Mendocino County Today: Saturday, August 9, 2014

• Fire News
• Public Squalor
• Government Service
• Frost Fan Challenge
• Grape Water
• Recommended Viewing
• Ram & Run
• Catch of the Day
• Underground Greenhouse
• Helping Professionals
• Dog Heaven
• Richardson Grove
• Craven Congress
• 100 Novels
• Tribal Waters

CALFIRE HAS ISSUED A FORMAL EVACUATION WARNING for the area around the eastern boundary of the Lodge Complex Fire near Camp Seabow, Bowman Ranch Road, Peterson and Grubb Creeks as well as residences in the areas of, Big Bend, Grizzly Creek, Cedar Flat, Hermitage, Cummings/Little Red Mountain, Little Dann Creek, Dann Valley, and Tan Oak Park. An, “Evacuation Warning,” means there is a potential threat to life and property in the affected areas. Individuals living in these areas should have a plan and be prepared to leave. Please visit www.wildlandfirersg.org for information on how to prepare for an evacuation.

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THE BAY AREA Air Quality Management District has issued a health advisory for the North Bay as smoke from the Lodge Lightning Complex Fire near Laytonville drifts inexorably south. The blaze has scorched roughly 5,400 acres as of Friday mid-day and was only 30 percent contained.

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MORNING UPDATES...

An Evacuation Order has been issued for the area around the eastern boundary of the Lodge Fire in the following areas: Camp Seabow, Elder Place, Tan Oak Park, Bald Mountain Ranch, Mad Creek, Elk Creek east of Brush Mountain.

An Evacuation Center has been established at the Leggett Valley School located at 1 School Way, Leggett, CA.

Two Community Meetings will take place Saturday, Aug 9, in Leggett (1 pm) and Laytonville (5 pm).

Incident Update [7 am, Aug 9]: 7100 acres, 30% contained, 11 injuries, 58 structures threatened. "Current Situation: The fire continues to burn in heavy timber. Firefighters are challenged by steep, rugged terrain with difficult access. Late yesterday afternoon the fire made significant runs on the eastern portion of the fire. Eight firefighters were injured as the fire crested a portion of Brush Mountain. All eight firefighters were transported to burn centers and treated for burns; they remain in stable condition. We will provide further information about the injured firefighters as it becomes available for release."

A RECURRING LETTER to the SF Chron: “I've just returned from four days in San Francisco visiting my daughter who lives on Nob Hill. We had a great visit as always, but sadly the last impression I'm taking away from SF is the surprising amount of trash on the sidewalks and streets. I walk nearly every morning, and on every block I passed papers, food waste, human and animal feces, and every type and variety of trash imaginable. I have been to most major cities in the US and in my experience SF has become the leader in filthy streets and sidewalks. Here in Hartford, the poorest capital city per capita in the US, we have city workers who walk the streets picking up refuse from the sidewalks and streets every day. What a shame SF can't do the same.” — John Brandon, West Hartford, Conn.

THE CITY'S WEALTHY NEIGHBORHOODS are relatively free of trash, and absolutely free of homeless people, even the ones who are still trying, the ones who live out of their cars. Police response time is about 30 seconds in Pacific Heights, and most areas of the Richmond, Diamond Heights, and those blocks of town with money people living on them.

SLIPPING ON MY PUNDIT hat, I'd say the same general tolerance for public squalor reigns most places anymore — Ukiah and Willits, for local example, and the basic reason for that, I guess, is a combination of an absence of civic pride among our rulers, rural and urban, and low expectations of government from the rest of us. We really don't expect government to do much in the way of good, and government, as a potential positive force, has been steadily undermined by the American rightwing, hence even a corporate health care swindle like ObamaCare is railed against by the fascisti as “socialism.” Americans who experience them come home raving about the efficacy of the single-payer systems in the civilized countries of the world. We can't have it here because… Well, ask fully insured Bill O'Reilly.

