HEARTIEST CONGRATULATIONS are due Lucy Lawson of Yorkville. Entering her senior year at Anderson Valley High School, Lucy has been selected to compete in the highly prestigious 63rd National High School Rodeo championships, to which only the top four contestants are invited to compete. To get herself into the finals, Lucy, a break away roper, was selected from among a huge pool of competitors drawn not only from the United States but Canada and Australia. Go, Lucy!

THAT DRILLING RIG at Guerrero’s Tire Shop downtown Boonville heralds the resumption of the thirty-year search for the source of the alleged fuel contamination of the Boonville Fire House’s water.

ELDER HOME on the rocks? Mr. Krieg’s candid letter aside, I’ve never understood the math in play here. $850,000 for two houses and an empty lot next door to the unaffiliated Senior Center, plus a hundred thou in donations and more fancy paperboy math brings the balance to maybe half a mil. Sooooo even with full tenancy income nowhere near comes close to ever paying this baby off.

IN THE MEAN TIME — an often very mean time as the Mex-Bashers complain that the premises are rented to Mex-Americans while poor old Charmian is sent over the hill to while away her last days, a timeline that does not jibe with Charmian’s demise — some of us remain confident that the ElderHome people can somehow make the thing go.

BY WAY OF CONTRAST, I was startled to learn of a communication from my old and dear friend Phillip Thomas that cites my estimated figure of a hundred thousand as the money Thomas and his uber-secretive colleagues on the AV Ambulance board are sitting on. The true figure is a little more than two hundred thousand, and why Thomas would be citing my estimate as the true figure seems to mean Thomas is peddling porkies.

THE AV HEALTH CENTER? Still headed for the fake rocks, apparently, but all these groups would be a lot better off if they ceased operating like Stalin’s politburo and told us the true state of their finances. Crimeny, this nutty secrecy is irritating.

DON PARDINI’S opinion of the just-concluded Rasta-Fest I daresay is shared by a hundred percent of downtown Boonville. I stuff in the earplugs at my place, which is about three hundred yards from the big stage. I don’t dislike the music, but after a few minutes of it I understand why the rasta-battalions are loaded when they hunker down to absorb hours of it. And I was shocked, shocked I tell you to learn that the Giants sent me an e-mail saying they’re again holding a “Grateful Dead Night” at an August game against the Pirates. Give me a box seat behind home plate and I’ll give it to the first person I see coming down the street. I wrote right back to the Giants: “Why not just have me bring in a gang of Mendocino County bush hippies and have them beat on garbage cans during the seventh inning stretch? Wouldn’t that be just as entertaining and a lot cheaper for you guys?”

SCHOOL HIRES for the coming year include: Logan Silva will teach junior high history; Amber Mesa will conduct English as a Second Language; the guy hired to teach Spanish got a better deal some other place; Kelly Arbor will handle Special Ed; Science is the province of Jacob Bagnell and Elizabeth Gonzalez; Andrew Settlemire will attempt to instill the basics of English; Ali Borst-Cook, a graduate of AVHS, is temporarily a 6th grade teacher.

FROM ALL ACCOUNTS last weekend’s wedding of Nichole Johnson and Derek Wyant went off splendidly, with the families of the bride and groom managing to get some 300 guests up into the hills where the altar had been set up beside the Johnson Ranch lake, a beautiful setting for the memorable occasion. The versatile Olie Erickson performed the ceremony uniting the popular Valley couple.

ASSISTANT NURSE TRAINING classes commence August 1st at the County Office of Education compound, Talmage. Classes for this work, which tends to lead to real jobs, will also be held in Fort Bragg at 300 Dana Street beginning August 22nd. The course is about a month long. Info at 463-0112.

THAT FINE STORY about a shootout in Brooklyn in last week’s New York Times by Tim Stelloh prompts me to remind you that Tim, and his talented wife, Freda Moon, both write for the Times, but not all that long ago they wrote for the Boonville weekly.

CONSIDER, PLEASE, Mr. Thomas Golding-Fuller, 29, of Redwood Valley, as a kind of walking statement of the times. We can assume from his hyphenated name and blandly untroubled features that Golding-Fuller is a son of Mendo privilege — a graduate of play groups, soccer camps, organic meals, correct thinking, and perhaps even a trust fund  — the full narcissistic wrap that creates the sense of entitlement so many young doofuses seem to feel these days. Master Thomas appeared in last week’s Sheriff’s Log when he was arrested for “disorderly conduct” hours after the Sierra Nevada World Music Festival had gone silent. He was walking aimlessly and disoriented down Highway 128, not in the middle of the pavement but well into the pavement where he could have been run over. Golding-Fuller had made it on foot all the way to the CalFire station a full mile south of Boonville when Deputy Walker spotted him. “He told me he had taken some ‘psychedelics’ and was confused about where he was,” the deputy said. “He said he had narrowly missed being hit by a car which came within a foot of him on the highway just a few minutes earlier.” Walker confined Golding-Fuller to his patrol car until a little after daybreak when the deputy turned the lad over for transportation to the County Jail to come down from whatever drug he was on. Deputy Walker may well have saved the kid’s life, but you can bet your life the deputy won’t get so much as a ‘thank you’ from the hyphenate.

THE ‘OLD TIME 4TH of July’ will be celebrated at the Fairgrounds again this year from Noon to 4pm. It’s a fundraiser for the AV Education Foundation. Parade, kids games, tug of war, food, and temperance society fun. $4/adults, kids free.

I’M SURE OTHER Senior Citizens can confirm that our “old time” 4th of July celebrations were rambunctious affairs that began early in the morning and went on until the early hours of the next morning. In those days, all our role models except the female ones got drunk and us kids threw firecrackers at each other while rival fire departments engaged in fire hose fights on the main drag. One year my neighbor Mario Schenone was so loaded he forgot the hydrant wrench and our whole department, a delighted crowd looking on, got washed down the street. The lawyers and the insurance combines long ago put an end to that kind of real fun, and here we are with the neo-blue noses in total charge of the festivities.

Not even the marijuana legalization measure or the possible return to Sacramento of a former governor who advocates a “less is more” attitude grabs me. In truth the saga of the SF Giants is personally more relevant, which from a guy who is decidedly not a jock is quite an admission. Even Judi Bari used to tease me that in her younger days at least she was a “jock sniffer.”

I wouldn’t even be writing this blog if I didn’t fear my editor Tim Stelloh might fire me. I think he expected me to weigh in over the past several weeks on at least some of the more divisive local issues.

Alas I’ve been studiously avoiding following any of the campaigns, locally, at the state level or gawd forbid, the national antics of the Tea Party and others. It’s a sad state of affairs because until recently I had a lifelong passion for politics, and the art of governing. As a journalist I worked adrenaline –filled election nights for decades. The nuances of campaigns and the backroom deals that can make or break them were of immense appeal to me.

So what’s happened?

I’m not certain I have the answers, but I fear I’m now among the voters who are simply burned out. I’m damn tired of promises giving way to inaction because of “political expediency.” Big money campaigns that swamp the larger good sicken me. And, Lord, look at the cast of characters dominating the field of candidates. How in the world did we get here?

So that’s my story, and I’m sticking to it.

In hopes of keeping my job I will make a few pre-election observations from the gut, with the caveat that I’ve paid scant attention to the campaigns.

Let’s start locally.

Former Rep. Dan Hamburg, a vagabond from the Democratic Party, seems a shoo-in for 5th District Supervisor in Mendocino County. Hamburg has come off his Green Party mountain, and worked a natural constituency in the southern Mendocino County district. Challenger Wendy Roberts is likely to face the same fate that even more qualified candidates have in the past because of the district’s long-standing liberal politics. The one ace up the sleeve that Roberts might have is the endorsement of Sheriff Tom Allman. We might learn how much influence Allman has with voters, as well as how willing they are to forgive Hamburg of past political transgressions.

In the 3rd District, populist incumbent Supervisor John Pinches is facing Willits challenger Holly Madrigal. The folksy cowboy wisdom of Pinches is a favorite of outsiders, including myself. But how district voters perceive his performance is unclear.

The election of David Eyster as the county’s new District Attorney seems likely given his broad base of support. He’s nailed down local law enforcement leaders, influential medical marijuana advocates and frustrated county residents who want a skilled prosecutor as DA. However, and that’s a big however, incumbent Meredith Lintott is still very much in the running. Lintott is if nothing else tenacious, having proven that in her long and costly quest to succeed the late Norm Vroman as DA. Don’t count Lintott out yet.

The county-wide Measure C sales tax measure is doomed to defeat. I could list a host of reasons why, including fears about the county’s huge pension liability, and the current Board of Supervisors’ inability to ease voters’ mounting concerns. Throw in organic grape guru Paul Dolan as a leading Measure C opponent, and defeat seems inevitable.

The statewide vote to legalize marijuana is probably too close to call. But I wouldn’t be surprised to see Prop. 19 pass despite valid criticisms. I think there’s wide public sentiment to end a costly decades-old effort to stamp out illicit pot growing, and instead try to capture some tax revenue from the billions of dollars being made from the sale of weed globally. Maybe I think that just because I live in a county where the underground marijuana industry has propped up the local economy big time in recent years. We’ll see.

I don’t eagerly embrace the return of Gov. Moonbeam, although I was a huge fan of Jerry Brown and his cadre of forward thinking advisers 30 years ago. Yet Ms. Whitman’s brazen attempt to buy the governor’s seat galls me. She reminds me of Texas financier Charles Hurwitz, and the first time he ever addressed hundreds of Humboldt County workers after his stealth takeover of venerable Pacific Lumber Co. in 1986.

“He who has the gold rules,” Hurwitz declared then.

Well, Ms. Whitman, I suspect your gazillion-dollar campaign might be greeted with the same disbelief.

As for Sen. Barbara Boxer’s chances, I think they’re good. She’s been roughed up before, and has survived. The good senator from Marin is tenacious too, and that’s not a bad trait at all.

Go Giants!

Thompson & Sunkett

Glenn Sunkett called the other day. He sounded pretty good for a guy who just got 63 years in the state pen for a Fort Bragg marijuana job back in July of 2008. It was a bad one. An indoor grow guy got clubbed on the head. He was in the hospital for a long time and still isn’t right. The other people present were threatened in sensi­tive places with a blow torch. Scrotums throughout Mendocino County tightened at the news of the blow torch.

Did Sunkett do it?

Maybe, but you wouldn’t have known for sure from the deeply flawed defense Sunkett received from Public Defender Linda Thompson, the best defense lawyer local prosecutors have ever had.

My name is Alejandro. I was reading an article from one of your staff writers Mark Scaramella. In regards to how to obtain a pot growers permit in Mendocino County. Well, I read that the minimum parcel size for the exemption is five acres. Does that mean you must have at least five acres to grow marijuana to be consider for the permits? And also, can those five acres be cultivated indoors or outdoors only? The article didn’t really specify. Can you please elaborate more on the subject. I’d appreciate it.

Best regards, Alejandro

* * *

Dear Alejandro,

I’m not an official, a lawyer, or an authority on pot. Nor am I a pot smoker, pot grower, or pot fan. Personally, marijuana makes me ill — plants and smoke. But that’s just me.

All I did was read the rules which are posted on the County’s website (County Code 9.31) and found them to be ridiculously complicated and burdensome — especially for the average stoner.

http://library2.municode.com/default-test/home.htm?infobase=16484&doc_action=whatsnew

(Click on Title 9, then choose 9.31 Medical Marijuana Cultivation Regulations.)

The rules you refer to, I believe, are Mendocino County’s DISPENSARY/COOPERATIVE rules. Not the personal garden rules. The five acre minimum applies to dispensaries and cooperative grows only. There’s a big difference.

I can’t even imagine a five acre indoor grow or a five acre personal grow which would not draw the attention of law enforcement.

The County does not issue permits for personal medical grows, just rules and zip-ties. For information on those rules and how to obtain zip-ties, check the Sheriff’s website, the County Code 9.31, or County Counsel Jeanine Nadel’s office. Frankly, I don’t know what the rules are for personal grows these days. The rules seem to change rather frequently. And people who are busted with personal grows tend to need expensive lawyers who specialize in pot law. There’s also the County’s criminal nuisance laws which the pot brigades have filed suit over alleging unconstitutionality. There’s also asset forfeiture which is even more complicated if the cops take you, your pot, your money, your car or anything else Trooper Cop Officer Hoyle lays eyes on during a compliance check or raid and makes you prove it’s not ill-gotten gains via a civil process separate from the criminal case to get it back.

You might also want to refer to the Mendocino Medical Marijuana Advisory Board (MMMAB) on the Coast. They’re trying to keep up with these things. PO Box 2555 Mendocino CA 95460 964-YESS. (email: info@mmmab.net)

Most personal pot growers I know around here do it without a “permit” and keep it low-profile and pretty small and hope that nobody ever looks at it very closely — including possible home invaders and other rip-off artists.

Personally, I’d say if you have to ask a newspaper about pot growing rules, you’re probably not ready to take the risk.

In the Summer of 1998 an enterprising fisherman and timber worker named David McCutcheon leased a bare acreof land from Ed Colombi Sr. The empty acre sits on Odom Lane about a mile north of Fort Bragg. McCutcheon needed a place to store the huge Doug Fir and redwood sinker logs he’d retrieved from the depths of local rivers. McCutcheon would convert the logs on Odom Lane into lumber, valuable lumber from perfectly preserved old growth logs lost years ago in the age of the big trees before they got all the way downstream to Mendocino County’s then-booming mills.

Fish and Game put an end to the sinker log business in 2007. Environmentalists had complained that the logs had been in place for so many years to remove them meant the altering of stream beds to their detriment. While it lasted, the retrieval of the logs proved quite lucrative. Old growth lumber had grown scarce, and the yield from the sinker logs was much in demand.

Dave McCutcheon was one of several men from the Mendocino Coast engaged in the sinker log business, a business that requires multiple skills, not to mention the risks that come from diving to locate the logs, securing them under water, then carefully hauling them up and out of the river. It is not work for the lazy and the careless.

McCutcheon had worked long and hard to salvage some 80 large sinker logs from local streams. Also busy as a working fisherman, he planned to mill the logs into commercial quality lumber. The logs were like a savings account, a large and valuable sweat equity savings account McCutcheon had deposited for safe keeping on Odom Lane.

Over the next few years McCutcheon, with a hired helper, had produced more than 4,000 feet of perfect redwood siding, 18 cants (large, slabbed logs ready for milling), 13 clear-heart redwood beams, a bunch of doug fir beams, and flooring, all of it of a very high quality as only increasingly rare old growth lumber can be. And McCutcheon still had about 28,000 board feet of unmilled, old growth, sinker redwood logs worth more than many of the world’s currencies. McCutcheon conservatively estimated the value of the milled lumber at about $70,000 and the value of the remaining unmilled sinker logs at about $300,000. He’d made this little fortune the old fashioned way — enterprise, ingenuity and many long hours of hard physical labor.

