OUR SUPERVISORS will hold a closed-door meeting Monday at 11am. The agenda includes three items: labor negotiations and two court cases to be discussed with the county’s legal counsel. The first case lists the cities of Ukiah, Fort Bragg and Willits as petitioners who are suing the County and Auditor-Controller Meredith Ford, along with “Does 1-10.” The second case on the agenda is Fifth District Supervisor Dan Hamburg’s lawsuit against the county in his attempt to get the County to allow his family’s burial of his wife, Carrie Hamburg, on the family’s property. The Supes meet in Fort Bragg on Friday the 12th at Town Hall downtown.

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WHEN LIGHTNING sparked a fire west of Hopland last Thursday night, and a CalFire chopper showed up the next day when smoke made it visible, the bucket chopper passed low over a ridgetop grow where an ag man was tending his crop. In the nude. The ag man dashed for the trees as the chopper gave him a merry blast of its siren, and a good time was had by all.

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CRAIG STEHR WRITES: Warm spiritual greetings, Today I spent the whole day in Catholic churches in San Francisco. Beginning with 7:30AM mass at the historic St. Patrick’s, and then sat a lengthy meditation at Old St. Mary’s. I walked to the National Shrine of St. Francis, and met with the new rector Fr. Snider. We briefly discussed my need of a spiritual vocation, and he appreciates that I have been active with Catholic Worker for 23 years. We agreed to pray for each other. A visit was then made to the Sts. Peter & Paul church, and I discovered upon leaving that the SF Mime Troupe was performing their new play across the street in Washington Square Park, so I watched “Oil and Water,” realizing that it’s not just my own circumstances which are dire. I’ve got one more week at the Berkeley men’s shelter. I have no idea what I am going to do or where I am going to go. Of course I have sent out hundreds of emails to activist groups saying that I am willing to relocate to continue being involved. Nothing substantive has been received yet. I have given up all hope, and am praying continuously. I ask for your prayers to receive a spiritual vocation, and am as always only seriously interested in doing the will of God. That’s just the way it is with me. Thank you very much, Craig Louis Stehr, Email: craigstehr@hushmail.com Mailing address: c/o NOSCW, P.O. Box 11406, Berkeley, CA 94712-2406.

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MAJOR CORPORATION execs now make, on average, about 273 times more than the average worker, according to a recent analysis by the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) of the CEO-to-worker pay ratio at top 350 firms. The average pay, EPI found, was $14.1 million in 2012, up 12.7% from 2011. That’s a big change from a half-century ago. In 1965, the CEO-to-worker pay ratio was about 20-to-1, but it grew over the next three decades, and that growth picked up speed in the 90s. It peaked in 2000 before the early 2000s recession, with a CEO-to-worker pay ratio of 383.4-to-1. It hit a lesser peak again in 2007, before the Great Recession, with a ratio of 351.3-to-1. During the recovery, CEO pay has been climbing upward once more. At the same time, for most Americans, wages have remained stagnant at best.

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THE RISING TIDE OF SUICIDES

The Link Between Suicides & Homicides

By Ralph Nader

“I am sorry that it has come to this.” Thus began the searing suicide note by 30-year-old Iraq War veteran, Daniel Somers on June 10, 2013 to his wife and family.

On the other side of the violent divide are video messages from the suicide bombers — the oft-described “weapon of the weak” against US soldiers and their presumed local collaborators.

In 2012 suicide by active duty American soldiers exceeded the number of US combat deaths in Afghanistan. Why?

In the war zones of Iraq and Afghanistan, young natives are lining up to become suicide bombers. Why?

For the soldiers’ conditions, there is an acronym — PTSD or post-traumatic stress syndrome. During World War I, it used to be called “shell-shock.” But in the Afghan and Iraq regions, the adversaries are not modern armies armed with “shells” — they have no thunderous artillery, missiles, gunships, tanks fighter planes or drones. They have rifles, rocket-propelled grenades, Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs) and suicide belts sporadically used. Something else is at work that is causing PTSD.

War correspondent and author, Kevin Sites offers this explanation: “Our understanding of PTSD from a clinical perspective has been that it’s triggered by witnessing a traumatic event that resonates so deeply that it prevents a person from leading a normal life in the aftermath. And so it is the witnessing of the event that causes the problems…. The Veterans Administration (VA) started looking at the connection between killing and post-traumatic stress and found that those soldiers who were involved in killings or who witnessed killings were experiencing a higher degree of post-traumatic stress disorder… It was about the feelings of guilt they had about what they did or witnessed. And the guilt stemmed from two things: the guilt from killing, whether justified in the line of duty or killing a civilian by accident or killing one of your own guys by accident or killing in a war crime — so any kind of killing; the second point was surviving, survivor’s guilt. Their friends died, but they didn’t.”

The VA distilled thousands of interviews in their 2009 report, Moral Injury in the Context of War, to come to their assessment.

Mr. Sites came to the same judgment after his many profiles of returning veterans. In an interview with the Northwestern Alumni Magazine, he said “when we do something that goes against our moral compass — and killing goes against a lot of moral compasses out there — unless you’re a sociopath — we do feel some empathy…. So that idea of participation in something that goes against your moral compass really screws you up. It makes you feel bad, makes you feel guilt and shame.”

But soldiers aren’t supposed to talk about these feelings and don’t, which is why Sites titled his new book The Things They Cannot Say: Stories Soldiers Won’t Tell You About What They’ve Seen, Done or Failed to Do in War (Harper Perennial).

The fact that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were so one-sided in weaponry and so full of casualties of innocent civilians, including children, who never threatened our country, exacerbates these feelings of guilt.

This trauma coursed through the lengthy suicide letter of Daniel Somers who ran more than 400 combat missions as a machine gunner in Iraq during 2004-2005 and later worked with JSOC — Joint Special Operations Command — in Mosul, Iraq.

He writes “to sleep forever seems to be the most merciful thing… During my first deployment, I was made to participate in things, the enormity of which is hard to describe. War crimes, crimes against humanity. Though I did not participate willingly, and made what I thought was my best effort to stop these events, there are some things that a person simply can not come back from…. To force me to do these things and then participate in the ensuing cover-up is more than any government has the right to demand.”

In Daniel Somers’ final message he asks: “And for what? Bush’s religious lunacy? Cheney’s ever growing fortune and that of his corporate friends? Is this what we destroy lives for?”

As for what he called his “actual final mission,” he wrote: “Not suicide, but a mercy killing…. It was quick, and I did not suffer. And above all, now I am free…. I have no more nightmares or flashbacks or hallucinations.”

What of the young suicide bombers who are depicted in their videos as wanting to become martyrs? Western reporters like to say their motivation is to go the Islamic paradise. That is not what University of Chicago professor, Robert Pape found in his extensive research, concluding that their principal motivation was to expel the occupying invader.

Their immense poverty, war-torn devastation of their villages and tribal areas, and the absence of any future, whether of economic survival or personal achievements, was probably also in the mix. Perhaps some money was given to their destitute families in exchange for their attacks.

Whatever the reasons, to dismiss these fighters as sociopaths is to help preclude our own examination of why we are there blowing apart their societies, provoking sectarian revenge cycles, bribing our way everywhere with crates of $100 bills. As a Yemeni villager plaintively asked, after a devastating drone attack that killed many civilians, “Why do you hate us so much?”

Here in the US we better start understanding the rising tide of suicides generally. The Centers for Disease Control totals suicides in 2010 at 38,364 Americans as compared with homicides totaling 16,259. Among the baby boomers, suicides are sharply higher than previous generations, especially since the onset of the recession, unemployment and home foreclosures.

We better starting digging more deeply into the conditioning “whys?” and discounting the traditional explanations of self-hatred and hating us “for our freedoms.”

(Ralph Nader is a consumer advocate, lawyer and author of Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us! He is a contributor to Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion, published by AK Press. Hopeless is also available in a Kindle edition.)

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HAMBURG’S LATEST END-AROUND

by Bruce McEwen

On Tuesday June 25^th a bench warrant was issued for Matthew Hamburg, the troubled son of Fifth District Supervisor Dan Hamburg. Matthew had bailed on a promise to appear at a hearing that day. He had failed to appear at a previous court date as well back on June 11^th. A bench warrant had been held at that time, at the request from the Public Defender. But in fact, Hamburg wasn’t supposed to have been granted bail at all, since he was the subject of a felony hearing to determine his mental competency to aid in his own defense, and it was speculated in open court that the Hamburg family had intervened in Matthew’s case for “political reasons.”

The case is a kind of local version of the Kennedys in the sense that Dan Hamburg is regionally regarded as the leader of the soft liberalism that prevails on the North­coast. It may be remembered that when she became an embarrassment to the Kennedys’ political ambitions, the disabled Kennedy sister, Rosemarie, was shipped out West to a private institution and given a lobotomy. When the Hamburgs bailed the troubled son Matthew out of jail a few weeks ago, he too was put in a private mental institution and was probably given a prescription for an oral lobotomy — Big Pharma has plenty of ’em.

But on Tuesday the 25^th, the court agreed that the Hamburg’s political interests were being put ahead of Matthew Hamburg’s mental health interests and the warrant was issued.

It has been common knowledge for years that Matthew Hamburg has mental issues, and it is often speculated that his heavy use of marijuana at an early age caused the condition he suffers from.

The latest episode involving him occurred on May 5^th, when Matthew got into some sort of squabble at or near the Frank Zeek School in South Ukiah. He was reportedly using foul language at peak volume and blis­tering the sensitive ears of the young scholars on the playgrounds. The police were called, a chase ensued across town and out the Boonville Road to Shepherds Lane, site of the Hamburg property, where Matthew was finally run to ground and arrested after a scuffle with deputies. He was charged with recklessly evading an officer, a felony.

The case was assigned to Carly Dolan of the Public Defender’s Office and a prelim was set for May 22^nd. Ms. Dolan in the meantime made a motion for a sanity hearing due to her doubts that Mr. Hamburg was men­tally competent to aid in his own defense. This proceeding includes appointments with psychologists to determine whether a person is crazy or not, because, well, in a culture as crazy as ours, only a professional with an office in an old Victorian house on School Street in Ukiah can tell for sure who’s crazy and who’s sane.

Kossow

But before the psychological evaluations could be completed enter Richard Kossow, described as “a visiting judge from Humboldt County.” He may live there now, but the Honorable Richard Kossow was a pioneer stoner who rose from a prolonged interlude of hippie grab ass at the famous Rainbow Commune on Greenwood Road, Anderson Valley, to the Superior Court sinecure he occupies to this day. Judge Kossow, who goes all the way back with Hamburg to the days of full moon boogies, had already granted bail to Matthew Hamburg on the grounds that a conservatorship was underway.

Matthew Hamburg had disappeared.

Someone — presumably a member of the Hamburg family — had bailed Matthew out on a promise to appear on June 25th. But he failed to appear, and the judge handling the case, the Honorable Ann Moorman, wanted an explanation why she shouldn’t issue a bench warrant. Her Honor was also annoyed with a set of orders with political overtones from an undisclosed source.

“I’ve been presented with orders I won’t sign,” Judge Moorman said.

Ms. Dolan wasn’t present, so Public Defender Linda Thompson filled in for Dolan, saying that it was her understanding that Matthew Hamburg had been taken to a private mental health facility and that County Counsel Tom Parker had somehow been involved in making this unique arrangement.

“The case has taken a weird turn, frustrating my office,” Ms. Thompson said. “I suspect something political is going on here. We had no notice his bond had been posted, so he could be taken to North Valley Mental Health on a 5150. But Ms. Dolan was hoping the 1368 (competence hearing) wouldn’t have to be declined.”

Thompson said it was her understanding that Matthew had somehow been found incompetent and his public guardian had asked for a temporary conservatorship.

“Dr. Kelly spoke with Matt and said he’d been restored… somehow. Then Judge Kossow accepted the placement.”

Kelly is also a long time Hamburg supporter.

Judge Moorman said she wasn’t entirely confident as to where Mr. Hamburg was. “But we need him here,” she added, emphatically. “And I won’t sign a placement recommendation.”

Deputy DA Matt Hubley wanted the bail bond forfeited and a bench warrant issued. “There’s a political element here,” he said, “and Dr. Kelly is caught in the middle. The defendant was not going to go back to North Valley.”

The Public Defender said she’d like the warrant held until she could contact the mental health facility and find out if Mr. Hamburg was there or not; and whether or not he was the subject of a conservatorship. DA David Eyster said it was unheard of that a conservatorship would be done when a defendant was the subject of a competency hearing, without first consulting with the DA.

DDA Hubley said, “Let the bench warrant issue and let law enforcement get him here.”

Thompson said, “I talked to Dr. Kelly this morning and he said if he could get the order today, he’d go back to North Valley and talk to him [Matthew Hamburg]. The family and Mental Health made this decision to get him out of here. If the court could hold the warrant until I can talk to ‘the powers that be’ and see if we can get him back here without law enforcement involvement…”

Judge Moorman said she agreed with Ms. Thompson that Matthew Hamburg’s interests were taking a back seat to his  connected family’s interests, and that his father’s political influence had obviously been exerted.

Moorman said, “I have an obligation to keep track of the expenses involved here. He was in court and Judge Kossow found him incompetent and agreed to the placement. Now, I‘m being asked to spend more tax dollars on the same questionable decision.”

Hubley said, “The DA was approached by two county officials asking for the release and placement — this comes at a time when we have other people waiting for those beds, and I don’t see why Mr. Hamburg should receive preference.”

DA David Eyster said, “I’m not sure how it happens that a 1368 felony gets bailed out of jail… I think the court has to forfeit the bond and issue the warrant.”

Judge Moorman said, “I don’t have jurisdiction if I don’t have a body so I’m going to issue the bench warrant in the amount of $35,000. The bail bond is forfeit because the defendant bailed to appear and failed to do so. I am also ordering County Counsel to be here, and I’m considering recalling Judge Kossow’s incompetent ruling. The court has not rescinded the 1368 even though he may have failed to appear intentionally.”

An honest judge is a wonderful thing to see.

WILL PARRISH was released from the County Jail on his own recognizance last Wednesday (July 3rd.) Parrish, also known as Red Tail Hawk, writes on environmental matters for the AVA. He’d been arrested for strapping himself to a piece of CalTrans road building equipment in protest of the Willits Bypass.

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“KUDOS,” a reader writes, “to Supervisors Dan Hamburg and John McCowen for getting ‘smoked out’ at the World’s Largest Salmon Barbecue in Fort Bragg. Both of them manned the grills, donning bright yellow rubber aprons and rubber gloves, completely sunburnt, covered in grease, completing grueling, six-hour shifts to save the salmon. Hamburg recalled that in earlier years, all the county judges used to come down and take a shift. Apparently the 3,000-plus portions of King Salmon come from Alaska. My boyfriend quipped that the motto for next year’s event should be, ‘Protect and Serve’.”

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SOME 3,500 PEOPLE turned out at the Green Center at Sonoma State University on the 4th hoping to hear some music and watch some fireworks. The fireworks fizzled, the many kids there strictly for the fireworks were bored by the classical music, the grass was inaccessible to wheelchairs, and lots of people demanded (and got) at least part of their money back. The disabled had to be carried up several flights of stairs to get to the green.

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SHORTLY before noon Monday, a trench on the Holmes Ranch near Philo caved in, injuring a man. No details yet.

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THE MENDOCINO COUNTY Republican Central Committee will meet Saturday, July 20, 2013, 10am–Noon at the Henny Penny Restaurant, 697 S. Orchard Ave (corner of Gobbi), Ukiah 95482.  For further information contact: Stan Anderson, 707-321-2592. One possible topic: “Are we as crazy as the liberals say we are, or is it them who’s nuts?”

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COMMENT OF THE DAY: “I communed with my fellow citizens this Fourth of July weekend for a few hours at a little beach in a Vermont state park. It was a family kind of place. The mommies and daddies were putting on a competitive tattoo display (along with competitive eating). So many skulls, Devil heads, snakes, screaming eagles, flags, and thunderbolts. I suppose they acquire these totem images to ward off some apprehended greater harm, the metaphysically inchoate forces marshalling at the margins of what little normal life remains in this nation of rackets, swindles, and tears. All was nonetheless tranquility, there by the little lakeside, with the weenies grilling and the pop-tops popping. A three-year-old came by where I was working on my tan on a towel in the grass, supine. He asked me if I was dead. Not yet, I told him. Behind him a skull smoking a doobie loomed in blue and red ink on his daddy’s thigh. My people. My country.”

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DON’T TELL the Mendo Health Department, but there’s a liquor store in San Francisco at 2nd & Balboa called “DRINK LIQUOR” Liquor Store. Been there for years.

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DRUG WAR OUT OF CONTROL: THE JOHN DALTON CASE

by Alexander Cockburn

(First published in June 1999, and reprinted this week in the hope that our friend, John Dalton, still being held at the federal penitentiary at Lompoc, will soon be free. So far as we know, Dalton has been held longer on marijuana-related charges than any other Mendocino County resident. He’s been in prison now for 17 years, and was already in custody during the hearing Cockburn describes here for The Nation magazine.)

* * *

All those present in a federal courtroom in San Francisco in mid-May were edified by the sight of a federal prosecutor getting off to a faltering start by having to admit that the government’s prime witness and lead investigator — Drug Enforcement Agency special agent Mark Nelson — had committed perjury.

The object of special agent Nelson’s probe has been John Dalton, brought to the courtroom from the federal detention center in Dublin, Calif., to hear his lawyer, Tony Serra, argue before Judge Susan Illston that the DEA’s case against Dalton be dismissed for “outrageous government conduct.” Among such outrageous conduct must undoubtedly be included the fact that special agent Nelson’s perjury stemmed from his efforts to conceal the precise date on which he commenced an amorous relationship with Dalton’s wife, Victoria Horstman.

Here, in other words, is a saga that gives us the government’s war on drugs at its ripest malevolence, for which I’m indebted to Mark Heimann, who compiled the incredible tale from court documents for a recent series in the Anderson Valley Advertiser, the weekly newspaper in Mendocino County, Northern California.

Let’s return to 1985. Dalton is living with his first wife on an 80-acre parcel in Mendocino County, some four hours’ drive up 101 from San Francisco. This is pot-growing country. About 4:00 in the afternoon, bullets start raining down on the cabin, and Dalton sneaks out to the ridge where the shots are coming from. At this point, he’s bushwacked by five men in camouflage, who beat him senseless.

He comes to, face in the dirt, to find his assailants are from the Campaign Against Marijuana Planting, better known as CAMP. These are teams of federal, state and local cops. They ask him if he’s a marijuana grower. Dalton says no and that he will sue. Sheriff’s Deputy Charlie Bone, who’s dislocated his finger in the encounter, tells Dalton that they know he’s a pot grower and that his troubles are only beginning.

Within eight hours of the arrest, the charges against Dalton are dropped, and though an attorney tells him he could collect big time, Dalton reckons the safe course is to do nothing.

In 1992, Dalton, a brilliant mechanic favored by the hot-rod set, embarks on a relationship with Victoria (Tori) Horstman. They are married a year later in Las Vegas.

The Dalton-Horstman menage is not tranquil. Dalton calls the police from time to time to restore order, and though Horstman claims her husband is a brute, her own 19-year-old son has testified, most recently in Judge Illston’s courtroom, that John was “a very mellow man” and a good dad, and that his mother was a mean drunk.

Horstman is a wanna-be cop, consorts with cops and by 1994 is passing bank deposit slips from her husband’s machine shop to DEA special agent Mark Nelson, who forthwith signs her up as a DEA source, SR3-94-0054. Horstman has also become romantically involved with agent Nelson, initial overtures having been made in a DEA safe house, where, according to a sworn statement by Horstman, “Agent Nelson gave me a beer, and later, we kissed and fondled each other. I do want to make it clear agent Nelson considered me at all times his personal possession and got angry if I ever talked with other DEA agents.” Among Nelson’s other possessions are three children and a pregnant wife.

Nelson successfully presses Horstman to spy on her husband. On at least two occasions, she allows Nelson to search the house while Dalton is at work. Whenever she demurs, the DEA agent threatens to charge her with money laundering on Dalton’s behalf. The most vivid episode in this sequence comes in September 1994, during a big fed/state/local enforcement drive against marijuana gardens in the area of Mendocino County. Nelson and a colleague seek out Horstman with the request that she place a “special FBI tape recorder” behind the headboard of her marital bed. Dalton duly returns home and describes the raids to wife and tape recorder, with the latter instrument soon returned by Horstman to Nelson.

Despite the surveillance, the DEA never gets a shred of evidence linking Dalton to marijuana growing. Thus balked, they turn to the drug war’s favored tool, a snitch. Two, in fact. Using the statements of these snitches — one with prior convictions for perjury and fraud — they seize all Dalton’s property for forfeiture, on the grounds that such property is the fruit of illegal labor. After the raid, Nelson oversees Horstman’s separation from Dalton; he and five feds load up a U-Haul with Horstman’s stuff while Dalton is out. When Dalton finds out Horstman is in Blaine, Wash., and goes north to patch up their marriage, Horstman informs Nelson, who himself hurries north with eavesdropping equipment. Horstman rejects Dalton’s overtures and ultimately divorces him at the urging of Nelson, who even drives her to the lawyer’s office to sign the final papers.

On Sept. 27, 1996, the Feds arrest Dalton, on the basis of a secret federal grand jury indictment, charging him with marijuana cultivation and witness tampering. Among the witnesses against him is the operator of a speed lab facing a life term but rewarded for his testimony with a 10-year sentence. Denied bail, Dalton has been in prison for nearly two years, awaiting trial. He’s suing the feds for $44.8 million for outrageous conduct. The feds’ last desperate throw in the dismissal suit was rich with effrontery, seeking to paint Dalton as an abusive husband. At time of writing, Judge Illston is considering whether to dismiss the case.

What this has to do with marijuana cultivation is unclear. Even if Illston doesn’t dismiss, it’s hard to imagine a jury failing to agree with Serra that in its war on drugs the government is running amok.

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HERE IN DENVER I haven’t yet personally encountered any Political Correctness. But in this neighborhood, diversity we’ve got. Next door is a black man and his Jewish rabbi wife, and they are right across the street from the young gay Mexican fellow. More Spanish than English is spoken on this block. This is what used to be commonly called a “mixed” neighborhood, and that’s what it is. If it were transported to Marin County, it would be “diverse” in PC terms but more realistically considered “ghetto.” No one on this very “diverse” street appears to be the slightest bit concerned with the notion of PC. People are too busy living for such nonsense.

If memory serves adequately, I seem to recall that PC is something occurring almost exclusively among middle class white people, most of whom have been exposed to one or another post-60′s New Age sort of thing, from “experimenting” with marijuana before it became mainstream — espresso and wine are the drugs of choice now — to gurus from India, the likes of Wavy Gravy and more serious dispensers of wisdom like Dr. Wayne Dyer and Byron Katie, seminar hustlers like Werner Erhard, tarot cards and so forth. PC boils down these days to denial of all stereotyping (in theory although reality can sometimes intrude), earnest trash recycling, calling oneself “progressive” while hypnotically voting for mainstream democrats, and cultivation of gay friends (for some reason gay women seem generally a bit safer to have at the suburban dinner party than gay men). And so on.

Our Esteemed Editor has joked, off the record, that the ultimate political correctness would be expressed in a transgender cripple as president of the US. Off the record only, since the warm-and-fuzzy PC legions, what the AVA sometimes calls The Nice People, would be horrified at the statement although delighted at such a reality, even though we have now seen that the first non-white president is strictly political business-as-usual or worse. And there is no reason to imagine that a disabled person of indeterminate gender would be any different, since anyone aspiring to the presidency is thoroughly corrupted well before getting near the possibility.