THE LONG DOWNWARD slide in all areas of public life continues. The Post Office fails to deliver, in anything like a timely manner, Boonville's beloved newspaper, despite the higher rates we pay to ensure that the paper is delivered in a timely manner. We also must perform a perfect mathematical calculation each week on a wad of government forms. (Locally, the Superior Court, as ever operating with itself as its first priority, is plodding forward on a new County Courthouse that will serve only the 9 of them. Why are there 9 judges for a Mendocino County population of 90,000, the highest ratio in the state? Don't get us started, but we can say, on the general theme of civic mindedness we started with, the civitas has devolved to a simple proposition: Every Man For Himself.)

SOME WEEKS AGO we filed a complaint with the County's Planning and Building Department about the frost fans of three of our immediate neighbors. By action time we hope our beef will include all the neighbors of these things in all of Anderson Valley.

THE COMPLAINT, boiled down, is this: Is it reasonable that three parties engaged in industrial grape growing in a residential neighborhood can destroy the early morning sleep hours of a thousand people? And do it every morning for up to six weeks for 6-7 hours at a time?

WE'RE ASKING this question in Mendocino County where, like every other place in this country, government, up to and including the courts, serves the dominant businesses, even if those businesses consume the unrelated populations. Push comes to shove, we're collateral damage.

MENDO PLANNING AND BUILDING has, we assume, long ago shuffled our complaint off to the Mendocino County Counsel for an opinion. Last time we asked how it was going, the guy who answered the phone said it was “still under consideration.”

WHEN (or if) we get the answer, it will be encased in several acres of obfuscating prose and misleading precedents pegged to an infinitely elastic and totally unreasonable interpretation of the county's Right To Farm ordinance. Government exists to protect business, especially big business, and wine grapes are big business, the biggest private business we have in Mendocino County, the biggest one being the unquantifiable marijuana business.

WHICH IS WHY we're pursuing our own legal strategies beginning with a temporary court order restraining local vineyards from using frost fans. The Anderson Valley grape growers, reinforced by inland sons of the soil, will heave great, racking, despairing sobs, and demand “justice.”

CONGRESSMAN HUFFMAN is presently doing a lot of huffing and puffing about how dope growers are drying up Northcoast rivers and streams. Empty Suit Huffman, fresh off an enthusiastic Yes vote for the Israeli Baby Bombers, couldn't be waterboarded into admitting that grape growers have a much greater negative effect on Mendocino County's streams than dope growers, which is obviously true because grape growers have legal access to local rivers, to which they help themselves in dry years and wet years alike.

HUFF, like Thompson before him, gets his primary political support from the Mendocino County wine industry — that support backed up Mendocino County's truly pathetic Democratic Party.

(QUICK ASIDE HERE: A consistent theme of much movie art for years now has been the equation of public office holders with craven superficiality. The irony is that your average lib will get the on-screen joke, share the assumption that the whole mob of them are lying swine, and then beat down the doors to get into a Mendo wine and cheese party with Huffman or Chesbro, hanging on every glib cliché these clowns utter.)

WHICH is where frost fans come in; the grape growers say the fans are ecologically superior to stream water for frost protection because they don't use any of the water that the grape growers have already impounded. Grape growers take the water and operate their frost fans, which operate at a decibel level comparable to the tarmac at SF International. Let's all hope we have a big rain year.

RECOMMENDED VIEWING. “Boyhood,” is the best movie-movie I've seen in a long time, and the most unique I've ever seen. Imagine a movie of yourself in real time as you grow from the age of about 7 to 18. You've got yourself in real time while your story is fleshed out with real actors, very good actors. We meet this kid, the filmmaker, when he's still a couple of years away from Little League. His parents married too young, dad takes off, mom is left with the boy and his slightly older sister. She remarries a college professor who turns out to be a tyrannical, woman-beating drunk. (Which seemed like typecasting to me; I've known very few who weren't personally creepy, but maybe I've just been unlucky.) Mom struggles mostly forward while we watch the two children form themselves here in WackyLand, a minefield for young people, and a nightmare for single mothers. The real father, not a bad guy but the kind of manchild this country produces by the millions, fades in and out of the lives of his children while Mom remains an absolute rock, which is also true of millions of real life Mom-dependent American families. It's the fascinating story of how these archetypal Americans function in a society that doesn't make normal functioning easy. You'll thank me for steering you to this one.

