A READER WRITES: On County functioning:
100% they will hire “managers” with a proper degree to hold the space and bill for services. The managers are not trained, nor mentored because there are No Mentors Left. The underling staff doing work while micro managed and controlled to not outshine the “managers”. Lots of narcissistic bullies with a certain tone deaf joy d vie, tasked with upholding and defending to the BOS the lack of functioning due to poor staffing!
A READER WRITES:
I wonder if the three board of supervisors who have been serving prior to the last election would be interested in a post on Trump’s cabinet? Seems a perfect fit, no?
MENDOCINO COUNTY HISTORY: JULY 19, 1984 – BRINK”S TRUCK ROBBED NEAR UKIAH
A gun-toting Brink”s guard locks the bullet-punctured armored car that was robbed by a brazen and well-organized band of thieves on July 19, 1984, northeast of Ukiah, on Highway 20, about a mile from U.S. Highway 101. The holes in the thick, bullet-resistant windshield came from high velocity rounds fired at point blank range by a man who leaped onto the armored car hood from the bed of a moving pickup. If you remember the daring, daytime robbery that brought national attention to Mendocino County, we”d like to hear from you for a future Reminisce page article with more information from our archives. Please send your recollections of the event or its aftermath (any length, from a paragraph to a couple pages) to: Jody Martinez, Ukiah Daily Journal, 590 S. School St., Ukiah, CA 95482; e-mail [email protected] post a comment below, or post a comment next to this photo on our Facebook page: Facebook.com/The Ukiah Daily Journal.
Jody Martinez, Ukiah Daily Journal
From the AVA Archive:
THE BRINKS ROBBERY occurred on Highway 20 just north of Ukiah, and it was the work of neo-nazis led by Robert Mathews, a lapsed Mormon who'd begun his career in rightwing extremism at age 11 when he joined the John Birch Society. (If the Mormons had instead handed the kid the Communist Manifesto, he would have grown up to be, ah, Starhawk?) One of Boonville's resident deputies at the time, Dennis Miller, was backed up in what he thought was a traffic accident on Highway 20, but it was Mathews and ten or so other rightwing commandos who'd stopped a Brinks truck in the middle of the road by pulling a pick-up in front of it, out of which a man with an automatic rifle then leaped onto the hood of the Brinks truck, spraying gunfire at the unreinforced windshield. The two Brinks workers, both young black men, having survived the gunfire uninjured, surrendered the cash amounting to $3.6 million. The money first was driven to Lake Mendocino where it was loaded into another vehicle; the robbers then drove it west to the dependably vacant Armstrong State Park where they spent the night. The money was split among them and, with the exception of uber-fanatic Mathews, the gang went on careless spending sprees that alerted law enforcement that a bunch of guys who had no money suddenly had lots and lots. Mathews himself shot it out with the FBI on Whidby Island, Washington, dying in the burning house he was barricaded in of smoke inhalation and gunshots.
Robert Mathews (Wikipedia): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Jay_Mathews
How the FBI smashed white supremacist group The Order: https://www.cnn.com/2017/08/17/us/fbi-spying-white-supremacists-declassified
ELEANOR COONEY: So, it turns out that yes, the DMV is open Monday, Wednesday and Friday, but according to a sign on the door, they no longer handle driver's license renewal or replacement. Sometimes these things can be done online, sometimes not. Which means, I suppose, that we will have to drive to Ukiah.
Linda Leitner: Today I called DMV at 800 777-0133. I was given a call back time and a DMV person called me within 10 minutes of that time. I now have an appointment at our Fort Bragg DMV office on a Thursday morning for drivers license renewal. The office is open on Tuesday and Thursday only for scheduled appointments. On Monday and Friday they open a 8:00 and on Wednesday at 9:00. You may also make an appointment at. dmv.ca.gov
Cooney: Ah! The mystery gradually clears up!
