Mendocino County Today: Saturday, June 23, 2018

• Solstice Heat
• Election Results
• Cop Investigation
• C Passes
• Ag Dysfunction
• Hare Creek
• Committee B
• Ed Notes
• Little Dog
• State Street
• Peppermint Rats
• Yesterday's Catch
• Hucksterism
• Cancer News
• Schadenfreude
• Double Logging
• Amazon Greed
• Catwoman
• Offendedness Cartel
• California Foodways
• Whitesboro Breakfast
• PA Agenda
• Approaching Infinity
• Don't Care
• Indigenous Artists
• Marco Radio

HOT! A summer pattern kicked in Friday with the typical three day temperature rise before the marine layer comes back. It got up to 92 in Boonville Friday, although a breeze kept it from feeling blistering. Should be around 94 on Saturday and 90 on Sunday before returning to the low 80s for the rest of the week. 102 in Ukiah. Supposed to be 106 in Ukiah on Saturday and 100 on Sunday before dropping into the low 90s for the rest of the week.

FINAL ELECTION RESULTS were posted Friday some 16 days after the election. And, SURPRISE!, the Coast Hospital parcel tax barely passed! There were no other surprises in the final results which generally confirmed the preliminary percentages and outcomes.

Fifth District Supervisor: Ted Williams (41.4%) vs. Chris Skyhawk (31%) in the November run-off. We expect that Williams will get a majority of Roderick’s third place 19.25% vote in November making him the presumptive winner at this point.

Third District Supervisor: John Pinches (30.84%) vs. John Haschak (30.33%) were nearly tied. This one is harder to handicap because it’s hard to tell where the voters who supported the other candidates will line up.

The Coast Hospital Parcel Tax Measure C ended up gaining just enough votes in the final tally to overcome a 100 vote deficit and barely pass, getting 4593 votes, just 7 votes over the two-thirds, or 4586, needed.

The Supervisors’ Measure G to apply bed tax to campgrounds went down 53.5% to 46.5%.

And, as expected, AV School Superintendent Michelle Hutchins maintained her lead, ending up with 52.11% over Ukiah Unified Assistant Superintendent Bryan Barrett with a niggardly 47.43%.

No surprises in the other local elections. County Elections Clerk and Assistant Clerk-Recorder-Assessor Katrina Bartolomie got two thirds of the vote, with challengers Dirk Larson and Jeanette Kroppman splitting the remainder.

Unopposed incumbents Lloyd Weer (Auditor Controller), Tom Allman (Sheriff), David Eyster (DA), Shari Schapmire (Treasurer-Tax Collector) all got well over 90% each.

Interestingly, turnout in the Fifth District (almost 57%) was much higher than turnout in the Third District (almost 46%).

Footnote: While Democratic party hacks Jared Huffman, Mike McGuire and Jim Wood all got 65% or more Mendo votes indicating the large Democrat-leaning voters in Mendo, Senator Diane Feinstein got only 45.5% of Mendo voters (and 44% statewide), not even a majority. The aging solon (Feinstein’s 85 now and will be 91 when her next term ends) who didn’t even get the endorsement of the State’s Democratic Party will face liberal Democrat and former State Senator Kevin de Leon (who got 13.5% in Mendo) in a November run-off. The "leading" Republican in the Senate Race, James Bradley, got only 6.3% of Mendo votes.

ROHNERT PARK COP AT CENTER OF INVESTIGATION INTO DRUG SEIZURE

Rohnert Park Public Safety Sgt. Brendon “Jacy” Tatum is no longer employed by the city amid an investigation into a mysterious drug seizure in Mendocino County, city officials said Friday.

pressdemocrat.com/news/8462549-181/rohnert-park-cop-at-center

ED NOTE: Kym Kemp of the essential website, Redheaded Blackbelt, first reported this story, which was then fleshed out by KQED News. The PD should give credit where credit is due.

JADE TIPPET OF FORT BRAGG WRITES:

How I love being wrong!!!

Yesterday at 11:25, Mendocino County Clerk Recorder released the final counts for the June Ballot.

For Measure C: 4593, 66.77%

Against Measure C: 2286, 33.23%

This is an amazing victory! The Yes on Measure C Committee thanks everyone who put their shoulders to the wheel to make this happen. And thank you to each and every person who voted Yes!!

Thank you so much!!

