Mendocino County Today: Tuesday, Aug 23, 2016

• Landmark Trees
• Room w/Terwilliger
• Kindles & Cockroaches
• Different Horns
• Evalue
• Marijuana Industry
• Sneaky Ray
• 1938 Shipwreck
• Yesterday's Catch
• Take Anything
• Tragic Leaders
• Retirement Story
• $5,000 per Minute
• SF Ballpark
• Body Shaming
• America's Hairball
• Library Events

UKIAH has set aside five trees for landmark status. Anderson Valley has some impressive trees, not counting Hendy Woods, and here are three I nominate for permanent protection.

The Laurel Bay (above) to the rear of the Farrer Building, central Boonville. It’s at least a hundred years old, and as perfectly shaped and as stately an old fellow as can be found in the Anderson Valley.

Iconic fir at the Little Red School House (above), and synonymous with the school in the fond memories of generations of local students. One of my prized possessions is a handmade tableau of the old school and its eternally vigilant fir created by the late Mick Bloyd.

There are more impressive madrones hidden away here and there — a grove of giants at the top of the Y Ranch, Yorkville, is a sight to behold — but this one (above) on Anderson Valley Way, for pure girth, gives us a clear look at how large at their feet these trees can get. An old timer told me that he knows of at least two drunks who’ve collided with the tree pictured.

RENTAL WANTED. Local with references since 1987. John Terwilliger currently resides in Philo in a small cabin but has to move out to make room for the landlord's family. "I am 62 years old, my Irish setter is 12-1/2. We are both gentle and loving souls who need housing by September 1 or soon thereafter. I rely on my retirement, Social Security, for most of my income. I always pay my rent on time on the first of the month. I can provide DirecTV for the household. Willing to caretake, rent a small space or cabin with electricity a must. I'd be happy to be your roommate. Thank you. Anywhere from Anderson Valley to the coast, I can afford to pay $500-$600 per month. Call 707-353-0125 or my current landlady Jackie Carmody at 895-2711."

WE’VE met Mr. Terwilliger and would move him in with us no problemo if we had the space. Modest, quiet, handy. Perfect tenant type of guy.

UKIAH HIGH SCHOOL students were welcomed back to another year of rigorous studies with a gift of $300 Kindles, one for each scholar. Ukiah has $300,000 for student toys but still can’t get rid of the cockroaches infesting the Low Gap Road campus.

CONTEXT

Editor,

Context Is Everything

Use the word “cuernos” in a Barcelona coffee bar at 6 in the morning, and you’ll probably get a couple of croissants. Use the word in a Barcelona absinthe bar at 11 at night, and you may get knocked off your bar stool.

S. Bowen (with a nod to Louis Bedrock)

Suisun City

EVALUE

 

in good circumstances

rugged beauty

peace

 

birds in business

minding their own

decorate the airs

 

each green flare

in the wild garden

eager for times to come

 

upslope by the road

linking my commerce

armloads of dry oak

 

dome of fog

vault of soft light

cover the quiet

 

remember tomorrow

sealed as today

reason to leap from the rack

 

— Gordon Black

YES, the black market marijuana industry accounts for a lot of the money that comes into Humboldt County but it also accounts for a lot of the homelessness, poverty and drug addiction we find here too. Like a casino, the War on Drugs makes a few lucky people rich, while it swindles the rest of us with games of chance where the odds are stacked against us, and like a casino, it doesn’t really produce anything, except poverty, social problems, and money. Would you care to place a bet on the future of Humboldt County?

— John Hardin

FROM THE FORT BRAGG POLICE:

"On Friday, August 19, officers of the Fort Bragg Police Department were dispatched to an address in the 500 block of South Whipple Street for the report of an unwanted male subject at the location.

Upon arrival, the female victim (name withheld) advised that her ex-boyfriend, Joshua Ray (age 34), was at her residence and was no longer welcome. Ray was contacted and counseled by officers and left upon request.

Over the course of several days, Ray was believed to have broken into the victim’s residence multiple times, destroying property, and placing the victim in fear for her safety.