The sinker log entrepreneur rented the Odom Lane lot from Ed Colombi Sr. It was perfect for storing and then milling the logs to lumber. The old man liked McCutcheon and never charged him more than a hundred dollars a month rent. But in late 2004 Ed Colombi Sr. passed away and the property was transferred to Ed Colombi Jr. McCutcheon continued to send rent checks to the address he’d always sent them to, but came back marked “deceased, return to sender.”

McCutcheon says that after the first few months his progress on the conversion of his log cache had slowed way down. He’d married and started to raise a family; he didn’t get out to Odom Lane much.

A drawing of McCutcheon's yard

On May 26, 2006, McCutcheon arranged to move his dormant lumber operation down the coast to Elk. He called Colombi Jr. and told him that he was ready to move.

“I told him I knew I was behind in the rent and that I was ready to make it even with him. He asked me how much I was behind and I said it’s got to be a couple thousand dollars. The actual amount was $1,800. And so I said I could pay $500 to a thousand now and give him the rest by the time I moved the lumber logs out of there by mid July.”

McCutcheon says that Colombi told him, “Send me $500 and we’ll call it good. … And I thought that was a heck of a generous — you know, very generous and very considerate of Mr. Colombi.”

McCutcheon sent the $500 check, but Colombi Jr. later told him that based on “legal advice” he hadn’t cashed it. McCutcheon says he then told Colombi that he would soon be down from his home in Oregon to relocate his logs and lumber to Elk, closer to where it was intended to be used.

When McCutcheon arrived on June 15 he discovered that his rented lot on Odom Lane was empty. His logs and lumber were gone.

“There had been a burn pile that was still smoldering,” said McCutcheon. “And there had been a road cut in from Odom Lane that had never been there before, since I was there, and never been used since I was there in ’98. And all my wood was gone.”

Colombi Jr. told the investigating officer, Mendocino County Sheriff’s deputy Ricky Del Fiorentino, that he’d given Robert Russell permission to remove firewood, downed trees and to do general cleanup of the property. The deputy also talked to a neighbor who said that between June 9 and June 11 a flatbed truck came and went late into the night, carrying away many loads of logs and lumber, Dave McCutcheon’s logs and lumber. The neighbor said he’d also heard chainsaws running for hours and couldn’t help but see a newly constructed gate at the site.

As the investigation proceeded, Ed Colombi Jr. told a stunned and disbelieving McCutcheon, “I thought you’d abandoned that stuff.”

Deputy DA Tim Stoen of the DA’s Fort Bragg office soon filed grand theft charges against both Edward Colombi Jr. and Robert Russell, but the case languished while Stoen and his investigator tried to find a crucial witness they eventually located in Idaho.

Ed Colombi Jr. and Robert Russell were in trouble.

A few months ago, Colombi Jr., forthrightly described by DA Stoen as a “recidivist thief,” pleaded guilty to felony grand theft; he’s scheduled to be sentenced on Monday, May 10th in Fort Bragg’s Ten Mile Court. Stoen is only seeking a year in County Jail plus full restitution for the value of the lumber.

For a man with four felony priors, Colombi is getting off light.

Stoen’s unkind description of Ed Colombi Jr. is based on Colombi’s criminal record; it includes four prior felony theft convictions in Oregon for which Colombi served time in the Oregon State Penitentiary.

Back home in Mendocino County in 2004, Colombi, with $300 in his pocket, tried to steal a $100 watch from the Ukiah Walmart. Walmart’s thief-monitor saw him do it and Colombi was detained when he walked out the door. Colombi told the Ukiah officer who’d slapped the cuffs on him, “Man, I know that I’m wrong. I’m on methadone, and when I’m on methadone I get these impulses, and sometimes I steal.”

Most of the lumber stolen from McCutcheon has disappeared or was sold by Colombi Jr. and Robert Russell to a third party named Greg Arnold. Arnold is not being charged in the case.

Well known defense attorney Richard Petersen is representing Colombi Jr. If Colombi Jr. has the resources to hire Petersen, he would also seem to have the resources to pay McCutcheon for McCutcheon’s losses.

Colombi’s co-defendant, Robert Russell, cannot be found. A bench warrant has been issued for his arrest.

And how do you get a large sum of restitution money from a junkie?

(Tim Stelloh and Bruce Anderson contributed to this story.)

***

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Jake Rohrer remembers Paris, prison & his travels with Creedence Clearwater Revival in his memoir, The Fortunate Son.

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Will Parrish‘s ongoing series on the Northcoast’s sprawling wine industry.

Booze, A Banker & A Bailout: The Murder Of Mark West Creek

Sonoma County, Banana Republic Of Wine Grapes

The North Coast Wine Industry Latest Coup De Grace: Draining Our Rivers Dry

On Memory & Forgetting In Wine Country

Anderson Valley, Tentacle Of The Wine Grape Octopus

When They Came For The Navarro

Goldeneye: Anderson Valley’s Mercenary Vineyard?

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Will Parrish & Darwin Bond-Graham’s 5-part series on financier and UC regent Richard Blum.

Part 1: Richard Blum, The Man Behind California’s ‘Developing Economy’

Part 2: Disaster Capitalist University

Part 3: A Lesson From California’s Students: WE Make the Crisis

Part 4: Richard Blum, Godzilla Regent

Part 5: Richard (Blum) Ellis’ North Coast Pension Booze

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Tim Stelloh on the fall of former Mendocino County Republican Committee Chairman Kenny Rogers.

Waterboarded: The Kenny Rogers Saga

Who Killed Michael Peacock?

Will Kenny Rogers Get a New Trial?

Kenny Rogers, Ex-GOP Chairman, Gets 25 to Life

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Mark Scaramella on Former Point Arena Elementary Principal Matt Murray, who had successfully lifted the historically troubled Point Arena school district from state probation. Then he was fired. Behind closed doors.

Murray Case Goes To Trial

Don’t Cry for Me, Point Arena

The Superintendent Does Not Recall

Murrays Lose, Point Arena Loses Bigger

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Freda Moon on Aaron Vargas & vigilante justice in Fort Bragg.

To Kill a Predator

To Kill a Predator, Part II

Fort Bragg Advocate-News: Not the NewsHour

An Interview with Mindy Galliani

In Vargas Case, Prosecutors Bring Out the Big Guns

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Bruce Anderson‘s 5-Part Series on the killing of Donald Perez.

Part 1: One Murder, Four Deaths

Part 2: The Interview, the Victim

Part 3: Mendo Justice Gets the Case

Part 4: Who Are These Kids?

Part 5: The Raps & The Wrap Up

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The AVA index on the Judi Bari bombing.

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Editor,

After reading Lee Simon’s letter in the 12/30 edition, I came across the following: written by Henri Cole in the January 14, 2010 edition of the New York Review of Books.

The poem is a nihilistic, existential description of the human condition in our times. It could only have been thought, understood, and written by a person living within an economic order that has quite thoroughly destroyed any understanding of even the possibility that “you are the other me.”

I think it also counts for Lee Simon’s insightful analysis of what has happened to and what currently explains “America.” It describes the absolute negation of any human connectedness, so nothing can be known — even at the most intimate level. The common good is not and cannot exist. Each is on his or her own. Each is alone. Each is separate from “the other.” Each is only “one animal.”

* * *

One Animal

Do not show how jealous you are. Do not

show how much you care. Do not think the bunch

of flowers in his hand connects the hand to you.

Do not close your eyes and kiss the funny

lips. Do not twist your torso, touching yourself

like a monkey. Do not put your mouth

on the filthy place that changes everything.

Do not utter the monosyllable twice that is

the signature of dogdom. Do not, afterward,

appear mangy with old breath, scrutinizing

every hole. And do not think — touching his hair,

licking, sucking and being sucked in the same

instant, no longer lonely — that you

are two animals perfect as one.

Terence Bresnahan
Berkeley
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MY UNCLE PETE

Dear Steve Sparks,

I read the interview you did with my uncle Dr. Peter Boudoures. He has been a true godsend to our family. He had a brother and two sisters and many nieces and nephews. Even though he has five children of his own he has never hesitated at one time or another to help us all whether it was with advice on financial matters or anything else he has always been there for us all. We truly love him and respect him. There is no better man than my uncle Pete. When we couldn’t count on other people in our lives we could always count on him.

Sincerely,

Suzanne LeCompte, his niece
Santa Rosa
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WHERE THE MONEY IS

Howdy Boss Hog,

The big boys who actually are running things have one basic major choice: “Peace or war.” There is no money in peace, so guess what is left?

Please donate your children and your taxes.

Sad reflections in the Bastille,

Michael Skeirik
Vacaville
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SAVING GRACE

Honorable Ukiah City Council Members ;

It has come to our attention that you are very seriously considering reducing the staff and function of Ukiah’s Grace Hudson Museum. Please consider more fully what the institution has and does bring to the community and county.

It and the college are responsible in large measure for the city’s cultural life. Is Ukiah’s civic life to survive solely on the basis of the Court, Justice and Civil Service Institutions? What a limited model for the children.

With respect, please value what that cultural life has meant to those who treasure the staff’s professionalism and breadth of endeavors as well as the education the young and the mature have received from the Museum’s quality exhibits and outreach activities. On a shoestring one might add.

My wife and I have been planning to retire here in three years and have been regular visitors during the past 15 years. Ukiah would be a poorer place in our view if the Museum were to be diminished even more from what is now, still a brave struggle to enhance the lives of those who visit.

Respectfully ,

Harry & Susan Betancourt
Alameda

UKIAH MAYOR RESPONDS:

Dear Mr. and Mrs. Betancourt,

Thanks for your letter regarding funding for the Grace Hudson Museum, one of many that I have received. I am wholly in agreement with the position that they have taken. As a history teacher for almost 40 years, I am well aware of the importance of such resources. I also know our Museum to be an outstanding, professional institution that is a significant draw to our community, and that the Sun House Guild, on which I serve, has been remarkably generous and effective in its efforts on behalf of the Museum. The question I wrestle with is, of course, what could not be funded if we support the Museum out of the general fund? There are no good answers to that. I join my fellow Council members in continuing to resolve the budget crisis with as little damage to the City as possible.

Sincerely,
Benj Thomas, Mayor
City of Ukiah
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PILEDRIVING FORT BRAGG

To the Fort Bragg City Council and Concerned People:

In the interest of cost efficiency, the Summers Lane Reservoir Project has been planned as an above ground water storage facility. CGI Technical Services, the city of Fort Bragg’s own engineers, stated in Geotechnical Report 45-Acre-Foot Reservoir that “Liquefaction analyses indicate that a consistent zone between depths of 10 and 20 feet have a potential to liquefy when subjected to regional earthquakes” (3.2). The report lists solutions to this problem which are:

• “Removal and recompaction of liquefiable soil;

• Vibro-replacement/vibro-compaction (stone columns)

• Deep dynamic compaction (DDC)

• Compaction grouting; and

• Geopiers” (3.2)

Most of these measures involve “repeated dropping of a dense weight” similar to pile-driving (3.2.3). One of the measures, deep dynamic compaction “imparts waves of energy into the ground, buried improvements, such as the City’s pipeline that extends along the western margin of the property, would be damaged during construction. There is also the potential that the pavement on the access road leading from Summers Lane to the Humane Society might be further damaged and degraded due to ground waves propagated by DDC” (3.2.3).

How will these measures affect the safety of the surrounding area’s underground improvements? How will it affect the asphalt portion of Summers Lane? What will the affect be on well casings and the pumps inside those wells? What will damages be to Celeri & Son Nursery’s underground irrigation system? Will septic tanks and leach fields be affected?

Will the surrounding area’s aboveground structures be able to withstand a human-made earthquake? The Human Society and Dog Pound are built with extensive use of concrete and cinderblock. How will this affect the foundations for both these facilities and the nearby homes?

Animals are very susceptible to noise and seismic activity. How are these procedures going to affect the animals? Will it become an inhumane society? During construction will it be unsuitable for animals? Are there any alternatives facilities?

It seems that building the Summers Lane Reservoir creates problems which need to be solved. Mitigating these problems seemingly creates just as many problems.

Sincerely,
Jim Celeri and the Celeri Family
Fort Bragg
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WHERE ARE THE YOUNG VETS?

To Bruce Patterson:

I have a question for you, and hope you will be kind enough to answer:

I use the VA services in Santa Rosa. I’m a vet of four years USAF. Everyone I see at the clinic appears to be over 50 years of age. It puzzles me. With Apache gunships, depleted uranium munitions, white phosphorous and a civilian versus combatant kill ratio in Afghanistan of 70 to 1 (I can’t imagine the horror of dealing with that many butchered civilians, not to mention your pals), I just know there are tens of thousands of truly fucked soldiers. Where are they? Do they not seek services until everything just caves in on them? Are there outreach programs for returning vets? What’s going on?

M. Smith
Petaluma
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SUFFERING THE INSUFFERABLE

Mighty Editor,

On the topic of radio punditry, I have as of late had the acutely maddening and masochistic misfortune of listening to (NPR) National Public Radio’s Talk of the Nation and idiot savant Neil Conan.

Chatter and propaganda have again reached orange status in the wake of the Christmas underwear bomber. On the topic of terror profiling one caller said he didn’t see the problem because just like in nature there are certain animals known to be dangerous and you take extra precautions with those animals. And Neil Conan interrupts, “Whoa, whoa, whoa. We should, um, er, uh, not compare not, um, make the comparison between animals and people, you know, some people would take that to be, um, er, uh, you know— yeah… (muttering… trailing off…) then… “BYE”!!!

Neil Conan and NPR swiftly hung up on the guy hoping no one caught on. As they do to every caller who doesn’t tow the line or stick to the script.

Is the stuttering muttering asinine apologist Neil Conan of NPR not the absolute epitome of what is really wrong with our media?!

NPR has been steadfast and lockstep in the march to War. Providing incessant propaganda and rationale for war, stirring the pot of our worst fears about those reactionary and irrational moslems. It has been a ten year march of generals, lackeys and agents through the Herbst theatre for the liberal version of high minded imperialism.

Why does this shit go over in the Bay Area so well?

So Tim Stelloh raised the point about FOX and Democracy Now, benign in my eyes in the face of the polite and oh so cultured WARMONGERS at National Public Radio.

Who is this asshole Neil Conan?

Why aren’t we analyzing the fork-tongued reptilian liberals who are poised in the long run to do way more damage to any prospect for change than any of the idiots to the so-called left or right. Okay, the left may have ruined it for us already BUT the real right wing is not the circus conducted by Rupert “the Moor” Murdoch but the saavy warmongering propagandists in charge at National Public Radio.

PS. If you are a masochist like I, you may also enjoy the supreme misfortune of listening to Scott Simon’s pompous ass on weekend edition. Happy listening.

