Mendocino County Today: Tuesday, Dec 15, 2015

• Winter Rains
• Turkey Roast
• Spring Ranch
• Crier o' Shill
• Exciting Plowrights
• Affinity Groups
• Intrepidicious Pay
• CRAP Principles
• Peterson Series
• Yesterday's Catch
• Bergdahl Case
• Cannabis Industry
• Fedpocalypse Now
• Simpson Truth
• Library Events
• Choose Marco
• Dude!

ANOTHER INCH of rain pushed Boonville's season total to 8.07 inches (as of 7pm Sunday night). The forecast now shifts to clear and cool over the next few days, with more precipitation on the near horizon (Friday).

RANCHERIA SWIMMING HOLE, December 13, 2015, video by John Atkinson

TURKEY ROAST

Editor,

I rarely, if ever, read anything the Turkey Vulture writes. While face to face I tend to like the human critter and love the winged wonder, I will indulgently chalk my dislike of the prose up to a misunderstanding or ignorance of the British sense of humor.

But Sunday night at the annual Holiday Community Dinner at the Grange something was grumbled that prompted me to take a peek at last week’s paper.

With this letter I am asking someone to explain the humor in degrading and trivializing an event that brings so many people together for good cheer, good conversation and a warm sense of community.

The ongoing theme of the Turkey is that at the root of all joy is alcohol, a drug that is implicated at the top of the list for traffic fatalities, domestic violence, myriad medical issues and a whole wealth of just plain stupid behavior that is often criminal.

Why would anyone want to belittle those of us who enjoy getting together without focusing on alcohol as a means of loosening our tongues?

To set the record straight, alcohol has never been served at the annual Holiday Community Dinner sponsored by The Food Shed and the Grange, and contrary to the Turkey this year, was no exception. Those among us who might consider a glass of wine as food did bring their own and I imagine the event will proceed through the coming years in such a fashion.

David Severn

Philo

SPRING RANCH (Little River, California), photos by Annie Kalantarian

PAUL BAUM, the clearheaded and therefore scourge of MCN's listserve chat line, tossed this bit of clarity into today's mele. The Major notes that he has been accused of being “Paul Baum,” as has the Editor. But we’re not. Paul Baum is much smarter than we are and we don’t write as well. Additionally, we zone out at the mere mention of Building 7, GMOs, the Grassy Knoll, and the replacement plane our Supervisor has enlightened us about. Good God! Baum can have these discussions all to himself, but we think he’s doing a major public service arguing against them, pointless as it is.

* * *

HEY DEL G. POTTER IN SEBASTOPOL, your weakness is showing again: Why calling someone a shill betrays the weakness of your position, and your inability to defend it.

Running common among luddites, conspiracy theorists, and anti-science culture is the quick-draw to cry “shill!” That is, to accuse someone of taking a cash payment to espouse views that are not their own. Any statement made by the crier o’ shill’s opponent must be invalid, because they’re in the pay of the imaginary demons (big whatever, Monsanto, the Government, reptile aliens) who are trying to pull the wool over everyone’s eyes. How is this proven? By the fact that they oppose the crier o’ shill, of course.

I wonder sometimes if criers o’ shill even know why they’re reaching for this tautology as a conceptual shield. It may seem like a strong tactic to the person using it, because it feels useful to knock down any argument against them. But it’s merely a paradox – an unfalsifiable loop.

1. Now that the cryer o’ shill has invalidated anything the ‘shill’ says, that person can no longer defend themselves, because they could be lying about not being a shill. Why do they lie? Because they’re a shill.

2. The “evidence” for the person being a shill is the fact that they have a stance against the crier o’ shill. Calling someone a shill with no proof to back it up, is the logical equivalent of saying, “You are wrong, because I am never wrong.“

Not only is the shill argument empty and sad, it’s one of the most common mistakes made by people in any argument. It’s a logical fallacy, known as an ad hominem (Against the person.) The crier o’ shill is attacking the person making a statement in an attempt to render that target’s argument invalid, rather than demonstrating any falsehood in the argument through attacking the argument itself.

Of course you would say there’s no scientific proof that GMOs are dangerous! You’re getting paid by Monsanto!

