Mendocino County Today: Tuesday, Jan. 16, 2018

• County Delays
• Sandbar Returns
• Hopland Vandalism
• Press Secretary Blues
• Variety Acts
• B Team
• Fishing
• Galletti Affair
• Little Dog
• MLK
• Yesterday's Catch
• Collateral Damage
• Vulgar Discourse
• Female Identity
• Racism-O-Rama
• Mendo Gothic
• Trump Thing
• Wool Building
• Student Art

MENDO: WHAT’S THE HOLD UP?

To Mendocino County CEO/Supervisors.

RE: Mendocino County LEMSA’s inactivity causing further delay to the Inland Ambulance EOA RFP

The Anderson Valley EMS Committee (AVEMSC) recently received a broadcast email from the Abaris Group, which is Coastal Valley EMS Agency’s consultant for the Ambulance EOA RFP process, which stated that the EOA is delayed yet again. The AVEMSC has been monitoring this process over the past few years and can only express frustration at the lack of commitment to bring this EOA to fruition.

Although we have many questions, we are only requesting answers to two specifically that seem to be inhibiting the RFP process:

[1] We are told that the RFP needs to be reevaluated by the State EMSA for second approval since the Dispatch RFP was eliminated, which is being blamed for the most recent delay. Why is the EOA needing to be reevaluated by the State when the consensus of the BOS at the June Budget meeting specifically directed staff to separate the Dispatch and EOA RFPs?

[2] The Nov 20^th broadcast email from the Abaris Group states that the EOA is on hold. “Due to the recent fires, the County’s priorities are going to be focused on community recovery for the immediate future...”

Is this true? What new obligations, within Mendocino County, has our LEMSA involved in such a capacity that our critical EMS needs and goals are being deferred?

Anderson Valley FD/Ambulance, as with volunteer ambulances nationwide, is struggling with volunteer staffing and constant new requirements in training and equipment. We are concerned that the County LEMSA is not recognizing these realities and are neglecting to continue the EOA RFP process.

Anderson Valley EMS Committee is requesting that the county regain its previous momentum with this EOA process. This is vital to ensure that the people of Anderson Valley will be able maintain a local and sustainable ambulance service for years to come, as new standards and requirements emerge.

Sincerely,

Members of the Anderson Valley CSD/FD EMS Sub-committee:

Judy Long – President, Anderson Valley Volunteer Fire Fighter’s Association

Phillip Thomas – AV Ambulance Treasurer/Board member

Martha Hyde – Former Ambulance Manager

Andres Avila – AVFD Fire Chief

Aaron Martin – EMT/Boonville Resident

Theresa Gowan – Paramedic/Philo Resident

Clay Eubank – AVFD EMS Officer/Battalion Chief

NAVARRO again plugged at the mouth.

Paul McCarthy of Elk and the indispensable MendocinoSportsPlus reports: “The USGS river gauge said (1:15 pm) the river level was 2.60’ - but Highway 128 will flood if it bears the 4.0’ and the sandbar stays intact. There have been two Highway 128 closures this season - one for 38.5 hours this month and one for 36 hours last November. In November, 2016 the sandbar flooding caused Highway 128 to be closed for more than 5 days, ironically, it was for 128 hours.

EX‑VOLUNTEER FIREFIGHTER SUSPECTED IN HOPLAND FIRE TRUCK VANDALISM

It was the banging about 7:30 a.m. Sunday that caught the on-duty engineer’s attention and drew him to a rear window of the Hopland fire station on Feliz Creek Road. Outside, a woman with an aluminum bat was whacking two vehicles in the parking lot, smashing windows, mirrors and lights, and puncturing all the tires.

pressdemocrat.com/news/7876758-181/exvolunteer-firefighter-suspected-in-hopland

PRESS SECRETARY BLUES (FOR S.H.S.)

 

Our dear Sarah, she wears ringlets in her hair.

But forget fashion, she just makes us want to swear.

And she annoys those surly press folks so very, very much--

Doubtless they know, she's gotten...way, way out of touch.

