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MCT: Wednesday, April 10, 2019

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NORTHWEST WINDS and dry conditions will persist through the day today. Next weak system will approach the area Thursday spreading light rain back across the area. Dry conditions will return for Friday and most of Saturday. (National Weather Service)

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LIVING WITH WILDFIRE in the Navarro River Watershed, a free three part series on consecutive Tuesday evenings at the Firehouse in Boonville, featuring experts from the Mendocino Resource Conservation District and the Fire Safe Council, as well as AVFD Chief Avila.

  • 4/30 - Fire Behavior and Home Hardening
  • 5/7 - Fire Behavior and Best Management Practices for your Property
  • 5/14 - Organizing and Communicating at the Community Level

Attendance at all three isn't required.

Learn what factors might affect fire behavior in your neighborhood and what you can to do to be prepared. Learn how to identify priorities, and how to leverage your neighborhood's organization for resources.

RSVP by email or 707/895-2020

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PROJECT SANCTUARY OPEN HOUSE FRI APRIL 12

In honor of Sexual Assault Awareness Month, please join us at Project Sanctuary for our Open House, Friday, April 12th from 5:30 - 7 PM. We will have information about our services, activities for the whole family, and light refreshments. Project Sanctuary is Mendocino County's dual service domestic violence and sexual assault crisis center. We are located at 461 N. Franklin St in Fort Bragg. Questions? Please call Vicki at 961-1507. We look forward to seeing you!

Project Sanctuary, Inc is a private, not-for-profit organization with the mission is to prevent domestic violence and sexual assault in Mendocino County through advocacy, crisis response, community collaboration, education, and shelter. Founded in 1977, Project Sanctuary assists over 2,000 clients annually and is supported by state and local funds and contributions from individual donors.

Vicki Wellspring, Volunteer Coordinator

Project Sanctuary

(707)961-1507

vicki@projectsanctuary.org

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THE ESSENTIAL FECH

by Fred Gardner

David Fechheimer, San Francisco's premier private investigator, died April 2 after open-heart surgery. We'd been friends for 44 years, minus two. David is Stephen Best in this piece the AVA ran in January, 1990. The original title was 'Nuts.' — FG


Stephen Best, the private investigator, got a call last week from a woman with an accent he couldn't quite place. She wanted to retain him right away. He told her to come to his office right away. About a half hour later there stood a petite and elegant olive-skinned woman of about 50 in an ankle-length mink with a silk scarf around her head. She introduced herself as Alice Boada and repeated that she wanted to retain him.

Stephen said "Retain me to do what?"

She said "I can't tell you."

He explained that in order to help her, he'd have to know what the problem was.

She already had her checkbook out. "May I write you a check for two thousand dollars? Then I'll tell you. I don't want you to back out. I want you to help me."

He assured Mrs. Boada that that was his goal.

"I hear voices," she said, handing over the check. She'd been hearing them for about a year: a man and a woman telling her when to Ieave or not leave her house, and other "very odd things" she didn't want to divulge at that point.

Stephen ascertained that she was the widow of a Portuguese shipping tycoon and lived in Presidio Heights with her teenage daughters. He arranged to inspect the place that evening.

He drove out there with Harry Jablonsky, the wire and electronics man. Harry has been in the business as long as Stephen, more than 20 years, which can give you a cynical outlook. “There are others technically capable of installing wiretaps,” said Stephen, “the streets are full of recording engineers— but Harry looks at the practical aspects of the job. How will the device be installed? How will it be powered? How will the tapes be changed?” (On the other hand Harry is so practical he once built an airplane in the basement of a building on Post Street and then couldn't get it out.)

The fog was penetrating that night and the Boadas' mansion seemed cold and empty. The maid had gone, the daughters were upstairs studying. The place was extremely quiet --the better to hear voices in, perhaps.

Harry conducted an electronic sweep which yielded nothing. Stephen searched the house and discovered a pile of religious tracts in Alice Boada's bedroom. He gathered from the daughters that they never heard voices or strange sounds. "Do you think my mom is crazy?" the younger girl asked bluntly.

Stephen told her that wasn't his field of expertise.

He saw no point in running up the bill. He ran out to Radio Shack and bought a voice-activated tape recorder for $62. He told his client to leave it in her bedroom and notify him when she got the voices on tape. But not until then.

Driving back the two detectives talked about nuts. "They're always out there, only the specific form of their phobias seems to change," Stephen observed. Years ago he'd had a spate of calls from women living alone who complained that someone was putting piles of dust in their apartments. Around the time of Watergate a lot of people "knew" they were being poisoned by the government. Harry recalled doing a sweep of a woman's breasts. She believed a transmitter had been implanted in them.

"A large number of individuals in our society," Stephen generalized, "are certain that they have swallowed transmitters." He once obtained a $25,000 Hewlett-Packard FM band sweeper for an engineer who claimed that while drinking ginger ale at Yosemite he had heard the clink of a transmitter falling out of his tooth. His plan was to sweep his stomach regularly. "The man had a PhD," Stephen added.

One pink-faced gentleman in a seersucker suit and straw hat came to the Lipset office (where your correspondent worked a long time ago) and said he had a lot of things he wanted to do in his life but couldn't because he was totally occupied by his problem: "they" had radiowave access to his brain. They forced him to masturbate, filmed him in the act and then showed brief clips on television, between commercials on the late movie. Using their radio controls of his brain they made it impossible for him to see these clips, but he knew they existed because when he went to Safeway, other shoppers would point him out as the man they'd seen masturbating on television.

For this client Harry built a heavily insulated copper helmet. The apparatus, which resembled a diving helmet, took weeks to make and the agency lost money on it because Harry got so involved in the production. The client would come around for fittings and the secretary and the bookkeeper would flee the office to keep from laughing out loud in his presence. The day the helmet was finished Harry demonstrated it to the client by placing it over a radio which then ceased to function as a receiver. The client was overjoyed, and everybody thought that was the end of the matter but of course it wasn't. The man came back a few weeks later to complain about his lack of mobility. He didn't like to be seen in public with the helmet on, and he couldn't even watch TV comfortably.

