Mendocino County Today: Saturday, April 28, 2018

• April Showers
• Silver Verdict
• Kimberlin Book
• Debris Deadline
• Little Dog
• Wildlands Walks
• Navarro Quake
• Hospital Heist
• Weasel Baby
• Trump Vote
• Ed Notes
• Yesterday's Catch
• Highway Underwhelm
• DNC Lawsuit
• DNC Plantation
• TV Shows
• Playboy Mentality
• Climate Whiplash
• Succulent Poaching
• Adoption Day
• Hero Comey
• Book Reading
• Industrial Society
• Regressive Taxes
• Get Money
• Marco Radio

APRIL SHOWERS

An upper-level low will continue to bring numerous showers with occasional heavy downpours to much of our area today, with additional scattered showers on Sunday. Cool temperatures will continue into Monday. High pressure will rebuild on Monday, resulting in dry weather for the upcoming week. (National Weather Service)

SILVER FOUND GUILTY

In one of the swiftest jury deliberations in homicidal history, Caleb Silver's jury found him guilty for the murder of Dennis Boardman an hour and a half after being sequestered. This reporter had gone back to his office after the closing arguments and expected the jury would spend the afternoon picking a foreman and return a verdict sometime next week. However, from my vantage point at the bar across the street, I saw an officer of the court involved in the case mount the front steps, so I clapped a coaster over my beer and ran over to find out what was up. By then it was general knowledge. I asked the late Dennis Boardman's only surviving relative, his daughter, Laurel Boardman, for a comment an hour or so after the verdict came in and she said, "It's so sad that everybody loses," or something to that effect, and I was too shy to take out my notebook and jot it down, but it was something very like that. More to follow. (Bruce McEwen)

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From The DA

Caleb Silver Found Guilty Of Murder

UKIAH April 27 - A Mendocino County Superior Court jury returned from its deliberations by mid-afternoon today to announce a guilty verdict and true findings on special allegations in a 2015 murder case.

The jury found Caleb Dain Silver, age 27, a transient on the Mendocino coast, guilty of the murder in the first degree of Dennis Boardman in December 2015. The jury also found true special allegations that the defendant personally used a hammer and a knife in the commission of the murder.

With the defendant demanding a speedy imposition of sentence, a sentencing hearing has been calendared for May 16, 2018 at 9 o'clock in the morning in Department H of the Ukiah courthouse. Anybody interested in this case or this defendant is welcome to attend that hearing.

The prosecutor who presented the People's evidence at trial against defendant Silver was Deputy District Attorney Tim Stoen, the oldest full-time prosecutor practicing law in California.

The law enforcement agencies that diligently gathered and pieced together the necessary evidence in this case were: the lead agency, the Fort Bragg Police Department, the Mendocino County Sheriff's Office, the Mendocino Major Crimes Task Force, the California Highway Patrol, the Santa Barbara County Sheriff's Office, the Department of Justice forensic crime lab, and the District Attorney's own investigators.

The trial was conducted before the Honorable John Behnke, judge of the Mendocino County Superior Court in Ukiah.

BILL KIMBERLIN is a Boonville resident, retired visual effects film editor, and author of his recently published memoir: “Inside the Star Wars Empire,” published by Rowman and Littlefield/Lyons Press. Kimberlin’s book recounts his 20 years working for George Lucas at Industrial Light & Magic. The book is an amusing inside look at what it takes to produce those blockbuster Lucas films like Jurassic Park, Star Trek, Jumanji, Schindler’s List, Saving Private Ryan, Forrest Gump, and of course, Star Wars.

Kimberlin studied film at San Francisco State University and The American Film Institute. After graduation he worked in post-production for a San Francisco film company as a sound technician and later as a film editor. He produced his first documentary, Jeffries-Johnson 1910, on Jack Johnson, the first black heavyweight champion of the world, with the help of Francis Ford Coppola.

Talking about his new book, Kimberlin said, “I’d been taking notes from the day I started working there and later I thought that somebody who actually worked there could write about it. Those movies became more than movies, they were part of the culture.”

Kimberlin grew up in Kentfield in Marin County but spent a lot of his childhood in Anderson Valley. He landed a job at Industrial Light and Magic through a friend who worked there. He had worked for 12 years in San Francisco as a post-production specialist before signing on.