National Lampoon did a goof on Joan Baez in the 70s, a sound-alike singing “Pull the triggers, niggers, we’re with you all the way, just across the bay… Just because I can’t be there, doesn’t mean I don’t care…” (Google ‘Pull the Triggers’ to find it on youtube.) This is PC distilled right down to its essence, despite deployment of the hot-button “N” word. — Jeff Costello

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ON JULY 4, 2013, at about 8:19pm, Deputies from the Mendocino County Sheriff’s Office received a call for service regarding an intoxicated male vandalizing a residence located in 17000 block of Redwood Springs Drive in Fort Bragg, California. Upon arrival, Deputies spoke to the victim Christopher Havens, 59, of Fort Bragg. Christopher told Deputies that his son Madison Havens, 19, also of Fort Bragg, had returned home intoxicated and became irate when Christopher would not allow him access to a motorcycle. This resulted in Madison breaking out the glass in two exterior windows at the residence. Deputies spoke to another family member at the location who also witnessed the event and told Deputies that Madison had pushed Christopher out of his wheel chair during the incident, causing Christopher to fall to the ground. Based on the statements received from all parties and Christopher meeting the criteria of a dependant adult by California law, Madison was arrested on the listed charges. Madison was transported to the Mendocino County Jail where he was booked on the listed charges and to be held in lieu of $50,000 bail.

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ON JULY 5, 2013, at about 4:50pm, Deputies from the Mendocino County Sheriff’s Office received a call for service regarding criminal threats and a brandishing of a knife in the 100 block of Mountain View Road in Manchester. (Manchester Indian Reservation). When Deputies arrived they contacted victims Elvis Scarioni, 56, and Colleen Rice, 49, both of Manchester. Both victims told Deputies that the suspect John Logan had entered their residence and forced entry into the bedroom they were occupying. Logan then demanded monies Scarioni owed him for labor work performed on Scarioni’s property. After Scarioni informed Logan that he was presently unable to pay him the monies owed, Logan demanded keys to a vehicle in Scarioni’s possession. Logan then brandished a knife and threatened to kill both Scarioni and Rice and/or cut their throats, and then demanded money or the keys to the vehicle. Rice provided Logan a set of keys to the above vehicle and Logan departed the location in that vehicle. Deputies responded to another location on the reservation and made contact with Logan outside of a residence. Logan was immediately arrested on an outstanding active arrest warrant for driving without a license [section 12500 of the California Vehicle Code]. Incident to that arrest, Deputies established probable cause to arrest Logan in regards to the reported incident on Mountain View Road. Logan was subsequently booked into the Mendocino County Jail on the listed charges where he was to be held in lieu of $50,000.00 bail.

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ELK FIRE’S ANNUAL SUMMER BBQ — The Elk Volunteer Fire Department invites you to cool down at the coast at its annual Summer BBQ to be held Saturday, July 27, from noon to 4 p.m. at the Greenwood Community Center on Highway 1 in downtown Elk. Department members and friends are preparing to serve up grilled tri-tip, smoked chicken and portabella mushroom entrees, along with beans, green salad, homemade dessert and coffee. Fresh bread from the Center’s wood-fired brick oven will accompany the meal, all for $15 for adults and $8 for kids 7-12 (6 and under free). And, as always, Elk’s famous Margaritas will be available, along with beer, wine and soft drinks. Emergency vehicles and equipment will be on display at the BBQ. Children can enjoy a dip in the portable pond. Local musicians will liven up the day. There will be a raffle featuring items donated by local inns, merchants and community members. Raffle tickets are a bargain at $1 each or 6 for $5 and are available now at the Elk Store, the Elk Garage, Queenie’s Roadhouse Café, and at the BBQ. You don’t need to be present to win. Serving the community for 57 years — and providing mutual aid to Anderson Valley and other districts — the EVFD currently has 19 volunteers, 6 of whom are Emergency Medical Technicians (EMTs) and 4 trained to respond to large fires statewide. The department maintains a fleet of 7 firefighting vehicles of mixed type and an ambulance housed at 4 stations spread out over a large, 55 square-mile service district. The annual BBQ is the department’s most important fundraiser. Thanks to the community’s generosity last summer, the leaky, rusty 41-year-old tanker/pumper on Greenwood Ridge was replaced earlier this year with a new 2,000 gallon unit. Proceeds from this year’s BBQ will be used to outfit the new tanker/pumper with hoses, fittings, a radio, and other necessary parts and equipment.

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COUNTY’S SCHOOL GARDENS IN CRISIS

by Elizabeth Archer

With summer just starting, students are hardly thinking about next year’s classes. But unless a handful of dedicated educators can pull a rabbit out of their hat, students might find one of their favorite programs missing in the fall.

Twelve years ago, the Network for a Healthy California (NHC) paved the way for Mendocino County’s Garden Enhanced Nutrition Education (GENE) program. Thanks to this funding, Mendocino now has a unique claim to fame: every single public school in the county has a vegetable garden.

For the past decade, garden coordinators have worked with local organizations such as The Gardens Project of North Coast Opportunities Community Action, as well as other organizations and volunteers, to get these gardens up and running. Teachers have incorporated the gardens into their lessons, and the food services staff at some of the schools use what’s grown in the meals they serve.

These 32 gardens at the 32 public schools in unified school districts — plus all the private school gardens — serve more than 8,000 kids every year throughout Mendocino county.

However, in a devastating blow to this successful program, all NHC funding has been cancelled. Starting in the 2013-2014 school year, schools must find the funds to keep GENE running, or shut their gardens down.

“It’s ironic,” says GENE Program Coordinator Terry D’Selkie. “This year our gardens are better than ever before, and all of a sudden, the funding is gone.”

D’Selkie is working with each school’s garden coordinator — all of whom will be laid off unless a new funding stream is found — as well as school administration and staff, parents, and community members to find a long-term solution to keep the gardens running. She estimates that each school garden needs eight to ten thousand dollars a year to operate; a remarkably small amount considering the program’s benefits.

“Students love it,” says D’Selkie. “For many of them, it’s their favorite part of the day.” Since the program started, attendance levels are up. The cause? Students don’t want to miss out on garden time. GENE also helps attention span in the classroom, since kids are able to move their bodies and expend energy in the garden before heading back inside.

The traditional classroom does not address the learning styles of all students, and garden lessons are an eye-opener for kids who need to see something in action to really process it. “Science and math become much more interactive when it’s done in a living classroom,” says D’Selkie. In a report commissioned by the Center for Ecoliteracy in 2003, California middle school students who participated in garden-based instruction experienced significant gains in GPA, specifically math and science.

School gardens also help establish a pride of place among students. “We’re part of an agricultural community,” says Susan Lightfoot, Farm2Fork Coordinator. “These gardens help weave kids into the fabric of our community.” Teachers are also proud to work at schools with gardens. The same Ecoliteracy report showed that teachers working in schools with garden programs have higher morale and greater job satisfaction.

Of course, the garden programs also educate kids about nutrition and help them make healthy and lasting choices — the primary goal of NHC and a proven outcome of garden and nutrition education. In a study done by the Journal of the American Dietetic Association showed students involved in garden-based education more than doubled their daily fruit and vegetable consumption. “I learned to try new fruits and veggies,” says Cody Shepard, a student at Eagle Peak Middle School. “After seeing food grow, I am more aware of what I eat.”

Fall is just around the corner, and without significant commitment from every school board and the community to keep the GENE program afloat, these established gardens will revert to weeds. “When I think about the gardens being closed, I feel really sad,” says Shepard. “I see a lot of people growing gardens now, but I never would have started without learning about it in school first.”

If you’re interested in volunteering with or donating to your local school garden, contact Terry D’Selkie at tdselkie@uusd.net.

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“OKLAHOMA!” musical performance raises funds for Ukiah Symphony. Enjoy an American classic under the stars

Ukiah, CA — On Saturday, August 3, the Ukiah Symphony will join forces with professional singers Melissa Dunham and Ian Parmenter to present Rodgers and Hammerstein’s beloved “Oklahoma!” at the Nelson Family Vineyards. The show, part of the Symphony’s “Broadway Under the Stars” fundraising series, is directed by Les Pfutzenreuter and offers musical entertainment as well as delicious food and wine. “Oklahoma!” is the first — and perhaps best — collaboration by the songwriting team of Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein. Debuting on Broadway in 1943, the play is one of the most popular in the American canon. Rodgers and Hammerstein creatively integrate musical numbers with the plot to provide a wonderfully entertaining story about the high-spirited rivalry between local farmers and cowboys in the brand-new state of Oklahoma. Singers Melissa Dunham and Ian Parmenter play the lead roles of Laurey and Curly, respectively. Both Dunham and Parmenter attended UC Irvine’s theater program. Dunham, who debuted with the Ukiah Symphony in 2000 as Amaryllis in “The Music Man,” acts and sings in Los Angeles, where she is currently portraying Princess Jasmine in “Aladdin: A Musical Spectacular” at the Disneyland Resort. Parmenter’s performing credits include work at some of the finest regional theatres across the country, as well as in independent film and as a lead singer for six-star cruise entertainment. He is based in New York. Filling out the bill are Dave Strock as Will Parker, Rosanne Wetzel as Ado Annie, and Carole Hester as Aunt Eller. Patrons can purchase dinner or bring food for a picnic. A wide and tempting array of food and beverages will be available for purchase, including wine from Nelson Family Vineyards, veggie pizzas from Mendough’s Woodfired Pizza, bountiful salads with grilled chicken from North State Café, tri-tip and sausage sandwiches from Si’s Grill, and house-made desserts and coffee from Uncorked. A lawn area will be provided for people to bring blankets and low-back chairs, and picnic meals if they so desire. No outside alcohol is allowed at the event. Concert-goers can further support the Ukiah Symphony by booking a private table seating eight people for $100. A gift basket will be awarded for the best decorated table. To reserve a table, call (707) 462- 0236. Gates open at 5:30 pm, with the concert starting at 7:30 pm. Tickets are $25 in advance and $30 at the door. They are $5 for those under 18 or for students with an ASB card. Tickets may be purchased at the Mendocino Book Company at 102 South School Street in Ukiah or at Mail Center, Etc. at 207A North Cloverdale Boulevard in Cloverdale. Tickets may also be purchased by calling (707) 462-0236, or online using PayPal at www.ukiahsymphony.org. Please leave pets at home. Parking space is limited and carpooling is encouraged. A golf cart will be available to shuttle people from the parking lot. Nelson Family Vineyards and Ranch is located next to the Saechao Strawberry Farm on Highway 101, between Ukiah and Hopland on the west side of the highway. This event is sponsored by Mendo Lake Credit Union and Nelson Family Vineyards.

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THE KUMBAYA CONNECTION FOR GROWN-UPS: Learning to Let Go: First, Turn Off the Phone

By Matt Haber

There was a phantom buzzing in my shorts. I had carried my iPhone in my left front pocket for so many years that my jeans have permanent rectangular fade marks over my thigh. By now the phone is almost an extension of my nervous system; even without the thing on my person, I could still feel it tingle like a missing limb. My phone was stapled inside a Trader Joe’s bag along with my watch, credit card and ID. Any buzzing I felt was surely imagined. Then again, it could have been a mosquito. This was Day 2 at Camp Grounded, an adults-only summer camp held on former Boy Scouts quarters in Navarro, Calif., about two and half hours north of San Francisco. A little more than 300 people had gathered there for three days of color wars, talent shows, flag-raisings and other soothingly regressive activities organized by Digital Detox, an Oakland-based group dedicated to teaching technology-addled (or technology-addicted) people to, in the words of its literature, “disconnect to reconnect.” The rules of Camp Grounded were simple: no phones, computers, tablets or watches; work talk, discussion of people’s ages and use of real names were prohibited.

There was a reason such strictures seemed appealing. A year ago, I was an editor at a news blog. My days started at the office at 7:30 a.m., where I routinely worked through lunch until 6:30 p.m. I was compelled to follow 1,200 Twitter users, skim 180 RSS feeds and edit dozens of posts a day on an ever-accelerating conveyor belt of content that would have made Lucy and Ethel choke. Evenings were a chance to catch up on “important” television shows between skimming Twitter.

The work-life crises of the meth dealer Walter White on “Breaking Bad” and the advertising executive Don Draper on “Mad Men” (or, when I was feeling particularly dark, Dexter Morgan, the serial killer on “Dexter”) were amplified, better art-directed versions of my own 24/7 grind. At night, the iPhone was docked beside my bed, making me feel that even as I slept, I was on the banks of the data stream just in case anything important — or anything at all — happened.

After a few months, my hands became numb and I asked my doctor for a chest X-ray because I was convinced I had pneumonia. I was beyond burned out: I was scorched, like a marshmallow on a stick held too close to the fire.

At Camp Grounded, however, we would no longer be bloggers, entrepreneurs, lawyers, consultants or any other title; we were just ourselves (in my case, answering to “Brooklyn”). By removing the things that supposedly “connect” us in this wireless, oversharing, humble-bragging age, the founders of Digital Detox hoped to build real connections that run deeper than following one another on Twitter or “liking” someone’s photo on Instagram. Without the distractions of the Web, social media, television and breaking news, campers, who, according to organizers, ranged in age from 19 to 67, were invited to share with one another and learn about ourselves.

All of which started immediately upon driving up to the camp. Cars were met at the gate and we were greeted by counselors whose grinning positivity reminded me of that scene in the 1981 movie “Ticket to Heaven” in which a reluctant recruit to a religious cult was met with a chant of “Bomb With Love!”

I had had a long, twisty ride up the mountain to get to the camp, and wasn’t prepared for so much full-body enthusiasm, especially not the hugs. Normally, I find myself pressed up against strangers only during my morning subway commute, and usually that’s no cause for smiles.

What was I getting myself into?

“My goal now is to connect people,” Levi Felix, Digital Detox’s 28-year-old co-founder, told me. “There’s always going to be more media, more to do outside of where you are. The only moment that matters is right now.”

Mr. Felix, whose camp name was Fidget Wigglesworth, is part of an emerging shift toward mindfulness among users of technology. Rather than merely accept social media’s intrusion on relationships, and the small, distancing lens onto experience that smartphones and tablets have become for many of us, some tech-savvy folks are rethinking their attachment to electronic devices.

Groups like Reboot have begun to advocate for digital sabbaths and a National Day of Unplugging. Jaron Lanier, a pioneer in the field of virtual reality, has lately begun to speak out against the dehumanizing downsides of technology. And Arianna Huffington, an undisputed doyenne of the Internet, has used her site and Twitter account to call for time offline, even plugging Camp Grounded, though she’s yet to relinquish her four BlackBerries. As for Mr. Felix, he used to work at Causecast.com, a corporate philanthropy platform, but after long hours and a bad diet landed him in the hospital, he re-evaluated his priorities. He sold his car and his “nice Penguin clothing,” he said, and traveled for two and half years. He spent time in Southeast Asia, letting his facial hair grow like a wizard’s.

“I had the opportunity to step away from ‘the modern world’ for a little bit,” Mr. Felix said. “I went on my hero’s journey and I escaped. A lot of people who do that never come back. They live vagabond lives. I came back, and my cause was to show people how to connect, how to shed these rules and unwritten codes we bought into.” He founded Digital Detox last year, leading small retreats in Northern California, Cambodia and other locations, emphasizing yoga, meditation, a healthy diet and one-to-one connections as a reprieve from digital life.

But Camp Grounded, Digital Detox’s biggest event thus far, was designed less to be a spiritual journey than a whimsical return to childhood. Campers, who spent $300 for the weekend, were sent maps, instructions and a suggested packing list designed with a self-consciously retro style that wouldn’t be out of place in a Wes Anderson film.

Men and women were separated and sorted into separate animal-themed villages, where they bunked in three-walled lean-tos built for the camp’s original Boy Scouts by the Petaluma Kiwanis Club. Aside from a water-resistant sleeping pad, no camping equipment was provided.

The Scouts’ rifle range had been reconceived as a typewriter range, and a yurt had been erected near a stream and used as an all-night tea lounge. Throughout the weekend, there was skinny-dipping at the swimming hole. A psychedelic bus parked in a clearing hosted a late-night concert. On the final night, there was an ’80s-themed prom, replete with souvenir couples’ photos and a new wave band that looked as if it had walked off the set of “Revenge of the Nerds.”

Meals were vegan and gluten-free variations on summer camp staples: The first night we ate chickpea “sloppy Joes” and kale salad; another night, gluten-free “mac ’n’ cheese” made from rice pasta and soy with collard greens. To hear some of the campers tell it, giving up meat was harder than giving up technology, and by the second day, talk of hamburgers, bacon and fried chicken was constant. For some, the craving for meat got so bad that a group of campers sneaked into the kitchen one night and devoured slabs of bacon and packets of hot dogs that had been stored in the freezer for the kitchen staff. Another night, two campers who had volunteered to tear kale for hours in the kitchen were rewarded with bacon, which they passed around like contraband candy at a weight-loss camp.

Unaccustomed to such a legume- and leafy-green-rich diet, many campers privately complained about feeling bloated or snickered about the dubious wisdom of feeding 300 people so many lentils and asking them to share a few latrine-style toilets. For the most part, though, complaints were few and interpersonal conflicts nonexistent. “When all that stress in life is removed, what’s there to fight about?” Mr. Felix said.

As for love, meanwhile, any fears (or fantasies) that this would be the millennial generation’s answer to Sandstone Retreat, the legendary Southern California swingers’ outpost chronicled in Gay Talese’s “Thy Neighbor’s Wife,” went unrealized. Immediately on entering, it seemed everyone reverted to a preadolescent state of innocent crushes, promiscuous hand-holding and “cuddle puddles,” a reprieve from the transactional approach to dating in the age of OkCupid and Match.com.

“It was affection you just don’t see in regular life,” Mr. Felix said. “I think that when you create a space of authenticity and openness, there’s true, true respect.”

If authenticity and openness included fretting about everyday career concerns, however, you were out of luck. Montgomery Kosma, a 45-year-old CEO of a new foundation addressing gun violence, was once featured in a Washington Post article about his addiction to his BlackBerry. A friend told him about Camp Grounded and he thought it sounded like fun — he also thought he could recruit some developers.

“I wasn’t aware it was entirely networking-free,” he said after camp. “I was thinking, ‘I’m building a company and need to hire people.’ ” He wasn’t able to do any of that, and said, “It was frustrating.

“This was the longest I’d been away from e-mail or cellphone literally since 1997,” said Mr. Kosma, whose camp nickname was Jefferson Smith. “It was strange, but not that strange. … I spent a lot of time off thinking and writing.

“My name and my job really form my identity,” Mr. Kosma said. “It’s really hard to talk about your job in generic terms.”

After a day, though, he adjusted. He spent some time learning how to solar carve using a magnifying glass and a piece of wood, creating a souvenir that reads “The Time Is Now” on one side and “All the Time in the World” on the other. A week after camp, Mr. Kosma said he was still carrying the Camp Grounded journal he was given in which he asked himself over and over “Who am I?” before concluding that he is “a man with an open heart.”

“I did a lot of listening to my own self,” Mr. Kosma said. “That’s just a remarkable thing.” And while his foundation is just months away from opening, he said he planned to attend the Burning Man festival this summer.

For Tatyana Plaksina, a 26-year-old social worker from Los Angeles, camp was almost a necessity.

“I felt like I needed something like this,” said Ms. Plaksina, whose nom de camp was Tater Tot. “I felt pulled in a lot of directions. My phone was always going off. I wanted an excuse to put it away and not respond to anybody.”

“From the moment that we drove up there, as soon as we met the organizers, they completely made me feel we were at the right place,” she said. “I didn’t expect there to be so much love and freedom and acceptance. It felt like a place where you could be yourself and be accepted for that.”

And me?

I had spent two days getting to know my fellow campers and participating in a meditative breathing workshop (or “playshop” in Camp Grounded lingo), taught by a surfer-yoga instructor called Didgeridoo, wherein I learned how to hug someone by positioning my head to my partner’s right side so that our hearts could touch and our breath could sync. I lost my voice during some very enthusiastic singalongs where I realized that I knew all the words to “If I Had a Hammer,” but not the second verse to “Norwegian Wood.” I had my face painted, napped in a hammock and spontaneously danced — not an easy thing since, as friends and family can attest, I’ve never done anything spontaneously in my entire life. And one night, I found myself lying on my back, gazing up at the night sky. The only other times I’d seen the constellations so clearly were when I glanced up at the ceiling in Grand Central Terminal.

Somewhere outside of Camp Grounded, iPhones were buzzing with the breaking news of Rupert Murdoch’s divorce and Kim Kardashian’s baby. But I was looking for shooting stars, not reality ones. And for once, I was enjoying the silence.

(Courtesy, The New York Times)

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OSAMA BIN LADEN Was Stopped By The Police For Speeding Just A Year After 9/11, Reveals Stunning Secret Pakistani Report Into Raid That Killed Him

By David Martosko

The terror chief was almost caught shortly after the 9/11 attack, said the wife of one of his guards, when their car was stopped for speeding Bin Laden was in the habit of wearing a cowboy hat in his Abbottabad compound because he thought it would shield him from US drones. He spent his last night with his youngest wife, and the two initially thought the noise from approaching Chinook helicopters was just a rainstorm.

A Pakistani government commission decided that killing bin Laden was an act of “murder” — and that he was a “victim.” Bin Laden was so secretive about his compound that he and his followers waited until after an earthquake to add a third story to the house Dr. Shakeel Afridi, now imprisoned in Pakistan for helping the US, wasn’t arrested for three weeks following the raid, allowing the CIA time to help him escape if US officials had wanted to help him.

9/11 mastermind Osama bin Laden died on May 2, 2011 in a military raid, but the Pakistani government’s appointed commission is convinced he is a “victim” who was murdered by the United States. A secret Pakistani report leaked online Monday provides a series of stunning revelations about the life and death of terror mastermind Osama bin Laden, the long-time Al-Qaeda leader responsible for the 9/11 attacks against the United States in 2001. The report, placed online by the Al Jazeera news network, recounts the testimony of more than 200 witnesses including bin Laden’s family members.

On one occasion during 2002 or 2003, bin Laden was almost caught while headed to a market with his security guard Ibrahim al-Kuwaiti and the guard’s wife Maryam. The car he was riding in — it’s unclear who was driving — was pulled over for speeding, but bin Laden “quickly settled the matter,” according to Maryam’s testimony, and the al-Qaeda leader was once again off and running. One of bin Laden’s relatives said “The Shaikh,” as he was known, often “wore a cowboy hat to avoid detection from above” by overhead US drones, and that “a complete collapse of local governance” allowed him to hide inside the country for six years before US President Barack Obama gave the order to have him killed in a Navy SEAL raid.

May 2, 2011 marked the end of bin Laden’s reign of terror as the leader of al-Qaeda. President Barack Obama announced that the United States had killed the most-wanted terrorist in an operation led by Navy SEALS.

Did he get the idea from Barack? Bin Laden was in the habit of wearing a cowboy hat in his Abbottabad, Pakistan compound because he believed it would shield his identiiy from U.S drones. That “kill mission,” Pakistan’s official inquiry declared, was “a criminal act of murder which was condemned by a number of international lawyers and human rights organizations.” “Due process was deliberately denied the victims,” the commissioners wrote — referring to bin Laden as a victim — “and their killing was explicitly ordered by the President of the US.”

Bin Laden had not left the room where he was shot for the past FIVE YEARS, claims his wife. Osama bin Laden’s secret Pakistani compound demolition completed as country tries to forget painful an embarrassing chapter in its history. Bin Laden WAS NOT buried at sea, but sent to the US for cremation, leaked emails reveal. Pentagon DELETES files about Osama bin Laden raid after transferring them to CIA where they can’t be made public. Revealed: How Bin Laden fled on horseback as US bombs rained down on Tora Bora… and slipped through the net for a decade. Among the dozen of new details in the report is the revelation that bin Laden and his supporters waited to build an unauthorized third story on the compound until after a devastating earthquake hit Pakistan in 2005.

Thunderclaps or Chinook helicopters? Bin Laden and his youngest wife reportedly thought at first that the Navy SEAL raid’s noises were due to a rainstorm. Of the raid itself, the commission wrote that bin Laden and his youngest wife Amal were together in the bedroom when the US helicopters first arrived. “After the evening meal and prayer,” the account reads, “Amal and the Shaikh retired for the night. Shortly past midnight, they were awakened by the noise of what at first sounded like a storm.” It wasn’t a cloudburst. Minutes later, bin Laden lay dead on the floor.

Scene of the “murder”? Pakistan’s commission decided that killing “the victim” bin Laden in his compound, was a criminal act since he was executed without due process in a court of law.

