Mendocino County Today: Saturday, Oct. 13, 2018

• Nicole Sawaya
• $57k Later
• Adoptable Pets
• Ed Notes
• Harts
• No Return
• Khadijah Banner
• Homecoming Parade
• Yesterday's Catch
• Hammer Time
• Corporatist Court
• Marjorie Prime
• Distraction
• Carnage Monday
• Salmon Festival
• Spaghetti Dinner
• Paleface Loses
• Oval Playdate
• 1931
• Country Squire
• GerryRonnieGeorgie
• Last Hour
• First Love
• Scary Inhabitants
• Marco Radio

NICOLE SAWAYA
Nicole Sawaya served as a KPFA general manager for about a year and a half before being fired in 1999 by former Pacifica Executive Director Lynn Chadwick. He said Ms. Sawaya was not a good fit. The termination followed Sawaya’s outspoken challenge to the amount of fees KPFA paid to fund the overall Pacifica network and general administration. In her brief tenure at KPFA, Sawaya had won the admiration and support of the staff and listeners for her hard work, radio skills and management style. KPFA staff actively resisted her termination and called on Pacifica to reverse it.

The mounting rebellion at KPFA lead the Pacifica board to evict the entire staff from KPFA's Studios for three weeks. Ten thousand listeners and supporters marched in the streets of Berkeley in the summer of 1999 to confront Pacifica over its decision. Ultimately, Pacifica let KPFA staff return but refused to reinstate Sawaya.

Years later, in 2007, and again in 2008, Sawaya returned for brief periods as Pacifica's executive director, but she resigned citing infighting and dysfunction. She also served as general manager of KLW-San Francisco where she built its news and public affairs programming. And before coming to KPFA Sawaya was general manager of KZYX in Philo in Mendocino County where she established a standard of intelligent, transparent managment that hadn't been seen at KZYX and certainly hasn't been seen since.

Former KPFA General manager Nicole Sawaya died Wednesday, October 10, in Mendocino County in the home of her son.

(Aileen Alfandary, KPFA Berkeley, October 11, 2018)

PATTERSON CASHES IN

by Rex Gressett

The great California Voting Rights Act (CVRA) legal battle against non-existent discrimination against the Fort Bragg Hispanic minority ended late in the evening October 10th, not with a bang but with a whimper. Councilman Will Lee, at the last regular meeting, had indicated an inexplicable optimism that negotiations with the still anonymous “Committee for Responsive Representation” were proceeding, as Lee put it, “very very fruitfully.”

I doubted it but I was wrong. The committee, and their front guy, attorney Jacob Paterson, ignominiously caved. The Fort Bragg City Council bluffed them, pushed them and backed them down.

Two hundred jurisdictions in California have undergone forced reorganization with the aim of increasing minority access to the electoral process, often spending millions in the process to do it. Not Fort Bragg. The City Council cleaned Patterson’s and his anonymous “committee’s” clock.

What the committee got out of it was a face saving ad hoc discussion and no guarantees. Attorney Patterson agreed to destroy all his work and meet humbly with an ad hoc committee of the City Council to discuss the possible conversion of Fort Bragg to a charter city. The timeline for discussions is vague, but the pressure is absolutely off until at least 2020.

The deal does not protect Fort Bragg from an eventual CVRA lawsuit. Any attorney who needs a little financial boost can come into town and sue us if he can endure the public mockery and the disdain sure to rain down on him by claiming we’re a bunch of seaside bigots.

Mr. Patterson will take home a check for $22,000 bucks for his state-imposed alacrity in shaking down non-discriminatory Fort Bragg.

Fort Bragg had to spend an additional $35,000 to hire expert demographers who were able to discover to no one's surprise that Hispanics are an integrated and respected element of our population occupying no specific neighborhood. (They were looking for a barrio.)

Attorney Patterson’s alleged and perhaps mythical Committee For Responsive Representation was also successful in enacting a major assault on electoral tradition and insulting the Fort Bragg community without ever disclosing their identities. Who these brave advocates of spurious identity politics are may never be known. As they reflect on their righteous adventure in the sanctuary of their personal privacy one can be sure they are gratified to have escaped a close call with public humiliation and ridicule.

We will be asking Mr. Patterson how he intends to spend the big fat check he got from the city. The discussions with the ad hoc council committee and two soon to be appointed citizens from the city remain vague. The Committee for Responsive Representation has withdrawn any pressure to do anything, and the Fort Bragg City Council are not only fine negotiators they are also experts at doing nothing in committee meetings. The discussion group will do exactly what discussion groups do. Discuss.