Not only is the crier o’ shill refusing to address any argument their target makes with a statement like this, they are usually doing so, as I said before, on the evidence that the target opposes them, leaving no room whatsoever for the crier o’ shill to be wrong.

This is what it means to be “unfalsifiable”. Being unfalsifiable doesn’t mean the crier o’ shill’s argument can’t be false. It means their accusation is automatically meaningless, because there’s no way for anyone in the situation to show that they definitely are not a shill, as crier declares. The crier o’ shill might as well just put their fingers in their ears and go, “LA LA LA LA LA!!!”

The only thing the crier o’ shill proves is that they don’t give a flying fuck about having an actual discussion, about hearing any viewpoint but their own, or about any reality outside of the one they’re already convinced exists. Saying, “I’m right, and that’s that! Neener!” is good enough for them.

But not for anyone who knows better. : )

PHILO'S infamous Thomas Plowright of the Nash Mill Road Plowrights, seems to be on the lam. Plowright was the sole star of the Sheriff's Warrant Wednesday last week where the Sheriff said he is wanted on two felony no bail warrants for possession of a firearm; possession of marijuana for sale and transporting with intent to sell.

NASH MILL'S most exciting residents, the Plowrights, were arrested last year by the CHP when they were pulled over at Highway 128 and Peachland Road. Granma Plowright, 70, and her wayward son, Thomas Plowright, 47, were both charged with possession of: methamphetamine, drug paraphernalia, two controlled substances, a forged driver's license, transportation of marijuana for sale. Gran Plowright was still walkin' the wild side this time last year.

BACK A WAYS, on May 6th (2010), an Obama-size police convoy, reinforced by a hovering helicopter, passed through Boonville on its way to 3500 Little Mill Creek Road, Philo, the home of Thomas Plowright III, then 42, of San Jose, and Thomas's wife Teresa Plowright, then 50, of Manteca.

THE PLOWRIGHTS had come to local attention three weeks earlier when deputies discovered a tractor stuck in Little Mill Creek where Little Mill flows, or attempts to flow, through a neighbor’s property. The creek is a year-round blue line stream in which much local volunteer labor has been invested in a vain effort to bring it back to its once fecund life as a major salmon and steelhead stream. It appeared that the Plowrights had been attempting to build a catchment pond to irrigate an outdoor pot field when their tractor became mired in the streambed.

THE COUPLE was arrested a few weeks later in 2010 “without incident” by that Obama-size task force composed of representatives of an array of police forces and regulatory agencies. The raid team found several pieces of stolen equipment, including a cement truck, apparently taken from a San Jose construction site. These items were valued at approximately $80,000. The raid team said they also found burglary tools, marijuana, methamphetamine, and paraphernalia related to drug manufacture at the property in addition to numerous firearms including a fully automatic assault weapon. Additionally, items and chemicals consistent with the manufacture of methamphetamine were discovered along with an “explosive device.” The Highway Patrol's hazardous devices technicians were summoned from their Sacramento office to render the apparatus harmless “by counter charging the device.”

THE UPSHOT of all these 2010 charges was a few months in the County Jail for Thomas and a period of house arrest at the Plowright headquarters in Campbell, Santa Clara County. It took a long time to sort everything out because David Eyster, then in private practice, had represented the Plowrights; then Eyster became DA, meaning a conflict of interest, meaning that the State Attorney General took control of the case, meaning it all just kinda went away over a period of years.

BUT YOU GOTTA hand it to the Plowrights. They just keep keepin' on, and here Tom is again!

THE LEAD STORY in last week's SF Weekly is called "Faerie Realm — Radical faeries have started a queer intentional community in Mendocino County. Will it have staying power?"

THE QUEER INTENTIONAL COMMUNITY is called Groundswell and is located six miles south of Boonville on the old Mathias Ranch where Pete Carroll, coach of the Seattle Seahawks once ran a summer football camp. The late Bob Mathias, a fundamentalist Christian with even stronger allegiances mercantile interests, owned the property. I'd love to rouse Bob on The Other Side to get his reaction to his property's present occupants. The old boy sustained his share of shocks to his perceptive apparatuses while he was alive, having hired fellow Hoosier Jim Jones to teach at the Anderson Valley Elementary School. Hey, who knew? Then Mathias was school boss at Chowchilla when the school bus was hijacked. He had his share of the shivers, but don't we all?

