MCT: Sunday, March 17, 2019

• Car Wash
• Pets
• Tai Hope
• WS Merwin
• Citizen Soldiers
• Pillsbury Memories
• Rendezvous Revitalization
• FB Gunfire
• Ed Notes
• Bootstraps
• Rancho Rajneesh
• Yesterday's Catch
• Biloxi Leak
• Scammers Busted
• Hail Satan
• Grammer Cops
• Leader Worship
• Wealth Effect
• Landfill Burials
• Asperger Artifact
• Good Prognosis
• Life/Death
• Much Clutter
• Socialism Scareword
• Marco Radio

CAR WASH: Sunday, March 17, 10-3, Boonville Fairgrounds Parking Lot

A Teen Center fundraiser for a college campus field trip.

UKIAH SHELTER PETS OF THE WEEK

We fell right in love with Fiona during her photo session. She pranced around the play yard, then cut loose and ran around with joy--and she is beautiful in motion! Fiona is a sweet, happy, smart young dog who knows SIT, SHAKE and ROLL OVER. She's athletic, graceful and energetic. Looking for a fun family dog? We think Fiona will be a perfect match! Fiona went on a Fido Field Trip to Lake Mendocino and got a great report card! Don't miss out on this shelter gem! Read all about Fiona on her webpage: http://www.mendoanimalshelter.com/dogblog/fiona

The Ukiah Animal Shelter is located at 298 Plant Road in Ukiah; adoption hours are Tuesday, Thursday, Friday & Saturday from 10 am to 4:30 pm and Wednesday from 10 am to 6:30 pm.

To see photos and bios of the shelter's adoptable animals, and the shelter's programs, services and events, please visit us online at http://www.mendoanimalshelter.com/

For more information about adoptions please call 707-467-6453.

HIGH HOPES FOR TAI

Editor,

I have high hopes that Tai Abreu is doing well and that his court case is being resolved. We have been on the same yard for over three years. He’s been out to court in Mendocino for a couple of months now. He is a good friend and he always carried himself in a happy, positive manner, even though he was LWOP’d for doing basically nothing.

My prayers and thoughts are with you, brother, and I hope things go your way.

Your friend,

Walter Miller

High Desert State Prison

AE5304 A3-227

PO Bo 3030

Susanville, CA 96127

WS MERWIN, PULITZER-WINNING FORMER US POET LAUREATE, DIES AT 91

Writer who protested against environmental destruction and the Vietnam war died at home in Hawaii

WS Merwin, a prolific and versatile poetry master who evolved through a wide range of styles as he celebrated nature, condemned war and industrialism and reached for the elusive past, died Friday. He was 91.

A Pulitzer prize winner and former US poet laureate, Merwin completed more than 20 books, from early works inspired by myths and legends to fiery protests against environmental destruction and the conflict in Vietnam to late meditations on age and time.

He wrote rhymes and blank verse, a brief report on the month of January and a book-length story in verse about colonialism and the birth of modern Hawaii. Like his hero, Henry David Thoreau, he was inspired equally by reverence for the planet and anger against injustice.

He died in his sleep at his home on the Hawaiian island of Maui, according to publisher Copper Canyon Press and the Merwin Conservancy, which the poet founded.

“He is an artist with a very clear spiritual profile, and intellectual and moral consistency, which encompasses both his work and his life,” his fellow poet Edward Hirsch once said of him.

Merwin received virtually every honor a poet could ask for – more, it turned out, than he desired.

Citing the Vietnam war, he declined a Pulitzer in 1971 for The Carrier of Ladders, saying he was “too conscious of being an American to accept public congratulation with good grace, or to welcome it except as an occasion for expressing openly a shame which many Americans feel”.

He also rejected membership in the National Institute of Arts and Letters, now the American Academy of Arts and Letters, but changed his mind five years later, in 1977.

Among other awards he accepted: a National Book Award for Migration in 2005, a Pulitzer in 2009 for The Shadow of Sirius, and such lifetime achievement honors as the Tanning prize, the Bollingen prize and a gold medal from the arts academy. He was chosen the country’s poet laureate in 2010 and served a single one-year term.

The changes in his work were no more dramatic than the changes in his life, which spanned continents and religious faiths. The son of a Presbyterian minister, he was raised in the urban east during the Great Depression, spent years as a young man in France, Mexico, Spain and England and lived his final decades as a Buddhist in a solar-powered house he designed on an old pineapple plantation, surrounded by a rain forest, on the north-east coast of Maui.

“There was something incomplete about the world of streets and sidewalks and cement,” he told the Paris Review in 1986. “I remember walking in the streets of New York and New Jersey and telling myself, as a kind of reassurance, that the ground was really under there.”