The headlock that Mr. Patterson had on the city is broken; the Committee for Responsive Representation is successfully hiding from their portion of the heaps of calumny due them, while the city council can rack up an admirable victory for local self-government on our own terms. A very rare victory it is, distinguishing the city council in the statewide avalanche of over 200 municipal capitulations and defeats.

Full disclosure. I would like to see a charter city, and am no fan of the policies of the City Council. I think that the current Council has engaged in profound deceptions that are sure to come out and that a charter city might be an excellent improvement. But like any Fort Bragg patriot, I don’t support any electoral reform forced upon us under the threat of ruinous legal action. I am not backing off the city council. I would like to see mayor Lindy Peters’ regime of deception stopped in its tracks. But I have to admit the Council won this one, skillfully and on the strength of integrity. Bernie Norvell and Will Lee particularly. Credit where credit is due.

MENDO SHELTER PETS RESCUE will be joining the Humane Society for Inland Mendocino and Anderson Valley Animal Rescue for a mobile adoption event hosted by Mendocino Barkery on Sunday, Oct. 14, from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. during Pumpkin Fest in downtown Ukiah.

The Barkery is located at 207 W. Stephenson Street, across the street from the Alex R. Thomas Jr. plaza. Adoptable pets will be there, and pet food donations will be accepted.

ED NOTES

THE FOLLOWING is from a man named Al Nunez, the kind of deserving, hard-working guy who deserves and needs real help. A skilled man like Al would be an asset to any property owner on the Coast. He writes:

"I need a new place to stay being the place I am at now is for sale and I was told I need to be off the property by January 9 2019, I would have never moved there if only I would have known this. I am a self employed handyman and at the moment I am doing carpentry construction on a old house that was lifted at Redwood and McPhearson. I was thinking to buy a vacant lot to live on to get away from renting but none are safe and livable for my tools and motorhome. I am a clean organized 59 year old male with skills tools and a work truck. I wish to find a place in or around Fort Bragg area being most people I work for live in the area. I have $5,000 saved up so I can pay rent for awhile if rent can be $400 a-month. If I don't find a place I may have to sell everything I own even all my tools of my handyman trade thus ending my handyman career and my way of survival, 25 years worth. Please Help Me, I don't want to lose anymore. 707-409-4147. AL"

* * *

IF YOU'RE WONDERING why Gavin Newsom has no candidate statement in the sample ballot, it's because he has too much money. In California, there are voluntary expenditure ceilings for candidates running for statewide offices, $14.5 million for gubernatorial candidates. Gav has more than $20 mil stashed away, most of it from Big Democrat. Only those candidates who stay under the spending limit are permitted to purchase a 250-word statement in the sample ballot.

* * *

SEEMS LIKE ONLY yesterday, as us nostalgics say, that marijuana was a furtive, often harrowing way to earn one's way, what with law enforcement's Campaign Against Marijuana Production, home invaders and old fashioned thieves. But here in Boonville, near the junction of 128 and 253, if you cast your eyes to the northeast you see an industrial gro under construction, so large it clearly enjoys lush capitalization. So long, mom and pop. The big boys are here, big and bold. Of course they've been here for a while now but hidden away in the traditional style. Water for this project? We understand that the owner, or owners, plan to store rainwater in a series of tanks perched on the side of the hill.

* * *

“LAST WEEK: I promised to explain IHiJY! to you.–Recent Itsalls end with that acronym. Each of the 3 syllables rhymes with ‘sly.’ Slightly more stress should be placed on Hi –suggesting expressive force without staccato emphasis. –‘Performed’ (at high volume) may be a better verb choice than ‘pronounced’.” — Jonathan Middlebrook, Ukiah Daily Journal

COMRADE MIDDLEBROOK commits sins against meaning twice a week in the Ukiah Daily Journal, but his latest crime is a departure from his usual misdemeanors, it's murder. Someone please make a citizen's arrest before he strikes again.

POTENTIAL RELATIVES TO HELP ID HART FAMILY

PORTLAND, Ore. — Authorities in Mendocino County are speaking with people who say they are biologically related to one of six children presumed dead when their adopted mother Jennifer Hart drove them and her wife off a cliff in March.

The Mendocino County Sheriff's Office says potential relatives of 16-year-old Hannah Hart contacted them to help identify human remains found near the crash scene.

Scientists previously compared DNA from the remains with samples from Hannah's biological siblings, Markis and Abigail, but the results were inconclusive.

Oregon news outlets report Mendocino County sheriff's spokesperson Lt. Shannon Barney said the office is now working with Hannah's potential blood relatives to obtain DNA samples.