THE HIGHER THE TRUCK, THE LOWER THE IQ.....

On August 6, 2014 at approximately 5:40pm Mendocino County Sheriff's Deputies were dispatched to the 28000 block of Poppy Drive in Willits for a domestic violence related assault. Upon arrival Deputies contacted the female victim, and learned the suspect, Timothy Gregory, 47, of Willits, had run from the location prior to the Deputies’ arrival. During the contact, Deputies learned the couple was engaged in a dating relationship and had been engaged in a verbal argument, which escalated into Gregory throwing a half full can of beer at the victim, hitting her in the leg. The victim then ran outside and locked herself inside her vehicle, trying to get away from Gregory. Gregory then got inside his lifted Chevy truck and rammed the victim's vehicle, with the victim still inside causing major front end damage to the victim's vehicle. Gregory then exited his vehicle and fled the location. There were no visible injuries to the victim, thus resulting in no medical treatment. During a search of the area Deputies located Gregory hiding approximately 30 yards from the victim's residence. Gregory was also found to be on summary probation in Mendocino County with an obey all laws clause. Gregory was placed under arrest without incident for Assault with a Deadly Weapon, Spousal Battery, Vandalism, and Violation of Probation, and transported to the Mendocino County Jail where he was booked in lieu of $30,000 bail.

CATCH OF THE DAY, August 8, 2014

DAVID DUNCAN, San Francisco. Drunk in Public

TIMOTHY GREGORY, Willits. Property destruction, Assault with a deadly weapon (non-firerarm), misdemeanor domestic violence, probation revoked.

BRIAN GULBRANSON, Hornbook, CA. Felon with firearm, failure to appear.

GORDON HANOVER, Ukiah. Under the influence of a controlled substance.

ALAN HOLLIDAY, Ukiah. Public intoxication of alcohol.

MICHAEL JOHNSON, Upper Lake. Public intoxication of alcohol.

ARION KELSEY, Fort Bragg. Felony under the influence and in possession of a weapon, felony child abuse or endangerment, felony child carrying firearms off premises, felony purchase of a handgun without safety certificate, possession of drug paraphernalia, offense code not in table.

CHELSEY LAUGHTON, Willits. Probation revoked.

ADRIAN LOPEZ, Covelo. Driving with a license suspended for DUI.

JUAN MARTINEZ, Ukiah. Resisting a public officer.

CODY PAYNE, Bangor, California. Driving under the influence of alcohol.

NICK SHANNON, Fort Bragg. Public intoxication of alcohol.

BUILD A $300 UNDERGROUND GREENHOUSE for year-round gardening (Video)

http://www.treehugger.com/green-architecture/build-underground-greenhouse-garden-year-round.html

MEMO OF THE WEEK

Mendo’s Professional Helpers At Work — for $120,000 taxpayer dollars a year.

(From an otherwise routine collection of contractual and legal provisions in a proposed $120k contract with Redwood Children’s Services of Ukiah)

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Definition Of Services

Contractor shall provide the following services:

Provide services as described to Transitional Housing Program – Plus (THP-Plus) clients.

1. Assist each THP-Plus participant, in coordination with Independent Living Skills Program (ILSP) staff, to complete a Transitional Independent Living Plan (TILP) outlining their educational, employment, and housing goals.

a) Educational advocacy and support, including linkages to Foster Youth Services with the goal of each youth obtaining a high school diploma, GED of High School Proficiency prior to graduation from the program.

b) Encouragement to seek college or other post-high-school training to better prepare for the future. The program will actively assist in helping participants apply for college or trade school admission, and for scholarships and grants for which they may be eligible.

c) Job readiness training and support including linkages to Mendocino County Private Industry Council (MPIC) resources, MPIC Work Readiness Certification, Mendocino Works and other appropriate employment resources.

d) Assistance to youth, at the completion of the program, in finding or maintaining affordable housing at costs no more than 30% of the youth’s gross income if the housing model selected is transitional.