THE SF WEEKLY sites Groundswell in the northwestern corner of "Alexander Valley," but recovers from this opening gaffe to describe the difficulties of intentional communities and Groundswell's popular weekend hijinks that draw many visitors from the Bay Area. There have been hundreds of intentional communities in Mendocino County, one of which I belonged to on that very same ground.

MY COMRADES AND I had a lease-option on the place, which was then valued at $210,000 for 320 acres six miles south of Boonville. We didn't exercise the option, but we were also an "intentional community" of sorts, although our intentional community had as its intention the rehab of some of the most dangerous juvenile delinquents then available in the San Francisco Bay Area. (That was before jd's were armed. They're much more dangerous now.) Our idea was that delinquents would be less delinquent under the redwoods than they were under the streetlights. They weren't. They were worse because their prey was pretty much limited to us and them.

A GAY COLLECTIVE in 1970 Boonville would have caused quite a stir. I wasn't fully aware there even was a community in Boonville for the first few months of my rural residence as we vainly attempted to bring at least a semblance of order to our wacky commune while simultaneously unwinding the mysteries of a gravity flow water "system" as we fended off hippies who thought it was cool to buy booze for our junior felons. We didn't have television reception and computers were unheard of. It was up to us to occupy the aspiring crooks whose only interests were violence, getting loaded on anything and everything from gasoline fumes to dope and whatever pills they could get their hyper hands on, and, of course, sex. We had the bright idea of bringing in female delinquents to, ah, establish gender balance. Guess the consequences. If we'd had computers we could have pacified the doomed beasts with Grand Theft Auto and kindred ultra-vi entertainments, but GizmoLandia was still forty years off.

THE FIRST GAY MAN I was aware of in the Anderson Valley was a louche character called Erik 'Swoop' Von Gehrig. He was rumored to be the wayward son of Prussian aristocracy born in Bangkok to a German diplomat. I saw him in the Boonville Lodge one night in a dress, and I marveled at his courage. The Lodge, in those days, could be a very violent place, and often was. Swoop, however, seemed to fit right in. He could be funny as hell and his humor seemed to make him a welcome presence among the bar fighters. One night, standing in full drag outside the Lodge smoking a cigarette, Swoop mooned the Boonville basketball team as it returned from a distant game. I never heard of anybody hassling Swoop, but I always thought the hippie fear of "rednecks" wasn't based in any more real peril than the unfamiliarity of cosseted middleclass hippies with everyday working people.

THE ANDERSON VALLEY these days is much less coherent than it was in the 1970s. And much less vivid. We're more a collection of affinity groups than a community, and gay people are at least as prevalent as "rednecks."

WHAT’S WRONG WITH THIS $250,000 PROPOSAL?

(HINT: Mendocino County already has six full-time lawyers in the County Counsel’s office: Katharine L. Elliott, Rebecca L. Chenoweth, 
Matthew T. Kiedrowski
, Brina A. Latkin, 
Doug V. Parker, 
George R. Valenzuela.

OK, so Mendo County already pays six full-time County lawyers a total of $1.4 mil annually, and all of them with middle initials, too! So why do the Supervisors approve the expensive hire of an outside "law group" to "evaluate" a case called Animal Legal Defense Fund et al v. Mendocino County?

"TINA THOMAS," no middle initial, writes of herself that she is "founder of Thomas Law Group, practices law the same way she lives life outside her firm: with relentless drive, unshakable commitment, and intrepidity.”

IT MUST have been Tina's 'intrepidity' that sold her to the Supervisors despite the $1.4 million Mendo already spends on its own County Counsel’s office. Tina will pick up a cool quarter mil for intrepidiciously reading the briefs.

THIS IS THE LAWSUIT, in case you forgot, which suggested that the County use less lethal means of dealing with “predator” animals by discontinuing the controversial federal trapping service and replacing it with a locally controlled and managed approach. Obviously, the ALDF didn’t think Mendo’s refusal to deal with the issue at the behest of a few remnant ranchers in the County was the end of the story. (PS. Several other NorCal counties have dropped the federal trapping service and adopted improved protocols and have not been sued. Not Mendo: We’re different. Now, money that could have gone to developing and implementing improved varmint control methods will go to outside lawyers.