Hannah and her 15-year-old brother Devonte Hart have been unaccounted for since the vehicle was found. Authorities recovered the bodies of Jennifer Hart and Sarah Hart, along with siblings Markis, Jeremiah, Abigail and Sierra.

(AP)

THE SUMMER OF NO RETURN

by Jeffrey St. Clair

(Courtesy, CounterPunch.org)

The forecast for August 8^th was ominous. The temperature in Portland was predicted to breach 100 hundred degrees for the second time in a couple weeks. In the end, the mercury stalled at 96 degrees because the sun was blotted out for most of the day by a thick pall of pinkish smoke from the Mendocino fires 500 miles to the south. Two days later the undulating jet stream carried traces of the smoke another 3000 miles east to New York City and beyond.

In just two weeks, the Mendocino Fire complex had scorched 340,000 acres, making it the largest wildfire in California history. The Mendo fire started four days after the Carr Fire ignited, which destroyed more than 1000 homes and killed eight people near the city of Redding in northern California. The Carr Fire, still burning in mid-August, has seared more than 210,000 acres. In the Sierras, the 100,000 Ferguson Fire closed the Yosemite National Park and killed two firefighters. In southern California, the Holy Jack Fire erupted in a mushroom cloud of smoke on Hiroshima Day. California was burning from border to border.

Clarence Sibsey is a fire refugee. For the second time in two years, he was forced to evacuate his home near Clear Lake. “We’ve never had fires like this before,” Sibsey told the Los Angeles Times. “Why now?”

In one of his most mystical Tweets, Donald Trump tried to give Sibsey an answer. The president blamed the California fires on the state’s policy of allowing some of the waters from its much-molested rivers to empty into the Pacific Ocean, instead of being totally diverted into the irrigation ditches of the Central Valley and the Klamath Basin. It may have escaped the President’s keen grasp of California geography that the two biggest fires are burning adjacent to several of the state’s largest lakes, including Lake Shasta, Trinity Lake and Clear Lake.

Following Trump’s lead, Interior Secretary, Ryan Zinke, strode forth to calm a troubled nation by assuring us that the historic fire-season had nothing to do with climate change. Instead, Zinke pointed the finger at radical environmentalists as the culprits, who the former Navy SEAL and failed micro-brewmeister alleged had shut down logging across the West. “America is better than letting these radical groups control the dialogue about climate change,” Zinke fumed “Extreme environmentalists have shut down public access. They talk about habitat and yet they are willing to burn it up.”

In the last 20 years, 84% of wildfires haven’t been “wild.” They’ve been started by humans, many of them by people affiliated with the timber industry seeking to profit from post-fire salvage logging.

In order not to excite skeptical minds, Zinke has cut all funding for federal research into the links between climate change and wildfires. As if to drive home the point, Trump’s EPA hubristically unveiled its plans to rollback emissions standards for new cars and trucks with the California fires as a kind of operatic backdrop.

Not even the timber industry is taking Zinke seriously. Their own internal documents reveal what should be obvious to all: extreme heat is fueling the mega-fires. Across the West, temperatures have increased by more than 2 degrees since the mid-1970s. Higher temperatures lead to drier vegetation. As a consequence, wildfires burn hotter, longer and spread faster. The proof is on the ground. Since 1984, the average number of acres burned in the West each year has more than doubled. The fire season starts earlier and ends later. In California, the fire season has expanded by 76 days since the mid-80s.

Last September, San Francisco, notorious for its frigid, fog-bound summers, hit 106 degrees, shattering a record for any date. On the day the Carr Fire ignited, the temperature in Redding topped out at 113 degrees. The Carr Fire raged with such fury that it created fire vortexes that propelled plumes of searing air 40,000 feet into the sky at speeds of 130 miles per hour.

The Mendo fires burned on the outskirts of wine country in (take note, Mr. President) Lake County about 120 miles north of San Francisco. Since 2012, more than half of the land in the county has been burned over. Lake County is now the most fire-prone county in California, perhaps the entire United States. In 2015, the Valley Fire consumed 1,300 homes and killed four people. The next year, the Clayton Fire roared through the town of Lower Lake, incinerating more than 300 houses, mobile homes, offices and churches. Land that was just burned was now burning again.

July 2018 was not just the hottest month in California history, it may have been one of the hottest months on Earth in the last 40,000 years with the daily temperatures (night and day) in Death Valley averaging 108 degrees, six degrees higher than normal. July 24th saw the hottest rain ever recorded, when a cloudburst opened over Imperial County when the temperature was 119 degrees.