In a now-famous photo, White House national security officials and cabinet members watched the SEAL Team Six raid in real-time as they stalked, found and killed Osama bin Laden.

The report also explores the case of Dr. Shakeel Afridi, a Pakistani physician who used his position as a public health vaccination volunteer to attempt to be admitted into bin Laden’s compound.

Pakistani doctor Shakeel Afridi helped the US track down Osama bin Laden. He was sentenced to 33 years in prison for “conspiring against the state.” Although he failed to get in, Afridi got a good enough look at the complex system of locks on the front door to help the Navy SEALs design a specialized package of explosives designed to blow the door off.

He also provided his CIA handlers with crucial information about the voices of the people inside the compound. Aftridi “met with the CIA operatives [assigned to him] on more than 25 occasions,” the report concludes, “and received approximately Rs. [Rupees] 10 million from them. 10 million Pakistani Rupees is equal to about $100,000.

The Pakistani government arrested Afridi and he remains in prison, sentenced to more than three decades behind bars. Despite the doctor’s key role in the mission’s success, the United States has done little to secure his release.

“[T]he fact is that he was arrested three weeks after the raid during which time the CIA could have ferreted him out of the country.”

Al Jazeera’s release of the commission’s report came on the same day the United States government was exposed for going to great lengths to hide its own collection of information related to the 2011 raid. The Associated Press gained access to information from the Department of Defense under the Freedom Of Information Act, but only after the Pentagon acknowledged shifting documents to the CIA and purging them from their original files, so it would no longer possess anything it would have to turn over to the news agency.

(Courtesy, Al Jazeera)

The matter of who bombed Judi Bari is unlikely to be settled in the courts, especially not 20- plus years after the event; the perpetrator not only got clean away with it but managed to make sure that anyone who knows anything never whispers a peep about it, although there never was much of an investigation done. A death-bed confession or other dramatic turn of events seems the only hope of solving this riddle, which occupied a good deal of public attention for a while, but has been largely out of the news since the court verdict.

Fifth District Supervisor Dan Hamburg was in court last week, and a good thing, too. He was about to lose $35,000, and after paying $9,500 in election fines imposed by the California Fair Political Practices Commission earlier this year, and maybe spending another $10,000-plus in lawyer fees for burying his wife at home without a legal sign-off his fellow Supes have refused to reimburse, wealthy as Hamburg is, he surely didn’t want to get socked another $35,000.

Since late-May, opponents of CalTrans’ Willits Bypass have conducted four occupations of the wetlands area where Big Orange’s construction contractors are installing 80-foot drainage tubes, or “wick drains.” The initial three of these non-violent direct actions delayed the wick drain installation for anywhere from 90 minutes to a full day.

A very large though not especially tall man is blocking the open doorway of Mendocino’s recently enlarged GoodLife Café and Bakery. This very large man is in his late thirties, I would guess, with short brown hair and wearing a white T-shirt, blue shorts, white socks and red tennis shoes. He is standing with his back to the outside as he shouts at his wife and two daughters inside the café. His wife is at the counter yammering at the patient woman behind the cash register, while his two young daughters rush around shouting that they are starving and don’t want to wait to start eating.

“Don’t eat those cookies yet,” shouts the very large man, as if he and his wife and daughters are alone in the wilderness and separated one from the other by great distances. “Wait until after lunch. Not a medium, Connie! I said I wanted a large. And I want my salad dressing on the side. Did you tell her I want it on the side? I said don’t eat those cookies yet.”

A line of hungry people wishing to enter the café has formed behind me, and a man in the line, also very large though not particularly tall, wearing a red, white and blue baseball hat, says to me, “Hey numb nuts. Yeah, you. Get a move on.”

“I would if I could,” I reply, refraining from calling him poo poo head or tiny balls or some other mean name, “but there’s someone blocking the doorway.”

I had already made two appeals to the very large man in the doorway that he please move out of the way, but he had studiously ignored me and begun to diddle his cell phone while continuing to yell at his wife and daughters.

“Pardon me,” I say loudly to him for the third time, “but I and several people behind me would like to enter the café. Would you mind stepping out of the doorway so we can get in?”

With great reluctance, the very large man turns to me. “We’re getting our food,” he sneers. “Do you mind?”

“What we mind,” says the not very large woman in line directly behind me, “is that you’re blocking the fucking doorway so we can’t get inside to get in the actual line to order our food and meet our friends.”

“What a bunch of assholes,” says the very large man in the doorway, moving a few inches to one side so we can just barely squeeze by him into the largely unoccupied café.

And as we squeeze by him, he continues to shout at his wife and daughters, and his wife continues yammering at the patient woman behind the cash register, and his daughters continue to screech, “We’re starving!” though their largeness belies their claims.

Finally having gained entrance to the spacious eatery, I find myself in line behind a woman studying the screen of her cell phone and speaking to the man beside her. “There’s a showing in Fort Bragg at one,” she says, “but it’s not in 3-D. The next 3-D showing isn’t until two-thirty.”

“Two-thirty?” says the man, grimacing as if someone has just slugged him in the stomach. “That’s like three hours from now. God, I hate small towns.”

Now someone shoves me in the back. “Sorry,” says a very large though not particularly tall woman. “I’m trying to read the salad list and you’re kind of blocking my view.”

“That’s because I’m kind of in line,” I explain, losing my cool, “and since I don’t want to trample the people in front of me, I thought I’d wait here.”

“Hey,” says the woman’s enormous though not very tall husband. “She apologized. You don’t have to be rude.”

Two gluten-free chocolate chip cookies purchased, I head for the exit and find the doorway blocked by a huge man and a large woman trying to decide if they want to come in or not.

“Excuse me, may I get by?” I ask, expecting one or the other of them to move aside, but neither of them moves because apparently neither of them heard me.

“Smells good,” says the woman, diddling her cell phone and staring at the little screen. “Let’s see if Yelp says this place is any good.”

“This is a very good place,” I say to them. “May I get by you, please?”

The man glares at me, but reluctantly moves aside. “Pushy pushy,” he mutters as I squeeze by him.

Welcome to Mendocino on July third, the start of the Fourth of July weekend, the town bursting at the seams with visitors who have come here to escape the inland heat and the hustle and bustle of their urbanized digitized lives, except they’ve brought their digital devices with them and their astonishing (to me) lack of civility and respect for anyone or anything other than their own individual persons.

Fortunately, right before I came into the village to get my mail and purchase the aforementioned chocolate chip cookies, I spent a wonderful hour on Big River Beach and had two remarkable (to me) encounters there that rendered my annoying experiences with those out-of-town visitors wholly unremarkable.

The first encounter was with a hummingbird that came to me as I was standing in the little waves on the edge of the ocean. Imagine my surprise to see a tiny iridescent rosy golden hummingbird hovering just a few feet from me, and my further amazement when she waited for our eyes to meet before she zoomed away. Wow I thought that was amazing, a hummingbird hovering right next to me on the edge of the ocean. And then the dazzling little bird returned, our eyes met again, and she zoomed away; and it dawned on me that maybe she wanted me to follow her.

So the next time she appeared beside me, I did follow her, crossing the wide expanse of sand to the cliffs that rise up to the headlands. There, in a grotto with walls adorned with wildflowers and flowering succulents, the hummingbird moved from flower to flower imbibing the precious nectar. Every few minutes, she would take a break from her feeding and come hover near me, looking at me for a moment before returning to the flowers. And after I had watched her for a good long time, she flew away out of sight.

The second encounter occurred twenty minutes later as I was making my way across the beach to climb the stairs to the village. I was heading for a log where I intended to sit and put my shoes on, when I heard a man and a woman calling, “Tina, no! Tina! Come here!”

I turned in the direction of their voices just as a beautiful brown dog came running up to me, a happy smiling dog who was the spitting image of my dog Cozy, my boon companion from my sixth birthday when I got her as a pup until the week before I left for college when she was hit by a car and died at the age of twelve.

Tina shoved her head up under my hand to let me know she wanted me to pet her, and I happily obliged. “Well aren’t you lovely?” I said as I petted her head and scratched behind her ears. “How nice of you to come see me. You are so sweet.” She held very still as I petted her, leaning against my legs just as Cozy used to lean against me, and then I cried for the first time in a long time, crying in memory of my childhood friend, in memory of my childhood, in memory of loved ones now gone, and for joy and sorrow at the beauty and poignancy of being alive in the world. ¥¥

(Todd Walton’s website is UnderTheTableBooks.com.)

AS PREVIOUSLY REPORTED, The County Of Mendocino (and Auditor Controller Meredith Ford acting in her official capacity), is being sued by the cities of Ukiah, Fort Bragg and Willits. All counties in California charge a Property Tax Administration Fee (PTAF) for collecting the property tax owed to cities and special districts. In 2004, the State Legislature, as part of it annual budget flim flam, adopted two programs called “the Triple Flip” and the “VLF Swap” which had the unintended consequence of putting cities and counties at odds with each other.

THE TRIPLE FLIP, in a series of moves that would make a riverboat gambler blush, diverted local sales tax dollars to pay bonds that were issued to pay off the state’s structural deficit; re-directed school property tax revenue from the Education Revenue Augmentation Fund (ERAF) back to cities and counties to make up for the loss of local sales tax; and made up for the loss to schools of ERAF funds by backfilling from the state General Fund. The VLF Swap reduced Vehicle License Fee (VLF) revenue to cities and counties and once again the state redirected property tax revenue from ERAF back to the cities and counties.

THE NET RESULT was that the cities (and counties) were receiving considerably more revenue from property tax than previously, although much of the increase was in lieu of local sales tax and VLF. The state also said the counties could not charge additional PTAF for the first two years of implementing the new programs. Starting in 2006-07 most counties began charging additional PTAF based on guidelines issued by the State Auditor’s Association. Because the funds diverted from ERAF were from property tax, the guidelines treated them like property tax and charged PTAF accordingly. A group of cities sued L.A. County alleging they were being overcharged. Cities and counties around the state agreed to hold off on additional legislation until the L.A. case was resolved. The trial court sided with the county, but the appellate court ruled that the counties had been miscalculating the PTAF. In November the State Supreme Court agreed that the cities had been overcharged.

CITIES & COUNTIES around the state are negotiating agreements to refund the amounts overcharged, but despite its reputation for love and peace, things are seldom so simple here in Mendoland. In addition to the law suit, the city councils of Fort Bragg and Ukiah have also written public letters to the County Board of Supervisors complaining that for years they have had to fight off state attempts to take “their” money and now the County is doing the same thing. So nine years ago the State Legislature engaged in its usual budgetary sleight of hand and now the cities and counties are left squabbling over the crumbs. The cities say in their lawsuit that they had to sue because the county was not coming to terms, but reliable sources say that discussions were already underway. In fact, the AVA has learned that the City of Willits has already reached a compromise settlement with the county. The item was considered in closed session by the County at a special meeting on Monday but no action was reported out of closed session.

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DANIEL HAMBURG v. MENDOCINO COUNTY was also a subject of the special meeting closed session, but again, no action was reported to have been taken. Hamburg is sueing the County for alleged violations of his “fundamental rights of Liberty, Property, Safety, Happiness and Privacy, Due Process of Law; Equal Protection of Law; and Civil Rights.” Hamburg is seeking an order from the Court directing Mendocino County to issue a burial certificate and death certificate for his disceased wife, Carrie, and is also seeking in excess of $10,000 in legal fees as of June 10, the date of the filing. Most people agree that state law needs to be updated to free our dead from the greed based strictures imposed by the death industry, but it is unseemly for a sitting supervisor, and chair of the board, no less, to be suing the county he represents. Oddly enough, Hamburg’s own lawsuit cites two examples (Jay Baker in Gualala and the Tebbuts family in Anderson Valley) where petitions were filed with the local Superior Court requesting the right to private burial. Both petitions were granted the same day they were filed. Speculation is that Hamburg is getting bad legal advice since the case would be over if he had simply filed a petition with the court instead of suing the County. And if the local judges, notoriously shy of getting embroiled in local controversy, pass the buck, Hamburg can rely on his old pal, visiting Judge Kossow, to sign off on the petition

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I KNOW ETHNIC identifications can be sensitive, but either this guy is an extremely disoriented Mexican or he’s an extremely disoriented Arab. But Mr. Ghafarisaravi says he’s Hispanic, and he oughtta know.

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“SHORTLY before noon Monday, a trench on the Holmes Ranch near Philo caved in, injuring a man. No details yet.” That was all we had yesterday. Further investigation reveals the site as the Duckhorn vineyard pond under construction in the hills due east of Floodgate near Navarro. A workman was standing on the lip of a trench when it gave way, burying him. A man working nearby saw what had happened and quickly managed to pull away enough earth for the buried man to breathe as equipment operators also on site began extracting the victim, a process later described by one witness as “a textbook trench rescue.” The rescued worker, still not identified, and may be from the out-of-area construction firm doing the work, never lost consciousness. Although he seems to have suffered an injury to his leg, the man is expected to fully recover, if one ever fully recovers from being buried alive.

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PETE’S SOLAR (aka Advance Power Inc. of Calpella) has made Boonville an offer Boonville (and Mendocino County) would be nuts to refuse. He has offered to install, free, a solarized power system at the County Fairgrounds. Needless to say, solarized power would save our financially precarious Mendocino County Fair a very large amount on its monthly power bill. We’ve passed this enormously generous offer on to Fair Manager Jim Brown and to Morgan Baynham of the Fair Board. Also known as Advance Power, Pete’s is based on deep North State Street, Ukiah, Mendocino County’s oldest and, in our opinion, most reliable solar power company.

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ANDERSON VALLEY HIGH SCHOOL, a look back. As a victim of American public schools my knowledge of the world is hazy at best. In algebra class I learned the sacred geometries of chalking the baseball foul lines and putting hash marks on the football field. In physics and chemistry some arcane bit of knowledge was surely gleaned from the astute Steve McKay, if only by genial osmosis. At some critical moment in life, like trying to pay for gas by the liter in a Swedish town taken over by ruffians and Burning Man casualties, perhaps Steve’s good natured patience will manifest, and I will be slightly and not completely confused. A fond memory from Steve’s class was the day when a hand-written love letter from a popular 9th grade girl to her female teacher/mentor/choreographer/lover was discovered on the floor. Surrendering to our desperate pleas for transparency and pre-Homeland Security eavesdropping, Steve read the first page like the narrator from Masterpiece Theater. The missive was the standard adolescent “I can’t live without you. Your lips are like plums that should stay in the icebox to chill. When you stand in front of the chalkboard sometimes I dream that I am the eraser, and also that I am a magic kind of chalk that lasts forever plus some more, a pink chunk of literary combustion that leaves poetic symbols that scream without raising its voice: I am a Panther, but my claws are tender hooks of scratch-worship designed to make you purr. And also for ripping the young throats of any losers who disapprove of God’s merciful rope as it binds my wrists and ankles to the pommel horse hidden behind the stage curtains in the gym. The ball gag is a caring touch. To feel your tenured mouth on my triple flip dismount is to know the techniques of the great East German gymnasts, in the days before gender testing and when the more respected coaches had handle-bar mustaches and synthetic trousers that made a hopeless romantic dream of the day when the curtain separating our Cold War love would turn from cold iron to tight but soft lycra.” Steve blushed and put the letter away, though not without a chorus of boos and blushing croaks from titillated scholars. Another unforgettable moment in science class was the afternoon when two lunatics in full camo and armed with crossbows walked into the classroom. It was like Robin Hood meets Mall Cops. They had a neighborly question for Steve: could they use the high school lab to build explosives? Specifically, they needed dynamite to blow up stumps from a field they were clearing, though the true motive was likely something like taking out the Little River Inn or derailing the Skunk Train (which jumped the tracks years ago). Consulting his teachers’ union manual, Steve replied honestly: school property was for clandestine love affairs and making bongs, not weapons of mass destruction. The two archers were named Leonard Lake and Charles Ng, who would become two of California’s most loathsome (yet industrious) serial killers. Lake’s girlfriend at the time went by the name of Cricket, and managed the Philo Pottery Inn and was also a teacher’s aide. I don’t know if such visits are standard for other schools, but A.V. High in those days was anything but typical. In fact, you could call it an MK-ULTRA mind experiment designed to test the effects of rampant adult selfishness, serial killers, cherry lip gloss, Miller Lite, and the music of Hall and Oates on theoretically impressionable minds.

BESIDES Lake and Ng’s request for an independent study demolitions course, an even bigger mass murder named Jim Jones taught 4th grade in Boonville several years before my sentence began. But more lively were a couple of fun-loving Australian moonies, bleach-blond brothers who kept their socks full of grape bubble gum. The moonies were tough little bastards, as opposed to the Macintosh twins, who were tough giant bastards. The Aussies were about five feet tall and 105 pounds. Clayton and Richard Macintosh were about 6’4”, 250 as freshmen (and much larger now). One recess I watched in awe as the moonies ambushed one of the Macintoshes: one leaped onto the victim’s back and put the robust American into a platypus chokehold, while his brother fired out at the backs of Macintosh’s knees. Even with the element of surprise, Macintosh didn’t go down, managing to list and sway like a tall redwood feeling the first bite of a Pardini chainsaw. The Aussies threw everything they had, but it wasn’t enough, and nonchalantly took their beating. Gradually a teacher put down her burrito and coffee and restored order. Apparently it was a dispute over bubble gum. The Aussies felt unfairly taxed by Macintosh’s daily demands for a free piece. Or maybe they just did what Aussies do and sent the message: Down Under, matey. Get bloody used to it. (Next week: Bud Sloan, and why UK roundabouts are the devil’s spawn.) (—Z)

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MARK BAKER ASKS AMERICANS FOR HELP

Michigan levies $700,000 in fines against a small farmer and veteran for raising healthy hogs

After serving his country for 20 years in the military and ten years as a farmer, Mark Baker is “at the end of his rope” and is asking Americans for help.

Baker’s Green Acres is an idyllic, bio-diverse, sustainable farm in Marion, Michigan. Baker, his wife and his six children raise pastured poultry, grass-fed beef, goats and dairy, and a heritage breed of hogs called Mangalitsa.

In December of 2011, the Michigan Department of Natural Resources informed Baker that his hogs were an “invasive species of wild boar” that needed to be exterminated in order to protect wildlife and other farms.

The agency said he had until April of 2012 to destroy all of his pigs or else it would destroy them for him. Baker refused and filed a lawsuit asking for relief.

He was hoping to get his case heard that spring, but the state attorney general – who is acting as a prosecutor on DNR’s behalf – has been successful in stalling the trial until late this summer.

Fortunately the agency did not follow through on its promise to shoot Baker’s pigs. Unfortunately, it decided to levy $700,000 in fines against him last week for “harboring” them on his property.

That’s $10,000 per hog or per “violation” of the state’s Invasive Species Order.

As of Food Riot Radio’s interview with him last week, Baker had 67 hogs. The state was unaware when it issued the fine that he recently “put down” four hogs because he couldn’t afford to feed them.

Starving them out

When the state tried to get Baker’s trial pushed back to 2014, Baker wrote a letter to the judge saying he’d be out of business and homeless by then. His current trial date of August 27 has been a stretch for him.

He’s been feeding the hogs, without being allowed to sell their meat, for a year and a half now, which he says is extremely difficult because “these pigs eat a lot everyday.”

Normally at this time of year he’d be breeding the pigs in order to have more to sell, but he can’t now, because it would just make “more mouths to feed.”

Add $140,000 spent in legal fees so far to his lack of pork sales, and Baker says his family is on a very tight ship right now.

“My boys are butchering pigs today so we can get them in the freezer, and so they’re not out on the field, where they’ve got to have food,” Baker said. “The nature of pigs is if they see green grass on the other side of fence and they have nothing to eat on their side of the fence, they’re going to figure out a way to get through. We can’t allow a bunch of pigs to get out and get in our garden because that’s our food.”

Baker’s resorted to “scrounging” scrap food for them at local restaurants, but says they’re not getting what they need nutritionally.

“I’m not being fair to the animals…” he paused, voice cracking, “… but I didn’t think it would take this long.”

Had Baker known he’d have to wait a year and a half for a court hearing, he might’ve just killed the hogs in the beginning.

“But what I’m up against now is, if I kill all these pigs, number one, I’m doing what they wanted me to do, and number two, I’d lose my standing in court because I don’t have the animals.”’

Why the state’s stalling

Baker believes the reason the state has tried so hard to stall his hearing is because it doesn’t have a good defense for what it’s doing to him.

Baker argues that DNR wrote an intentionally ambiguous description of “feral” pigs in its Invasive Species Order, so it could use the law against any hog farmer it wanted to shut down.

“They’re saying any pig with a curly tail or a straight tail is an illegal pig … any pig with floppy ears or erect ears is an illegal pig,” he said. “I think they’re going to have a rough time with that testimony in court. That’s why they don’t want the case to move forward. They want to starve us out.”

“Basically they’re saying any type of pig outside of these confinement-style operations is illegal to have,” added Radio Host Brad “the Butcher” Jordan. “If you have a pig outside, you can’t have it.”

“Exactly,” Baker said.

Baker seeks to prove in court that it is “Big Ag” – especially the Michigan Pork Producers Association – that initiated the law classifying all non-CAFO pigs as a “feral” invasive species.

He believes big agribusiness sees the growing popularity of heritage-breed meat and poultry as a threat to their factory-farming model, and will stop at no end to eliminate the competition.

“If they can issue a declaratory ruling that says anything with a straight tail or curly tail is an illegal pig, and neither the governor, the legislature or the courts say ‘hey wait a minute,’ then what’s to stop them from issuing a declaratory ruling that says any cow that is brown is feral and must be disposed of, or any chicken that is not raised in a hen house is a feral chicken?”

“Industrial agriculture wants all the market share,” he added. “They want all the small farmers off the land, and they want to own the entire food production model.”

Baker asks for “ammunition”

“They’re putting me out on the street and they’re not blinking an eye about it,” Baker said. “I need American people to get fired up about this. And I need wealthy Americans to come alongside us and join our legal team, so we can start going after them [DNR officials] individually and putting them out on the street.”

Baker said there is much more at stake than his farm. “Our little pig thing is a microcosm of what’s going on nationally.” If we let Big Ag win, he said, it will be a grim future for our children and grandchildren. “We’re all in this together.”

“There are plenty of us [farmers] that are fighters, perpetual warriors, but we don’t have ammunition to put this fight on. So we’re looking to other Americans and saying please give us some ammunition, and that’s money, U.S. dollars. You can pray for me and pat me on the back and that’s great, but if I can’t pay lawyers to do their job, it doesn’t happen. And I’m at the end of my rope right now, and I need help. There it is – I need help.”

Please check out the Baker’s Green Acres website, watch the video of him and his family asking for help, donate to the cause, and don’t forget to “like” Food Riot Radio on Facebook.

(Brad Jordan hosts a podcast called Food Riot Radio where this article first appeared. He and his co-host Sara Burrows work to expose how a collusion between government, big agriculture, big pharma and big food has determined what ends up on our plates and offer ideas for how to fight back.)

(Courtesy, Activistpost.com)

As has become even clearer this Fourth of July with the ongoing saga of fugitive whistleblower Edward Snowden playing out on the world stage, what was celebrated on Independence Day in America is not independence from tyranny, nor even independence of thought and action more generally, but security. Safety has been confused with freedom, the former elevated far above the latter. Oppressive governmental power is now easily accepted if the fireworks can be shot off without terrorist counterattack, never mind you’re being spied on even during a celebration supposedly dedicated to the proposition that certain inalienable individual rights cannot be violated by government, be it in far away London or within our borders from Washington, DC.

The music of Independence Day is of course patriotic stuff, but the bombast of the Star Spangled Banner, whose first verse concludes with praise for the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave, rings especially hollow this year.

The notion of certain inviolable individual liberties being protected from state power was foreign to Johann Sebastian Bach, yet paradoxically his music has something to teach us about security. While no one, including Bach, has ever enjoyed getting blown up in the backyard grilling the burgers beneath fluttering flags, his vocal works, especially at their most harrowing, are instructive about the complacency that supposed safety brings.