THIS CONSULTANT DEAL is probably like a lot of Mendo deals. Someone's pal, someone's love interest, someone's relative gets the job.

WELCOME TO MENDOCINO. We've got principles.

Here's my latest video comic strip:

Thanks again,

Scott M. Peterson, Mendocino

THE MIGHTY AVA now provides a link to all Scott Peterson's ultra-cool video comic strips from this page: https://www.theava.com/special-projects

CATCH OF THE DAY: December 14, 2015

ODALYS LOPEZ, Fremont/Ukiah. Parole violation.

LAMAR MANUEL, Ukiah. Transient registration, parole violation.

HARRISON POLK, Ukiah. Drunk in public.

CHRISTINA RUPPERT, Temecula/Ukiah. Shoplifting, no license, probation revocation.

SGT. BOWE BERGDAHL will face a court-martial on charges of desertion and endangering troops. The decision comes despite a recommendation for lesser charges for the soldier who left his remote Afghanistan outpost in 2009, prompting a deadly manhunt and his own five years of captivity with the Taliban. In a statement, Bergdahl counsel Eugene R. Fidell denounced the charges, saying, “The convening authority did not follow the advice of the preliminary hearing officer who heard the witnesses... We will continue to defend Sgt. Bergdahl as the case proceeds.”

THIS KIND, WONDERFUL COMMUNITY CALLED SOHUM

by John Hardin

This past week, officers from our local VFW post changed the locks on the doors of the Garberville Vets Hall to prevent the building from being used as an emergency shelter during our recent spate of severe weather. We have no other shelters in Southern Humboldt, and hundreds of people live outside around here, largely due to the lack of housing, economic forces, and the nature of the cannabis industry.

A lot of these people currently work regular jobs in town that don’t pay enough to afford a decent place to live. More still work in the cannabis industry. Of course we also have people who suffer from illness, mental or otherwise, that prevent them from thriving, and people who simply cannot cope with, or have given up on society, and/or life. It’s much too large of a population to make generalizations about, except to say that too many people in SoHum have too few housing options.

We have a perverse attitude towards poverty in SoHum, although I don’t think SoHum is unique in this perversion. We try to punish poverty with more poverty. We attempt to drive poor people from our midst by withholding services, and demonstrating our hostility and disdain for them. It never works. Every year we have more poor people, and every year, the hostility increases. Isn’t it about time we faced the fact that not everyone in SoHum can be rich or middle-class?

Try as we like, we cannot run a town exclusively for the benefit of the rich and the middle class. In fact, almost no one in SoHum would be rich or middle-class were it not for a hell of a lot of poor people. The black-market marijuana industry makes a few people rich, but it makes a lot of people poor. Most of the money that comes into SoHum by way of the cannabis industry comes from poor people. Besides that, poor people do most of the work necessary to produce and distribute black-market cannabis as well, but the secrecy of the industry, and a community in denial, demand that they remain unheard and unrecognized, if not, unseen.

Here in SoHum, not unlike the rest of the world, we have two kinds of people. A) people who make their living from what they own, and B) people who make their living from what they do. Around here, the thing that people own, that makes money, is land, and the thing that people do, to make money, is grow weed. The people who own land, the “owners” if you will, fall broadly into two categories: A) the dope yuppies, who got here first, and their kids. These people still think they are God’s greatest gift to humanity because they invented marijuana and hold a patent on it. They think that the rest of us are just lucky to get high, at any price, and that we should be nothing but thankful to them for it. Whenever you hear the word “community” used in Southern Humboldt, it refers exclusively to this group of people.

Increasingly though, as the dope yuppies retire, they sell out to: B) large-scale distributors from out of state, who send managers, to aggressively expand production, often at their neighbor’s expense.

Both the dope yuppies and their successors, the big distributors, need help from the “Doers” in order for their land to make money. They need workers, lots of them, but not the normal 9-5 type workers. They need people who can drop everything and move to a remote piece of land where they camp out all summer while they do all of the work necessary to turn piles of soil into piles of cannabis.

These workers need to work hard in the hot sun, deal with primitive conditions, keep secrets, know the cannabis industry, and appreciate good weed. The pay is negotiable, and often based on a share of the harvest. Usually the people who want these jobs have exhausted other options. Growers know who they’re looking for. They recognize desperation, and take advantage of it when they can.

