EVEN BEFORE the Supervisors had "courageously" upped their pay, "courage" being the term County CEO Carmel Angelo had applied to the vote for the raise, four persons had signed up to run for 5th District Supervisor: Allan Rodier of Ukiah; Arthur Juhl of Gualala; Ted Williams of Mendocino; and Chris Skyhawk of Albion. We know of another South Coast resident who's thinking of running. Of course by Molgaard's standard of more money means more “diversity,” four white boys running for office, unless at least one of them is a transsexual, is not diversity, but none of the 5th District candidates seem to have been deterred by the prospect of $60k for a part-time job with a full range of fringe benefits, an annual salary twice that of the average working Mendo person.
DURING THE BULLSHIT BLIZZARD blowing through the Supes meeting last week, "excellence" was the theme, the reasoning being that money attracts "excellent" candidates, and with the people in office invoking "excellence" as the standard, and being "excellent" themselves, because if they weren't "excellent" how could they possibly recognize other "excellencies?”
I DON'T SEE IT. Excellence I mean. I guess it's kinda like some kind of freemasonry, secret handshakes among the already excellent. I don't think the Supervisors are excellent. What am I not seeing? I've turned local government upside down looking for excellence and I'll be darned if I can find it anywhere. What I do find is lots of modest, capable people doing their jobs the way the work is supposed to be done. Which I don’t find at the level of Supervisor and CEO.
THE BIG RAISES were justified on the basis of vague interpretations of the County Code, whose stipulations are interpreted by the County Counsel's Office much as Ouija Boards were interpreted by Madam Blavatsky and her baboon — always with a view to pleasing the boss.
WHENEVER the County's top bureaucrats and Supervisors want more money they also invoke the Slavin Study, commissioned in 2000 by the then Board of Supervisors to justify a big raise for those excellencies, and invoked ever since to justify more and more money. It said other counties paid more, and Mendo just had to catch up.
SO THE PAY RAISE JUSTIFICATION monologue from CEO Angelo went something like, "Section 647f of the County Code refers to Board Resolution 5150, circa July of 1998, and subsequently amended then mandated by adoption of the Slavin Study of 2000 that we can raise our pay to a million dollars a day if we want and you saps? Hah! Gitchee gitchee goo. Try and stop us."
LOTS of comment about the legalization of recreational pot breaks down pro and con along predictable lines, with lots of stoners jubilant that they no longer have to bother with the medical pretext to get the drug, as non-drug people lament pot's ever-growing prevalence, especially the young. The lamenters say stuff like, "Hell, let's go all the way with this and bring back opium dens, brothels in every town, get the cocaine back in the Coca Cola recipe."
WHICH, in the County whose economy is pegged to intoxicants, and in the country rhetorically devoted to free enterprise, combo pleasure palaces of the 19th century type in enterprise-needy places like Ukiah and Willits would certainly be consistent with Mendocino County's economic direction, not to mention the County's vibe.
A READER NOTES: "What all the hullabaloo about legalization fails to mention is that prices have gone up significantly 'before' the legalization. As a user for medicinal reasons (cancer treatment) we who really need it are being priced out and forced to shop around for competitive prices. Those of us who have the medical ID should be given not only priority, but a discount, and not have to pay the increases."
THERE'S POT all over Mendocino County available for $500 a pound, even less. The black market will continue to thrive because it will be able to undercut storefront dope. Law enforcement will also continue to profit by busting the black market people. And, so far, local law enforcement has even busted people who thought their papers were in order!
PEBBLES TRIPPETT of Navarro is prominent among the pioneers of legal marijuana. She recently went national in a television show on the history of legalization. Pebs' neo-ubiquity reminded me of her visit some ten years ago to our old office in the Farrer Building, central Boonville. No sooner was she through the door, and still wheezing from the climb up the stairs, when she asked if she could fire one up. I said sure, but my colleague, The Major, shouting as if he was about to be shot, “No! It makes me nauseous! Please don’t smoke it in here, Pebbles.” As an old school guy, my position is if a lady of a certain age wants to smoke a marijuana cigarette in my office or do cartwheels or fly a kite out the window, what the hey, she’s got seniority. I said, "Go ahead, Pebs, the smoking lamp is lit!" The Major stayed opposed. We went back and forth. “This lady could be your mother, Major,” I argued, “and she’s our guest.” The Major replied, “My mother wasn’t a drug addict. She, she, she..... My mother was a Druid, a Point Arena Druid!” We finally arrived at a compromise suggested by our visitor. “I’ll only take one hit,” Pebs promised. The Major buried his head in his hands and moaned, “No, Pebs, please, no.” Pebs produced a bomber as big around as my wrist and, in what seemed like a single, almost subliminally rapid move, lit it, took a drag, extinguished the dragon, and staggered backwards into a chair, exclaiming, “Wow! Thank you,” and that was that. When she left, The Major was still distraught. "For Crissakes. This is supposed to be a business office, not a goddam dope den. Don't let her do that again!"