As director of music in Leipzig, a job Bach held from 1723 to his death in 1750, the composer had to supply music to glorify the rulers of Saxony, first August the Strong and then his less-than-strong son, August III. Leipzig was the commercial and university center of the realm and both monarchs enjoyed making state visits to the city, often with very little notice. For these appearances Bach was required to supply grandiose music performed outdoors by torchlight in the town square with the ruling family basking in festive glory on a balcony looking down on their subjects.

In the first half of the eighteenth-century the Saxony Electors also ruled as kings of Poland, having had to convert to Catholicism to assume the Polish crown. This was bald political opportunism, especially when one recalls that their forbear Frederick the Wise had been Luther’s protector two centuries earlier. Crowned in October of 1733, August III had had to secure his claim to the Polish crown against a native Polish contender, the War of the Polish Succession concluding some five years after his accession.

To celebrate the first anniversary of his coronation, August decided at the last minute to make the trip from Dresden to Leipzig. A text of glorification was hastily assembled and Bach was charged with setting it in a lavish style fitting the occasion. Miraculously, it seems that Bach wrote most of the music in the mere three days before the arrival of the royals. The result was Preise dein Glücke, gesegnetes Sachsen, BWV 215.

For the rollicking opening chorus, however, Bach drew on a movement written two years earlier to honor August the Strong, the deceased father of the new king. Crucial to the monarchic glorification, especially when the ruler was called Augustus, was the instrument evocative of Roman imperial power — the trumpet. The resident Leipzig brass virtuoso, Gottfried Reiche died from a stroke the day after the performance. The town chronicler suggested that he succumbed to the smoke from the torches, though the demands of Bach’s virtuosic music were perhaps more lethal. Fittingly, the on-line YouTube clip reproduces an oil painting of Bach’s fallen trumpet player)

With its opening unison flourishes, like a sabre cutting a swath across Europe, the first chorus is pure bravado, made martial by the trumpet that then joins in to bolster the charge. When the chorus enters it takes up the unison acclamation with the words “Extol your fortunate, blessed Saxony.” As the jubilant strains gather force the text and music thank God for securing August the throne. It’s an ecumenical sleight of hand that skirts the ruler’s self-serving conversion to Catholicism. The middle section of the movement ratchets back on the throttle and allows the chorus to deliver large chunks of text praising the land’s happiness and admitting that honoring God is not incompatible with kissing the hand of the earthly ruler. Bach depicts this courtly deference with an interlude featuring Frenchified flutes in contrast to the blaring trumpets of the opening.

The welfare of Saxony presided over by the king is made possible by the safety his rule ensures: the text concludes with the pronouncement that he “places his subjects in security.” Security [Sicherheit] is the last word of the poem and the people, as embodied in the voices of the chorus, rush into its embrace like children into a father’s protecting arms. While the music is doing what it must to meet the requirements of ceremonial convention, it is almost touching how eagerly and naturally Bach gives himself over to monarchic blessing and protection. This security is not lingered on, but has barely been voiced before the piece rockets back to the opening and to the music of military might and monarchic grandeur that are the supposed guarantors of safety.

This celebratory music, irrepressible and fawning, hymns earthly power. But the allusions in the text and music to heavenly might speak to a higher authority and to longer term concerns than which armies are marauding through your city or who has secured the Polish crown. A different take on “security” is heard in an alto aria from Bach’s Cantata (BWV 70 Wachet! Betet! Betet! !Wachet —Watch! Pray! Pray! Watch!) The alarmist exclamation points suggest the urgency of the situation confronted in this cantata, nothing less than the Second Coming and the end of the world.

The third movement of the work, composed in 1716 in Weimar but revived some years later after Bach’s move to Leipzig, is apocalyptic in its rejection of the false securities of the world:

Wenn kömmt der Tag, an dem wir ziehen

/ Aus dem Ägypten dieser Welt?

/ Ach! lasst uns bald aus Sodom fliehen,

Eh uns das Feuer überfällt!

/ Wacht, Seelen, auf von Sicherheit

/ Und glaubt, es ist die letzte Zeit!

When will the day come when we will

Pull ourselves from the Egypt of this World?

Oh! Let us flee Sodom

Before fire consumes us?

Wake, ye souls, out of security

And believe that this is the final hour!

There is a Taliban-like ring to this music that leaps away from the wealth and safety lauded in BWV 215 into the abyss of eternity. Bach sets the text as an alto aria with a bassoon playing a sparse bass line above which an independent cello gropes through the darkness towards Armageddon. Trumpets and massed voices are banished in favor of a lone voice delirious with yearning for end. The world is a penal colony like Egypt, a place suffocated in sin. The misery of it becomes unbearable as the voice sings a long melisma painting the word “flee” — an ascending line that sprints frantically towards freedom and away from the fire that threatens to engulf us all.

The tone shifts to one of grim resolve with the last two lines of the text and the repeated rising shouts to “Wake up from Security.” The question marks of the first two sentences are answered with the shrill command to face larger truths. The alto voice is even scarier when that order is given almost as a whisper. When the high complaints slither back towards the depths, there is fear but also implacable determination.

The temporal might of, for example, the Saxon rulers is an inconsequential illusion when seen through the lens of eternity and heard through the instruments of Bach’s dramatic eschatology. When Bach repeats the entire text of the aria he doles out further lashes to the complacent and distracted wanderers through the wasteland of Gomorrah, before giving one more urgent round of wake up calls. There is no comfort, only fear and fortitude.

However disturbing this intensely artistic music may be and however far it is from a theocratic worldview that even during Bach’s lifetime was being transformed by the European Enlightenment, the theological nightmare it presents has lessons for our own partially secular age: Wake up from Your Security! Don’t you believe in other, more important principles?

David Yearsley is a long-time contributor to CounterPunch and the Anderson Valley Advertiser. His latest book is Bach’s Feet. He can be reached at dgyearsley@gmail.com.

Hiking is in my blood, from the Highlands of Scotland to the Burren of western Ireland. One of my great uncles, Alec Robertson oft times strode from Rockport to the Albion River and back for a long weekend’s jaunt. My parents hiked into the Trinity Alps as part of their honeymoon in the fall of 1941.

Marijuana was by no means the first boom crop to delight my home county of Humboldt, here in Northern California, five hours drive from San Francisco up Route 101. Leaving aside the boom of appropriating land from the Indians, there was the timber boom which crested in the 1950s when Douglas fir in the Mattole Valley went south to frame the housing tracts of Los Angeles.

In the early 1970s new settlers — fugitives from the 1960s and city life — would tell visiting friends, “Bring marijuana,” and then disconsolately try to get high from the male leaves. Growers here would spend nine months coaxing their plants, only to watch, amid the mists and rains of fall, hated mold destroy the flowers.

By the end of the decade, the cultivators were learning how to grow. There was an enormous variety of seeds — Afghan, Thai, Burmese. The price crept up to $400 a pound, and the grateful settlers, mostly dirt poor, rushed out to buy a washing machine, a propane fridge, a used VW, a solar panel, a 12-volt battery. Even a three-pound sale was a relatively big deal.

There was a side benefit in the form of decent organic vegetables. The back-to-the-land folk of 1974-79 were learning to grow pot at same time as all other vegetables. Just as the early pot was puny and weak, so were the vegetables. The organic/natural food store in Eureka typically stocked baskets with five withered carrots, some sad looking turnips… A potato farmer once told me that in that era he took the ugliest, most knobbly and pitted potatoes and threw them in the “organic” bin. But, just as the pot boomed in quality, so did the vegetables. The local coop in Arcata became a vast enterprise — and the present “Whole Earth” emporia, with their piles of vegetables more lush than anything in Renoir, parallel the astounding transformation of the pot flower.

The 1980s brought further advances in productivity through the old Hispanic/Mexican technique of ensuring that female buds are not pollinated, hence the name sin semilla — without seeds. By 1981, the price for the grower was up to around $1,600 a pound. The $100 bill was becoming a familiar local unit of cash transactions. In 1982, a celebrated grow here in the Mattole Valley yielded its organizer, an Ivy League grad, a harvest of a thousand pounds of processed marijuana, an amazing logistical triumph. Fifteen miles up the valley from where I write, tiny Honeydew became fabled as the marijuana capital of California, if not America.

That same year, the “war on drugs” rolled into action, executed in Humboldt County by platoons of sheriff’s deputies, DEA agents, roadblocks by the California Highway Patrol. The National Guard combed the King Range. Schoolchildren gazed up at helicopters hovering over the valley scanning for marijuana gardens. War, in this case, brought relatively few casualties and many beneficiaries into the local economy: federal and state assistance for local law enforcement; more prosecutors in the DA’s office; a commensurately expanding phalanx of defense lawyers; a buoyant housing market for growers washing their money into legality; $200 a day and more for women trimming the dried plants.

A bust meant at least a year of angst for the defendant and at least $25,000 in legal fees, though rarely any significant jail time. All the same, it did usually produce a felony conviction, several years of probation, and all the restrictions of being an ex-felon. Checking that little box, “have you ever been charged or convicted of a felony?,” eliminates many government jobs, like teaching school or government loans. There are 32 people serving life sentences in California on third-strike marijuana convictions. In 2008, 1,499 were in prison on marijuana convictions; in 2007, 4,925 in county jails. (Nationally, between 1990 to 2005, there were 7,200,000 marijuana related arrests — one out of every 18 felony convictions.)

By now, the cattle ranchers were growing too. Along the little county roads in front of my house where once you’d see battered old pickups rattling along, now late model stretch-cab Fords, Chevys and Dodges thundered by. Ranch yards sported new dump trucks and backhoes. Dealerships were selling big trucks and Toyota 4-Runners, purchased with cash. By the mid-1990s, the price of bud was up around $2,400 a pound.

Best of all, the war on drugs was a sturdy price support in our thinly populated, remote Emerald Triangle of Humboldt, Mendocino and Trinity counties. Marijuana remained an outlaw crop.

Then, in 1996, came California’s Compassionate Use Act, the brainchild of Dennis Peron, who returned from Vietnam in 1969 with two pounds of marijuana in his duffel bag and became a dealer in San Francisco. In 1990, when his companion was dying of AIDS, Peron began his drive for legal medical use of marijuana.

It was the launch point for greenhouses, big enough to spot on Google Earth, plus diesel generators in the hills cycling 24/7 and lists of customers in the clubs down south in San Francisco and LA. By 2005, with increasingly skilled production, the price was cresting between $2,500 and even $3,500 a pound for the grower. These days, in San Francisco and LA (the latter still fractious legal terrain), perfectly grown and nicely packaged indoor pot — four grams for $60, i.e., $6,700 a pound at the retail level — can be inspected with magnifying glasses in tastefully appointed salesrooms.

The age of Obama saw Attorney General Eric Holder tell the federal DEA to give low priority to harassment of valid medical marijuana clubs in states — 14 so far, plus Washington DC — that give marijuana some form of legality. Remember, in the USA there is federal law and there are state laws. Federal law trumps state law, but it’s still up to the US attorney general to decide on priorities in enforcement.

On March 25, 2010, California officials announced that 523,531 signatures — almost 100,000 more than required — had been validated in support of a state initiative to legalize marijuana and allow it to be sold and taxed, no small fiscal allurement in budget-stricken California. (Many growers, zealous not to get on the wrong side of the IRS and the state tax board, declare “agricultural” revenues in some form dependent on the creativity of their accountant or lawyer. After all, to get a bank loan, a college loan, you need a healthy looking return. The feds and the state are happy to take the money and, as a rule, not to ask questions. The state utility, PG&E, is similarly happy to rake in large sums from growers using huge amounts of power to run their indoor grow lights and electric fans.

People here in Humboldt County reckon legalization is not far off and that it spells the end of the 30-year marijuana boom, which was under stress anyway because of one of the oldest problems in agriculture — oversupply. The local weekly, the North Coast Journal, has made a somewhat comic effort to construct a silver lining for the county. It talks hopefully of branding the Humboldt “terroir,” of tours of “marijuanaries.”

Dream on.

Down south there’s more sun, more water, and very capable Mexicans ready to tend and trim for $15 an hour. The smarter growers reckon they have two years at most. Here on the North Coast, the price of marijuana will drop, the price of land will drop, the trucks will stop being late model. There’ll be less money floating around.

The New Deal began with an end to prohibition of the sale of alcohol across the United States. The individual small producers of bourbon — some good, a lot awful or downright poison — shut down, and the big liquor producers took over, successfully pushing for illegalization of marijuana in 1937. How long will the small producers of gourmet marijuana last before the big companies run them off, pushing through the sort of regulatory “standards” that are now punishing small organic farmers?

Drug War Out Of Control (1999)

All those present in a federal courtroom in San Francisco in mid-May were edified by the sight of a federal prosecutor getting off to a faltering start by having to admit that the government’s prime witness and lead investigator — Drug Enforcement Agency special agent Mark Nelson — had committed perjury.

The object of special agent Nelson’s probe has been John Dalton, brought to the courtroom from the federal detention center in Dublin, Calif., to hear his lawyer, Tony Serra, argue before Judge Susan Illston that the DEA’s case against Dalton be dismissed for “outrageous government conduct.” Among such outrageous conduct must undoubtedly be included the fact that special agent Nelson’s perjury stemmed from his efforts to conceal the precise date on which he commenced an amorous relationship with Dalton’s wife, Victoria Horstman.

Here, in other words, is a saga that gives us the government’s war on drugs at its ripest malevolence, for which I’m indebted to Mark Heimann, who compiled the incredible tale from court documents for a recent series in the Anderson Valley Advertiser, the weekly newspaper in Mendocino County, Northern California.

Let’s return to 1985. Dalton is living with his first wife on an 80-acre parcel in Mendocino County, some four hours’ drive up 101 from San Francisco. This is pot-growing country. About 4:00 in the afternoon, bullets start raining down on the cabin, and Dalton sneaks out to the ridge where the shots are coming from. At this point, he’s bushwacked by five men in camouflage, who beat him senseless.

He comes to, face in the dirt, to find his assailants are from the Campaign Against Marijuana Planting, better known as CAMP. These are teams of federal, state and local cops. They ask him if he’s a marijuana grower. Dalton says no and that he will sue. Sheriff’s Deputy Charlie Bone, who’s dislocated his finger in the encounter, tells Dalton that they know he’s a pot grower and that his troubles are only beginning.

Within eight hours of the arrest, the charges against Dalton are dropped, and though an attorney tells him he could collect big time, Dalton reckons the safe course is to do nothing.

In 1992, Dalton, a brilliant mechanic favored by the hot-rod set, embarks on a relationship with Victoria (Tori) Horstman. They are married a year later in Las Vegas.

The Dalton-Horstman menage is not tranquil. Dalton calls the police from time to time to restore order, and though Horstman claims her husband is a brute, her own 19-year-old son has testified, most recently in Judge Illston’s courtroom, that John was “a very mellow man” and a good dad, and that his mother was a mean drunk.

Horstman is a wanna-be cop, consorts with cops and by 1994 is passing bank deposit slips from her husband’s machine shop to DEA special agent Mark Nelson, who forthwith signs her up as a DEA source, SR3-94-0054. Horstman has also become romantically involved with agent Nelson, initial overtures having been made in a DEA safe house, where, according to a sworn statement by Horstman, “Agent Nelson gave me a beer, and later, we kissed and fondled each other. I do want to make it clear agent Nelson considered me at all times his personal possession and got angry if I ever talked with other DEA agents.” Among Nelson’s other possessions are three children and a pregnant wife.

Nelson successfully presses Horstman to spy on her husband. On at least two occasions, she allows Nelson to search the house while Dalton is at work. Whenever she demurs, the DEA agent threatens to charge her with money laundering on Dalton’s behalf. The most vivid episode in this sequence comes in September 1994, during a big fed/state/local enforcement drive against marijuana gardens in the area of Mendocino County. Nelson and a colleague seek out Horstman with the request that she place a “special FBI tape recorder” behind the headboard of her marital bed. Dalton duly returns home and describes the raids to wife and tape recorder, with the latter instrument soon returned by Horstman to Nelson.

Despite the surveillance, the DEA never gets a shred of evidence linking Dalton to marijuana growing. Thus balked, they turn to the drug war’s favored tool, a snitch. Two, in fact. Using the statements of these snitches — one with prior convictions for perjury and fraud — they seize all Dalton’s property for forfeiture, on the grounds that such property is the fruit of illegal labor.

After the raid, Nelson oversees Horstman’s separation from Dalton; he and five feds load up a U-Haul with Horstman’s stuff while Dalton is out. When Dalton finds out Horstman is in Blaine, Wash., and goes north to patch up their marriage, Horstman informs Nelson, who himself hurries north with eavesdropping equipment. Horstman rejects Dalton’s overtures and ultimately divorces him at the urging of Nelson, who even drives her to the lawyer’s office to sign the final papers.

On Sept. 27, 1996, the Feds arrest Dalton, on the basis of a secret federal grand jury indictment, charging him with marijuana cultivation and witness tampering. Among the witnesses against him is the operator of a speed lab facing a life term but rewarded for his testimony with a 10-year sentence. Denied bail, Dalton has been in prison for nearly two years, awaiting trial. He’s suing the feds for $44.8 million for outrageous conduct. The feds’ last desperate throw in the dismissal suit was rich with effrontery, seeking to paint Dalton as an abusive husband. At time of writing, Judge Illston is considering whether to dismiss the case.

What this has to do with marijuana cultivation is unclear. Even if Illston doesn’t dismiss, it’s hard to imagine a jury failing to agree with Serra that in its war on drugs the government is running amok.

Garret Rodriguez with Katrina LeBlanc.

When Garret Rodriguez drove north from Ocean Beach in late December 2012, he sat behind the wheel of his newly purchased 1998 Dodge Ram four-wheel drive pickup. He and two friends had left their marijuana growing operation in Humboldt to visit the neighborhood in San Diego that he had lived in for many years. Now, he was headed back to Rancho Sequoia, a rural subdivision near the tiny hamlet of Alderpoint in southeastern Humboldt County. The area has a reputation for violence and is sometimes known as Murder Mountain. (See why below.)

As Rodriguez headed back to the Emerald Triangle after the holidays, he called a friend, Katrina LeBlanc, to ask her to visit him there. She explained, “He wanted a big group of us to come up for New Year’s Eve.”

He called, LeBlanc said, from a 707 number, so she knows he made it back to Humboldt. Another friend, Bill Macpherson, remembers a phone call in January. He believes Rodriguez was calling from Humboldt also. These calls were normal for Rodriguez who kept in touch frequently, LeBlanc says. She also says, however, that he warned his friends that he wouldn’t be able to call again soon because cell service was spotty in the hills where he was.

LeBlanc was close with Rodriguez. In fact, he had spent Christmas Day with her. He had showed up in the morning to help put out toys for her two year old. LeBlanc says, “The last place he was seen [by family and friends] was at my house at Christmas. He came over so early and helped up set up all the gifts from Santa for my little girl.” She paused and added, “She loves her uncle Gar Gar. That has been one of my hardest things has been her asking about him.”

Rodriguez had been at LeBlanc’s house on Christmas Eve also. She recalled, “He brought little gifts the night before. He was basically our adult Santa…”

Late on Christmas Day or in the wee hours of the 26th, LeBlanc walked Rodriguez down to his truck to say goodbye. It would be the last time she saw him.

By April, Rodriguez’s friends began comparing notes. None of them had heard from him since at least January. This was very unusual, said his mother, Pamela Mcginnis. “It is really out of character for him not to contact someone. He was really social…He always had contact with his friends. The people who have known Garret for years know that he would have to have contact with the people he cares about.”

As friends and family ascertained that Rodriguez hadn’t been in touch with anyone since late December or maybe January, their concerns grew. By the end of April, Rodriguez’s father reported him missing.

Through the cooperation of both public investigators and private investigators hired by the family, Rodriguez’s truck was found in late May. Mcginnis explained, “Someone called in where the truck was located on private property in a remote area… The truck was found about 20 miles from where he worked…” It took awhile to verify that this was Rodriguez’s truck but since the family had the vin number as well as the license plate, they were able to confirm it was his. The truck wasn’t running and the person who left the vehicle there is out of the area and difficult to find, said Mcginnis.

“The family,” she explained, “whose property it is on have been extremely cooperative.” However, the person who left the truck there is out of the area.

Private investigators from Humboldt County’s Cook and Associates are attempting to find the person who left it. Mcginnis pointed out, “It would be nice to know how [the person] came by the truck and when they came by it…”

Though his mother said the vehicle was clean, Chris Cook, the lead private investigator explained, “It wasn’t like it was detailed out. There was crap in the back.” Which may, she said, hold some information. But, she says, “There were no obvious signs of foul play.”

On a late June day, Chris Cook has been in town for hours trying to meet up with someone who might have information about the disappearance of Rodriguez. No luck. Now she’s sipping water in a coffee shop. She doesn’t have much hope Rodriguez will be found alive.

She leans forward and explains seriously, “Garret was in Humboldt before New Year’s Eve….[But] he wasn’t here very long before he disappeared.” Not long after Rodriguez got back, she believes, he called LeBlanc from Humboldt. He also might have called another friend mentioned above a week or two later. Cook has been checking around in Humboldt and asking questions. She shakes her head noting, “No one has seen him since early January. I am 100% convinced that this is not a situation where someone is hiding out because [Rodriguez] had too many people that he trusted not to contact someone.”

When asked, Cook admits, “Is he alive? Probably not….I really want people to know that if you are coming up here, you could be taking your life in your hands.”

She says she has been trying to find out what happened to Rodriguez since mid-May. She just met with a detective from the Humboldt County Sheriff’s Office. Cook, whose husband was a sergeant with the force, reports that the local sheriff’s department is taking the case seriously and is working with her to solve it.

The Humboldt County detectives working on the case did not respond to requests for an interview. The department public information officer stated that the place where Rodriguez was last seen is uncertain. He is considered a high-risk missing person, however, and detectives are assigned to the case and following up leads as they develop.

The cost of paying for a private investigator has been hard for the family and friends of Rodriguez are stepping in to help. LeBlanc says that the fundraiser will be Sunday, July 21st at Collier Park in Ocean Beach. “We’re trying to raise some money for his mom to help continue the investigation. He was really well known. I’ve gotten three bands who will donate their time…We’re having t-shirts made for Garret…” The money raised will go to help pay for the investigation. [People can also donate online here.]

In addition LeBlanc hopes that getting Rodriguez’s friends together will help put together the pieces of that last visit Rodriguez made with his two Humboldt partners to the San Diego area. She notes, “Everybody’s got a story. Maybe we can iron out and get some more accurate information.”

His friends have also set up a Facebook page for information to be shared among themselves. Mcginnis has been impressed with his friends’ passion. “Early on when they first set up this Facebook page,” she explained, “I was told that people would stop going after about a week. Garrett is so loved and missed that this is still active. A lot of his friends are not going to give up until he is found. I don’t think people realize how tenacious his friends are in Ocean Beach. They aren’t going to let this rest.”

She sighs, “It’s been difficult. There isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t cry. Sometimes it is because of comments people send me or post on the site.” She says one of the hardest parts is that the family just doesn’t know what happened.

The family has arranged for new posters to be placed at local garden stores and other community gathering places. A phone number to contact the private investigators with information has been provided: (707) 839-7422.

Side Note

How did Rancho Sequoia become Murder Mountain?

Around 1968, the land which came to be known as Rancho Sequoia was subdivided in response to the proposed Yellow Jacket Dam. (Eureka Times Standard 1/29/68) The dam never materialized. The land was eventually subdivided into relatively small lots—many just 10 acres. The area soon became home to many people who came from out of the area to own their piece of paradise.

Like much of Southern Humboldt during the late Seventies and early Eighties, the area became known as a place for growing marijuana. Numerous raids were held in the subdivision over the years. Here’s one described from the point of view of people living there. Here’s a CAMP report (scroll to page 18.)

The name Murder Mountain probably came in response to a 1982 murder. There are also rumored to be other disappearances related to the area but below are three of the most well-known stories.

Clark Stephens, age 26, was murdered by Michael and Suzane Carson, on the 17th of May, 1982. The couple were serial killers who were convicted of three deaths but suspected of more. A book, Cry for War, was written about the lethal twosome. Here’s an excerpt about the murder from a contemporary newspaper.