Stephen then proposed that the agency build him an insulated van for $50,000. That must have been more than his trust fund could provide because they didn't hear from him again. "Every so often on the Bay Bridge I would check to see if the driver next to me was wearing a copper helmet," Stephen said.

"I do to this day," said Harry.

Harry had a client back in the '50s who lived on the ground floor of a duplex in Sausalito. His landlord, who happened to be Chinese, lived on the floor above. According to the client, the landlord possessed "powers" and would beam electrical waves at him through the floor, preventing him from getting an erection. His marriage was suffering as a result.

The client proposed a plan. Harry would sit outside the house in a car. When the client was ready to make love to his wife, he would lower the shade as a signal. Harry would then go upstairs with a bucket of water, ring the landlord's bell and heave the water into his face. This would startle the landlord, short-circuiting his powers and enabling the client downstairs to get it up.

"I think it worked," Harry says.

One time Stephen couldn't get rid of a guy who claimed to be a CIA agent. "They won't let me come in from the cold. They won't even acknowledge my existence." Stephen told him to go to the Labor Commission and file a complaint for back wages. “Didn't take a nickel from him,” he notes.

And there was a woman who used to fly up periodically from Phoenix and have him tail her to find out if she was being tailed. She never was —except by Stephen. "These people can be the bane of a private investigator's existence," Stephen reflects. "You know you can't help them and you don't want to take their money. You start out feeling sorry for them and wind up feeling used as they pull you into the web of their delusions.

“Once you've started talking to them you're in trouble. If you don't take the case they're convinced you're working for the 'other side.' If you recommend a doctor they're convinced you're the enemy. They've all studied the technical aspects of their problem, so any attempt to reassure them that there's nothing to it is immediately waved off. There's great psychological force behind their fantasies and they can have you hopping from foot-to-foot for weeks, serving their strange needs. Sometimes you come to see them as con artists using you as props in their game.

"But it's not always easy to spot a nut," Stephen adds. "Some have syndromes you've never seen before."


The New York Times obituary by Sam Roberts noted that Fechheimer's clients included “Black Panthers, Koby Bryant, Angela Davis, Robert Durst, John Gotti, Daniel Ellsberg, Patty Hearst, Timothy McVeigh, Roman Polanski and Martha Stewart, among others.” The obit included a photo of Fech with his mentor, Hal Lipset, in which my eyebrow is clearly visible.

Knowing that the editor of the AVA, a voluminous reader, does not find time for the Times, I've pledged to send along items of interest (from my POV, anyway, and maybe yours). Check out www.theava.com for a new feature, “Our Times.”

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"GOOSE REPORT." He was being anti-social today (may have been the rain).

She was doing her job and sitting on her eggs while the "pests" kept a close eye on her.

Decided to go out to MacKerricher Park, it was nice being able to see the lake without all the tall grass around it.

(Judy Valadao)

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WHAT'S IT LIKE WORKING FOR MENDOCINO COUNTY?

MSP stumbled across a website called "Indeed" that had employee ratings for working in Mendocino County. Some were hilarious:

"A downtrodden, nepotistic mess. Librarian (Former Employee) – Ukiah – March 20, 2019

There's not much positive to say here, so I am just going to run down a list of quick faults.


Working for the county, it becomes apparent almost immediately that the 'best people' are rarely promoted. Rather, the majority of the managers advanced due to a combination of nepotism or 'who they knew' in high school. Most lifers are only marking time until they retire, and advancement is offered to those who have 'put in their time' rather than people who are going to innovate or advance.


Financial waste is everywhere. Without going into specifics, it is crystal clear that there is almost zero accountability when it comes to spending tax dollars in a frivolous manner. I haven't directly observed fraud (though I strongly suspect the county is rife with it), but I have seen enough squandering of resources to make me ill.


Training almost always boils down to lectures and nothing more. Not one of the managers I encountered had even the slightest notion of how to teach someone to do a job. Often, I was placed in a position where I was told to, say, observe an employee for an hour (not actually performing any tasks myself), and then expected to be well-versed in doing that employee's job the following day. That is NOT how you train people.


My position suffered acutely from 'multi-manager syndrome' - I had at least three, and sometimes four, people giving me orders. Often, these directives were contradictory; in EVERY circumstance, it was apparent that the managers didn't speak to each other.


My direct manager was almost never in the office - she was present at her desk - no exaggeration - MAYBE 5 hours a week. Every other second was eaten up either in 'meetings,' or via some form of leave. It's like the woman didn't work.


My position was completely misrepresented prior to my hiring. I was told I would be performing a role that never really emerged; instead, I was essentially reduced to serving as an over-educated secretary.


The building I worked in suffered from obvious mold issues.


Pay, at least for my position, was dramatically below the standard elsewhere in the state. An employee doing my job for a county nearer to San Francisco could expect to make upwards of TWICE of what I was being paid. Cost of living aside, that's an enormous and - frankly - irreconcilable gap. I don't care if 'Mendocino County is poor' - they need to offer competitive compensation.


The county itself feels decidedly like a place that was lost to time, and not in a good way. There is a distinct lack of services, recognizable food venues, the Walmart looks like it was the first one ever built, the roads are all in horrible shape, etc. As an outsider moving in, it was an immediate and harsh culture shock - like a 'little slice of Appalachia' tucked into Northern California'."

Pros

I wasn't directly chained to the wall.

Cons

Everything else."

(via MendocinoSportsPlus)

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AN ARAPAHO MAN, 1880-1900.