A READER WRITES:

Confidential: From what I heard, Kelly Overton resigned/was fired because he was unable to work with anyone. The dysfunction he was creating was threatening to further dismantle the Ag Commissioners office. So, good riddance. The real question is why did he get hired in the first place? There is nothing in his resume that hints of him being qualified to manage anything. The new Ag Commissioner appears to be a good hire.

HARE CREEK

Follow up to Hare Creek Draft EIR public process

Thank you for taking interest in the proposed Hare Creek Center project, especially those of you who took the time to send in comments on the Draft EIR. We just wanted to let you know where the process goes from here.

City staff are currently reading through all the comments. Eventually they will scan everything sent in and put this information up on the active permits webpage (https://city.fortbragg.com/486/Active-Permit-Applications). The comments go to the consultant, Michael Baker International, and a Final EIR will be prepared that hopefully addresses al the issues brought up during the public comment period. The Final EIR is scheduled to be presented for public review this fall.

However, because of major deficiencies in the Draft EIR, we, and others, repeatedly asked that a revised Draft EIR be prepared and presented for another round of public comment. We won’t know if they choose to do this, or just present a Final EIR this fall (or whenever they complete it). We will let you know once we have new information about the status of this project.

Currently City staff have posted comments from 3 public agencies. The one from CDFW refers back to the comments they provided for the 2015 project. This can be found in Appendix B, but we can send it to you directly if you want. Because it is taking so much time for all the other comments to be posted, we have attached some of the documents we sent in so you can read more about the concerns we expressed. Attached are a CACLU summary letter, the comments provided by Leslie Kashiwada, and a through analysis of the biological resources section of the Draft EIR, also written by Leslie. If you are interested in receiving a copy of any of the other comments submitted by other members of CACLU, please let us know.

Finally, save the date of June 28, 6:30 - 8:30 pm for a public meeting at Cotton Auditorium about MCRPD’s proposed Off Highway Vehicle (OHV) park on their property located up Hwy 20 just east of Summers Lane.

Thank you, Leslie Kashiwada on behalf of Citizens for Appropriate Coastal Land Use (CACLU)

AS EXPECTED, the Sheriff’s Measure B Committee meeting next Wednesday doesn’t have anything substantial to discuss anymore now that they’ve hired consultant Lee Kemper for $40k to do a Needs Assessment and tell them what they should already know.

Discussion and Possible Action Items. Public expression on agenda topics will occur.

1. Report from Member Weer, Auditor, on Measure B Tax Funds with Discussion and Possible Action. Member Weer. (5 mins)

2. Stepping Up Initiative with Discussion and Possible Action. Member Angelo. (10 mins)

3. Update on Contract and Detailed Scope of Work for the Lee Kemper Needs Assessment, June 19 Board of Supervisors Meeting with Discussion and Possible Action. Member Angelo. (30 mins) 2

4. Needs Assessment Progress Report with Discussion and Possible Action. Member Angelo (20 mins)

5. Monthly Committee Update to the Board of Supervisors at their First Meeting Each Month with Discussion and Possible Action. Vice Chair Barash (15 mins)

LIKE MOST of Mendo’s many “advisory” committees, the Measure B committee will now retreat into semi-irrelevancy while they wait (indefinitely) for Mr. Kemper to offer his opinions. Of course, they could be out looking for candidate sites in their various districts (Mendo has lots of abandoned properties up and down the inland corridor) to identify possible low-security distributed residential facilities, or they could go over what little information Camille Schrader provides about mental health services and clients, or maybe even review the Sheriff’s booking log to see the short list of frequent flyers who need but are not getting any “services.” But they seem happy to sit back and do basically nothing (not that they’ve done much so far anyway).

ACCORDING to the agenda CEO Carmel Angelo and Sheriff Tom Allman have “planned absences” for their Wednesday, June 27, 2018 Measure B meeting so the three items (above) which might have had some small value will not even be presented. (You’d think that whoever prepared the agenda for the June 27 meeting would have noticed that the agenda has three items being presented by an “absent” member, but…) We wonder if anyone will notice that Kemper’s fancy contract doesn’t even call for a completion date.

UPDATE: Late Friday, somebody at least realized and corrected the agenda problem:

The June 27, 2018 MH Treatment Act Citizen's Oversight Committee Agenda has been revised.

The revisions are:

In Member Angelo's absence: Item 5.b. Stepping Up Initiative will be continued until the July 25, 2018 meeting.

Item 5.d. Update on Contract and Detailed Scope of Work for Lee Kemper will be addressed by Member Miller.

Item 5.e. Needs Assessment Progress Report will be addressed by Member Miller.

