.
[5] Oh sure, if you’re one of those globies you might believe that the shortened days are caused by axial tilt. You’ll believe anything those government-funded scientists tell you.
Some guy in line at the grocery store told me that the days are getting shorter because China has been buying up all the daylight.
After President Musk and Vice-president Trump take office, that’s all going to change.
Mark my words, within just a few months we’ll be enjoying long sunny days again.
MASA! (Make America Sunny Again)
(It’s also good for making tamales.)
[6] We truly live in an upside down world when a cold blooded murderer who guns a man down on a NYC street is raised up as a hero, and worse—a sex symbol??—while a veteran who acted to protect his fellow citizens from a violent, deranged individual on a subway is acquitted by a NYC jury of criminal wrongdoing, then finds himself howled down as a villain? As a New Yorker, I’m disgusted today.
[7] I am amazed that so many Americans know so little about how Social Security works. Social Security is limited in its investments to non-marketable US government securities and has been since the program was created. The trust fund does not send money to Ukraine, or Israel or anywhere else. It does not directly pay for tanks or drones or bullets sent to foreign governments. If the trust fund is on the brink of ruin (and it probably is), blame the fact that its mission has been expanded over the years to cover all sorts of programs that have nothing to do with retired employees.
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