 

Sarah makes them gasp and makes them groan--

It's clear her wisdom's gone--or maybe out on loan.

She stands so very straight, she never gives an inch--

No, she chatters on and on, just like a little finch.

 

She blusters and snarls and chomps the bit--

The press all swear: “she's such a little twit.”

She's a rabid, full-tilt shill for her creepy, racist boss.

For words, it's true, she's never-never at a loss.

 

Up is down, wrong is right — that's Sarah's world.

And the heck with how her hair is curled.

Our Sarah's so righteous and in her glory

And, wow, she lets the press have it--a gory story.

 

Sarah frowns and stares, smirks and glowers--

She wants those pesky reporters to cower.

She'll argue, bicker, nag, at the drop of a hat--

Whatever comes, she'll take 'em to the mat!

 

Some say she's insufferable, so hard to take.

Others say she's the worst, that she takes the cake.

But, you know, it's all too true — she's got a lot of brass.

Yet it's bad and sorry and so sad — she lacks that touch of class.

 

Who knows what our Sarah really, truly thinks--

But what she says-- oh man, it really, really stinks.

May she soon just disappear... from our very sight--

At last relieving the podium of her oh-so-nasty blight.

 

So, our dear Sarah, she wears ringlets in her hair.

But of her looks most don't so much care.

“Cause it's not her looks, but truth that matters.

And it's respect for truth she's left so torn in tatters.

 

— Chuck Dunbar

RINGMASTERS Angela DeWitt and Captain Rainbow write to remind us that the 27th annual Grange Variety show nears:

IT'S TIME, kick that act you've been thinking about for the VARIETY SHOW into high gear.

Ah yessss, these wet Winter days and nights are a perfect time to polish that gem, turn that sows ear into a silk purse, write that epic poem, pick up that dusty fiddle. Or that wacky skit you promised us last year.

AND never forget the ever present desire to see our animal friends onstage,singing dogs? dancing goats? we hear there's a Yak somewhere in Mendoland, can we fit it onstage? you know we'll try.

C’mon, take a chance, it's the best crowd in the world! We accept acts from anywhere with very few questions asked. Don't wait, we'll even help you develop your act. If you don't want to jump up and hear that thunderous applause get your friend to do that plate spinning act you saw 'em doing in the kitchen. It's not rocket science, but come to think of it we did have the Boonville Space Program launch a few rockets from the parking lot several years ago, so get creative!

DON'T WAIT, CALL NOW, operators are waiting: Captain Rainbow, 895-3807 or Angela 895-3362

APPOINTMENTS were made last Tuesday to the Measure B Mental Health Facilities Oversight Board. There are eleven of them now. Sheriff Allman, the Measure’s key advocate, of course; plus County Auditor Lloyd Weir; County Mental Health Director Janine Miller; CEO Carmel Angelo; Donna Moschetti of the local chapter of the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill (NAMI); Mental Health Board Chair Jan McGourty; plus five appointments by the five Supervisors: Dr. Ace Barash, Shannon Riley, Jed Diamond, Bill Mark Mertle (Owner of Fort Bragg Electric), and Ross Liberty (of Factory Pipe, Ukiah). Their first meeting is set for later this month. Most of these people can be trusted to ensure the facility does what it’s supposed to do.

RAIN ON THE LOST COAST

(Photo by Dick Whetstone)

WARREN GALLETTI, fog belt Socrates, resigned his easy over job as County Superintendent of Schools with a non-explanation presser because, it seems, he knew that the four-person majority on Point Arena's perennially defective school board had wired their top job for him at more money than Galletti had made as Mendocino County’s educational leader. A reader put it this way: "Heard it got pretty hot and heavy last night at the Point Arena School Board meeting. Apparently, four board members hired Warren Galetti for superintendent of the PA schools absent of prior notification or due public process. The salary was reported as $145,000/year, with a set $1,200/year raise guaranteed. When asked how the salary got so high, the answer was that this is what you pay for ‘exceptional people.’ I understand the contract for last year's superintendent has not been finalized."

