BAD NEWS FOR MENDO. The Board of State Community Corrections will not fund the Sheriff's hoped-for plan to build a unit at the County Jail for mentally ill inmates. The Sheriff and the Supervisors had hoped to garner as much as $20 mil for what amounts to the only effective, long-range solution to the free range mentally ill. Mendo didn't make the cut. As most of us know, the cops do almost all the mental health heavy lifting, not only here but everywhere.
ACCORDING TO A PRESS RELEASE published Saturday in the Ukiah Daily Journal, the “typical vineyard in Mendocino County is only about 14 acres.” This suspicious statistic derives from “a census by the Mendocino Winegrowers, Inc.,” There are “570 vineyard properties” owned by 404 owners in Mendocino County, they note. 14 times 570 is about 8,000 acres.
THERE are some 17,000 acres of grapes in Mendocino County according to the County's 2014 Crop Report, a number conveniently missing from the Mendocino Winegrowers, Inc. census. That leaves about 9,000 acres unaccounted for in the Winegrowers’ “We’re just a bunch of little guys” census.
USING the standard 80-20 rule of thumb for statistical breakdowns, we can estimate that 20% of the 420 owners own 80% of the vineyard acreage. Or just 84 people/corporations own about 13,600 acres and 336 own the remaining 3,400 acres. 3400/336 is about 10 acres each for 20% of the acreage.
THE WINEGROWERS INC. also claims that Mendocino leads the state in “certified biodynamic vineyards at 4%” and that “more than 20% of the vineyards are CCOF certified.” Here, interestingly, the Winegrowers Inc. fail to say how many acres those CCOF vineyards represent. Since the entire press release is propaganda meant to fudge as many numbers as possible to paint the wine industry as neo-environmentalist little guys, we can assume that here they mean 4% of 10-14 acre vineyards are certified biodynamic and 20% of the 10-14 acre vineyards are organic. Since those 4% and 20% are probably not among the Big 84, the good guy grape growers are really only about 250-300 acres of biodynamic and 1300-1500 acres of organic.
HOW were these skewed numbers calculated and who wrote the press release? “ ‘Mendocino’s wine growers are a dedicated group who truly care about environmentally friendly farming. Our growers have a long term vision so that their land is sustainable for generations to come,’ Mendocino County Ag Advisor Glenn McGourty was quoted as saying.”
McGOURTY is the tax-paid wine industry flak who draws pay as the UC Ag Extension Grape Advisor. The shameless McGourty, who of course has a vineyard of his own, has absolutely zero objective views of the industry he promotes and defends with every breath. So it’s no surprise that McGourty wants people to think that most Mendo grape growers are just little guys scraping by, and that the small fraction of grape growers who don’t spray their grapes with poisons are representative of the other 15,000-plus acres owned by growers who do.
McGOURTY ALSO CLAIMS that lots of local vineyard owners practice “fish-friendly farming.” Which is interesting, seeing that the few remaining fish they’re allegedly friendly to are on the endangered species list in large part due to the wine industry’s unregulated draw on local streams and rivers.
FORT BRAGG will not lower the city's "Water Emergency" from Level 3 to level 2. The Emergency Level 3 was put into effect at the end of September. Public Works Director Tom Varga said he thought the City could safely return to the less severe warning level. In September he'd warned that "the Noyo River is now so strongly influenced by high tides that it cannot reliably supply water. The City needs to rely on its two remaining water sources, Newman Gulch and Waterfall Gulch, which are also at record low levels. The City's water system normally maintains a 10% margin of safety between its raw water supply and daily water demands. The system has dropped well below this margin and it is essential that drastic water conservation efforts be implemented."
AT LAST WEEK'S meeting of the FB City Council, Varga recommended the city lower the water "alert" even though there are "King Tides" this week there will also be rainfall (0.25"-0.50") from this next storm. He said he was "comfortable" with the lowering of the water emergency to level two.
COUNCILMAN LINDY PETERS, summing up the Council's opinion on the subject, "It's not that I don't have confidence in our public works director, but in my opinion, the council should be the ones to make the decision" and he thought it would send out the "wrong message" to the citizens if it were lowered.