Officers were called back to the address, but each time, Ray had already fled, and was not located.

On Saturday, August 20, officers were called back to the address for the fourth time in two days for the report of Ray breaking into and entering the residence again.

Upon arrival, it was discovered that Ray had broken into the firewood pass-through storage box, and entered the residence due to the locks on all the doors being changed.

Ray again had fled the location prior to officer arrival. An investigation commenced into locating Ray and he was later located inside a residence on South McPherson Street.

Ray was subsequently arrested for stalking, burglary, criminal threats, dissuading a victim or witness, and vandalism. Ray was transported to the Mendocino County Sheriff’s Office Adult Detention Facility in Ukiah.

VIDEO OF SHIPWRECK NEAR POINT ARENA YIELDS ‘TWISTED GARDEN OF STEEL’

by Guy Kovner

Remote vehicle captures video of 1938 shipwreck off Mendocino coast

(Live stream at www.nautiluslive.org)

Orange rockfish swim over the shattered wreck of the Dorothy Wintermote off the Mendocino County coast, captured on video Saturday night and seen live by scientists aboard a research vessel and an online audience around the world.

A remotely operated vehicle spent about four hours cautiously circling the “twisted garden of steel,” as shipwreck hunter James Delgado described the remains of the 261-foot cargo freighter that sank after striking a rock south of Point Arena in September 1938.

“It was a little murky,” Delgado said of the limited underwater visibility during an interview by satellite phone Sunday aboard famed undersea explorer Robert Ballard’s high-tech research vessel Nautilus.

The Wintermote’s fate was documented by newspapers at the time, and the wreck’s location on the flat, muddy ocean bottom had been pinpointed in a sonar survey in 2007, but Saturday’s video gave the world the first direct view of the ill-fated vessel, said Delgado, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s director of maritime heritage.

White anemone, a flower-like marine animal related to corals and jellyfish, cling to the wreck in 260 feet of water in still images processed Sunday by Ballard’s Ocean Exploration Trust and the NOAA.

After confirming the Wintermote’s location in a 3-D sonar image taken by equipment built into the Nautilus’ hull, Ballard’s crew deployed the bright yellow remote vehicle Hercules about 8 p.m.

The vehicle came down by the Wintermote’s bow, which shattered on impact with the sea floor as it sank bow-first. A little more than half of the ship’s stern portion remained intact, Delgado said, affording Hercules’ camera a clear view of collapsed masts, a four-bladed steel propeller and the rudder, swung hard to the left.

Peering into the remains of the forward hold, the camera caught mud-covered cargo, including barrels, broken jars, dishes and sealed cans. The deckhouse, where the crew lived, was intact on the Wintermote’s stern, its interior pitch dark.

The vehicle made a 360-degree survey of the wreck, Delgado said.

The Wintermote was a “tramp freighter,” hauling basic goods and lumber along the North Coast, just as big rigs do on the highway today, he said.

“This is not a famous ship,” said Delgado, whose career includes exploration of the Titanic and the USS Arizona at Pearl Harbor. It is, instead, an “everyday ship” manned by “everyday guys who had to go to work,” he said.

The Wintermote, with a crew of 29, was steaming from San Francisco to Portland, Oregon when it encountered fog and ran aground off Fish Rock, about 10 miles south of Point Arena. The crew was rescued, and three days later the vessel sank under tow by a tugboat after heavy seas had pushed it off the rocks.

The Nautilus is conducting an 11-day survey of the Greater Farallones National Marine Sanctuary, including the Sonoma and Mendocino coasts, and part of the Monterey Bay sanctuary.

As Delgado spoke Sunday, the Hercules was sending up color video as it traversed a ridge about 4,000 feet down in Arena Canyon, where deepwater coral grow a few miles from the Dorothy Wintermote.

Tonight, the Ballard expedition plans to survey the wreck of the USS Independence, a World War II aircraft carrier scuttled west of the Golden Gate five years after serving as a target during the U.S. atomic weapons tests at Bikini Atoll in 1946.

(The Santa Rosa Press Democrat)

CATCH OF THE DAY, August 22, 2016

JEREMY AUMAN, Laytonville. Probation revocation.