His poem Thanks is among his odes to the natural world:

Listen

with the night falling we are saying thank you

we are stopping on the bridges to bow from the railings

we are running out of the glass rooms

with our mouths full of food to look at the sky

and say thank you

(AP)

CITIZEN SOLDIERS

by Bruce Patterson

It’s scary to think that, back in 1969, we as anti-war GIs had more civil rights than we have today. If the 20th Century proved anything, it’s that living under Big Lies Inc. is comforting in a mass society shaped by commercial propaganda campaigns zeroed in on mass-produced gullibility. Misery loves company and, up till now, our lowest common denominators have nearly always ruled over the best within us. So the promise of Liberty remains just that (Obviously, our “Greatest Generation” hasn’t been born yet).

As funny as it sounds, all great tyrants and war criminals see themselves as society victims. But in Vietnam us grunts had gotten ourselves washed and rinsed, tumbled and dried inside our world of hurt; misery had been our starting point and our bus wasn’t ever again going in the way it used to go or could have gone had we stayed home. As returnees, the whole world was like the girlfriends we’d left behind who’d moved so far away.

It wasn’t like we came back home from some useful and valuable on-the-job training in lovely London or Gay Paree. If we came back, it’d be as figments of your imagination. Having been broken down, reassembled and broken down again, we were figments of our own imaginations, too, our memories and futures joined like our hands with their fingers laced. But none of the shit turning over in our heads had happened in the real world and there was the rub. War wasn’t a hole to dig then fill back up and then dig again to fill back up again. Yesterday’s gone and tomorrow ain’t yet in a grunt’s field of vision. So jump back up on the magic bus, boy, lock and load, let’s get it on.

Maybe you’ll get a passenger to tell you their name, rank and serial number. No? Too forward? Then soak in the defoliated scenery out the window: bleached tree trunks the masts of ancient sunken warships. Read a book and/or plug your ears with Surround Sound. It’s the going and not the getting there, right? Hanging out too long in any one place is liable to get you killed.

The GI anti-war movement birthed the veteran’s anti-war movement, and we as citizen soldiers stood foursquare on the blood oath we’d sworn to defend the US Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic. Unfortunately for ourselves, and millions of non-combatants of the Indochinese persuasion, we’d gone to war without a Congressional Declaration of War and that made our war blatantly unconstitutional—at best, gross dereliction of duty as a high crime and misdemeanor—on the part of the cracker US Congress back in 1965. Because, to paraphrase Daniel Webster: where in our Constitution is it written that some grasping tyrant in a faraway Capitol can forcefully take son from mother, and brother from sister, and send him to be slaughtered in some faraway land in the name of whatever cause some politician decrees to be Just and Necessary?

Our wars in Indochina violated the UN Charter and a number of other treaties adopted by Congress and signed by the US President and, if that weren’t disgraceful enough, they also violated the Nuremburg Principles our own government had authored and advocated for. The Nuremburg Principles the military had used to instruct us trainees in war’s Rules of Engagement. Any individual who commits an atrocity like a Nazi, we were warned, will get treated like a Nazi.

So how could we get punished for demanding that the Laws of the Land be upheld? Where is the sedition in honoring our oath? We as petitioners were patriots the same as our legions of celebrity judges, juries and executors yakking away on rightwing cracker TV and squawky/talkie yahoo radio (Lt. Calley was a political prisoner in respectable Southern Opinion). We were the same patriots they were just one hell of a lot more of it. We’d been to hell and back: all these dudes had done was talk Nixonite Cold War/Peace with Victory horseshit. Besides, the noble Commander-in-Chief the War Hawks had pledged their allegiance to was just another crooked little WW2 GI goldbrick, weakling and card cheat.

Nixon’s “base” were not just stone fools, they were hypocrites on a Biblical scale and, if that weren’t bad enough, their own worst enemies in the end, their self-willed ignorance in the name of “duty,” “National Security” and “national unity” a form of punishment for their minds, bodies, pocketbooks and souls.

Some stuff a person can forgive and forget, and some stuff a person can’t. The obscenity called war is as old as the hills and as new as a toddler squatting in the dirt of a refugee camp. War is a bone-skinny boy POW watching you from inside his concertina cage, him hoping for a lump of bread you ain’t got and wouldn’t give him anyway. War is a raggedy young peasant woman collapsed in a heap and hiding her face, her shoulders heaving, her wailing sounding like a gut-shot dying animal because her god has abandoned her.

I don’t think many folks remember the USA’s St. Patrick’s Brigade or Coxey’s Army, the Bonus Marchers, 1943’s GI Bill of Rights or Post-WW2’s Bring Them Home Campaign. That last of personal interest since my dad, and virtually all of his close friends, had volunteered to fight in WW2. They joined for the duration of the war which would be, now that the Yanks were coming, maybe a year or two away. But then, after Germany was not just defeated but flattened, the military refused to honor their promise seeing how Japan wasn’t quite done fighting yet. Then, after Japan joined Germany in total defeat and submission, the military still refused to demobilize, the spoils of victory still not having been properly secured and consolidated in their professional opinions.

