- Memorial To Be Broadcast
- Coq au Vin Update
- No Right To Sleep
- Three Inches Forecast
- The Governor's Dreams
- KZYX's Snowden Moment
- Poem For Jim
- Historians On Trial
UPDATE: MEMORIAL SERVICE TO BE BROADCAST LIVE VIA LOCAL CABLE CHANNEL AND INTERNET STREAM
For those unable to attend Wednesday's Memorial Service for Deputy Ricky Del Fiorentino, the Mendocino County Sheriff's Office, working with GSA/Information Services, and Mendocino Access TV has arranged for a live broadcast of the service. (The service will also be recorded for delayed playback.) Interested parties are encouraged to access Local Cable Channel 3 or 65 (Ukiah Valley) as the primary source, and the internet-feed at: http://mendocinoaccess.org as a secondary option due to bandwidth limitations. Further information is available in the enclosed Press Release [see below] and on the MCSO's Facebook site (Mendocino Sheriff).
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THE LOGISTICS of a mass memorial service for slain deputy Ricky Del Fiorentino are complicated by the absence of places to hold them in Fort Bragg. There's the small-ish Cotton Auditorium, the Fort Bragg High School gym and, outside in the weather, the high school's little jewel of a football stadium; those are the three venues that can accommodate a large crowd. The late Vern Piver's service was standing room only in the gym. Piver, like the late deputy, was enormously popular, not only in Fort Bragg, but throughout the County for both his ebullient personality and his unflagging commitment to youth sports. Fort Bragg City councilman, Jere Melo, also a murder victim at the hands of a maniac, was honored with an outdoor memorial in the football arena. Del Fiorentino, also a man with a Piver-Melo quality of community respect, will draw a huge number of people. So, with rain expected for the middle of the week with the memorial scheduled for Wednesday morning, and school in session? Got to be Cotton Auditorium, which it is on Wednesday, (today, 26 March) at 10am.
ON TUESDAY NIGHT, the 25th, a Candlelight Vigil will be held in front of the Fort Bragg Justice Center located at 700 South Franklin Street in Fort Bragg, California.
BOTH EVENTS are expected to draw unprecedented numbers of mourners lamenting the loss of a very fine man. Deputy Del Fiorentino is survived by his wife, children (ages 21, 19, 18, 6), step-son (age 29), grandson (age 5 months), step-grandchildren (ages 6, 3), parents and siblings. Anyone wishing to make monetary donations to the Ricky Del Fiorentino Memorial Fund can do so by contacting or visiting any of the Savings Bank of Mendocino County locations or by mail to PO Box 3600 Ukiah, Ca 95482 (707-462-6613). To donate online via PayPal to Deputy Del Fiorentino’s memorial fund go to the Mendocino County Sheriff’s facebook page at:
https://www.facebook.com/MendocinoSheriff
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DEPUTY RICKY DEL FIORENTINO MEMORIAL SERVICE TO BE TELEVISED ON TV & INTERNET
Cotton Auditorium (500 North Harold Street, Fort Bragg). Wednesday, March 26, 2014, 10am.
In preparation for the memorial service for fallen Deputy Ricky Del Fiorentino on Wednesday March 26, 2014 at 10:00 am the Mendocino County Sheriff’s Office expects attendance to exceed the seating capacity of the Cotton Auditorium. Overflow seating has been established adjacent to the Cotton Auditorium at the Fort Bragg Middle School Gymnasium and a large enclosed outdoor tent beside the Gymnasium. It is expected that there will be a live steaming video feed transmitted from inside the Cotton Auditorium to the Gymnasium and tent for viewing purposes. The live steaming video feed will be broadcasted on cable channels 3 and 65 in the Ukiah Valley area and on the internet at the www.mendocinoaccess.org website. Those who are unable to attend the memorial service are encouraged to watch the cable broadcast if all possible as opposed to the internet broadcast to prevent any disruption in the internet broadcast due to over saturation. (Sheriff’s Press Release)
MRS. RICHARD, of the excellent Coq au Vin restaurant at Floodgate, Navarro, visited us Monday morning. Gracious but unhappy, she explained the extended period of medical misfortune which has plunged her culinarily talented family into a morass of insurmountable debt. The Richards, prior to the onset of their medical emergencies, enjoyed a long run of celebrated success in the East Bay. Things went awry in Monterey County. Without re-hashing the entire sad saga, all of it exhaustively recorded by ghoulish Monterey County newspapers, I believe Mrs. Richard and I regret printing the links to the Monterey stories because none of those stories addresses the crucial point: Crooks tend not to work hard. The point of being a crook is to avoid sustained labor of any kind. The Richards have worked long and hard in a business that runs on long, hard hours. I hope Valley residents will see it my way and continue to enjoy the truly fine food at Coq au Vin. The Richards try hard and they deserve a break.
