Mendocino County Today: Saturday, March 3, 2018

• Cannabis Crisis
• Skyhook Al
• Class K
• NRA Dinner
• More Anapolsky
• Coast
• Predator Frankovich
• Little Dog
• Rock Moisture
• Yesterday's Catch
• OJ Interview
• Unfit Realm
• Penis Twitter
• Low Salmon
• Arm Everyone
• Failed State
• Buffett Windfall
• Blood Money
• Information Warfare
• Warhead
• Ta-chesli
• Healthy Mendocino
• Immigrant Money
• Raisman Lawsuit
• Planning Agenda
• Rowley Interview
• Marco Radio

STATE OF CALIFORNIA SABOTAGES CANNABIS INDUSTRY

by Jonah Raskin

California Assembly member Jim Wood and State Senator Mike McGuire demonstrated their incompetence before a standing room only crowd on March 1, 2018 in the Ukiah Valley Conference Center. Wood and McGuire hosted the hearing which was titled “The First 60 Days of Prop 64.” Members of the audience, as well as many of the panelists, agreed that the first 60 days were a failure. Or maybe they were a huge success. It all depends which side of the banking industry one sits.

Ever since Prop 64 became law on January 1, 2018, the marijuana world in the Emerald Triangle has become, increasingly, the domain of big growers with big capital and big political clout. Sonoma County Agricultural Commissioner, Tony Linegar, who formerly served as Mendocino County Agricultural Commissioner, told the crowd, “If the overall goal of the program was to favor a corporate, big dollar, new money industry then we have succeeded.”

Pot growers from Covelo to Comptche and Caspar, and from communities in Humboldt and Sonoma, conferred among themselves and agreed that in order to comprehend the marijuana story one had only to omit the little word “If,” and say “the overall goal of the program was to favor a corporate, big dollar, new money industry.”

Linegar had predicted that outcome more than a year ago. Indeed, the cumbersome governmental process and the high cost of permits and licenses were guaranteed to favor the big boys and cut out the small players from the lucrative market.

“It doesn’t matter much what the politicians and the agency people say,” a long time, small-scale grower from Potter Valley explained. “What matters is what they’ve created, and what they’ve created is a mess for us.”

One newspaper, which sent a reporter to cover the hearing, ran a headline that proclaimed, “Small pot growers feel stifled.” The real story wasn’t about feelings. It was about the bottom line, pocket books, bank accounts and plans for the 2018-growing season. Indeed, the state of California had, in the first 60-days, sabotaged the marijuana industry that had, on the whole, done quite nicely on its own for decades, without taxation and regulation.

Put government employees in charge of an industry and a plant that they know little or nothing about, and one is guaranteed to come up with a plan that’s not only unjust, but also unreasonable and non-sensible.

Linegar drew cheers and applause from the crowd when he said, “I see no reason to regulate this crop differently than any other crop.” His was not the only voice of reason on the panel, but it was the loudest, the clearest and the least ambiguous. To a large extent, the other panel members patted themselves on the back, paid homage to “Beautiful Ukiah” and thanked the audience for braving the rain, as though a little weather would keep growers at home.

There was no end of pandering, patronizing, politicking and threatening. “I want to commend you on the wonderful job you have done,” Jim Wood told Lori Ajax, the California cannabis czar. Ajax explained that the state would go after growers who didn’t have permits and licenses, and that those citizens who didn’t like cannabis in their neighborhoods could “report suspicious activity” at “Weed Tip.” She also insisted that her agency wanted “to run the system efficiently,” though she said nothing about compassionately. In the interests of efficiency, the state would be opening eleven locations where growers could remit their taxes in cash and by-pass banks entirely. It was clear that the state wanted the money.

Hezekiah Allen, the Executive Director of the California Growers Association, said that he saw a “mockery of the values of compassion and justice.” He added that many people in the marijuana community were “at the breaking point,” that “prejudice was cooked into the policy” and that a “crisis was looming.”

At the very end of the evening, Assemblyman Wood redeemed himself in part when he complained that farmers were unable to sell legally to dispensaries and that there might be “the collapse of a whole industry because there was no product.” What law enforcement had failed to do, legalization and regulation had to a large extent succeeding in doing.

Welcome to the state of near-permanent crisis that exists in California.

(Jonah Raskin is the author of Marijuanaland: Dispatches from an American War)

MORE TRIBUTES TO BIG AL

Al Snyder (Jr. I believe?) taught me the sky hook, my most effective basketball shot to this day (40+ years later). "Big Al" worked at the apple orchard my family owned up Little Lake Road east of Mendocino, and when we weren't moving irrigation pipes, pruning branches, picking apples or (ugh) battling the bees as we picked up rotten, fallen apples, Al and my brother Zach and I were shooting baskets on the 10' rim nailed to the garage. Mostly HORSE, and Al rarely lost.