But the people back home wouldn’t have it. Mothers, fathers, sisters, daughters, aunts and uncles, cousins, neighbors, church congregations and union locals all knew a promise is a promise and they got fighting mad. How dare anybody extend the tours of those who’d already sacrificed what should have been the best years of their lives? And what of their loved ones? How much do they count for in this “democracy” of ours?

Individual politicians can defy the people only when they’re issued blank checks. But yank on their leashes and they’re liable to land on their backs, their little manicured paws dog-paddling in the air. And that’s what happened when these DC/Wall Street War Hawks tried to convince everybody “on the home front” that “duration” means whatever they say it means and, by the way, your questions are very much in bad taste.

Well the War Hawks got letters, telegrams, petitions, picket lines and an almost universally hostile press. In the end, demobilization happened the way everybody had expected it would way back at the beginning: the beginning which was already starting to seem like a world lost overnight and lost forever.

So it’s not surprising we’ve forgotten about Vietnam Veterans against the War and Vietnam’s legions of anti-war vets more generally (all wars breed plenty of “malcontents” seeing how wars are never all they’re cracked up to be). So getting to write the Official History of any war is that war’s most important spoil, for controlling the story of the past is the key to fashioning the future. Official History makes your customers look good by sweeping all evidence to the contrary under the proverbial rug while making sure a war’s ancient lessons are forgotten in good time. In short: if a tree falls in a forest and there’s nobody there, nobody hears about it. That is good, too. As Orwell so proudly asserted, Ignorance is taken as Strength.

April is coming and it reminds me of Nam in bloody April, 1968, and how, throughout history, April has been considered a good time to start a war. We Americans already have wars aplenty, of course, but they’re sub-contracted and so flying under our radar. Meatloaf and potatoes, bread and butter, cheap food and gas are supposedly all that holds today’s voter’s attention in what the media has christened “The New Trump Era.” Getting citizens to vote their pocketbooks makes them predictable and so easy to ambush. Especially when you’ve made it so when you give them a dollar back in taxes and pocket ten bucks for yourself, they think they’re getting a bargain. The Ancient Regime as State as Church has trained them so well that the one thing they absolutely are not is their brother’s keeper. Or so they’d have us think.

Call the functionalities of the straight-laced American Consumer sins if you want, but they’ll keep their pieces of silver and still be forgiven—blind faith better than no faith at all according to the Gospel of Themselves, which makes Jesus their ace in the hole. In 2018, the desire for more and more is bred into us the way speed and endurance are bred into Thoroughbred horses. And so, if you’ve been “reborn” in war, you’re doomed to die a warrior just like everybody else who has walked down that lonely midnight alley. Such is the nature of the beast, as most everybody quickly finds out too late.

April, 1971, was also when VVAW launched what was called Operation Dewey Canyon III. To the consternation of the War Hawk Nixonites, but the solid support of local law enforcement and the endorsement of plenty of retired and distinguished military officers and NCOs, and field-grade officers, including General D.M. Shoup, Medal of Honor winner and former Commandant of the US Marine Corps, and heavily-decorated WW2 Army Infantry generals H.B. Hester and James M. Gavin, 8,000 Vietnam Veterans gathered in D.C. to demand an end to the carnage and more money for the VA’s rundown and over-stuffed hospitals. During the four day gathering, some 800 vets threw their war medals onto the steps of the US Supreme Court, and the extensive and in-depth media coverage of the heart-wrenching ritual pounded another wooden stake into the heart of the vampire war that refused to die until, four long years later, it finally did. The killing didn’t stop, of course, but at least we Americans weren’t dying anymore.

GIs United against the War in Vietnam, Ft. Bragg, NC chapter, got respectful and extensive press coverage, including a documentary on National Educational Television and a cover story in Life Magazine. I was interviewed for the doc and, “plagiarizing” a friend with Military Intelligence who worked inside the JKF Special Warfare Center and wished to remain anonymous, I said on camera that the US Special Forces (“those brave men of the Green Beret”) spread out across Latin America were “the American guns behind the American money the American people know nothing about.”

Today there’s a massive youth movement growing nationwide and they’re not getting any press. As if our salvation lies in dinosaurs like Joe (“3rd time’s the charm”) Biden or Bernie the ancient New England Hobbit storyteller. By the way: has anybody ever seen a politician who acts more innocent than Herr Trump? That makes him innocent, right?

If Trump’s taken away in a straightjacket anytime soon, the vast majority of Americans will celebrate, as will virtually all the people on earth outside of Gangland Russia and Imperial China. Given his wicked sense of humor, Trump getting his just desserts will probably prompt Putin to declare a National Day of Mourning and, in requiem, award His Loyal People with a Military Parade.