Item 5.f. City of Willits Resolution re: Old Howard Hospital has been added by Member Myrtle.

AND in that update they included a (non-text) photocopy of the Willits City Council’s May 23 resolution on the subject of the planned conversion of Old Howard Hospital into a Psychiatric Health Facility (PHF):

Willits City Council Reso re Howard Mem. Hospital 5-23-18

THE WILLITS resolution was dated prior to the May 23 Measure B committee meeting. It specifically requests assurances that Willits City regs will be followed and insists that all required studies be conducted and staffing be arranged.

WILL THE SUPES respond? They’ve had since May 23, but so far nothing.

ED NOTES

THE FINAL VOTE COUNT is in right on schedule as the very last in the state. We were pretty sure our math would hold, and that Anderson Valley's Michelle Hutchins preliminary plurality over her phantom Ukiah opponent, Brian Barrett, would be too great for Barrett to overcome. (Barrett didn't show up for an important debate, dispatching his non-verbal pal, former County Superintendent, Paul Tichinin, to do his talking for him.)

For us here at the mighty AVA Ms. Hutchins' victory is particularly gratifying because it means she overcame a truly vicious campaign of secret slander that her detractors spread throughout the County's teaching faculties never, on their most lucid days, what you'd call centers of critical thinking. For instance, an Albion lady I've known for years said to me, "But my friend in Boonville says…" Says what? I asked. "Well my friend is against Hutchins and I trust my friend."

* * *

WE WERE HOPING that Roderick voters would somehow show up in enough force for him to squeeze into a runoff with the 5th District's lead vote getter, Ted Williams. The Roderick forces remained no-shows, and now we'll have an uninteresting run-off between Williams and Skyhawk, although they're not political twins despite their same-same political-social demographic of Coastal Mendo. Roderick has an attractive edge to him, and would have been much more likely to take on the ever more dysfunctional County leadership of the Queeg-like CEO Carmel Angelo and her partly lame duck, wholly rubber stamp Board of Supervisors. Supervisor McCowen, as we reported yesterday, got the full Queeg at Tuesday's meeting when he attempted to suggest that the buck stops with the Supervisors, not the CEO. His fellow Supervisors disappeared on him while the rest of us got an object lesson of who's running the County show. Which wouldn't be all that bad if local government weren't in the disarray it is — the Juvenile Hall fiasco: the hopelessly screwed-up marijuana policy; Mental Health services wherein upwards of $25 annual millions allegedly benefits this or that dependent population with no reports on who's providing what to whom; elimination of the Sheriff''s overtime budget, which obviously will have to be made up somehow, and so on. The primary diff between Skyhawk and Williams is that Williams is much more likely to see The Prob more clearly than Skyhawk who has made his way for years as an apparatchik in The Prob. (The Prob defined: Mendo's non-profit, public agency nexus heavy on believer-type Billery Democrats.)

IN THE WILDS of the County's northeast, up there at ground zero Emerald Triangle, we've got a runoff between Cowboy John Pinches, a former Supervisor returning for another go at it, and a much less vivid Willits school teacher named Haschak.

These two ran neck-and-neck in the June election and will meet in a November run-off. The question is, Who will the also-rans in that crowded race now support? Haschak has the backing of the Warm Fuzzies and, presumably, much of the public employee juggernaut as fired up by Joe Wildman, the Willy Loman of local rightwing Democrats, the people who have gifted us with Donald Trump. Are there enough of Fuzzy Warms to elect Haschak? Will the formidable Mrs. Haschak get hubbykins off the rote drone of the Local Lib Lab Catechism? (No offshore drilling, low cost housing, nice things for the kids, support for the pot industry, etc. Generalities pleasing to the Church of the PC, but empty of specifics.)

* * *

CLOSER TO HOME, the rogue charter school-funded Blackbird Farm, Philo, has racked up another Notice of Violation for building an unpermitted road. Meanwhile, at the foot of Ray's Road, Blackbird's entry point, we've got OneTaste, a sexual "educational" business committed to instruction in "spiritual" masturbation. The onanists paid $4.9 million for a Philo property where, for $5,000 a weekend, men and women, previously unknown to each other, are taught "orgasmic meditation."

THE ORGASMICS arrive in Philo in droves, many of them traveling in charter buses from the Bay Area and paying lots and lots to orgasmically meditate, which seems to me some pretty darn tricky multi-tasking, but I guess that’s why you need lessons.

* * *

SPOTTED in San Francisco, a t-shirt inscribed, "Gayest Dad in the World!"