ME DEAR OLD MUM grew up in a little town in Southern Illinois called Hillsboro. She remembers as a child, circa 1920, several townspeople popping in and out of the town's soda fountain all day long for a Coke which, in those days, contained the magic pick-me-up. And we should also recall that Coleridge wrote Kubla Khan while he was totally stoned on laudanum. And the goddess only knows how many great modern novels have been hammered out under the influence of amphetamine. Here in Mendo, brothels thrived in Ukiah, Fort Bragg, Navarro, Mendocino, and Point Arena up through the Depression years. There's even a plaque commemorating Ukiah's apparently unforgettable palais de la joie called "Madge's," patronized by the County's leading male citizens. These days, in line with contemporary kinks, brothels would be required to considerably diversify to satisfy the new multiplicity of sexual tastes, but nothing seems beyond the entrepreneurial genius of Mendocino County.
RARELY DOES a book blurb prove true, but the one on Swan Song — A Collective Diary of the Last Days of the Third Reich — lives up to its promise to provide, "An emotionally immediate and multi-faceted perspective....difficult to put down." I didn't put it down for the day it took me to read it. Walter Kempowski is a German writer born in 1929, meaning when the Reich fell he was old enough to retain vivid memories of those harrowing (for Germans) last days. He has assembled a collection of contemporaneous accounts from victims and predators alike of first-hand experience of Germany in April of 1945. I've never read anything like it. There are first-hand accounts from Mussolini just before he hanged from a telephone pole; Hitler, from his last bunker, ordering troop movements of troops that no longer existed; German army privates hoping to surrender to Americans rather than Russians; German women writing about their savage rapes by the Russian forces; ordinary Germans surviving however they could; American soldiers reporting on what they found in collapsed Germany; concentration camp survivors; Danish Red Cross workers beneath Allied bombs in Berlin itself. Americans might not be so bellicose if they'd experienced first-hand the true horror of WW Two as relayed here. An amazing book that conveys that horror like none other I've read.
INTERESTING COMMENT by Ed Denson via Redheaded Black Belt about his home area's reputation for mayhem, which applies just as well to much of bordering Mendocino County: "Before we all go nuts about the Alderpoint Road let’s remember that it is about 50 miles long. The gunshot victim and the burning car are some 25-30 miles apart. More importantly, they are on parts of the road used by different communities. Alderpoint is at about mile 18, measured from Garberville. People in Alderpoint seldom go north of Casterlin school, say mile 28. People from Blocksburg tend to go north to route 36 rather than south to Garberville. People burning cars should probably face aiding and abetting grand theft auto charges, as well as arson. Both are serious felonies. How hard could it be to set out a decoy, set up the cameras, and find out who is burning the cars? It seems like the powers that be just don’t see this car burning problem as one of destroying thousands of dollars worth of vehicles, and assisting thieves in covering their tracks by destroying evidence (fingerprints, DNA, etc. in the vehicles). Instead the great silence by the sheriff and the CHP suggest they think these arsons are harmless pranks. Still, the murders are a more worrying problem. Thanks to the long running war on pot, there is still a culture of silence about crimes, even major crimes like murders, in the rural parts of the county. Don’t think that “legalization” is going to change either the attacks on pot growers by the government or the widespread black market growing anytime soon. For all the excitement about “legalization” it appears to be a failure as far as cutting down on black market weed. The county has gotten greedy, thinking they can fix 50 years of neglect and poor policies with a couple of years of taxes on “rich growers.” But the market is in collapse due to overproduction. The “rich growers” who are going legal are seeing their riches drain away into the regulatory swamp. We are not seeing more effective law enforcement. Last murder we had in Alderpoint, the murderer was still driving around town 24 hours later. This one, I don’t think the name of the murderer is widely known. I haven’t even heard any decent speculation about who did it. I did see a CHP car in town this evening. Should I expect an arrest? A grower in another area had his crop ripped off by a trimmer. Law enforcement just yawned when told who did it and took no steps to find and arrest the rip-off. Think there will be more murders? Anyway, back to the main point. The Alderpoint road is long, it serves a number of communities, and aggregating everything that happens on those 50 miles as if they happened in 5, simply is lazy thinking."