Kimberlin’s AV family history includes familiar names like the Rays (former proprietors of Ray’s Resort), the Prathers, and the Falleris. His mother’s sister married Avon Ray whose family owned Ray’s Resort, known also as Wellspring or River’s Bend. Avon’s mother was a Prather. And Avon’s sister Pearl married Frank Falleri who owned the old Philo Market (where Starr Automotive is now) and who also owned the AV Market in Boonville for a time.

Kimberlin will give a book talk about his new book at Gallery Books in Mendocino on Friday, May 4 from 6:30 to 7:30pm. Q&A will follow.

LEE HOWARD WONDERS:

Oh, I see, now the USACE [Army Corps of Engineers] says if you want to complain about your cleanup you MUST object by tomorrow or forever lose you rights! If you have concerns about debris removal work done on your property, but have not yet reported the issues to USACE, you are [were, now] required to do so by Friday 4/27/2018 to be eligible for any additional work. The USACE phone will close [closed] on Friday. The USACE were in attendance at the Mendocino County Board of Supervisors meeting on Tuesday, 4/24/2018, and no one said a word about this! All in government should be ashamed of not telling the people of this very important fact. Why? It's the people’s business, but as our government you won't tell us this kind of news. Why? Read more: https://sonomacountyrecovers.org/u-s-army-corps-of-engineer-information-phone-line-closes-friday-4-27

Lee Howard

Ukiah

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UPDATE – the above linked page has been removed and replaced with the following, extending the deadline to May 4: sonomacountyrecovers.org/closure-of-usace-debris-removal-information-phone-line-pushed-to-may-4th/

LITTLE DOG SAYS, “Coupla kittens showed up yesterday. ‘Are you our daddy?’ I didn't want to run down that degenerate Skrag in front of his children, so I just told them to wait by his food bowl. ‘He'll show up as soon as he's hungry, kids’."

AV LAND TRUST EVENTS

[1] Spring Wildflower Walk at Galbreath Wildlands Preserve, led by Kerry Heise and Linda MacElwee, Sunday, May 6, 2018, 10AM-1PM. Presented by Anderson Valley Land Trust, Navarro River Resource Center and Galbreath Wildlands Preserve. Contact avlt@mcn.org or 707-895-3150 for reservations and more information.

[2] A Day in the Oaks at Galbreath Wildlands Preserve. Saturday, May 12, 2018, 9:30AM-3:00PM. Join Kate Marianchild and Linda MacElwee as we explore the ecosystems of the oak woodlands. Presented by Anderson Valley Land Trust, Navarro River Resource Center and Galbreath Wildlands Preserve. There is a $25 fee for this event which includes a picnic lunch. Contact avlt@mcn.org or 707-895-3150 for reservations and more information.

MARSHALL NEWMAN alerts us to the odd quake off Navarro head Thursday.

scedc.caltech.edu/recent/Quakes/nc73007256.html

ABOUT AS LOW AS A THIEF CAN GO

Someone stole our Welch Allyn Vital Sign Machine from the Emergency Department; it looks just like the one in this photo.

This is a very expensive piece of equipment that is difficult to replace. Not having this makes it much harder to help community members in our ED. If you have any information about this unfortunate situation, please call Officer Joseph Shaw with the Fort Bragg Police Department at 707-961-2800 x181. Thank you.

(Coast Hospital Press Release)

WEASEL BABY LIVES!

End of Weasel-baby's story (Coast Listserve)

So many people seem to know about and be following Weasel-baby's story, I thought I'd let you all know that he is safely on his way to Sonoma Wildlife where they have appropriate cages for raising the aggressive, Whirling Dervish-escape artist he became when his eyes opened yesterday. Weasel eyes open when they are 26 days old—so he must have turned 26-days yesterday. We tried several times to give him back to his mother, but that didn't work, so he will be raised to adulthood in captivity, then released in the wild. Every species of animal requires a specialized kind of caging and diet. We are just not equipped to take on a weasel. I believe it was a short-tailed weasel with a little black tip on its tail. A special thank you to all the people who participated in his rescue, attempts to reunite him w/his mother, and transport to Sonoma — and to all you out there in List Serve Land who cared about his progress.

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The weasels came back here in Cleone a few years back. They are the BEST for rat eradication and also get gophers … and sometimes chickens. It’s a compromise. They don’t venture all that far from the burrow. We gave up on the back chicken house after too many weasel incursions and chicken losses. But they DON’T ever come to the other houses and we never have a rodent problem.