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ED NOTES

ANOTHER NEW WINERY? Nope, "artisanal" marijuana according to BusinessWire:

"We are one of the few groups in California who are creating and building our own brand, Anderson Valley Reserve, versus white labeling to a distributor,” said Hue Freeman who formed the group in June 2018. “This is much harder to do but we believe this is truly the only way to support the small craft farmers during this turbulent time in this evolving industry.” Anderson Valley Farms is a community-based and family-oriented organization that is deeply embedded in Anderson Valley. The company’s local roots and commitment to cannabis cultivation run deep. Some of its members have been growing continually since the 1970s, and some belong to families that have lived in Anderson Valley for generations. What unites the group of farmers is their dedication to their community, environmental sustainability, and quality production. The Valley’s climate is unique with its hot days and cool nights throughout the summer making it an ideal environment for cannabis, producing rich terpene profiles. The Valley is also known for its world renown Pinot wines.


MEANWHILE, out at Mendocino College, a student in a psychology class was startled by the instructior's statement that "The reason the suicide rate is higher among white males over 60 is because they can't handle not being in control of things anymore." Challenging that unsupported assertion, the student was warned against being "disruptive."


ERIC SWALWELL is a Bay Area congressman who has joined twenty-plus other Democrats running for President. "I will be the first candidate to say that reducing gun violence has to be a top three issue," Swalwell told Esquire magazine. "Last year I wrote a bill calling for a buyback and ban on assault weapons — not just to ban future manufacturing, but to just take the 15 million that are out there and buy them back." Swalwell stated that the buyback is mandatory. "I'm the only candidate calling for a mandatory national ban and buyback of military-style semiautomatic assault weapons. It's bold and will cost money, but it is constitutional and it rightly treats gun violence as a life-or-death matter. Our children deserve better than an attempt to reduce or contain gun violence. Our goal must be to end it."

A MANDATORY, publicly-funded gun buy back? A gun nut immediately took on-line issue, warning that mandatory anything having to do with guns would touch off a civil war. Swalwell's reply: "The government has nukes." (!)


THE MENDOCINO VILLAGE POST OFFICE was closed most of Monday. It seems an elderly patron hit the gas instead of the brake and plowed into the east side of the building, caving in much of the wall. A sign on the P.O. door said it was closed until P.O. central safety-cleared re-entry. The P.O. was open again Tuesday morning.


A LETTER making the HumCo rounds is titled "Rex Bohn must resign" and begins, "Recently, I was informed that Supervisor Rex Bohn made a statement at a non-profit fundraiser about Mexican food, asking if it was authentic enough to ‘make you want to go out and steal hub caps.’ Several reliable sources directly heard the comment…."

BOHN says he doesn't remember saying it, and even if he did, it seems from here such an obscure slur that warrants only an, Excuse me, Rex, that's not funny, but not the guy's resignation.

I think it would help improve public morale if the Appropriate Police would calm down. Some of you older people out there may recall the break-through comedian, Lenny Bruce, many of whose comic presentations would be banned today because the roving bands of censors would not "get it." It seems from here we've got a neo-Puritanism going these days. Bohn said he was sorry for the "joke" he doesn't remember telling, but for some people sorry isn't enough. They demand the rack and pinion out of all proportion to the offense alleged.


IT COUNT (NOT) HAPPEN HERE: New York mayor Bill de Blasio has threatened irresponsible parents with a $1,000 fine if they don’t get themselves and their children vaccinated with the measles vaccine as he declares a state of emergency.


U.S. ATTORNEY Barr, testifying before the House Appropriations Committee today, said that he offered Special Counsel Robert Mueller a chance to review his conclusions on the investigation between President Trump and Russian meddling in the U.S. presidential election but that Mueller declined. Barr also said that he will be “in a position” to release a redacted version of the report within a week, not the full, un-redacted report.


SURPRISE! BERN'S A MILLIONAIRE. According to The New York Times, Sanders said his tax returns are likely to be less interesting than Trump's, but he'd made big dough from the book he wrote after the 2016 election. “I wrote a best-selling book. If you write a best-selling book, you can be a millionaire, too.” He remains, however, among the least prosperous members of the Senate.

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‘DISNEYLAND FOR DEVELOPERS’?

A busload of Bay Area developers and investors rolled into downtown Santa Rosa on a recent Friday, combing the streets for opportunity and asking each other a key question — will Santa Rosa be the site of the region’s next building boom?

pressdemocrat.com/business/9481369-181/from-disaster-to-building-boom

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A READER NOTES: California gas prices have risen 50 cents in the last month to reach an average of $3.80 a gallon — and analysts said it's going to get worse. Within a couple weeks, the average was expected to hit $4 for the first time since 2014. Then, on July 1, a 5.6-cent increase in the gas tax is scheduled to kick in.

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COUNTY BURN PERMITS now available online (free).

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APARICIO’S GUN — March 9 - A Mendocino County Superior Court jury took just 20 minutes to find the trial defendant Tadeo Munoz Aparicio, age 32, of Covelo, guilty as charged of carrying a loaded handgun in a vehicle, said handgun not being owned by or registered to the defendant, a misdemeanor.

The People's evidence at trial was presented by Deputy District Attorney Jessica Guest. The investigating law enforcement agency was the Mendocino County Sheriff's Office.

Mendocino County Superior Court Judge Cindee Mayfield presided over the less than two-day trial.

(District Attorney Press Release)

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ANIMAL SHELTER STATS

Income Statistics, March 1, 2019, through March 31, 2019

  • One dead animal(s) disposal request received
  • 20 feral cats received
  • Five animals came in due to owner being in custody (jail)
  • Four owned dogs received by Animal Control or Police due to owner in custody (jail)
  • 25 owner surrendered animals received
  • One shelter animal returned after having been adopted.
  • 71 stray animal(s) impounded in the field by Animal Control, Police or came in over the counter from citizens
  • Total of 127 animals received at the Animal Shelter

Outcome Statistics, March 1, 2019, through March 31, 2019

  • Seven cats adopted
  • 35 dogs adopted
  • One animal(s) died
  • Six dead animal disposals
  • 18 total euthanasia
  • Two return to field cats
  • Six trapped, neutered and released cats
  • 40 return to owner animals
  • 14 animals transferred to other rescue organizations
  • Total of 129 animals departed the Animal Shelter

(Mendocino County CEO Report)

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UKIAH HIGH SCHOOL JOURNALIST LEXIE GARRETT RACKS UP A SCOOP

https://www.facebook.com/notes/ukiah-high-journalism/ukiah-high-caught-up-in-college-cheating-scandal/2126714710769844/

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CATCH OF THE DAY, April 9, 2019

Blunt, Havens, Madrid

CHARLES BLUNT, Ukiah. County parole violation.