Al would occasionally also join in games at the Mendocino Middle school (when it was located in town, next to the little league diamond), and even against the best high school players (Paul Satterfield, Danny Dubiago, Carl Larsen, Kevin Young et al), he more than held his own. He'd play defense rather sporadically, but his array of trick shots and passes, combined with his quick, fluid, graceful movement, made Al nearly impossible to defend. His hook shots came from all angles, anywhere within 20 feet of the basket, and even the big guys could only watch in wonder as they fluttered through the net.

Al was truly one of a kind, and a Mendocino fixture for sure. I'll miss him.

Garth Chouteau

* * *

(Previously)

Somewhere in Bobby Markels' (also gone, alas) writings is a sublime description of a conversation she and Al had years and years ago when he came to her house to do some work. I'm not going to wreck it by trying to paraphrase it, but I'll ask her son where I might find it. I used to enjoy watching the reaction of visitors to town when they encountered Al, 6'4", dreadlocks, fearsome countenance like a Toltec tomb guardian, usually with a big long knobby walking stick. They'd flinch, gape and cover their children's eyes involuntarily, their instinctual reaction at total odds with their deeply programmed "inclusiveness."

Eleanor Cooney

* * *

On my way to Fort Bragg at about midnight, to go to the bank and put my paychecks in to stave off disaster, I met a man in the Mendocino post office who told me Big Al is no more. I said, "When? How did you find out?" He said, "Everybody knows. It was last night. They were just all having a drink for him at Patterson's."

I told him a couple of my Al stories and I asked him if there was anything he could tell me about Al that most people might not know. He said, "He was very generous with his weed... And he rolled these giant bombers, just huge, /that big/, and he'd sit on that bench behind the bakery smoking this giant thing, and one time the sheriff's there, in the front, and he's going, to us, 'You're smokin' weed right in /fronta/ me? Right in /fronta/ me?' But we weren't; it was comin' all the way from the back." I said, "And he knew that?" "Yeah." "But he didn't go back and mess with Al, because--" And he and I said at the same time, "Who would mess with Al?"

I'd like to hear a few Big Al stories I haven't heard yet.

Marco McClean

POMONA CLASS K statement to the Board of Supervisors: "The county wide Grange, Pomona #10, objects to any changes to the class K ordinance as a part of the housing element of the general plan. We support Class K as an avenue to affordable housing and we encourage our supervisors to actively do the same."

Voted on January 23, 2018, 17 yes, 0 no. The statement is from the Mendocino County Pomona Grange. This resolution was passed unanimously on Sunday, January 23, 2018. We represent six local Granges with hundreds of members countywide.

* * *

FOLLOW-UP to last Tuesday's Class K discussion at the Board of Supervisors meeting: while the defenders of Class K who want to leave it alone were happy that the perimeter foundation and fire sprinkler requirements being removed from the Class K update, they still object to the update involving the 2018 state building code. The defenders of Class K insist that it be left alone including being based on the 1974 building code as it was originally intended. We understand that the Class K defenders will be back in front of the supervisors at their next meeting on the subject to point out that the legal opinion did not require the board to change Class K at all, including the update to current (and much more expensive) building codes.

PROPOSED NRA “PROTEST”' DOESN'T HURT DINNER SALES. THE EVENT IS SOLD OUT.

The local chapter of the National Rifle Association will be holding their annual fundraising dinner Saturday - which attracted the attention of a small group of coast activists who plan to picket the dinner.

The announcement of the plan to picket the dinner saw the remaining tickets scooped up and now it is a "SOLD OUT" affair - there were individual & table tickets available as late as Thursday evening.

Interesting to note, the purchase of a "table"($1,435) came with a "free gun" - a choice of a Glock 26 9mm pistol, Henry Golden Boy .22 caliber LR, Remington 870 Express Super Mag 12-gauge shotgun or a Smith & Wesson Shield 9mm or a .40 caliber (you had to specify which).

THE ANAPOLSKY PAPERS

More on Stephen Anapolsky...

CATHERINE YRONWODE wrote in 2005:

He was a bad guy when i met him -- an East coast hustler type newly landed in California, always on the look-out for opportunities to steal and cheat. In fact, the idea of him tattooing the word ‘THIEF’ on someone ELSE'S forehead is probably the most bizarre aspect of this case. He stole a sofa from my mother, for instance, and ripped off people for short term loans all over the county. He was a low-grade non-violent sociopath when i knew him, not dangerous, kinda funny and smart, but not someone to trust.

Stephen Anapolsky is mentioned in this retrospective article written by David Yager for the Mendocino Beacon newspaper, originally printed in 1998 [link not good] -- it's a memoir of the hippie era, so just use your "find" function on the word "Anapolsky" to get to the section about him. Note that the writer calls him "Anapolsky" — most of us knew him that way, by his last name.

Anapolsky was a fixture of the 1960s hippie pot smoking and acid tripping scene in Mendocino until he started dealing heroin. That put him over the line with most of his former friends. Green herbs are one thing, but white powders are another. He travelled all around the world, ripped off folks or pandered to their addictions wherever he went, and slowly lost whatever shred of humanity he had ever had. After he did a long stretch in jail for drug dealing, he came out more sociopathic than previously and no one who had befriended him in earlier times stuck by his side.