LITTLE DOG SAYS, “Gophers are all over Skrag's neighborhood, which is the office, which is also Skrag's food and water source. The gophs pop up right in his face! And what does he do? Rolls over and goes to sleep! This guy is what you call a total non-contributor!”

LEAVE STATE STREET ALONE

To the Editor:

Recently those traveling through the city of Ukiah have been given a glimpse of what “City Staff” thinks is best for those of us who drive a car through the middle of Ukiah will be in the near future.

On Wednesday May 16 from 4 until 6:30 p.m. Northbound traffic crept along at slower than a stop and go pace. People walking on the sidewalks were moving along faster.

Today, June 6, once again we see the traffic totally jammed up. From Clara Ave. to Low Gap Road, traffic was almost at a total standstill with traffic being shoved into one lane for the long overdue road repair. Again, people walking the sidewalks were progressing at a faster pace.

This is what the fine “City Staff” has in mind for us if they progress with this crazy downsizing of State Street…and making it into one lane each way through mid town. I continue to be amazed that I have not talked with anyone who thinks this is a good idea.

With someone leading this department making what is reportedly about $250,000 compensation per year, I think our area deserves better ideas than this.

City leaders should take control with this issue promptly. This type of radical change should be offered to the citizens of Ukiah via being on the next ballot.

It does not matter where the money for this crazy project comes from. The bottom line is, this is our tax dollars. And we expect those dollars to be spent wisely.

G. Sissons

Ukiah

NATURAL RAT DETERRANT

A READER WRITES: I had a few rats in my wall. Got one with a trap, but rats are smart and stopped taking the bait. So, knowing rats hate peppermint, I drilled a few small holes up high in the walls; then I folded four squares of toilet paper together to make one thick square pad and saturated it with peppermint oil. One pad for each drilled hole. I rolled the pad into a tight cylinder and pushed it into the hole in the wall, thus saturating the inside of the walls with the essence of peppermint oil. So far, 3 days later, no rats, and my room smells yummy! Hope this trick works for others. Just be careful with peppermint oil - wash your hands well afterwards, and don't touch your face til your hands are cleaned! I figured this out after learning old timers would plant copious peppermints around the foundation of their houses to deter the pests.

CATCH OF THE DAY, June 22, 2018

MORGAN AMMERMAN, Willits. Receiving stolen property, probation revocation. (Frequent Flyer)

SHAWN BIAS, Fort Bragg. Under influence, paraphernalia. (Frequent Flyer)

NATHAN DELACRUZ-OROZCO, Santa Rosa/Ukiah. Failure to appear.

WESLEY DICKSON, Redwood Valley. Failure to appear.

DAVID DUES, Ukiah. Disorderly conduct-alcohol.

MIGUEL ESQUIVEL JR., Ukiah. DUI, suspended license (for DUI) probation revocation.

JOSE FELIX, Redwood Valley. Disorderly conduct-alcohol.

KENDALL GRIFFITTS, Willits. Disorderly conduct-alcohol.

JORGE HERNANDEZ-BARRERA, Ukiah. Disorderly conduct-alcohol.

JACEY JACOBSON, Point Arena. Failure to appear.

HEATH JARVIS, Ukiah. Probation revocation.

JESSIE LUCAS, Ukiah. Community supervision violation.

JODY MCCOY, Covelo. Shoplifting, probation revocation.

MARIETTA MCKEE, Fort Bragg. Domestic abuse, probation revocation.

FRANKLIN OLIVER, Covelo. Assault with deadly weapon not a gun.

MICHAEL QUAIL, American Cyn/Ukiah. Community supervision violation, false impersonation of another, probation revocation.

DANIEL VARGAS-DURAN, Willits. Fugitive from justice.

SABRINA YBARRA, Ukiah. Domestic abuse.

ON LINE COMMENT OF THE DAY

Political Correctness is hucksterism to the extent that no reasonable serious person would take the position that a person cannot make an argument or have his authority and accomplishments recognized because of his status as a white male. Nor would a reasonable, serious person take the position that a person is entitled to some benefit and power because he/she is a member of a particular group without regard to his/her effort. Nor would a reasonable, serious person take the position that having suffered in the past is a License for future bad behavior. Hucksterism….