The people who want these jobs know that if you work hard, volunteer a lot, and suck up to the right people, you can get off of the streets and into some abandoned trailer or shack with plenty of weed, and maybe even a few bucks in your pocket. If you’ve been convicted of a felony, didn’t finish high school or have big gaps in your employment record, this might be the best job you can get. As a result, a lot of people come here, smile a lot, and try to find something nice to say about everyone.

“Oh, this is such a kind, wonderful community” and “we feel so blessed to have found this place and want to contribute to it in any way we can” they say, as they help clean up after a music festival. This proven strategy has helped many young “doers” find underground work and substandard housing where they produce most of the marijuana grown in SoHum. It has also contributed greatly to the swollen egos of the dope yuppies, who have come to expect lots of free labor and ass-kissings from hapless strangers looking for work.

As the cannabis industry continues to grow, so grows this workforce. By now, they comprise the majority of the population of SoHum. These people make Humboldt County prosperous, and they pay a lot of taxes. However, they are not protected by workman’s comp; OSHA never inspects their workplace, nor will they receive unemployment benefits if they lose their job … and inevitably, they lose their job, and have to start from scratch.

So we have a large workforce of people who don’t mind camping for extended periods of time, in an industry with a high turnover rate. In this business, generally, your boss and your landlord are the same person, so when you lose your job, you lose your home too. This happens a lot. The cannabis industry becomes a trap, and the workers in it rarely get ahead, so eventually they quit, or get fired, but instead of complaining they keep their mouth shut and continue singing the praises of “this kind, wonderful community” while they attempt to brown-nose their way into another job.

It shouldn’t surprise us one bit that we have lots of people camping around Garberville, because that’s the nature of the cannabis industry. The cannabis industry needs workers who know how to “rough it” even if local merchants prefer to cater to a different clientele. Most of the people who live here in SoHum have no use for dashboard hula dancers, makeovers or $25 dollar-a-plate entrees. They need a campground, affordable housing, cheap eats and a place to charge their cell phone and wifi, not that anyone cares.

Nor should it surprise us to hear so many praises for “this kind, wonderful community” from people who enjoy so few benefits from their participation in it. How could “this kind, wonderful community” exploit them more? In truth, land owners use the veil of secrecy that surrounds the cannabis industry to sweep displaced workers under the rug, and we see how “kind and wonderful” this community really is by how it treats the least fortunate among us, on the coldest nights of the year.

(John Hardin writes at Like You’ve Got Something Better to Do.)

FEDPOCALYPSE NOW?

by James Kunstler

“Here’s another fine mess you’ve gotten me into….”
— Oliver Hardy

If ever such a thing was, the stage is set this Monday and Tuesday for a rush to the exits in financial markets as the world prepares for the US central bank to take one baby step out of the corner it’s in. Everybody can see Janet Yellen standing naked in that corner — more like a box canyon — and it’s not a pretty sight. Despite her well-broadcasted insistence that the economic skies are blue, storm clouds scud through every realm and quarter. Equities barfed nearly four percent just last week, credit is crumbling (nobody wants to lend), junk bonds are tanking (as defaults loom), currencies all around the world are crashing, hedge funds can’t give investors their money back, “liquidity” is AWOL (no buyers for janky securities), commodities are in freefall, oil is going so deep into the sub-basement of value that the industry may never recover, international trade is evaporating, the president is doing everything possible in Syria to start World War Three, and the monster called globalism is lying in its coffin with a stake pointed over its heart.

Folks who didn’t go to cash a month ago must be hyperventilating today.

But the mundane truth probably is that events have finally caught up with the structural distortions of a financial world running on illusion. To everything there is a season, turn, turn, turn, and economic winter is finally upon us. All the world ‘round, people borrowed too much to buy stuff and now they’re all borrowed out and stuffed up. Welcome to the successor to the global economy: the yard sale economy, with all the previously-bought stuff going back into circulation on its way to the dump.