NOE BRACA-MONTES, Compton/Ukiah. DUI.

THEO CORCORAN, Willits. False imprisonment, ex-felon with firearm, ammo possession by prohibited person, probation revocation.

JOSE GONGORA, Fort Bragg. Drunk in public.

JACQUALYNNE LAURSEN, Ukiah. Drunk in public.

MALIA LINDE, Willits. Driver of vehicle with concealed weapon, loaded firearm in public, false imprisonment, failure to appear, probation revocation.

JERRAD MATHEWS, Grants Pass, Oregon/Ukiah. Drunk in public.

BRIAN MOORE, Larkspur/Fort Bragg. DUI, driver with concealed weapon, loaded firearm in public.

RUBEN PACHECO-VASQUEZ, San Jose/Willits. DUI, no license.

RICKY PONTS, Fort Bragg. Protective order violation, probation revocation.

JOSHUA RAY, Fort Bragg. Burglary, talking and threatening bodily injury, criminal threats, vandalism, witness intimidation.

ALONSO RUIZ, Ukiah. DUI.

KRISTIAN THOMPSON, Lakeport/Fort Bragg. DUI with priors, child endangerment, probation revocation.

PALOMO VALDEZ-CEJA, Ukiah. DUI, vandalism, suspended license,

UNDERSTANDING ENGINEERS #1 Two engineering students were biking across a university campus when one said, "Where did you get such a great bike?" The second engineer replied, "Well, I was walking along yesterday, minding my own business, when a beautiful woman rode up on this bike, threw it to the ground, took off all her clothes and said, "Take what you want." The first engineer nodded approvingly and said, "Good choice. The clothes probably wouldn't have fit you anyway."

— Miguel Lanigan

DARK DYNAMICS

by James Kunstler

What the world is witnessing, without actually paying much attention, is the death of our debt-based economy — that is, borrowing the means to thrive in the now from a future that can’t really furnish it anymore. The illusion that the future would always provide was a legacy of the cheap energy era. That era ended in 2005. The basic promise is broken and with it the premise for living as we had been. The energy available today, especially oil, is no longer cheap enough to run the industrial economies designed to run on it. Any way that you look at the dynamic, Modernity loses.

With oil under $50 a barrel, and gasoline under $3 a gallon (back east), the public apparently thinks that the Peak Oil story is dead and gone. But when it costs $75 a barrel to pull the stuff out of the ground, and the stuff only sells for $47 a barrel, the oil companies’ business model doesn’t really work. The shale oil companies especially have been gaming the system by issuing bonds that pay relatively high interest rates in an investment climate where almost nothing else offers enough yield to live on, especially for pension funds and insurance companies. Two little upward bumps this year in the price of oil toward the $50 range prompted a wish that the good old days of high-priced oil were coming back, that the oil business would be profitable again.

The trouble is that high oil prices — say, over $100 a barrel, as it was in 2014 — crush advanced economies, so that demand for oil crashes, and with it productive activity. Without productivity, the debts issued by companies (and even governments) don’t get repaid. There really is no “sweet spot” in this energy cost equation.

A lot of wishful thinkers would like to believe that you can run contemporary life on something beside oil. But the usual “solutions,” solar and wind energy, don’t pencil out, especially when you consider that the hardware for running them — the photovoltaics, charge controllers, batteries, turbines, and blades, can’t be mass-produced and distributed without the very fossil fuels they are supposed to replace.

These matters add up to the essential quandary of our time. It has expressed itself in falling standards of living for what used to be the middle class, most particularly in the USA. European countries have tried to work around this problem with their rigid bureaucracies for keeping those already employed from losing their jobs. In France, Spain, and Italy, this has only made it much harder for people under 30 to get a job. The jobs picture for millennials in the USA is not much better, though there’s no structural job-protection for their elders who are still working here. They live in abject fear of termination by the HR ghouls of the big corporations.