SLOBS, THE NEXT GENERATION
I just want to share something that happened yesterday in Fort Bragg. I was driving south just past the Noyo Bridge when a car with several Caucasian teenage boys pulled up beside and very close to my car. The one in the passenger seat hung most of the top of his body out of the window and proceeded to yell obscene things that he would like to do to various parts of my body at me. Broad daylight, other cars around and completely unprovoked. For those who don’t know me, I am a 71 year old woman and I was wearing a baseball cap, driving glasses and a quilted vest, nothing remotely attractive. They were all laughing loudly and egging him on. I’m sure they were just trying to shock me, and this wasn’t the first time that I have been verbally sexually assaulted, but to have it happen at 3:30 in the afternoon in our little town was upsetting. I am sharing this because the more I thought about it, the more concerned I became that these little shits might think it would be equally funny to hold some young girl down or even rape her. I called the police and opened a file. If you see or hear of anything like this happening in Fort Bragg, please call the police. They would like to talk to these boys. The car was a nondescript darker colored sedan like a Toyota.
— Yarrow Summers
ANTHONY BOURDAIN
"Americans love Mexican food. We consume nachos, tacos, burritos, tortas, enchiladas, tamales and anything resembling Mexican in enormous quantities. We love Mexican beverages, happily knocking back huge amounts of tequila, mezcal, and Mexican beer every year. We love Mexican people—we sure employ a lot of them. Despite our ridiculously hypocritical attitudes towards immigration, we demand that Mexicans cook a large percentage of the food we eat, grow the ingredients we need to make that food, clean our houses, mow our lawns, wash our dishes, and look after our children. As any chef will tell you, our entire service economy—the restaurant business as we know it—in most American cities, would collapse overnight without Mexican workers. Some, of course, like to claim that Mexicans are “stealing American jobs.” But in two decades as a chef and employer, I never had ONE American kid walk in my door and apply for a dishwashing job, a porter’s position—or even a job as a prep cook. Mexicans do much of the work in this country that Americans, probably, simply won’t do.
We love Mexican drugs. Maybe not you personally, but “we”, as a nation, certainly consume titanic amounts of them—and go to extraordinary lengths and expense to acquire them. We love Mexican music, Mexican beaches, Mexican architecture, interior design, Mexican films.
So, why don’t we love Mexico?
We throw up our hands and shrug at what happens and what is happening just across the border. Maybe we are embarrassed. Mexico, after all, has always been there for us, to service our darkest needs and desires. Whether it’s dress up like fools and get passed-out drunk and sunburned on spring break in Cancun, throw pesos at strippers in Tijuana, or get toasted on Mexican drugs, we are seldom on our best behavior in Mexico. They have seen many of us at our worst. They know our darkest desires.
In the service of our appetites, we spend billions and billions of dollars each year on Mexican drugs—while at the same time spending billions and billions more trying to prevent those drugs from reaching us. The effect on our society is everywhere to be seen. Whether it’s kids nodding off and overdosing in small town Vermont, gang violence in L.A., burned out neighborhoods in Detroit—it’s there to see. What we don’t see, however, haven’t really noticed, and don’t seem to much care about, is the 80,000 dead in Mexico, just in the past few years—mostly innocent victims. Eighty thousand families who’ve been touched directly by the so-called “War On Drugs”.
Mexico. Our brother from another mother. A country, with whom, like it or not, we are inexorably, deeply involved, in a close but often uncomfortable embrace. Look at it. It’s beautiful. It has some of the most ravishingly beautiful beaches on earth. Mountains, desert, jungle. Beautiful colonial architecture, a tragic, elegant, violent, ludicrous, heroic, lamentable, heartbreaking history. Mexican wine country rivals Tuscany for gorgeousness. Its archeological sites—the remnants of great empires, unrivaled anywhere. And as much as we think we know and love it, we have barely scratched the surface of what Mexican food really is. It is NOT melted cheese over tortilla chips. It is not simple, or easy. It is not simply “bro food” at halftime. It is in fact, old—older even than the great cuisines of Europe, and often deeply complex, refined, subtle, and sophisticated. A true mole sauce, for instance, can take DAYS to make, a balance of freshly (always fresh) ingredients painstakingly prepared by hand. It could be, should be, one of the most exciting cuisines on the planet, if we paid attention. The old school cooks of Oaxaca make some of the more difficult and nuanced sauces in gastronomy. And some of the new generation—many of whom have trained in the kitchens of America and Europe—have returned home to take Mexican food to new and thrilling heights.