2. Provide each participant with a monthly supplement for basic living expenses.

3. Provide all basic household furnishings.

4. Provide each participant with case management services and assistance in completion of their TILP goals.

5. Provide 24-hour crisis intervention and support which will include providing each youth with:

a) On-call professional assistance.

b) Resource referral to County Mental Health Services.

c) 24-hour Staff Mental Health Professional.

d) Individual and group therapy. Should participants have a need for counseling, therapy, or medical treatment, they will be assisted in pursuing these services through either public or private providers who accept Medi-Cal. In such events, the program will be responsible to assure that youth get to all medical appointments.

6. Assist each THP-Plus participant in accessing comprehensive health care, and helping to link them to appropriate health insurance as a result of participation in the program.

7. Connect pregnant THP-Plus participants to regular pre-natal care.

a) Assist parenting THP-Plus participants to identify a pediatrician through Medi-Cal or through other health coverage to provide required immunizations and recommend well-child visits.

b) Encourage parenting THP-Plus participants to enroll in a parenting class. Assist with enrollment.

8. Provide services to build and support relationships with family and community.

9. Provide aftercare services including support groups and referrals to community resources.

a) Provide adult mentors who will commit to following youth for a minimum of six months following graduation from the program.

b) Provide outcome and evaluation continuing for 2 years following graduation from the program.

A DOG HAS DIED

My dog has died.

I buried him in the garden

next to a rusted old machine.

Some day I'll join him right there,

but now he's gone with his shaggy coat,

his bad manners and his cold nose,

and I, the materialist, who never believed

in any promised heaven in the sky

for any human being,

I believe in a heaven I'll never enter.

Yes, I believe in a heaven for all dogdom

where my dog waits for my arrival

waving his fan-like tail in friendship.

Ai, I'll not speak of sadness here on earth,

of having lost a companion 
who was never servile.

His friendship for me, like that of a porcupine

withholding its authority, 
was the friendship of a star,

aloof, 
with no more intimacy than was called for,

with no exaggerations:
 he never climbed all over my clothes

filling me full of his hair or his mange,

he never rubbed up against my knee

like other dogs obsessed with sex.

No, my dog used to gaze at me,

paying me the attention I need,

the attention required
 to make a vain person

like me understand 
that, being a dog,

he was wasting time, 
but, with those eyes

so much purer than mine,

he'd keep on gazing at me

with a look that reserved for me alone

all his sweet and shaggy life, 
always near me,

never troubling me, 
and asking nothing.

Ai, how many times have I envied his tail

as we walked together on the shores of the sea

in the lonely winter of Isla Negra

where the wintering birds filled the sky

and my hairy dog was jumping about

full of the voltage of the sea's movement:

my wandering dog, sniffing away

with his golden tail held high,

face to face with the ocean's spray.

Joyful, joyful, joyful,

as only dogs know how to be

happy 
with only the autonomy 
of their shameless spirit.

There are no good-byes for my dog who has died,

and we don't now and never did lie to each other.

So now he's gone and I buried him,

and that's all there is to it.

--Pablo Neruda

(Translated, from the Spanish, by Alfred Yankauer)