Best Regards as always,

Nate ‘Redshank’ Collins
Oakland
________________________________________

POETRY O’BOMB-A

Editor,

This is a postcard. The poet S.A.Griffin has a practice bomb. Like the Navy has up in Nevada. This kind of bomb, empty of explosives, this kind every now and then the pilots-in-training screw up. They screw up. That’s why they are in training. So now and then they bomb a trailer park. S.A. and an army of poets have this practice dummy bomb. And they are filling up the bomb with poetry. An article about S.A. and his Poetry Bomb is in the New Yorker and the L.A. Times on his doorstep today. He asked me to do the postcard which he will be giving away. I can’t sue anyone for giving away art. Another Twist of the Fair Use Knife. So here I am, running around with poets. Art Attack. Thank the Good Lord for Bad Company.

Dan O’Neill
Nevada City
________________________________________

AYN RAND’S BALLS

Editor,

The person on your front page looks like a typical victim of socialized medicine, which you would know had you ever been in a Russian or British or Canadian hospital. People in Canada with serious health problems come here for treatment instead of waiting years for governmental permission to get surgery.

Bernanke was never an admirer of deregulation or Friedman. Thomas Woods, Jr’s book Meltdown describes in detail how government regulation and credit expansion caused the current depression. Read Capitalism by George Reisman, Human Action by Ludwig Von Mises, Man, Economy and State by Murray Rothbard, Power and Market by Rothbard, America’s Great Depression by Rothbard AND Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand, the greatest literary and philosphical achievment of all human civilization. Bruce, you are not fit to lick the sweat off of Ayn’s balls.

MLK was a Communist-Socialist and good riddance to him.

Cockburn has now recycled that BORING anecdote about the 95 year old libtard THREE TIMES in his column, enough already !

Ergo for Judge Brennan. You’ve chewed that cabbage to death. He made the right decision. You can stop printing phony letters that you concoct.

Enough of Blankfort, I agree with him on Palestine but he’s a one-barrel crackpot.

Tired of the Rossi bore too, he’s always bitching about government but he advocates socialized medicine! Typical contard dumbskull.

Final point, we have two too many big, fat numbskull Bruces running so-called alturdenate papers in NoCal.

Al Blue
Ukiah
________________________________________

‘SOLED’ A BILL OF GOODS

To the Editor:

Let’s see if I got this right. Costco wants to come to this area.

They may have an option from DDR to buy part of the Masonite site, which was zoned Industrial the last time I heard about it (Measure A was all about changing the zoning and it failed miserably). DDR, which lost that election, is hot to get some money out of the site to help its bottom line.

Now, the Planning Department says “under the current zoning for the land, Costco, as an owner, could put up a retail store with a minor use permit”. On a site zoned industrial? “The zoning allows retail,” says the CEO. (UDJ, Dec.12, 2009) Since when?

What about all the infrastructure issues? What about possible pollution of the ground?

What chance does any industry have next to a big box retailer? What about the voters saying they didn’t want retail on that site?

Where are the SOLE folks in all this? Was their issue about saving our local economy or about winning an election? Where is the outrage about a foreign developer trying to ram a retail development on an industrial site down our throats? Has anybody looked into how to get industries to that site or are we just sitting around? Let’s get proactive in this New Year. We need real jobs and we are going to have to find the employers that can provide them. We are going to have to make our place appealing to them. What are we waiting for?

Hal Voege
Redwood Valley
________________________________________
AB WATCH

To the Editor

Due to the Trail Symposium in Fort Bragg, Jan.9, 2010, I had the privilege to walk part of the newly acquired property of the City of Fort Bragg-which was formerly the Georgia-Pacific Mill site. Three miles of rugged, spectacular coastline comprising 92 acres of bluff-top trail will not be open to the public for two more years. So we 60 folks felt it a real privilege to be the first to walk part of it.

The northern part was the site of a Pomo Indian Village whose inhabitants were moved to Covelo in the 1800s forced by the former Louisiana Pacific Lumber Co.

It is the most spectacular coastline of Northern California, as quoted by City Manager Linda Ruffing, who has studied other coasts south of here. There are islands and sea stacks off the rocky coast, perfect places for abalone diving when the trails are public property. There is great concern that the opening will be a green light of an abalone gold rush in spite of the limits set by the Fish and Game Dept. The Abalone Watch group of adjunct people to aid the Fish and Game Dept.will have to be expanded due to cutbacks in funding for State Parks.

Three million dollars was paid by the Mendocino Land Trust to the Georgia Pacific Lumber Corporation.

From the southern one third of the trail we could see across Soldier’s Bay, on the northern part some large buildings used to dry lumber, one of which which will be converted to an Art Center. There will be a Marine Science School set up as an extension of the Sonoma State College.

Access was allowed as part of a Trail Symposium with speakers discussing new trails in Fort Bragg, a mere ten miles from Mendocino. I was too tired after walking two hours with a photographer friend to stay for the Symposium. To avoid a wipe out of abalone as happened when a Point Arena coastline was made public I urge folks who want to preserve the abalone to sign up for the Abalone Watch, a citizen’s nonprofit association to be the eyes and ears of the State Department of Fish and Game, to please contact Rod Jones of Mendocino, for training and a Volunteer Handbook.

Sincerely,
Agnes Woolsey
Mendocino
________________________________________

GRANGE FLEA MARKET

Editor,

Coming Sunday, January 17th the Anderson Valley Grange Flea Market from 1-3pm in the Grange Parking Lot, inside if it is raining. Clean out your closets, garage, and old sheds; contact Captain Rainbow (895-3807) to reserve a table; and bring all those forgotten treasures down to the Grange to sell to your neighbors. If you didn’t find enough stuff to sell, be sure to come on down to the Grange and look for things to fill those closets with; or check out the weekly Grange Mart for local veggies, mushrooms, crafts and other treats.

Thanks,
Diane Paget
Boonville
________________________________________

LOST IN TRANSLATION

Editor,

Much of the ignorance that marks American knowledge of world geography foreign affairs is lost in translation. During the Vietnam war a small radical news service offered alternative reporting from South East Asia, mostly drawn from tactical battle reviews translated from Pathet Lao broadcasts by Laotian American activists, a vaguely Maoist persuasion. Regardless of the political slant, the detailed coverage of the conflict was vastly more accurate than the US network propaganda offered every night back on the home front.

Forty years later America is still short on both accurate translation and understanding of the motives and methods of our enemy: Islamic radicalism and its causes, as viewed by the adherents of Jihad. Our talking head media continues to express amazement that the best educated and most sophisticated of Islamic youth are joining the anti-American resistance overseas and launching themselves on self-sacrificing missions against our homeland.

Nobody explains the relevant history of the Middle East and the Christian crusaders, nor the parallels between the massacre and destruction of those times and our several current wars against various Arab Muslim countries.

Fortunately, there appears to be a spokesman for Jihad whose lectures and vision have propelled him to world notice, mostly because he speaks fluent American, having been raised in New Mexico and thoroughly Americanized in his education. His name is Al Awlaki, and he is currently holed up somewhere in the mountains of Yemen where he preaches to the faithful over the internet, streaming his sermons, posting on Facebook and other “social media” as well as selling DVD and CD versions in every continent, where they are played at mosques and schools as educational tools.

And they’re right! English is, by dint of centuries of imperialism, the language in which history is made these years, and being able to offer eloquent explanations for the movement of Islamic resistance to the West gives the entire conflict a new perspective.

Think back to the racist days of yore, a mere 50 years past, when the lynching of “Negroes” was still practiced and black people were separate but unequal in every phase of society. When Martin Luther King Jr. and other civil rights activists began campaigns of self defense and protest the white media ignored the content of the demonstrations and focused on the riots and violence. Editorials and radio comment all decried the actions, but few cared to publish the thoughts and writings of the movement.

Despite the accusations of direct involvement in the Xmas panty bomb attack over Detroit, there has been no evidence offered that Awlaki is either part of Al Qaeda or any other action group within the overall insurgency. Now might be the time to open a real conversation between adversaries by giving Awlaki a platform for his arguments, particularly here in the US where we never hear the other side.

Perhaps Fox News and Rupert Murdoch might live up to their motto: “Fair and Balanced” by giving the Jihadists an hour following Glen Beck every evening.

Travis T. Hip
Nevada City
________________________________________

NO MORE MR. NICE CORP

Editor,

These are troubled times. Few would argue with that. So the big question is, What’s wrong? The answer is that we are living under the tyranny of the dollar. Power is solidly in the hands of corporations, or big money. Everywhere you look, you see the effects: money controls everything, and perverts everything. The concerns of real people are marginalized, so that big money can have its way.

So the question then becomes: How can we, the people, fix this? And the answer to that is actually quite simple: *corporations are not persons*. This goes right to the legal/political heart of the matter. We need to get the Supreme Court to acknowledge the obvious fact that corporations are not persons. Once that is established, corporate lawyers will not be able to abuse the Bill of Rights, as they do now, on their clients’ behalf.

The Amendments were obviously drafted with real people in mind, but corporations have found a way to bend *our* rights to *their* favor, by making the ridiculous claim that corporations are persons. For instance, corporations are able to pump unlimited sums of money into lobbying by claiming their right to the First Amendment. It’s an obvious perversion of a citizen’s right to free speech, but that’s how special interests justify their ability to essentially own our government. So we need to get very clear on this distinction: corporations are not people (and people are not corporations). They are two distinctly different entities, and each needs its own set of rights and regulations. We have to stop the muddling, and once we do, we’ll have gone a long way toward clearing up the problem.

Fortunately, there is an excellent book on the subject: “Unequal Protection: The Rise of Corporate Dominance and the Theft of Human Rights” (2002). The author goes into good detail about how this folly of “corporate personhood” came about, how it is being abused, and — most importantly — how we can go about fixing it. I highly recommend reading this book and then acting upon the advice within.

Mike Kalantarian
Navarro
________________________________________

THE COLD TRUTH

Editor,

Alex Cockburn has been bashing the “Truthers” for many years now. He finds it OK to attack those who seek the truth of what really happened on 9-11-01.

Now, he ridicules those who ask why the CIA “missed” the underpants bomber, even though they had plenty of warning.

“The Truthers reject the obvious answers — caution, bureaucratic inertia, buck-passing, turf fights — and say it was a plot.” Oh really Mr. Cockburn, do we?

We don’t know one way or another, and you are now the spokesperson for the Truthers? What’s obvious is your “strawman” attacks are very misplaced.

Like, why spend so much time attacking truth seekers? Especially when these “failures” keep benefiting certain countries and military-industrial-corporations.

“The Israeli firm, ICTS, and two of its subsidiaries are at the crux of an international investigation in recent days, as experts try to pinpoint the reasons for the security failure that enabled Umar F. Abdulmutallab to board Northwest flight 253 and attempt to set alight explosives hidden in his underwear.”

A Haaretz investigation has learned that the security officers and their supervisor should have suspected the passenger, even without having early intelligence available to them.

The failure was a twin flop: An intelligence failure, which US President Barack Obama has already stated, in the poor handling of information that arrived at the State Department and probably also the CIA from both the father of the would-be bomber and the British security service; and a failure within the security system, “including that of the Israeli firm ICTS.” http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1141434.html Nothing to see here, move along Truther scumbags!

So, the US is relying on Israeli security, and we are to believe that everyone just messed up, again? Mr. Cockburn wants us all to fall in line with his theory, the Official US Government Incompetence Theory. OUSGIT. OUSGIT! OUSGIT!! OUSGIT!!! OUSGIT!!!!
Over and over, again and again, just plain dumb goy? For how long? How many more times to fall for lies? As many as it takes. As one commenter wrote online, “If the plane went down, maybe Israel could of fed us intelligence saying it was Iran.”

But, that’d NEVER happen, that’s a CRAZY conspiracy theory, false flag operations NEVER happen. I’m sure Mr.Cockburn would be glad to agree.

Cheers,
Rob Mahon
Covelo

P.S. I’d rather be a Truthseeker, than a Denialist.

–

Alexander Cockburn replies: From this it’s impossible to discern what Mahon’s version of events is. I’d prefer to stay within the ambit of buckpassing, bureaucratic rivalries and incompetence, starting with the fact that Umur Farouk Abdullmutallab didn’t show up on the Watch List because someone had entered his name wrong. Probably tripped up on the twin double-LLs. As for denialism, Rob, go preach Warming in western Europe or Beijing, as temps plunge to new lows. The world has been cooling since 1998 and that’s da cold truth. Petrolia.

________________________________________

WHAT UP, MMMAB?

Editor,

MMMAB: Missing the Point.

It’s kind of funny that the “MMMAB steering committee” criticizes the AVA for publishing an anonymous letter. Who is hiding behind the “MMMAB steering committee” moniker? Pebs? And who of you wants to take credit for the anonymous hit piece email you did on Dennis Hollingsworth? What was the point of sending out verbatim a Sheriff’s Department press release slamming him and another person who is “innocent until proven guilty”? Except by the Sheriff’s Dept. and the MMMAB inner circle mafia? What was the point? That was the question that the anonymous assassins of MMMAB will not respond to.

Anyone who knows much of anything about MMMAB, and I do, knows that collectively they, or at least their leadership, are a bunch of self-righteous, mean-spirited, in-fighting, back-biting, stoned crazy dope growers who couldn’t reason their way out of a paper bag. I was an early member but I have decided to quit sending them money because I don’t like the results. And they are anything but democratic. Decisions get made in the large meetings only to get undone behind the scenes where the people who run the show and control the money make the real decisions. I saw this happen when a MMMAB general meeting at Herban Legend voted to use funds to send a MMMAB member to an out of state conference. That goes undone because the small group of people with their hands on the money did not want to let go. They also control the message. In this, they are no different form your typical gaggle of Mendo rad/lib political poseurs.

MMMAB has a large and almost impressive “Advisory Board” that never meets, is never consulted and never advises. The Board consists mostly of marijuana growers and marijuana criminal defense lawyers. The lawyers see it as free advertising and will never publicly say they disagree with MMMAB even when they do.

What we are left with is “Pebbles Trippet” who fits right into Mendo where everyone gets to reinvent themselves as many times as they like. Does anyone know her real name? Or if she ever had one? Or has she pseudonymously tripped through life from birth? And I do mean tripped. Her statements that the Peace Movement was fueled by LSD are classic self-delusion. Until I read Pebs’ letter I never knew that LSD also fueled the Czech Revolution of 1968. And I bet not many people know that the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King was high on crack when he gave his “I Have A Dream” speech.