Stephens, who allegedly worked on a marijuana farm near Garberville with the Carsons, was slain near the town of Alderpoint, Mrs. Carson said he was “a demon. He had to be killed.”

Carson said he shot Stephens twice in the head and once in the side and then burned the body and buried it beneath some chicken fertilizer.

See also here for another contemporary account. Here’s a video containing interviews with Carson’s daughter and ex-wife.

Another man missing and presumably dead in the area is Bobby Tennison. He was known locally as Builder Bob. He came frequently to Southern Humboldt. Reportedly he went to the Rancho Sequoia area to get paid for a construction job. He has not been seen since January 2009. See photos of Tennison below.

Interesting note: Just across the valley from Rancho Sequoia is the location of another famous death. Dirk Dickenson was killed while running from law enforcement in 1972.

Courtesy, Lost Coast Outpost.

Once again, the scenic Anderson Valley gears up for three days of practical DIY skills, fun, music and the building of a community.

Once again, I feel absolutely compelled to respond to another of Mark Scaramella’s front page articles, this one in the July 3rd edition, on boozing in Mendocino County. I believe that I am in a unique position to comment on this issue, being a multiple DUI offender, the most recent conviction (from my arrest upon returning to Ukiah from attending the Mendocino County Fair in Boonville last September 15th) having occurred last December, ten days before I moved from Clearlake to Ukiah.

Nearly everyone in Mendocino County has encountered a rattlesnake. Though bites are rare, California’s Northern Pacific Rattlesnake is worthy of healthy respect and is the subject of much misinformation.

Identifying the Pacific Rattlesnake is challenging, due to extreme color variations, location and age, according to Bob Keiffer, superintendent of the University of California Agriculture and Natural Resources at the Hopland Research and Extension Center. “There are even color variations as snakes mature. Some can be dark and hardly show any pattern. A few rare individuals develop long stripes,” Keiffer explains.

“Another attribute unique to the mature Northern Pacific snake is their black and white striped tail, which looks very much like a king snake,” says Keiffer. When trying to identify a rattlesnake, Keiffer suggests looking for the diamond pattern along the body and the large, diamond-shaped head surrounding the venom sacs.

Rattlesnakes mate in the spring, and around Aug. 1 to 25 young are live-born. By early October, they begin searching for a den site. Keiffer loosely tracks den sites at the center. “They look for winter den sites to hibernate- to shut down, slow down and retreat from harsh weather. It can be a small rock pile, but it needs a crack, rock crevice or other downward element going a foot or two into the ground.” Multiple snakes often inhabit den sites. “Most of our sites have three to 20 snakes. In desert areas, there are massive sites containing 100 snakes,” he continues.

Snakes detect the scent of other snakes to locate a den site. “Once they use a den site, they have a pattern in their brain and return. If one gets lost, a pile of plywood becomes a perfect, substitute den site.” Keiffer urges people to use caution when moving stacks of wood or debris. “I’ve heard if you stack firewood, you will rarely find a snake underneath it, but unstacked piles offer more nooks and crannies for snakes to live in,” he notes.

Mature females grow to about 60 centimeters in length, with males growing larger. “They’ll get up to and over four feet long. I have seen a 56-inch long snake, and have heard rumors of a 60-inch snake, but I’m not believing that until I see it,” he smiles.

For nearly 20 years, researchers at UC Davis have known some ground squirrel populations have developed significant amounts of immunity to rattlesnake venom. Recently, Matthew Holding, an Ohio State University graduate student came to the center to try and determine if co-evolution is creating unique interactions between predator and prey.

“The amount of ground squirrel resistance to rattlesnake venom varies from colony to colony and location to location,” says Keiffer. Holding’s theory is that venom immunity is relegated to specific squirrel populations and groups. “He’s trying to tease out from genetic research why and how this has come about. It’s like an arms race between squirrels and snakes. As rattlesnake toxin gets more potent, the ground squirrel population responds by building up immunity to the toxins,” he continues.

Holding visited various sites throughout Northern California, collecting venom from rattlers and blood from squirrels, freezing samples in liquid nitrogen. “Matthew was gathering data from 20 snakes and 20 squirrels at each site to collect information for genetic analysis in the lab.” His goal was to sample up to 25 populations spanning the northern two-thirds of California. No snakes or squirrels were harmed during the data collection process.

Holding’s research underscores the fact that rattlesnake venom continues to intrigue scientists, doctors and veterinarians. Baby snakes are about six inches long at birth. Their primary diet consists of lizards. Juvenile snake venom contains higher amounts of neurotoxin, killing lizards quickly. “Young snakes bite lizards and hold onto them.”

“Many vets and doctors aren’t aware that Northern Pacific rattlesnakes don’t reach maturity until they are about 60 centimeters long. At that magical size, snakes undergo a physical change. Their production of toxin in venom changes dramatically as they switch to a mammalian diet.”

Mature snakes begin producing a venom much higher in hemotoxin and lower in neurotoxin. “It’s the hemotoxin that breaks down muscle movement and blood cells in humans. They no longer grab prey and hold on. Mature snakes bite, inject and let go.”

When snakes bite larger victims, usually in defense, they don’t necessarily inject venom. “They have control, whether it’s thinking or physiological control. It doesn’t matter the snake’s size or the age. Small and large snakes can bite with dry bites,” says Keiffer.

Veterinarians generally provide antivenin to a bitten pet, but physicians often take a more cautious approach. “Many people have severe reactions to antivenin, so doctors monitor patients for swelling,” Keiffer explains. Many people contract secondary infections from snakebites, so a course of antibiotics is almost always administered.

Though Keiffer is adamant that “no one should try this at home,” venom could probably be swallowed. Eagles, Red-Tailed Hawks and even bass will kill and eat rattlesnakes with no deleterious effects. “With mammals, venom must be injected into the bloodstream – into the circulatory system of an animal,” he continues.

“The rattle is for self-survival, not catching prey. It’s used so larger critters don’t step on them,” says Keiffer. But rattlesnakes do not always herald their presence with their rattles. “I found a three-foot snake near one of our roads under a piece of tin. I didn’t want someone to find it and kill it, so I scooped it up and carried it about 300 feet away. I did that three times in three weeks. It puffed up and hissed, but never rattled.” Juveniles start out with a “button” rattle, accumulating additional segments over time. Rattles do not drop off when snakes shed their skin, about three times yearly.

“Be most careful when gardening and reaching down with your hands. Snakes crawl anywhere looking for food. They don’t sweat. You will not find snakes in the hot sun. When it’s cooler, they exit their dens and sit in the sun to warm up. They enjoy being on roads in the middle of summer nights. If they’re run over during the day, it’s probably where a tree has cast a shadow on the asphalt. No snake in the world will crawl on asphalt in the middle of the day.”

Old ideas die hard, and Keiffer reminds the public never to “cut an X” over a snakebite and suck out the venom. “Keep the person calm, keep the bite area below the heart and apply something cool, but not as cold as an ice pack, over the wound.”

Rattlesnakes are dangerous, but not aggressive or vicious. The classic display with coiled body and rattling tail is their defensive stance, and Keiffer notes that if given a chance to escape, they will do so rather than attack. “It’s unfortunate to kill them. They control the rodent population. People hate mice and they hate rattlesnakes, but one can help keep the other population down,” he concludes.

For more information on Hopland Research and Extension Center activities, visit: http://ucanr.org/sites/hopland/ 

“SHORTLY before noon Monday, a trench on the Holmes Ranch near Philo caved in, injuring a man. No details yet.” That was all we had yesterday. Further investigation reveals the site as the Duckhorn vineyard pond under construction in the hills due east of Floodgate near Navarro. A workman was standing on the lip of a trench when it gave way, burying him. A man working nearby saw what had happened and quickly managed to pull away enough earth for the buried man to breathe as equipment operators also on site began extracting the victim, a process later described by one witness as “a textbook trench rescue.” The rescued worker, still not identified, and may be from the out-of-area construction firm doing the work, never lost consciousness. Although he seems to have suffered an injury to his leg, the man is expected to fully recover, if one ever fully recovers from being buried alive.

AS PREVIOUSLY REPORTED, THE COUNTY OF MENDOCINO (and Auditor Controller Meredith Ford acting in her official capacity), is being sued by the cities of Ukiah, Fort Bragg and Willits. All counties in California charge a Property Tax Administration Fee (PTAF) for collecting the property tax owed to cities and special districts. In 2004, the State Legislature, as part of it annual budget flim flam, adopted two programs called “the Triple Flip” and the “VLF Swap,” which had the unintended consequence of putting cities and counties at odds with each other.

THE TRIPLE FLIP, in a series of moves that would make a riverboat gambler blush, diverted local sales tax dollars to pay bonds that were issued to pay off the state’s structural deficit; re-directed school property tax revenue from the Education Revenue Augmentation Fund (ERAF) back to cities and counties to make up for the loss of local sales tax; and made up for the loss to schools of ERAF funds by backfilling from the state General Fund. The VLF Swap reduced Vehicle License Fee (VLF) revenue to cities and counties and once again the state redirected property tax revenue from ERAF back to the cities and counties. (This is as clear as we can make it, but uncross your eyes and keep reading.)

THE NET RESULT was that the cities (and counties) were receiving considerably more revenue from property tax than previously, although much of the increase was in lieu of local sales tax and VLF. The state also said the counties could not charge additional PTAF for the first two years of implementing the new programs. Starting in 2006-07 most counties began charging additional PTAF based on guidelines issued by the State Auditor’s Association. Because the funds diverted from ERAF were from property tax, the guidelines treated them like property tax and charged PTAF accordingly. A group of cities sued L.A. County alleging they were being overcharged. Cities and counties around the state agreed to hold off on additional legislation until the L.A. case was resolved. The trial court sided with the county, but the appellate court ruled that the counties had been miscalculating the PTAF. In November the State Supreme Court agreed that the cities had been overcharged.

CITIES AND COUNTIES around the state are negotiating agreements to refund the amounts overcharged, but despite its reputation for love and peaceful simplicity, things are seldom so simple here in Mendoland. In addition to the law suit, the city councils of Fort Bragg and Ukiah have also written public letters to the County Board of Supervisors complaining that for years they have had to fight off state attempts to take “their” money and now the County is doing the same thing. So nine years ago the State Legislature engaged in its usual budgetary sleight of hand and now the cities and counties are left squabbling over the crumbs. The cities say in their lawsuit that they had to sue because the county was not coming to terms, but reliable sources say that discussions were already underway. In fact, the AVA has learned that the City of Willits has already reached a compromise settlement with the county. The item was considered in closed session by the County at a special meeting on Monday but no action was reported out of closed session.

DANIEL HAMBURG v. MENDOCINO COUNTY was also a subject of the special meeting closed session, but again, no action was reported to have been taken. Hamburg is sueing the County for alleged violations of his “fundamental rights of Liberty, Property, Safety, Happiness and Privacy, Due Process of Law; Equal Protection of Law; and Civil Rights.” Hamburg is seeking an order from the Court directing Mendocino County to issue a burial certificate and death certificate for his disceased wife, Carrie, and is also seeking in excess of $10,000 in legal fees as of June 10, the date of the filing. Most people agree that state law needs to be updated to free our dead from the greed based strictures imposed by the death industry, but it is unseemly for a sitting supervisor, and chair of the board, no less, to be suing the county he represents. Oddly enough, Hamburg’s own lawsuit cites two examples (Jay Baker in Gualala and the Tebbuts family in Anderson Valley) where petitions were filed with the local Superior Court requesting the right to private burial. Both petitions were granted the same day they were filed. Speculation is that Hamburg is getting bad legal advice since the case would be over if he had siimply filed a petition with the court instead of suing the County. And if the local judges, notoriously shy of getting embroiled in local controversy, pass the buck, Hamburg can rely on his old pal, visiting Judge Kossow, to sign off on the petition.

WE RECEIVED this message anonymously. It originated with Mari Rodin, Ukiah City Councilperson, as she responded to recent criticism: “Why do the media in Mendocino County continuously, relentlessly, and ignorantly criticize the City of Ukiah? If anyone cared about the truth, they would speak to the individuals involved like reporters in most newspapers do. They would then find out that the City is, in fact, a well-run organization that has done an amazing job of dealing with five straight years of financial challenges that have come as a result of factors completely beyond the City’s control. (For example, revenues increased only $300,000 between 2008-2012, which is 2% of a $15 million general fund. With immense pressure on expenditures coming from PERS, labor contracts and the loss of RDA, the City still managed to hold down costs to 2%/year over this same period. A remarkable accomplishment by any measure.) The facts regarding the city manager’s salary are mistaken. There USED to be executive pay (and several other extraneous and ridiculous pay categories) but to clean up all these behind-the-scenes components of her pay package, the city manager herself (!) suggested we streamline and simplify her contract to make it transparent. Her pay is $150,000 and she may be eligible for merit pay, but that will depend on how revenues come in this new fiscal year. She volunteered to take a 10% salary cut. The statement about administrative overhead is false too. It’s laughable! The city manager recommended eliminating her administrative assistant last year to help trim the deficit. The city clerk has taken up some of this role, but not all of it, which has been very difficult. How many executives do you know of who oversee a $62.5 million budget give up their secretary in an effort to do their part in sharing the pain during difficult times? If reporters around here would simply (oh, so simply!) just ask questions directly, they would have a different story to report.”

THING IS, MS. RODIN, all the stuff you complain about is public record from which all us media slime have drawn pretty much the same conclusions, i.e., the Council majority’s spending decisions haven’t been wise and tend to favor management over line staff. Also, there was the suspiciously selective allocation of Redvelopment monies on your fave restaurant, the talk of an on-staff therapist, and other public statements by you, Ms. Landis and Little Benj that create an overall impression of fuzz brains running the City of Ukiah.

JOHN SAKOWICZ WRITES: “The indisputable fact is that the City of Ukiah has what’s called a ‘structural deficit’. The structural deficit happened two years ago as a result of the city’s Redevelopment Authority (RDA) being dissolved per state law (AB 126) and a California Supreme Court decision that upheld the law. The deficit is of $900 000 is now baked into the budget, meaning that if the City Council doesn’t cut the excessive number of executive positions/salaries at the top of its personnel chart, the city can expect this deficit to be recurring year after year going forward into the future. Why? Because in an accounting shell game masterminded by City Manager Jane Chambers, Assistant City Manager Sage Sangiacomo, and City Finance Director Gordon Elton, that $900,000 in RDA monies were used to pad the salaries of those very same executives. Shocking. Absolutely shocking. Some say it was self—enrichment at its worst. It’s all public information. See the Grand Jury’s report.

WE WENT BACK to the Grand Jury Report Mr. Sakowicz referred to. Here’s an excerpt from the “Summary” in the 2012 Grand Jury RDA report: “The 2010-2011 report found that the City used RDA funds to pay significant portions of the salaries and benefits of 18 employees, many of them executive employees. The report also found that some of RDA project time lacked documentation by a code system intended to track staff hours on RDA projects.”

AND BACK WE WENT to the 2010-2011 report: “Finding 14.

Employee salaries are paid with RDA funds disproportionate to the time spent on RDA business. More than one RDA employees’ salary and benefits are paid 100% with RDA funds even though they do not perform 100% RDA business.”

AND, “Finding 24. The RDA is using funds to pay significant portions of 18 employees’ salaries and benefits: City Manager/Exec. Dir.: 50%. Senior Planner: 40%. Ass’t City Mgr.: 80%. Assoc. Planner: 25%. City Clerk: 50%. Ass’t Engineer: 31%. Ass’t Finance Dir.: 15%. Accounting Ass’t.: 15%. Director of Finance: 35%. Administrative Sec.: 20%. Project and Grant Admin.: 100%. Administrative Sec.: 40%. Finance Controller: 7%. Park Service Worker: 60%. Accountant: 15%. Director of Public Works: 8%. Senior Civil Engineer: 32%. Director, Planning & Community Dev.: 35%.”

THE CITY OF UKIAH responded: “The Ukiah Redevelopment Agency pays for a percentage portion of the salaries and benefits of employees that share duties between the URA and the City of Ukiah. The Agency does not pay a disproportionate share of City salaries. The percentage varies among personnel in accordance with the estimated time spent on duties associated with each of the respective agencies and is approved by both agencies with each fiscal year’s budget. The shared resource model increases efficiency through the elimination of redundant administrative staffing and services for both agencies. In Fiscal Year 2010/11 the URA and the City of Ukiah had only one full time staff member funded at 100% with redevelopment funds.”

TRANSLATION: Ukiah jiggered the timecards so that costly financial staffers and managers billed more of their time to the RDA than to the Ukiah General Fund so that the Council’s pals in upper management could continue to be employed at their overly generous salaries while the Council appeared to be saving money for the City’s budget. The specific percentages reported by the Grand Jury were not disputed and they show that the City Manager and her assistant spent 50% and 80% respectively on RDA business. Ridiculous on its face. Clearly the numbers were skewed to overbill the RDA account where the money was. Mr. Sakowicz calls it self-enrichment and that’s fair to say, although it’s also standard issue bureaucratic empire building for no other reason than: “because that’s where the money is.”

“WHEN IN THE COURSE of human events, it becomes necessary for our people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another…impel them to separation.”

AND SO ON, thunders our Declaration Of Independence, but if you read the document substituting “corporate oligarchs” for King George, you have an accurate picture of the current political situation in America where, to varying degrees, most of us are economic serfs without representation. I don’t feel represented at any level of government, but I do think the Mendocino County Board of Supervisors, as presently constituted, can be said to be fairly representative of Mendocino County public opinion. At the grander levels of government, however, only the oligarchy’s interests are defended.

(MY LAST LINK to the federal government was severed about five years ago when the Post Office stopped delivering my newspaper in a timely manner.)

ALL THIS IS OBVIOUS to citizens of most countries because they understand how capitalism works and they know where they are in the class system capitalism creates. Americans, many of whom are now descending the class ladder, are slowly awakening to the realities of our social-political system and, when fully awake…… well, it won’t be pretty, but we’re at the point where we’ve got to have another revolution or our children and grandchildren won’t even be allowed into the starting blocks to pursue the happiness we’re guaranteed by what’s left of our shredded Constitution.

MYSELF, I spent Freedom Day listening to the Giants game on the radio, then enjoyed an afternoon of gluttony and general over-indulgence with relatives, climbed up on the roof for the evening’s fireworks, and called it a day. We may be seriously on the skids as a country, but it’s still possible to have a good time.

MISSING MAN’S FAMILY STILL HOPING TO FIND HIM — The wife of a Rodondo man who has been missing since the end of May is still hoping a someone will provide a tip that may lead to finding him. Samantha Lamberg has been at home in Southern California with her 10- and 14-year-old children, wondering what happened to their father, Erik Swan Lamberg, 51, who was last seen in Laytonville on May 27. The Lambergs are separated, and he was driving to Oregon to seek help for mental health issues, according to Samantha Lamberg, who said he is bipolar and was off his medication when he left Southern California around May 23. She talked with him on the phone from Laytonville on May 26. “He sounded paranoid,” she said, “but said he was safe in a motel.” Lamberg had apparently tried to get some repairs done to his Honda Odyssey van in Laytonville, but told Samantha Lamberg the repairs could not begin until after the holiday weekend, on May 28. Nonetheless, the van  —  which had been towed to Laytonville from Leggett  —  was driven away. According to Samantha Lamberg, the Laytonville motel owner said Erik Lamberg and the van were gone on May 28. His credit card showed a charge May 26 for the motel. Samantha Lamberg did not hear from Erik Lamberg between May 26 and May 28, and his credit card was not used again, which she said was unusual, and so she reported him missing the night of May 29 to the Mendocino County Sheriff’s Office. The MCSO found the Honda van on Sherwood Road about 20 miles west of Willits on Saturday, June 1. Deputies did a limited search immediately around the van, and a ground search for Erik Lamberg  —  including a bloodhound  —  was organized for the following Wednesday. Lt. Shannon Barney at the MCSO said the dogs followed what they thought was a good scent about a mile west of the spot where the van was found, but then lost the scent. Since the search, the MCSO has had a couple of calls of possible sightings but neither panned out. “We’re looking for tips,” Barney said. Samantha Lamberg is hoping to keep her husband’s case in the public eye and has launched a Facebook site dedicated to finding him. In the meantime, however, “I’m down here feeling pretty powerless,” she said. (The Ukiah Daily Journal)

ON-LINE COMMENT OF THE DAY in response to pot raid in the Alderpoint area Wednesday morning: “Get the armed felons and mega grows cleaned out and the area cleaned up and you will see crime drop like a rock and a sudden migration out of the area of these career criminals and it will be appreciated by the majority of people in the area, especially those who still work an honest job or are retired and pay taxes and want a safer family friendly community like they remember not that long ago. This should start a turn around, the people are ready and have had enough body counts and neck tatted criminal zombies who should be locked away and the key thrown away. Good work HCSO!”

LAST TUESDAY, JULY 2, we asked, Why the secrecy when we received the following communique from Carmel Angelo, Mendocino County’s chief executive officer. It said Ms. Angelo would “be answering written questions” at Fort Bragg Town Hall on Friday, July 12, 2013 beginning at 10:30am from, it seems, invited persons only. Brandon Merritt would be screening the questions for Her Majesty.

THE NEXT DAY, July 3, the County CEO’s office released the following press release: “County Kicks Off District Budget Presentations. The Public Is Invited To Attend The July 12, 2013 Forum At Fort Bragg Town Hall. Mendocino County Chief Executive Officer, Carmel J. Angelo, is scheduled to present a County Budget Update/State of the County informational presentation in the 4th Supervisorial District on Friday, July 12, from 10:30 a.m. to 12:00 noon at the Fort Bragg Town Hall….”

OF COURSE most people are occupied at those hours, and for most people in Fort Bragg local government means the Fort Bragg City Council. It’s way too much to even hope that a County budget presentation might be held at night so the few people who might be interested could attend. But government at all levels operates at its convenience as the hours of Ms. Angelo’s visit to Fort Bragg indicate. An hour and a half travel from Ukiah, an hour and a half with the unwashed, a leisurely tax paid lunch at The Wharf, an hour and a half back to Ukiah and…… Miller Time!

LONG-TIME INTERNET STALKER, Michael Hardesty, has been sending his nasty opinions to our website under the name Martin Zemitis, a successful Berkeley entrepreneur. For years, Hardesty wrote to us under various pseudonyms. At first, he’s more or less rational, insofar as your generic Randian nutball can be said to be rational. But soon, unable to contain himself, Hardesty’s racist and homophobic rants, interspersed with superlatives for fascism as revealed to him by Ayn Rand’s fiction, betray him and we cut him off. The Zemitis cover means that Hardesty, banned from newspaper websites throughout the Bay Area, in his desperation to vilify whole populations of people, has moved into identity theft. We apologize to Mr. Zemitis for any embarrassment he’s suffered from this lunatic appropriating his name.

I KNOW ETHNIC identifications can be sensitive, but either this guy is an extremely disoriented Mexican or he’s an extremely disoriented Arab. Or maybe an East Indian from Watsonville. But Mr. Ghafarisaravi says he’s Hispanic, and he oughtta know.

THE MENDOCINO COAST FURNITURE MAKERS celebrate their 15th Anniversary with a show at Odd Fellows Hall in Mendocino. The show opens July 3, but the Opening Reception will be Saturday, July 13, 5-8 pm. I’ll be there with butterbean hummus (you have to taste it to understand) and — maybe — the dastardly brownies. Hope you can come. (Norma Watkins)

MORE THAN $10,000 of stolen goods has been recovered by Fort Bragg police and two alleged thieves taken into custody. Joseph Anthony Fitch, 30, and Eric Christopher Seale, 37, also charged with meth possession, were arrested last Tuesday. Police say Fitch’s family told police they thought Fitch was robbing houses in Fort Bragg, and Fitch quickly implicated Seale in whose apartment many stolen items were subsequently discovered.

A 29-YEAR-OLD HOMELESS MAN WAS FOUND DEAD beneath the North Cliff Hotel on Thursday morning. The area at the mouth of the Noyo River has functioned as a homeless camp for some time. The young man, not yet identified, went to sleep with his girlfriend on Wednesday night. She woke up, he didn’t.