JOLENE SHANAHAN WRITES regarding Joe Munson’s recent account “as told to Jonah Raskin”: https://www.theava.com/archives/97701

I'm unclear how this article was printed. It's false. I've been a resident of Lake Pillsbury almost 30 years. Kirk Hamilton isn't necessarily one of my favorite people. No houses were burned during the fires and he got more than 5 years in prison. And he always got in there and tried to put them out. He never stood and watched. It doesn't even comment about the government and FBI harassment of the Lake Pillsbury residents, going on properties without permission, following people, watching them skinny dip and writing statements about it. In the statement about how he's in jail right now is true. but the messed up thing is he wasn't even at the crime scene and everybody else who was there when it happened are all free. I know you're allowed to have your opinion but why go out of your way to bad mouth a person who's already hit rock bottom? And Joe Munson has done criminal activities in the past. He just didn’t get caught.

THE RENDEZVOUS RESTAURANT holds many great memories for many of us on the coast. After sitting empty for many years, a new business is proposed to revitalize this location. The new owner is seeking a Use Permit to establish a wellness clinic with family medicine, infrared sauna, massage, teaching kitchen, and retail apothecary.

WHO SHOT THE CAR?

On March 15, 2019, at approximately 10:27 p.m. Officers of the Fort Bragg Police Department were dispatched to a report of an unoccupied vehicle being struck by gunfire in the 600 block of Madrone Street.

Upon arrival, Officers contacted the reporting party who pointed out his vehicle had been struck twice by gunfire. Officers conducted a search of the area and discovered a neighboring residence had also been struck twice. The occupants of that residence were contacted and determined to be uninjured.

During their investigation, Officers canvassed the area and contacted multiple neighboring residents to insure no one was injured. Once Officers had completed the canvass they began processing the scene. Several items of evidence were recovered and collected to be later processed.

At this time the motive for the shooting is unknown and the investigation is ongoing. Currently this incident resulted in property damage only and there is no evidence to indicate anyone was injured.

The Fort Bragg Police Department is asking anyone with information regarding this incident to contact Officer Awad at (707) 961-2800 ext. 180 or our anonymous Crime Tip Hotline at (707) 961-3049.

(Fort Bragg Police Press Release)

ED NOTES

ALAN 'THE KID' FLORA has been named Clearlake's city manager. Some of you will recall that the baby-faced bureaucrat functioned as an assistant CEO for Mendocino County until one bleak Friday morning when he was told to immediately turn over his keys and perp-walked out to the parking lot. No notice, no reason, just "Yer outta here, buddy boy." I've always assumed that Flora's Mendo execution had more to do with the fact that he's smart, capable and, dare I say it, male. We may live in a theoretical democracy but most of us endure in tyrannical circumstances, especially, it seems, in "progressive" Mendocino County.

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INTERESTING COMMENT by Debra Keipp: "During WWII my grandfather was required (I don’t know if he was paid for it) to grow half of our 400 acres in hemp grade marijuana for the war effort. So, most all of our crop land was planted with hemp for ropes for the war ships. Hemp rope floats in the water. It took most all of our crop land at the time, so they may have subsidized g-pa somehow. Years later when visiting the farm, I walked through the area where the seeders were filled before taken to the field for planting, and there was a strange smell of marijuana underfoot. I looked down and there was a strange broad leaf type of marijuana plant growing under foot. Immediately when it came up out of the ground, it formed a broad leaf on the stem that was different from smokeable pot. We had alot of cows and horses. The horses would walk along the gravel roads until they spotted a hemp plant in the ditch and head for the ditch to pull it out. Hemp is strong and fibrous, so the plant always pulled out of the ground from the root when the horses pulled on it to chew. So, we’d walk down the road with the horse chewing on and dragging an entire hemp plant along while he chewed on it. All I can say, is he must have had a bad headache! They sure loved it, tho. Hemp still grows in much of Iowa today. That’s where the farm was."

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SEEMS there was recently much cyber-turmoil inspired by an old video of Maya Angelou that it was noted in the SF Chron. To a teenaged girl who greeted the late Angelou by her first name, Angelou replied, "Thank you, and first, I'm Ms. Angelou. I'm not Maya. I'm 62 years old. I have lived so long and tried so hard that a young woman like you, or any other, have no license to come up to me and call me by my first name. That's first. Also, because at the same time, I'm your mother, I'm your auntie, I'm your teacher, I'm your professor. See?"

JUST READING ANGELOU'S comment, I thought to myself, good for Angelou. She's absolutely correct pointing out that given her years she's entitled to the respect of proper address.