Sooner or later the younger generation will explode in rage at the system and there is no telling what the result will be. We’re already seeing it in the black ghettos, where decades of accrued social dysfunction make the anomie and purposelessness — of young men especially — much worse. The newer loser class of people who once had good jobs and now have poor prospects of ever getting them back gets swept up in the mania for their incoherent champion, Trump, who shows no sign of understanding the essential quandary of our time. The tragedy of Trumpism is that the man so poorly represents a large group of Americans with genuine woes and grievances. And the larger tragedy of our country these days is that events did not prompt better leaders to step forward.

The explanation may be that people who actually understand the dark dynamics spinning out are rather pessimistic about the our ability to carry on under the familiar disposition of things. Hillary represents the forces in our national life that want to pretend that nothing is wrong, that all the splendid rackets of the day — Federal Reserve interventions, corporate debt-fueled stock buybacks, military log-rolling, medical racketeering, the college loan Ponzi, pension fund levitation, primary dealer bank interest rate arbitrage, agribiz Frankenfood proliferation — can just grind along like some old riverboat banger engine keeping the garbage barge of American life afloat. Thus, Hillary is shaping up to be the patsy of the century, likely to preside, if elected, over the biggest blowup of established arrangements that world has ever seen.

The debt problem alone is absolutely certain to express itself in at least three major ways: the crash of equity markets, the collapse of the bond markets, and the loss of faith in the value and meaning of whatever money you’re using. Any of those events would turn the economic life of the linked advanced economies upside down. Any of them could occur during the 2016 US election season.

(Support Kunstler’s writing by visiting his Patreon Page: https://www.patreon.com/JamesHowardKunstler?ty=h)

ON LINE COMMENT OF THE DAY

Most people were left with various forms of false prosperity driven by consumer debt and illusory deferred compensation (i.e., retirement plans that will never be honoured).

* * *

The above sentence does not describe my own experience.

I bought a home on a 30 year mortgage in June 1978 (where I still live today) and finished paying it off in late 2005, shortly before I retired. I bought a couple of different cars over the years and paid for them over four years. I have NEVER had any credit card debt. Always paid credit card bills promptly to avoid interest charges (other than effing up a couple of times and missing a payment).

I retired in Feb 2006 and have received a direct deposit pension check the first of every month thereafter, without fail.

I funded IRA/401K the maximum allowable amount (usually 15% of income) from the very inception of these programs (in the 1970s? or 1980s?, I forget) and then began to take MRDs (minimum required distributions) at age 70.5 (in accordance with the rules) and pay the tax that had been deferred. I lived by a rule I learned on the very first night of my MBA classes from the excellent Professor Dyer, i.e., “Spend less than you earn” which requires self discipline and a certain amount of good luck.

I started getting SS checks when I turned 65 and this system too has not failed to date. However, I suspect my ashes will have been at rest inside my pyramid for a decade or two when there is some kind of general failure of the SS system. Probably the checks will still arrive (for the living) but won’t buy that much.

My annual salary never exceeded $75K excluding overtime.

HILLARY’S HUBRIS: ONLY TELL THE RICH FOR $5000 A MINUTE

by Ralph Nader

There is a growing asymmetry between the media’s mounting demands for Donald Trump to release his tax returns (Hillary has done so) and their diminishing demands that Hillary Clinton release the secret transcripts of her $5000 per minute speeches before closed-door banking conferences and other business conventions.

The Washington Post, an endorser of Clinton, in its August 18 issue devoted another round of surmising as to why Trump doesn’t want to release his tax returns—speculating that he isn’t as rich as he brags he is, that he pays little or no taxes, and that he gives little to charity. Other media outlets endorsing Hillary have been less than vociferous in demanding that she release what she told business leaders in these pay-to-play venues.

When asked last year about her transcripts on Meet the Press, she said she would look into it. When the questions persisted in subsequent months, she said she would release the transcripts only if everybody else did. Bernie Sanders replied that he had no transcripts because he doesn’t give paid speeches to business audiences. Nonetheless she continues to be evasive.

We know she has such transcripts. Her contract with these numerous business groups, prepared by the Harry Walker Lecture Agency, stipulated that the sponsor pay $1000 for a stenographer to take down a verbatim record, exclusively for her possession.