Meanwhile, back up in Oregon, the Columbia Gorge is burning again. Four major fires have blackened more than 100,000 acres and will likely burn until the November rains. Or longer. There are still embers smoking from last year’s fires. In Portland, the temperature topped 90 degrees 15 times in the month of July alone, the hottest on record. For perspective, from 1941 to 1975, Portland averaged only nine 90 degree days for an entire year. Since 2000, the annual number climbed to 15 days. In the past two years, the average has been 22 days. Through mid-August of this year, the temperature in Portland has already hit 90 degrees 25 times, and that’s with the skies turned opaque by layers of smoke.

Call it a heat wave if you want, but up here it felt like the summer of no return.

(Courtesy, CounterPunch.org)

THE HOMECOMING PARADE in Ukiah this afternoon reminded me of an old Scot’s joke about the Aberdeen boy who went off to Oxford on a scholarship, poor fellow, and when his mum came to visit she asked how things were going?

The lad answered that things were going pretty well until late at night, when the fellows upstairs would start a-stomping on the floor, and the fellows below began to bang with broom handles on the ceiling, and the fellows on either side start a-pounding on the walls, with “I dunna ken wahh, but t’wer the awfulist din ye e’er heard.”

Mother wondered how on earth her son put up with such a racket? He answered: “I just keep a-playing me bagpipes, Mum.”

For the parade, the Homecoming Parade (read recruitment spectacle), the streetlamps were hung with full-bust portraits of US Marines and other local servicemen, who had fought these football skirmishes in a few years previous, and were now commanding ships at sea, battalions on land and fighter jets in the air, all over the world – WELL, THE READERSHIP has seen these parades before, and no one can deny how stirring a thing a Souza March is in the breast of a young lad, a march to the beat of the drum, the thump of thousands of heels striking the parade deck in unison, and the martial skrill of bagpipes coming o’er the moor – well, not anybody over 17 years, that is, can resist it!

The new version is a very artfully modulated use of the sirens and, well, it really is pretty darn good -- oops, I meant, "Stirring!" — the cops and firefighters know their business, and will soon replace The President's Own, USMC Band - Semper fi, General Souza!

(Bruce McEwen)

CATCH OF THE DAY, October 12, 2018

JULISSA ALVAREZ, Ukiah. Disorderly conduct-alcohol.

BRIAN BACONY, Berkeley/Redwood Valley. DUI, pot possession for sale, sales of marijuana.

BRET BENGSTON, Ukiah. Parole violation. (Frequent flyer.)

STEVEN KING, Ukiah. Failure to appear.

TERRELL LOVE JR., Sacramento/Willits. Parole violation.

WILLIAM MISHOU, Willits. Concealed dirk-dagger, controlled substance, paraphernalia.

RICKY OWENS, Boonville. Probation revocation.

EVANGELOS PARSON, Ukiah. Disorderly conduct-alcohol.

CODY WILLIAMS, Covelo. Suspended license, probation revocation.

DAVID WORTHY, Ukiah. Probation revocation.

HAMMER TIME

by James Kunstler

Looks like somebody threw a dead cat onto Wall Street’s luge run overnight to temporarily halt the rather ugly 2000 point slide in the Dow Jones Industrial Average — and plenty of freefall in other indices, including markets in other countries. A Friday pause in the financial carnage will give the hedge funders a chance to plant “for sale” signs along their Hamptons driveways, but who might the buyers be? Hedge funders from another planet, perhaps? You can hope. And while you’re at it, how do you spell liquidity problem?

Welcome to the convergence zone of the long emergency, where Murphy’s law meets the law of unintended consequences and the law of diminishing returns, the Three Amigos of collapse. Here’s where being “woke” finally starts to mean something. Namely, that there are more important things in the world than sexual hysteria. Like, for instance, your falling standard of living (and that of everyone else around you).

The meet-up between Kanye West and President D.J. Trump was an even richer metaphor for the situation: two self-styled “geniuses” preening for the cameras in the Oval Office, like kids in a sandbox, without a single intelligible idea emerging from the play-date, and embarrassed grownups all standing ‘round pretending it was a Great Moment in History. You had to wonder how much of Kanye’s bazillion dollar fortune was stashed in the burning house of FAANG stocks. Maybe that flipped his bipolar toggle. Or was he even paying attention to the market action through all the mugging and hugging? (He did have his phone in hand.) Meanwhile, Mr. Trump seemed to be squirming through the episode behind his mighty Resolute desk as if he had “woke” to the realization that ownership of a bursting epic global financial bubble was not exactly “winning.”