A few years back Anapolsky wrote a book about his life, which was edited and published by Bruce Levine. The idea was to produce some sort of fascinating Ken Kesey-ish tale of the freewheeling life of a woods hippie in the pot fields of Northern California, but the finished result was quite a different thing. In the book Anapolsky revealed the depth of his sociopathic tendencies in a way that was both revolting and queasy-making. I think he thought the stories he was telling were "funny" or "witty" but they were actually shocking to those of us who had known him back in the 1960s.

He told of stealing things all his life, from early childhood onward, of having no respect for the wisdom or morality of his elders, of lacking any sort of regard for the emotional safety or property rights of others. The creepy thing was that he phrased all of his narcissistic self-justifications in terms of straight versus hip — with hip being smart, and smart meaning able to steal and defraud others with impunity. It was a pretty grotesque read.

Bruce Levine, who co-wrote ("edited") and published Anapolsky's memoir, disconnected from him and professed disgust with him. I think Levine understood that the guy was not the edgy, hip, iconoclastic James Dean-ish anti-hero he had hoped to immortalize, but a true career criminal. After the tattooing incident, Bruce kinda made a point of going around telling folks that he was no longer Anapolsky's associate, which i found a little pathetic, after the fact.

As for the crime itself, all i could locate on the web was a short article from the Santa Rosa [California] Press Democrat. It is no longer online at the P-D pages, but it was posted in the blog of one Dennis Mangan. Mangan has since pulled his blog down, but as of today google still had a cached copy of it at [link not good] from whence this comes:

Tuesday, November 16, 2004

Annals of Crime, from the Press Democrat:

Four Mendocino Coast residents have been arrested for allegedly kidnapping and tattooing "thief" on the forehead of a man they suspected of stealing a pound of marijuana.

"This is the first time in 34 years in Mendocino County in law enforcement I've seen something like this," Mendocino County Sheriff Tony Craver said Monday.

Stephen Anapolsky, 64, Daz Curtis Carlson, 34, and Colin Gilligan, 19, all of Fort Bragg, were arrested last week and arraigned Monday on charges of kidnapping, false imprisonment, conspiracy and mayhem, Sheriff's Capt. Kevin Broin said.

A fourth suspect, Greg Troy June, 41, was arrested Sunday on a warrant issued for alleged spousal abuse and is scheduled to be arraigned later this week.

The victim, a 31-year-old Fort Bragg man, was lured to Gilligan's home Nov. 9, Broin said. He declined to release the victim's name, saying that it could place him in danger and that he had suffered enough. The kidnappers believed the victim had stolen a pound of marijuana from Anapolsky, Broin said.

Anapolsky had offered a $1,000 reward for the return of his marijuana - or the victim's little finger, Broin said.

Once at Gilligan's home, the victim was punched, placed in a choke hold and duct taped, Broin said.

Anapolsky, with the assistance of Carlson and Gilligan, allegedly tattooed "thief" in 2-inch-high letters on the victim's forehead, Broin said.

"They didn't just write it on his forehead with a magic marker. It will have to be surgically removed," Craver said.

posted by Dennis Mangan @ 6:43 AM

Well, i apologize if this was rambling and long, but the Steve Anapolsky case is just one of those things where i shake my head and feel weird, ya know? Kinda like how "The Shadow Knows" told us he felt after finding out that he had one been at a wedding party with Dennis Rader, the BTK killer -- although on a much lower level of criminality, of course.

Cordially,

cat yronwode

* * *

A READER WRITES:

Re, Steven Anapolski: Make a note to ask Captain Fathom about Anapolski next time he comes staggering in looking for a drink. The Captain is one of Anapolski's many disciples, and could tell some good stories. Doesn’t mean he would though. There is absolutely nothing honorable about SA. He was born into a monied retail family in Sacramento. Hippies who knew him, loved him, even though he conned everyone he could, as many times as he could. He did two stints in prisons in Europe, too, for heroin trafficking. All interesting stuff. But the most interesting part to me, was his ability to con people repeatedly, and never estrange anyone.

* * *

A FORT BRAGG reader notes: "Anapolsky was at the Monday morning meeting with the Mayor crying tears because he can't pay his water bill. Then he says he was in prison 'for growing weed', what a liar. A nice man at the meeting paid the water bill for him. Right there at the meeting he said ‘fuck’ more than once, then proceeded to call a city employee a son of a bitch and a prick for turning his water off because he didn't pay his bill!"

ROUGH WATER

(Photo by Judy Valadao)

SOME PEOPLE are aware of Jack Silver, a self-alleged environmental attorney based in West Sonoma County who searches out technical violations of the Water Quality laws then bats out demand letters to municipalities and other heavily insured entities saying, "Send me $25 grand and I won't drag you into court and keep you there until you give me even more money." Silver got a nice payment out of Willits a while ago, as if Willits wasn't striving mightily to keep its water systems safe. He has similarly screwed public entities up and down the Northcoast.