The presidential campaign is moving into a stage where it will be harder for reporters to reach her. Except for a recent informal gathering with some reporters, Hillary Clinton, unlike all other presidential candidates, has not held a news conference since last December. This aversion to media examination does not augur well should she reach the White House. Secrecy is corrosive to democracy.

Why wouldn’t Hillary tell the American people, whose votes she wants, what she told corporations in private for almost two years? Is it that she doesn’t want to be accused of doubletalk, of “gushing” (as one insider told the Wall Street Journal) when addressing bankers, stock traders or corporate bosses? On the campaign trail Hillary only mimics Bernie Sanders’s tough, populist challenges to Wall Street. The Clintons are not known for answering tough questions or participating in straight talk. Dodging and weaving is what they do and too often they get away with it.

Hillary is the clear reported choice for president not just by the Wall Street crowd. The champions of the military-industrial complex love her variety of extreme hawkishness, which rings the cash registers for ever more military weapons contracts.

As the Sanders uprising dims, Hillary can be seen already returning to her former militarized foreign policy. On the last day of the Democratic Convention, the stage’s military presence foreshadowed her return to militarism. Her supporters shouted “U.S.A., U.S.A.” to drown out the Sanders shoutouts for peace and justice. Hillary’s supporters sounded like the jingoistic Republicans. She’s been endorsed by numerous retired Pentagon, C.I.A. and N.S.A. officials who find Trump’s “Why can’t we get along with Russia and China?” statements disturbing to their world views.

Where Trump’s White House is seen as utterly unpredictable, Hillary’s White House is utterly predictable: more Wall Street, more military adventures. As Senator and Secretary of State she has never seen a weapons system or a war that she didn’t support. Remember her singular pressure to attack Libya over the objections of then Secretary of Defense Robert Gates who asked, “What happens after the regime is overthrown?”

Hillary’s judgment and experience regarding Libya resulted in an ongoing, spreading disaster of violence and chaos in that war-torn country and its neighboring countries to the south.

It is bad enough that monetized politicians and the mass media reduce voters to the status of spectators, excluded from injecting their issues, and their perceived injustices into the electoral campaigns. Now people are told to stop complaining when candidates such as Hillary Clinton tell the gilded few what she and they don’t want many of us to hear.

To help people prevail against the refusals to disclose by Hillary and Donald, I’ve made two videos you may wish to see and share.

On Hillary Clinton’s Transparency.

On Donald Trump’s Transparency.

(Ralph Nader is a consumer advocate, lawyer and author of Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us!)

JUST IN FROM NATE:

Giants game!

Denard Span’s homerun bounced off my hand last Monday night. Tickets are cheap on the losing streak, made 3 games last week.— Nate Collins

BODY SHAMING TRUMP: STATUE OF LIMITATIONS

by Michael Donnelly

Dammit. I never thought I’d have to defend Trump or Clinton on anything.

I have to weigh in on the Naked Trump statues. Have to, because I have now been told to “Fuck off;” been called “vapid;” been called a “rube;” “deluded;” “against SPEECH;” “ashamed of your body;” … all because I expressed a view that such derogatory Body Shaming is unproductive and likely to backfire and has no place in political discussion…not to mention, cruel.

It’s not that I am Politically Correct. I am far from that. I like crude jokes. I simply see no benefit from substance-less attacks on people based on superficial personal traits. I fully believe that Identity Politics has neutered radical resistance. (I recently was at a gathering of young, predominantly white radical environmentalists so I could address new logging plans on Public Lands and seek allies to oppose them. The discussion of the massive new logging was given 30 minutes on the agenda. The next topic, “Oppression” was given 2.5 hours). I loathe PC diversions.

Sure, I go shopping for groceries and see huge people riding electric carts, unable to walk for their shopping. I, like most people, have friends and relatives with food addictions. And, of course, at my age, 67, I have had friends and relatives die prematurely from it and I worry about others. Numerous times I have had discussions with others about our common friends’ food addictions and whether there is anything at all we can do. On the other hand, I know people whose food addictions run the other way and are very thin from anorexia.