RICHARDSON GROVE UPDATE; BATTLE CONTINUES; THIRD LAWSUIT FILED

Greetings,

There has been a quiet period in the battle to Save Richardson Grove from the CALTRANS project to realign Highway 101 to allow access by bigger trucks but the battle is beginning to heat up again. Construction was originally halted by the Federal Judge as a result of our first Federal lawsuit in 2010. He ruled that the data presented by CALTRANS to justify their finding of "no significant impact" was flawed and their conclusions "arbitrary and capricious." He also ordered CALTRANS to take note of the other objections cited in our complaint if they intended to resubmit their analysis. True to the bullheaded nature of this bureaucracy, CALTRANS submitted a "Supplemental Environmental Analysis" containing revised data without further analysis of their previous unsupported conclusions. They filed a notice in the Federal Register indicating they were prepared to start the project, leaving the project opponents with no alternative but to file another Federal lawsuit on July 28, 2014. In our companion case in the California Court system, we succeeded in our Appeal and the Appeals Court has remanded the case back down to the trial Court for another hearing. We have been assigned a new Judge and are awaiting the assignment of a trial date. The Richardson Grove project is one of a number of projects that CALTRANS is pursuing to create an alternative access route for Interstate-size trucks from Oregon to the Bay Area. The 197/199 project in Del Norte County along the wild and scenic Smith River is another of these projects. Again, a lawsuit had to be filed to stop the project for similar reasons - inadequate analysis and faulty conclusions. Once again, a Federal Judge had to "reign-in" CALTRANS to protect threatened salmon, ancient redwoods and the pristine river. These projects are for the sole purpose of allowing Interstate-size truck access. Interstate-size trucks have no Federal length limit. California legal trucks have a 65 foot limit. All trucks, Interstate-size or California, are limited in weight to 80,000 gross pounds. The overarching purpose of opening this area to Interstate-size trucks is to promote development of this area - one of the last and most beautiful areas left in California. This effort is being promoted without any adequate protection for our fragile environment or wildlife and without regard for the safety of other users of the road. A tragedy this summer occurred when students on a field trip to Humboldt State University were killed when their bus was crushed by an Interstate-size truck that crossed the medium on Interstate 5. We can only expect more such slaughter on our narrow, winding roads if these projects are allowed to continue. Thank you for keeping up with these developments and for your desire to help Save Richardson Grove. Your help is needed to help defray the cost of these lawsuits. The Environmental Protection Information Center (EPIC) of Arcata California and the Center for Biological Diversity of Tucson, Arizona are bearing the brunt of the legal costs and those costs are tremendous. EPIC is a relatively small non-profit and really needs the financial help to keep this effort going. Please consider making a donation on their website at www.wildcalifornia.org Feel free to email me with any questions at bkenn202@att.net and thanks for your concern.

With appreciation, Barbara Kennedy

THE ISRAELI ASSAULT on Gaza was so odious that it seems almost grotesque to draw positive lessons from it. Nevertheless, there are lessons to be learned. They reflect poorly on the usual suspects – Republicans of course, but also the national Democratic Party and the Obama administration. The handful of so-called “progressives” in the Senate and House come off even worse, if only because more is expected of them. Every member of the House and Senate, every single one, is now on record in support of Israeli war crimes and crimes against humanity. They don’t have the excuse that they are only reflecting attitudes that are pervasive in their time and place. This is a lame argument whenever it is raised, but it hardly applies in this case. The overwhelming majority of people on earth abhor what Israel has done. Cowardice, ignorance, and malice account for their moral and political turpitude; there are no mitigating factors.

— Andrew Levine

100 BEST NOVELS IN ENGLISH, SINCE 1900

A CounterPunch Reading List

by Jeffrey St. Clair & Alexander Cockburn

In my study hangs a hand-colored photograph of James Joyce ambling down the Rue Saint Jacques on the Left Bank of Paris. The photograph was a Christmas gift to our household from Alexander Cockburn. As was so often the case with presents from Alex, this wasn’t something he’d just bought on a sudden whim through e-Bay (a mode of commerce he was, it can now be disclosed, seriously addicted to for several years) with us in mind. Alex liked to test-drive his gifts and we cherish his fingerprints on them. A few years earlier, he’d been given two photographs of Joyce from our mutual friend the late Ben Sonnenberg, the former publisher of Grand Street. The photographs had migrated from his room, to his study and up to the old CounterPunch tower, before one of them was wrapped in well-thumbed copies of the Anderson Valley Advertiser and sent by UPS to Oregon City, where it landed on X-mas Eve 2008.

I look at that photograph many times a day and think of Alex. Joyce was one of our favorite writers (though neither of us could make heads-0r-tails of Finnegans Wake) and each year on Bloomsday we’d try to top each other with a juicy quote from Ulysses. So it’s no surprise that James Joyce’s Ulysses leads our list of the 100 best novels in English.