QUESTION OF THE DAY: Banks can borrow money at .75% interest, mortgage loans are currently around 4% and Students are charged 6.8% on student loans. What’s wrong with this picture? Why aren’t people demonstrating? Why do the people in this country take such abuse and not fight back as people do in other countries?

OUTSIDE MAGAZINE  in its June 30th edition proudly declares that Eureka is one of the best places to raise adventurous kids. It names the “towering redwoods on one side and plunging ocean cliffs on the other…” The redwoods, yes… But, plunging ocean cliffs in Eureka? A further read exposes the confusion: The magazine lists a number of amazing places to visit in the area including a “unique pygmy forest,” Jughandle State Reserve, and the Devil’s Punch Bowl in Russian Gulch State Park. All, of course in Mendocino about a three hour drive from Eureka. Humboldt: a great place to live… because it’s really not that far from Mendocino… (—Kym Kemp)

THE COUNTY BUDGET for fiscal year 2013-14 is preliminarily set at about $224 million, which includes a $2.9 million carryover from the fiscal year ending this month. It also includes about $57 million of anticipated revenue for the County’s general fund (the rest going to state and federal programs over which the county has little fiscal control). CEO Carmel Angelo told Tiffany Revelle of the Ukiah Daily Journal last week, “Over the past three-plus years, we’ve gone from a $7-million shortfall to a $7-million reserve; we’ve saved this county $14 million. We certainly have avoided the (fiscal) cliff … and there’s been a lot of work on all fronts.” Final budget hearings begin September 9th.

COUNTY REVENUES REMAIN FLAT, however, while the County’s “structural deficit” continues to deficit because of ongoing debt repayments for the formerly mismanaged Teeter Plan, the underfunded pension system plus continuously escalating healthcare costs and general inflation. Most of the improved budget picture stems from the large reduction in line staff over recent years combined with a 10% wage reduction. Only a sudden improvement in the Big Economy, which is not likely, would the Mendo budget’s deficit un-deficit. But given the recent but relative stabilization, county employees (in eight separate bargaining units, about two thirds of which are SEIU members) are expected to demand at least partial restoration of pay and benefits in ongoing negotiations.

THE STATE BOARD OF EQUALIZATION has begun mailing out another round of tax bills for their controversial “fire prevention fee” fire parcel tax. According to the Howard Jarvis Taxpayer’s Association the Jarvis Gang didn’t get their lawsuit filed with the state until last March. That lawsuit claims that the parcel “fee” is actually a tax which was imposed illegally by not going through the voters via Proposition 218 rules. And, we’re told by firefighters, so far the money is disappearing into the state’s general fund, not firefighting.

THE JARVIS people don’t expect a decision any time soon — “Please be patient as lawsuits typically take a long time” — so they advise that property owners pay their $150 tax perhaps $35 less if your parcel’s “habitable structure” is on land within an existing fire protection district.

MOST OF MENDO COUNTY outside the incorporated cities is subject to the tax, including all of Anderson Valley although the slightly lower $115 fee will apply to most Anderson Valley homeowners in the Anderson Valley Community Services District because we have fire protection.

OUR SUPERVISORS has repeal of the fee on its state legislative agenda But so far nothing has come of this item. Legislation to repeal or change the fee has been introduced in the state Legislature but hasn’t been passed out of any committee. For more information go to the Jarvis group’s website: http://firetaxprotest.org/ Or the state’s tax board fire prevention fee website: http://www.firepreventionfee.org/

STATE ASSEMBLYMAN WES CHESBRO will be term-limited out of office as of December 1, 2014 when, we assume, he’ll quickly situate his jive self in some other tax-funded sinecure. ‘Bro has milked the taxpayers of California for 16 years since first being elected out of Arcata in 1998 when he succeeded state senator Mike Thompson as State Senator. Thompson had been elected to represent the wine industry in the House of Representatives in Washington DC. Chesbro, who was born in Glendale, stumbled north with the back-to-the-landers in the 1970′s and went on to buy a dubious diploma in “Organizational Behavior” from the University of San Francisco. Then he “attended” Humboldt State classes in “natural resources.” According to his own website Chesbro’s “professional experience” consists of a bunch of government recycling jobs plus elected office.

UPON ASSUMING his senate office in 1998, Chesbro proposed a bill that would benefit one (1) person — Francis Ford Coppola — by describing “certain” wine-selling restaurants so narrowly that a sharp reporter at the Sacramento Bee noticed that Chesbro’s Bill would have applied only to Coppola (a big Chesbro campaign contributor) and Coppola’s small wine/restaurant chain. When the Bee published their story, Chesbro quickly withdrew the Coppola bill. Chesbro spent eight years as state senator. Term-limited out, he was instantly appointed by his Democratic Party pals to the state’s Integrated Waste Management Board where he did nothing but attend a few meetings a year for a salary of more than $100k a year until former assemblyperson Patti Berg was term limited out as this area’s assemblyperson. Chesbro immediately ran for that office with the backing of Party Boss Mike Thompson and won easily in a district dominated by career Democrats and people who call themselves ‘progressives’ but loyally vote for whomever the Northcoast’s Demo Hackdom puts on their ballots.

LAST MONTH ARCATA RESIDENT HEZEKIAH ALLEN announced that he intended to run as a Democrat for Chesbro’s assembly seat. We don’t know Allen, but simply on the strength that his announcement does not mention wine, he’s already made it clear that he’d be an improvement over Chesbro. And he gets major points for his Old Testament handle. Back to the future, Hez!

WILL PARRISH was released from the County Jail on his own recognizance last Wednesday (July 3rd.) Parrish, also known as Red Tail Hawk, writes on environmental matters for the ava. He’d been arrested for strapping himself to a piece of CalTrans road building equipment in protest of the Willits Bypass.

“KUDOS, a reader writes, “to Supervisors Dan Hamburg and John McCowen for getting “smoked out” at the World’s Largest Salmon Barbecue in Fort Bragg. Both of them manned the grills, donning bright yellow rubber aprons and rubber gloves, completely sunburnt, covered in grease, completing grueling, 6-hour shifts to save the salmon. Hamburg recalled that in earlier years, all the county judges used to come down and take a shift. Apparently the 3,000-plus portions of King Salmon come from Alaska. My boyfriend quipped that the motto for next year’s event should be, ‘Protect and Serve.’“

SOME 3,500 PEOPLE turned out at the Green Center at Sonoma State University on the 4th hoping to hear some music and watch some fireworks. The fireworks fizzled, the many kids there strictly for the fireworks were bored by the classical music, the grass was inaccessible to wheelchairs, and lots of people demanded (and got) their money back. The disabled had to be carried up several flights of stairs to get to the green.

THE MENDOCINO COUNTY Republican Central Committee will meet Saturday, July 20, 2013, 10:00 AM — 12:00 Noon at the Henny Penny Restaurant, 697 S. Orchard Ave (corner of Gobbi), Ukiah 95482. For further information contact: Stan Anderson, 707-321-2592. One possible topic: “Are we as crazy as the liberals say we are, or is it them who’s nuts?”

COMMENT OF THE DAY: “I communed with my fellow citizens this Fourth of July weekend for a few hours at a little beach in a Vermont state park. It was a family kind of place. The mommies and daddies were putting on a competitive tattoo display (along with competitive eating). So many skulls, Devil heads, snakes, screaming eagles, flags, and thunderbolts. I suppose they acquire these totem images to ward off some apprehended greater harm, the metaphysically inchoate forces marshalling at the margins of what little normal life remains in this nation of rackets, swindles, and tears. All was nonetheless tranquility, there by the little lakeside, with the weenies grilling and the pop-tops popping. A three-year-old came by where I was working on my tan on a towel in the grass, supine. He asked me if I was dead. Not yet, I told him. Behind him a skull smoking a doobie loomed in blue and red ink on his daddy’s thigh. My people. My country.”

DON’T TELL the Mendo Health Department, but there’s a liquor store in San Francisco at 2nd & Balboa called “DRINK LIQUOR” Liquor Store. Been there for years.

MARI RODIN of the Ukiah City Council is leaving the Council for a government blah-blah job — LAFCO the ultimate blah-blah job — in Monterey County. Bowing out with Mendo-Typical solipsistic effusion, Rodin said her “work with the city has been a gift that changed my life, shaped my thinking, expanded my appreciation of local government” and similar arias to ME ME ME ME ME.

IN FACT, she leaves Ukiah a cool mil in debt, administratively top-heavy and an estranged public muttering that the city has been destabilized by the self-serving crackpots.

CALIFORNIA PRISONERS kick off a statewide hunger strike today to protest conditions recognized the world over, except here, as amounting to torture, especially the system’s isolation units where inmates can spend years with no human contact. Usually balkanized into warring ethnic units, the strike is unanimously supported by the California inmate population.

ACCORDING TO THE FORBIDDEN KNOWLEDGE website, our very own “Dr. William J. Courtney is an evangelist for the medicinal use of non-psychoactive, RAW cannabis. Cannabis aka hemp is not psychoactive unless it is dried, cooked or burned, prior to ingestion. While still raw, however it does not affect the cognition or motor skills of its user and therefore, it can be taken in doses 60 times greater than burned cannabis. It is at these doses that cannabis becomes among the most anti- inflammatory compounds ever discovered, that has been proven to cure skin- and ovarian cancer, with medicinal applications for dozens of illnesses. Courtney believes that hemp/cannabis needs to be re-cast as a green, leafy vegetable that should be consumed every day as a nutritional supplement, preferably juiced, by those afflicted by painful inflammatory conditions like arthritis, IBS, etc. Dr. Donald Abrams, MD, Chief Hematology and Oncology at San Francisco General Hospital asserts that if cannabis were just discovered in the Amazon, people would be clamoring to make uses out of it. Instead, it suffers from the stigma of a “street drug” and worse — from the stiff legal sanctions against its possession or use in many states and countries. Courtney says that the FDA, which owns a patent on cannabis, recognizing its medicinal value should change its current status as a Schedule I narcotic with no accepted medical uses, as these two positions are in stark contradiction with one another.”

A DAYLIGHT HOME INVASION in Hopland early Friday evening was said to have been committed about 6pm by three black men who’d fled a home invasion at Hopland and took off south on 101. The Mendocino County Sheriff’s Department alerted police agencies to be on the lookout for three black men in a black Dodge Challenger. Cloverdale Police soon saw the car rocket past them and gave chase at a top speed estimated at 125mph. The fugitives, having outrun Cloverdale, abandoned the Challenger near Alderbrook due west of central Healdsburg. A house-to-house search commenced while a helicopter hovered overhead and three canine teams and some one hundred officers looked for the men.

UPDATE: Sonoma County Sheriff’s Deputies located one suspect around 11pm Friday night and took him into custody. That suspect, later identified as Gregory Ladel Jenkins Jr., was positively identified by a victim as being one of the Hopland robbery suspects. At approximately 5:30am Saturday morning two more individuals thought to be suspects were detained by Sonoma County Sheriff’s Deputies and were transported to Mendocino County Sheriff’s Deputies. One of the suspects, identified as Michael Edwin Steele, was positively identified by one of the robbery victims. The third subject was later released without charges when it was learned he’d been called north by Steele who’d said he, Steele, had been robbed. Sonoma County Law Enforcement agencies were advised to be on the lookout for the third suspect who fled from the Dodge Challenger and is outstanding at this time. Gregory Laden Jenkins Jr. and Michael Edwin Steele were booked into the Mendocino County Jail and were to be held on $250,000 bail. The investigation into the Hopland robbery is ongoing and anyone with information is urged to contact the Sheriff’s Office Tip-Line by calling 707-234-2100.

FOUNDER of the annual protests, Mary Moore, has announced there will be no organized protest this year at the exclusive, all male, Bohemian Grove this July. There were some advanced proposals being considered about a “Squeaky Wheels” protest on July 20 which would have focused on the recent government sequester cuts disproportionately affecting the disabled, elderly and poor populations of this country. “Because of internet confusion many people have not understood that this event was only a proposal and is not being planned,” Mary says.

QUOTE OF THE YEAR: “For nearly four years you have had an Administration which instead of twirling its thumbs has rolled up its sleeves. We will keep our sleeves rolled up. We had to struggle with the old enemies of peace — business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering. They had begun to consider the Government of the United States as a mere appendage to their own affairs. We know now that Government by organized money is just as dangerous as Government by organized mob. Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hate for me — and I welcome their hatred. I should like to have it said of my first Administration that in it the forces of selfishness and of lust for power met their match. I should like to have it said of my second Administration that in it these forces met their master.” — Franklin Delano Roosevelt, 1936

ON THE FOURTH OF JULY at about 8:19pm, Deputies from the Mendocino County Sheriff’s Office received a radio call for service regarding a physical assault in the 100 block of Main Street in Point Arena. Deputies arrived at approximately 9pm and contacted the victim, Timothy Hall, a long time resident of the area. Hall lives at the ‘Abalone Arms’ at ground zero PA. Hall told Deputies that the suspect, Janet Guess (aka “Janet Planet”), had entered his home and demanded that he give her his prescription medications. After Hall refused to provide Guess with the goods, Guess grabbed Hall’s cane and struck Hall in the head “causing a minor visible injury.” Hall was able to take the cane away from Guess after a brief struggle. Guess continued to demand Hall’s medications then attacked Hall by striking him several times with closed fists. Guess then departed Abalone Arms and Hall called 911. Deputies subsequently arrested Ms. Planet for attempted robbery, assault with a deadly weapon and elder abuse (57 is elderly?) and transported to the Mendocino County Jail where she was booked to be held in lieu of $150,000 bail.

WHEN LIGHTNING sparked a fire in the hills west of Hopland last Thursday night, and a CalFire chopper showed up the next day when smoke made it visible, the bucket chopper passed low over a ridgetop grow where an ag man was tending his crop. In the nude. Doubly exposed, the ag man dashed for the trees as the chopper gave him a merry blast of its siren, and a good time was had by all.

CRAIG STEHR WRITES: Warm spiritual greetings, Today I spent the whole day in Catholic churches in San Francisco. Beginning with 7:30AM mass at the historic St. Patrick’s, and then sat a lengthy meditation at Old St. Mary’s. I walked to the National Shrine of St. Francis, and met with the new rector Fr. Snider. We briefly discussed my need of a spiritual vocation, and he appreciates that I have been active with Catholic Worker for 23 years. We agreed to pray for each other. A visit was then made to the Sts. Peter & Paul church, and I discovered upon leaving that the SF Mime Troupe was performing their new play across the street in Washington Square Park, so I watched “Oil and Water,” realizing that it’s not just my own circumstances which are dire. I’ve got one more week at the Berkeley men’s shelter. I have no idea what I am going to do or where I am going to go. Of course I have sent out hundreds of emails to activist groups saying that I am willing to relocate to continue being involved. Nothing substantive has been received yet. I have given up all hope, and am praying continuously. I ask for your prayers to receive a spiritual vocation, and am as always only seriously interested in doing the will of God. That’s just the way it is with me. Thank you very much, Craig Louis Stehr, Email: craigstehr@hushmail.com Mailing address: c/o NOSCW, P.O. Box 11406, Berkeley, CA 94712-2406.

MAJOR CORPORATION execs now make, on average, about 273 times more than the average worker, according to a recent analysis by the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) of the CEO-to-worker pay ratio at top 350 firms. The average pay, EPI found, was $14.1 million in 2012, up 12.7% from 2011. That’s a big change from a half-century ago. In 1965, the CEO-to-worker pay ratio was about 20-to-1, but it grew over the next three decades, and that growth picked up speed in the 90s. It peaked in 2000 before the early 2000s recession, with a CEO-to-worker pay ratio of 383.4-to-1. It hit a lesser peak again in 2007, before the Great Recession, with a ratio of 351.3-to-1. During the recovery, CEO pay has been climbing upward once more. At the same time, for most Americans, wages have remained stagnant at best.

WILL PARRISH was released from the County Jail on his own recognizance last Wednesday (July 3rd.) Parrish, also known as Red Tail Hawk, writes on environmental matters for the AVA. He’d been arrested for strapping himself to a piece of CalTrans road building equipment in protest of the Willits Bypass.

THE AVA’S FAVORITE PAINTER! Mary Robertson: River Days July 11 — August 17, Krevesky Gallery, 77 Geary, San Francisco. Writer Jon Carroll, a longtime friend of Robertson, reflects on her work. “I have always wanted to live on Mary Robertson’s Russian River. Such an indolent place, so dreamy, like an underwater kingdom. The umbrellas, towels, beach chairs, and the people in Mary’s paintings are frozen in time, always inhabiting that same summer. It’s a little like heaven and a little like camp.”

GEOFF THOMAS of Boonville writes: “So Edward Snowden simply tells the world that the US government has the ability and power to collect information, powers that were legally granted by his own Government …. so where’s the problem? Is it now illegal to talk about what is legally allowable in the land of the free? You make something technically ‘Legal’, but then make it ‘Illegal’ to mention that which should not be mentioned?I may be slow and I may often be stupid, but can somebody please explain why with all the shit that’s happening in the world today, Edward Snowden is America’s ‘Most Wanted?”

HERE IN DENVER I haven’t yet personally encountered any Political Correctness. But in this neighborhood, diversity we’ve got. Next door is a black man and his Jewish rabbi wife, and they are right across the street from the young gay Mexican fellow. More Spanish than English is spoken on this block. This is what used to be commonly called a “mixed” neighborhood, and that’s what it is. If it were transported to Marin County, it would be “diverse” in PC terms but more realistically considered “ghetto.” No one on this very “diverse” street appears to be the slightest bit concerned with the notion of PC. People are too busy living for such nonsense.

If memory serves adequately, I seem to recall that PC is something occurring almost exclusively among middle class white people, most of whom have been exposed to one or another post-60′s New Age sort of thing, from “experimenting” with marijuana before it became mainstream — espresso and wine are the drugs of choice now — to gurus from India, the likes of Wavy Gravy and more serious dispensers of wisdom like Dr. Wayne Dyer and Byron Katie, seminar hustlers like Werner Erhard, tarot cards and so forth. PC boils down these days to denial of all stereotyping (in theory although reality can sometimes intrude), earnest trash recycling, calling oneself “progressive” while hypnotically voting for mainstream democrats, and cultivation of gay friends (for some reason gay women seem generally a bit safer to have at the suburban dinner party than gay men). And so on.

Our Esteemed Editor has joked, off the record, that the ultimate political correctness would be expressed in a transgender cripple as president of the US. Off the record only, since the warm-and-fuzzy PC legions, what the AVA sometimes calls The Nice People, would be horrified at the statement although delighted at such a reality, even though we have now seen that the first non-white president is strictly political business-as-usual or worse. And there is no reason to imagine that a disabled person of indeterminate gender would be any different, since anyone aspiring to the presidency is thoroughly corrupted well before getting near the possibility.

National Lampoon did a goof on Joan Baez in the 70s, a sound-alike singing “Pull the triggers, niggers, we’re with you all the way, just across the bay… Just because I can’t be there, doesn’t mean I don’t care…” (Google ‘Pull the Triggers’ to find it on youtube.) This is PC distilled right down to its essence, despite deployment of the hot-button “N” word. — Jeff Costello

Ramblin’ around this diry old town

Scroungin’ for nickels and dimes

Times getting rough I ain’t got enough

To buy me a bottle of wine

Bottle of wine, fruit of the vine

When you gonna let me get sober

Leave me alone, let me go home

Let me go back and start over

Little hotel, older than Hell

Cold and as dark as a mine

Blanket so thin, I lie there and grin

Buy me little bottle of wine

Aches in my head, bugs in my bed

Pants so old that they shine

Out on the street, tell the people I meet

Won’cha buy me a bottle of wine

— Tom Paxton

* * *

Have you noticed, we don’t have the term “wino” anymore?

It was around 1978 when I had my first and only Northern California “wine-tasting” experience. We were driving north to Willits, to visit Jim Gibbons, the poet, athlete, sportswriter and all-around not-very-nice person who was busy becoming famous for being able to run long distances without dropping dead, and for writing stories offensive enough to get him fired from certain positions in the local education establishment.

We got as far as northern Sonoma or southern Mendocino, I can’t remember which, when, having recently switched from amphetamine addiction to alcoholism, I realized it was time for a drink. No bars or liquor stores were in sight, but just around the next curve a winery appeared. The sign said, “Tasting Room.” My wife rolled her eyeballs when I said, “Let’s drop in for a taste,” but she didn’t hesitate to join me. In the parking lot, I combed my hair and straightened my clothes in hopes of creating the illusion that I was a sophisticated, classy sort of person, the kind who discriminates carefully in matters such as wine selection.

The winery itself was an impressive building — very large and very clean, and occupying some very expensive real estate — obviously designed for the sophisticated, classy sort of person. No doubt about it, our car, a beat-up ‘65 Valiant, was the crummiest one there and looked cheap indeed next to the shiny new Winnebagos and luxury sedans.

The Tasting Room looked more like a bar than I’d expected, but a classy bar, lined with well-dressed people from the shiny cars. Nervously, thinking someone would spot me for a freeloading drunk, I eased up to the bar and in a discriminating manner read the labels on the bottles available for “tasting.” The bored-looking bartender walked over, looked at me and said nothing.

I now noticed that of all the available wines, none had a date, a vintage, or a recognizable wine-snob name. Picking one at random, I said, “I’d like to try this one, please,” as if really caring about anything but a free drink. The bartender produced a very small glass and poured my selection. I took a sip. It was junk, barely better than Thunderbird, Annie G-Strings or Night Train Express. Now there’s a powerful potion. My friend Buck drank a bottle of Night Train once and proceeded to get a can of gasoline and set his mattress on fire. At least he got it out of the house first.

Finishing the small glass of swill quickly, I scanned the other bottles and realized they were all equally low-grade material, but if I “tasted” all of them I might get a decent buzz on. The bartender did his duty as I moved down the line. Eventually I began to see the other “tasters” more clearly. Their new clothes and shiny vehicles were one thing, but their faces were a whole other story. They were a bunch of sots — wheezy, watery-eyed inebriates — here for the exact same reason as I was, a free dose of their drug of choice, and despite their expensive possessions, closer in mind and spirit to skid-row bums than wine connoisseurs.

I laughed out loud, realizing that unlike upper-class wine tasting sessions, there was really not much pretense going on here at all. This was all about nothing but drinking for free.

After sampling every bottle, we hit the road again. My wife drove, having imbibed only moderately. Leaving our tourist friends inside to repeat their samplings again and again, we knew we’d never view a retired couple in an RV or a northern California Wine Tasting room in quite the same light again.

2013 update

During my two years of involvement on internet dating sites, I was shocked at the number of women who named wine tasting as one of their favorite activities. One of my acquaintances in Portland drank a lot of wine and “loves” wine tastings. Her alcohol addiction was covered with a fine veneer of what she regarded as sophistication, as though drinking wine wasn’t really drinking; rather, it was an expression of refined taste. A divorced woman, she also played around with dating sites but remarked that the “caliber” of men available in these venues was not up to her standards. I was such a man, thank goodness, and suspect this woman would be almost deliriously at home anywhere on the 101 corridor from Santa Rosa to Ukiah, where there are enough wine tasting rooms to drink oneself into oblivion while navigating to the next sophisticated gourmet experience.

ASSAULT WITH DEADLY WEAPON CHARGE ADDED TO DUI CASE

by Tiffany Revelle

The Mendocino County District Attorney’s Office is taking a novel approach in a misdemeanor DUI case where the defendant also faces a felony charge of assault with a deadly weapon after allegedly crashing through a neighbor’s fence and into the wall of a bedroom where an 8-year-old boy was sleeping.

The alleged weapon is a 2008 Toyota Camry driven by Joan E. Rainville, 53, the night of May 26, when she was arrested shortly before 9 p.m. on suspicion of driving under the influence, driving with a suspended license and driving without an ignition-interlock device.

“I’m not aware of a case where (the prosecution) has charged a DUI driver with assault with a vehicle — not where it’s just a DUI,” Rainville’s Ukiah defense attorney, Justin Petersen, said outside the courtroom where her preliminary hearing was postponed Tuesday.

The District Attorney’s Office opted to add the assault charge because, in part, the incident was her fifth known DUI in about 16 years, prosecutor Matt Hubley of the District Attorney’s Office said previously.