DOUGLAS CHOUTEAU of Fort Bragg writes: "At the Monday night City Council meeting Malcolm MacDonald describes, I made the following comment he omitted: If you look at a municipal map of Fort Bragg, the Central Business District is defined as four blocks long, and three blocks wide. It was designated by city government for economic development and tourism. This leaves hundreds of blocks of the core city between the Noyo River and Pudding Creek available to social services and nonprofit groups. "
SUZIE DE CASTRO REMEMBERS PARIS: I lived in France in the early 70’s, first in the South of France and then in Paris. I want to tell you about an experience, I had, which may shed some light on the present situation. At the time of the incident, I was living in Paris, wishing to go south to visit a friend from Holland, I had left behind. Hitchhiking was popular then, so from the outskirts of Paris, I began the three hour ride. First, I was picked up by a gentleman who was nice enough to ask me, first, if I wanted to undress with him, as he proceeded to do so, while driving his car. I asked him to stop ‘z’ car, and he did so without a problem. The next gentleman asked me if I would mind stopping at his home for a moment. I said I didn’t mind. We went upstairs, into his apartment, when and where I began to feel uncomfortable. I walked to the door (it was unlocked) and I was able to leave, unharmed. We returned to the open road when and where I asked him to be let out, which he did, no problem. The next ride I got was with three gentlemen who spoke what sounded to me like Arabic. They lived in France, but were also traveling south. They promised to take me all the rest of the way to my home. They laughed and smiled a lot, I remember. Around lunchtime, they asked me if I wanted to have a picnic lunch. I agreed. We stopped. They bought bread, cheese, grapes (maybe something else) and we sat in a field of grass, and ate lunch. When approaching my destination, it was getting dark and cold. They invited me to continue the journey, with them, but I asked them to please drop me off. As promised, they dropped me off in my hometown.
THE NEXT MEETING of the Broadband Alliance of Mendocino County is January 8th. There will be no December meeting. At their November meeting, the Alliance heard a presentation from Comcast on their Internet Essentials program which offers low-cost internet access to eligible families with children in the Ukiah, Willits, and Fort Bragg school districts if they are within the Comcast service area. The program has been in effect for 4 years and offers low-cost internet service to all students and their families enrolled in schools with a 50% or higher number of students eligible for the free and reduced lunch program. Comcast wants to expand the program and has asked the Broadband Alliance to help spread the word to those already eligible but who may not know about it.
POIGNANTLY FAMILIAR HEADLINE in the Press Democrat reads, "Slain Sebastopol parents struggled to get help for troubled son." And struggled until he came home one day and stabbed them both to death. There's a small army of the untreated mentally ill out there, their demons often exacerbated by street drugs, especially methamphetamine. I can name three who I know here in Mendocino County. One guy roams the Mendocino Coast, the other two are free range in Ukiah, all three in and out of the County Jail.
PLEASE READ CAREFULLY the following jive-o press release from Mendocino College and try to do the math. How much did they borrow in the first place and over what period? Without that number the self-serving press release makes no sense.
“The Mendocino-Lake Community College District is refinancing a portion of the voter approved Measure W bonds and will save the taxpayers $36 million in the process. With direction of the Community College Board, the District administration chose to take advantage of historically low interest rates to refinance bonds from its Measure W authorization without extending the term of those bonds. The District was able to reduce the interest rates on the prior bonds from an average of 6.46 percent to 4.72 percent, reducing the community’s tax bill by a total of $36,506,861 over the life of the bond refinancing. ‘I am thrilled that the Mendocino-Lake Community College District trustees’ vision and fiduciary responsibility will save taxpayers millions of dollars in the coming years,’ said Superintendent-President Arturo Reyes. The District’s ability to get these low interest rates and achieve savings was boosted by its credit ratings of ‘A1’ from Moody’s Investors Service and ‘A+’ from Standard & Poor’s, which reflect the District’s 1) large service area with stable enrollment, 2) maintenance of solid available general fund reserves, and 3) good financial management policies and procedures. While the District will not receive any part of the savings, (our emphasis) the District Board and District Administration pursued this opportunity strictly on behalf of local taxpayers.”
ACCORDING TO THE COLLEGE’S Measure W webpage: “On November 7, 2006 under Proposition 39, voters in the Mendocino-Lake Community College District (MLCCD) passed Measure W, authorizing $67.5 million in general obligation facility bond funds. Measure W encompassed 30 construction and renovation projects that included the Ukiah campus, Lake Center and the Willits/North County Center. The first bond issuance in the amount of $30 million took place in March 2007, and the second bond issuance occurred in August 2011 in the amount of $37.5 million. All bond funds were expended by December 2014.”
BUT THE TERM of the bond is still not provided. Nor is what happens to whatever “savings” the college claims to have achieved. The admin brainiacs claim to have saved almost $37 million in interest with a 2% rate reduction — assuming they started with a ridiculously long 30 year bond (which means they pay more interest because of the length of the term). They must now pay about $162 million to borrow the initial $67 million, about $37 million less than the even more ridiculous $199 million they’d have had to pay to borrow a mere $67 million before refinancing. Will the College actually be lowering the tax rates to the taxpayers of the college district by 15%-20%? We doubt it, because if that were the case they would have said so directly, not simply summarized it with a claim that they “will save the taxpayers $36 million in the process.”