MENDO WENT FOR MS. (NOT) INEVITABLE

Letter to the Editor

I guess my questions got lost in the clutter of your busy days. Have you noticed how when you're old even the same old shit gets harder and harder?

But please say: did Trump carry AV? Did Trump carry Mendo Co? I always assumed he had just as I always assumed that taking after our emperor would cost me some readers. But insurrection of thought precedes insurrection as deed, and the more you know, the more you owe and, besides, as the victims of a counter-revolutionary coup, never in our lives have we been more in need of a backlash. Anyway… if you think it's easy finding that info on the web, I think you are mistaken. Totalitarianism is when you can't even get a straight answer out of your machine. I'll take the horse's mouth any day, any time.

Best regards,

Pat Patterson

Prineville, Oregon

ms replies: We don’t have easy access to the individual AV precinct voting totals for November 2016. But Mendo was about 58% for Hillary, 29% for The Donald.

ED NOTES

THE AVA GOES DEEP: A good physical metaphor for the true state of the nation is the Potter Valley Diversion where huge gulps of the Eel River are siphoned south through a hole in a ridge dug by Chinese labor at the dawn of the 20th Century. Originally intended to power primitive turbines to electrify Ukiah, then an outback farm town, now an outback franchise fast food town, today, more than a century later, several million downstream Americans as far south as Sausalito depend on it to live and to farm, assuming you consider industrial wine production farming. If the Diversion collapses, as it probably will in an eventual earthquake, it will take with it a large part of the NorCal economy, which is a crucial part of the Diversion-like larger economy, a paper construct based on faith that it will provide agua forever. The Potter Valley Diversion, dear readers, is as improbable and as tenuous as America! The metaphor works!

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THE SUPERVISORS spent a couple of hours last Tuesday discussing a $50,000 report they'd commissioned on the growing homeless populations in the Ukiah Valley. Willits doesn't have much of a homeless prob because Willits doesn't offer the array of free stuff available from several different Ukiah-based charities, all of them dependent on tax money. Fort Bragg's homeless population is primarily dependent on a largely publicly-funded charity called Hospitality House, which is located in the center of town, resulting in a permanent sidewalk population of persons unwilling and unable to care for themselves. Like the Potter Valley Diversion, everyone downstream of homelessness assumes it will continue to just kinda work out.

THE STICKLER in the debate about what to do about the growing population of the walking wounded is, and here we go typically Mendo, is the terror our public officials have in saying "compulsion" out loud, or even to whisper it in private, as if anything good for the homeless and its host communities can happen without it, as if small towns and lightly populated counties like Mendocino County can treat and house a large population of troubled, permanently dependent people without the serious support of the federal government. A national problem needs a national plan. There is none. In fact, there may not even be a national anymore given the political divisions in the country.

THE MARBUT REPORT on homelessness in the Ukiah Valley was written by a portly, brisk Republican. A Democrat of the Mendo type couldn't have managed it. Freed of the boilerplate necessary to leaving Ukiah with fifty grand — you can't hand in a statement of the obvious confined to a few sentences and expect to get a big pay day with another $25,000 for checking in occasionally for a progress report on your recommendations, the Marbut Report said this: Do what you reasonably can for the homegrown population of dope heads, drop fall drunks and miscellaneous incompetents before you do nice things for the north-south transients who simply take advantage of whatever freebies are available and will stick around so long as you feed them. Maybe give these professional sponges a meal or two but don't try to house them or otherwise make them comfortable. Keep 'em moving.

THIS SIMPLE (and obvious) recommendation inspired a howling and gnashing of teeth among the several hundred paid local doers of good that could be heard clear over in Boonville. Why the inhumanity of it!

BUT WHAT'S HUMANE about the present strategies? It's humane to assist a growing population of drug and alcohol-addicted people to commit public suicide? It's humane to subsidize an even larger population of people who refuse to contribute to their own maintenance? (The old distinction between hobos and bums remains useful: hobos would work and move on; bums stayed as long as you fed them. Mendocino County is subsidizing outdoor death and feeding more and more people who will stay as long as they're fed, with a bunch of people nearly as numerous as the bums and public suicides getting paid to preside over the whole show.)

THE SOLUTION is a revival of federally subsidized state hospitals for the terminally impaired, a federal housing program for working people who don't make enough money to buy or rent shelter, single payer health care, and a federal jobs program at a livable wage for people who can't find work. Not a chance in the present political context for any of it, and here's what will happen locally: Lots of meetings but no change as the unhoused dependent population grows larger and larger.