If I were President, I’d declare Oct 12 Greater Fool Day. (Nobody likes Christopher Columbus anymore, that genocidal monster of dead white male privilege.) The futures are zooming as I write, a last roundup for suckers at the OD corral, begging the question: who will show up on Monday. Nobody, I predict. And then what?

The great false front of the financial markets resumes falling over into the November election. The rubble from all that buries whatever is left of the automobile business and the housing market. The smoldering aftermath will be described as the start of a long-overdue recession — but it will actually be something a lot worse, with no end in sight.

The Democratic Party might not be nimble enough to capitalize on the sudden disappearance of capital. Their only hope to date has been to capture the vote of every female in America, to otherwise augment their constituency of inflamed and aggrieved victims of unsubstantiated injustices. It’s been fun playing those cards, and the Party might not even know how to play a different game at this point. Democratic politicians may also be among the one-percenters who watch their net worth go up in a vapor in a market collapse, leaving them too numb to act. The last time something like this happened, in the fall of 2008, candidate Barack Obama barely knew what to say about the fall of Lehman Brothers and the ensuing cascade of misery — though unbeknownst to the voters, he was already a hostage of Wall Street.

Complicating matters this time will be the chaos unleashed in politics and governing when the long-running “Russia collusion” melodrama boomerangs into a raft of indictments against the cast of characters in the Intel Community and Department of Justice AND the Democratic National Committee, and perhaps even including the Party’s last standard bearer, HRC, for ginning up the Russia Collusion matter in the first place as an exercise in sedition. The wheels of the law turn slowly, but they’ll turn even while financial markets tumble. And the threat to order might be so great that an unprecedented “emergency” has to be declared, with soldiers in the streets of Washington, as was sadly the case in 1861, the first time the country turned itself upside down.

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

LET’S START A KAVANAUGH WATCH TO CHECK ALL THE CORPORATE JUDGES

by Ralph Nader

Brett Kavanaugh, the new Injustice of the Supreme Court of the United States, must be pleased by the leading news stories on Monday and Tuesday regarding his swift swearing-in on Saturday. The multiple perjurer, corporate supremacist, presidential power-monger, and a past fugitive from justice (regarding credible claims of sexual assault), Kavanaugh saw critical media coverage become yesterday’s story. The mass media has moved on to other calamities, tragedies, superstorms, and celebrity outrages. Opponents of his nomination must persevere anew.

The future of the Supreme Court looks grim considering Kavanaugh’s judicial decisions and involvement in war crimes and torture as Staff Secretary to President George W. Bush. It is likely that Kavanaugh will be the cruelest and most insensitive justice on the high Court. His support of corporate power will have few limits. That’s saying something, given the rulings of Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch.

Kavanaugh’s decisions and political statements are so off the wall, I’ve called him a corporation masquerading as a human being. Corporations’ uber alles is his pre-eminent core philosophy. Public Citizen’s analysis of his judicial record (apart from his extremist political ideology) showed that in split-decision cases (which are the most ideologically revealing cases), Kavanaugh ruled 15 times against worker rights and 2 times for worker rights. On environmental protection, he ruled 11 times for business interests and 2 times for the public’s interest. On consumer protection, he ruled 18 times for businesses and only 4 times for consumers. As for monopoly cases, he ruled 2 times for the corporation and zero times for market competition.

Kavanaugh also likes to rule for government power when it is arrayed against the people – ruling 7 times for police or human rights abuses and zero rulings for victims. On the other hand, governmental decisions that are protective of people interests will find Kavanaugh blocking the court room door more often than not. (See Public Citizen’s report).

The Alliance for Justice report on nominee Kavanaugh summed up their research with these words:

“He has repeatedly sided with the wealthy and the powerful over all Americans. He has fought consumer protections in the areas of automobile safety, financial services and a free and open Internet. Kavanaugh has also repeatedly ruled against workers, workplace protections and safety regulations… Kavanaugh has repeatedly ruled against efforts to combat climate change and the regulation of greenhouse gases. He also repeatedly ruled against protections for clean air.”

Locking in the 5 to 4 dominant corporate muscle of the Supreme Court will endanger you as a consumer and will jeopardize your health and economic well-being. Unless you become a corporation, your freedoms will be jeopardized. (See the Citizens United Decision in 2010 that allowed our elections to be overwhelmed with unlimited commercial campaign money and propaganda).

The cold-blooded, most corporate-indentured Republicans dominate our political process today. Mitch McConnell (see Kentucky Values), led by the election-buying Koch brothers, drove Kavanaugh’s nomination through the Senate, excluding important witnesses who wished to testify. To shore up claims of legitimacy, McConnell allowed the FBI to conduct a sham investigation that was shaped by Trump’s White House lawyer Don McGahn and the FBI head, Christopher Wray. Wray had previously worked with his friend Kavanaugh on the Starr investigation of Bill Clinton’s sexual misconduct.