A SUGGESTION FROM 'DICK'S PLACE' IN MENDOCINO: "Dick's Place would just like to take a moment this Thanksgiving to remind everyone that punching one of your in-laws in the face really ruins the holiday season. When crazy Uncle Bob starts explaining to everyone how Trump is gonna make America great again, just take a deep breath, count to ten, and come have a drink with us. A beer is much cheaper than an assault and battery charge…"
THE MOVIE TRUMBO is bad in so many ways it's hard to know where to begin the indictment. The devisers of this thing basically grafted a lot of conjured stuff onto the dramatic fact that Dalton Trumbo, author of the sure-to-make-a-pacifist out you, Johnny Got His Gun, was blacklisted in the swinish 1950s. Trumbo's father died young. Trumbo became his family's sole support, an experience that made a communist out of him. The movie begins with Trumbo's indictment as one of the Hollywood Ten, ten screenwriters who Ronald Reagan, John Wayne and other stars of the silver screen got thrown out of work. Trumbo was the best of them at turning out movie scripts for movies that made a lot of money. Although non-personed, he went on turning out scripts for himself and his fellow internal exiles, mostly under an assumed name.
THIS STORY of Trumbo's blacklisted life is hoked up and so corn-ified that Trumbo comes off as an unflappably smug little fellow with a witticism for every occasion, including prison occasions where he did time for refusing to snitch off his comrades before the House on UnAmerican Activities Committee. He was, in real life, an angry man (in the best sense) and an intellectual doing stupid work for a lot of money, work he knew was stupid but he was, above all things, a family man, albeit a family man who put it all on the line for principle.
ANOTHER RECURRING IRRITANT in this thing is unconvincing modern actors playing the memorable stars of the forties and fifties. I mean, really, who can plausibly do Edward G. Robinson? Or John Wayne? For the real deal, see a documentary on this baleful period of American history.
BRYAN CRANSTON, wonderful in Breaking Bad, is not good as Trumbo. His portrayal is way off, as you can see for yourself in any documentary footage of the real Trumbo. Helen Mirren steals the show as the viperous newspaper columnist, Hedda Hopper, and the wonderful Diana Lane is very good as Trumbo's wife.
OVERALL, Trumbo, the movie, misses the pure evil of the Red Scare '50s, just how oppressive the time was for people who deviated however slightly from the political norm. I got to know Alvah Bessie late in his life. Bessie was also one of the Hollywood Ten, and a veteran of the Lincoln Brigade, combat that won him and everyone else who fought fascism in Spain, constant FBI harassment when they returned to Liberty Land. Bessie told me that when he got out of federal prison after defying HUAC, the FBI hounded him so thoroughly that they showed up everywhere he found work and leaned on his boss to fire him. The only person who defied the FBI was Enrico Banducci of San Francisco's Hungry I. He gave Bessie work as the light man for the stage acts.
INTERVIEWED by Marin County sports writers in the wake of Fort Bragg's 49-0 playoff loss to Marin Catholic, Fort Bragg coach Roy Perkins said, “Our section talks about competitive equity, but was there competitive equity today? We were 11-0 in the playoffs and became cannon fodder. It's a travesty. This is a violent sport and our system is broken. There has to be a better way.”
THAT BETTER WAY would be to put all the Catholic schools in their own Bay Area league, and that league should include Cardinal Newman of Santa Rosa. (Marin Catholic and Cardinal Newman play off against each other this week. Ho hum.) The CIF has been controlled by oafs and idiots for years. They perpetuate the annual high school football imbalance. For years, Marin Catholic has beat up on all the Marin County high schools, all the while claiming they don't recruit athletes, the kind of cosmic lie that few people even try to refute anymore since it's at least fifty years old.
THE CATHOLIC SCHOOLS of the LA area have their own league. Some of those schools have 300 or so students a hundred of whom just happen to be football players, the other half basketball players. It continues to surprise me that the supine public schools of Marin County allow Marin Catholic to play football in the Marin County League. Basketball? The public schools can hold their own and often do, although the rich kid private schools, like Branson in Ross, have been recruiting for years now and often mop up Marin's public schools.