BUT THE COMMENT LINES lit up with denunciations of Angelou's "arrogance"! And those comments that I saw failed to point out that Angelou, in the same encounter, graciously apologized to the girl for what might have seemed to the untutored kid like rudeness.

I CAN'T REMEMBER the last time a young person addressed me as "Mr. Anderson," and I'm damn near 80. Just the other day, a high school kid approached me. "You, Bruce?" No, punk, I'm his great grandfather.

OF COURSE I didn't say that. After all, we live in a Youth Must Be Served society, but when did young people stop being taught basic manners, one of which is basic forms of respectful address? Not a big deal? Hierarchical bourgeois relic? I'd say no, the simple, basic deference that smooths social intercourse.

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LONE NUTS aren't lonely anymore. My mother told me a story about an aggrieved man in her hometown when she was in high school during The Depression. Nobody knew what his grievance was, but he was an old coal miner so he probably had some legitimate ones. He'd say things like, "One of these days I'm going blow up this whole goddamed town." And one day he did. Or about half of it anyway. Miraculously, he was the only one killed, although a number of people were harmed. Turned out the old boy had stockpiled dynamite until he figured he had enough, then ka-boom! Fast forward to 2019, and thanks to the internet, the lone nuts have whole communities.

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PRESIDENT TRUMP, a twitter comment quickly erased from his cyber-feed after the slaughter in New Zealand: "It's so terrible what's happening. You know, the left plays a tougher game, it's very funny. I actually think that the people on the right are tougher, but they don't play it tougher. OK? I can tell you, I have the support of the police, the support of the military, the support of the Bikers for Trump — I have the tough people, but they don't play it tough until they go to a certain point, and then it would be very bad, very bad. But the left plays it cuter and tougher."

THE WASHINGTON POST'S David Nakamura pointed out, this is actually quite similar to something Trump said at a September campaign rally: "They're so lucky that we're peaceful. Law enforcement, military, construction workers, Bikers for Trump — how about Bikers for Trump? They travel all over the country. They got Trump all over the place, and they're great. They've been great. But these are tough people. These are great people. But they're peaceful people, and Antifa and all — they'd better hope they stay that way. I hope they stay that way. I hope they stay that way."

TRUMP is like a lot of non-tough blowhards in that he doesn't know the diff between tough and vicious; and even his idea of tough is way off. Ten fat bikers beating another fat biker with pool cues? Trump's "bone spurs" conveniently kept him from keeping company with real tough guys during Vietnam, and “tough” needs precise definition beyond windy fascist fantasies about a diabetic uprising. Gotta give it to Orange Man though, he's mobilized the neo-Reich for sure. The drift of events just might give us all much more violence than any rational person wants.

STEVE GILL WRITES:

Remembering your articles in the early 90s on the Mitchell brothers way back when. Did you know at one time a lot of their workers and other sex workers in SF were Rajneesh devotees? I lived there then, but had no idea: "For a long time, Rajneesh women predominated in the escort services in San Francisco and among strippers at the well-known Mitchell Brothers O’Farrell Street Theatre in San Francisco, but after operations got going at the ranch in Oregon, Rajneesh summoned all of them to Central Oregon. Bill Driver, the investigative reporter with whom I worked on several Oregon Magazine features about the cult, received a tip from a law enforcement source that the man the FBI considered to be the major cocaine dealer in the United States was observed leaving the ranch on Rajneesh’s last day there, but Bill was unable to confirm the information…"

Outside the Limits of the Human Imagination

newrepublic.com/article/147657/outside-limits-human-imagination

Keep up the good work! Cheers…

CATCH OF THE DAY, March 16, 2019

LAURA ADAMS, Ukiah. Disobeying court order.

LORENA ARREGUIN, Willits. Domestic battery, use of tear gas for other than self-defense.

ROBERTO BALANDRAN, Ukiah. Probation revocation.

JEREMIAH BENNETT, Hendersonville, Tennessee/Ukiah. Burglary, failure to appear.

NOELLE FETKENHAUER, Santa Rosa/Redwood Valley. Probation revocation.

JUSTIN HILL, Ukiah. Disorderly conduct-alcohol, false reporting of a crime, probation revocation.

DIONICIO JIMENEZ-LORENZO, Arcata/Leggett. DUI.

CHELSEY LAUGHTON, Willits. Protective order violation.

VERONICA LOPEZ, Covelo. Assault with deadly weapon not a gun.

AUDREA LUNA, Trinidad/Ukiah. DUI-alcohol&drugs, no license.

ISAIAH MALIN, Ukiah. Domestic abuse.

MARY MORROW, Lakeport/Hopland. DUI, suspended license.

DEMETRIE PIKE, Ukiah. Kidnapping.

TONY RAMOS JR., Ione/Ukiah. Probation revocation.