A generous view of the American predicament might suppose that the unfortunate empire of lies constructed over the last several decades was no more than a desperate attempt to preserve our manifold mis-investments and bad choices. The odious Trump has made such a splash by pointing to a few of them, for instance, gifting US industrial production to the slave-labor nations, at the expense of American workers not fortunate enough to work in Goldman Sachs’s CDO boiler rooms. Readers know I don’t relish the prospect of Trump in the White House. What I don’t hear anyone asking: is he the best we can come up with under the circumstances? Is there not one decent, capable, eligible adult out there in America who can string two coherent thoughts together that comport with reality? Apparently not.

The class of people who formerly trafficked in political ideas have been too busy celebrating the wondrous valor of transgender. Well, now the wheels are going to come off the things that actually matter, such as being able to get food and pay the rent, and might perforce shove aside the neurotic preoccupations with race, gender, privilege, and artificial grievance that have bamboozled vast swathes of citizens wasting a generation of political capital on phantoms and figments. Contrary to current appearances, the election year is hardly over. There is still time for events to steer history in another direction.

Mrs. Yellen and her cortege of necromancers may just lose their nerve and twiddle their thumbs come Wednesday. If they actually make the bold leap to raise the fed funds rate one measly quarter of a percent, they might finally succeed in blowing up a banking system that deserves all the carnage that comes its way. There is something in the air like a gigantic static charge, longing for release.

(James Kunstler’s third World Made By Hand novel is available! The Fourth and final is complete 
and in production for May 2016 publication)

ALAN SIMPSON'S GETTING OLD — and more honest and entertaining:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ac_MFSBJc00

THE MENDOCINO COAST CHILDREN’S FUND, Fort Bragg Library and FIRST 5 Mendocino will be hosting a free Winter Wonderland party. Join the fun! Crafts, family pictures, face painting, toy trains, storytelling and more! Every child will leave with a free book. Saturday December 19, 1:00-4:00 at the Fort Bragg Library, 499 E. Laurel St. Information 707-684-9993.

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KNITTING AND CROCHET DROP IN Every Sunday from 2-4pm

Beginning Sunday January 3rd the Mendocino County Library, Ukiah Branch is hosting an informal knit and crochet group every Sunday from 2-4pm

Join us at the Ukiah library in the New Year to knit, crochet, and chat. Bring your friends to find helpful library resources, meet fellow crafters, work on ongoing projects, and learn from one another. If you are just getting started with knitting or crocheting, the library will have a limited amount of yarn and supplies to borrow while on site. Please bring your own supplies for projects you wish to take home.

* * *

DIY SNOW GLOBES – A Holiday Gift-Making Event for Teens, Saturday, December 19^th, 11:30 am

Still looking for that special gift for your friend or relative? Teens are invited to personalize Snow Globes at the Library’s free holiday gift-making event. Feel free to bring your cherished memento or artifact to include in your special snow globe. All other supplies will be provided. Pre-registration is required & space is limited! Please call us at 463-4490 to sign up. For more information, please contact Melissa at the Ukiah Library: 467-6434 or carrm@co.mendocino.ca.us Sponsored by the Ukiah Valley Friends of the Library.

SQUALLS

Editor,

On 12/13/2015 8:43 PM, Norman de Vall wrote: “…No matter the amount of chat about the weather this is the latest in 30 years that the runoff canal between my house and Joels is still dry. We have yet to have day after day of rain. Reminds me of the squalls around the Hawaiian Islands in December.

Ah, yes, the squalls around the Hawaiian Islands. Tiki heads, redolent of kerosene, bumping in the bilge, making that erotic hollow knocking sound, like pumpkin-size popcorn popping in slow motion in a giant saltwater microwave. The contented whirr of the toilet masticator. The slapping of the sheets. The pronunciation of the fo'c's'le. And then the moon, sandwiched between hump of horizon and farthest of clouds bubbling like upside-down cheese, having their own numinous, contrapuntal, long-open-married, stage-whispered dinner conversation up there...

Oh, by the way, Norman, I've been informed that the search committee to find someone to manage KZYX — the committee picked by Stuart Campbell, who shoved his way to the head of the line to be chosen and hired permanently for the position — tossed aside my and Doug McKenty's and Cynthia Click's (sp?) applications, so the trustees, insulated in nearly every way from the membership and the public, will not even be considering any of us. Again.