JUNE NEWS FROM THE CANCER RESOURCE CENTER Why is there so much cancer news in June?

by Karen Oslund, Executive Director

I was warned! When I first started watching for every item in the news related to cancer, I was told that June would bring a deluge of cancer-related stories. This is because the American Society of Clinical Oncologists (ASCO) holds its annual meeting in June and many new studies are released to coincide with this gathering. Sure enough, June did not disappoint. Some of the stories are hopeful, some helpful, and some fascinating. My blog post this month summarizes just a few of the stories that have been coming at us this month. Read about it here.

Introducing CRC's Newest Patient Navigator

Martha Molina-Saucedo has joined the staff of CRC as a Patient Navigator in our Ukiah office. Martha has worked as a Spanish language translator in both a medical and court setting, including visit accompaniment for injured farmworkers. She has worked in dental offices as well as the field of tax preparation. She is a long-time Ukiah resident and has had a personal experience of losing a loved one to cancer. She is learning quickly and will be helping us reach out to the Latino community so that we can better serve our Spanish-speaking friends and neighbors who have cancer. Welcome, Martha!

Thank you, Goldeneye Winery! The 14th annual Goldeneye Winery Dinner was a wonderful gathering and helped raised funds to support the Cancer Resource Centers. Many thanks to Goldeneye Winery in Philo for this annual gift of support, and for the guests who return year after year to enjoy good food, wine and company and a stunning setting to support a wonderful cause.

Pure Mendocino Tickets are On Sale Now!

This year's organic farm-to-table dinner and dance will be August 25 at Dark Horse Ranch. Seating is limited and this event often sells out. Purchase tickets at puremendocino.org.

Or call our office at 937-3833. Individual tickets are $135 each. Table sponsorships are also available.

GOVERNOR BROWN'S GIFT TO THE LOGGING INDUSTRY

Gov. Brown's wildfire plan will make things worse

by Chad Hanson & Char Miller

Responding to the tragic losses of homes and lives in wildland fires in California over the past year, Gov. Jerry Brown announced a "major offensive" against fire in the form of a "Forest Carbon Plan." The governor proposes to use $254 million of taxpayer money to double logging levels in California's forests — to "at least" 500,000 acres a year — and to achieve it, he wants to reduce environmental protections.

Although the governor's May 10 proposal is ostensibly designed to protect human communities from forest fires and to mitigate climate change, it ignores and misrepresents current science. The Forest Carbon Plan will exacerbate climate change while doing little to protect communities from fire.

Most of the devastating impacts to communities from recent California wildland fires have occurred in grasslands, chaparral and oak woodlands — not in forests. This includes the October 2017 fires in northern California, and the December 2017 Thomas fire and Creek fire in southern California.

Claiming to protect towns from fire by increasing logging in remote forests is a bit like proposing the construction of a sea wall in the Mojave Desert to protect coastal populations from rising oceans.

Moreover, reducing environmental protections in forests, and increasing logging, as Brown proposes, does not curb fire behavior — in fact, it typically does the opposite. This is because logging reduces the cooling shade of the forest canopy, creating hotter and drier conditions, and removes tree trunks, which don't burn readily, while leaving behind "slash debris" — kindling-like branches and treetops

The science is clear that the most effective way to protect homes from wildfire is to make homes themselves more fire-safe, using fire-resistant roofing and siding, installing ember-proof vents and exterior sprinklers, and maintaining "defensible space" within 60 to 100 feet of individual homes by reducing grasses, shrubs and small trees immediately adjacent to houses.

Vegetation management beyond 100 feet from homes provides no additional protection. Subsidizing logging in remote forests won't protect us; we need to live with fire, the way we do with earthquakes.

Subsidizing logging in remote forests won’t protect us; we need to live with fire, the way we do with earthquakes...

Logging is a major source of CO2 emissions because less than half the wood in a tree is usable as lumber. The rest is burned or quickly decays in a landfill.

"Thinning" operations actually cause a large net decrease in forest carbon storage and a net increase in emissions. "Thinning" sounds benign, but such projects often kill and remove more than 70% of the trees in a given stand, including many old-growth trees.

The governor's plan emphasizes cutting down millions of dead trees, or "snags," in backcountry forests to make wood chips that would be burned for kilowatts in "biomass" energy plants. In essence, this substitutes wood for coal in power generation...

As dozens of the nation's top forest and climate scientists recently pointed out, "burning forest biomass to make electricity releases substantially more carbon dioxide per unit of electricity than does coal." Turning our forests into coalfields would only worsen climate change.