RICHARD STRAZI, Fort Bragg. Grand theft, probation revocation.

STEVEN TOKOSHIMA, Fremont/Ukiah. Failure to appear.

ROBERT VIALE, Fort Bragg. Failure to appear, probation revocation.

BRYAN VICKHAMMER, Coeur d’Alene, Idaho/Redwood Valley. Disorderly conduct-alcohol.

DOUGLAS WHIPPLE III, Covelo. Under influence,

BILOXI DAYS: THE LEAK

by Mark Scaramella

I happened to be in the office of Chief Master Sergeant Ralph Johns, the Field Maintenance superintendent, when he received a call from Sergeant Wilkins in the aero repair shop over in Hangar 3. It was late July in a hot southern Mississippi summer. Sergeant Wilkins was annoyed because someone on the flight line had asked for one of his aircraft mechanics to repair a cockpit heater.

Johns: "It's July!"

Wilkins: "Exactly."

Johns: "You mean Maintenance Control actually passed this request along?"

Wilkins: "Yup. Heard it myself on the intercom."

Johns: "Which flight?"

Wilkins: "C flight."

Johns angrily hung up and dialed Maintenance Control. I could only hear his end of the conversation.

"Did somebody up there just call aero repair about a heater problem?"

…

"Why? It's fucking July!"

…

"I've never heard of a heater problem in July."

…

"No they don't. Just because some candy-ass pilot thinks it's cold?"

…

"Well, I'm not sending anybody out for that right now. Put it on the delayed discrepancy list."

…

"If you don't like it, have Major Smith (the Maintenance Control Officer) call the Lieutenant [me, Johns’ boss]."

Johns hung up. "Come on, sir. Let's go out to C Flight."

---

We arrived at the C-Flight flight shack which the flightline mechanics worked out of.

Johns: "Where’s Sergeant Atkins?" (Master Sergeant Atkins was responsible for the mechanics on the flight line. He did what we called "gas station maintenance" on C Flight, a group of about 20 T-28s out of the 80 or so we maintained: Fueling, run-ups, cleaning, tire changes, forms, etc.

Airman: "Right over there."

Johns: "Did you know one of your people just called for a heater repair?"

Atkins: "The pilot said it wasn't working."

Johns: "The pilot’s full of shit. Which pilot?"

Atkins: "Captain Bledsoe. That's him right there, taxiing in."

Chief Johns strode determinedly in the direction of Captain Bledsoe as he climbed down from the cockpit.

"Did you just report a heater problem — sir?"

"Yes, Sergeant. It gets kind of chilly up there at 10,000 feet."

"You are the first pilot I've ever heard complain about a heater in the summer."

"It's cold, Sergeant."

"Zip up your jacket — sir."

"I did, Sergeant. It was still cool."

"Would you fly that plane again if the heater wasn’t fixed?"

"If I had to, Sergeant."

"Well, you have to — sir. We can't be sending mechanics out here every time one of you officers thinks there's some minor problem. We’re behind on the heavy maintenance hangar work."

"Do what you have to do, Sergeant,” Captain Bledsoe said as he strolled back to the flight ops building.

Chief Johns went back to Sergeant Atkins and angrily told him to think twice about heater complaints in the summertime. "If your people can't handle these kind of things, put it on the goddamn delayed discrepancy list and if it's really a problem we’ll fix it during the next periodic inspection in the hangar."

---

A few days later I was in Sergeant Wilkins’ aero repair shop when a call came in over the intercom about a fuel leak in one of the wheel wells of a T-28.

"There they go again!” shouted Wilkins. “They’re always calling us for this minor shit. Come on lieutenant. Let's go take a look."

We arrived at the aircraft with the supposed fuel leak. Sergeant Wilkins, a tall, lanky redhead with years of aircraft maintenance experience, many of them with the T-28, bent over and then carefully stood up inside the wheel well and looked around. He then bent back down and came out from under the wing and said, "Step in there and look upward to your right, sir."

I bent over and leaned in trying not to bump my head.

“Now, see that fuel line a couple of feet above your head?"

“No.”

“Ok. You should be able to feel it. Just reach all the way up and follow the line to where the nut is.”

I followed some copper tubing with my fingers until I felt the nut at the very maximum reach of my arm as I contorted to barely reach it.

“Okay, I feel the nut.”

“Tighten it hand tight.”

I tightened it up.

Wilkins pulled a small wrench out of his pocket and handed it to me. "Now take this wrench and tighten it as tight as you can."

I stretched and reached back up and awkwardly tightened it, all by feel.

"Ok. That's it. We’re done.”

I squirmed out from under the wing and followed Sergeant Wilkins over to Sergeant Atkins’s flight shack.

Wilkins: "Atkins! See this lieutenant here?”

Atkins: "Yeah."