IN THAT TRADITION, we have another legal predator stalking Willits. He's called Thomas Frankovich. Like Silver, Frankovich claims to be doing great public good, in his case for "civil rights for the handicapped." If your idea of a handicapped person is someone who eats himself into a wheelchair your definition of handicapped is more elastic than most people's.

FRANKOVICH says his client, Jeanette Brown, can't get into several Willits' public facilities, and Willits better make it easier for her to squeeze into the restroom in the park and other public structures or she and Frankovich will soon own City Hall. Frankovich has successfully sued in Willits before on behalf of Ms. Brown, and here he and Brown are in federal court suing Willits again. Their civil rights action alleges discrimination against Ms. Brown by the City of Willits for failure to remove architectural barriers structural in nature, but also faults city officials for “failing to create and implement a bona fide transition plan or to otherwise remove barriers in a timely manner to comply with the 1990 American Disabilities Act.”

LITTLE DOG SAYS, “I'm kicking' back in my igloo when Skrag saunters by and says, "Wazzup, Ig?" At least once a day he says something just to provoke me, but in this life you've got to learn to ignore him and his whole species if you're gonna achieve minimum mental tranquility.”

THE LAYTONVILLE CONNECTION

Hidden 'rock moisture' may be key to tree survival during drought.

by Robert Sanders

An oft-neglected layer of weathered rock underlying the soil on hillslopes could be a significant reservoir for water, providing critical moisture for trees during droughts, according to a new study by scientists from UC Berkeley and the University of Texas at Austin.

William Dietrich, a professor of earth and planetary science at UC Berkeley, and former UC Berkeley doctoral candidate Daniele Rempe, now an assistant professor of geological sciences at UT Austin, have studied this underground layer at the Eel River Critical Zone Observatory with funds from the National Science Foundation. There, they have followed the water in the environment from the time it falls to the time it trickles into streams or is taken up by plants and returned, via respiration, to the atmosphere.

Prior work had predicted the thickness of this weathered bedrock. The new study shows for the first time that this layer gains and loses significant quantities of water moisture annually.

Much is already understood about how water moves through the rich surface soil. But beneath the soil, on hillslopes developed on bedrock, weathering can generate cracks and pores through which the water readily travels as it makes its way to streams.

This layer, part of the earth’s critical zone – the region from the tops of the trees down to fresh bedrock – has been difficult to explore. In mountainous areas, including the study site in the Angelo Coast Range Reserve in Mendocino County near Laytonville, this region can be 80 feet thick – far thicker than the veneer of soil.

In a study published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Rempe and Dietrich report that at this site, the weathered rock zone can store up to 27 percent of all the rain that falls over the course of a year.

Rock moisture

They refer to the water stored in the weathered bedrock as “rock moisture.” This is water clinging to cracks and pores within the weathering bedrock that is used by vegetation. They found that even in drought years, when the soil dried out, rock moisture was available and only slowly declined as the deep roots of trees pulled out water during the summer and fall.

While the impact of rock moisture will vary depending on the region and topography, Dietrich said, rock moisture likely explains how trees in the study area showed little effect from the severe 2010-2015 drought, which killed more than 100 million trees throughout California.

“Our work now shows that rock moisture is strongly dependent on the underlying bedrock type,” Dietrich said. “So strong that it explains why along the northern California coast ranges the coastal region is evergreen forest, and inboard, on a different rock type that produces only a thin weathered bedrock zone, it is a savannah.”

“How trees can survive extended periods of severe drought has been a mystery,” said Richard Yuretich, director of the National Science Foundation’s Critical Zone Observatories program, which funded the research. “This study has revealed a significant reservoir of trapped water that has gone unnoticed in the past. Research of this kind can help greatly in managing natural resources during times of environmental stress.”

Dietrich said that a major implication of this study is that global climate models, which don’t take rock moisture into account, may greatly underestimate the level of transpiration return to the atmosphere and the consequences of that. They thus predict lower humidity and higher temperatures than will occur, and don’t predict the dominant vegetation correctly in future climate states.

One of Dietrich’s colleagues at UC Berkeley, Inez Fung, is now developing a model specifically to explore how to include rock moisture and fracture flow processes in a climate model.

“The challenge for us now is how to predict the rock moisture availability across landscapes,” Dietrich said. “We have just one site well-studied. A mixture of theory and field studies will need to be developed to provide regional information for climate modelers.”

Storing water in times of drought

The researchers monitored rock moisture from 2013 to 2016 at nine wells drilled into the weathered bedrock along a steep forested hillslope. They used a neutron probe, a precision tool that measures the amount of water in a sample area by detecting hydrogen.

They found that the weathered rock layer built up a supply of 4 to 21 inches of rock moisture during the winter wet season, depending on the well. The maximum amount of rock moisture in each well stayed about the same throughout the study period, which included significant drought years This water was then progressively depleted by trees.

“It doesn’t matter how much it rains in the winter, rock moisture builds up to the same maximum value,” Rempe said. “That leads to the same amount of water every summer that’s available for use by trees.”