THOSE RUMORS that Ten Mile Court's prosecutor, Kevin Davenport, has been suspended from his job for a DUI are trumped by the second round of rumors that Davenport has indeed been sent to the DA's time-out room but for an accident in a County car he failed to fully report, not a DUI. In the meantime, Coast prosecutions rest with the Ancient Mariner, Tim Stoen.
I'D BET FRIENDS that Trump would be out by Christmas. I was early by a month. He'll be out by the end of January. He's more erratic by the day. Even the nuts around him concede that he can't focus, has little memory, repeats himself, tantrums, talks back to the tv news and so on. The book out this week, "Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House" by Michael Wolff confirms the chaos at the top. This system needs a blandly complicit character at the helm — Obama was perfect; a volatile Alzheimer's case gives the whole world the heebie jeebies.
JUST SAYIN' but the recent pot busts of people in the local licensing process shouldn't surprise anyone. Mendo's Drug Task Force has operated independently of local authority for years. An insider told me a couple of years ago that the Sheriff himself does not have prior knowledge of who they're going to hit, let alone who's in charge of them. I suspect a DEA guy or two are the local shot callers, but if people trying to get legal, or think they're already legal because they've paid their fees, keep on getting popped, the County's cockamamie licensing procedures will be all the way mooted. PS. These guys who get stopped while they're transporting many thousands of dollars worth of product? One would think they'd make sure all the lights on their vehicles were in working order before they hit the road. And if you're on felony probation from a prior pot bust, uh, wouldn't it be a good idea to find someone else to drive?
IF YOU DIDN'T wade through the LA Times story on the failure of warning systems during the Big Fires, the following are the relevant Mendo paragraphs:
(1) “….Phone records show fire evacuation warnings in Mendocino were delayed by overwhelmed sheriff’s dispatchers."
(2) “…Mendocino County was 90 minutes into its wildfire when the first call came from the field for evacuation warnings. The dispatcher wrestled 10 minutes with the wording, then called a lieutenant at home. He encouraged a valley-wide warning “just so we can get people awake.” But she worried about downed power lines, and they agreed to “hold off, because we have to figure out where [residents] are going to go.
“It was 43 minutes before the county launched its phone-dialing system to ring some 4,000 numbers in Redwood Valley, already engulfed in fire. The automated phone messages were limited to incomplete phone lists, and then blacked out when cell towers were lost to the fire. Nine people died in that valley, in their homes or attempting to leave."
(3) “…Hundreds of miles north in Mendocino County, where emergency managers have now discovered steep ridges block even the radio signals of National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration weather alerts, Sheriff Thomas Allman has settled on a different path. “He is buying air sirens."
OVERHEARD at the Good Earth organic market in Fairfax. A middle-aged couple sits at a table with a slender, bearded man in white cotton scrubs and rope sandals.
Rope Sandals says, "If Trump wants war, so be it."
"We'll hit the barricades," the middle-aged man says. "We'll write letters. Have bake sales."
His wife nods, but stipulates, "Yes, but no refined sugar."
"Fructose and corn syrup were created by the Bilderbergers,” Rope Sandals clarifies. "I've seen a PDF of the original meeting notes."
Middle-aged man looks at his watch. "Nice chatting, Tommy, but we gotta go. Tonight's the finale of Dancing with the Stars."
Rope Sandals, incredulous: "What? You own a television?!"