No doubt Pebs was flying as high as a kite from the 60s to the present, but most people seriously involved in social change movements, from civil rights to the peace movement, to women’s rights and beyond are hard-working, sane and focused. Hangers on like Pebs who wish to make a spectacle of everything have held us back and dragged us down. People like her and Beth Bosk have efficiently destroyed every effort to form a credible left opposition in this county. Politically, we probably have the highest percentage of progressive voters of almost any county in the United States. But functionally there is no evidence that the local “movement” has a heartbeat. Why? Because stoned crazies like Beth Bosk insist on disrupting, dominating and destroying every attempt to launch a progressive based alternative. Witness the demise of the Green Party and the local environmental movement.

Now Beth and Pebs are training their guns on KZYX once again with the false claims that the pr0-marijuana side of the story is banned from the airwaves. No one who is not stoned, and most of us who are, must be asking, “What are they smoking?” Probably that moldy coast ditchweed that Pebs is famous for growing. Really, can anyone who listened to KZYX say the pro-marijuana point of view is excluded? It is refreshing to hear someone other than Pebbles and E.D. Lerman once in a while.

So back to the point: Pebs, what has Dennis Hollingsworth done to you to cause you to send out a Sheriff’s Department press release to the MMMAB Email and media list?” What has he done to deserve to be smeared by MMMAB? Whatever happened to innocent until proven guilty? Pebs?

Still anonymous
Fort Bragg
________________________________________

CORRECTING THE MLPA RECORD

Editor,

I screwed up on the MLPA opening with erroneous dates for Arnold. It was not April first, and 2003. Gray Davis signed the first MLPA into law in 1999; it was rejected by the public before our girly-conservative governor pushed it forward once more in 2009 with a so-called blue ribbon panel. All the rest reads true as far as I can tell. Please excuse my error, but I have recently been researching the ill effects of medical marijuana and have astutely proved my premise. I have severely disciplined my proof reader and suggest that you do also.

My confused and balding head hangs low in typo shame,

Mike Koepf
Elk

Grams the Crankster

You’d think she was Ma Barker the way the DA’s Office has ballyhooed the conviction of 68-year-old Nancie Henthorne of Covelo. It’s not as if Ms. Henthorne hadn’t convicted herself, readily admitting to possession and sales of methamphetamine and to being the owner of a Derringer she kept in her home.

A grandma in the crank business? In Covelo?

You may recall that after much back-and-forth between Sako and his arch-nemesis, Beth Bosk, we raised questions (in stories published here and here) about Sakowicz’s financial past back in April. In an open letter to me submitted a couple of days ago, Chad Lewis made the following observations:

I just re-read Tim Stelloh’s articles about John Sakowicz, KZYX host, which appeared in the April, 2009 editions of the AVA.

At the start this this New Year, 2010, I’ve got one thing to say: Tim Stelloh, you are a FOOL AND A HACK..

A FINRA “snapshot” of John Sakowicz’s Wall Street career is on file at the GM’s office at KZYX, FOR YOUR EXAMINATION…or anyone else. You may look at the snapshot, but not copy it. It has been on file since September.

The FINRA snapshot clearly establishes Sakowicz’s career THAT STARTED IN 1979, you fool..

The FINRA snapshot clearly documents SERIES 7 AND SERIES 3 LICENSES ISSUED IN 1979 AND 1985, RESPECTIVELY. That’s makes for a 30-year career, you hack.

Mr. Lewis goes on with the hack-and-fool stuff (and tells me I should apologize, in writing, to Sakowicz), but the gist of his point is about FINRA, and how the fact that Sakowicz has FINRA licenses proves that he was a 30-year Wall Street veteran, as he often claimed. To which I responded:

If Sakowicz (or his lawyer) had mentioned FINRA when I contacted them, I would have been happy to include that in the story. Ditto with John Coate at KZYX, who I also talked to. Sakowicz wouldn’t talk to me, and Coate didn’t mention FINRA when I asked him about Sakowicz’s financial background.

More to your point, our stories weren’t about FINRA. They were about the credentials Sakowicz was using to position himself as a 30-year Wall Street insider and a media authority on finance. That cred didn’t include FINRA licenses.

Here’s what it did include: Employment at UBS, Dean Witter, Colonial Management Associates, Spear Leeds Kellogg, Merrill Lynch and Alex Brown & Sons. He said he worked as a trader on the floors of the New York Stock Exchange, the New York Mercantile Exchange and the Commodity Exchange. He said he was a general partner in an offshore investment advisory, Templar Advisors, and a founding member of an offshore hedge fund, Battle Mountain Research Group.

I found little evidence of anything–save UBS, where he was a trainee for three years (ending in September 2007), and Templar Advisors, which had been established with the Secretary of State’s office the same month we ran our stories.

That’s what I found when reporting my stories, and that’s what we published in the AVA.

Beth Bosk then got in on the action, submitting a very long account of the whole Sako episode, which includes a good bit on Gretchen Giles, the editor of the North Bay Bohemian who once published Sakowicz’s columns and who eventually “dis-invited” him from writing for the paper because of his perceived misrepresentations.

Before we go any further, a couple of notes: First, I’m no graduate of Columbia University, as Bosk says in her letter (I went to NYU). Second, Giles wrote an interesting piece when she decided to give Sako the heave-ho that explained why she’d decided to run his columns in the first place and why she’d asked him to beat it.

The Boho was subsequently served with a demand letter from Sako’s lawyer, Steven Schectman, and shortly after Giles’ story disappeared from the Bohemian’s website. A shortened version of the piece was published here, but we found the original here, in all its PDF glory (check out page 9).

Which brings us to Pebbles Trippet, who’s apparently launching a new offensive against Sakowicz. This time it’s got nothing to do with his background. This time (what else?) it’s about pot:

Dear John Coate, KZYX GM

I wrote your colleague, news director Paul Hansen, a lengthy email on Dec 1 about the Mendocino Medical Marijuana Board’s concern that John Sakowicz not become KZYX’s official news reporter on medical marijuana, based on his stark lack of knowledge on any level, lack of roots in the community and a conflict of interest association with Medical Marijuana Inc., whose roots and mindset are clearly commercial in violation of state law.

I told Hansen that Sakowicz’s coverage of the 11/30 H&HS meeting on the 9.31 medical marijuana nuisance ordinance was flawed as an objective news report, without also including statements from the opposition. He agreed that if the report was biased, as I insisted, he would air MMMAB’s responses. We never got a reply from him, nor from you, though you were sent a copy.

Sakowicz’s report was essentially a fact-free op-ed in praise of county staff — what a wonderful job they’re doing “bringing order out of chaos” — and a shameless hustle for Sup John McCowen’s controversial medical-marijuana-is-a-public-nuisance regulation legislation (9.31), strongly opposed by the patient majority.

It is not the job of objective news reporters to introduce their own bias in lieu of news or to endorse the legislation of politicians rather than “holding their feet to the fire”, especially with such a controversial proposal as 9.31. Opposition to McCowen’s regulation ordinance and proof of controversy is in the votes of Sups John Pinches and David Colfax, who think Sup McCowen is wrong and publicly voted against 9.31 in a Ft Bragg BOS meeting, as based on potential violations of civil liberties and constitutional rights. This was not reported, nor were any of the other members of the opposition, which include MMMAB steering committee members Pebbles Trippet and Tom Davenport; New Settler Interviews editor Beth Bosk; former KZYX reporter Sheila Dawn; candidate for 5th District Supervisor Dan Hamburg; Attorneys Keith Faulder, Edie Lerman, Ed Denson, Omar Figueroa, Tony Serra, David Nick, Bill McPike, among others. Why was none of this covered?

Attorney Edie Lerman filed a constitutional challenge to the nuisance ordinance asking the courts for injunctive and declaratory relief. It is calendared for February 2010, around the time of the BOS Public Hearings on whether or not to adopt 9.31, the 25-plant per parcel law, categorizing cannabis patients as public nuisances, comparable to stream pollution, garbage and rotting carcasses — true public nuisances. Under 9.31, patients are afforded fewer rights than under criminal statutes. These are the issues. KZYX is not adequately reporting on any of them and Sakowicz is not capable of it.

Instead, KZYX upped the ante by allowing Sakowicz more time to air his undisguised bias in a half-hour interview with Sup John McCowen on Truth About Money.

His Money show started out with the following outburst:

“Since my report on Nov 30, I’ve been the subject of a smear campaign with hate mail…I wonder when will John Sakowicz put a key in his car and it blows up….I had my son put my key in the car for me… Some people don’t want any regulation.” He continued, “They’ve opened up a John Sakowicz must die campaign…they’re out there, people doing a letter-writing campaign, people who can’t agree on anything except that they all agree they hate certain people doing anything that would smack of regulation.”

What kind of a poseur would joke about potential violence to his own son?
Who are these “people who don’t want any regulation” he is speaking of?

Is he suggesting that non-violent medical marijuana patients would carbomb your reporter, due to our disagreements with the ordinance he’s reporting on?

Why is he allowed to say these inflammatory things about the opposition without our response and/or a station disclaimer?

KZYX should consider itself in potential jeopardy from Sakowicz’ intemperance and should not allow his false statements, insinuating that MMMAB, the group that was named, would use violence to settle differences, by pretending we are opposed to regulation, which we are not, and suggesting we might go to illegal extremes to stop it, which we would never do.

We generally use reason based on patients’ rights and voters’ will to settle differences and would never resort to violence for any reason. Our last resort is the court.

This scenario has no resemblance to reality but it appears to have a script.

Sakowicz’ statements are designed to shed doubt on MMMAB’s integrity and intentions, as critics of the ordinance.

In the interests of accuracy, balance and credibility,

1) Sakowicz must interview the critics of 9.31 to correct his one-sided report;

2) stop insinuating the opposition’s bad faith — running a “hate campaign” against him — without facts;

3) stop suggesting that medical marijuana policy advisors would engage in violence of any sort — without facts;

4) stop biased reporting on medical marijuana news.

Many of us believe that you, as General Manager, have a responsibility to be concerned.

John Sakowicz appears to be using KZYX to ridicule and silence the critics of 9.31
through one-sided reports and false accusations and the station is helping him do that
in violation of federal broadcast standards, i.e., airing both sides of the story.

Do you intend to communicate with MMMAB about righting this wrong? Or do we have to look elsewhere?

We consider the situation serious — false accusations of violence; no coverage of the 9.31 opposition; a pattern of biased medical marijuana news and interviews. This amounts to discrimination.

Unlike how it’s being reported, MMMAB supports principled medical cannabis regulation but it must fulfill the law’s purpose — “to enhance access” — not restrict, reduce, block, threaten, penalize.

9.31 does the opposite — it restricts access, reduces patients’ rights and puts untrained law enforcement, rather than public health or planning and building, at the center of implementing regulatory procedures and penalties against patients.

This sets standards that set us backward toward a type of punitive neo-prohibition called administrative law. It is not progress. It is regress.

The alternative is to base medical cannabis regulation on land use impacts, such as water, fire, traffic and other neighborhood and environmental concerns, establishing a legal foundation that expands access as the law intends.

KZYX’s public news mission is on the line here.

Twice in one week, the oppositional point of view was omitted from the 9.31 discussion on KZYX, forming a pattern of bias and a flaunting of broadcast standards of fairness. Is this acceptable to you?

Mr. Sakowicz is not acceptable to the cannabis patient community as an objective news reporter, nor is his use of KZYX as a bully pulpit against those who dare to disagree with official wisdom.

Sack Sakowicz.

Sincerely,

Pebbles Trippet
Mendocino Medical Marijuana Advisory Board
Fort Bragg

So it begins again. Who’s next?

In the piece, I called Amy Goodman and Ann Coulter “smug ideologues” who use the term as “a favorite punching bag, an omnipresent boogie man who manipulates, digests and excretes a pile of propaganda.”

To which I got a ration of shit from Louis Bedrock of Roselle, New Jersey, who called the essay “shallow” and “silly” (I’m an “intellectual dwarf”), and wrote:

1. Comparing Amy Goodman with Ann Coulter is ludicrous. Goodman is a serious journalist who has earned her reputation by risking her life in East Timor to cover a massacre by the Indonesian army, being arrested in Minneapolis, and detained at the Canadian border while covering news stories in the field. She’s known for asking hard questions to people in power — most famously to Bill Clinton, unlike Coulter whose forte is spawning facile, uninformed opinions like recommending that the US convert all the inhabitants of Iraq to Christianity or calling the murder of a doctor a “retroactive abortion.”

2. Equally demeaning — to Mr. Stelloh, is dismissing Noam Chomsky as a “lefty media critic par excellance [sic].” If Stelloh had read any of Mr. Chomsky’s books instead of the blurbs on the back of the book, it might have enhanced his comprehension of the limits of mainstream corporate media.

In “Manufacturing Consent,” Chomsky explains that five factors act as filters in the corporate media in determining what news is fit to print:

1. Size, ownership, and profit orientation.
2. Advertising as the primary income source. (My local NPR station, WNCR, receives a large grant from Monsanto. This doesn’t give the station much incentive to investigate the dangers of BGH or GMOs.)
3. Reliance on information provided by government, business, and “experts” — often funded and approved by the aforementioned primary sources.
4. “Flak” as a means of disciplining the media.
5. Anti-communism (and anti-socialism) as a national religion and control mechanism.

Thus, whether it’s Fox News, The New York Times, or your local NPR station, the tone may be different, but the message is the same: Support for imperial wars, scant information on the destruction of the planet by corporations, skepticism toward or omission of serious discussion about global climate change, bovine acceptance of the status quo.

Stelloh is an intellectual dwarf attempting to gain attention and credibility by smearing Goodman and Chomsky, and obfuscating the dangers of mainstream media. He recalls the lyrics of Bob Dylan:

“And the words that are used
For to get the ship confused
Will not be understood as they’re spoken.”

In last week’s letters to the editor, I responded thus:

Whoa’ there Louis, easy on the invective. I’m not sure what article you read, but I never said the MSM critique was dead—I said the word is. To quote myself, “MSM” isn’t “a critique of powerful institutions anymore; it’s simply a way for politicians and political organizations and powerful people to talk about politics.” My point in comparing Goodman to Coulter was simple: On issues of domestic politics, each represents an ideological position so entrenched their critiques and commentary feel like talking points from their respective ends of the ideological spectrum. Yes, Goodman has one of the best digests of undercovered foreign news around. But just as you’ll never hear Coulter criticize James Dobson or Mike Huckabee or Dick Cheney, you won’t hear Amy Goodman critically interview Dennis Kucinich or Ralph Nader or Barbara Lee, or any other of the left’s sacred cows. Which is a shame, because the real left—not the fictional left of Barack Obama and Bill Clinton—but the real left, is in laughable shape. They have no power—and perhaps a few “hard questions” would do them some good. Regarding Chomsky, I’m not following you on the one-man smear campaign I’ve apparently initiated, as I’m not sure how “lefty media critic par excellence” could possibly be interpreted as derisive. For your benefit, I’ll translate without the fancy French: He’s one of the left’s most sophisticated public intellectuals when it comes to media. I’ll be even plainer: I like him. I respect him. And I respect his ideas. I certainly don’t want to leave the impression that I’ve besmirched the good name of Noam.