The Forest Carbon Plan also ignores hundreds of other scientific studies concluding that "snag forest habitat" — stands of dead trees among the living ones we see in pictures of the Sierra, for instance — are actually ecological treasures. They support native wildlife at levels comparable to old-growth forests. In this unique habitat, woodpeckers feed upon native insects that depend on dead trees, and excavate new nest cavities each year in the snags, which are softer than live trees.

Bluebirds, nuthatches, flying squirrels, chipmunks, and dozens of other cavity-nesting bird and small mammal species then use the former woodpecker nests for their homes. But this rich wildlife habitat would be destroyed by Brown's expensive and misguided plan.

A gift to the logging industry, the governor's proposal will leave communities more vulnerable to wildfire, not less. It will harm forest ecosystems and accelerate climate change...

(Chad Hanson is a research ecologist with the John Muir Project and is the coauthor of "The Ecological Importance of Mixed-Severity Fires: Nature's Phoenix." Char Miller teaches in the environmental analysis program at Pomona College and is the author of "America's Great National Forests, Wildernesses and Grasslands.")

THE UNSURPASSED POWER TRIP BY AN INSUPERABLE CONTROL FREAK

by Ralph Nader

Jeff Bezos, CEO
Amazon.com, Inc.
410 Terry Ave N
Seattle, WA 98109

Dear Mr. Bezos:

You’ve come a long way from being a restless electrical engineering and computer science dual major at our alma mater, Princeton University. By heeding your own advice, your own hunches and visions, you’ve become the world’s richest person – at $141 billion and counting. You must feel you are on top of the world.

You are crushing your competition — those little stores on Main Street, USA, and other large companies that are still in business.

Your early clever minimizing of sales taxes gave you a big unfair advantage over brick and mortar stores that have had to pay 6, 7, 8 percent in sales taxes. Your tax-lawyers and accountants are using the anarchic global tax avoidance jurisdictions to drive your company’s tax burden to zero on a $5.6 billion profit in 2017, plus receiving about $789 million from Trump’s tax giveaway law, according to The American Conservative magazine (see Daniel Kishi’s article, “Crony Capitalism Writ Large,” in the May/June 2018 edition).

Amazon has been a leading corporate welfare King and is about to reap more of this extorted harvest once you decide where to locate your second headquarters. By the way, if you are considering the Washington, D.C. area, where you are building an extended mansion worthy of an emperor, consider the fact that there is a higher concentration of public interest lawyers per square mile there than any other metropolitan area. These lawyers stand opposed to further housing price spirals, gentrification, congestion, and huge crony capitalistic subsidy demands.

Your expansion into retail stores and warehouses will further highlight the low wages and sometimes hazardous working conditions and assembly line pressures of your corporate model. Other companies are exploiting their workers — as in Walmart (which by the way pays far more income taxes than you do on a percentage basis even under its tax avoidance schemes) — but few companies are as blatant in their planning to replace with robotics the warehouse workers and truck drivers delivering goods.

Your small Board of Directors is clueless about both their responsibility for Amazon shareholders and their overall social responsibility. Your board will rubberstamp all of your proposals as they tally how rich you’ve made them with stock options, at the expense of your workers. I wrote you (see enclosed letter) as a shareholder to start paying a dividend — your horde of cash belongs to the shareholders, doesn’t it? You have not had the courtesy to reply to this letter.

Amazon and Starbucks have just succeeded in a grotesque power play reversing the Seattle City Council’s vote to impose a mere $48 million a year tax on large, local corporations to combat the crisis of homelessness and unaffordable housing in your hometown. Given your successful tax avoidance mania, you should be ashamed of yourself. Because of your company’s insatiable greed, you have decided to ignore the plight of the homeless.

You should spend some personal time with Seattle’s homeless. Then you can announce what you have seen is inconsistent with our society‘s values and capabilities. You should then announce that you will personally pay that annual $48 million to the city. This charitable gesture will ground, ever so slightly, your cash investments in extraterrestrial space travel. Jeff, reduce your focus on the future, installing all robotic plants and your outer space ventures. You would do well to increase your focus on what is happening presently on Earth. Here, hard-pressed people have to live and raise their children with increasingly bleak prospects.

So you are on top of the world, hyper-rich, arrogant, with your raucous laugh and your sudden temper, believing that neither antitrust laws, nor labor laws, nor tax laws, nor consumer, nor environmental, nor securities laws will ever catch up with the excesses of your business model.

Don’t bet on it. Relentless greed with overly concentrated power (about the only thing you seem not to be willing or able to control is Alexa whose ambitions may come back to haunt you) sooner or later, faces a statute of limitations.