Alex and I both studied English Literature, Cockburn at Oxford, me at American University in DC 15 years later. During our 20 year friendship, we talked about novels, films and poems nearly as much as we did politics and certainly found greater enjoyment in long-ranging debates about the relative merits of Waugh, Stendahl and Proust. Before Alex died, we’d been working on putting together two lists of our favorite novels written since 1900, similar to the very popular lists we’d done years before for nonfiction books in English and in translation. We set some ground rules. First, one of us had to have actually read the book and convincingly described its merits to the other. Second, we limited each writer to one entry; otherwise, novels by George MacDonald Fraser and Patricia Highsmith might have dominated the list. Third, each of us had unlimited preemptory challenges to be invoked against writers we hated. Thus no: George Orwell, Philip Roth, Saul Bellow, Margaret Atwood, Martin Amis, Salman Rushdie, David Foster Wallace or Jonathan Franzen. Fourth: the novels had to have been published after 1899, which meant that one of Alex’s favorite books, the rousing Dumas-like adventure set in Richelieu’s France Under the Red Robe by Stanley Weyman (1894) just missed the cut. We didn’t distinguish between so-called genre fiction and serious literature, thus you’ll find a gripping thriller like John Masters’ The Deceivers lodged very near Vikram Seth’s novel-in-verse The Golden Gate.

Unlike our previous lists, this time we chose to rank the books. Why? Because people tend to feel more passionately about novels than treatises on the surplus-value theory and we hoped that our list would give CounterPunchers something new to fight over. Here though the rankings are tilted more toward my own biases, since Alex and I had only gotten round to slotting the first 25 or so books before he died.

We hope that our novels list confirms some of your own tastes and at other times confounds you, irritates you and turns you on to some fresh reading pleasures. As Alex was fond of saying: “By the quality of life, art and freedom that radicals commend, so will radicals prevail.”

In a few weeks, we’ll publish our list of the best novels in translation since 1900. In the meantime, there’s much reading to be done. Better hurry, before all the beaches disappear….

– Jeffrey St. Clair

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1. Ulysses: James Joyce (1922)