“An assault is an intent to commit battery,” Petersen said, “like when someone used a car to try to hurt someone else.”

District Attorney David Eyster, who approved the legal approach Hubley is taking in the case, said the prosecution doesn’t have to prove that Rainville meant to hurt anyone, just that she knew drinking and driving was dangerous when she chose to do it.

A DUI is a misdemeanor crime unless the incident injured someone, or the driver was convicted of three or more DUIs in the last ten years. No one was injured in the May incident, but Hubley elevated the whole case to the level of a felony by adding the assault charge.

He did so, according to Eyster, on the premise that Rainville was given the Watson advisement, a legal warning the court gives anyone convicted of a DUI. The advisement essentially says driving under the influence is “extremely dangerous to human life,” and that the driver could be convicted of murder if someone dies as a result.

Because Rainville was given the advisement, according to Eyster, she knew the danger of getting behind the wheel drunk. That, he said, indicates that she had “general intent,” meaning she chose to do something she knew could hurt someone.

In an assault with a deadly weapon case, the prosecution only needs to show that the defendant employed that willfulness, not that the defendant had a “specific intent” to commit assault, according to Eyster. He said the fact that Rainville had been given the Watson advisement several times shows the kind of intent needed to prove the charge.

“It’s a real stretch,” Petersen said of the prosecution’s approach, which was unusual enough that a representative of the Lake County District Attorney’s Office attended the Tuesday court hearing to see whether the strategy would fly in court.

“I applaud Matt and the other attorneys for seeing the danger she caused and dealing with this as more than a DUI,” Eyster said.

Rainville was due in court for a preliminary hearing, which is the district attorney’s chance to show a judge enough evidence to bind the defendant over for trial. The hearing was rescheduled for Aug. 6. (Courtesy, the Ukiah Daily Journal)

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BOARD OF SUPERVISORS TO TALK BUDGET IN FORT BRAGG — The Mendocino County Board of Supervisors has announced it will host a budget presentation from 10:30am to noon Friday at the Fort Bragg Town Hall. The presentation is the first in a series of five presentations to be given in each of the county’s five supervisorial districts before the annual county budget hearings begin Sept. 9, according to the Mendocino County Executive Office. The League of Women Voters of Mendocino County President Jane Person offered to sponsor the event, according to the Executive Office. “The League of Women voters of Mendocino County is happy to host this budget presentation as part of its educational outreach to help inform county voters,” she said. Fourth District Supervisor Dan Gjerde, whose district includes Fort Bragg, volunteered to have his district receive the first of the budget presentations. “In times when revenues are stagnant, the balanced budget represents an organization that is constantly looking for new ways to achieve its goals at lower costs,” Gjerde said. The presentation will include highlights of the county’s 2013-14 recommended budget, a “State of the County” update and items of interest in the 4th District.

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ANDERSON VALLEY FIRE CHIEF COLIN WILSON updates us on recent lightning, fires and major emergencies.

As I’m sure everyone noticed we had some major thunderstorm activity Monday night and Tuesday morning.

We established a command post at our Boonville station and contacted our volunteer lookouts (we now have 16) and began getting smoke reports a little before 10am Tuesday morning. The first fire was south of Highway 128 near the base of Haehl’s Grade about six miles east of Yorkville. It was a strike in a large fir tree which spread into the surrounding vegetation about 50 feet around the tree. Both CalFire Boonville engines and both of our Anderson Valley Yorkville units responded to the scene and with the help of our newest volunteer lookout, Ramone Avila on Ward Mountain, they were able to locate and access the fire relatively quickly. They laid hose and extinguished the ground fire in short order but had to remain on scene for several hours waiting for a timber faller provided by CalFire to arrive and put the tree on the ground where they could fully extinguish it.

Kyle Clark, AV firefighter/EMT and volunteer lookout reported our next fire in the Navarro drainage near Floodgate creek. The Howard Forest Hele-tac crew was the first on scene. They got a line around the quarter-acre fire and pretty well extinguished it with bucket drops from the copter. It took quite a while for our engine company from Boonville to gain access over the Mouse Pass Road and about an hour longer for the CalFire engine company to arrive since they came in through the Perry Gulch Ranch. They did some final mop up and departed around 8pm after ensuring there was no extension or rekindle.

We also chased a few smoke reports from Cold Springs Lookout which was staffed for several days by George Castagnola of Signal Ridge. There was a considerable amount of haze east and south of the tower for the first two days making it difficult to determine whether we had new fires in the area or not.

Surprisingly we have had no additional fires to date yet reported in the District but there’s still the very real possibility of “sleeper fires” smoldering in shady and or damp areas that may still be discovered in the next few days.

On Monday we were dispatched to a Medical Aid call for a person buried in a trench. This occurred at 2171 Hwy 128 just east of Floodgate at about noon. A construction crew was building a pond for a vineyard at that location and were in the process of constructing the “keyway” which is a deep wide trench cut under the levee and then filled with compacted dirt to seal the dam to the underlying soil. The uphill side of the cut gave way and slid into the trench burying a worker up to the top of his head. Fortunately a coworker saw the accident and was quickly able to expose the victim’s head enabling him to breath A small excavator and a backhoe were used by the construction crew to carefully free the victim who was then packaged by fire department personnel and carried to a helicopter landing zone that had been established nearby. The victim was transported by Reach medevac helicopter to Santa Rosa Memorial Hospital where he was treated and released later in the evening apparently without having sustained significant injury, which was quite surprising given the fact that he was partially buried for about 30 minutes.

The latest weather report is calling for more lightning activity tomorrow (Thursday) afternoon and evening. This event is supposed to have significant rain associated with it. As usual, it could miss us entirely or put us in the bull’s eye and the rainfall may or may not occur. In any event we should all be prepared and we will follow the normal protocols for lightning fire response. It’s helpful to have all our spotters reporting in to the our Boonville station with the available manpower and staffing for your stations if this event materializes.

Our volunteer lookouts have become a critical resource for these types of events and we will depend on them tomorrow to locate and direct us to any potential fires.

Keep your fingers crossed

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BAY AREA SERVICE WORKERS UP IN ARMS

Photoessay by David Bacon

Concession Workers Get Arrested at SF Giants Ballpark

Twelve AT&T Park concession workers were arrested, and another 50 were forcibly removed by police, in an act of civil disobedience on June 18, 2013. They sat down in front of one of the park’s most profitable concessions, Gilroy Garlic Fries, and prevented anyone from ordering food, while hundreds of supporters picketed outside the stadium. Concessions workers voted on May 13 to authorize a strike and a boycott of food and beverage concessions at the park. “We sent a clear message today to Centerplate and the Giants – that we have the power we need to win a fair contract,” said Billie Feliciano, a concessions worker at Giants games since 1978. Negotiations are at a standstill between Centerplate – the Giants’ subcontracted concessionaire – and the concession workers’ union, UNITE HERE Local 2. Workers are seeking job security through a successorship clause, along with fair wage increases and improved health care. Centerplate is proposing to severely limit access to healthcare, and to maintain a wage freeze for the last three years with a 25 cent raise for 2013 as well as another 25 cent raise for 2014. “Job security is really important to me and my family. I travel two hours to come and serve Giants fans,” said worker Anthony Wendlberger. Without successorship language, if the concession contract changes hands all the workers employed at the stands could lose their jobs.

Workers picket outside the ballpark.

Giants fans applaud when they see the workers sitting in.

Police warn the workers they’ll be arrested.

And then they arrest them.

UNITE HERE Local 2 President Mike Casey is taken to be booked.

Security Guards Fight for a Contract in SF, and Against Bad

Conditions at Google

In San Francisco, marches, civil disobedience and a threatened strike won a new contract for 5000 northern California security guards at the beginning of June. On June 6, nine officers and supporters were arrested after they sat in and blocked an intersection in downtown San Francisco at the height of the afternoon rush hour. One guard, Jerry Longoria, said, “I live in a single room occupancy place. I have no kitchen, no bathroom, and the neighborhood is so bad I can’t even go out at night. People like me who work for a living should be able to afford at least a one-bedroom apartment in a decent neighborhood.” The union, Stand for Security, the security division of United Service Workers West, SEIU, said the new agreement made gains in wages, healthcare, paid sick days and job protections. Meanwhile, in Mountain View, that same day security officers and supporters marched to the auditorium where the annual stockholders meeting of Google was being held. Two weeks later, the guards were back, this time with two busloads of participants from the Netroots Nation 2013 conference then taking place in San Jose. The security union protested the fact that Google uses a non-union contractor, Security Industry Specialists (SIS), which maintains conditions that make it hard for its employees to survive. One common complaint is that the company won’t give each guard enough hours to survive, and calls its system “flex time.” Lack of hours keeps the guards from qualifying for benefits and sick days.

Guards march through downtown San Francisco past the buildings where they work.

Police get ready to arrest demonstrators in the intersection at rush hour.

Guards cheer while their friends get arrested.

At Google guards demand more hours and treatment with respect.

They question why Google doesn’t take seriously its own slogan, “Don’t be evil.”

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CRAIG’S UNENDING JOURNEY

Warm spiritual greetings, Following my recent email detailing last Sunday in San Francisco, in which I spent a lot of the day in deep meditation in the older cavernous Catholic churches, I received thoughtful email responses from some of you. First off, I have no idea what the future holds, but I do know that we are all living on a spiritual battlefield in this world. I am seeking others for spiritual direct action, as opposed to just giving up in the face of a downwardly spiraling world in crisis. For the record, I do have a satisfactory spiritual life. I am NOT looking to realize that; I already have it. What I’ve been trying to do is find ways to respond to the stupidity and insanity of materialism, and the apparent failure of contemporary society to save itself from its own destruction. Therefore, I have been recommending “spiritual direct action”, because I have no other realistic answer to the global crisis. This includes prayer, which I asked others to do. This also includes going forth and performing effective rituals, street theater, silent group meditations, and particularly going to places such as Washington DC and engaging in these practices. Political protesting is not enough! I continue to seek others for effective spiritual direct action on the battlefield which we are all on. I appreciate an email which I received, urging me to “just do it”, and also some frank criticism in regard to my general behavior, straightforward advice suggesting that I take more individual responsibility for my well-being, and other messages urging me to to keep doing what I am doing. I am in my last week staying at the Berkeley downtown men’s shelter. I have enough money to travel. I have food stamps. What I do not have is others to do spiritual direct action with. If you understand that we are all living on a spiritual battleground right this moment, then please contact me. What do you want to do, beyond standard political protesting, signing petitions, and letter writing? I am ready to leave California, where the general population is focused on the success of animated movies, the financial flop of the remake of The Lone Ranger, a recent minor heat wave, and the future legal entanglements that same sex married couples will have if they get divorced. I’d love to return to the Washington D.C. area for spiritual direct action, but have nowhere to go to there. That’s where it hangs at the moment. Peace and love, Craig Louis Stehr Craig Louis Stehr Email: craigstehr@hushmail.com Mailing address: c/o NOSCW, P.O. Box 11406, Berkeley, CA 94712-2406

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EDITOR,

Maybe Bruce Bochy is short-tempered from all the flak over the Giant’s poor record recently, and maybe that’s why he yanked Matt Cain after only 2/3 of an inning on Wednesday. And maybe Cain is tired after years of quality pitching into the post-season or maybe he’s developing some physical anomalies that affect his control. But I don’t hear Kruk & Kuip or Rich Aurelia or the other pundits mention another possibility that I call the Zito Syndrome.

The Zito Syndrome occurs when an excellent pitcher who has proved himself early in his career receives a monster contract. Suddenly he is being paid ten times what he earned before, but he can’t pitch ten times better, because he is already at the top of his game. But he feels obliged to pitch ten times better, to justify the new pay, and because this is impossible, a mental dissonance is set up that interferes with his control. As his game degrades he feels even more unworthy of his salary and a vicious circle ensues.

Barry Zito was given a monster contract by the Giants and pitched badly for years afterwards. Only last season did he regain his natural abilities. Tim Lincecum was given a monster contract and immediately fell apart to the extent that he was demoted to middle relief. Only recently has he shown some return to his old form, striking out 10 against the Mets in Monday night’s endless snorathon I could not leave because the ferry would not leave. Now Cain, pitching poorly all season after receiving a monster contract, has hopefully hit bottom, but history shows that recovery from Zito Syndrome can be long and difficult.

We all hope that the Giants will snap out of their funk, that their pitchers will shake off their affliction with Zito Syndrome, and that they will give us a second half to remember! Go Giants!!!

Yours, J. Biro

ED NOTE: I was up in View for today’s bummer. There are signs of panic in the Giants camp. Signing a number one pick from yesteryear (Jeff Francoeur) on the hope that he’ll somehow hit again, bring in an aged singles hitter from Japan (Tanaka), keeping Brandon Belt in the lineup, the pitching in a state of collapse, Brandon Crawford with a sudden case of the bumbles, although he did drive in a run today. Two great plays by the Mets shortstop. It’s always major league baseball no matter who wins, and I’d pay at least ten bucks just to sit up top looking out at the water. Poor Cain. I’ve never seen him as bad as he was Wednesday, but I think Bochy was right in getting him outtathere. I thought it was a bad omen when I saw that Zack Wheeler was pitching for the Mets. Wasn’t he the guy the Giants traded away for a few months of Carlos Beltran? Wheeler duly mowed down his former comrades. Nice day though, east of VanNess. To the west the fog in all day Wednesday. I wonder if you saw Larry Ellison’s lego catamaran go by out on the Bay? On Tuesday New Zealand raced itself and won. Frisco’s been had big time by this so-called America’s cup, with major giveaways to Ellison and an event no one gives a hoot about. I say the boats should be wood and canvas, and the race out to the Farallones and back.

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Mr.&Mrs.Gaudin

SAN FRANCISCO GIANTS PITCHER CHAD GAUDIN has been charged with lewdness after allegedly groping a woman on a gurney in a Las Vegas hospital, the Las Vegas Review Journal reported Wednesday. Police arrested Gaudin on Jan. 27 at Desert Spring Hospital after a 4:30am incident. Police say Gaudin, who was drunk, approached a 23-year-old woman lying on a gurney in the emergency room lobby. According to the report, Gaudin touched the woman’s breast and face and told her she was “gorgeous.” A witness then heard Gaudin say to the woman, “I will take care of you, don’t worry about them.” A paramedic was unable to stop Gaudin and hospital security held down Gaudin until the police arrived. “I asked Gaudin several times how he ended up at the hospital and each time he told me that he didn’t know,” the officer wrote in the police report. “Gaudin appeared to be intoxicated. He had slurred speech, bloodshot eyes, trouble standing still, obeying commands, an odor of alcoholic beverages and couldn’t repeat his house number, where he lives, the same way twice in a row.” The Clark County District Attorney Office’s has charged Gaudin with open and gross lewdness, a misdemeanor, the paper said. The arrest was not publicized at the time. According to the San Francisco Giants media guide, Gaudin has been married since 2011 and has a young son. He lives in Henderson, Nevada.

UPDATE: Gaudin’s attorney, Dominic Gentile, has issued this statement on his client’s behalf: On January 27, 2013, Chad Gaudin was examined in the emergency room of a local hospital while experiencing symptoms believed to be related to acute renal failure due to a condition known as rhabdomyolysis. The symptoms included confusion, dehydration and loss of orientation and/or consciousness. Although he has been accused of improperly touching another hospital patient while on the premises that night, there are differing and exonerating versions of what occurred that have been reported by eyewitnesses. Mr. Gaudin denies any unlawful conduct and has been cooperating with the authorities. I am confident that this matter will be resolved in his favor and because it is pending in court there will be no further comment.

Gaudin & Wife at backyard party

WIKIPEDIA: Rhabdomyolysis is a condition in which damaged skeletal muscle tissue breaks down rapidly. Breakdown products of damaged muscle cells are released into the bloodstream; some of these, such as the protein myoglobin, are harmful to the kidneys and may lead to kidney failure. The severity of the symptoms, which may include muscle pains, vomiting and confusion, depends on the extent of muscle damage and whether kidney failure develops. The muscle damage may be caused by physical factors (e.g. crush injury, strenuous exercise), medications, drug abuse, and infections. Some people have a hereditary muscle condition that increases the risk of rhabdomyolysis. The diagnosis is usually made with blood tests and urinalysis. The mainstay of treatment is generous quantities of intravenous fluids, but may include dialysis or hemofiltration in more severe cases.

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IT NOW COSTS $35 to camp at most state parks and the Department of Fish and Wildlife charges upwards of $45 for a fishing license, meaning a truly low cost rural adventure for persons of ordinary means is getting so expensive young families especially can’t afford it.

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ON JULY 5 WE WROTE: Long-time internet stalker Michael Hardesty, has been sending his nasty opinions to our website under the name Martin Zemitis, a successful Berkeley entrepreneur. For years, Hardesty wrote to us under various pseudonyms. At first, he’s more or less rational, insofar as your generic Randian nutball can be said to be rational. But soon, unable to contain himself, Hardesty’s racist and homophobic rants betray him and we cut him off. The Zemitis cover means that Hardesty, banned from newspaper websites throughout the Bay Area, in his desperation to vilify whole populations of people, has moved into identity theft. We apologize to Mr. Zemitis for any embarrassment he’s suffered from this lunatic appropriating his name.

LAST SATURDAY JULY 6 we received this letter from Mr. Hardesty:

Editor,

A friend just forwarded your latest libel.

First, I have never been banned from any newspaper or publication in the Bay Area. You printed this falsehood before with no specifics and I refuted it at the time. I have never had a problem getting my letters published in any venue in the Bay Area or elsewhere. In fact, I was never banned from the AVA. The last time I sent you a letter for publication in 2010 on the state elections it was published.

Second, nor have I ever written you under any other name. I know several people who have written you and you accuse them of being me! You are obviously off your rocker.

Third, I haven’t read the AVA for years for reasons that are apparent. You are a liar, a cheat, a thief and a libeler. I have absolutely no interest in you or the AVA. Period.

Fourth, I haven’t seen Martin Zemitis for several years. I broke off my friendship with him for entirely personal reasons, not political ones. He’s probably the sixth or seventh person you have falsely accused me of writing under his name. I will copy him here to set the record straight.

Fifth, when the national writers Union in 1996 forwarded my complaint about not being paid $300 for 12 lengthy op-eds written for the AVA, you lied and wrote them that I had only written letters to the editor! That I had, only a few dozen, but they were separate from my op-eds. I never expected to get paid for letters but did expect to get paid $25 a piece for the op-eds which was the standard fee at the time. (1992-93, 1994-5.) The NWU forwarded all 12 of my op-eds to you and you wisely chose not to respond.

Sixth, I don’t know what “racism” even means anymore. It appears to be a code word for brainless libs who which to evade the fact of growing black sociopathology. Some black conservatives like Thomas Sowell and Walter Williams have documented this almost ad infinitum. See LewRockwell.com.

Seventh, “homophobic” apparently means any person who does not subscribe to the misnamed “gay” agenda. That probably covers 98% of the people on this planet.

I have less than zero interest in the AVA or the cur­rent political scene.

You’re [sic] a_hole opinions on Ayn Rand mean nothing. Her 60 page speech, “This Is John Galt Speaking” in “Atlas Shrugged,” is more of an intellectual achievement than 99.99% of all the persons who have ever lived on our planet. Maybe the entire universe if there are other inhabited planets.

Now goodbye forever and I do not want to hear anything about you in the future. Nada. Zilch. Nothing. — Mike Hardesty, Berkeley

THE AVA REPLIED: Knock-knock. Who’s there? Hardesty. Hardesty who? Hardesty-Zemitis. PS. Op-eds? The AVA? From you? PPS. Your obsessions betray you every time, HZ. Give it up.

DC NONSENSE

Editor,

The nonsense going on in Washington these days keeps making me think that we are living in a completely broken, nonfunctional state; one that is incapable of even recognizing, much less responding to, the most pressing problems that we as a society, lo, as a species, face.

While Congress spends endless hours obsessing about Bengazi and the IRS’s scrutiny of Tea Party and so-called ‘Patriot’ 501(c)(4) tax exempt applications, a decade after our “liberation” of Iraq, as I write this, I hear that today 17 bombs went off in Baghdad, killing and maiming who knows how many people. But, rather than doing what reason and morality would dictate and admit that the entire invasion of Iraq was a misguided war crime which should have resulted, first, in the arrest of Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld etc., shipping them all off to The Hague for trial in the International Criminal Court, and secondly, by doing trillions of dollars worth of actual reconstruction of all the property destroyed by our illegal invasion. Far from that though, instead, we hear the same criminals once again beating the drums for a new war, this time against Syria, in order to keep our permanent war economy humming, at such devastating cost to so many people in other lands.

I am at a loss to see how this business with the IRS ever got to be considered a scandal; I mean, the fact is that the Tea Party adherents have basically fetishized their passionate opposition to taxation itself. Never mind the fact that in virtually every other country in which one might actually want to live, people, especially the well off, pay significantly higher taxes, but enjoy a much higher quality of life, with a degree of security about health care and basic needs that is unimaginable to most Americans.

Since the bizarre Supreme Court Citizens United case basically tore up and threw away all controls on the flow of corporate and billionaire money into politics, the IRS has been swamped with requests for these tax-free “social welfare organization” applications, creating an enormous new workload for them, with hardly any more IRS staff to handle it.. Isn’t it only reasonable for them to give a bit more scrutiny to organizations whose main organizing principle is a hatred of taxation? Given all the hullabaloo over this IRS policy, you would think that some entities besides the most obscure news sources would point out the fact that even though all of these organizations got a little closer look, not a single one of them was denied! WHAT ARE THEY WHINING ABOUT!?

Of course, whining seems to be about the only thing that the Republican-controlled House is capable of these days, other than their single-minded obsession with cutting the taxes of the people and corporations who are already wallowing in more wealth than they know what to do with, and their truly pathological fixation with stripping away the rights of women to have sovereignty over their own bodies, apparently at the behest of these madrasah-style ‘Christian’ sects who believe that they have a god-given right to force you to act as if you share their particular set of obsessions.

Instead of involving itself with any of the actual challenges facing our country, they chose instead to pass, for the 37th time, a bill repealing Obamacare, even though they know full well that it has zero chance of even being taken up by the Senate.

No wonder Congress’s approval rating, according to Gallup, has fallen to 10%, the lowest point in the history of such testing. I think Satan himself enjoys higher poll numbers. How can our society function at all, when one party in a two party system is determined to not cooperate with ANYTHING this president wants to do, for fear that it might do some good for people and thus increase Obama’s popularity?

When I hear from some of Tea Party type crazies recently elected by the red states, I’m reminded of Ambrose Bierce’s definition of demagogue; “one who preaches doctrines that he knows to be false to people he knows to be idiots”. What hope is there for progress on unemployment, the weak economy, the continuing housing crisis, global climate change, or any other of our nation’s pressing problems while our political system is hobbled into inaction the way it is today? Why on earth do people in these perma-red states continue to vote for these deranged Tea Party type repugs?! What will it take for them to change their default Republican voting pattern?

Sincerely,

John Arteaga

Ukiah

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ARCHIPELAGOS, NEAR & FAR

Editor,

When I re-read Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag yesterday, I wrote you this prose poem editor letter:

“Dwell in the past and you’ll lose an eye. Forget the past and you lose both eyes.”

The sea of oblivion rolls over the islands of the archipelago; scars and soars.

“The White Sea Canal was the first Russian literature to glorify slave labor.” Clandestine Archipelago, hour by hour planes fly there, ships steer there, trains thunder off. “Arrest me? What for?” An instantaneous, shattering thrust, expulsion, somersault from one state to another. Past walls and fences of rotten wood, rammed earth, brick, concrete, iron railings. The gate to our yard used to be open is slammed shut. Arrest is a blinding flash and a blow. The fake circus moon will blink at you: “It’s a mistake! They’ll set things right!” Sharp nighttime ring, rude knock on the door. The insolent entrance of unwiped jackboots. A witness who must sit there all night long and sign in the morning. They rip your place apart, crunch and trample. They unwind bandages to search beneath them, the cholera epidemic, 1830. They broke the bottles that contained lysates that were curing people. “No right to correspond” means: “has been shot.” Those left behind, a wrecked and devastated life. Night arrests, as if they had not taken place. The Black Marias. The cab driver knows, the Organs don’t pay. Lubyanka.