Apparently my response didn’t make Jeff Blankfort of Ukiah too happy. In this week’s letters to the editor, he writes:

Finally, somehow I missed Tim Stelloh’s piece comparing Amy Goodman with Ann Coulter which is simply ludicrous, particularly when he seems to infer that Dennis Kucinich, Ralph Nader and Barbara Lee are simply liberal-left mirror images of the likes of Mike Huckabee, James Dobson, and Dick Cheney, as if the relative power of those ultra right wing kooks compared to the trio of liberal leftists as well as their contrasting public records are irrelevant. It isn’t that Kucinich, Lee, and Nader couldn’t stand to be asked more than the usual softball questions by Amy or anyone else, but what, aside from Lee’s general subservience to the Israel lobby, would you expect to uncover?

I also take issue with Tim when he lauds praise on Noam Chomsky whose name at this point in time I have no problem besmirching. Chomsky has been for some years and proudly so, the most important defender of the pro-Israel lobby within the ranks of the liberals and the left, not by praising it of course, but by going out of his way to dimiss its influence on US Middle East policy. To do that he has had to distort the history of US-Israel relations to such a degree that anyone who has actually studied the subject, as have I and others, might have legitmate reasons to question his motives as well as his intellectual honesty, particularly when he has also openly opposed the boycotts, divestment and sanctions movement designed to put global pressure on Israel.

Several years ago, I decided that he had to be challenged and I wrote an article: “Damage Control: Noam Chomsky and the Israel-Palestine Conflict. I think AVA readers will find it enlightening.

www.leftcurve.org/LC29WebPages/Chomsky.html

Jeff Blankfort
Ukiah

To which I was happy to respond.

“Uncover” isn’t a word we can use with good ol’ Amy, as that would assume she (still) practices the respectable craft of investigative journalism. Yes, occasionally she’ll feature the reporting of somebody else, but investigative journalism isn’t what she does. She’s a host. She does news from the left, for the left, that, much of the time, seems little more than PR. That’s fine, but that’s why I called her an ideologue (like Coulter). Both she and Coulter bag on the “mainstream media” with the same holier-than-thou glee for not covering the stuff they think the MSM should cover or for being complicit in the crises of the day. That’s why I called her smug. That was my only point of comparison — 13 words in an 800 word essay about the MSM. To be clear, I agree with our esteemed editor, who pointed out last week that Goodman isn’t a lying, raving fascist like Coulter. She’s just overly-earnest, painfully dull and a terrible interviewer. To get back to the point, I don’t want Goodman to try and “uncover” anything. I want something much more basic: a thorough, probing interview instead of drab asskissery. Re: Chomsky. I was talking about media, not Israel. But we appreciate the self promotion.

It wasn’t all bad. Author and AVA contributor Bruce Patterson wrote:

Dear Mr. Stelloh

I enjoy your writing and especially liked last week’s Mainstream Media Madness, given its relevance. The AVA is the best little newspaper in the west precisely because it isn’t mainstream. Over the decades the AVA has been allowed to publish so much subversive material because it is whispering into the whirlwind. What’s remarkable about the mainstream media is the unity of its ownership and voice. It controls not just the national agenda but the people’s vocabulary, values and “world view.” The best media critic ever was George Orwell.

What Henry Adams wrote during the 19th Century is doubly-true today, “The press is the hired agent of a monied system, and set up for no other purpose than to tell lies where the interests are involved. One can trust nobody and nothing.”

One last note. The premise of my essay was about how “mainstream media” used to be a sophisticated critique of powerful media institutions. As I said in the essay, I don’t disagree with Chomsky’s view–that big media is a profit-driven monster controlled as any mega corporation is, from the top down–though I often do, particularly when we’re talking about newspapers, which still break much of the news that winds up in Huffington Post and on the cable channels. Yes, the fact that newspapers have operated wholly as public (and private) corporations dependent on ad dollars is insane–and the industry is feeling the wrath of that now. But there’s no accounting for individuals in Chomsky’s critique. It’s all systemic: Reporters and editors merely do what the top of the food chain tells them to. Sometimes this is how it works–it certainly seemed like there was a conspiracy in the run-up to the Iraq War (McClatchy nothwithstanding). Often, however, I think that view is completely off base. Reporters do terrible things independent of their bosses: They’re lazy, unimaginative and simply not interested in one of things I find most exciting about this profession (as corny as it s0unds): being driven enough to follow where a story leads you.

The collapse of our industry  shouldn’t be underestimated either: Having to write three stories a day because the rest of the newsroom has been laid off doesn’t foster solid reporting skills.

When I was a beat reporter at a daily owned by a giant media corporation, I never once had a story killed because it was too controversial–which seems to be the fear among people who talk about “corporate media” like it’s the anti-Christ. I wrote four to five stories a week, which allowed time for longer, deeper projects. Our competitor daily, however, was locally-owned and run by the ex-head of the Chamber of Commerce, who had deep ties to local businesses and politicians. It was a terrible paper–mostly because their reporters were expected to pump out two to three stories a day. They rarely broke news and they did no investigative work.

What’s my point? Media is complicated. Not all “corporate media” should be derided as such. And not all locally-owned media are bastions of independent thought.

]]> http://theava.com/archives/2838/feed 0 http://theava.com/archives/2825 http://theava.com/archives/2825#comments Wed, 23 Dec 2009 19:43:58 +0000 Letters to the Editor http://theava.com/?p=2825 GREENHOUSE SUMMIT GAS

Greetings Editor,

Can anyone with some economic expertise inform me about how much (in round figures) gasoline, airplane fuel, energy, cop overtime, the use (or non-use) of many thousands of toilets, vandalism, etc. and the resultant huge carbon footprint costs our planet and ultimately its inhabitants (human and otherwise) due to the idealistic and fervent reactionism surrounding the Copenhagen Climate Summit by the hundreds of thousands of protesters who — well meaning as usual — will have little or no ACTUAL EFFECT on the outcome of a rather specious summit conference? Will it equal, say, the trust fund monies that apparently paid for so many comfy jet airplane trips to Denmark?

Perhaps these protesters should have stayed home and given their plane fares, hotel expenses, etc. to some needy local charity or cause. As long as humanity uses the green ethic to continue business as usual (with a few minor tweaks here and there) — i.e., basically untrammeled population growth and recreation of the natural world in our own images — summit conferences and mass protests thereof may eventually become luxuries.

John Shultz
Willits

Editor,

The 6th Annual Emerald Cup at Area 101 in Laytonville went off without a hitch —
no negative incidents, no parking problems, no law enforcement intrusions, just 600 people in a festive atmosphere in the pouring rain pulling together to pull it together.

#1 was Cotton Candy Kush grown by a lifelong grower, unlike last year’s winner who was a first time grower.

Three women were in the top 10. Last year’s #3 winner died of cancer after his crop placed #3.

His wife went on to grow the “sugaree” after he died and placed #5.

A woman also won the prize for best photograph.

At the pre-party Friday nite, an excellent new full-length film, “Cash Crop,” was shown, featuring Area 101′s Tim Blake, Sheriff Tom Allman, Dr Courtney, his wife Kristen and her mother, Dan Hamburg, Lorraine Ahlswede formerly of the SB420 ID card program, myself and several other locals.

Rolling Stone Magazine is expected to do a major Emerald Cup story in a coming issue.

Pebbles Trippet
Elk

Dear Friends,

Back in October super-adventurer Michael Fay arrived in Caspar for a talk about his recent transect (a fancy word for a hike) through the redwoods, from Oregon to Big Sur. His presentation coincided with National Geographic Magazine’s feature story written by John Bourne on the redwoods in that month’s issue.

As dwellers in some of the remaining stands of coastal temperate rain forest in Mendocino County, we found Bourne’s convivial portrayal of the Pacific Northwest timber industry in its present incarnation detestable. Whatever his good intentions may have been, Bourne scarcely could have provided more favorable coverage to the corporate chameleons who currently seek to maximize their profits at the expense of our local ecosystems. Fay’s advocacy of this corporate greenwashing campaign, portrayed throughout Bourne’s article, is equally disturbing. In Caspar this agenda was on full display.

The main thread of the story is Michael Fay’s politically misguided, essentially pro-industry line, which maintains that “better managed” forests can provide “high-quality lumber” while actually preserving forest ecosystems. Despite their newfangled paens to “sustainable forestry,” the timber industry’s goal in this area remains fundamentally unaltered, even under the green-washed auspices of companies like Humboldt Redwood Company (HRC) and Mendocino Redwood Company (MRC): to turn forests into a commodity, so as to accumulate profits in their own coffers and those of distant banks. Altruistic notions of jobs for locals and clean rivers for fish factor in only to the extent that they benefit the company’s public images. Their PR operations have grown far more sophisticated under the direction of the Fisher Family than they were under the stupidly brazen Maxaam and Georgia Pacific multi-national timber firms in the ‘80s and ‘90s.

The carefully crafted “green” image of HRC and MRC rests largely on the image they have cultivated with help from their chief forester, Mike Jani — a man invoked in Bourne’s piece as a model proponent of the new politics of sustainable forestry. Notably, Jani is known to many forest defenders in Santa Cruz as “The Butcher of Butano,” in connection with his role in the liquidation of the final 4,000-acre tract of unprotected residual old growth redwood trees in the Santa Cruz Mountains while serving as chief forester of Big Creek Lumber Co. in the early to mid-nineties. Jani accomplished this feat in spite of Santa Cruz County’s logging regulations, which are perhaps the most stringent in the country. This sort of bureaucratic acumen makes Jani an ideal representative of a pair of firms that seek to maximize their profits while maintaining the appearance that they are complying with the loophole-ridden standards for “sustainable timber harvesting” set by the Forest Stewardship Council (of which Jani happens to be a director).

The massive swaths of ecosystem to which MRC has laid waste during its decade-plus “stewardship” of Mendocino County forestland provide the clearest testament to the dangers inherent in a greenwashed timber industry. As the Redwood Coast Watershed Alliance and other local activists have copiously documented, MRC has fragmented and eliminated thousands of acres of redwood and conifer forest via dozens of clear-cuts, including in sensitive (and now significantly more polluted) river ecosystems of the endangered coho salmon.

We find equally disturbing the complex schemes to financialize the redwoods and other forest ecosystems, whereby large swaths of wooded land are sold as “carbon offsets” to major polluters like the coal industry. These “carbon markets” do not meaningfully protect forests, nor do they transparently address the problem of global warming and industrial pollution. You’ll hear more about these carbon offsets in the near future as financial giants like Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan Chase are very excited about them, eager to press National Geographic’s staff in their service.

Michael Fay’s desire to provide jobs for timber workers at the same time that forest ecosystems are preserved is admirable. However, the corporate application of his ideas will invariably lead to the further destruction of what little is left of the vitally important remaining wilderness of the Pacific Northwest. After all, corporations are profit-generating machines by their very nature — never forget that their primary legal responsibility to their shareholders is to turn the largest profit possible, not to support local economies and healthy ecosystems.

Will Parrish / Darwin BondGraham
Laytonville / Navarro

To the Editor:

The County teeters on the edge of bankruptcy, yet our Board of Supervisors approaches serious budget cut-backs as if they were virgins considering a serious affair: they flirt with cost cutting notions, they talk these ideas into confusion, and then put off a decision for six months, knowing full well that our local economy is not likely to have some wonderful rebirth in the next year unless the price of pot miraculously soars like a phoenix to $10,000 a pound.

A few examples: At last week’s Board of Virgins’ meeting, John McCowen moved to eliminate our two lobbyists in Washington. Dave Colfax, while admitting that the idea had merit, was concerned that McCowen had not been specific about what it was the lobbyists had failed to do in Washington. Supervisor Smith admitted that it was hard to measure their actual performance. McCowen’s motion was defeated 3 to 2. The Supes agreed to think about it again in six months.

Next, an apparently sponsor-less proposal to increase the Clerk of the Board’s salary by 35% was removed from the Consent Calendar for further review. The Clerk had already promised to take voluntary time off for, oh yes — the next six months — to avoid overrunning her budget. While the clerk’s supervisor, CEO Mitchell, had placed this item on the Consent Calendar without making the requisite recommendation, he wiggled around quite nicely by saying that her current salary was “in line” with other counties.

We have many county employees who have been voluntarily working less than full time for six months or more to save the county money. If the county hasn’t yet collapsed due to work left undone during this time, then should we conclude that the county government was really overstaffed? (I won’t hold my breath waiting for an answer — as to whether it has indeed collapsed — from Tom Mitchell.)

I repeat an idea discussed during the campaigns of Dolly Brown and Paula Dieter in 2008: Namely — to reduce all salaries to a maximum of $85,000 until the economy recovers. This is double the median income level for a family of four and should not cause impoverishment. Another cost reduction suggestion, now current: that the Sheriff’s staff be cut by 4 or 5 deputies should not even be considered. They are working at the same staffing level they had 30 years ago! We cannot afford any less protection from the drunks, the druggies, the zombies, and the criminals in our towns, on our highways and working our pot gardens.

Sincerely,

James F. Houle
Redwood Valley

Dear Bruce:

US President Obama’s speech accepting the Nobel Peace Prize was a good one. One based in the realities of the way the world is and not in a fantasy of the way we might think the world should be.

But what the President’s speech, a justification for war, says is the Peace Prize is a dubious one, the goal of world peace an impossible one. Remember, what the US and Obama define as “evil in the world” can in other cultures be defined as divine. This has been the “truth” of humanity and war from the beginning. It is a reality we will never escape. The Nobel Committee likes Obama because of his commitment to “international engagement” and move away from US “unilateralism.” But remember, The Great War, WW1, was fought because of “international engagement.”

So one would have to question how reality based the Nobel Committee is on the subject of peace, or war for that matter. And for how much longer must the Committee mock itself and the fantasy of peace? It is time for the Nobel Committee to retire the Peace Prize to the dustbin of history, and maybe replace it with a Humanitarian Prize. Because what we see now is the Peace Prize could just as well called the War Prize.

Sincerely,

George A. Hollister
Comptche

Editor,

Coastal residents — including fishermen, divers and gatherers — have joined together to protest the Marine Life Protection Act Initiative (MLPAI). There is plenty of reason to protest.

Jim Martin, vice president of the Salmon Restoration Federation, the Recreation Fishing Association and a member of the Mendocino County Fish and Game Commission, has pointed out many of the foibles of the MLPAI. Special interest groups, unaccountable to elected officials, dominate the process. Key policy decisions are made by private foundations rather than the public. And, at a time when the state is broke, Martin asks who will pick up the tab to police a large number of underwater parks.