IT COULDN’T be more obvious that Galletti conspired — sorry, no other word to describe it — with his pals on the Point Arena school board to install himself in PA’s superintendent’s position without advertising the job, without even the fig leaf of a public process. The deed was done in private session but clearly pre-arranged. The board simply emerged from closed session and announced that Galletti was the man. His job in his home town of Point Arena secure, Galletti then announced he was resigning from his job as Superintendent of County schools, a job with no job description because it’s a job without work. One brave fog belt soul voted against the Galletti deal.

POINT ARENA will pay Galletti $145,000 a year plus perks and regular annual salary increments. At the County Office in Ukiah he made $132,000 annually plus a free car and gas to ease his commute from PA to his invisible tasks in Ukiah.

EVEN by Mendo’s dependably sleazy standards of unaccountable public employment, the Galletti affair stinks. The public’s business is supposed to be conducted in public. It’s the law, even in Mendocino County. Both the DA and the Grand Jury ought to have a look at how Galletti got the job.

FORTY-FOUR (44) PEOPLE at the County Office of Education make more than $70,000 a year (as of 2016). The County School Board gets paid to attend meetings and gets free medical care, too. This way their loyalty to whomever happens to occupy the top job is assured. But, heck, it’s for the kids. 

SOME OF OUR favorite MCOE job titles:

• Debra Courtney, Director I-Internal Business, $109,924.02
• Denise Keller, Behavior Specialist, $105,450.00
• Antonio Lopez, Administrator On Special Assignment-IRPA, $106,397.52
• Lech Slocinski, Teacher-CTE Commercial Photography, $72,145.50
• Stephen Hahm, School Climate & Transformation Coach, $68,553.27

(COME ON, HAHM. Pick up your game. Responsibility for climate and transformation (transformation of what?) is worth at least $70k.)

SKRAG HERE: "I laugh every time I see Little Dog hunkered down in his igloo. Ever see a cat in an igloo? Weather turns bad I give one of these people my pathetic meow and next thing I know I'm snoozing next to the stove.”

EVERY YEAR, as Martin Luther King's birthday approaches, and rote ceremonies in his honor commence amid steadily deteriorating economic and social conditions, the man himself is lost. He's as remote now as the turbulent 1960s he helped define.

NOT TO BE TOO much of a geezer about it, but I was there, a foot soldier on the left when King was besieged from all directions, denounced practically on a daily basis in the media of the 1960s, and written off by the left for his non-violent strategies and ridiculed for his Christianity. The media routinely denounced King as an all-round subversive, if not a communist, a com-symp, and was moving "too fast" in his aggressive opposition to the prevalent injustice.

KING was among the very bravest figures of those low times, beginning every day without police protection for himself and his family, not knowing if he or his wife and children would survive the day. These latter day celebrations of King's life are kumbaya affairs, a luke warm rhetorical muck of rainbows and unicorns.

THE DAY AFTER KING was murdered, I was leafletting for a protest rally on Market Street when a young guy walked up and started screaming vile insults about how happy he was that King was dead. I thought I was going to have to fight the great white knight before he walked away. That guy was the only negative on the whole day. Everyone else who took a leaflet or stopped to talk was sympathetic and shocked at King's murder. But I still remember that one encounter as emblematic of '68, and hadn't experienced anything like it since until these Tiki Torch clowns, emboldened by the Trump election, started popping up around the country.

SAN FRANCISCO back in the day was not at all the liberal bastion it has since become. Sort of. The City was strictly, militantly segregated up through the 1970s, and the cops routinely busted gay bars just for the hell of it.