HOLLY RAWLINS has taken on the beast. Employed by the historically stumbling Point Arena School District for 23 years, Ms. Rawlins won herself a summary heave-ho last year by district superintendent Brent Cushenbery, himself offed later in the school year, when she complained about Cushenbery's odd disposition of harassment complaints by 11 high school girls. (He had each girl separately write their versions of events as Cush slapped on his sleuth's hat to determine if they plausibly coincided.) The girls had complained that a teacher was not only inappropriately hands-on with them, he was verbally given to lech talk. The teacher was also fired.
MS. RAWLINS has sued the district for her dismissal and "takes to task the Independent Coast Observer" for allegedly publishing a letter from her that she didn't want published. She says the ICO reporter assured her the letter would be kept private. The ICO published it, then Cushenbery hustled into print with a point-by-point refutation, summing up by calling Ms. Rawlins a liar. (Rawlins's complaint re the ICO is a he said / she said affair unlikely to go anywhere.)
IT'S ALL REMINISCENT of the sexual charges leveled almost twenty years ago at a Point Arena High School staffer (and EMT/teachers union rep) named Steve Juriest. Complaints about Juriest became so numerous the school board hired an investigator who found more than 30 instances of sexual misconduct involving him and any number of high school girls.
JURIEST, a married man who also functioned as Point Arena's teacher's union rep, mobilized Point Arena's craven faculty to raise some $9,000 with which he could fend off the school board's inquiry as he simultaneously threatened to sue anybody who made the accusations public. Juriest's critics were bullied into silence, but school authorities confirmed the charges by prohibiting Juriest from accompanying students on overnight trips and also directed him keep his office door open when a student was with him. But Juriest kept on keeping on, as the school board and school admin kept on turning over until the district was led (sic) by a smarmy incompetent called Mark Iacuaniello, fired at both Laytonville and Mendocino who, natch, supported Juriest. Juriest eventually moved on to a nebulous position with the Sonoma County Office of Education, as the administrative turmoil at Point Arena went on and on and on.
I SPENT much of the last weekend reading a samzidat on-line copy of “Fire and Fury.” Conclusion? If half of it's true and, in its gossipy way it seems careful, the Golden Golem of Greatness exists in a radically deteriorated mental state bordering on dementia, and more to be pitied than schadenfreud-ed. The only question I have, as the countdown to his removal nears — How crazy are the people around him? If GGG wants to nuke Korea or Iran on his way out the door, and if the people around him are as nuts as he obviously is, well, jeez.
IN 1967, the little woman and I, and baby makes three, rented a two bedroom Frisco flat at 24th and Dolores for $90 a month. A one-bedroom apartment in SF now goes for $3,250 per, hence help wanted signs in every district of the city because labor can't afford to live there. Mendocino County? A habitable one-bedroom in Ukiah will run you two grand monthly and up. If you can find one.
WHY HONEY OIL "LABS" BLOW UP
Butane is used as a solvent; it dissolves the resin or whatever is in the devilweed that is desired. Butane is pretty close to propane, which your kitchen stove burns, except it has no odor. It`s of course extremely flammable; slightly more so than propane. The people using this aren`t trained chemists or chemical engineers or it seems even very smart and have no concept whatsoever of safety procedures or how to handle flammable gases. Their haywire procedures often allow a huge leakage of butane. Being odorless, this isn`t noticeable and mixes with air, forming a flammable or borderline explosive mixture. Any source of ignition — throwing a light switch; lighting a cigarette or “fatty” then ignites this, resulting in the fire, explosion and crispily cooked stoners.
ON LINE COMMENT OF THE WEEK
It sure seems as though the the financial house of cards is poised to crater in 2018, but it has felt that way for a decade or so and they somehow keep the rackets running. Of course, I see more and more homeless people begging at street corners each month. I can’t imagine what it’s going to look like this summer at the major intersections as the beggars crowd each other for the prime spots. Their long emergency is already underway.
Looking beyond the financial realm, 2018 looks to usher in an era of less civility across the spectrum. Less courtesy. Less decency. More “in your face” uninformed opinions being expressed. More across the board doubling down on stupid, even when confronted with contrary facts, which used to be the exclusive domain of whack-a-loon conservatives. It’ll move to the mainstream. More proud ignorance. More hope trampled. More general awfulness across the board. So, while we may see other aspects of life lean down, there will be an abundance of the awful to fill the void. Just my guesses. The months ahead will tell the story.
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