Cindy Arch, a longtime ocean preservation leader, is also disturbed that the MLPAI is being funded “by the charitable arms of huge businesses.” She foresees aquaculture (farmed fish) as a real possibility for the coast if the initiative isn’t stopped.

Author, activist and businessman John Lewallen’s critique is perhaps the most devastating. He sees the MLPAI as a diversion from the real prize — offshore oil. He reminds us that while it was during the George W. years that the possibility of drilling off the Mendocino coast reemerged, the Obama administration has done nothing to reinstate a moratorium on the Outer Continental Shelf.

Lewallen’s concern was recently amplified by the appointment of Catherine Reheis-Boyd to the MLPAI’s Blue Ribbon Task Force, a group of “knowledgeable and highly credible public leaders” selected by Governor Schwarzenegger’s Secretary of Resources, Mike Chrisman. Reheis-Boyd is president of the Western States Petroleum Association.

I urge everyone in Mendocino County to become familiar with the MLPAI and the process currently underway for the area from Point Arena to the Oregon border. A good place to start is with Frank Hartzell’s excellent series that ran in the Fort Bragg Advocate-News last summer. Additional information is available on the Albion Harbor Regional Alliance website at albionharbor.org.

Dan Hamburg
Ukiah

Dear Editor,

The juxtapostion of “Gimmee Shelter” (Scaramella/McEwan) and the quotations from Sinclair Lewis’ “Main Street,” supported by my recent reading of George Orwell, lead to the following conclusion: social activism on behalf of a better future for everybody is incompatible politically and psychologically with a sense of entitlement.

“Main Street” is one of the greatest political novels ever written. The heroine, Carol Kennicott, is intelligent, cultivated, and sensitive. Unfortunately, she thinks this makes her more important than other people. The result for Carol is personal misery and an inability to work for realistic improvements in her environment. It is only when Carol gets off her high horse and accepts her commonality with the other citizens of Gopher Prairie that she can escape from intense unhappiness and contribute to a more egalitarian future through pursuing achievable goals such as raising open-minded and enquiring children, and contributing tolerance and aesthetics to her dreary and provincial town.

The connection between “Main Street” and the Mendocino County Board of Supervisors who have such such cruel and insensitive attitudes towards homeless people is that like Carol Kennicott, they need to get over their sense of entitlement. While I expect that Supervisors Colfax and Smith didn’t vote for Bush, what difference does that make if they don’t understand that homeless people are not inferior to them, only less lucky?

The author of the December 2 column “Off the Record” wrote eloquently that socialism is necessary for human survival and prosperity, but the psychological advantages of leftists not kidding ourselves that would be achieved through socialism are also important. Chez Panisse’s Edible Schoolyard is a fine charity, and as a gifted home chef, I would like to believe in the Slow Food movement as political activism, but what difference does it make if one cooks seafood stock from scratch if children are hungry for bread? As George Orwell wrote in “Looking Back on the Spanish War,” when he criticized the “yogis of California” [Christopher Isherwood, etc.] for placing a greater value on “change of heart” than a change in the economic system: “The damned impertinence of these politicians, priests, literary men, and what not who lecture the working-class socialist for his ‘materialism!’ All that the working man demands is what these others would consider the indispensable minimum without which human life cannot be lived at all. Enough to eat, freedom from the haunting terror of unemployment, the knowledge that your children will get a fair chance, a bath once a day, clean linen reasonably often, a roof that doesn’t leak, and short enough working hours to leave you with a little energy when day is done.”

Until these demands are met, everything else — even literature and delicious food — is superfluous, and comfortably situated leftists, such as myself, will live in a state of perpetual self-delusion.

Richard Russell
Santa Clara

Editor,

Merry Christmas?

Sheer torture it is to remember

what’s at last burned down to an ember

but that blow to the heart —

all intention apart —

Strikes hardest that day in December.

Name withheld
Boonville

Dear Editor,

Pebbles Trippet writes (Dec.16) that “LSD,’shrooms and marijuana — all central nervous system expanders — fueled the peace movement. It was our oil. Would anyone disagree?” Well, frankly, yes, unless Pebbles is ready to concede that it also fueled the death of the movement and led to many who became addicted, psychologically, if not physically, to act as if fighting for the right to take those “central nervous system expanders” trumps all the other political and economic issues facing our society today. It doesn’t. That twisted choice of priorities was also alive and well during the 60s and 70s, exemplified by that decade’s leading charlatan, Tim Leary.

But Pebbles may have been tripping too much at the time to realize that the fuel of the movement came not from the dopers but from those who were most endangered by the Vietnam war on the home front, the young men facing the draft and their families and friends. When Nixon shrewdly decided to end the draft, the movement deflated like a New Years’ eve balloon on January one. Sure, marijuana and acid were around, as were psychedelic mushrooms, but no serious activist made taking them a priority and one of the movement’s problems at the time were having to deal with those who did.

In the adjoining letter, Bob Wilkinson is still hung up on the notion that Iraq was a war for oil when there has been no evidence, quite the contrary, that it was. Unless it was a war for oil for China, for Russia, for Malaysia, for Angola, because those are the ones who have signed the big contracts with Iraq’s oil ministry after a two-day auction earlier this month. He would be closer to the truth if he thought it was war orchestrated by the neocons for their favorite country, Israel.

He’s also still hung up on the notion that Al Qaeda is a CIA front — which is almost a guarantee that he has never set foot in the region and knows nothing beyond the superficial about its peoples nor its history. Bob, the US does have enemies out there, enemies that have arisen in response to US imperialism, cultural, as well as militarily. And they are not always nice guys. By pretending that every attack against the US is a false flag operation (and, yes, such operations DO take place), it appears, you are simply projecting the willingness of most Americans to allow themselves to be routinely reamed by the system without showing the least sign of resistance on to people you know nothing about and who refuse to be patsies.

Finally, somehow I missed Tim Stelloh’s piece comparing Amy Goodman with Ann Coulter which is simply ludicrous, particularly when he seems to infer that Dennis Kucinich, Ralph Nader and Barbara Lee are simply liberal-left mirror images of the likes of Mike Huckabee, James Dobson, and Dick Cheney, as if the relative power of those ultra right wing kooks compared to the trio of liberal leftists as well as their contrasting public records are irrelevant. It isn’t that Kucinich, Lee, and Nader couldn’t stand to be asked more than the usual softball questions by Amy or anyone else, but what, aside from Lee’s general subservience to the Israel lobby, would you expect to uncover?

I also take issue with Tim when he lauds praise on Noam Chomsky whose name at this point in time I have no problem besmirching. Chomsky has been for some years and proudly so, the most important defender of the pro-Israel lobby within the ranks of the liberals and the left, not by praising it of course, but by going out of his way to dimiss its influence on US Middle East policy. To do that he has had to distort the history of US-Israel relations to such a degree that anyone who has actually studied the subject, as have I and others, might have legitmate reasons to question his motives as well as his intellectual honesty, particularly when he has also openly opposed the boycotts, divestment and sanctions movement designed to put global pressure on Israel.

Several years ago, I decided that he had to be challenged and I wrote an article: “Damage Control: Noam Chomsky and the Israel-Palestine Conflict. I think AVA readers will find it enlightening.

www.leftcurve.org/LC29WebPages/Chomsky.html

Jeff Blankfort
Ukiah

–

Tim Stelloh replies: “Uncover” isn’t a word we can use with good ol’ Amy, as that would assume she (still) practices the respectable craft of investigative journalism. Yes, occasionally she’ll feature the reporting of somebody else, but investigative journalism isn’t what she does. She’s a host. She does news from the left, for the left, that, much of the time, seems little more than PR. That’s fine, but that’s why I called her an ideologue (like Coulter). Both she and Coulter bag on the “mainstream media” with the same holier-than-thou glee for not covering the stuff they think the MSM should cover or for being complicit in the crises of the day. That’s why I called her smug. That was my only point of comparison — 13 words in an 800 word essay about the MSM. To be clear, I agree with our esteemed editor, who pointed out last week that Goodman isn’t a lying, raving fascist like Coulter. She’s just overly-earnest, painfully dull and a terrible interviewer. To get back to the point, I don’t want Goodman to try and “uncover” anything. I want something much more basic: a thorough, probing interview instead of drab asskissery. Re: Chomsky. I was talking about media, not Israel. But we appreciate the self promotion.

Dear Editor,

Tremendous thanks goes out to all who participated in making this year’s Holiday dinner at the AV Grange a wonderful success. The goodwill and generosity of this community is truly heartening, and this event was a lovely expression of that. There are too many people to name but Thank you to all of the table and chair haulers and the kitchen and dining room setter uppers, the decorators that transformed the Grange to a warm and cozy setting, to the chefs who cooked the main dishes, the carvers, the servers, the 4-H elves/tree-trimmers, to Lynn Archambault and Bill Taylor for playing piano, to the AV Chorus for singing, to all those who helped Clean up and break down the tables and chairs, to those who brought greenery, and set up the lighting. And a final thanks to Diane Paget and Suzie Miller for all of their help in organizing this beautiful community event. Happy Holidays and New Year to all!

Sincerely,
Linda MacElwee
Boonville

Letter to the Editor:

Excuse me, I lost my glasses and haven’t been able to read your paper causing three nervous breakdowns. Yet as Nietzche has said “Without focus there is no direction!”

The other day I was at Low Gap and State street when the light turned green and the green man said it was my turn to cross. No I am not talking about Sheriff Tom Allman. Mendocino County is such a green place. Just ask Captian Fathom!

Anyway, I was damn near run over by a silver truck, and I had the pedestrian right of way. When I looked up and glared at the driver, I realized it was my ex-parole officer by a number of years.

Big D.H. actually looked handsome at 35 miles per hour, dead on and I mean dead on!

He took one look at my sorry ass and told me to get out of the way, and I thanked him.

Some things will never change now will they?

Trent Foster
Ukiah

PS. Carry the word, keep an eye out, and move on.

Editor,

Here is one for your “memo of the week” — no mention of the COMMUNITY.

Taylor: Lakeport officers respond to letter over debate

Written by Norman Taylor

Wednesday, 16 December 2009

It has come to the attention of the Lakeport Police Officers Association (LPOA) that at least one political candidate who was invited to the Lake County Law Enforcement Candidates Night has raised concern about this event not being open to the public. It is the position of the LPOA that it is proper for this event to be closed to the public. To explain our position I would like to let some things be known about how and why this event was planned.

Several of the Lake County law enforcement associations were individually approached by candidates for sheriff and district attorney. Those candidates requested to address the associations during association meetings with the desire to solicit a political endorsement.

Realizing that it is common for political candidates running for the offices of sheriff and district attorney to ask for a political endorsement from all of the county’s law enforcement groups, we joined together to create a group association meeting that would streamline the endorsement request process. This event will be focused on the issues most important to people employed in the law enforcement field in Lake County, so the candidates’ comments will be specific to the group.

The LPOA is proud to be working with the other law enforcement associations in Lake County to produce a venue which will create a fair environment for candidates to solicit the associations for their individual support.

Norman Taylor is president of the Lakeport Police Officers Association.

M. Lanigan
Lakeport

Editor,

LINK TV’s program “Mosaic,” a digest of news clips from stations in the so-called “Middle East,” took time out from the usual sturm und drang to present, from Al Jazeera, a report on a goat beauty contest in Saudi Arabia. A crowd of men, sharply dressed in white robes and red-checked kaffiyehs, paid close attention as the judges scrutinized the animals, while an English voiceover of the Arabic commentary explained the proceedings.

“This is a beauty contest for these special goats. These are Syrian goats, introduced to our country by our Syrian brothers. They are primarily judged by the shape of their heads. The ideal head is round, with big eyes. It is preferred that these goats be black to dark brown, and with narrow waists. These goats command high prices, often even larger than the dowry for a beautiful woman…”

At this point I almost fainted from laughter. Saudi Arabia, the only country in the world named after a particular family, may have more problems than we might think. It is clear that the House of Saud is becoming too inbred, at least.

Humor Uber Alles!
Jay Williamson
Santa Rosa

Editor,

I’m streaming on a Wide Christmas,

just like on public radio.

With cell towers glist’nin’

and children pissin’

their names and weblogs in the snow.

I’m streaming on a Wide Christmas

with every twitter that I write.

May your text be smarmy and snide.

And may all your Christmases be Wide.

Don Morris, “Holiday Classics”
Willits/Emerald Triangle

Mr. Editor:

As you point out every chance you get, those who forecast a rosy future are probably wrong. The problems run deep. The hour is late! There are no painless solutions. Most leaders in all fields, not least journalism, instinctively avoid facing facts that erode faith and long-held belief systems. You identify with the claim that the impact of illegal immigration on the economy is “neutral.” That’s the widely publicized point of view pushed by business and ethnic groups. Enclosed are other ways of looking at aspects of American mythology — immigration, diversity and the workability of democracy under crowded conditions. Alas, real solutions will require waking up to facts and reality. As for the effort to “create jobs,” President Obama has said that “150,000 additional jobs are needed each month just to keep up with the growing working population.” A critic asked why then “are we giving out 160,000 new green cards and temporary work permits each month to working age foreigners?” Add to this thousands of illegals and the term “neutral” becomes absurd.

Richard van Alstyne
Fort Bragg

PS. Senator Feinstein and many others say that immigration is what made this country great! Here is another view. The pity is that about the time European-based birth rates stabilized and began to care for the environment, Congress changed immigration policy to open the flood to prolific Third World hordes.

Editor,

HO! HO! HO! We’re on the go as stimulus bucks flow to the Big Biz Show.

Obama-care will clear the air and make it fair for Medicare to cover those who decompose.

Got Osama on the run, visible in the noonday sun. Drones aloft will wipe him out giving way to a US rout.

Peace on earth, good will toward men, or Obama bombs will fall again.

Bombs away!
Joe Don Mooney
Hopland

PS. Norman Mailer said, “Fighting a war to fix something makes about as much sense as going to a whorehouse to get rid of the clap.”

PPS. A sign outside a Willits glassworks: “Christmas special! Custom blow jobs, sliding scale.”

A few friends and family members paused upon hearing of my decision to regularly post a blog on theAVA.com website. It’s a fair and not unexpected reaction. After all, they’ve heard me pontificate for years about the importance of accurate, balanced reporting on events that shape our lives and the communities where we live. The new web site, an adjunct of the free-wheeling Anderson Valley Advertiser, may seem an unlikely venue for a veteran journalist with long ties to the mainstream media.

So let me explain how I got there.

The world of newspapers as I’ve known it was showing shocking signs of imploding before August, 2008 when I accepted an early retirement offer from The Press Democrat in Santa Rosa. It was not an easy decision. I loved my job writing about the North Coast. The issues, the places and the fascinating people were the source of endless stories, a number of which garnered national attention.

Still the end was in sight to the heady days of newspapering as I experienced them. An advertising revenue free-fall put the squeeze on the newsroom, curtailing expansive coverage and limiting the amount of time and money to work in-depth stories. Shorter stories and more of them became the mantra of editors grappling with staff cutbacks and reductions in available news space.