MIKE KALANTARIAN WRITES: "Years ago, in order to listen to baseball games at home, I needed to find a radio with good reception. Some online research brought me to the Sangean PR-D5, which has a powerful built-in antenna for AM. An unintended result of this purchase is the peculiar pastime of occasionally listening to AM talk radio. Anyone who has toured the AM spectrum knows this has become the natural habitat for some of the most vile audio ranters of our time: people like Michael Savage and Mark Levin. The sheer hatred and wrongmindedness that spews at these wavelengths is absolutely mindboggling, and they seldom fail to drop my jaw in very short order. The other interesting thing about good radio reception is the ability to hear from distant foreign cultures in places like Fresno, Sacramento, Barstow, and San Diego. Recently my radio has been tuned to KNX 1070 AM, a news & traffic station in Los Angeles. I’ll sometimes turn it on for a few minutes in the early evening to marvel at their alternate reality. One thing they like to focus on is terror, both domestic and foreign, but the big focus this Thanksgiving weekend was Black Friday (which is, in turn, a prelude to Cyber Monday). KNX has helicopter reporters who constantly fly over the LA region reporting on the everpresent freeway traffic jams, and this weekend they’ve been joyfully observing the fantastic crowds that were pressing in at the great shopping malls (which have names like The Citadel). Friday evening these whirly-reporters were marveling at the fact that they could not spot any open parking spaces in the megamall parking lots, and were warning of 45-minute waits to simply enter these parking lots (to then troll about in order to eventually find a space). They were urging listeners to immediately pull into any opening spot as quickly as possible, regardless of how far it might be from their destination. We heard a brief interview with a brave soul who had parked on a nearby street and walked about eight blocks to get to the mall. To me, it sounded like mass insanity."
BETTER TO MARRY than to burn. The movie Spotlight is very good, and very good as a re-creation of how large circulation newspapers put together an investigation of a powerful interest, in this case the Catholic Church in Boston circa 2001-2, and as powerful an interest as there is in a largely Catholic city. As we now know thanks to the Boston Globe, the Church had for years covered for and protected its thriving population of cho-mo priests, going so far as to reassign priests who complained about their evil colleagues, in one case a reassignment from Boston to South America. And there were lots of twisted men in those cassocks, and there were lots of their victims, many of whom were destroyed by these church-cossetted perverts. The Globe's revelations sparked a virtual revolution inside the Church as newspapers throughout the world uncovered nests of privileged pervs darn near everywhere, including nearby Santa Rosa and even one here in Mendocino County that came to light when a pair of Coast teenage boys assaulted the priest as he attempted to interfere with them, as the chaste term from a more chaste time described child molestation. Most refreshing about this film is its lack of piety about the nobility of a free press and so on, the kind of thing you get from the media themselves.
RECOMMENDED READING: Deep South by Paul Theroux, an honest account by a talented writer of his journey through the Southern United States, which he frequently describes as America's Third World and repeats throughout the book his shock at the economic conditions that rival the poverty Theroux has famously described in his travels in Africa, Asia and India. Of course the book is not all Klan menace and Pacifica-style speeches by safe, comfortable people about inequity. Theroux, who is also a very good fiction writer who abhors cant, engages a large number of memorable individuals.
ESPECIALLY GRATIFYING are several passages damning the Clintons' conveniently and ostentatiously distant good works, not a dime of whose two billion dollar non-profit reach any part of the South, including Clinton's home state of Arkansas.
IN AN INTERVIEW with black farmers who've made a success of it by themselves, a farmer says, "But we're still struggling with the banks," Andre said. "We're still struggling with the good ole boys. After all these years we still have to prove ourselves."
“I SAID, Bill Clinton spends a lot of time in Africa and India. Couldn't he do something here to help?”
"‘IF Clinton came here,’ Andre said, ‘the good old boys would say, “Why you coming here? Why you want to change things?” He looked around the room for approval, and got the nods he expected. ‘That's why he doesn't do it’.'"
ONLY IN MENDO, a young man writes: "I was in a local eatery, Chop-Chop in Ukiah, when this guy about my age — mid-30s — walks in. He's got all the trappings of a Grateful Dead trustafarian, right down to the nicely groomed dreads with all the little beads carefully inserted, and he's wearing a 50TH Reunion t-shirt, which would have cost him $500 a ticket to hear a buncha has beens sing songs they ripped off from black sharecroppers. The ticket and hair-do alone put his visible net worth at about $700. I can tell the guy's itching for conversation but I try to ignore him until he says, 'Hey man, there sure are a lotta white people in here. This place reeks of white privilege.' I look at him and say to my friend Pedro down at the end of the bar, 'Hey Pedro, you're Mexican aren't you? Pedro says, 'Do I look like Frosty the fuckin' Snowman?' So I say to the guy, 'Dude, check out the table behind you. 6 outta 20 people in here are non-white and I'm eating a Vietnamese tofu peasant sandwich, so please shut the fuck up.'"
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