THE QUESTION OF THE DAY: Does Mendocino County's Right To Farm ordinance trump the State of California's Noise Pollution standards? Many residents of the normally quiet and bucolic Anderson Valley are fuming at the early morning noise coming from giant propellers, fueled by propane, that the vineyards are using for frost protection. These things are loud, very loud, sleep-disrupting loud, and their din is inescapable, echoing off the hills after it jolts the Valley floor awake, keeping everyone up and cursing the day the industrial booze industry took over our 26 miles of shattered tranquility.
THE AURAL ASSAULTS began Tuesday morning the 18th a little after 1am. More than a week later they continue, blasting off between midnight and roaring on until an hour or so after daylight.
WE CALLED Chuck Morse, Mendocino County's Ag Commissioner, asking for a clarification. Other people are calling the Sheriff's Office. Yesterday we were informed by an irate citizen that the Sheriff will dispatch the duty officer from Ukiah to measure decibel levels. We haven't heard of an officer actually appearing to take decibel levels, and even if they're found to exceed state guidelines of 60 and above, what can be done about it? The wine industry rules Mendocino County, as most of us know, and it would be a rare official, elected or appointed, who would dare take them on. Everyone seems hazy on the law as it applies to the wind machines.
WE CONTACTED 5th District supervisor Hamburg: Can we get a clarification on the rules? Does the right to farm ordinance trump the noise pollution laws? Several thousand people are awakened every early morning over here for the last week when these fans go on from midnight to past daybreak."
HAMBURG passed us to Morse, who wrote: “Morning Dan, It is a function, this year much more so than in ‘normal’ years, of the drought and I believe the practice is covered under the right to farm ordinance. A year or two ago I explored the possibility of quieter props on the wind machines, but that didn't go too far, as it tends to minimize the goal in the first place and they were not really available (as they are counter-productive to the goal of moving as much air as possible). I hope we get some cloud cover this week to warm the air mass and keep the wind machines off as much as possible."
BOTTOM LINE is the bottom line of the wineries. We sacrifice our sleep for their vines.
I WONDER if local realtors, henceforth, will be forced to attach sale covenants. "The buyer must agree to forgo sleep from the middle of March until the middle of April of every year…"
THE FAUX APOLOGY from Roederer reprinted in this yesterday’s Mendoino County Today is especially galling. It's signed with an illegible scrawl to conceal the identity of the French national who wrote it. The wine people, esp. the furriners, don't like negative attention. They prefer Jon Bonné and sunstruck beautiful people holding golden goblets to blue skies.
THE FRENCH have invested here because they know they can do whatever they want — from labor practices to water draws to chemical applications. American vintners assume their rights of destruction come with citizenship. The French wine industry is heavily regulated. They couldn't do in France what they do here. The monarchical assumption that the industry provides jobs is, strictly speaking, true, but those jobs mostly go to non-citizens whose underpaid labor makes the wine industry possible.
ROEDERER VINEYARD workers struck at harvest time a decade ago because the wealthiest family-owned winery in the world tried to screw them out of a few cents on the dollar for bringing in the grapes. Roederer demonstrated for all time its commitment to worker welfare. The winery's first move was to bus-in replacement workers from somewhere over on I-5. When those workers arrived in Boonville they refused to cross the picket line established by Anderson Valley workers. A hurry-up election was held right in the Boonville vineyard, with sleek French execs and attorneys flown in from Paris for the occasion looking on in their five thousand dollar suits. The workers voted heavily for representation by the United Farm Workers. Roederer quickly hired the infamous union-busting law firm of Littler Mendlesohn, and in a week L&M convened seminars around the County on the theme How To Keep The Unions Out. Wine people all over the Northcoast worried that their unhoused, uninsured, underpaid labor was in revolt; they flocked to these shameful sessions, and here in The Valley, Roederer placed a snitch in their single worker's housing in Navarro whose task it was to identify those workers who were pro-union, and those workers never worked another day in the Anderson Valley.
RASTAFEST, and other local events dependent on amplified sound, are compelled to agree to strict hours. Vineyards don't. Vineyards, of course, are most vulnerable to destructive frosts during the midnight-to-early-morning hours. We all get that, and some of us even sympathize.
AS AN EARLY RISER — 4am to 5am — I always check the temperature posted outside the castle gate. Lately at 4:30, it reads right around 40 degrees, but at 6am, the crack of dawn, it's been at or about 35 degrees. Vines are harmed when it's cold enough to frost, and there indeed have been light frosts over the last week, although one would think the din from the propane blasters, by itself, would keep the vines on the awake side of death. One has to wonder, though, what did pre-industrial vineyards do?
WE UNDERSTAND that this is a drought year, and we understand that the grape growers are short on our water, the usual agent deployed for frost protection. We even agree that given the grim choice of our water vs. the oppressively intrusive noise from the big propellers, we'd rather endure a few hours of noise than see our streams sucked dry.