Resilience and action are required. The Supreme Court is deeply political – forget about the claims of judicial independence by the five Justices in the majority. Their votes on issues of class, race, presidential and corporate power, peoples’ rights, and remedies and access to justice (day in court with trial by jury) against corporations are quite predictable.

A new Kavanaugh Watch group – lean and sharp – needs to be created to publicize the Five Corporatist Judges. Their unjust decisions, hiding behind stylized plausibility and casuistry, need to be unmasked and regularly relayed to the American people. Their speeches to the Federalist Society (that shoehorned them onto the Court) and other plutocratic audiences need to be publicized and critiqued. Importantly their refusal to recuse themselves, due to conflicts of interest or prior expressions of bias (as in Kavanaugh’s eruption on his last day of the Senate Judiciary hearings), need to be denounced. (See Laurence Tribe’s op-ed in the New York Times). Also, their light workload, as in the low numbers of cases they take, in contrast to the many cases they decline to hear, both requires more public attention.

The life-time ensconced enforcers of corporate state control over the lives of the American people and often innocent people abroad (permitting undeclared bloody wars of choice) must be confronted by “We the People.” We need to remember that the words “corporation” or “company” are not mentioned in the Constitution that starts with the phrase, “We the People.”

Finally, are there a few billionaires in the country, concerned enough about what their children, grandchildren and great grandchildren are going to inherit from our generation, to make a significant founding grant to launch the Kavanaugh and company watch dog project?

To donate, please visit: https://csrl.org/donate/.

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

DON'T MISS MARJORIE PRIME!

‘Marjorie Prime,’ featuring Ruby Bell Sherpa, Jesse Bevan, Mary Bever, and Dwight Branscombe, continues this Thursday through Sunday at the Mendocino Theatre Company It’s 2062, the age of artificial intelligence, and 85-year-old Marjorie — a jumble of disparate, fading memories — has a handsome new companion who’s programmed to feed the story of her life back to her. What would we remember, and what would we forget, if given the chance? This richly spare and wondrous play by Jordan Harrison explores the mysteries of human identity and the limits of what technology can replace. For tickets and information, please go to our website, http://mendocinotheatre.org/, or phone 707-937-4477. Marjorie Prime plays weekends through October 28th and is suitable for youth over 12 years of age.

“Your 10:30 distraction is here.”

ON LINE COMMENT OF THE DAY

Monday will be interesting as that is the day most carnage occurs.

Whether or not this rout has legs, the massive levels of debt is a ticking bomb. Most individuals, corporations, countries, all carry too much debt. Nuts. It will not continue indefinitely.

Kanye West talking to the president of the US? The place has gone fucking nuts. Inertia may carry this clown show for awhile yet, but some day in the future history books will be written about this corrupt and bereft social experiment. There will be denial this even happened as it is unfolding. It is simply too embarrassing to admit a Country is so ‘exceptional’.

SALMON AWARENESS FESTIVAL

The Eel River Recovery Project is once again joining the Round Valley Indian Tribes in celebrating the return of the salmon and the salmon people on Friday and Saturday, October 19 and 20.  In addition to the traditional salmon feed and ceremonies, we will also show a salmon movie and have a workshop on forest health.

The highlight of the weekend is the traditional salmon feed and educational fair at Hidden Oaks Park in Covelo beginning at 3 PM on Saturday October 20.  ERRP will have posters on all their projects. Volunteers will be on hand to explain about scientific studies on river health and agricultural best practices aimed at getting farmers in harmony with nature.  Dinner will be salmon and corn as the main dishes. There is no charge, but those attending are encouraged to bring a side dish to share.

This year’s celebration will start with a showing of a new ERRP salmon movie at the Covelo Library Commons on Friday evening at 7 PM. This is a world premiere of Signs of Resilience: Eel River 2012-2017 Chinook Salmon Trends, which documents the findings of six year’s work. The film has stunning footage of salmon and the Eel River watershed and conveys the hopeful message that runs are in the tens of thousands and rebuilding in some areas of the watershed.

On Saturday morning at 10 AM there will be a workshop and community discussion of forest health. The workshop, Improving Forest Health in the Wild and Scenic North Fork and Middle Fork Eel River Watershed, will be held in the conference room at the Round Valley Tribal Health Center. Upper Lake/Covelo District Ranger Frank Aebly will give a presentation on where the Ranch Fire burned within the Eel River basin and what activities are planned to help rehabilitate burned areas.  Ernie Merrifield and Ron Lincoln Sr. will share their views on traditional ecological management.  The most important part of the workshop will be the community discussion about how to restore forest health and how we can collaborate to begin work in the watersheds.