Researchers also found that the average rock moisture at all wells exceeded the average soil moisture measurements at all locations.

“Soils are important, but when it comes to determining if a place is going to experience water stress, it could be the underlying rock that matters most,” Rempe said. “This is the first time this has been demonstrated in a multi-year field study.”

The new findings also could help understand the role of trees in regulating river flows during the summer, at a time when the spread of Douglas fir trees along California’s north coast is being blamed for reduced summer stream flow.

The research was supported by the Keck Foundation, the National Science Foundation and the University of California Natural Reserve System, which manages 39 wildlands statewide for research and teaching.

http://news.berkeley.edu/2018/02/27/hidden-rock-moisture-may-be-key-to-tree-survival-during-drought/

(UC Berkeley)

CATCH OF THE DAY, Mar. 2, 2018

CONLEY BUTLER JR., Ukiah. Controlled substance, unlawful operation of vehicle, probation revocation.

KENTON COLBERG JR., Fort Bragg. Resisting.

KANDI DELAPENA, Covelo. Evasion, probation revocation.

MICHAEL DONAHE SR., Ukiah. Disorderly conduct-alcohol (Frequent flyer.)

MONALISA DURAZO, Covelo. Probation revocation.

JAMIE FASANELLA, Richmond/Ukiah. Pot cultivcation, suspended license for drunk/refusing chemical test.

KUULANI FRANKLIN, Hopland. Domestic abuse.

CHARLES HENSLEY, Ukiah. Disorderly conduct-alcohol. (Frequent flyer.)

KIMIYO JONES, Gualala. Domestic abuse.

CHARLES MAXFIELD JR., Ukiah. Taking vehicle without owner’s consent, controlled substance, felon with firearm, alteration of firearm ID, conspiracy.

JOSEPH PARRISH, Windsor/Ukiah. Domestic abuse, parole violation.

TODD RAMOS, Redwood Valley. Controlled substance, pot for sale, receiving stolen property, alteration of firearm ID, conspiracy.

LATOYA REYES-CAMPOS, Ukiah. Controlled substance, paraphernalia, failure to appear, probation revocation.

ROGER SCHOENAHL, Ukiah. Disorderly conduct-alcohol.

JUAN VALDESPINO-CRUZ, Elk. DUI, DUI-suspended license, probation revocation.

JAMES WATTS, Richmond/Ukiah. Pot cultivation in violation of Fish & Game code.

DANIEL YEOMANS, Fort Bragg. Disorderly conduct-alcohol, resisting, probation revocation.

FOX will air a previously unseen 2006 interview with O.J. Simpson in which the notorious football great hypothesizes about what might have happened the night his ex-wife Nicole Brown and Ron Goldman were murdered. O.J. Simpson: The Lost Confession? will air March 11, and TMZ reports that it will contain an explosive theory from Simpson himself: that an accomplice may have joined him that night, if he’d carried out the killings. Sources familiar with the program told TMZ that: “It sounded like a first-person account of the murders and, although it’s not a clear confession, it’s in that arena. We’re told Simpson flat-out talks about an accomplice who was with him at Nicole’s home. He did not name the accomplice.” The interview was scheduled to run 12 years ago — alongside a ghost-written book from Simpson that was to be titled If I Did It - but both the interview and the book were canned due to a backlash from the public and families of Brown and Goldman. The families are reported to have given their consent for Fox to finally air the interview this month.

END TIMES AT THE OD CORRAL

by James Kunstler

Personally, I believe that the plodding, implacable Robert Mueller, white knight of the Deep State, will flush the Golden Golem of Greatness out of office, probably on some sort of money-laundering rap having nothing to do with “Russian meddling.” Anderson Cooper will have a multiple orgasm. Rachel Maddow will don a yellow hard-hat and chain-saw a scale model of Mar-a-Lago to the glee of her worshippers. The #Resistance will dance in the streets. And then what?

I doubt that Mr. Trump will go gracefully. Rather he’ll dig in and fight even if it means fomenting a constitutional crisis. He’ll challenge Mr. Mueller on veering into matters unrelated to alleged Russian pranks in the 2016 election. He may well attempt the self-pardoning gambit. He will have a lot of support out in the Deplorable gloaming. But, at some point, I expect a bipartisan consensus to emerge in congress that the guy has got to go. He’s making it impossible to conduct even the routines of bribery and domestic collusion that Washington exists for. Nobody is getting paid — at least not the bonuses they’re accustomed to seeing.

The 25th amendment is still the best tool for the job. Unlike impeachment, it doesn’t require much in the way of standards of evidence or any Mickey Mouse niceties of due process. It doesn’t take months and months of tiresome legal gamesmanship, no committees or reports. You just get a small number of cabinet members and congressional leaders to agree that the President is “unfit” — which can mean anything, really — and he’s chopped. General Kelly may be enlisted to pry Mr. Trump’s smallish fingers from the doorjamb and shove him into the waiting limo in the porte cochère for the long sad ride up the Jersey Turnpike.