MICHELLE HAVENS, Lakeport/Ukiah. Failure to appear.

DEANNA MADRID, Calpella. Probation revocation.

Myers, Schleper, Smith, Vogler

DONNA MYERS, Ukiah. Petty theft with priors, failure to appear.

BRANDY SCHLEPER, Ukiah. Controlled substance, disobeying court order.

ALWOOD SMITH, Ukiah. Disorderly conduct-alcohol.

ROBERT VOGLER, Point Arena. Domestic abuse.

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THE CRIPPLING OF BRITAIN IN THE AGE OF BREXIT

by Patrick Cockburn

Future historians will look back at Britain in the age of Brexit and seek to explain why its people reduced their power and influence in the world in the belief that they were doing the exact opposite.

But historians will have to move quickly if they are to have a say because the most important consequences of Brexit are already with us. People do not see this because UK membership of the EU is wrongly discussed as an economic issue when it is primarily a political one.

This is a traditional mistake by the British who have been making it with varying degrees of intensity ever since the French politician Robert Schumann put forward his plan for the French-German Coal and Steel Community on 9 May 1950 – a pact that eventually turned into the EU. Enhancing the political power of European states, particularly France and Germany, was always the chief objective.

The misperception has meant that the outcome of the Brexit crisis is talked about with alarm or enthusiasm, depending on the views of the speaker, but generally on the supposition on all sides that this is something good or bad that lies in the future. There is ceaseless discussion about custom unions and single markets which masks the devastating loss of UK power and influence that has already occurred in three crucial areas.

There is greater political division in Britain than at any time since the 17th century and this is not going to go away. Even if parliament is finally forced to swallow Theresa May’s withdrawal agreement at least half the population is going to feel that they have been betrayed or, at best, are the victims of an act of self-destructive idiocy. Theresa Mayhas systematically made these divisions deeper by pretending that there was national unanimity about the referendum decision.

Secondly, the UK as a state is more divided than it has been since the Scottish Act of Union in 1707. Scottish nationalists and Irish nationalists in Northern Ireland – half the population – are strengthened because Scottish independence and Irish unity can be presented as a jump into the future with the EU rather than staying put with a regressive and xenophobic England. Through resurrecting Irish partition as an issue, Britain will be permanently at odds with the Irish government, something which might not have mattered much in the past, but does now when Ireland is empowered by the rest of the EU. Angela Merkel was in Dublin this week telling Leo Varadkar that Germany would “stand by Ireland” and earlier the Irish taoiseach was seeing Emmanuel Macron in Paris. This used not to happen.

The third area in which the balance of power has swung against the UK over the last three years is that, as Britain becomes more divided, the EU becomes more unified. This was not inevitable: remember how there was talk in 2016 of the EU shedding more members and possibly even breaking up. Having seen what is happening to Britain, dissident members of the EU are these days keeping secessionist thoughts very much to themselves.

Evidence of the swing in the balance of power away from Britain has become more apparent over the course of the Brexit negotiations. Retreat on one side and advance on the other was the inevitable consequence of Brussels having much the strongest hand of cards. Nothing is more absurd, and a sign of a frightening detachment from reality, than the claim of prominent Eurosceptics that Britain would have got what it wanted in negotiations if only it had been firmer, something it failed to do because the British negotiators were weak-willed, incompetent or treacherously sabotaging their own side.

At one level, the explanation for the crisis gripping Britain is not a mystery: globalisation has produced political crises all over the world which differ in some respects but have certain common themes such as de-industrialisation, increased inequality, immigration, and the alienation of large parts of the population. There are obvious parallels between Trump supporters in Pennsylvania and Leave voters in the Labour strongholds in the Welsh Valleys. The same pressures were long visible in the Middle East where kleptocratic elites clustered around authoritarian rulers and their families, leaving the rest of the population to rot.

But this does not tell us why it is that the political crisis in the UK looks worse than elsewhere in Europe. Unsurprisingly, the historically minded have sought guidance from past precedent and, more particularly, from crises that revolved around the UK’s relations with continental Europe and, equally important, those that threatened the integrity of the UK itself.

Jacob Rees-Mogg caused some hilarity by plunging deep into the Middle Ages for an analogy, pillorying May’s withdrawal agreement as a sell-out by claiming that it was “the greatest vassalage since King John paid homage to Phillip II at Le Goulet in 1200”. Academic historians immediately pounced to call his history wrong, but there was nothing wrong with taking the longer view.

One could even go back a further 800 years and look at Roman Britain’s departure from the empire at the start of the fifth century. The circumstances are murky and ill-recorded, but there is evidence that the Romans did not pull out unilaterally but were encouraged to go by the local inhabitants. According to the sixth century historian Zosimus, quoted in The Anglo-Saxon World by Nicholas J Higham and Martin J Ryan, they were reduced “to such straits that they revolted from the empire, no longer submitted to Roman law, and reverted to their native customs. The Britons, therefore, armed themselves and ran many risks to ensure their own safety and free their own cities from attacking barbarians.”

This early example of Brexit did not end happily, though it would be interesting to imagine some Romano-British version of Liam Foxtrotting off to sign trade deals with the Angles, Saxons and Jutes on behalf of “global Britannia”.

A constituency has always existed in Britain open to the idea that continental entanglements are a costly waste of money and are undertaken with the complicity of simple-minded or corrupt British politicians. Jonathan Swift wrote a devastating pamphlet, The Conduct of the Allies, making such charges three hundred years ago that would not look out of place in Leave campaign literature.