It’s a country I feel particularly attached to and grateful for. In nearly 30 years of cooking professionally, just about every time I walked into a new kitchen, it was a Mexican guy who looked after me, had my back, showed me what was what, and was there—and on the case—when the cooks like me, with backgrounds like mine, ran away to go skiing or surfing or simply flaked. I have been fortunate to track where some of those cooks come from, to go back home with them. To small towns populated mostly by women—where in the evening, families gather at the town’s phone kiosk, waiting for calls from their husbands, sons and brothers who have left to work in our kitchens in the cities of the North. I have been fortunate enough to see where that affinity for cooking comes from, to experience moms and grandmothers preparing many delicious things, with pride and real love, passing that food made by hand from their hands to mine.
In years of making television in Mexico, it’s one of the places we, as a crew, are happiest when the day’s work is over. We’ll gather around a street stall and order soft tacos with fresh, bright, delicious salsas, drink cold Mexican beer, sip smoky mezcals, and listen with moist eyes to sentimental songs from street musicians. We will look around and remark, for the hundredth time, what an extraordinary place this is.
The received wisdom is that Mexico will never change. That is hopelessly corrupt, from top to bottom. That it is useless to resist—to care, to hope for a happier future. But there are heroes out there who refuse to go along. On this episode of “Parts Unknown,” we meet a few of them. People who are standing up against overwhelming odds, demanding accountability, demanding change—at great, even horrifying personal cost."
ICE “MISTAKENLY” ARRESTED a US Marshall in Arizona because he looked the type. We’ve gone from showing probable cause as a basis for arrests to “he fits the general description” (i.e., male and Hispanic), let’s haul him in and sort it out later….
I thought this had to be a parody and looked for transposed letters to indicate that the ICE number would take you to an underground sanctuary network like the Trystero postmarks in Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49: “Report All Obscene Mail to the Postmaster General.” Nope, the federal government really wants you to snitch out the guys who mowed your lawn and washed your car.
—Jeffrey St. Clair
SHERIFF VS. ANNEXATION
The city’s annexation proposal would put an unnecessary burden on our law enforcement officials, with the current proposal being opposed by Sheriff Kendall. “This annexation will be a lose-lose for everyone… including a reduction in services for those annexed in the city.” It’s important that we ensure that our vital law enforcement resources aren’t further strained with this proposal. For more information on annexation, you can go to noukiahannexation.com.
SHERIFF MATT KENDALL:
When I speak with folks around here there is one common thread to the conversation. The first thing they want from their government when their feet hit the floor in the morning, is please don’t hurt me.
Don’t hurt me physically, financially, don’t take from me what I have earned and allow me to live my life without intervention labeled as assistance.
Thanks to our legislators, people are running afoul of laws none of us knew existed. When the state is cranking out thousands of laws and regulations every year, how do we know something has changed? Building codes, penal codes, CEQA, CARB and the good old state tax codes. When will Sacramento believe we have finally gotten there?
How about we start with do no harm and then work our way out from there?
I don’t think it’s too much to ask.
A FRIEND sends along the news that I belong "to an incredibly rare group: only One Percent of your generation is still alive." Having just returned from another medical assault on my battered pud, which is on life support while the rest of me remains vigorous enough to continue the fairly rigorous exercise routine that's kept me alive, that and my in-home care-givers, who double as my family. I count my blessings, believe me.
OVER the past year, an international team of Frisco doctors has puzzled over strategies to keep me going. They include two East Indians, three Chinese, a Vietnamese, and a black female, all of them Americans, I must add lest my Mendolib card gets pulled.
TWO WEEKS AGO I was strapped to a gyno-bed complete with stirrups while an all business Vietnamese doctor steered a device resembling a dildo up my chaste kazoo-zoo. (People do this for fun?) That rather excruciating thirty minutes came with an audience of four young female medical practitioners! Me, a child of the fiercely modest 1950's fully exposed to a quartet of my chronological grandchildren! I cringe at the memory, a grisly spectacle by any standard of grisly, but I got a big laugh out of them when I scribbled on my message board, "I hope you girls haven't had lunch."
THIS MORNING I went in for a catheter change, hoping the lady who usually performs this, uh, martyred task, would do it again. She's a marvel of efficiency, and she's fun, laughing throughout, making the process almost enjoyable. I was so happy with her doing this necessary unmentionable task that I tried to slip her a couple of bills. "No thank you, Mr. Anderson. It's against the rules. I'd get in trouble."
TODAY, my usual angel of deliverance was off. Her replacements were a young man and a young Chinese woman who looked like she was about 14. And she was in charge of the young Pakistani guy, an apparent trainee, who did the dirty work. They got it done, though, and I'm good for another month while the multicultural medicos figure out what to do next.