I HAVE VIVID MEMORIES of the assassination of Martin Luther King. My daughter had just been born at Kaiser Hospital in San Francisco. Her delivery doctor was barefoot and wore a flower behind his ear. I remember feeling that I should probably check his credentials. I was driving a cab, writing bad poetry and working to overthrow the government for all the reasons King himself perfectly articulated — the insane war on Vietnam at the expense of home front spending. My brother had just gotten out of the federal penitentiary at Lompoc for refusing to register for the draft. He was the first guy in the state to refuse to register and had been packed off in '64. Just as he was leaving prison, my cousin, sentenced out of Arizona, was arriving at Lompoc on the same charges that had locked up my brother. Cousin Jim was the first guy in Arizona to get prison time for refusing to register. Years later, as a public defender here in Mendo, DA Massini always referred to him as "The Felon."

I WAS WATCHING the news when the announcements that King had been shot began. Later that night, Yellow Cab Dispatch warned us to stay out of Hunter's Point and the Fillmore District because men were shooting at cab toplights. I tried to find confirmation that this was true but never did. No driver I knew had had it happen to him. But it was a bad time generally in San Francisco with lots of violent street crime and hard drugs mowing down acres of flower children, hastening the “back-to-the-land” movement that would form the Mendocino County we see around us today.

I HAD A WIFE and two small children and no money. But cab driving, in the San Francisco of 1968, could pay the bills out of the cash it generated, and I "managed" the slum apartment building we lived in at 925 Sacramento at the mouth of the Stockton Tunnel, perhaps the noisiest residential neighborhood in the world, with horns honking and idiot shrieks emanating from the tunnel's echo chamber round-the-clock.

I GOT A FREE apartment in return for my management, which consisted of doing absolutely nothing because rents were mailed directly to Coldwell Banker. The Nude Girl On A Swing was our immediate neighbor. She sailed out of the ceiling naked every night at a North Beach nightclub over a sea of upturned faces. Her act was a big draw, and solid evidence that the male species is pathetic. She was also a junkie whose dope head boyfriend threatened to kill me one night when I stopped him from beating her up. We headed north, too, soon after, but not "back to the land," just out of the city and, purely by accident, landed in Boonville.

HERE'S AN excerpt from the MLK speech that probably got him killed, the last straw for the guardians of a corrupt system. You’e unlikely to hear it repeated at the occasions memorializing him:

I should make it clear that while I have tried to give a voice to the voiceless on Vietnam and to understand the arguments of those who are called enemy, I am as deeply concerned about our troops there as anything else. For it occurs to me that what we are submitting them to in Vietnam is not simply the brutalizing process that goes on in any war where armies face each other and seek to destroy. We are adding cynicism to the process of death, for they must know after a short period there that none of the things we claim to be fighting for are really involved. Before long they must know that their government has sent them into a struggle among Vietnamese, and the more sophisticated surely realize that we are on the side of the wealthy and the secure while we create hell for the poor. Somehow this madness must cease. We must stop now. I speak as a child of God and brother to the suffering poor of Vietnam. I speak for those whose land is being laid waste, whose homes are being destroyed, whose culture is being subverted. I speak for the poor of America who are paying the double price of smashed hopes at home and death and corruption in Vietnam. I speak as a citizen of the world, for the world as it stands aghast at the path we have taken. I speak as an American to the leaders of my own nation. The great initiative in this war is ours. The initiative to stop it must be ours. There is something seductively tempting about stopping there and sending us all off on what in some circles has become a popular crusade against the war in Vietnam. I say we must enter the struggle, but I wish to go on now to say something even more disturbing. The war in Vietnam is but a symptom of a far deeper malady within the American spirit, and if we ignore this sobering reality we will find ourselves organizing clergy — and laymen — concerned committees for the next generation. They will be concerned about Guatemala and Peru. They will be concerned about Thailand and Cambodia. They will be concerned about Mozambique and South Africa. We will be marching for these and a dozen other names and attending rallies without end unless there is a significant and profound change in American life and policy. Such thoughts take us beyond Vietnam, but not beyond our calling as sons of the living God.

— Martin Luther King Jr., April 1967

CATCH OF THE DAY, January 15, 2018

TINA CORNWALL, Willits Failure to appear, probation revocation.

JACOB CORONA, Ukiah. Disorderly conduct-alcohol/suspended license.

DAYANARA CUMMINS, Santa Clara/Ukiah. Failure to appear.