Since then things have only become worse, in Santa Rosa and in every newsroom across America. Legions of journalists and their colleagues in production, circulation and advertising have lost their jobs. The very future of newspapers is in doubt.

Give everything, what does a true believer in the importance of accurate, timely information do?

There are more theories than answers, of course. Maybe the big scramble to return profits to the news business will come up with a formula that will keep Wall Street happy. But what we the information consumer end up with is questionable.

So let’s get back to the old dog and theAVA.com, and his decision to enlist in the only non-profit news information venture that I know of on the North Coast. That’s right. TheAVA.com depends on dollars contributed by readers, and not advertisers to cover the costs. It’s part of fledgling movement nationwide for community-based, subscription-supported journalism.

TheAVA.com web editors are Tim Stelloh and Freda Moon. I don’t know Stelloh and Moon personally, but their writing talents are obvious. Click on Timstelloh.com and Fredamoon.com to see examples of their published works in The New York Times, the Christian Science Monitor and other main stream media icons.

Yes, AVA Editor and Publisher Bruce Anderson is still around, overseeing the print version of the Boonville-based weekly and carrying his fiery brand of newspapering from the cottages to the palaces. “Fanning the flames of discontent” is a cry Bruce still shouts on his newspaper’s masthead.

But, no, I don’t find my new relationship with the new AVA website incompatible with my lifetime beliefs as a journalist.

There are other veteran journalists who too ponder where we’ve been, and where we might go.

Alan D. Mutter is a Silicon Valley media consultant. During his newspaper career, Mutter was a former editor of the Chicago Sun-Times, and San Francisco Chronicle. He currently writes an intriguing blog on the state of journalism at http://newsosaur.blogspot.com/.

Among Mutter’s most recent observations:

“In the interests of tossing a potentially unwelcome ingredient into the roiling stew over the future of journalism, I’d like us to consider for a moment whether a more outspoken, less diffident, more opinionated and less dreary press might be welcomed by journalists and readers alike.”

I’m willing to give it a try. Subscribe to theAVA.com – remember it’s a non-profit venture – for $25 a year, and together let’s see what happens.

You can contact Mike Geniella at mgeniella@gmail.com.

Staff had rolled up the carpet because they thought it didn’t fit with the sculptures on exhibit. They then left it on a stairway where Dr. Miller declared it a safety hazard and decided it should be moved to his house for storage. Instead of simply returning the rug, valued at upwards of $5,000 when he was recently asked to return it, Dr. Miller snapped at the requester, “Who authorized you to contact me?” and “How dare you volunteer the maintenance guy’s services to pick up the rug.” As we go to press, the rug remains at the doctor’s house. (Miller’s KZYX show on alternating Tuesdays is called “Mind, Body, Health, Politics” where the unwary could be reduced to a kind of wheat germed feeblemindedness if any of the doc’s nostrums were to be taken seriously. So, why the gratuitous insult? It’s the holiday season.)

Dear friend and fellow worker John Wester,

We really wanted to see you and your Jewish wife in the flesh. As we can attest, some things in life just don’t happen. We are once again in Tom Allman’s torture chamber hellhole, or poor man’s health spa depending on how you adapt. I am re-reading Hemingway, a great writer who blew his brains out at age 62. I felt that way myself, but my early years in Catholic school convinced me of two things: 1. It is a crime against God to commit suicide. 2. A decent and caring man never divorces. We never have, we just keep adding them on.

We are fortunate that all my “wives” especially Tami-Diane, my #1 ex, are standing with me.

The bad guys are trying to kill me. I won’t, er, will bore you with the latest total injustice. I was arrested for breathing air in Fort Bragg. I was not drunk, not causing anybody any harm. I was accused of not downloading my bracelet two days after the probation officer demanded that I return it — which I did.

Next to Joe Hill, Debs, Sacco and Vanzetti, Judi Bari, etc. my coming death at the hands of the HIDs (hoodlums in government) pales.

After my last capture we had our fourth heart attack along with my colo-rectal cancer and tuberculosis. We don’t expect to live much longer.

We know that my family, my union and my nation will carry on.

Up with the rebels,
Alan ‘Captain Fathom’ Graham
Ukiah/Albion

Greetings Editor:

That fading inaugural glow…

No matter what color a cat is, a politician is still a politician, and Barack O-bomb-a is just that: a politician. I’m amazed at people baffled by O-bomb-a. Every O-bomb-a maniac is now wearing a rubber chicken on top of their heads as mediocrity comes home to roost! That same musty old Hope expecting fresh new change doesn’t seem to “work.”

John Schults
Willits

Hey, Newstender,

Another round for the house! Keep them coming until the money runs out. Here’s my $50 so I can keep on pounding them down. Please don’t stop till my eyes pop out and my head explodes!

Thanks,
Doug Lotz
Mad River

PS. Question for anyone who might know why the criminal organizations known as big oil, Wall Street bankers, multinational corporations, Big Pharma, Congress, Senate, etc. are not being prosecuted under the RICO act which was used to go after organized crime groups such as the Mafia, drug dealers, street gangs etc. Just wondering why not? Anyone know? Just asking!

Dear AV community,

The Elderhome board is delighted to announce that with generous community support and a grant from the Mendocino County tobacco settlement committee we paid down our mortgage by $200,000 in 2009. Thanks to a local donor and with your invaluable help, the mortgage can be reduced by an additional $100,000!

An anonymous pledge of $50,000 has been made toward the mortgage *if* it is matched by the community. So this holiday season your tax-deductible contribution to the Valley’s nonprofit, community owned Elderhome will be doubled, helping us take another big step toward making our much-needed assisted living facility a reality.
In 2009 we also celebrated the completion of $100,000 in improvements to the Elderhome property. These included the new water and septic systems that are core elements for rebuilding the house into an approved assisted living facility.

Right now, however, the goal is to reduce our debt before taking hammers in hand. It’s the fiscally responsible thing to do.

Please give as generously as you can and remember that your contribution at this time will be doubled. Every pledge brings us closer to starting construction and achieving our goal of keeping our elders at home in the Valley.

“We very definitely need the Elderhome, otherwise families are torn away from our beautiful valley. This valley has become a little hamlet. Even if you are not related, you know almost everyone. This community is a family.”

Lucille Estes
Boonville

Stephen Krieg, President
Anderson Valley Elderhome
PO Box 455, Boonville, CA 95415. 707-895-3889

Letter to Editor

Yearly mudslides and wildfires can, and should, be prevented with Supertanker jumbo jets, but the fire officials refuse to do it!

If they had put the Station Fire (and others) out when it started by using the DC-10s or 747 Supertanker water bombers and others immediatly at the START of the fire as the firefighters were calling for, but were REFUSED by uppercrust fire officials, there wouldn’t be the mudslide threat we now have resulting from the 280+ square miles of charred forest that the US Forest Service deliberately ALLOWED the original 15 acre fire to spread to and burn.

We must stop this kind of suicidal “fire management” by the Fire Industrial Complex that has been burning our state and country for over 16 years with protracted fires for power and profit that devastate and kill EVERY year.

We must demand that wildfires be STOPPED IMMEDIATLY WITH SUPERTANKERS every time the fires START while the fires are still small, which the Forest Services have NEVER done. We must contact every politician there is about this to stop this yearly horrible loss of life and homes from wildfire and the resulting MUDSLIDES caused by absence of vegetation destroyed by wildfires that Supertankers would have stopped if called in time!

We must get organized and DEMAND the jumbo jet Supertanker aircraft. See evergreen supertanker (on internet) being used at the START of wildfires.

Sincerely,
Ed Nemechek
Landers

Dear Editor:

Today we attended an Explorer’s Club Christmas luncheon. Gifts were exchanged. One person received a decorative ornament for the top of a Christmas tree. He was quite pleased as his angel was quite tattered and needed replacing.
This got me to thinking about the tradition of putting an angel ornament on top of the Christmas tree. Not many people know how the tradition got started.

Back in the 1950s Santa was having quite a lot of trouble with his helpers. The elves were sitting around drinking and smoking cigarettes. The reindeer were frolicking in the meadows, rather than going to the gym in preparation for their one hard night’s work. And the angel was behaving like a teenager (you know what *that* means).

Worried, on the 20th Santa went to check on his troops. The elves had hardly enough toys for Canada, let alone Europe and America. The reindeer hadn’t done anything to the sleigh; the damage from that little incident in Barstow was unrepaired. And the whole sleigh needed a coat of paint.

He looked for the angel and finally found her — still asleep at 12:30 in the afternoon. He woke her up — not gently.

He called a meeting and made a get-tough speech. The elves were to work 24 hour a day shifts to catch up. The reindeer were to drop everything and get cracking on the sleigh — including the harnesses. The angel asked, “What should I do?” Santa put her in charge of the finding and decorating a Christmas tree.

On December 24th Santa checked their progress. It was a disaster! The elves were all drunk and there were still no toys for Alaska, New Zealand, Poland or New Jersey. The sleigh had been fixed, but not repainted. The harnesses had not even been touched. Jeez, what a cockup. It was a low point in Santa’s long career.

About that time the angel walked in, dragging this pathetic looking, crummy Christmas tree. In a harpy voice she asked, “Santa, what’ll I do with this Christmas tree?”

And Santa told her.

And that’s how the tradition of putting an angel on top of the Christmas tree got started.
It’s a simple, but lovely Christmas story. Pass it on to your children.

Best regards,

Bart Boyer
San Diego

Dear Mr. Stelloh

I enjoy your writing and especially liked last week’s Mainstream Media Madness, given its relevance. The AVA is the best little newspaper in the west precisely because it isn’t mainstream. Over the decades the AVA has been allowed to publish so much subversive material because it is whispering into the whirlwind. What’s remarkable about the mainstream media is the unity of its ownership and voice. It controls not just the national agenda but the people’s vocabulary, values and “world view.” The best media critic ever was George Orwell.

What Henry Adams wrote during the 19th Century is doubly-true today, “The press is the hired agent of a monied system, and set up for no other purpose than to tell lies where the interests are involved. One can trust nobody and nothing.”

Bruce Patterson
Boonville

Dear Bruce,

Religion, you want religion? I’ll give you religion — the new one; it’s called Corporateism. It has millions of followers already. It began as a cult, as all religions do.

The first few members were called the owners of the trading companies that went around the world “exploring” in the search for profits. That readily morphed step by step into today’s full blown religion, the goal of which is always to control the populace.

The god of this is called Corporation. By law it is a person. And it is worshipped by all who genuflect at the font of profit. There is definitely a hierarchy, with the CEOs at the top, (acting as high priests), then come the middle managers (acting as deacons), followed by the workers, (acting as parishioners).

The dogma is right up-front. It encompasses the concept “capitalism good-socialism bad” Along with this is the other dogma-in-chief, “Free market good-regulated market bad.” These two are chanted continuously by the devout (acting as a catechism).

There is also a trinity in this religion. Growth-profit-and the invisible hand of the market are all there (acting as the father, the son, and the holy ghost). You can’t separate them because it is a holy trinity.

Like every other religion this one also takes money from the poor and redistributes it to those on top. It is not called charity; it’s called tithing, and it is no more voluntary in Corporateism than it is in old religions.

It is a social mechanism for redistributing the wealth upwards to the corporation (acting as church). Middle managers allow themselves to be part of this upward flow (acting as preachers of the corporate party line).

The power in this religion comes from above, from the stock owners, manipulators, traders, insiders, and brokers (acting as god and the angels). Part of the control of the populace comes in the form of social events, such as sport games, computer games, game shows on tv (acting as pallatives on critical thought). Another means with which they control the populace is via fear. If you do not obey you will end up broke (acting as ‘if you do not obey you will end up in hell’).

As Karl Marx so aptly said, the ideas of the ruling class are the ideas adopted by those who are ruled. This is true in Corporateism (acting as the word of god). There is even a holy book titled “The Wealth of Nations” (acting as the Holy Bible). Marx also said that religion is the opiate of the people. Corporaetism makes the populace feel good by providing the delusory dream of getting rich someday (acting as going to heaven).

Finally (oh there’s more, but space is limited), Corporateism has a set of rules known as the Corporate Creed (acting as the Ten Commandments). Thou shalt not go bankrupt. Thou shalt not be generous. Thou shalt not have any other god before profit. Thou shalt not refrain from ruining the competition. Thou shalt not refrain from denying responsibility for harmful acts. Thou shalt not care about community. Thou shalt not treat workers fairly. Thou shalt have dominion over the globe and all under the heavens. Thou shalt make alliances with the devil if need be. Thou shalt know that all are greedy by nature.

So it is as we enter the 21st Century that the old god has been replaced; the new god is well ensconced in the boardroom (acting as high temple). Yes, the new one is filled with as many internal contradictions as the old religion. That doesn’t seem to bother the parishioners, nor does it seem to bother the populace. The opiad is working well, thank you. Praise profit!

Lee Simon
Far ‘n Away Farm
Virginia

Editor,

It’s not worth it. That $2 you might save at a big chain or buy on the internet.

This notion struck me solidly the other day when I read about Spencer Brewer’s music store closing. I consider Spencer one of the community’s greatest assets. An excellent musician himself, Spencer has brought music into our Ukiah valley in so many ways: his recording studio, a music school and performance space, Music in the Park, producing local music shows at his shop, piano concerts and his shop itself. Essential gifts for our community. But customers weren’t buying from his store because they thought the internet was cheaper.

Now I was an early internet fan and have purchased many things by catalog. But I’ve learned to adjust my thinking and that’s not easy for me, as I love a good deal. I am adjusting though, because, well, it’s just not worth it. Cheap is not value. The lowest price is not the best deal. First of all, someone local will help you get it fixed if there is a problem. Secondly, the owner and staff of that store generally has some product knowledge and can help you make an informed choice.

On top of that, the dollars I spend on local goods has even more added value.

Here is the idea: Buying local products at locally owned businesses keeps money circulating in our community. This creates a ripple effect as those businesses and their employees in turn spend that money locally (we hope). Corporate chains send most of your money out of town.

The rule of thumb is that for every dollar spent at a local business 45¢ is reinvested locally. For every dollar spent at a large corporate chain, only 15¢ is reinvested locally.

Every local purchase triggers purchases by others within a community. For instance, a dollar spent on rent might be spent again by the local property owner at the local grocer, who in turn pays an employee, who then buys a movie ticket. This phenomenon is what economists call “the local multiplier.” The more times a dollar circulates within a defined geographic area and the faster it circulates without leaving that area, the more income, wealth, and jobs it creates. This basic concept in community economics highlights the importance of maximizing the numbers of dollars being spent locally.