2. Absalom, Absalom!: William Faulkner (1936)

3. Gravity’s Rainbow: Thomas Pynchon (1973)

4. Native Son: Richard Wright (1940)

5. Orlando by Virginia Wolff (1928)

6. The Rainbow: DH Lawrence (1915)

7. Under Western Eyes: Joseph Conrad (1911)

8. Invisible Man: Ralph Ellison (1952)

9. The Violent Bear It Away: Flannery O’Connor (1960)

10. Tropic of Cancer: Henry Miller (1934)

11. The Golden Notebook: Doris Lessing (1962)

12. The Sun Also Rises: Ernest Hemingway (1926)

13. Wide Sargasso Sea: Jean Rhys (1966)

14. The Code of the Woosters by PG Wodehouse (1938)

15. Tender is the Night: F. Scott Fitzgerald (1934)

16. Giovanni’s Room: James Baldwin (1956)

17. The Talented Mr. Ripley by Patricia Highsmith (1955)

18. At Swim-Two-Birds: Flann O’Brien (1939)

19. On the Road: Jack Kerouac (1957)

20. JR: William Gaddis (1975)

21. Pale Fire: Vladimir Nabokov (1962)

22. End of the Affair: Graham Greene (1951)

23. Red Harvest: Dashiell Hammett (1927)

24. Mumbo Jumbo: Ishmael Reed (1972)

25. A Lost Lady: Willa Cather (1923)

26. The Hound of the Baskervilles: Arthur Conan Doyle (1902)

27. Far Tortuga: Peter Mattheissen (1975)

28. The Iron Heel: Jack London (1908)

29. Jazz: Toni Morrison (1992)

30. The Grapes of Wrath: John Steinbeck (1939)

31. Their Eyes Were Watching God: Zora Neale Hurston (1937)

32. Nothing Like the Sun by Anthony Burgess (1964)

33. Riddle of the Sands by Erksine Childers (1903)

34. The Thinking Reed by Rebecca West (1936)

35. Catch 22: Joseph Heller (1961)

36. Beat the Devil: Claud Cockburn (1951)

37. The Indian Lawyer: James Welch (1990)

38. The White Hotel: DM Thomas (1981)

39. Neuromancer: William Gibson (1984)

40. The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold: Evelyn Waugh (1957)

41. Light Years: James Salter (1976)

42. Almanac of the Dead: Leslie Marmon Silko (1991)

43. Death of the Heart: Elizabeth Bowen (1938)

44. The Monkeywrench Gang: Edward Abbey (1975)

46. Slaves of Solitude: Patrick Hamilton (1947)

47. The Left Hand of Darkness: Ursula K. LeGuin (1969)

48. Novel on Yellow Paper: Stevie Smith (1936)

49. A Feast of Snakes: Harry Crews (1976)

50. Vida: Marge Piercy (1975)

51. The Man in the High Castle: Philip K. Dick (1962)

52. Naked Lunch: William Burroughs (1959)

53. A Place of Greater Safety: Hilary Mantel (2006)

54. Voss: Patrick White (1957)

55. Dog Soldiers: Robert Stone (1974)

56. Animal Dreams: Barbara Kingsolver (1990)

57. Cat’s Cradle: Kurt Vonnegut (1963)

58. Sometimes a Great Notion: Ken Kesey (1964)

59. Mask of Dimitrios by Eric Ambler (1944)

60. The Known World: Edward P. Jones (2003)

61. Written on the Body: Jeanette Winsterson (1993)

62. Disgrace: JM Coetzee (1999)

63. Call It Sleep: Henry Roth (1934)

64. July’s People: Nadine Gordimer (1981)

65. The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler (1939)

66. The Black Prince: Iris Murdoch (1973)

67. Julian: Gore Vidal (1964)

68. The Killer Inside Me: Jim Thompson (1952)

69. An American Dream: Norman Mailer (1965)

70. If He Hollers, Let Him Go: Chester Himes (1945)

71. The Secret History: Donna Tartt (1992)

72. Flaubert’s Parrot: Julian Barnes (1984)

73. Matterhorn: Karl Marlantes (2009)

74. The Last Good Kiss: James Crumley (1978)

75. Salvage the Bones: Jesmyn Ward (2011)

76. Underworld: Don DeLillo (1997)

77. The Radiant Way: Margaret Drabble (1987)

78. Regeneration: Pat Barker (1991)

79. Snow Crash: Neal Stevenson (1992)

80. Ray: Barry Hannah (1980)

81. Tripmaster Monkey: Maxine Hong Kingston (1989)

82. The Golden Gate: Vikram Seth (1986)

83. Lucky Jim: Kinglsey Amis (1954)

84. Day of the Locust: Nathaniel West (1939)

85. Gateway: Frederick Pohl (1977)

86. Machine Dreams: Jayne Anne Phillips (1984)

87. Two Serious Ladies: Jane Bowles (1946)

88. Mr. American: George MacDonald Fraser (1980)

89. Zuleika Dobson: Max Beerbohm (1911)

90. The Dogs of March: Ernest Hebert (1979)

91. The Deceivers: by John Masters (1952)

92. Sleeping Beauty: Ross McDonald (1973)

93. The King Must Die: Mary Renault (1958)

94. Tree of Smoke: Denis Johnson (2007)

95. House of Splendid Isolation: Edna O’Brien (1994)

96. Lucy: Jamaica Kinkaid (1990)

97. Affliction: Russell Banks (1989)

98. Gaudy Night: Dorothy L. Sayers (1935)

99. Flicker: Theodore Roszak (1991)

100. Greenmantle: John Buchan (1916)

(With many thanks for their valuable input, even when it was ignored: Ben Sonnenberg, Kimberly Willson-St. Clair, Daisy Cockburn, Joshua Frank, Ron Jacobs, Carl Estabrook, Christine Karatnytsky and JoAnn Wypijewski.Jeffrey St. Clair is editor of CounterPunch. His new book Killing Trayvons: an Anthology of American Violence (with JoAnn Wypijewski and Kevin Alexander Gray) will be published in June by CounterPunch Books. He can be reached at: sitka@comcast.net. Alexander Cockburn’s Guillotined! and A Colossal Wreck are available from CounterPunch. Courtesy, CounterPunch.org)