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THE WAY WE LIVE NOW. 72% of school-age children in the Ukiah schools qualify for free and reduced lunches. American special ops forces are presently deployed in 149 countries.

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INGENIOUS, DOGGED POLICE WORK finally nailed the California Strangler via DNA evidence obtained from an ancestry website. Here in Mendocino County, assuming the authorities would act on the obvious, which is that the 1990 car bombing of Judi Bari was a crime committed in Ukiah and Redwood Valley, that famous felony could also be solved via the DNA found on the bomber's confession letter, now housed at the Santa Rosa Press Democrat. Match that DNA to the DNA from the Bari-Sweeney family and bingo! you've got the bomber who is, I and others assume, Mike Sweeney, Mendocino County's former trash czar. On the off chance anyone else is interested, this case is thoroughly discussed at the ava website at www.theava.com/archives/1235

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EARLY MORNING hitchhiker, Boonville, tall bearded young man a paper bag at his feet, Coast-bound traffic ignoring him. Interpreting this visual we see a young man without prospects and probably without hope just released from the County Jail. Probably released a minute after midnight, he's made it over the hill to Boonville and is headed back to Fort Bragg, I'd guess, which may or may not be his home, and he may not, as is likely, have a home anywhere.

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KYM KEMP'S story posted here yesterday — www.theava.com/archives/81921#2 — bears watching as it strongly suggests a pair of rogue cops out of Rohnert Park are engaging in extra-curricular law enforcement. How two cops out of RP are patrolling the Mendo-SoCo county line area of 101 for southbound dope cargoes needs some serious explaining.

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TODAY'S TYCOONS don't seem anywhere near as class conscious as the oligarchs of yesteryear. Jay Gould famously boasted that if it came to it, he "could hire half the working class to kill the other half." Most, if not all of today's ruling class, at least pretend to be liberals.

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WE ARE URGING ava readers to vote for Michelle Hutchins for County Superintendent of Schools if, for no other reason than she isn't her opponent. Mrs. Hutchins would be the first woman to hold the position after 150 years of men, the last 50 years a collection of criminal men, and men whose own schooling obviously didn't take. Mrs. Hutchins is smart and capable. Yes, she had some personality differences with the ladies at the Anderson Valley elementary school, difficulties inevitable when Mrs. H. stepped into a district previously managed on a Do Your Own Thing basis.

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A READER asked me," Why don't you play the Thursday quiz at Lauren's Restaurant anymore?" Because my hearing is so poor it's an ordeal. And unfair to quiz mates to ask them to repeat the questions all night. I still attend a public meeting now and then just to show the flag, but I can't hear much of anything, not that I'm missing much given the nature of public meetings anymore. But now that the most important ones are telecast I can watch them at frost fan decibel level at the office, and even play back the fun parts.

CATCH OF THE DAY, April 27, 2018

LEE ADAMS, Alameda/Ukiah. Kidnapping pursuant to carjacking.

WILLIAM BARRY, Ukiah. Disorderly conduct-alcohol, disorderly conducting “lodge without owner’s consent.” (Frequent flyer.)

ERIN BRANYAN, Concord/Ukiah. Failure to appear.

JAMES BRAY, Fort Bragg. Probation revocation.

TIMOTHY DIGGS, Ukiah. Disorderly conduct-alcohol.

JACOB GARCIA, Ukiah. Protective order violation, probation revocation.

DANIEL GRIFFITH, Eureka/Ukiah. Probation revocation.

ALAN HOLLIDAY, Ukiah. Disorderly conduct-alcoholl, probation revocation. (Frequent flyer.)

JOSE NUNEZ, Calhoun/Willits. Domestic battery, vandalism.

ALEX SANCHEZ, Fort Bragg. First degree robbery, willful cruelty to child with possible injury or death, conspiracy, criminal threats.

JOHNNY SHIELDS, Ukiah. Grand theft bicycle, stolen property, probation revocation.

JASON SIERRA, Willits. DUI-alcohol&drugs, suspended license for DUI.

THE ETERNAL BOTTLENECK

Editor:

In late 2018 or early 2019, the project to widen Highway 101 at San Antonio Creek (the Marin-Sonoma county line) will be finished. It will add one high-occupancy vehicle lane in each direction at this location, which hasn’t been widened in more than 70 years (the two-lane northbound bridge over San Antonio Creek was built in 1929; the two-lane southbound bridge was built in 1947). During these 70 years, the population of Sonoma County has increased about sixfold.