THE MAJOR REMEMBERS:
At the risk of being too graphic or cringeworthy…
When I was living in San Jose in the 80s I went in to Kaiser for a penis exam because there was blood in my urine. The intake nurse said that was “unusual in a man.”
The exam was a mini-camera on a flex-tube going up the penis and into the bladder. The exam was performed by a male nurse with the tube and some Vaseline while I was in a device like the one the Editor described. They also probed the anus for a prostate check, while they were down there… The procedure was supervised by a mousey Kaiser urologist who never touched me. All he did was direct the tube-camera and look at the video from the tube.
Turned out to be a false alarm. Nothing of concern since. The Doc said it must have been a small blood vessel leak or something.
I remember during the process trying to put myself in a weird sort of detached mental zone that one must adopt as the discomfort plays out. You try to remind yourself that these people have seen this area a lot and you’re just a machine to be checked to them. Then when it’s over it's back to daily modesty… I have since imagined that women probably undergo comparable medical inspection (invasion?) much more frequently, often at the hands of male doctors.
Since then, I have sympathized more about what women and some men go through on a regular basis. Obviously, I would not want to do it that often, even if I could more easily manage the mental zone out over time.
STEVE DERWINSKI
Can you say TURP ?
Somewhere into my fifties I noticed I was getting up in the middle of the night sometimes to pee. Twenty years later it had escalated to two or three times with not much of what they call “flow”. My doctor gave me some pills but they really didn’t help the situation and so it seemed like I was jumping out of bed every ten minutes.Finally one morning I had a pain so fierce in my abdomen that the local clinic shoved a catheter up my pee pipe and sent me to the emergency room in a nifty white and red ambulance.
The catheter—which I would wear with the accompanying pee bag for about ten weeks was a hassle to say the least but I didn’t feel so bad after the cute young nurse In the emergency room confided that she’d had her own catheter to contend with.
So I was a candidate for the TURP. Which turns out to be a fairly standard procedure for old guys like me. It stands for TransUrethral Resection of the Prostate and while they’re “dicking” around with a special”tool” —you won’t feel a thing cause the anesthesiologist has sent you to La La Land for about an hour or so.
My urologist was a straight ahead kind of guy and the few times I visited him before my surgery I tried to chat him up to no avail–no small talk–no joking around–this prostate/penis/bladder stuff is serious stuff.
But I never gave up hope I could get him to crack a smile.So when I was in pre-op and he came to check on me I told him my friends had wished me luck with the surgery but I’d told them I hoped it wasn’t luck–I hoped it was skill. He actually broke into a big smile and walked around the bed to give me a fist bump on my shoulder.
TOM TETZLAFF: Not only does PG&E charge us far too much for power, they can’t even manage to properly upgrade their own payment system so that it works.
CHUCK WILCHER: Maybe they need to pay their CEO a little more. A poverty wage of $17 million in salary and stocks she gets only goes so far.
WHAT CRUEL COSMIC JOKER placed Netanyahu, Trump and a medieval Mohammedan in charge of the world’s fate? Small wonder the fundies are double-bubble wrapping their baseball cards as they queue up for the view seats on the Rapture Express.
NOT SO INNOCENT ABROAD. DA Eyster, apparently unaware that tourist excursions to the Middle East at this time are mos def contraindicated, especially tourists from the Great Satan, has safely returned to his bunker in the County Courthouse. May his lawn be forever free of dandelions as the rest of us await publication of his deposition in the Cubbison Case. Former Supervisor McGourty’s oughta be a howler, too.
INTERESTING ARTICLE on Reading, How To, in this morning’s collection about a return to phonics. I almost jumped out of my catheter when I read this follow-up comment because it exactly mirrors mine, lo these many years ago: “See Spot run. Run Spot, run! I remember the instant I learned to read — a word I didn’t know. I knew many words by sight, but struggled with unknown words. I was sounding out the letters in my head. My friend said “say it out loud”. I said the sounds, instantly recognizing the word. (First grade, 1959)” SOMEONE, probably my mother, advised me very early on to “sound out the words you don’t know,” and I can’t imagine any other way of learning to read.