Enter Mike Pence, slated to be a kind of combination Millard Fillmore/Herbert Hoover. Who knows what really lurks behind the bland Pencean facade, but on the off-chance that he may be a decent fellow of average intelligence, the fates have a way of casting such accidental leaders into ignominy despite their theoretical virtues. Surely, the Deplorables of Flyover Land will not like the dumping of their Golden champion one bit. I’d stay away from post offices and other parcels of federal property for a while. If a bunch decides to march on the nation’s capital, it will be a messier affair than anything the hippies pulled off back in the day, perhaps the first battle of Civil War 2.

The financial markets wobbled and puked on Wednesday and Thursday of this week, finally mirroring the tremendous stresses in our politics. They’ve been every bit as jacked on unreality as the two major parties for years now. The markets, after all, are not the economy itself, just indexes of the supposed values of things, stocks, bonds, gold, soybeans, etc., and the Federal Reserve has been jamming hallucinogens down their craw since the last little seizure in 2008.

The markets don’t seem to like the new chairman of the Fed, a cipher named Jay Powell. In his first big public performance since stepping into Janet Yellen’s tiny shoes this week, Powell managed to do a complete 180 in 24 hours on whether his outfit will stick to four rate hikes this year… or maybe just ride to the rescue of the floundering markets with their old tricks of lowering interest rates and “printing” shitloads of new “money” to get those animal spirits going again in the S&P. Absolutely nothing Powell’s Fed might try will work. In fact they will only make the cratering indexes fall deeper and harder, along with the value of the US dollar. Interest rates can’t go any higher, anyway, without blowing up half the paper obligations on earth. Businesses will be terrified to transact. You can’t do much with a crippled financial system. The authorities and the news media will call it a “recession” but a sore-beset public will know it is the start of something a whole lot worse.

As a nice side-dish to this banquet of consequences, the Democratic party will be deprived of its only reason to live the past two years: to shove Donald Trump off-stage. And the Republicans will be blamed twice over: once, for not coming to Trump’s defense, and again for getting behind him in the first place. Enjoy the last few weeks of relative normality.

(Support Kunstler’s writing by visiting his Patreon Page.)

A READER WRITES:

I read something recently that stated that people in this country check their phones 150 times a day. This means if they sleep for eight hours, that during the time they are awake they check their phone on the average every 6.4 minutes. Amazing they ever get anything done, unless they are multi-taskers like this piece of work I saw the other day; a UPS guy in Costco standing at the urinal taking a leak, with his dick in one hand and checking his phone with the other. In a world full of idiots this guy just lowered the bar for everybody. What a class act. I bet if he even gave it a thought, he wouldn't see anything wrong with it.

SALMON FISHERY HITS NEW LOW

A third straight year of low king salmon runs is expected to deliver another blow to one of the North Coast’s most iconic and lucrative fisheries, wildlife managers indicated Thursday, as both regulators and fishermen faced the prospect of a federally mandated plan to reverse the trend and rebuild key stocks.

pressdemocrat.com/news/8055549-181/forecast-shows-california-salmon-fishermen

EVERYONE NEEDS ONE

Editor:

The heat-packing sheriff’s deputy who was supposed to protect the Florida high school from maniacs with assault rifles decided not to engage. Maybe he had bone spurs in his feet, but it is possible that he was afraid for his life.

We must remember that only real heroes, like the president, are willing to confront such dangers.

If I were a teacher with a pistol, even if they let me wear a cowboy hat, I might end up trembling in the closet with my students when the lunatic was hosing down the place with lead.

We need a higher concentration of guns. The only way we can make schools safe is to have students and teachers carry AR-15s. Actually, to be 100% secure we should all have them.

Stephen Hawkes

Healdsburg

ON LINE COMMENT OF THE DAY

The good old USA is a failed state. The collapse will pick up some speed as things unfold. So what? Let it go. The economy is a scam. Just about every aspect of life in the land of the free –cough, cough, cough–is a poor joke. We are inundated with bullshit and we think it smells good. We accept, tolerate any absurd behaviors, ideas, theories, opinions. This is the land of the addicted, the bizarre, the simply dumb. There is no common decency or basic politeness. I fully expect Rev Graham’s funeral to be crashed by some group of freaks that Maddow, Tapper, Cooper will fawn over. Let the whole damn thing collapse. Good riddance. Seventeen school kids are gunned down and we shit ourselves. The medical industry slaughters people by the hundreds of thousands annually and we yawn. We are some kind of fucked up.

WARREN BUFFETT: Tax law delivered $29 billion to Berkshire Hathaway

...Berkshire’s $29 billion bonus stems from unrealized gains on equity investments getting taxed at a rate of 21 percent instead of the previous 35 percent rate. The gain helped push Berkshire’s net earnings in 2017 up to $44.94 billion, nearly double the $24.07 billion recorded a year earlier.