THE FOLLOWING HOOPA VALLEY TRIBE PRESS RELEASE details how local tribes are planning to deal with recent extreme water shortages and potential mass fish death. In the release, tribal officials note that they are already seeing the effect of rising Klamath River temperatures on local fish:

* * *

The Hoopa Valley Tribe has issued this statement on the present state of the Klamath River: "California’s Emergency Services Coordinator, Jan Marnell, met on Wednesday with representatives from the Yurok, Karuk, and Hoopa Tribes to coordinate a response to what appears to be a looming disaster in Eastern Humboldt County.

California is in the middle of its worst drought in history after three years of below-average rainfall, and more than 75 percent of the state is under extreme drought conditions.

Even as the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation (BOR) announced that there would be no water releases into the Trinity or Klamath Rivers to prevent mass fish deaths, millions of gallons of local water continue to be diverted to Central and Southern California.

As more water is diverted away from local rivers, lower water flow leads to higher temperatures in the water, which at a certain point will become deadly for fish trying to swim upriver to spawn.

Robert Franklin, senior hydrologist with Hoopa Tribal Fisheries, said, “Three times more water is being sent to the central valley than is being released into the Trinity. If we don’t see a fairly wet winter, we’ll take a beating on the Trinity.”

That beating may already be starting. Wells are going dry in several parts of Eastern Humboldt, and sick fish are being reported up and down the Trinity and Klamath Rivers.

Vivienna Orcutt said the water temperature in the Lower Klamath is already 77 degrees and local fishermen were reporting a lot of odd fish behavior.

“There are fish missing the scales on their bellies and rolling on the bottom of the river,” Orcutt said.

Franklin confirmed the reports. “We’re seeing obviously sick, disoriented salmon doing things they normally wouldn’t do.”

In addition to water diverted south to Central Valley farmers, there’s also the problem of entire local streams and creeks being illegally diverted to irrigate hidden marijuana plantations.

Hoopa Forest Supervisor Darin Jarnaghan said, “We’re finding large dugout basins – three or four feet deep – being used to water marijuana plants.”

“We’re not getting enough water flow. The majority of the streams in the area have more than half of their water diverted,” Jarnaghan said.

In most of Eastern Humboldt County, the streams going dry have an immediate effect on people living there.

Hoopa Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Director Ken Norton said, “The depth of the alluvial aquifer is about 30 feet and it’s fed by surface level runoff. As the streams dry up, the aquifer and the wells will dry up.”

Bill Patterson, assistant director of environmental programs for the Yurok Tribe, said, “We anticipate we’re going to have a really big problem running out of water this summer.”

“Right now we still have water flowing to two community systems, and we can truck water from there,” Patterson said. “When those go dry, we won’t have a lot of options.”

Dara Zimmerman, an environmental engineer with Indian Health Services (IHS) in Arcata, said, “There are a lot of people downriver who are out of water and they’re drinking creek water that’s not safe to drink.”

Hoopa Tribal Chairperson Danielle Vigil-Masten, Marnell and her staff, and other representatives from tribal and state agencies traveled to Eureka to attend the first meeting of Humboldt County’s Drought Task Force.

Carol Rische, general manager of Humboldt Bay Municipal Water District, said the County’s main source of water – Ruth Lake – was completely full, so residents of coastal Humboldt County are in no danger of immediate water shortages.

Rex Bohn, 1st District Supervisor, said Southern Humboldt residents could be facing the same sort of water shortages already hitting Eastern Humboldt, and water would have to be shipped to them.

“31 water trucks have been brought in this year,” Bohn said.

Vigil-Masten told the Task Force that water trucks from outside the area were spotted trespassing and illegally siphoning water from creeks on the Reservation.

“We have a huge issue,” Vigil-Masten said, “with this fish kill coming up.”

John Driscoll, from Congressman Jared Huffman’s office, said, “I can assure you my boss is very much with the Tribes on this issue and he’s very angry about what’s happened.”