Britain has traditionally tried to avoid having a crisis in relations with continental Europe powers at the same time as a crisis threatening the unity of the UK. But Brexit was guaranteed to produce both simultaneously. Eurosceptics denigrate the EU as a leviathan and then seem shocked when it behaves like one. “Splendid isolation” was a dangerous idea for Britain even when it was at the height of its power at the end of the 19th century and looks like an even worse one today. Even so, Leavers are blithely confident that it does not much matter that Britain is now more isolated in Europe than at any time since the five-year period before Napoleon marched on Moscow in 1812.

The failure of historians to find a convincing parallel between events in Britain’s past and the Brexit crisis may have a simple explanation: never before has the nation embarked on a project likely to make it poorer, weaker and less able to control its own future.

(Patrick Cockburn is the author of The Rise of Islamic State: ISIS and the New Sunni Revolution. CounterPunch.org)

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THE NEIGHBORS' CAT EXITING THE NEIGHBOR'S YARD

(photo by Harvey Reading)

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ON LINE COMMENT OF THE DAY

So I was at another one of those ‘Easter Ham Shoots’ at a gun club in rural Ct on Sunday, good group of members and locals attending, mostly blue collar guys (most of whom were apparently doing pretty well because there were some expensive shotguns extant, as well as nice trucks in the parking lot). A group of firemen from a nearby city showed up; I got talking to this fireman, a big dude, about 6 ft 300 lbs, wearing a MAGA hat. I mentioned to him he was risking assault wearing that hat and a few days ago an elderly Jewish man in San Francisco was attacked on the street for wearing one. He looked at me and pulled back his coat, revealing one of those Colt model 1911s, the Colt .45, in a leather holster, saying “let ’em try”. It occurred to me, this is how it might start, lefties indulging in what they consider bullying street theater, but bullying the wrong guy, one not well versed in intersectional PC platitudes and the game that’s being played, but takes the threat seriously.

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THE POOL that used to be at the Hollywood Fwy-Temple.

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A POT TO PISS IN?

The State Water Board will be holding a public workshop on Access to Sanitation for People Experiencing Homelessness on Friday, April 19, 2019. The workshop will include expert panels on data collection and metrics, public health challenges, innovative approaches by cities and NGOs, funding pathways, and roles for the Water Boards. The workshop is an opportunity for interested persons to provide input to the State Water Board. While a quorum of the State Water Board may be present, this will be an informational workshop only, and the State Water Board will take no formal action. The workshop will be:

Friday, April 19, 2019

9:30 AM – 4:00 PM

Joe Serna Jr. - CalEPA Headquarters Building

1001 I Street

Byron Sher Auditorium, 2nd Floor

Sacramento, CA 95814

NOTICE & AGENDA — The agenda and notice are attached. They’re also available on the State Water Board’s website at: https://www.waterboards.ca.gov/water_issues/programs/conservation_portal/assistance/.

REGISTRATION — To attend in-person or to webcast, please register at: https://forms.gle/coBLUajLBb4Z1Vca8.

ARCHIVE — A recording of the meeting will be available a few days after the meeting at: https://www.waterboards.ca.gov/water_issues/programs/conservation_portal/assistance/.

CONTACT — Please direct addition questions about this notice to Mary.Yang@waterboards.ca.gov or (916) 322-6507.

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APPROXIMATELY 70,000 RUSSIANS MARCHED against war with Ukraine in Moscow on March 15, 2014.

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“WHAT HAVE THEY DONE TO THE EARTH?

What have they done to our fair sister?

Ravaged and plundered and ripped her and bit her

Stuck her with knives in the side of the dawn

And tied her with fences and dragged her down.”

— Jim Morrison “When the Music’s Over”

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FINAL STAGES

by Manuel Vicent (translated by Louis S. Bedrock)

It was on that now distant day when I was in a fashionable restaurant, ordered red mullets, and discovered that one of them had a Winston cigarette butt in its stomach that I realized that the end of the world as we know it was near.

At the time, I attributed the fact that there were mullets which smoked American cigarettes to a whim. But today, fish not only smoke but also swallow the smoke and expel it through their gills. They also eat every kind of plastic and sanitary napkin with absolute regularity.

A crab trapped in a plastic cup in the sea in the Passage of Green Isle in the Philippines. (Noel Guevara, Greenpeace)

There was a time when trawlers in the Mediterranean gathered amphoras, and in the most fortuitous cases, harvested in their nets, among the silver plated fish, ship wrecked divinities.

Those were the golden days in which a great part of mythology and history was found at the bottom of the sea; when pondering the abyss was still a good way to purify the mind.

Now a growing cesspool of detritus has invaded the grounds once occupied by statues of our gods submerged alongside the reefs formed by Phoenician triremes, Moorish schooners, the caravels and packet boats of explorers and pirates. The giant octopuses that attacked Ulysses are today billions of tons of plastic that float on top of the Spirit of the waters and which threaten to create new continents.

The putrid sea is a warped mirror in which our collective unconsciousness is reflected. The end of the world will not arrive with fiery hail announced by the trumpets of the archangels nor will be a product of the enormous mushrooms of a nuclear war. The planet will wind up buried beneath a bottomless pile of shit that the human race expels.

Our souls are biodegradable but plastic is immortal.

The catastrophe will be accompanied by some prodigious events. There will be some cheerful bloke in a seaside bar and suddenly some red mullets with cigarettes in their mouths will emerge from the sea and ask for a light.

* * *

BEAM ME UP, SCOTTY

Editor,

Re: Joe Biden and “personal space” of women.

Biden should play it safe and not even shake women’s hands in his public duties. I suggest he employ the Vulcan hand salute used by Mr. Spock of Star Trek and tell them, “Live long and prosper.”