THINGS COULD BE DONE to reduce the nuisance level of these loud machines, especially near residences, but there doesn’t appear to be much organizing to put pressure on County government even for the modest things mentioned in yesterday’s post by Mark Scaramella. The dominant wine mob would object to even an attempt to call a hearing on the subject, believing it’s their god-given right to keep everybody else awake.
A WEEK of light rain beginning Tuesday night is predicted to bring about three inches, total, of the precious stuff.
GOVERNOR BROWN: “He’s never seen ‘Chinatown,’ but he’s trying to deal with the drought by fixing the state’s unsustainable water transport system, which his dad helped put in place and he himself tried to fix 30 years ago. And he’s still fighting for his dream of a high-speed train from Sacramento to San Diego, a project bogged down in lawsuits. He takes a white model of the train from the window and lovingly places it in the middle of a big picnic table, noting that he has liked trains since he was a kid.” (—Maureen Dowd)
GORDY WANTS TO KNOW
Dear Editor:
As you are an AVA reader and moreover a believer, Bruce, let me caution you about an incomplete judgment by your KZYX Board reporter in re: the internal Board memo finessed mysteriously to you, and given front-page publication. It was, the reporter writes, "an Edward Snowden moment." Not quite. Snowden acknowledged his deed.
Perhaps the usual suspect was surprised to see his FYI in print. But newspapers should have no friends, eh?
Yours, Gordy Black, Mendocino
ED REPLY: Right you are, Gordo, and looking around the room for a friendly face I see only a field of KZYX programmers, one of them sporting a greasy cravat, who stare back in the manner of dumbly quizzical ruminants, and I… Well, not to go on here because even you probably get the point, which is, if you don't, who cares?
FOR JIM ARMSTRONG of Potter Valley, a great American poem...
Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio
by James Wright
In the Shreve High football stadium,
I think of Polacks nursing long beers in Tiltonsville,
And gray faces of Negroes in the blast furnace at Benwood,
And the ruptured night watchman of Wheeling Steel,
Dreaming of heroes.All the proud fathers are ashamed to go home,
Their women cluck like starved pullets,
Dying for love.Therefore,
Their sons grow suicidally beautiful
At the beginning of October,
And gallop terribly against each other’s bodies.
HISTORIANS & JOURNALISTS ON TRIAL
by Tom Cahill
A Review of "Hidden History: The Secret Origins of the First World War" by Gerry Docherty and Jim Macgregor, 2013
Cecil Rhodes was a 19th Century diamond and gold mining magnate in South Africa who, according to his will, was determined to create a secret organisation of English ruling-class elites who would eventually control the world and . . . "render war impossible and promote the best interests of humanity." To this day, scholarships in his name are still being awarded. A young Bill Clinton received one.
Rhodes died young, at 48--fortunately--because by then he was a full-blown sociopath and a mega control freak who had already caused the deaths and misery of a vast population of blacks and whites in Africa in his successful attempt to monopolize that continent's gold and diamond mines. And the secret group he started in London at the turn of the 19th/20th Century included other famous sneak-thieves and royal cheats of the period such as Nathaniel Rothschild and King Edward VII. These were the chief architects of the very first global war--a war "to end all wars" and to "save democracy" as the media hype of the time proclaimed to the undereducated and the gullible.
Thus it was an old boys' club of Brits organized by Rhodes and NOT a German cabal that instigated the "Great War" of 1914-18 as popular history has propagandized us for the past hundred years. This is the theory with lottsa facts and sources NOT of German historians but of two Scots blowing the whistle on English elites. In their most timely contribution to truth and reconciliation titled "Hidden History: The Secret Origins of the First World War," Gerry Docherty and Jim Macgregor have issued a challenge to historians and journalists to stop whoring themselves to the financiers and politicians as well as the industrialists and military brass-hats and their camp-followers who have forever profited from the misfortune of others.
As for the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand and his wife in Sarajevo in June 1914 that allegedly lit the fuse of WW I, the fingerprints of the Rhodes mob are all over the crime that was pinned solely on a group of idealistic young Bosnians.
In their introduction, the authors name a very few brave Anglo/American historians and journalists who dared question the authority of this royal crime syndicate as to the causes of WW I. This is of the utmost importance because historians and journalists should be objective but, alas, much, much too often they are NOT, thus aiding and abetting horrendous crimes against humanity.
Take for instance "The New York Times"--the so-called "free world's" so-called "newspaper of record"--that for the past half century has rarely missed an opportunity to denigrate as "conspiracy nuts" the overwhelming majority of Americans (as high as eighty percent) who disagree with the Warren Commission that Lee Harvey Oswald (a poor shot in the Marine Corps) acted alone with a vintage, inaccurate, cheap, piece-of-trash carbine (NOT a rifle) in assassinating Pres. John Kennedy. So it will be interesting to see if "The New York Times" even deigns to review "Hidden History" about the current mother-of-all-conspiracy theories, ie. who really started WW I and why.