This year’s events are sponsored in part by the U.S. Bureau of Land Management in celebration of the 50^th Anniversary of the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act, which passed into law in October 1968.  Designation of 394 miles of the Eel River means that most of major tributaries cannot be dammed.  Both the North Fork and Middle Fork Eel that overlap with the Round Valley Reservation are designated as Wild and Scenic.

For more information see www.eelriverrecovery.org, follow ERRP on Facebook or call 707 223-7200. Find out about car-pooling opportunities from Willits by calling Robin at 707 459-0155.

SPAGHETTI DINNER--WHITESBORO GRANGE--SATURDAY

A traditional SPAGHETTI DINNER will be held at the Whitesboro Grange on Saturday, October 13th from 4-7 p.m. On the menu are salad, spaghetti with Bob Canclini’s famous sauce (meat or vegetarian), garlic bread, beverage and pie or cake for dessert. Adults $8, age 6-12 half price, children under 6 eat FREE. The community and public are invited for a great meal with good company. Whitesboro Grange is located 1.5 miles east on Navarro Ridge. Watch for signs just south of the Albion Bridge.

Ronnie James, ronnie@mcn.org

DARIUS ANDERSON JUDGED A FRAUDSTER

How lobbyist and media investor Darius Anderson and a senator’s son gambled and lost their bid for a big casino payday

bohemian.com/northbay/graton-expectations/Content?oid=7290271

‘MORE PEOPLE NEED TO KNOW that they’re not f***ing cool,’ said Kanye West two years ago.

I thought of this observation while I watched his bizarre, disturbing and rambling performance in the Oval Office yesterday.

Yes Kanye, you’re right - they do.

Starting with YOU.

There was a time when Kanye (I refuse to call him by his new name ‘Ye’ because it sounds ridiculous) was the absolute epitome of cool.

He was the sharpest, most innovative, wittiest and eloquent rapper in the world; a musical genius at the top of his game, inspiring millions.

Now, he’s about as uncool as an erupting volcano, and just as volatile.

Frankly, his antics at the White House were beyond embarrassing.

They were an abject, shambolic humiliation – the moment Kanye’s brand collapsed live on TV as the world looked on with our collective heads in our hands.

And if President Trump hopes Kanye’s toe-curling meltdown might inspire some kind of surge of support from African-Americans then he too is living in Cloud Cuckoo Land.

How has it come to this?

One word: Kardashian.

Ever since Kanye married Kim, instantaneously immersing himself into the planet’s dumbest, most vacuous, talent-devoid, narcissistic, attention-seeking family, he signed his coolness death warrant.

Now he’s just another Kardashian, with all the hellishly grating insincere, insipid and irritating behavioural deficiencies that entails.

For ten tortuous minutes in the Oval Office, we witnessed a mini episode of Keeping Up With The Kardashians, and it was just as brain numbing.

He ranted about everything and anything he could think of - from why Trump’s Making America Great Again cap makes him feel like Superman, to why guns are great.

He cursed, becoming the first person to ever publicly say ‘mother-f***er’ in America’s most hallowed room.

He raged, calling the 13th Amendment – which abolished slavery – a ‘trap door’.

He banged on about ‘flyest planes’, loving Hillary because he ‘loves everyone’, his sleep deprivation, and why police brutality can be cured if everyone just got along.

Not much of his monologue made any sense, but he exuded an air of someone who thought he was delivering the State of the Union address to an expectant nation.

Then he got up, told Trump how much he loved him and hugged him.

By this point, even the normally verbose President was stunned into temporary silence.

‘Well,’ he finally stammered, ‘that was quite something.’

Yes, it was.

It was the single most unedifying performance I’ve ever seen in that room, which when you think of all the stuff that’s gone on in there is quite an achievement.

Maybe Kanye’s bi-polar, as he claims.

Maybe it’s all an act, as I fear.

But what’s beyond doubt is that his stupendous ego is now writing checks his self-awareness valves are unable to cash.

Those who applaud his ‘free-thinking’ style are really applauding a guy who’s long lost the ability to be even vaguely coherent.

That’s a tragedy for Kanye West, but ultimately his problem.