Keith Bramstedt

San Anselmo

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* * *

OXIES

In 1996, a company called Purdue Pharmaceutical launched a new opiate painkiller called OxyContin. At a party celebrating its release to the public, Richard Sackler, a scion of the family that owns the company and its senior vice president of sales, made exuberant predictions about its success. ‘The launch of OxyContin tablets will be followed by a blizzard of prescriptions that will bury the competition,’ he said, according to a lawsuit recently filed against Purdue. ‘The prescription blizzard will be so deep, dense, and white …’

The active ingredient of OxyContin is oxycodone, a semi-synthetic opiate (an ‘opioid’) first synthesised in Germany in 1916. Prior to OxyContin’s launch, oxycodone had been marketed as a painkiller in various pill forms for years, including Percocet (where it is mixed with paracetamol), Percodan (where it is mixed with aspirin) and Roxycodone (where it is dispensed pure in small doses of 15 to 30 milligrams). Other kinds of opiate painkillers, like the hydrocodone-based Vicodin, were also mixed with aspirin and came in small doses. While people did become addicted to these pills, the low doses of opiates they contained made it hard to overdose on them, and the paracetamol and aspirin would cause liver damage if the drugs were taken for a long time.

OxyContin distinguished itself from these medications, and received a patent, on the basis of an extended-release technology, the ‘contin’ of the drug’s suffix. Purdue developed OxyContin not to serve an urgent public health need but because the patent was expiring on its most profitable drug, a time-release morphine pill called MS Contin. Pharmaceutical patents, which last twenty years, allow pharmaceutical companies to maintain a monopoly on a drug and avoid competition from generic manufacturers. When a patent on a popular drug expires, its price can drop by as much as 90 per cent. To maintain monopolies, the industry often makes small adjustments to existing medications in order to patent and market them as new. OxyContin was one such drug.

OxyContin dissolves slowly in the digestive system, titrating the oxycodone into the body. Instead of taking a conventional painkiller like Vicodin or Percocet every few hours, the manufacturers claimed a patient could take OxyContin once in the morning and once at night and experience long-lasting pain relief. The slower-acting nature of OxyContin justified the manufacture of pills that contained much higher quantities of oxycodone than had ever been available in a single dose: up to 80 milligrams at first; 160 milligrams a few years later.

‘It was the cleanest drug I’d ever met,’ the artist Nan Goldin wrote in a column for Artforum describing the addiction she developed to OxyContin after an operation. Goldin writes that she took 40 mg doses and was addicted ‘overnight’. She went from taking three pills a day to as many as 18 of them. Not everyone is partial to the feeling produced by morphine derivatives, but for the people who like it, OxyContin seems to represent an apex. ‘Oxycodone provides the most glowing and rapturous high I have experienced in my very thorough career as a recreational drug user,’ a report on the online drug encyclopedia Erowid begins. The writer, under the pseudonym RighteousDopeFiend, describes the aftermath of snorting an 80 mg OxyContin tablet:

“The oxycodone experience is difficult to describe to an opiate virgin. Personally, I feel as if I have suddenly gained all that I want in life and no longer have anything to fear. I am perfectly content both mentally and emotionally. All the tension slips from my body and I feel warm and utterly comfortable, as if I were sitting beside a roaring fire, wrapped in a delicate cashmere blanket, rocking gently back and forth. Communication is pleasant but unnecessary. Under the influence of oxycodone, no companionship is needed. I accept myself and the world just as we are, not begrudgingly, but eagerly, ecstatically even.”

Since OxyContin’s arrival on the US market in 1996, a widespread increase in opiate use in America has killed more than 400,000 people. Drug overdoses have been the leading cause of accidental death in the United States since 2008, when they surpassed deaths from road accidents. In 2017, more than 49,000 Americans died of opiate-related overdoses.

(Emily Witt, “A Blizzard of Prescriptions,” London Review of Books)

* * *

NEWSOM in EL SALVADOR: Governor Says California Deserves Bigger Say in U.S. Immigration Policy

by Elizabeth Aguilera

California Gov. Gavin Newsom says he intends to help steer U.S. immigration policy just as former Gov. Jerry Brown influenced climate change policy — because California’s size, robust economy, diversity and political clout allow the state to “punch above our weight.”

“The one area that California should do more is on immigration policy,” he said today, the second of his three days on an official visit to El Salvador. He added that in the last decade, the state ceded that role to governors from more conservative border states. “That’s why I’m down here. That’s what I want to bring back in terms of the leadership that we want to advance for our state.”

The stated purpose of his trip: to learn more about the root causes driving Central Americans to migrate by the thousands in the last year and how California could help here or at home. It also raises his political profile as a counterpoint to President Donald Trump.

Newsom said he’s relying on the powerful California congressional delegation — which includes Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi of San Francisco and GOP House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy of Bakersfield — and local leaders to work from the bottom up to compel changes in the Trump administration’s hostile approach to immigration from places such as Central America.

“We have a unique responsibility and an opportunity to advance a different conversation,” he said after a session with humanitarian, LBGT and women’s rights advocates in the small town of Panchimalco, about an hour outside of San Salvador.

Since arriving on Sunday, Newsom has met with El Salvador’s President Salvador Sánchez Cerén; U.S. ambassador Jean Manes, a career diplomat stationed at the embassy since the Obama administration; Salvadoran mayors and community members.

While Newsom focuses on “managing up” to impact federal immigration policy in the remaining years of the Trump administration, humanitarian advocates on the ground in El Salvador say they hope he will have a positive impact on economic opportunities and human rights.

“He can influence the El Salvador government, the El Salvador legislators, to get them interested in how to reform workplace regulations, how to ratify codes that protect the rights of women,” said Montserrat Arevalo Alvarado. She’s executive director of Mujeres Transformando, an organization pushing for better working conditions for the 70,000 women who work in clothing factories, and make clothes mostly exported to the U.S.

“He can send letters, bring delegations and spotlight what is happening here,” she said. “I believe he can because our leaders go to the United States, too, and it’s important they listen to him.”

Traveling with only his wife Jennifer Siebel Newsom, Assemblywoman Wendy Carrillo, some staff and reporters — as well as a security contingent from the California Highway Patrol — the governor has received a warm welcome here.

People in the mountain town of Panchimalco were waiting for him when he arrived this afternoon. Salvadoran children adorned in colorful costumes danced and boys in white played traditional instruments — part of a cultural arts program intended to help the children avoid gangs and possibly create a path to future jobs through traditional artisanry.