Completion of this segment of the project will still leave bottlenecks through Petaluma and from Atherton Avenue in Novato north to San Antonio Creek that won’t be addressed until sometime after (perhaps long after) 2020. Upon completion of these last segments, the addition of a single HOV lane in each direction between Santa Rosa and Novato will have cost more than $1 billion and will have taken about a quarter of a century.

I have to admit that I’m underwhelmed by the pace, cost and results.

Andy McLean

Cotati

DNC: STFU ABOUT RUSSIA!

“The DNC is doing a good job of winning New York and California,” said Mahoning, Ohio Democratic party chair David Betras. “I’m not saying it’s not important — of course it’s important — but do they honestly think that people that were just laid off another shift at the car plant in my home county give a shit about Russia when they don’t have a frickin’ job?”

zerohedge.com/news/2018-04-24/midwestern-democrats-want-dnc-stfu-about-trump-russia

COUNTER-#RESISTANCE?

by James Kunstler

Who hit Kanye with that white privilege stick? The rapper/fashion maven/theologian/Kardashian arm candyman sent chills through the Twitterverse when he declared himself, somewhat elliptically, off-the-bus of the Progressive #Resistance movement and an admirer of the Golden One in the Oval Office. This came in his endorsement of YouTube blogger Candace Owen, who happens to not be down with the cause of the national victim lottery. Both Kanye and Candace have apparently crossed some boundary into a Twilight Zone of independent thought. Many probably wonder how they are able to get out of bed in the morning without instructions from Don Lemon.

Speaking as a white cis-hetero mammal, I’m not quite as dazzled by the president, but it’s a relief to see, at last, some small rebellion against the American Stasi who have turned the public arena into a giant holding pen for identity offenders — though it is but one corner of the triad-of-hysteria that also includes the Hate Russia campaign and the crusade against men. This nonsense has been going on long enough, while the country hurtles heedlessly into a long emergency of economic disarray.

Next in line after Kanye and Candace, a popular Twitter critter name of Chance the Rapper endorsed Kanye endorsing Candace, more or less, by tweeting “black people don’t have to be Democrats.” The horror this thought aroused! Slavery, these days, it turns out, has a lot of appeal — maybe not so much for laboring in the canefields under the noonday sun as for serving juleps in the DNC plantation house. It happened that Kanye’s mom was a college professor, Chance’s dad was an aide to Chicago Mayor Daley (Jr.), and later worked in Mr. Obama’s Department of Labor. Candace describes her childhood home in Stamford, CT, as “very poor,” but she rose far-and-fast out of college to become an executive on Wall Street in her twenties. What they seem to have in common is being tainted with bourgeois values, horror again!

In speaking up against the Victim Cartel, it is thought that they threaten a solidarity of narrative: that the USA (perhaps all of Western Civ) is composed of identity victims and identity oppressors. Candace, being a more conventional polemicist (i.e., not a rapper) makes the point overtly and repeatedly in her writing that all the “help” and solicitude black Americans have gotten from their overseers on the Democratic Party plantation has only made life worse for them — especially policies based on the idea that black people need lots of assistance to overcome structural racism and the legacies of slavery.

Luckily for the rest of us, the DNC has decided to put its mojo behind a lawsuit against Russia and Wikileaks for ruining the 2016 election. It’s an amazing exercise in idiocy — like, who, exactly, in Russia do they expect to subpoena for this epic showdown in court? If the suit finds a sympathetic judge who does not laugh it off — not so difficult these days — we’ll be treated to a fabulous Chinese fire drill in a three-ring circus of clowns running around in DNC dirty laundry. The party may not survive the suit. They’ve Whigged themselves into a final, fatal apoplexy of irrelevance.

I dunno about the perpetually scowling Kanye, with his periodic mood problems and spotlight-stealing antics on stage, or Chance the Rapper’s artificial hood raptures, but Candace makes the argument for the value of a common culture that might bind us together as a nation of individuals, not hostile tribes, starting with a language that everybody can understand. Of course, the whole Kanye/Candace dust-up may be forgotten by the middle of next week, and the country can go back to gaslighting itself into either a new civil war or world war three. Candace seems to have drive, guts, and stamina and there’s no sign that she’s going to shut up. Won’t some Ivy League university please invite her to speak, just to see what happens?