Wilkins: "He just fixed that leak. Even this green lieutenant can fix these things. Are you saying your people can't even do what this lieutenant just easily fixed?"

Atkins: “We couldn't see the leak.”

Wilkins: “Neither could the lieutenant. You don't need to. You can just reach up there like the lieutenant did and tighten it. … No offense, sir,” Wilkins added turning to me. (I had not taken offense.)

Atkins: “How were we supposed to know that? Our policy has been to call a specialist from the shops if in doubt.”

Wilkins: “We have offered time and again to hold classes for your lead people on stuff like this.”

Atkins: “Warrant Officer Knowles says we should call the specialists.”

This went to the heart of the problem that Chief Johns and I had been unsuccessfully complaining about. The flight line had at least 10% more people than their manpower allocation called for; whereas the shops in Field Maintenance were at least 15% short in most shops. But even with this imbalance in staffing, Warrant Officer Knowles, the Officer In Charge of the flight line, and Maintenance Control’s Major Smith, continued to send their minor probs to the shops; even Sergeant Wilkins’ attempt to embarrass Sergeant Atkins by having me, the green lieutenant, do the "repair," didn't help.

BOOK 'EM, DANO!

West Coast credit card skimming ring busted in Sacramento

https://www.kcra.com/article/west-coast-credit-card-skimming-ring-busted-in-sacramento/26843140

INCREDIBLY OBNOXIOUS

Editor:

The “grammar cop” is a common phenomenon. When people hear or see a person make a grammar error, many cannot resist the urge to correct them. It is understandable in a way. It is certainly satisfying to be right, and correcting someone’s grammar is an easy way to feel superior. However, to all but the grammar cop in question, this comes off as incredibly obnoxious.

Language is a fluid medium. What is considered correct grammar changes over time. As with any living language, English is constantly changing to suit the needs of the current generation of speakers.

Being overly fussy about grammar is unnecessary. Speech is different from writing, and it isn’t possible to look over a draft for grammar mistakes. Derailing the conversation simply to correct someone’s grammar is unnecessary and obnoxious. As long as someone is understandable, it does not matter if their grammar is perfect.

Caitlyn McMillian

Santa Rosa

ON LINE COMMENT OF THE DAY

There’s a lot of predicates based on nothing resembling reality, all false, all preposterously contradicting the most basic common sense and fundamental laws of nature.

No, notwithstanding the claims of the financial elite, there’s no magic elixir called the “wealth effect”. It’s just another Wall Street con that should have been roundly discredited in the debacle ten years back. No matter, the Fed still has its plunge protection mechanism, that being to flood the financial system with counterfeit money, the justification being that if you have a “wealth effect” with rising stock prices, you have the opposite with falling prices. Of course everyone knows that this “wealth effect” talk is all phony-baloney, it’s just a ploy to get intervention so rich guys don’t get creamed in a market rout. ZIRP will solve all the issues, and, if it doesn’t, then NIRP will. Sure it will, the economists say so. And besides, the institutions of the US federal government will break legs and make people disappear if they have to, to make sure Wall Street bankers stay rich.

The antics of the last two years, especially with the nonsensical Russia Collusion theory, is all about the Deep State and its Washington errand boys fighting back mightily against the rising tide of event and circumstance that, as sure as we were born, is submerging their absurdist schemes for the enrichment of the outlandishly rich and their delusions about American hegemony in history’s sink-hole, that place to which all arrangements without a future eventually go.

Trump and his Deplorables, UK Brexiteers, French Yellow Jackets, and the multitude of European political movements represent something absolutely anathema to Western ruling classes; the suggestion that not only ruling class interests matter, that people who work with their hands for a living have legitimate aspirations, that wanting a decent shot at life isn’t by definition beyond the pale. Hard as it is to believe for Ivy League grads and students, and the denizens of Washington and New York and London, it isn’t all about them.

Of course the New York Times and other reality denying publications will try to mold the stories, being history’s “first draft” as they like to call themselves. They decry “fake news”, but nothing is remotely as fake as their assumptions and presumptions and the nonsense they spout. What they’ll find is that lying about reality doesn’t change it, that reality has its own dictates, and that what happens isn’t altered one whit by bullshitting about it.

BETSY CAWN WRITES: Okay, boys, that tears it. Disgrace beyond imagination, as a loyal “military” brat, sister to three US military veterans (one of them nearly died in Nam, the other two served 20+), daughter of WWII decorated Army combat veteran, step-daughter of WWII decorated Marine combat veteran, supporter of peaceful military services and Veterans for Peace - Savannah, and still outraged by Kent massacres of unarmed Americans by the National Guard and Jackson State slaughter of unarmed Americans by city and state police, I thought I’d witnessed the worst. But this?