A popular bumper-sticker and poster in the US during the War on Vietnam was "WAR IS GOOD BUSINESS: Invest Your Sons." The poster was illustrated with a photo of the "Pieta," the famous statue by Michelangelo depicting the mother of Christ holding in her arms the tortured corpse of her only son.
Because of the massive wealth stolen by the "robber barons" such as J.D. Rockefeller, J.P. Morgan, Leland Stanford, Cornelius Vanderbilt and many others at the turn of the 19th/20th Centuries, Mark Twain called this period "the Gilded Age." But it wasn't just an American phenomenon. Europe and especially Great Britain was also gripped by a plague of uncontrolled, unconscionable greed at this time.
The difference between the British gang that Docherty and Macgregor call the "Secret Elite" and the American white collar gangstas was that the Brits were (1) better organized, (2) more international in scope and (3) had a broader objective, being that of white, Anglo/Saxon, global domination in which they preceded by decades Adolph Hitler's Aryan super-race.
During the Boer War of 1899-1902 the British also predated the Nazis with concentration camps in which about 20,000 white children died. More than 6,000 white women and untold numbers of black people also died in what the Secret Elite euphemistically called "camps of refuge." And most responsible for this barbarism was Alfred Milner who took over leadership of the Secret Elite when Rhodes died and was knighted for his crimes by King Edward VII.
Most governments in history have a "gangster nature," says Michael Parenti. He's an American political scientist, historian, lecturer and author of many books including "Democracy For The Few" and "Dirty Secrets."
Not long after the Boer War, the Secret Elite went into high gear, conspiring to neutralize Germany both commercially and militarily. By 1911, Winston Churchill was a card-carrying member of this clique and used his post of First Lord of the Admiralty to prepare the Royal Navy for battle against Germany. When war finally overcame the world in 1914, it was an unholy horror that even the author Stephen King could not possibly overdramatize. Fighting became static, the trenches were open cesspools, and men died from diseases as well as from the new wonder- weapons such as machine guns, flame-throwers, tanks, airplanes and-- gasp--poison gas.
The Battle of the Somme in France began 1 July 1916, literally with a bang--a very big one--from tons of explosives placed by miners under a German trench that left a crater three hundred feet across and ninety feet deep. In just that one day, in just that one battle, the British Army alone lost more than 20,000 killed and 40,000 wounded and missing. Most of the casualties fell in the first two hours, cut down in a crossfire by well-placed German machine gunners. There was virtually no gain, and that infamous day's losses were never matched before or since by any army in the world.
Can you imagine dealing with 20,000 corpses as the medical aid stations were overwhelmed with tens of thousands of wounded? Some were blown to small, unidentifiable pieces and/or buried by explosions of artillery shells, never to be seen again. Bones of men killed that day are still being unearthed by farmers along with unexploded munitions and other debris of combat. And can you imagine the number of widows created that single day in 1916? It had become fashionable for young women to marry their sweethearts just before they left for France--a blessing for a safe return.
But I'm getting ahead of myself. "Hidden History" is about the run-up to WW I: who masterminded the plans to provoke Germany; who financed the filthy politics, deceit and hypocrisy; what newspapers beside "The New York Times" beat-the-drum for the bloodletting; what British General was a member of the Secret Elite and most responsible for the carnage at the Somme.
"War against a foreign country only happens when the moneyed class think they are going to profit from it," said George Orwell.
Rhodes' Secret Elite may have even caused WW II as well as the "Great" War in that Germany's punishment at Versailles in 1919 set the stage for a fanatical dictator like Adolph Hitler.
Docherty and Macgregor name names, dates, and places in incredible detail, enough to hang as traitors members of the Secret Elite. One family name repeated over and over and over is "Rothschild"--perhaps the arch-villains of all times. And the author's end their scholarly contribution to justice with one hundred pages of notes, references, and index.
"Hidden History" could be, and should be, a template for Historians Without Borders to chronicle the causes of other wars. Just "follow the money trail" and name names especially of dynasties such as the Rothschilds involved in more than one mass murder.
But beware! This book could affect you as Peter Weiss has his key character lament in "The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of the Maquis of Sade."
Day and night were not enough for me. When I investigated a wrong, It grew branches And every branch grew twigs. Wherever I turned, I found corruption.
"Hidden History" proves once again--as if further evidence is necessary--that conspiracy is synonymous with politics. The book is not for the faint-of-heart, but is an invaluable contribution for the psycho/spiritual healing necessary for the second great Renaissance now spreading globally.
A great short American poem.