(Piers Morgan)

THE COUNTRY GENTLEMAN of 200 years ago farmed the land he held. As years have rolled on, the strong have swallowed the weak, — one strong man having eaten up half-a-dozen weak men. And so the squire has been made. Then the strong squire becomes a baronet and a lord, — till he lords it a little too much, and a Manchester warehouseman buys him out. The strength of the country probably lies in the fact that the change is ever being made, but is never made suddenly.

— Anthony Trollope, 1870; from "Ralph the Heir"

IF SOMEBODY TOLD ME I only had an hour to live, I’d spend it choking a white man. I’d do it nice and slow.

— Miles Davis

INGRATES

Editor,

Let's talk about lives lost fighting wars to keep our freedom and good ways of life in our society while a buncha no-goods try to destroy the Constitution, the Second Amendment, freedom of religion, free speech, stopping the border wall, trashing our cities and a whole list of other bad things. How can we tolerate people like Nancy Pelosi, Maxine Waters, Dianne Feinstein, Chuck Schumer, Kamala Harris, and others like Jerry Brown and Hillary Clinton? And how can we tolerate those rotten yellow bellied, sickening, chicken, no good, cowardly Antifa? Or George Soros. How can we tolerate the condition of our cities with crime and total disrespect for human life, drugs, slums and places where a white person can't go without getting killed? Are all these things the way to honor all of our fallen heroes? Our brave men and women who fought wars for this?

I'm sorry, I'm so sick of liberals and what they stand for I could puke. How do these people look their children in the eye when they watch their children look at the millions of disgusting and pitiful anti-Americans? We better start weeding them out or we won't have a country that we have fought for for over 200 years.

Donald Trump is the best thing that ever happened to this country. God bless him and his family and his administration.

Mexican people are some of the finest people I have ever known. I was raised with a Mexican family who used to live at my dad's sawmill where the father worked for my dad. Mr. Esquivel's family were all good people. Georgiana Suki Pacheco Rio was Mr. Esquivel’s stepdaughter. She was my first love. She had to move away when we were about 14 years old and I have missed her ever since. Mexican people have come into this country, got their citizenship, settled down, raised a family, worked hard, paid their taxes and they are real Americans. They are all hard-working, God-fearing citizens and they take care of their children, and they support a lot of good things.

On the other hand, those that come here illegally break the law, raise hell, kill and rape our communities and they are not wanted, they have to go out.

How do you feel about wounded servicemen and women? Most of them have given every effort to keep America safe, several thousand of them have made the ultimate sacrifice, several thousand of them have been wounded. Is it right to just turn them loose without jobs or a safe place to stay? They need our help like they gave us their help. Thank you for doing a great thing to help our heroes, our heroic veterans. You liberals who hate the military should feel the shame that only a rotten human being could feel. Keep it up, you commie libs, your day is coming.

God bless Donald Trump

Jerry Philbrick

Comptche

MEMO OF THE AIR, FRIDAY NIGHT

On 10/12/2018 10:56 AM, dcowboy@mcn.org wrote: “Bartender asks Rene Descartes if he would like a drink. Rene replies, "I think not." Poof! Descartes disappears.

* * *

Okay, bartender says to the horse on the next stool, "Why the long face?" And the jockey on its back says, "Because you put Descartes before da horse."

In other news, I had to stay in town this week, so tonight, Friday, 12th of October, 9pm to 5am, there's Memo of the Air, live from the KNYO performance space at 325 N. Franklin, next door to the Tip Top bar. Appear, entre vous, meander to the clean, well-lighted space at the back, and you can show-and-tell and/or perform your [ahem] act, or talk about your project, or read your own work, or whatever.

If you'd like to stay home meditating in your spandex shorts under the kitchen table and participate anyway, the deadline to email your writing to be read on the air tonight is maybe 6:30. Also the number in the Fort Bragg studio is 707 962-3022, so you can read your own work with your own voice right there on the phone (after 9). If there will be swears, please wait until 10pm for that, because otherwise it agitates the weasels, as you well know.

I've got ten pounds of delightful material to read for tonight as well as fresh exotic music to play for breaks. Ten pounds of this stuff in a five-pound bag. Like the T.A.R.D.I.S. it's way bigger on the inside than the outside.

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. Also there and anywhere else via http://knyo.org

Bonus tracks: An explorable opioid overdose map.

https://opioidmisusetool.norc.org/

Yet another drunkenly graceful trampoline art piece.

https://laughingsquid.com/debussy-centenary-clair-de-lune-acrobatic-routine/

And a fish lunch. Lurk, loom, lunge; that's the way.

http://bitsandpieces.us/2018/10/fish-for-lunch/

- Marco McClean, memo@mcn.org

https://MemoOfTheAir.wordpress.com