ROBERT DANIELS, Fort Bragg. DUI with priors.

JOY DAVIDSON, Fort Bragg. Under influence. (Frequent flyer.)

ERIC KOOYERS, Willits. Controlled substance for sale/transportation, paraphernalia, false impersonation of another, community supervision violatioin.

DYLAN KOPMAN, Willits. Burglary tools, receiving stolen property.

JILL POTTER, Willits. Under influence, disobeying a court order, failure to appear.

IAN SANDERSON, Laytonville. DUI.

RACHAEL SEIVERTSON, Hopland. Vandalism, resisting, battery on peace officer.

MELISA TONER, Alderpoint/Willits. Controlled substance for sale/transportation, false impersonation of another.

DON’T MESS WITH US

Editor,

I want to respond to the man from Elk wrote the letter last week. He said he wanted to figure out how to respect me and all that stuff. I don’t want to know his name. I don’t really care about him at all. But I do want to say what a fool he is. In the first place they didn’t drop a uranium bomb over there in Japan, they dropped an atomic bomb. They did it to stop the war. It could have drug out for a long time. Sometimes you gotta take a little to save a lot. Collateral damage.

We didn’t start World War I either. And Japan started World War II with their sneak attack on Pearl Harbor. We did not start the Korean War, North Korea did, trying to put their communist regime on South Korea with the help of the Chinese. We did not start the war with Vietnam. North Vietnam with Chinese influence trying to put their communist regime on South Vietnam.

Every war that somebody else started, we won. Look how we came back against Japan after the sneak attack on Pearl Harbor. It shows the American people’s courage and the will to keep our freedom alive. Anybody that wants to start trouble with us had better think twice.

So this guy is full of shit. He might have polls that say certain things, but you know how they get polls? They go down to San Francisco and ask all the liberals.

It’s just not right to say these kinds of things without any proof.

God Bless America, God Bless Donald Trump and God Damn the people who hate America. They should get out.

Jerry Philbrick

Comptche

ON LINE COMMENT OF THE DAY

This Affair – “ShitholeGate,” will go down in the annals of American history as the very moment that civil political discourse left the station and in its absence, the same vulgarization that has plagued secular American culture for decades finally breached the moat of propriety and crapped in the britches of collegiality in Washington, D.C. And far beyond.

WE WERE RAISED to accommodate men, particularly in my generation. And women so often lose their own identity to the identity of the men that they're with. They even change the way they dress and what they do to fit the men that they're with. We're starting to acknowledge our own gifts as women and not think that we have to behave as men in order to be empowered or powerful or valuable.

— Sharon Stone

RACISM-O-RAMA

by James Kunstler

The New York Times worked itself into a fugue state this morning of the MLK holiday with a front-page orgy of reproving headlines: “[Charles] Blow: Trump is a Racist, Period”; “Donald Trump’s Racism, the Definitive List”; “‘I’m Not a Racist,’ Trump says, as DACA Hopes Dim”; “In Trump Remarks, Black Churches See a Nation Backsliding.”

I suspect these are not so much the cries of a people yearning for redress of unfair laws — as was the case in 1963 when Martin Luther King led the now-hallowed march on Washington against the Jim Crow regime in Dixieland — but the hue and cry of a political machine desperate for attention that has otherwise run out of principles and purposes.

Donald Trump is certainly a vulgar fellow of questionable intelligence, and the country might be better off with someone else in the White House. But where exactly would that leave black America? We’re not going to re-run the civil rights campaign of the 1960s, which culminated in explicit federal laws that abolished the southern state’s Jim Crow laws.

What is government supposed to do now to improve the lives of black America? There is, for instance, the quandary of public assistance — welfare of various forms, transfer payments, SNAP cards, housing subsidies. I don’t believe these policies were concocted deliberately to keep people-of-color down, but they’ve been hugely destructive to family formation because of the “man-in-the-house” rule that strongly promotes single-parent households headed by mothers. And these policies have surely shaped a dysfunctional ghetto culture in many other ways. I don’t hear any calls from the black caucuses, or from their professional colleagues in the lobbying industry, or from the black churches, to change that rule. There is no movement at all to get rid of public assistance per se.