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

“This is the ‘Handmaid’s Tale’ conversation. THAT’S the ‘Westworld’ conversation.”

ON LINE COMMENT OF THE DAY

The whole Hollywood scene is an ugly place. Women had to compromise themselves to be able to follow a career path in SoCal. Women forty years ago were instructed by their mothers to avoid situations that we now hear about all the time. Compromise under power men was commonplace. The culture bred by the Playboy mentality of the 60s to the 90s have caused a lot of the problems we are seeing today. The women’s movement has succeeded in bringing out a lot of the problems for a breath of fresh air. Men are learning that the good old boy days are over. Social change is always painful. Maybe we will get back to where marriage is the core of society and some of the shenanigans will cease. Playboy after Dark and scenes from the Playboy mansion fostered a sexual morality that pulled in many men AND women. People on the edge got hurt.

MORE CLIMATE CHANGE 'WHIPLASH' AHEAD For CA

California will zigzag between droughts and floods which will become more intense and more frequent in the coming decades unless global emissions of planet-warming greenhouse gases are checked, researchers said Monday.

juancole.com/2018/04/climate-california-whiplash.html

STOLEN SUCCULENTS: California hipster plants at center of smuggling crisis

In China, they are prized for their chubby limbs and cute shapes. In Korea, they are a treasured hobby for housewives. But on the coastal cliffs of California, the dudleya succulent plants are vanishing, snatched up by international smugglers and shipped to an Asian middle-class market hungry for California native flora.

theguardian.com/environment/2018/apr/27/stolen-succulents-california-hipster-plants-at-center-of-smuggling-crisis

‘EMPTY THE SHELTER’ EVENT

Mendocino County Animal Care Services joins 111 Animal Shelters throughout eleven states in the United States on Saturday May 5, 2018 for an amazing “Empty the Shelter” event.

The Bissell Pet Foundation will cover all adoption fees for adult dogs & cats at all participating shelters. Mendocino County residents must pay the required $25 dog license fee.

The Mendocino County Animal Shelter is located at 298 Plant Road and will be open for adoption on Saturday May 5, 2018 from 10:00 a.m. until 4:00 p.m. For more information call 707-467-6453.

Carmel J. Angelo

Chief Executive Officer

THE HERO OF COMEY’S STORY is, naturally, James Comey. His sense of self-regard is at least as grandiose as Trump’s and it comes embroidered with pieties cherrypicked from the greatest hits of moral philosophy. His writing turns brittle when he begins spouting off about the ethics of leadership, where his observations are as insipid as Kanye West’s daily epigrams from his work-in-progress “philosophy” book.

Here’s Comey extrapolating on the humility of leadership:

Of course, in a healthy organization, doubt is not a weakness, it is wisdom, because people are at their most dangerous when they are certain that their cause is just and their facts are right. And I’m not talking about finger-in-the-wind, I’m afraid-to-make-a-decision kind of doubt. Decisions have to be made, often quickly, even the hardest decisions. And the hardest ones always seem to need to be made the fastest and on the least information. But those decisions must be made with the recognition they could be wrong. The humility leaves the leader open to better information until the last possible moment.

These observations will never rival Montaigne’s. They sound more like they came from a TED Talk by self-empowerment guru Tony Perkins.

— Jeffrey St. Clair

INK STAINED WRETCH-ETTES

On May 13th, join the Mendocino Coast Writers’ Conference and Gallery Bookshop to celebrate the publication of the 6th annual Noyo River Review ”a literary journal of poetry, fiction and nonfiction” featuring prizewinning writing from the 2017 Mendocino Coast Writers’ Conference and visual art from Mendocino County artists. The reading will be held at Gallery Bookshop, on the corner of Main and Kasten Streets in Mendocino from 2:00 p.m. until 4:00p.m. Writers will be coming from throughout the Northern California to read work that was chosen for the Noyo River Review.

The Mendocino Coast Writers’ Conference is a vibrant, interactive gathering of aspiring writers and award-winning authors in a three-day immersive conference which will be held this summer from August 2nd to August 4th, in Mendocino, California. This year’s faculty include: Elizabeth Rosner, Indigo Moor, Linda Joy Myers, Guadalupe Garcia McCall, Vanessa Hua, Shanthi Sekaran, Jason S. Ridler, Nina Sadowsky and Elizabeth McKenzie. The registration fee for the conference is $575 before June 30 and $625 thereafter. For more information about the Noyo River Review and the Mendocino Coast Writers’ Conference, visit www.mcwc.org

“THE DISTINGUISHING FEATURE of advanced industrial society is its effective suffocation of those needs which demand liberation — liberation also from that which is tolerable and rewarding and comfortable — while it sustains and absolves the destructive power and repressive function of the affluent society. Here, the social controls exact the overwhelming need for the production and consumption of waste; the need for stupefying work where it is no longer a real necessity; the need for modes of relaxation which soothe and prolong this stupefication; the need for maintaining such deceptive liberties as free competition at administered prices, a free press which censors itself, free choice between brands and gadgets.”