Buffett said while the gain is “real,” it “did not come from anything we accomplished at Berkshire.”

thedailybeast.com/warren-buffett-tax-law-delivered-dollar29-billion-windfall-to-berkshire-hathaway

BLOOD MONEY: In 2015, NRA chief Wayne LaPierre took home $5.1 million: $1,090,515 in base base, plus a $150,000 bonus & a special retirement plan payment of nearly $4 million. (Jeffrey St. Clair)

A REAL JOURNALIST'S FAREWELL

Robert Parry's Last Article Before His Death

For readers who have come to see Consortiumnews as a daily news source, I would like to extend my personal apology for our spotty production in recent days. On Christmas Eve, I suffered a stroke that has affected my eyesight (especially my reading and thus my writing) although apparently not much else. The doctors have also been working to figure out exactly what happened since I have never had high blood pressure, I never smoked, and my recent physical found nothing out of the ordinary. Perhaps my personal slogan that “every day’s a work day” had something to do with this.

https://consortiumnews.com/2017/12/31/an-apology-and-explanation/

A LOT OF NONSENSE is talked and written about war: fight for your country, for America, for democracy, for your loved ones. Hell, a soldier fights only to protect himself. Somebody shoots at him, so he shoots back before the other guy can kill him. He runs like a deer. He comes back and brags: "I fought for my flag." That's a lot of ta-chesli, a lot of bull. When he's shot at, nobody thinks of a piece of cloth.

—Lame Deer

HEALTHY MENDOCINO PROJECT SUMMIT MARCH 8TH

Working Together for Healthier Communities

For all the regional Action Teams and interested community members

• An opportunity to meet each other, hear updates, share ideas, and brainstorm strategies.
• Shelly Mascari, the Community Wellness Director at St. Helena Hospital in Lake County, will speak on “Best Practices for Working Collaboratively”.
• We will break out into groups for each priority area and each group will give status reports on challenges, visions, and preliminary strategies toward outcomes.

March 8th, 2017 at 9:30-12:30, Willits Community Center, 111 East Commercial St.

For more information contact Patrice Mascolo at healthymendocino@ncoinc.org or 707-468-3228

Mendocino K8 sixth grade fundraiser dine out. Support the kids in attending the outdoor school at the Mendocino Woodlands in June.

Wednesday, March 28th, Bar open at 5pm, Dinner 5:30-8:30, MacCallum House Inn, reservations: 937-0289

All profits from the evening will benefit the kids!

NANCY PELOSI gave a marathon speech on illegal immigration the other day. But how would she know much about the realities of open borders, given her palatial retreat in Northern California and multi-millionaire lifestyle that allows wealthy progressives like herself to be exempt from the consequences of her own hectoring? In the end, the House minority leader was reduced to some adolescent racialist patter about her grandson wishing to look more like his Mexican-American friend.

I was thinking of the San Francisco Democrat’s speech last week, during a brief drive into our local town, in a region that is ground zero of California’s illegal immigration experience.

Illegal immigrants are neither collective saints nor sinners, but simply individuals who arrive from one of the poorest regions in the Americas, without legality or much in the way of English, or high school education.

They encounter an American host that has lost confidence in its once formidable powers of assimilation and integration as well as its ability to mint Americans from diverse races, religions, and ethnicities. Instead, American culture has adopted an arrogant sense that it can ensure near instant parity as redemption for supposed past –isms and –ologies. That may explain the immigrant’s romance for Mexico to which he fights any return, and the ambiguity about America in which he fights to stay.

We dare not mention illegal immigration in California as a factor in the state’s implosion. But privately, residents assume it has something to do with the 20 percent of the state’s population that lives below the poverty level. Illegal immigration plays a role in the fact that one-third of the nation’s welfare recipients lives in California and that one of four state residents was not born in the United States — or that one-half of all immigrant households receives some sort of government assistance, and that one in four homeless people lives in California.

Note a final statistic. A record of nearly $30 billion a year is forecast to be sent this year as remittances home to Mexico. If the sum is assumed to be wired largely by the reported 11 million illegal aliens, then illegal immigrants are sending per capita around $2,700 home per year. Again, in per capita terms, a household of five would average about $1,100 sent home per month to Mexico — a generosity impossible without the subsidies of the American taxpayer. (Some might wonder whether the U.S. could tax that sum to build the wall or at least declare that proof of remittances disqualifies one for public support.)

— Victor Davis Hanson

ALY RAISMAN: CAN’T STOP, WON’T STOP

by Dave Zirin

Aly Raisman isn’t stopping, and that is great news for anyone who wants the powerful to be held to account or believes that the #metoo movement in sports is just barely beginning. The gold medalist who went public with accusations of abuse against one time USA Gymnastics and Michigan State doctor Larry Nasser is now suing the United States Olympic Committee for negligence, saying that they provided no oversight or intervention as Nasser assaulted hundreds of athletes “under the guise of medical treatment.”