As a life-long athlete, I admittedly used to get disgusted when seeing people like this. Then, I used to feel pity. Now, after reading a lot on and understanding Body Shaming and how that derails so much, I now blame most of it on false Big Ag and Madison Avenue concepts of nutrition and beauty.

As to the Trump Statue and the quick back-atcha of mirror-image demeaning political cartoons of Hillary Clinton, I find them despicable. I abhor both candidates. But, cruelly Body Shaming 69 and 70-year-olds does nothing to address just why I abhor them – their positions and actions are what matter. If anything it generates sympathy for them and gives them a pass on the issues.

Small Dicks and Big Ankles

Trump asks for it, of course, He demeans people with handicaps; he ridicules women he finds unattractive, etc. But stooping to his level is not an appropriate or effective response. So what if he is lumpy and has a saggy man butt (and yes the artist admits to having searched the Internet for images of “saggy old man butt” in order to create it). So what if he has a small dick – likely 20% of men do. How is that funny or politically enlightening in any way? Why in hell would liberals/progressives/radicals buy into the “one has to have big cock to be a real man” BS?

Same goes with Body Shaming Clinton. I can’t believe she is ridiculed for her “cankles,” when it is her policies are that are abominable. When one ages, muscle mass deteriorates. Why in hell would liberals/progressives/radicals buy into the “one has to be svelte and pretty to be a real woman no matter what age” BS? (On the other hand, we have seen Michelle Obama criticized by the Right for being too buff, too masculine.)

None of this matters, other than on the personal health level. Whatever happened to the vaunted progressive ethic of not attacking people for how they were born/for things they have no control over? Does it only apply to people you like…agree with?

Again, I abhor both Imperial candidates’ politics. I live in a state where it won’t matter how I vote – Clinton will sweep Oregon by over 10%. I don’t even think it matters how one votes nationwide – it appears to me that the fix is, and has been, in for HRC all along.

I told a pollster who called last night that I planned to vote for Gary Johnson (I won’t, as I cannot stomach the Libertarian position against Public Lands.) I told one a week ago, I was voting for Jill Stein (I may well, though I have misgivings about the mis-leadership of the Greens.) I tell them that because I want to see their poll numbers rise – a minor monkey-wrenching the Status Quo pleasure I highly recommend.

Dammit. I never thought I’d have to defend Trump or Clinton on anything.

(Michael Donnelly has been an environmental activist since before that first Earth Day. He was in the thick of the Pacific Northwest Ancient Forest Campaign; garnering some collective victories and lamenting numerous defeats. He can be reached at pahtoo@aol.com.)

WHAT REVENUE?

Dear Editor,

The blessed AVA and the ad revenue thing.

We're so pleased here to see you've provided ad space for the 'presumed nominee' of the RNC, proffered by the Grand Old Party with some trepidation as a 'candidate' for election to Our Nation's Highest Office. Do we detect some foto-shopping of the hand, do you suppose? Will this Throwback with The Hair actually gain the Throne? I hope the poor, over-privileged boy paid you enough to justify the column-inches. Your policy should be as rewarding as it is equitable, I think. [Sigh. The most important 'election' event of the last 10,000 years or so, and the GOP goes all nervous and No Legs while coughing up this...this... my god... Trump is America's HairBall! Stand back, world! Or get ready to get 'Great, again' all over ya! Pride just oozing. Dignity, too, just overflowing...the bands, the buntings, the decorations, the little checks for showing up to make the hall look full in the maw of the TV Bite. The forty or fifty battle flags all ironed flat and arranged precisely so, close behind Your Next (Left or Right flavored) 'President'...it's downright heartwarming, reminiscent of 1930's Germany, or somewhere... Have we ever been so swept up in such a fair, honest, and clearly defined contest as Election 2016? I'm askin' ya. This is not a rhetorical question. W.T.F., y'all?]

We are grateful, as ever, to your fine paper for the diversity of it's published voices, and the depth, richness, and consistent ACCURACY of the actual information content therein. Thank you, again, and once more, congratulations.

Rick Weddle

Brookings, Oregon

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