In other words, Forget it, Jake, it's KZYX. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9cWnubJ9CEw

I'd like to talk about this with you on the radio. We won't be able to do it on tax-funding-bloated, so-called public KZYX, of course, but we can do it on KNYO and KMEC.

Marco McClean

memo@mcn.org

http://MemoOfTheAir.wordpress.com

PS. On 12/14/2015, Al wrote: “So Marco, why don't you and John Sac put your energy into developing KNYO?”

I am and I do. I put about twenty hours of concentrated prep into each one of my weekly Memo of the Air: Good Night Radio shows, and then I stay up all night doing the show live on KNYO-LP in Fort Bragg — sometimes by remote from other places — and then I upload the recording to MediaFire and tend to my weblog and email list. And, along with others, I buy and build and repair equipment for KNYO. And I promote it on the air and in print, and encourage others to participate. You can send material for my show and you can even get your own airtime to do whatever kind of show you want to do. If there's something else you can think of to do to promote KNYO, please just do it.

Unfortunately KNYO is in a legal category of radio stations that by law can never reach far beyond one small community, no matter how much promotion or work or money or love is put into it. In contrast, KZYX and its translator stations have a lock on control of three frequencies that blanket the entire county, with a main transmitter that uses as much electricity as a couple of electric heat logs, and despite its costing only a little more than KNYO to operate, KZYX has absorbed and spirited out of the world $4,000,000 in tax-derived money over its life, enough by itself — not even counting the unlistenable pledge drive nonsense — to build, license and operate dozens of KNYOs over the same period, if the frequencies were available. The people who run KZYX want very much to think of themselves as the good guys, defending their rule against barbarians, and they think of anyone who criticizes their oppressive control measures as crazy people attacking them. They've said so on numerous occasions.

I'm not sure why you associate me with John Sakowicz. I've never even met him. He tends to quote me and in some cases champion me; is that why?

I know he has a show on KMEC in Ukiah. And I also promote KMEC by providing my show. KMEC automatically picks up my show in progress at midnight (Friday night) and so I'm on in Fort Bragg from 9pm to 3 or 4am and also in Ukiah and Redwood Valley from midnight to 3am.

I don't know if you're aware of this, but my show was on KMFB from early Feb. of 1997 to late October, 2011. After Claude Hooten bought KMFB and destroyed it (and he bought the station outright for about half of KZYX' ridiculously inflated yearly cash flow) I offered my show for free to KZYX and was treated abysmally, but nonetheless I waited years before beginning to recreationally complain. It's been almost four years now, with no action on my offer except abuse from the management.

Just like you and everyone else — except the undeserving and Nixonian management of KZYX — I have to work for a living. I have always maintained several part-time jobs in the real world to support my projects, and I've always been operating right at the edge of what I can do. That's how I know it's important to pay the airpeople at KZYX — that's another reasonable proposal of mine that the overpaid management suite there has laughed off up to now and/or ignored. I don't mind not being paid at KNYO, because no-one is paid at KNYO. Everyone at KNYO is in it for radio. Please email Bob Young — bobb@poetworld.net — and offer to help underwrite the station on behalf of my show or another show you like. It will be appreciated. KNYO is cheap to operate but we could use some replacement equipment: a better main mixing board, power backup units for the main studio and the transmitter, a few more portable remote studios (I'll build them; we just need to buy the parts). Also rent on the storefront. Electricity, water bill…

I recently applied to manage KZYX because I'm more than qualified and I can fix the problems there and make the station better, and open it up to people and groups who have up to now been excluded, and put remote studios in more communities, and move the office to a place populated by more people than rabbits. As I suspected, going by the hierarchy's previous behavior in the KZYX bunker in every aspect of their operation — over more than a quarter-century — I had and have little chance. But I had to try anyway.

Thanks for asking. I'll read your question and my answer on my show.

Marco McClean

memo@mcn.org

http://MemoOfTheAir.wordpress.com

MEDICAL MARIJUANA

Brad: "Dude."

Dillon:"Yeah?"

Brad:"Dude!"

Dillion:"Yeah!"

Brad: Dude?"

Dillon: "I forgot where we parked."

And now in Spanish:

Brad: "Vato."

Dillon:"Si?"

Brad:"Vato!"

Dillion:"Si!"

Brad: Vato?"

Dillon: "Yo olvide donde estascionamos el carro."