We’ve had several generations who, in one way another, have enjoyed the benefits of “affirmative action,” and American black people are still under-represented in the professions, except in government jobs. Affirmative action has been challenged in the courts, but it finds new ways to assert itself, especially in academia. Black public intellectuals — Sowell, McWhorter, Steele, et al — have argued that affirmative action stigmatizes all of black America, and it’s worth considering if that is true. They are in a tiny minority of black non-Leftists who even dare to raise the question.

Who is actually responsible for the murder rate among black men in cities like Chicago, Baltimore, and Milwaukee? Is “structural racism” behind the decision to pull the trigger? Are gang-bangers depraved on account of they’re deprived, as the old lyric from West Side Story goes?

How come there is no recognition that the promotion of multi-culturalism militates against the idea of a national common culture — e pluribus unum (out of many, one) — leaving nothing for any people to assimilate into? And how much is the cult of multiculturalism an excuse for black America to stay exactly where it is, separate and steeped in grievance for being “left out”?

These questions are apart from the easily-observed character deformities of the President. But they were there in plain sight before he came on the scene and Trump is not the reason black America finds itself so frustrated and angry.

I had an eye-opening experience three years ago after I gave a lecture at Boston College (a talk on issues raised by The Long Emergency). The social justice hysteria on campus was reaching cruising speed just then. After my talk, I was taken out for dinner by six or seven faculty members. One was ethnically Asian, the rest white. Three of them were professors specializing in “race and gender” studies. Since that was the case, they steered the conversation to issues of race and gender. I made the remark that it ought to be a primary mission in education to teach proper spoken English — because without that ability, kids might not be able to learn anything else.

I was denounced as a “racist” all round the table for saying that. Three years later, it still astounds me that any professional educator would mount an argument against developing skills in the language of this country. That’s something I would definitely blame white people for.

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

MENDOCINO GOTHIC

THIS TRUMP THING

… or as it had been known previously for nearly 250 years up until now - The US Presidency.

Immigration took the spotlight in America on many occasions in 2017 and this continues to be a major talking point in the new year. President (?) Donald Trump indicated a willingness to work with Democrats on immigration reform. A judge recently ruled against the president’s attempt to end protections for people who came to America illegally as young children. Last week Trump hit a new low when he reportedly wondered why America should accept immigrants from “shithole countries” in Africa, or indeed Haiti, saying he’d prefer people from Norway. Is he nuts?!? At 70, Mr Trump was America’s oldest newly elected president. Last week he received his first physical examination since taking office. Concerns have begun swirling about his mental health. The White House says Mr. Trump will not undergo psychiatric tests, and was mum on whether his cognitive functions will be studied. Oh, dear, when and how will it all end?

— Steve Sparks

FAIR FAN REPORT

The County Fair Board voted unanimously, following several months of discussion, to change the name of the Commercial Building to the Wool Building. This is located inside the main gate on your left (toward Yorkville) as you enter the grounds and you know it well as it is the home to The National Wool Show during fair time. Further a banner will be displayed recognizing The National Wool Show for their participation and ongoing contribution to the excellence of our annual Fair. The building has for many years been known as the Wool Building by most fairgoers and now it is getting the sign on the wall amended to match its new title. Stay tuned for more news about the Mendocino County Fair next month and thanks for all you do to make our fair truly special. See you at the fair September 14th through the 16th 2018.

Kindly,

Donna Pierson-Pugh & The Fair Boosters

FIRST FRIDAY, FORT BRAGG HIGH SCHOOL ART OPENING AT EDGEWATER GALLERY

Where: 356 N. Main Street, Fort Bragg

When: Friday, February 2, 5-8pm

This show at Edgewater Gallery has become an annual tradition. The students' art encompasses a wide range of media. The unbounded creativity of the students is always a joy to behold. The show will continue through the month of February. Light refreshments served.