— Herbert Marcuse

THEY'LL NOTICE THEN

Editor,

So, a 25 percent increase in the California gas tax, from 47 to 59 cents, in addition to the $50 increase in the vehicle registration fee is not that much, according to Dianne Steinhauser, head of the Transportation Authority of Marin. She says “no one has noticed” in the circles she travels in and, in addition, she says, “I don’t think people are suffering.”

Perhaps she should talk to a different group of people in addition to getting a good public relations firm. This regressive tax takes about $200 per year out of the pockets of the people who can least afford it — and out of the economy.

The increase by itself does not seem like much but when we drive to a neighboring state and get gas for about $1 a gallon less, it is a lot. Unfortunately, previous gas taxes, once collected, were diverted to other “more important social and environmental” needs rather than the roads the tax was voted for.

For Steinhauser, head of the multi-million-dollar agency wanting more, this tax is great. For those she thinks have “not noticed” or are “not suffering” is the attitude that so many of our representatives have taken. The very ones who passed this tax in one week, with no hearings or public input, will certainly notice and may be suffering, when this tax is repealed by the voters in November.

Ron Leach

Novato

WELCOME TO THE WONDERFUL WORLD OF CAPITALISM!

Access to Capital Event

Access to Capital, Thursday, May 17, 2:30 - 5:00pm; There's more than one way to finance a business. Join us for this unique opportunity to: Hear how successful business owners have funded their businesses; Learn from experts how to successfully navigate the lending process; Network with lenders and business owners at the monthly Coast and Ukiah chamber mixers following the event. Live in *Ukiah* at the Grace Hudson Museum, 431 S. Main St.; Live Stream in *Fort Bragg *at Cinder's Productions, 528 N. Main St. Presented by Economic Development & Financing Corp.Tickets $10 in advance, $20 at the door; Scholarships available. To register visit: www.edfc.org or call 707.234.5705 Thank you! Diann

Diann Simmons
Program Director
Economic Development & Financing Corp.
A 501(c)3 Community Development Financial Institution (CDFI)
175 E. Church St., Ukiah CA 95482
707.234.5705
A2CFlyer

MEMO OF THE AIR: Good Night Radio tonight!

The first MOTA show after the biblical end of the world last Monday! So it's special, keeping in mind that homeopathic quantities of deadly Planet Nibiru are still out there somewhere, aimed at the fevered collective imagination of Earth, and there'll be plenty of other close shaves, so.

And I'll be in Fort Bragg for a third Friday in a row. You —yes, YOU— are invited to drop by 325 N. Franklin, next door to the Tip Top bar, after 9pm and just wander in. Negotiate your way between elements of the '70s-dayglow storefront diorama, achieve the somewhat more normally lighted room at the back and you and your wack personal mania or novelty musical act or thoughtful, well-reasoned concern are on the air. If somebody's with me ahead of you, there's the couch. The haunted piano has been exorcised and removed from the building, that's over, but the raccoon that lives inside the ceiling has been too crafty for us. Listen for it, and cry out if you hear something; that'll be fun.

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. Just paste your poem or essay or kvetch or sale item or event notice 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 of your own style and devising on KNYO. Contact Bob Young: bobb@poetworld.net and introduce yourself; he'll put your hand on the correct knob and you can begin your new life at a top level in the cult of radio. No difficult goofy handshakes to learn, no loyalty oath, no shoes, no shirt, no problem. Pants, though; you have to have some kind of pants on; it's just basic courtesy. Pyjamas count, thongs don't.

Memo of the Air: Good Night Radio: Every Friday, 9pm to 4 or 5am on 107.7fm KNYO-LP Fort Bragg, and 105.1fm KMEC-LP Ukiah. And also there and anywhere else via http://knyo.org or http://kmecradio.org and if none of that works for you try http://TuneIn.com and look up KNYO-LP.

Marco McClean