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THE AIR FORCE ADMITS It Has Been Dumping Troops' Remains In Landfills For Years

As part of an ongoing investigation into military mortuary services, the Air Force admits it dumped the partial cremated remains of at least 274 servicemembers in Virginia landfills.

businessinsider.com/the-air-force-admits-its-been-dumping-troops-remains-in-landfills-for-years-2011-12

WHY IS ‘ASPERGER’S SYNDROME’ such a part of our lexicon? Why did its use take off in the mid-1990s? Edith Sheffer is clear: autism in its severe forms is about underlying biology; but what we now call Asperger’s syndrome is a cultural artefact.

lrb.co.uk/v41/n06/michele-pridmore-brown/unfeeling-malice

IT'S ALL GOOD, ALL OF IT. EH?

My son and I had a half-hour of so after the nice doctor read the numbers on the computer and informed me that I wasn't scheduled for the sort of surgery you might not wake up from this morning. I was pretty much alive, and likely to remain so. My odds are about the same as yours.

After my son left, I scanned the life I'd been handed. I saw right away that since moving into my new apartment, every single thing that has come into my living room had brought life changing great news. Besides that, every piece of mail that arrived was a bill easily within what passes for my budget. I am current with all my bills. My CPA daughter knows my financial circumstances far better than me. And if she ain't worried, I'm humming too. In this case, writing this.

I have been given back my ability to live my life. I am still inhaling. And laughing. And loving. And bowing down to kiss the precious Great Spirit with thanks. And a medical staff person on the doctor's staff have me a red sucker yesterday in the shape of a heart. Given with love. I love all as I bow. Thank you. I love you. All…

(Bruce Brady)

WHENEVER I return from a sojourn in the woods or waters or mountains, I’m dismayed by the noise and jumble of the workaday world. One moment I can lay everything I need on the corner of a poncho, tally my responsibilities on the fingers of one hand. The next moment, it seems, I couldn’t fit all my furniture and tasks into a warehouse. Time in the wild reminds me how much of what I ordinarily do is mere dithering, how much of what I own is mere encumbrance. Coming home, I can see that there are too many appliances in my cupboards, too many clothes in my closet, too many strings of duty jerking me in too many directions. The opposite of simplicity, as I understand it, is not complexity but clutter.

— Scott Russell Sanders

MEMO OF THE AIR: Smithereens.

"Potter is jealous of potter, and craftsman of craftsman; and the poor have grudge against the poor, and the poet against the poet." -Hesiod

The recording of last night's (2019-03-15) KNYO Fort Bragg and KMEC Ukiah arguably world-class Memo of the Air: Good Night Radio show is available by one or two clicks, depending on whether you want to listen to it now or download it and keep it for later and, speaking of which, it's right here: https://tinyurl.com/KNYO-MOTA-0324

Savion, of the Mendocino Community School, was accordion busking in Franklin Street when Bob Young finished his Captain Crusty show (of mostly mashups this time) and Bob told Savion to go to KNYO later and play on the radio. When I got there he came in with a fine little electrical piano and a massive non-electrical accordion, played for a bit, and then Willow Arthur showed up with her bag of mystical tricks and read Savion's cards, palms, eyes, stars and anything else that occurred to her, and she told a story of, many years ago, psychically turning a whole airport in her favor without endangering a single life.

And that's just the first hour, there. Savion's been playing keyboards for like three weeks and he’s already pretty good. You'll hear him again, and also Willow, who's interested in doing a whole regularly-scheduled psychic trip of her own on KNYO. Oh, she came back in later after realizing she didn't have enough gas to get home. I gave her a dollar and wished her luck, suggested there are more people with a dollar in the bar next door, went back to what I was doing. At the end of the night Jerry told me that Willow went to the bar, recited poetry out front and inside, passed the hat, and got her gas money in like five minutes. That kind of fearless resourcefulness impresses me. Everyone appreciates a cartoonlike combination of haplessness (running out of gas, say) and ready brave skill at solving the problems haplessness gets a person into. Like Coyote. Or Susan Sarandon in King of the Gypsies. Or Big Fish.

Besides that, also at http://MemoOfTheAir.wordpress.com you can find a fresh batch of dozens of links to not necessarily radio-useful but nonetheless worthwhile educational items I set aside for you while gathering the show together. Such as:

A weirdly hypnotic Paper Moon. My grandmother used to sing it to me, and I remember it felt a lot like looking at this.

http://tinyurl.com/BobbleheadPaperMoon

Snail is a leaf on the wind. Watch how he soars.

https://misscellania.blogspot.com/2019/03/snail-takes-magic-carpet-ride.html

And something to use your two-color 3D glasses on that you got from the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen book that introduced The Blazing World.

https://cosmosmagazine.com/space/ultima-thule-in-3d

Marco McClean, memo@mcn.org, https://MemoOfTheAir.wordpress.com