ON A RECENT SATURDAY afternoon, I was walking on California between 7th and 8th when a leashed, medium-size dog, maybe a fifty pounder, leaped out from behind his inattentive owner at a passing Hispanic woman. She just kept going, probably thinking to herself, “One more bummer here in Gringolandia,” as the trendo-groove-o dog owner remarked to me, “Gee, he’s never done that before.” I’d like to see a law banning big dogs from The City. Period. It’s not fair to the dog to keep him cooped up in an apartment. Your little yappers, while annoying, are at least apartment-sized. And you shouldn’t be allowed to own a dog at all if you have to hire someone to walk it. (A trendo-groove-o, btw, is a young guy with a little pork pie hat, stovepipe jeans, a t-shirt emblazoned with a corporate logo, a tattoo of a cartoon character on his forearm. They’re coming in the windows!)
LGBTIQA2S
WOT THE HELL? I can’t keep up. No sooner had I mastered LGBT than the gender benders add on IQA2S! The whole of it doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue, and between you, me and the apocalypse, expecting John and Jill Q. Public to take it all seriously is also self-deluding. The people who thusly self-satirize themselves might want to come up with a new ID.
ON LINE COMMENTS OF THE WEEK
[1] I’m a Millennial, born in 1981. I live by myself in a rundown apartment I pay $700 a month for. I make about $55k a year and work 2 jobs. Home ownership is not a reality for me even though I have a college degree. In the real world it means little, basically nothing. I did not vote for Trump, But because of the way I’m living I refused to vote for Harris as well. Did you ever think maybe we are exhausted? Fed up?
[2] He said he would deport 25 million people. So far he’s done less than 10,000, and most without due process - so those don’t count as “deportation” - they are just a legal headache for future American governments. So in summary this is another Trump administration cluster phck and he is proving that he has no management or leadership skill for the n+1 time where n is a number >> a million.
[3] The problem with vouchers is simple. The voucher doesn't contain enough money for parents to send their kids to GOOD private schools. There are lots of private schools that are really bad. They are more like christian madrasas than real schools.
[4] No nation and no people is so virtuous that they are incapable of temporary (one hopes) insanity. Israel is at bat now. Look, I have no love for Hamas; I understand that Israelis feel threatened and vulnerable, surrounded by Arabs who hate them. But the warfare state that Israel has devolved into has lost its mind, given in to its own dark side. There is no justifying its blood thirst in Gaza, its moral corruption. It's hard to know what to realistically hope for as things stand. For those who believe in miracles, let them pray that peace can settle in the hearts of those who dwell in that savage corner of the middle east.
[5] Giant pickups that are never used for work are an insult to those who labor with those little pickups to feed their families and not their ugly egos.
[6] Of the 35,000 or so who materialized in my city's downtown (not including the dozen or so smaller, scattered gatherings in various city suburbs and exurbs) , I didn’t see anybody waving their George Soros check. But then it defies the MAGA imagination that people in today’s America would voluntarily interrupt their daily routines to go protest on behalf of something bigger than themselves, with no personal profit involved. (“Suckers and losers”, as Trump would say, just like the military wounded that he disparages.)
[7] What was Saturday’s “protest” about? I saw signs disparaging Israel. I saw signs in support of Ukraine. I saw signs supporting abortion, I saw signs against ICE. I saw some signs that didn’t make any sense at all. There were signs insulting President Donald J Trump. Seems to me these staged and planned astroturfing events are more of an opportunity for the people who were there to post on Social Media saying, “I was there!”, than anything substantial. Like their leaders in the Democratic Party, the people “protesting” have no coherent message, no plan, no vision. Nothing of interest to everyday Americans. The Left’s platform has nothing of substance. Just pissed off people screaming into the void. They’re AGAINST everything but can’t explain, coherently, what they are for.
“Orange Man Bad” is not a winning platform. That was evident during the 2024 election.
ON LINE RESPONSE:
I’ll tell you what most of them are for, despite their apparent inability to clearly say it.
Single payer health care, higher taxes on the rich, an end to US support of Israel’s Genocide, jail for bank fraudsters, a functioning opposition party, an end to gerrymandered elections, greatly reduced Pentagon spending, real assault weapon control, a reasonable immigration polilcy, etc.
The trouble is, as an organization, the Democratic Party leadership is against all these things and they tend to dominate (and fund) the protest organizers.
Make the rich pay their fair share!
(For the genocide and illegal wars of aggression…)