Note bene, mark it well,

Diana Vance

Mendocino

PS. She who steals rocks gets stoned. And Officer Guydan, the Bible tells us: The false accuser is the one who is guilty. I salute the AVA for dealing with the legal now.

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GIVE IT UP, HZ

Editor,

A friend just forwarded your latest libel.

First, I have never been banned from any newspaper or publication in the Bay Area. You printed this falsehood before with no specifics and I refuted it at the time. I have never had a problem getting my letters published in any venue in the Bay Area or elsewhere. In fact, I was never banned from the AVA. The last time I sent you a letter for publication in 2010 on the state elections it was published.

Second, nor have I ever written you under any other name. I know several people who have written you and you accuse them of being me! You are obviously off your rocker.

Third, I haven’t read the AVA for years for reasons that are apparent. You are a liar, a cheat, a thief and a libeler. I have absolutely no interest in you or the AVA. Period.

Fourth, I haven’t seen Martin Zemitis for several years. I broke off my friendship with him for entirely personal reasons, not political ones. He’s probably the sixth or seventh person you have falsely accused me of writing under his name. I will copy him here to set the record straight.

Fifth, when the national writers Union in 1996 forwarded my complaint about not being paid $300 for 12 lengthy op-eds written for the AVA, you lied and wrote them that I had only written letters to the editor! That I had, only a few dozen, but they were separate from my op-eds. I never expected to get paid for letters but did expect to get paid $25 a piece for the op-eds which was the standard fee at the time. (1992-93, 1994-5.) The NWU forwarded all 12 of my op-eds to you and you wisely chose not to respond.

Sixth, I don’t know what “racism” even means anymore. It appears to be a code word for brainless libs who which to evade the fact of growing black sociopathology. Some black conservatives like Thomas Sowell and Walter Williams have documented this almost ad infinitum. See LewRockwell.com.

Seventh, “homophobic” apparently means any person who does not subscribe to the misnamed “gay” agenda. That probably covers 98% of the people on this planet.

I have less than zero interest in the AVA or the current political scene.

You’re [sic] a_hole opinions on Ayn Rand mean nothing. Her 60 page speech, “This Is John Galt Speaking” in “Atlas Shrugged,” is more of an intellectual achievement than 99.99% of all the persons who have ever lived on our planet. Maybe the entire universe if there are other inhabited planets.

Now goodbye forever and I do not want to hear anything about you in the future. Nada. Zilch. Nothing.

Mike Hardesty

Berkeley

Ed reply: Knock-knock. Who’s there? Hardesty. Hardesty who? Hardesty-Zemitis. PS. Op-eds? The AVA? From you? PPS. Your obsessions betray you every time, HZ. Give it up.

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SUCH A DEAL

Greetings, Beloved Brethren & Cistern:

I’ve been busy setting up my new venture these many weeks, but if you’re seated comfortably on a vulture-feather pillow, I’ll bring you up to date.

The Christian Science Ambulance Service is up and running! Got a sucking chest wound? Don’t call us. We don’t care and we don’t have to. That’s what religious freedom is all about. We get to watch you die and you can’t get us to help; we’re covered by our conviction that god wants you dead. Think about it.

So, we sit around the station and polish the equipment (what are they burning in that thing?, I hear you cry) and pet the horses (that’s real nice) and every once in a blue moon we fire up and get on the road. Road kill makes a really great smoke (hint hint) and a pretty good barbecue occasionally. The rest of the time we sit on the porch and watch the turkey vultures pile excrement on their feet. They’re a bit behind the bell curve, but their heart is in the right place.

So, I’m up and running with this service. I wanted to keep busy in retirement, but I didn’t want to work at it. With this one I have no work, no responsibility and no intercourse with needy mediocrities with attitude. Sweet!

Remember: Don’t call us. We’ll call you!

Ignatzio Hephalumpe

CEO, CSAS Incorporeal

Paphlagonia

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FAIR TRIAL. NOW.

To The Editor,

Evil prevails when good men fail to act.

Ok, Mendocino County, it breaks my heart when I watch miscarriages of justice occur on Dateline and across the country, but after reading KC Meadows’ recent report on the hearing for Timothy Elliott, I can’t believe it’s occurring my county. What is being done to get this guy a fair trial?

The only witness was a young boy on a dark knight through a window.

The “murder weapon” was tuned in weeks later by friends of the victim with no evidence on it.

The “murder weapon” was 1.65 inches. The Medical Examiner testified about it being 3 to 4 inches, yet the fatal wound was 6.7 inches.

The Medical Examiner recanted his original testimony, then recanted that he was recanting it. Under penalty of perjury.

The defense attorney, Linda Thompson, didn’t question his discrepancy in the knife facts due to her knowledge that he doesn’t like being contradicted and of him being pompous.

Are we in the Twilight Zone? Nobody likes being contradicted. But it’s your job as Mr. Elliott’s attorney to cross-examine.

One more thing. No evidence was found on Mr. Elliott’s clothes and this guy is sitting in a cell for 16 years to life? This could be any one of us Mendocino County residents needing a fair trial and adequate representation.

Something needs to be done now.

Tina Thompson

Ukiah

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KZYX RULE VIOLATIONS

To: Board of Directors Mendocino County Public Broadcasting

July 2, 2013

P.O. Box 1 Philo, CA 95466

Re: Violation of California Corporations Code – Annual Membership Meeting

Members of the Board:

I am writing today to alert you to violations of the California Corporations Code that affect the legitimacy of the corporation and its ability to renew its broadcast license for KZYX&Z.

Sections 5510-11 of the Corporations Code state, in part, that:

5510. (b) A regular meeting of members shall be held on a date and time, and with the frequency stated in or fixed in accordance with the bylaws, but in any event in each year in which directors are to be elected at that meeting for the purpose of conducting such election, and to transact any other proper business which may be brought before the meeting. . . . 5511. (a) Whenever members are required or permitted to take any action at a meeting, a written notice of the meeting shall be given not less than 10 nor more than 90 days before the date of the meeting to each member who, on the record date for notice of the meeting, is entitled to vote thereat . . .

The Bylaws of Mendocino County Public Broadcasting state, in part, that:

Section 10.01 Annual Meeting:

1) The annual meeting of the Membership shall be held within sixty (60) days of the completion of Board elections each year, unless the Board shall provide for another date and so notifies Members. 2) The purpose of this meeting shall be to declare the results of the preceding election of the Board, to present an annual report to Members on the activities and accomplishments of MCPB, to present the audit report, and any other business as may come before the meeting. 3) Notice of the annual meeting date and location, including agenda items that may require Membership vote, shall be given to all Members a minimum of fifteen (15) days prior to the meeting if delivered by first class mail or a minimum of four (4) days prior to the meeting if broadcast daily on the Station’s radio frequencies and posted at the Station headquarters.

MCPB failed to notify its membership of the most recent purported annual membership meeting, as required by both the Corporations Code and its own Bylaws. Such notice is required under Section 5510 because 1) the meeting completes the election process for the Board of Directors, and 2) such a meeting is required by the Bylaws. The notice must be no less than 10 nor more than 90 days prior to the annual membership meeting. The 90 day outside limit will allow you to send a notice of the annual meeting along with the notice of election, so there is no practical reason not to do so.

In addition, MCPB failed to hold a proper annual membership meeting by failing to answer any questions put forth by members at the meeting, thereby failing to transact any other proper business which may be brought before the meeting or to fully present an annual report to Members on the activities and accomplishments of MCPB.

I recently attended a regular meeting of your board, during which members were permitted three minutes each to make comments and ask questions, but with no provision for the board to answer those questions. It took two brave board members to disobey the instructions of the current Board chair and actually respond to questions raised by members. The Board’s current policy of never responding to the questions and concerns raised by the membership at any meeting brings into question the legal legitimacy of the Board. Worse, it burns the bridges of communication that are essential to any membership nonprofit organization.

As a member of the Board of Directors, each of you has a sacred duty to maintain that communication.

MCPB is a membership-based organization dedicated to serving the entire community of Mendocino County and contiguous counties. The primary purpose of MCPB is to engage in providing high-quality, independent, community and public radio and other media products and services. — MCPB Bylaws, Article III, Purpose and Governing Principles

When I raised these issues at the recent Board meeting, the General Manager shook his head in a dismissive gesture. If any employee fails to honor the organizations Bylaws or abide by California law, they are doing a disservice to the Board, the organization, and the community. It may be more work to listen and respond to the questions and concerns of the membership community, but that is precisely what the governance of MCPB must do. You are enjoying the benefits of being a membership organization. You must also accept the responsibilities.

On a related matter, I have requested that your quarterly reports to the Public File, required by the Federal Communications Commission, be posted on your website, along with the General Manager’s reports and other information. I was told I would need to go to your main office in Philo if I wanted to see any such reports. Considering the size of Mendocino County and the cost of gasoline, that is an undue burden to place on your membership, or the public, when access can otherwise be provide with a few keystrokes. You will be required to include the most recent Public File report in your application for renewal of your broadcasting license. Refusing to make them readily available to your members and the public at large appears to violate the rules concerning public access.

Since you are submitting another legal matter to pro bono counsel for review, I recommend that you do the same here. The full California Code section on membership meetings can be found online at http://www.leginfo.ca.gov/cgi-bin/displaycode?section=corp&group=05001-06000&file=5510-5517

Please give your urgent attention to these matters. Although I try to resolve issues with the least confrontation possible, the issue of membership involvement is so important that I will file an action in Superior Court to enforce compliance if the Board does remedy its current practices.

Thank you for your time and attention.

Sincerely,

Dennis O’Brien

Ukiah

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AMAZING FESTIVAL WEEKEND!

Editor,

The Sierra Nevada Music Festival brought many folks to our valley AND many of those folks stopped by our wine booth for a glass of wine, benefitting the Anderson Valley Senior Center and the Anderson Valley Historical Society. The wine was donated by Navarro Vineyards. The booth space was donated by our local Lion’s Club. Booth volunteers staffed the booth. SNWMF promoters provided booth personnel with free admission on the day of their shift and waived all booth fees. A special THANK YOU is in order for all!

Navarro Vineyards – Yummy wine and a community focused local business! The Lion’s Club – They just keep on giving! The Volunteers – Susan Bridge-Mount, Kathy MacDonald, Michael Nissenberg, Aaron Sawyer, Mimi Duvigneaud, Rose Easterbrook, Chris Lloyd, Neil Darling, Mary Darling, Michele Darling, Ann Amman, Gretel Amman, Megan McQueeny, Nat Corey-Moran, Noor Dawood , Michael Sheridan, Char Rowland, Christine Clark, Joann Borges, Vicky Center, Vicky Kuntz, Rod Bashore, Judy Bashore, Jeannie Collins, JR Collins, Bob Nimmons, Sandra Nimmons, Joe Hansen, Sheri Hansen

Thanks to all form the AV Seniors and the overseers of the museum!

Sheri Hansen

Boonville

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THANKS EVERYONE

Editor,

Thanks to so many.

It truly was amazing how quickly our porch at the restaurant was put back together after the accident last Sunday. The AV volunteer firefighters really did go way above and beyond the call of duty by staying after the crashed car was removed and helping us stabilize the porch.

So a very grateful thank you to Colin Wilson, Jack Ridley, Cob and Angela Dewitt. You gave up much more of your Sunday evening than the accident required and I really appreciate it.

There were a number of other friends and neighbors who also stepped up immediately and provided much needed help and I’d like to acknowledge their efforts. Julie Winchester helped keep our traumatized plants alive for a few days while I worked to gather new containers. Remember it was blistering hot those days! Robert Rosen worked on another very hot day to transfer much dirt and replant the containers. My landlords Eddie and Tamara worked so quickly to get the new posts that we were able to install them before it got dark Sunday night. Del and Wendy got the call from Tamara and interrupted their Sunday night plans in Ukiah to pick up the posts. Jed Adams was just driving by, stopped, put on his tool belt and became the perfect guy to help Joe Petelle who was the one pulling it all together. Those two just kept working till the porch was safe and I was able to open again for our regularly scheduled Tuesday dinner.

So as the original AVA report in Valley People expressed it, Bad Things happened Sunday night followed by really Good Things. The Bad Thing could have been much worse if it had occurred at a different time, and I’m very grateful about that. I’m also very grateful to all the people who made the Good Things happen. Thank you for stepping up.

Sincerely,

Lauren Keating

Boonville

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CHANNELING REAGAN

Esteemed Editors

The AVA arrived real late last week and I just read Micheal Koepf’s tirade against the “47,0000,0000” freeloaders getting fat on food stamps (Pass the Boloney, please 6/26). What with its snide references to “tax serfs and freeloaders,” “free chow,” obese, candy-munching, ice cream-licking “snappers,” food-stamp-stealing aliens “sneaking over the border” (those inscrutable mes-e-cans), the witless ones eating fine sit-down suppers with a zero “dinner tab,” etc, the piece made me think down there in Hollywood poor Mike must have gotten himself whipped with an ugly stick.

Or maybe kicking back in his secluded hilltop estate has unhinged him. Those redwoods constantly swaying in the ocean breezes can do that to a fellah. Or maybe when he set pen to paper he got caught in a time-warp and found himself in the 1970s channeling Ronald Reagan’s “Welfare Queens” stump speech. If that’s the case, I’d advise him to go and see somebody.

Bruce Patterson, tax serf.

Prineville, Oregon

OUR CONGRESSMAN will be in Belvedere Saturday afternoon. Fresh off challenging his constituents to a photo contest, Mr. Irrelevant will join Nancy Pelosi at a billionaire’s home to raise money for Democrats. Democrats, as most of us know by now, are pretty much interchangeable with Republicans on the big issues.

THIS THING will cost you a thousand bucks to get in the door, so if you’re driving down from Laytonville better set a little aside for gas money to get back home. But if you chuck $32 thou at Nancy and Spike you’ll certainly be invited back. The Democrats are frantically collecting money to elect Hillary, a female version of Obama-Bush.

PELOSI was booed last month at a Demo get together in San Jose when she said, “Edward Snowden did violate the law in terms of releasing those documents. We have to have a balance between security and privacy.” She also said that “People on the far right are saying Oh, this is the fourth term of President Bush…. Absolutely, positively not so.”

THE FAR RIGHT said that? If any of them did then they’re more acute than we would have thought, Bush being their apotheosis guy.

NORM SOLOMON and several hundred disaffected Democrats will be demonstrating outside the event. They released this statement: “It’s unacceptable for the government to target the telephone records of journalists, or to vacuum up the phone-call records of hundreds of millions of Americans, or to capture and store everyone’s emails, or to jettison centuries-long principles of due process and habeas corpus.

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OUR SUMMER INTERN, Mayte Guerrero, has completed a review of the Mendocino County Sheriff’s booking log for the first half of 2013. We suspected that a relative handful of chronic public drunks occupy a lot of police time. Ms. G found that over the period of six months (181 days) there were 417 arrests for 647(f), public intoxication, or about 2.3 arrests per day, or 16 such arrests per week. To get yourself arrested for public intoxication you have to be more than just drunk. You have to come to the attention of law enforcement. Our investigator has not attempted the more daunting task of trying to determine the amount of serious crime in which alcohol is the precipitating factor.

The winners:

Nick Halvorsen, 11; Michael Donahe, 11; Charles Hensley, 9; Stacey Moddrelle, 9

Steven Rich, 8; Sam Sanchez, 7; Christopher Alexander, 5; John Bolton, 5

Everybody else was 4 or fewer 647(f) arrests in six months.

So only eight drunks accounted for almost 16% of those 417 arrests. Another way of calculating it is that every sixth public intoxication arrest is one of these eight drunks.

HERE’S AN IDEA: Let’s have Meredyth Reinhard of the Public Health Department circulate the booking photos of these eight drunks to all the liquor outlets in the County and tell them not to sell booze to them because they are a public nuisance. Further, let’s have Ms. Reinhard keep a list of drunks who are a nuisance and update and distribute it every six months. When someone goes a full six months without a 647(f), they can be removed from the list for as long as they’re 647(f)-free.

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ACCORDING to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization almost one-third of Mexican adults — 32.8% — are obese while 31.8 of Americans can fairly be described as fatsos. Egyptians are fatter than Mexicans and Americans, Kuwaitis are fatter yet, and an astounding 71.1% of the citizens of the Micronesian island, Nauru, are obese.

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IN NOVEMBER OF 1959, as a shocked American public was hit with the news that a number of their favorite quiz shows had in fact been rigged for some time, author John Steinbeck wrote the following letter to his friend, politician Adlai Stevenson, and spoke of his concern at such a morally bankrupt turn of events occurring in his increasingly gluttonous country.

(Source: America and Americans and Selected Nonfiction)

New York, 1959, Guy Fawkes Day

Dear Adlai,

Back from Camelot, and, reading the papers, not at all sure it was wise. Two first impressions. First, a creeping, all pervading nerve-gas of immorality which starts in the nursery and does not stop before it reaches the highest offices both corporate and governmental. Two, a nervous restlessness, a hunger, a thirst, a yearning for something unknown — perhaps morality. Then there’s the violence, cruelty and hypocrisy symptomatic of a people which has too much, and last, the surly ill-temper which only shows up in humans when they are frightened.

Adlai, do you remember two kinds of Christmases? There is one kind in a house where there is little and a present represents not only love but sacrifice. The one single package is opened with a kind of slow wonder, almost reverence. Once I gave my youngest boy, who loves all living things, a dwarf, peach-faced parrot for Christmas. He removed the paper and then retreated a little shyly and looked at the little bird for a long time. And finally he said in a whisper, “Now who would have ever thought that I would have a peach-faced parrot?”

Then there is the other kind of Christmas with presents piled high, the gifts of guilty parents as bribes because they have nothing else to give. The wrappings are ripped off and the presents thrown down and at the end the child says— “Is that all?” Well, it seems to me that America now is like that second kind of Christmas. Having too many THINGS they spend their hours and money on the couch searching for a soul. A strange species we are. We can stand anything God and nature can throw at us save only plenty. If I wanted to destroy a nation, I would give it too much and would have it on its knees, miserable, greedy and sick. And then I think of our “Daily” in Somerset, who served your lunch. She made a teddy bear with her own hands for our grandchild. Made it out of an old bath towel dyed brown and it is beautiful. She said, “Sometimes when I have a bit of rabbit fur, they come out lovelier.” Now there is a present. And that obviously male teddy bear is going to be called for all time MIZ Hicks.

When I left Bruton, I checked out with Officer ‘Arris, the lone policeman who kept the peace in five villages, unarmed and on a bicycle. He had been very kind to us and I took him a bottle of Bourbon whiskey. But I felt it necessary to say— “It’s a touch of Christmas cheer, officer, and you can’t consider it a bribe because I don’t want anything and I am going away…” He blushed and said, “Thank you, sir, but there was no need.” To which I replied— “If there had been, I would not have brought it.”

Mainly, Adlai, I am troubled by the cynical immorality of my country. I do not think it can survive on this basis and unless some kind of catastrophe strikes us, we are lost. But by our very attitudes we are drawing catastrophe to ourselves. What we have beaten in nature, we cannot conquer in ourselves.

Someone has to reinspect our system and that soon. We can’t expect to raise our children to be good and honorable men when the city, the state, the government, the corporations all offer higher rewards for chicanery and deceit than probity and truth. On all levels it is rigged, Adlai. Maybe nothing can be done about it, but I am stupid enough and naively hopeful enough to want to try. How about you?

Yours, John

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THE ALBION LITTLE RIVER Fire Protection District & the Albion Little River Fire Auxiliary present our 52nd annual BBQ and fundraiser. Come join us at the Little River fairgrounds by the airport Saturday, July 13, 12-5 pm. $15 Adult, $10 ages 6-11, under 6 free. We will be serving beef tri-tip, smoked chicken and vegan tamales. Enjoy good food and live music throughout the afternoon. We’ve got lots of new firefighters — come meet us! Spend the day with family and friends and support your Local Fire Department. Featuring Music with the: The Groovenators Stellar Baby including Jon Faurot, Butch Kwan, Buddy Stubbs, John Smith, & Steven Bates Solos by Jon and possibly Steven Three on the Tree Additionally: – Display of classic cars and hot rods! – Display of CalStar & REACH air service vehicles, including the newest EC135 REACH helicopter There will be children’s activities, so bring the kids! Kids’ area with games, prizes, bounce house, & Smokey! Save the date! Mark your calendars now! *Locally baked desserts are needed to sell at the dessert booth. Please bring your goodies the day of the BBQ.* If you can’t attend but still want to support us, consider joining the Fire Auxiliary. Monthly meetings are held the third Tuesday of every month at 7 pm at the fire station behind the Albion Grocery. We look forward to seeing you – — Scott Roat

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ADAPTING TO WATER SCARCITY — Please join Sanctuary Forest on Saturday, July 20th for the Adapting to Water Scarcity: Business, Home & Garden hike. Hike leaders Joseph Cook, Tasha McKee and Larry Ogden will take participants on a walking-tour of gardens, homesteads and farms in the upper Mattole watershed—exploring a variety of techniques to reduce water use, including no-till gardening, agricultural ponds and groundwater recharge ponds. Hikers will see first hand how some local homesteaders are adapting to water scarcity, and be able to learn some of their water-saving techniques. Bring a lunch and water and wear sturdy shoes. We will meet at the Sanctuary Forest office in Whitethorn at 10 a.m., and the hike should be over by 2:30 p.m. This hike is free of charge, though donations are gladly accepted and help Sanctuary Forest to offer this program year after year. For questions or clarifications, contact Marisa at marisa@sanctuaryforest.org, or call 986-1087 x 1#. Hope to see you there!

Support from volunteers and local businesses have made this program possible for Sanctuary Forest. Local businesses that have made generous contributions are Blue Star Gas, Jangus Publishing Group, Whitethorn Winery, Charlotte’s Perennial Gardens, The Security Store, Chautauqua Natural Foods, Clover Willison Insurance Services, Hohstadt Garden Center, Roy Baker, O.D., Worthy Construction, Wyckoff Plumbing, Mattole Meadows, James Friel Plumbing, Ned Hardwood Construction, Randall Sand & Gravel, Sylvandale Gardens, Redwood Properties, Dazey’s Supply, Monica Coyne Artist Blacksmith, Southern Humboldt Fitness, Pierson Building Center, Whitethorn Construction, Caffe Dolce, Mattole River Studios, and Wildberries Marketplace.

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Please join Sanctuary Forest on Thursday, July 18^th at the Garberville Theater to see mind-blowing entertainer Brad Barton, Reality Thief. His blend of magic, humor, and mind reading is a unique and unforgettable experience as he predicts your dreams, causes borrowed objects to levitate, and reveals your most cherished memories.

Doors will open at 6 p.m. and show at 7 p.m. Cocktails, prosecco, beer, wine and an assortment of Asian appetizers available for purchase. Recommend for those 10 years of age and up. Admission is $15 at the door. All proceeds will go to Sanctuary Forest to support the restoration and conservation of the Mattole River watershed and surrounding areas.

Sanctuary Forest is a land trust whose mission is to conserve the Mattole River watershed and surrounding areas for wildlife habitat and aesthetic, spiritual and intrinsic values, in cooperation with our diverse community.

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EVERYONE IS WELCOME at the Manchester School Alumni Association’s 3rd Annual BBQ Benefit on Saturday, July 20. The celebration starts at 1pm until 8pm, at the Greco Field Farm Center, on Highway One in Manchester. This event will support educational programs at Manchester School. Enjoy Tri-Trip and Chicken BBQ with all the fixin’s, Full Bar by Knights of Columbus, Dessert Auction, Silent Auction, Children’s Games, Horseshoe Tournament, and more! Entertainment by Old Stage, Fast Company & Dj Sister Yasmin. Pre-sale Tickets: Adults $12, Children 6-12: $5 Tickets at the Gate: Adults $15, Children 6-12: $6 Sponsors: $50 or more gets you 2 free meal tickets To order pre-sale tickets, volunteer or sponsor call Cindy at 877-1676 or 884-1828.