Raisman wants to know whether the USOC ignored Nasser out of benign neglect, or perhaps for more malignant reasons. Warnings about Nassar were reportedly bandied about for years, although the USOC and USA Gymnastics put their heads in the sand until an expose published by the Indianapolis Star in 2016. The known facts tell us that even if you give the USOC every benefit of the doubt, more people were hurt precisely because they chose silence. Raisman’s lawsuit puts it out there is plain and brutal language, saying that the USOC “at the highest levels of its organization” knew what was happening, and looked the other way in order to keep the Olympic trains running on time.

As Raisman said in a statement to the media that accompanied the lawsuit:

"My highest priority has been to push for change, so future generations of athletes will be safer. It has become painfully clear that these organizations have no intention of properly addressing this problem. After all this time, [The USOC remains] unwilling to conduct a full investigation, and without a solid understanding of how this happened, it is delusional to think sufficient changes can be implemented. I refuse to wait any longer for these organizations to do the right thing. It is my hope that the legal process will hold them accountable and enable the change that is so desperately needed."

What makes the timing of Raisman’s actions so important is that she made the choice to throw down the lawsuit just days after the post-Winter Olympics resignation of USOC head Scott Blackmun. While Blackmun’s resignation was chalked up to legitimate health reasons, there is no question that his exit was thought by the USOC as another way – along with the mass dismissal of the USA Gymnastics board – to publicly turn the page on Nasser and display some kind of veneer of good governance. Raisman is making clear that the page cannot be turned until there is accountability; there cannot be peace in the Olympic Village until there is justice, or this will repeat itself again and again.

This is hardly the first time that Raisman has performed the difficult task of linking Nasser’s abuse with the bystander-complicity of the USOC. At Nasser’s sentencing, a seemingly infinite line of survivors spoke to how Nasser’s abuse derailed their lives, resulting in in Nasser receiving a sentence all totaled – between child pornography and assault convictions – that will keep him behind bars for 300 years. But Raisman, in part due to her gold medal fame, in part due to the fact that she was not expected at the trial, sent shockwaves by her presence. Those shockwaves became an earthquake when she stood up and in addition to calling out Nasser, condemned the absence of the USOC at the sentencing, saying, “Why have I and the others here probably not heard anything from the leadership of the USOC? Why has the U.S. Olympic Committee been silent? Why isn’t the USOC here right now?”

With this lawsuit, we can be assured that we won’t have to settle for eventual Congressional hearings, or having to stomach whatever the USOC’s “independent investigation conducted by a third-party” delivers. Instead, they will be held to account by an athlete whose only goal is forcing them to actually assess how they allowed an abuser access to their athletes and then chose to do nothing.

PLANNING COMMISSION MEETING AGENDA for March 15, 2018, is posted on the department website at: mendocinocounty.org/government/planning-building-services/meeting-agendas/planning-commission

NEW YOUTUBE VIDEO with Time Magazine "Person of the Year", FBI agent Coleen Rowley, on "Heroes and Patriots", KMEC Radio

Please use the above You Tube link to watch a brand new video! Coleen Rowley, Retired, FBI speaks with John Good Iron and Mary Massey on the US's position of perpetual war and intervention. Ms Rowley speaks on how this dynamic contributes to mass shootings, domestic violence, the opioid crisis and veteran suicides. The program originally aired on Monday, February 19, 2018, KMEC Radio, Mendocino Environmental Center.

Heroes and Patriots is a program about national security, intelligence and foreign policy. The show is streamed live each Monday, 1 p.m., P.S.T. on www.kmecradio.org. Like us on Facebook and YouTube at Heroes and Patriots, KMEC Radio, Mendocino Environmental Center.

Follow on: Facebook, YouTube and Twitter @heroesandpatri2

MEMO OF THE AIR: GOOD NIGHT RADIO:

Every Friday, 9pm to about 4am on 107.7fm KNYO-LP Fort Bragg, and 105.1fm KMEC-LP Ukiah.

And also there and anywhere else via http://knyo.org. Or if that doesn't work for you try http://TuneIn.com or the TuneIn Radio app and look up KNYO-LP. (I've been experimenting with TuneIn Radio; just to let you know, they often play their own thirty-second ad for car insurance or something when you connect, and then again at random intervals of twenty minutes or half an hour; don't let that throw you off. It's a free service, and that's fine. They gotta make their money somehow. That's America.)

I'll be in Fort Bragg for tonight's show. If you want to talk about your project, or play your new song, or show-and-tell about the weird kind of snail you found, you can drop by 325 N. Franklin, next door to the Tip Top bar after 9pm and just wander in. Head for the lighted room at the back and you're shiny. And so is your snail.

The deadline to email writing to be read on MOTA is always about 5 or 6pm the night of the show. So you've got a little while to get that together for tonight. It only takes a minute: just paste your poem or essay or kvetch or sale item or event notice or whatever into the body of an email, check that it's going to memo@mcn.org and not to the whole group, unless that's what you want, and press send.

Besides that, you can have your own whole regular real radio show on KNYO. Contact Bob Young: bobb@poetworld.net and introduce yourself; you'll be on the schedule just like that! --

–Marco McClean