Earlier in the day the Newsoms toured a deportee processing center, where Salvadorans who have been returned to the country are fingerprinted, interviewed and offered assistance if they need it. Several returned migrants shared their stories with the governor, telling him they left El Salvador because they lacked jobs and feared for their safety. Two were detained in Mexico and deported. A third made it to Houston, but returned after six months for a family reason.

The Newsoms and Carillo also met privately with President Cerén and the U.S. Ambassador Manes. Afterward the governor said little about the meetings, but did report that both expressed concern about having just met with Trump administration officials to discuss U.S. humanitarian aid — more than $450 million — only to have President Trump move to cut off the aid.

“The U.S. aid we are providing is making a real difference in people’s lives, not just from a security perspective but from an economic perspective,” he said he learned. “The absurdity of the U.S. would pull back from something that is working and would create a problem they want to fix.”

He said his wife asked President Cerén about the situation for women in El Salvador, and particularly women in prison. The issue is important to Salvadoran American leaders in Los Angeles, who say many women in El Salvador face incredible violence and abuse, which often propels their migration.

“Their American dream, as part of America, is to stay in their home and in their community,” said Angelica Salas, executive director of the Coalition for Human Rights Los Angeles. “Nobody comes because they want to.”

Newsom didn’t disclose the president’s response.

(CalMatters.org)

* * *

* * *

BARCELONA!

Barcelona has been much in my life lately. I have just hung up the phone. Talking to my brother's wife who lives near there. My brother passed many years ago. She moved to Spain. Can't make the party but will be here a month or so later. Haven't seen each other in some years. Far too long. My oldest daughter just returned home. She and my granddaughter, Erin, have become Facebook friends.

This party idea is an unfolding cornucopia of positives. You might try it, too. See what happens. You may like it. Since this idea first occurred to me, in a hospital bed, I think, I have tried to contact everyone who's been important in my life. And, through the good fortune of Facebook, I have been successful beyond my wildest dreams. Barcelona.

I am playing. And basking. And eating Wheaties. And saying thank you. We usual. When I finish with this, I will be calling a cousin in Woodstock to invite him. The last time I talked to him was a couple of years back. Then another cousin, then another (I have hundreds) in Bend.

I am thankful. I am bowing. I am saying thank you, doing this. I also will have an afternoon game from Houston on my Kindle. I suspect Clifton Chenier. Auto-correct just brought up cotton. Mather. This is what happens when your mind is constantly churning. Playing. Inhaling. Awake. Almost an hour has passed. My stepson Tim just called. Indeed.

(Bruce Brady)

* * *

* * *

UPCOMING CLIMATE CHANGE PRESENTATIONS

Dear Citizens of Mendo Land, Coast folks and Ukiahans,

Climate Change presentations coming up this week and next at the Inglenook Grange/Community Center, 26500 Highway 1 on Saturday, April 13 at 6pm and at the Ukiah City Council on Wednesday, April 17 at 6pm. Both are open to all citizens. Thanks to Keith Wyner at the Grange, and to Ukiah Council folks Mo Mulheren and Steve Scalmanini for setting things up.

All the best,

Doug Nunn dnunn@mcn.org

12 Comments

  1. james marmon April 10, 2019

    RE: DA EYSTER AND MENTAL-CINO COVER UP’S.

    Former Iowa social worker charged with perjury for lies that led to children being taken from parents

    “A former Iowa social worker has been charged with three counts of perjury in connection with what prosecutors say is false testimony in child welfare cases.”

    https://www.desmoinesregister.com/story/news/crime-and-courts/2019/04/09/prosecutors-iowa-social-worker-committed-perjury-child-welfare-cases-chelsie-gray/3410367002/

    I have copies of the evidence I sent to DA Eyster regarding false testimony, the withholding of exculpatory evidence, and the deletion of official records from the State’s CWS/CMS database. Eyster the Syster took care of the County and excused my information as being nonsensical. If his lead investigator had met with me as Eyster promised, it would have made a lot of sense, so he dismissed me and my documented evidence. I had an email from Bryan Lowery who admitted deleting official records, yes he was stupid enough to do it and then tell me about if in an email. He should have been charged with an felony but that would have probably exposed Becky Wilson, Carmel Angelo, Sandra Applegate, Jeanine Nadel, and the Counties fraud investigator’s all of whom I reported Lowery’s criminal actions to. I have copies of all those emails as well.

    James Marmon MSW
    Former Social Worker V
    Mendocino County Family and Children’s Services.

    • Harvey Reading April 10, 2019

      If you truly have real evidence, why not contact the state Attorney General’s office, James?

      • james marmon April 10, 2019

        Well I do have a message from Eyster telling me to hold off on reporting the corruption to the AG’ office, maybe it ain’t too late?

        Thanks Harv

        • james marmon April 10, 2019

          “David, sorry to bother you at home, but I need you to read this; I will be sending a copy to the Grand Jury and Attorney Gerneral’s Office, this is just the tip of the iceburg”.
          Letter to D.A. Eyster regarding altered sworn testimony.pdf

          James Marmon Nov. 20, 2011

          “I have forwarded your information to my chief investigator. My inclination, for the moment, is to wait and see if the Grand Jury is interested in engaging. The Attorney General’s Office is not viable.”

          -David Eyster Nov. 21, 2011

      • james marmon April 10, 2019

        Harv, just like the back shooting vigilante case, the Steven Neuroff case, the Baby Emerald case, and many more, Eyster is known as the County’s fixer. He even bragged about the money he saved the county regarding Baby Emerald’s murder, he kept Child Welfare’s culpability out of the thing. My friend Attorney Robert Powell was at least able to get the mother a measly hundred grand out of the county for the poor mother. The County never even sent an apology to her for the terrible job they did.