I believe that supporting local enterprise should be part of any strategy for economic regeneration. Local enterprises are more likely to employ local people, provide services to improve the local quality of life, spend money locally, promote community unity and, by reducing transportation of goods from far away, will have less environmental damage.

More than employers and profit-takers, local business people are also neighbors, community builders, and the starting point for aligning commerce with the common good. Local business generally pays better than big box stores and seldom cuts their hours so they won’t have to pay full time benefits.

The national and global economy has failed to live up to its promise of providing stable livelihoods and has placed our communities and our environment in great peril.

Especially now, we need to rethink our local economy and make it stronger. It is time to rethink that $2 savings and use your money with more effect. Let’s keep good community stores alive. Local is worth it.

Michael Laybourn
Hopland

Hello,

This is Javier Silva from the Sherwood Valley Band of Pomo. I support what the Potter Valley Pomo plan on doing on the land outside of Fort Bragg and encourage them to continue with their economic efforts. The people in Fort Bragg well know our presence with the small community located on the Noyo Harbor made up of Sherwood Valley members. We appreciate any support from the Fort Bragg community in our efforts to restore, enhance and respect our cultural values. We are the original stewards of the land and as such we look to protect our environment. Our people continue to gather and hunt to this day. We need to reassure them that it is safe to do so now and in the future. Again, I want to show my support for the Potter Valley Pomo and hope to work with them, the people of Fort Bragg and the county in the near future. Thank you for your time.

Javier Silva
Sherwood Valley Band of Pomo

Editor,

Imagine my surprise when a kind soul at the Emerald Cup in Laytonville last week told me, “There was a cartoon of you in the AVA. Did you catch it?”

“Wha? What are you talking about?”

“Yeah, there was a cartoon of you hitchhiking down the highway, and it’s a close resemblance.”

“Really? I missed it. Dr Doo?”

“Yep.”

“Was I nude?”

“I didn’t notice that.”

Puzzled, I checked out back issues and yes, there ’twas, buried underneath an ad, easy to overlook.

I was “hightailing it down 128.” But I wasn’t hitchhiking. I was running on LSD, smiling, carrying a lunchbox with a peace sign painted on it.

That’s an accurate characterization since most LSD users were anti-war.

LSD, ‘shrooms and marijuana — all central nervous system expanders — fueled the peace movement. It was our oil.

Would anyone disagree?

I’d previously told the story of my Boston experience — being able to run a mile with acid in my system without tiring, learning the benefits first hand.

I was escaping an overbearing bully who wouldn’t stop hassling me, who followed me off the bus, brazen, bellowing, hoping to slow me down.

The opposite occurred. I sped up. My instinct is to run from bombs.

Fight or flight? I chose flight, running underneath the elevated train, the noise and lights protect.

It was the clarity of the LSD that released my enhanced energy to run at top strength with the presence of mind to focus on the problem.

I don’t recall being tired at all. Running underneath the elevated train provided protection.

My own brief experience with athletic excellence cleared the cobwebs of my mind and tells me that the story of the pitcher who threw a no-hitter while on LSD is absolutely credible.

As a youngster baseball catcher and standing broad jump competitor, I know how to appreciate an excellent game.

Pebbles Trippet
Elk

To the Editor:

President Obama has ordered an additional 30,000 troops into Afghanistan in 2010, increasing American troops to 98,000. Obama is nothing more than a puppet, doing what he has been told. The oil pipeline from the Caspian Sea to the Arabian Sea via Turkmenistan, Afghanistan, and Pakistan will be established and American combat troops will be withdrawn. A contingent of American troops will remain in Afghanistan to protect oil interests. We have been involved in this “blood for oil” war for eight years. The deaths and injuries continue and will soon escalate.

This is similar to the performance by the puppet George W. Bush when he ordered the 2003 invasion of Iraq in order to control their oil. 4,367 American military gave their lives and more than 30,000 suffered injuries in the “blood for oil” war in Iraq. Tens of thousands of Iraqi men, women, and children gave their lives or suffered injuries also in the George W. Bush “blood for oil” war. The deaths and injuries in the war continue more than six years later.
Organizations are encouraging American troops to refuse to fight but military personnel are trained killers and the majority will follow orders. Many congressional representatives are puppets and therefore only do what their financial backers tell them to do as they continue to fund the wars.

President Obama has set the defeat of al Qaeda as his objective in Afghanistan. Al Qaeda is a CIA front group. Al Qaeda, the CIA front group, is responsible for many terror related activities over the years such as: 2001 — 9/11 WTC tragedies; 2005 — 7/7 London bombings; 2004 — Madrid train bombings; 2003 — Jakarta hotel bombing; 2000 — USS Cole bombing; 1998 — Kenya and Tanzania U.S. embassy bombings; 1993 — WTC bombing; 1988 — Pan Am Lockerbie bombing.

A ubiquitous foundation of “terror” has been established on this planet by the U.S. and certain allies. The CIA/al Qaeda terror group is assisted by other intelligence organizations such as MI5 in the UK, ISI in Pakistan, and Saudi Arabian intelligence.

The American people have got to expose the puppeteers that are the hidden face of terrorism. This will take years of dedicated work by investigators that value freedom over their footsteps into the danger zone to stop this perpetual war machine. The outer circle of puppeteers includes the “Council on Foreign Relations.” As one looks deeper into the inner circles the elite moneyed interests in the world begin to appear on the landscape.

The American people have got to identify, prosecute, and imprison the elite moneyed interests that are responsible for global terrorism and “blood for oil” wars.

Bob Wilkinson
Laytonville

Editor,

A Christmas tree is an expression of religious faith for Christians. I am at a loss to understand its appropriateness in the workplace.

There is a very large expression of this religious faith in the lobby of the Financial District office building where I work. Many employees in America are not Christian, and the presence of a Christian symbol in the office serves to remind us that we are different, that to some, we do not truly belong here.

I am saddened by the insensitivity of the building management and surprised that this particular management company, being Jewish, would not have thought to be more inclusive of all people who pass through the building lobby.

Marilyn Wacks
Montara

Howdy,

1.Where does one access the “farmer’s weather” report?
2.What is an ideologue?

As to the first question, we here experienced the same problem with the weather forecast a week ago, because it didn’t rain like it was supposed to, we got caught unprepared for the extreme freezing. It was down to 12 — 14 degrees (depending on which temp. gauge one looked at), for three nights.

We have experienced below 10 degrees here back in the ’90′s.

In the early ’70′s it got cold enough to top kill mature native trees (bay, maple, alder) which is pretty unusual.
The second question comes from the use of the term by Stelloh (Mainstream Media Madness, 12/9/09).
When he lumped Amy Goodman and Ann Coulter in the same category, I had to go to Webster’s to define terms.
Unfortunately, my copy does not define ideologue. Rather than try to piece the word together, I ask you as you are a man who knows words.

John Phillips
String Creek, Willits

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Ed note: An ideologue, John old boy, is a person whose opinions don’t coincide with ours. Technically, of course, an ideologue is a person who translates reality through the prism of a theory or, as most people would probably say, the straitjacket of a theory. Coulter, a stone fascist, would almost certainly prefer to goose step through her paces at Fox News, but I understand Murdoch has told her that his viewers aren’t quite ready for on-camera swastikas. Goodman? Not an ideologue but a lefty-wefty reformer heavy on PC opinion of the received type, and wayyyyy too light on the irony, I’d say, and kinda cult-like in the devotion of her listeners, not that that’s her fault. She’s an important antidote, though, to the deluge of misinformation delivered by the rest of the media, most of it owned by very rich people who, like Coulter, yearn for The Big Crackdown. As for the secret weather reports, the only way to get the true skinny the local farmers get —pot farmers need not apply — is to be a member of the Farm Bureau, and even if you’re a member you still have to call 462-6664 for an unlisted number, which you cannot get unless you belong to the Farm Bureau, or know somebody who is.

Editor,

Re. Tim Stelloh’s silly, shallow article, “Main¬stream Media Madness (AVA, 12/9/09):—

1. Comparing Amy Goodman with Ann Coulter is ludicrous. Goodman is a serious journalist who has earned her reputation by risking her life in East Timor to cover a massacre by the Indonesian army, being arrested in Minneapolis, and detained at the Canadian border while covering news stories in the field. She’s known for asking hard questions to people in power — most famously to Bill Clinton, unlike Coulter whose forte is spawning facile, uninformed opinions like recommending that the US convert all the inhabitants of Iraq to Christianity or calling the murder of a doctor a “retroactive abortion.”

2. Equally demeaning — to Mr. Stelloh, is dismissing Noam Chomsky as a “lefty media critic par excellance [sic].” If Stelloh had read any of Mr. Chomsky’s books instead of the blurbs on the back of the book, it might have enhanced his comprehension of the limits of mainstream corporate media.

In “Manufacturing Consent,” Chomsky explains that five factors act as filters in the corporate media in determining what news is fit to print:

1. Size, ownership, and profit orientation.
2. Advertising as the primary income source. (My local NPR station, WNCR, receives a large grant from Monsanto. This doesn’t give the station much incentive to investigate the dangers of BGH or GMOs.)
3. Reliance on information provided by government, business, and “experts” — often funded and approved by the aforementioned primary sources.
4. “Flak” as a means of disciplining the media.
5. Anti-communism (and anti-socialism) as a national religion and control mechanism.

Thus, whether it’s Fox News, The New York Times, or your local NPR station, the tone may be different, but the message is the same: Support for imperial wars, scant information on the destruction of the planet by corporations, skepticism toward or omission of serious discussion about global climate change, bovine acceptance of the status quo.
Stelloh is an intellectual dwarf attempting to gain attention and credibility by smearing Goodman and Chomsky, and obfuscating the dangers of mainstream media. He recalls the lyrics of Bob Dylan:

“And the words that are used
For to get the ship confused
Will not be understood as they’re spoken.”

Louis Bedrock
Roselle, New Jersey

–

Tim Stelloh replies: Whoa’ there Louis, easy on the invective. I’m not sure what article you read, but I never said the MSM critique was dead—I said the word is. To quote myself, “MSM” isn’t “a critique of powerful institutions anymore; it’s simply a way for politicians and political organizations and powerful people to talk about politics.” My point in comparing Goodman to Coulter was simple: On issues of domestic politics, each represents an ideological position so entrenched their critiques and commentary feel like talking points from their respective ends of the ideological spectrum. Yes, Goodman has one of the best digests of undercovered foreign news around. But just as you’ll never hear Coulter criticize James Dobson or Mike Huckabee or Dick Cheney, you won’t hear Amy Goodman critically interview Dennis Kucinich or Ralph Nader or Barbara Lee, or any other of the left’s sacred cows. Which is a shame, because the real left—not the fictional left of Barack Obama and Bill Clinton—but the real left, is in laughable shape. They have no power—and perhaps a few “hard questions” would do them some good. Regarding Chomsky, I’m not following you on the one-man smear campaign I’ve apparently initiated, as I’m not sure how “lefty media critic par excellence” could possibly be interpreted as derisive. For your benefit, I’ll translate without the fancy French: He’s one of the left’s most sophisticated public intellectuals when it comes to media. I’ll be even plainer: I like him. I respect him. And I respect his ideas. I certainly don’t want to leave the impression that I’ve besmirched the good name of Noam.

Dear Editor,

What a pleasant surprise to see the lead article from the AVHC September Newsletter printed in last week’s Letters to the Editor! It happily joins the company of the Housing Association’s and Senior Center’s fund raising letters that appeared in previous editions of the AVA. This public service is much appreciated.

Thanks,

Susan Addison
Boonville

Editor,

You cite a study from something called the Migration Policy Institute which proves that the economic assets and liabilities of illegal immigration into the US is a wash. Is this the same type of current scientific statistical analysis that proves that unemployment is at 10% and that the “recession” is over?

The Migration Policy Institute’s website lists its sponsors. Among them are various quasi government agencies (i.e. Fanny Mae Corporation) and foundations created by the robber barons of the late 19th and early 20th centuries: Carnegie Corporation of New York; John D. and Catherine T MacArthur Foundation; The Rockefeller Foundation; and The Ford Foundation. These gangsters will support anything that provides an endless supply of cheap, docile, easily exploited labor.

Also, I wonder if the study factored in the 15,000 illegal aliens currently in California prisons? Heroes of the working class, all. And, now that the dope harvest is in, is it safe to hike in the Mendocino woods?

Regards,
Jock Penn
Shawano, Wisconsin

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Ed reply: Are you suggesting that capitalism’s cruelties are caused by its most obvious victims? Dopes in the woods aren’t seasonal. They’re always out there.

Anderson Valley Community:

Thank you for all the support you’ve given toward our Holiday For The Troops fund-raiser. We appreciate every single contribution of items and money donated toward sending packages to the troops in Iraq. A big thank you to All That Good Stuff, AV Market, and Lemons’ Market in Philo for allowing us to set up donation boxes at their stores.

Sincerely,
Ed & Candy Slotte & Family
Boonville

Dear AVA:

What’s worse: screwing a dozen women out of wedlock, or screwing thousands of loyal employees out of their pensions?

Yesterday, Accenture announced it was ending its six-year relationship with Tiger Woods because it’s worried about its reputation with the American public. Really? So the same company that was so embroiled in the Enron scandal that it had to change its name from Arthur Anderson to Accenture is nervous that Tiger is a moral liability? That’s rich.

It has been a long struggle for the Fortune 500 company. For years, Arthur Anderson/Accenture worked really hard to reinvent itself. In fact, it’s what makes the company and Tiger such a perfect match, especially now. They are like two cubs in a cage.

Arthur Anderson/Accenture has such rock solid experience in turning its reputation around, shouldn’t it offer Tiger and his pussycats some advice. Maybe Tiger could get a name change too. How about “Tender”? Or “Love”? Maybe “Sweetiepie”? From where I stand, Tiger and Arthur Anderson/Accenture should be getting a room, not calling it splits.

Tiger should be using his hiatus from the game to sharpen his skills in the PR world. And the fact is, Arthur Anderson/Accenture knows damage control. Tiger’s ad tagline proves it: “It’s what you do next that counts.”
Yes, Arthur Anderson/Accenture, it certainly is.

Naomi Seligman
Los Angeles

THEY WON’T APOLOGIZE, of course, and the money for their lawyers, a good hunk of which is already set aside as an annual retainer, will come out of tax money supposedly earmarked for the education of Mendocino County’s children. The County’s educational brain trust shouldn’t be consulting their free lawyers on one because the injured party, a Ukiah teacher named Dennis Boaz, is suing Tichinin in small claims court where plaintiff and defendant are supposed to square off without lawyers. But you can be sure the lawyers have already put in a lot of time on this one to spare Tichinin further embarrassment. I would think they’re trying to persuade Boaz to drop his claim, trying hard to make it all disappear. But all this maneuvering should be paid by Tichinin out of his own ample pocket. Then again, Tichinin’s probably too niggardly to do the right thing.