Sincerely,

Ralph Nader

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

DON’T CRY FOR ME, RACHEL MADDOW

by James Kunstler

The latest artificial hysteria cranked up by the Offendedness Cartel — re: detention of juvenile illegal immigrants — is the most nakedly sentimental appeal yet by the party out-of-power, aka “the Resistance.” I have a solution: instead of holding these children in some sort of jail-like facility until their identity can be sorted out, just give each one of them an honorary master’s degree in Diversity Studies from Harvard and let them, for God’s sake, go free in the world’s greatest job market. Before you know it, we’ll have the next generation of Diversity and Inclusion deans, and America will be safe from racism, sexism, and Hispanophobia.

I won’t waste more than this sentence in arguing that official policy for the treatment of juvenile illegal immigrants is exactly what it was under Mr. Obama, and Mr. Bush before him. I didn’t hear Paul Krugman of The New York Times hollering about the various federal agencies acting “like Nazis” back in 2014, or 2006. You’d think that ICE officers were taking these kids out behind the dumpster and shooting them in the head. No, actually, the kids are watching Marvel Comics movies, playing video games, or soccer, and getting three square meals a day while the immigration officials try to figure out who their parents are, or how to repatriate them to their countries-of-origin if they came here without any parents — say, with the assistance of the Sinaloa Drug Cartel. By the way, these make up the majority of kids detained in the latest wave of mass border crossings.

Actual political leadership among “the Resistance” is AWOL this week. Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer failed to offer up any alternative legislative plan for sorting out these children differently. One can infer in the political chatter emanating from the Offendedness Cartel that immigration law is ipso-facto cruel and inhuman and that the “solution” is an open border. In theory, this might play to the Democratic Party’s effort to win future elections by enlisting an ever-growing voter base of Mexican and Central American newcomers. But it assumes that somehow these newcomers get to become citizens, with the right to vote in US elections — normally an arduous process requiring an application and patience — but that, too, is apparently up for debate, especially in California, where lawmakers are eager to enfranchise anyone with a pulse who is actually there, citizen or not.

Krugman of The Times really hit the ball out of the park today with his diatribe comparing US Immigration enforcement to the Nazis’ treatment of the Jews. As a person of the Hebrew persuasion myself, I rather resent the reckless hijacking of this bit of history for the purpose of aggrandizing the sentimentally fake moral righteousness of the Resistance. It actually diminishes the enormity of the Nazi campaign against European Jews. I daresay that commentary like Krugman’s will only serve to amplify a growing resentment of Jewish intellectuals in this country — including myself, increasingly the target of anti-Jewish calumnies and objurgations. You’d think that Mr. Trump had offered to blow up Ellis Island the way the Resistance is clamoring to pull down statues of Thomas Jefferson.

One also can’t fail to notice that this latest hysteria was ginned up the very same week that the Department of Justice Inspector General Michael Horowitz and FBI Director Christopher Wray testified in congress about the gross and astounding misconduct in the executive suites of those sister agencies — literally a bastion of the Resistance (or Deep State bureaucracy). Some kind of giant worm is turning in that circle of the three-ring-circus US politics has become. A lot of the characters who politicized the FBI — turned it into a chop-shop for election campaign shenanigans — will be headed for grand juries and some of them maybe even jail. It may be the sort of jail in the federal system that offers ping pong and bocce ball, but it won’t be the same as practicing law on K Street in a wainscoted office with coffered ceilings and lunch of poulet chasseur sent up from the brasserie downstairs. Those confined will have plenty of time to commiserate with the kids from south-of-the-border who were dragged into the USA one way or another by people who didn’t care what happened to them, or reckon on it if they did care.

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

INTRODUCING...THE CALIFORNIA FOODWAYS PODCAST!

Everybody eats, and food propels storytelling. In California Foodways, I'm going county by county reporting stories about California and Californians through the lens of food, and I want you to come along ...

Listen to California Foodways stories on demand!

After four years of radio broadcasts, we're joining the world of podcasting, mixing newly-reported stories with favorites from the series. Take a listen to our trailer here. Better yet, subscribe on your favorite provider, and share widely:

There are 58 counties in California, and California Foodways will report from them all! If you use social media, follow the series on Twitter and Facebook. We have a new, beautiful website! Visit californiafoodways.com to explore all the stories in the series. Feel free to share this email with friends.

Thanks,

Lisa Morehouse (The California Report)

YUM!