        James

        • Harvey Reading April 10, 2019

          My opinion of the so-called justice system in this country started declining after high school. It exists to serve and protect the wealthy and influential, at the expense of common folks. From what I’d read here in the past, I thought maybe your current DA was different. But, if he is, I can’t see it from here.

          “Viable” with respect to what, I wonder.

          • Harvey Reading April 10, 2019

            I’m not sure what the statute of limitations is in the matter. In some cases limitations do not apply.

    • james marmon April 10, 2019

      It might of been nonsensical to Eyster because of his lack of knowledge of the Welfare and Institutional code and much of the Penal Code, especially regarding perjury, but I doubt it, he covered it up, went along with “he’s crazy” defense that the County had already employed against me.

      James Marmon MSW

  2. james marmon April 10, 2019

    RE: PARALLEL UNIVERSE (MENTAL-CINO COUNTY)

    I just watched yesterday’s BoS meeting. It appears that, according to Nurse Ratched, that there is now plans for a 38 million dollar crisis project on one of 3 properties. There are no plans to discuss how to mitigate the need for such a project by offering services that would decrease the growing numbers of folks reaching the crisis level. “Tommy boy” made it clear that the Measure B ad hoc committee charged with studying the Kemper Report will only be looking at “Brick and Mortar” options for those 3 properties and ignore all the other recommendations including feasibility and/or sustainability. Call me stupid but if you get a leak in your roof, you fix it, a bucket placed under the leak will only catch so much water before it overflows, then you need another bucket.

    “If you’re just going to do crisis, then you’re just going to do crisis”

    -Lee Kemper and Associates.

    Kemper provided the County with a comprehensive strategic financing plan where he believed that we could build all 3 (PHF, CSU, and CRT) for as low and 14 million if the County really tried. Below is a breakdown of Kemper’s strategic financing plan

    Proposed Measure B Strategic Financing Plan – Years 1-5 % Allocation

    TOTAL: Measure B Revenue – $37,500,000
    Years 1-5 Allocation: $7,500,000-$7,500,000-$7,500,000-$7,500,000-$7,500,000

    Crisis Residential Treatment (CRT) 12.7% $4,750,000
    Years 1-5 Allocation: $4,7500,000 -$0-$0-$0-$0

    Psychiatric Health Facility (PHF) 20% $7,500,000
    Years 1-5 Allocation: $0-$4,000,000-$3,500,000-$0-$0

    Crisis Stabilization Unit (CSU) 5.3% $2,000,000
    Years 1-5 Allocation: $0-$500,000-$500,000-$500,000-$500,000

    Support Services Expansion 15.3% $5,750,000
    Years 1-5 Allocation: $1,000,000-$1,000,000-$1,250,000-$1,250,000-$1,250,000

    FSP Expansion 6.7% $2,500,000
    Years 1-5 Allocation: $500,000-$500,000-$500,000-$500,000-$500,000

    Supportive Housing Pool 9.3% $3,500,000
    Years 1-5 Allocation: $500,000-$750,000-$750,000-$750,000-$750,000

    SUDT Services Expansion 10% $3,750,000
    Years 1-5 Allocation: $750,000-$750,000-$750,000-$750,000-$750,000

    Measure B Prudent Reserve 20.7% $7,750,000*
    Years 1-5 Allocation: $0-$0-$250,000-$3,750,000-$3,750,000

    TOTAL 100% $37,500,000
    Years 1-5 Allocation: $7,500,000 $7,500,000 $7,500,000 $7,500,000 $7,500,000

    (page 45 Behavioral Health System Gap Analysis & Recommendations)

    https://www.mendocinocounty.org/home/showdocument?id=23234

  3. anonymous Post author | September 25, 2019

    Is Hue Freeman and his greedy group Anderson Valley Reserve trying to yank our chain? Take a look at their farms right here in Mendocino and see what a sight they are creating in previously beautiful residential neighborhoods! Drive Clow Ridge to the top of the first hill and see the huge hoop houses and RV’s and trash every where or take a right after Steve Williams bridge and judge for yourself. Would you like this trash in your neighborhood? Supporting the community? Unsightly to the say the least and what about all the traffic they create in residential neighborhoods without paying their fair share for road association dues? I never see them supporting any local businesses or at any local fundraisers…what support to the community is he talking about. I don’t understand how someone can honestly market themselves as a brand that supports the community when the residential community they grow in wants them to leave and go grow in a commercial/industrial area and not in a previously quiet and clean neighborhood. Quit yanking our chain Hue and there’s nothing special or “brandable” about your generic pot especially when it’s what everyone else is growing and based upon a lie! Shame on you…and shame on you or using the name Anderson Valley…and shame on all your greedy lying group members. Shame, shame, shame, your mother would not be proud of you and neither is your community.

  4. Justin Post author | September 25, 2019

    Hey Anonymous,

    Seems like you have a problem with Anderson Valley Reserve! I am sure Hue or any other farmer in dthe group would be happy to give you a tour of their farms! I think you will not find them to be trashed or generic.

    Your comments are actually so off base, I am wondering if you aren’t just a paid shill? Why else would you be anonymously smearing local, independent farmers fighting an uphill battle against massive corporate players and transnational capital? Maybe you LIKE big tobacco and the rush to create “big canna”? Maybe you are the type that Roots for the bullies against the underdogs?

    The kind of growers you describe are not the kind that bother going through the incredibly difficult and expensive process of permitting. We permitted growers are paying taxes and fees that go directly into the community.

    You claim to speak for “the community”, but lumping all growers together just reveals either a lack of understanding, or an axe to grind. I suspect the latter, considering you are calling out Hue personally, a man I know to be of great integrity.

    Whatever your position on cannabis, Anderson Valley Reserve is committed to preserving the legacy of small, family farms here in the heart of the Emerald Triangle. You call us “greedy” but we are all just fighting for survival against a tidal wave of corporate money from all corners of the globe.

    I assure you, you are in the minority if you are rooting for the corporate money over the locals.

    For anyone else reading this, check out our website and shoot us an email if you are interested in learning more about us!

    Best,

    Anderson Valley Reserve

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