Pancake B'fast Whitesboro Grange

A traditional pancake breakfast will be served at the WHITESBORO GRANGE on Sunday, June 24th. Breakfast includes orange juice, pancakes with maple and homemade berry syrups, ham, eggs your way, and coffee, tea or hot cocoa. The public and visitors are invited to join neighbors and community for a hearty pancake breakfast. Adults $8, ages 6-12 half price, children under 6 eat FREE. Breakfast is served from 8 to 11:30 a.m. Whitesboro Grange is located 1.5 miles east on Navarro Ridge Road. Watch for signs south of the Albion Bridge.

MEANWHILE, OVER IN AMERICA'S MOST GOVERNED CITY....

Point Arena City Council Meeting June 26, 2018

mailchi.mp/b61bcae1a09f/city-council-meeting-june-26-2018?e=d0e3cdc057

MCN GOES DEEP

Subject: Cyclic Apocalypses [Isaac Arthur]

Alan Haack: "In classic physics, as you approach infinity, the steps get shorter and occur faster. Western civilization shows the same pattern. Greece lasted longer than Rome, which lasted longer than Spain, which lasted longer than Britain, which lasted longer than the US."

Marco McClean: "So that the eventual FTL galactic empire of our machine descendants will last the femtosecond it takes to reboot all the nested simulated universes, or pop the master universe inside-out. And everyone will be all surprised, because while you're current it seems like it's always been this way, and marriage has /always/ been between a USB-A and a USB-B interface, and landscape, not portrait mode."

“Should I go with the blue or the tone deaf?”

INDIGENOUS ARTISTS AT GRACE HUDSON: FIRST FRIDAY, JULY 6

The Grace Hudson Museum will be open from 5 to 8 p.m. on Friday, July 6, as part of Ukiah's First Friday Art Walk. Admission is free and refreshments will be served. The evening will include a special program: Redwood Valley Pomo basketmaker Corine Pearce and bead artist Stewart Wilburn (Wailaki/Tolowa/Pomo/Wintu) will be on hand to talk about their work and demonstrate their craft, while Museum curator Sherrie Smith-Ferri will read from the stories of her great-aunt, Dry Creek Pomo elder Elizabeth "Belle" Lozinto Cordova. Pearce, Wilburn, and Cordova are featured in three new books from Beauty & Love Publishing. Books will be available for purchase and signing. This special First Friday program accompanies the Museum's latest exhibition, "Our People, Our Land, Our Images," featuring photography by 26 different indigenous artists, spanning four continents.

The Grace Hudson Museum is at 431 Main St. in Ukiah. For more information go to www.gracehudsonmuseum.org or call 467-2836.

MEMO OF THE AIR: Good Night Radio tonight! Extended deadline. Tech notes.

Just tonight, 9pm to 5am, I'm doing MOTA by live remote from Juanita's apartment, /not/ from the back room of the KNYO performance space at 325 N. Franklin, next door to the Tip Top bar, so make plans to show-and-tell there /next/ week (Friday, June 29).

Word count so far for tonight's show: 45,500. I'll try to read all that, but sometimes people call and they want to talk and there goes half an hour. And at the end I'll play a remarkable recording of an actual Christian charlatan megachurch exorcism from the early 1980s, with demons and blood and reeling and writhing and fainting in coils and everything, so. Don't eat a heavy dinner.

Deadline to email your writing to be read on the air tonight is as late as /seven/ p.m. Simply paste your work into the body text of an email, check that it's going to me and not also to the whole group, unless that's what you want, and press send. Even if you're reading this after seven, it's never too late; send it anyway and I promise to read it on next week's show. I don't screen anything out. Or come in and read it yourself next week, see above. I don't screen /people/ out, either. Not like those oppressive new-age smily-face shitheads in the office at KZYX, who pay themselves $300,000 a year (!) to make sure nothing interesting or confusing or off-message educational ever happens, and then lie that there's no money to pay the airpeople even to beg for money for them.

Memo of the Air: Good Night Radio: Every Friday, 9pm to 5am on 107.7fm KNYO-LP Fort Bragg, and 105.1fm KMEC-LP Ukiah*. And also there and anywhere else via http://knyo.org

*KMEC's server and some other crucial equipment is down for renewal and replacement and revampmenship, so tonight's MOTA will only be on the air on KNYO. KMEC will be airing something else wonderful until that's all ironed out and I can connect again, next week, I hope, but certainly by the week after that. Les Tarr's roadhouse blues show is also affected.

The fix is in the works.

Marco McClean

https://MemoOfTheAir.wordpress.com